Three Graves Full by Jamie Mason

Author:Jamie Mason [Mason, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781451685039
Google: 1wrCmBE10zoC
Amazon: 1451685033
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2013-02-12T08:00:00+00:00

15

Jason came back to himself by degrees. The sad fact was that a sliver of sense rekindled at the crest of the backswing. On primal autopilot, he’d seen only “intruder,” and the push of the shovel’s arc had dragged harder than the pull of maybe-I-shouldn’t. It was a blind impulse, the violence of it uncalibrated, but the split-second debate on what he was about to do weakened his commitment to the follow-through. He didn’t strike as hard as he might have, but still plenty hard enough.

His soul slammed back into its borders once the girl completed her graceless crash to the turf, but reason had gone AWOL in the shuffle. His place in time flickered in and out of focus, and the swerving of his mind felt just the tiniest bit on purpose. Something was wrong enough with the “now” that it wouldn’t seem to settle over his thoughts.

Jason smiled down at her fondly. He knew she’d been tired. He’d been asking her all the time lately if everything was all right, and she kept saying nothing was wrong. She said she was just tired, but he couldn’t understand why his wife was sleeping in the grass. And why she was wearing a skirt—she’d worn a dress at their wedding and, reluctantly, at her sister’s. Otherwise it was strictly slacks, jeans, or shorts. And her hair—his eyes slid away because something was definitely wrong with her hair.

“Patty, get up, silly.” The shrillness played in his ears a little too much like begging. He cleared his throat. “Come on, honey. It’s late.” (Why in the hell is she sleeping in the grass?) His eyes rolled like loose ball bearings on a lazy Susan—most reluctant to light on any one thing because, each time they did, his stomach vaulted a little hillock of terror in his midsection. His gaze could skitter and dance at will, but his hands, weighed down as they were, could not. The shovel kept announcing itself, a clumsy anchor looking to tilt out of his grasp. He didn’t want it to slip and hit Patty by mistake, so he gripped the handle until his knuckles went pale.

A voice, his own—but whether inside him or out loud he didn’t know—proclaimed, “It was an accident. It doesn’t count.” Try as he might to avoid it, his glance kept roving back to her hair. It kept nagging for an explanation. Patty had faithfully dyed her short, dark hair a deep auburn, but the red here was a bright delta, vivid enough to make even the grass lush with ruby highlights. Tendrils lay heavy and glistening on her cheek. Not unlike the mark Harris just left on—Jason shook his head and the horror spread through him on pace with the widening funnel of blood through the long, honey-brown hair of the girl at his feet—the girl who looked not one thing like his late wife.

“Oh, God.” He planted the shovel blade in the ground and bent double, hands on knees, trying to breathe through the panic stacking up like wet bricks in his throat.

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