Edmund Graves's Arc

Chapter 5 of 8

By morning the house smelled wrong. Edmund stood in the kitchen with coffee going cold and knew the back room had turned on him overnight. The air near the bolted door had a sweet edge under the tar paper smell. He had planned to wait a day, maybe two, before moving the hiker. He no longer had that time. The road out front carried a truck past twice a week. A neighbor from the next place down sometimes walked over with jarred beans. If any of them stepped onto the porch and drew a breath, he was finished. He went out to the shed and looked at what he had. A tarp. A short spade. A wheelbarrow with a soft tire. The ground behind the little log house rose into pine and rock, no good for digging deep. He thought of the empty cottage a quarter mile through the trees, the one with the steep roof and boarded windows, sitting on its own overgrown lot. He had walked past it twice buying the puppy's feed. No smoke from its chimney in months. The crawlspace under it would be dry and dark and no one's problem. He pumped the wheelbarrow tire and rolled it to the back door. The body had gone heavy in the way bodies do. Edmund wrapped it in the tarp and lashed it with baling twine. Lifting it into the wheelbarrow, he felt the dead weight lurch against him like some big rotted thing out of a bad dream, all slack limbs and stink. He gagged once and kept working. He pushed the load along the deer path through the pines, stopping when the tire caught on roots. Sweat ran into his eyes. The puppy did not follow. At the boarded cottage he pried a lattice panel off the foundation and dragged the tarp under. He dug a shallow trench in the crawlspace dirt, rolled the body in, and covered it with the loose earth and a layer of old brick he found stacked by the chimney base. He nailed the lattice back. He walked home a different way and dragged a pine bough behind him over the wheelbarrow ruts. Back at his own place he opened every window and burned coffee grounds on the stove. By dusk the sweet smell was gone. The back room was only cork and felt and straw again. He washed the wheelbarrow with well water and left it turned over in the yard. At the tree line the wolf stood watching. It looked at him, then in the direction of the boarded cottage through the pines, then back. Edmund met its yellow eyes and understood that it knew where he had put the body. The count still stood at thirteen. But now thirteen was buried under someone else's floor, and the wolf knew the address.