I didn’t blame Nathan for letting （fake） Silvia preside over the transport of Mom’s corpse. Having done the dead-body thing, I was fully supportive of someone choosing to forgo it. Plus, as I’d learned the hard way, removing a dead body from your house is as quick and easy as getting rid of an old refrigerator. When my father died, the nice men from the mortuary came and left inside twenty minutes. I remember those twenty minutes vividly, how Charlie and I had huddled in the hallway outside Mom and Dad’s bedroom, terrified to get too close and risk catching a whiff of Dad’s budding death rot. Mom was fourteen hours away in Milan when Dad passed, but it didn’t matter; we would have endeavored to be rid of our dead dad before she got there if she had been fourteen minutes away in Beverly Hills, so eager were we to get it over with.
As to why someone had impersonated Silvia to deliver the news, well, that was a head-scratcher. I would have preferred to let the police figure out who it was and why they did it, but Nathan was determined to start the investigation without them, and we were determined to tag along. We didn’t assume that the woman who had just inherited all Mom’s money had murdered her, but we didn’t assume she hadn’t. And given that Nathan was dating her, well, let’s just say we thought it best to chaperone the excursion. We had no idea what to expect when we cracked open that coffin. Had she been strangled? Beheaded? Shot in the face? Buried alive? If there were clues as to whodunit, Charlie and I wanted to see them before they disappeared. It’s not that we didn’t trust Nathan—it’s that we suddenly found it impossible to trust anybody.
“Hi, Nathan,” I said as I climbed in beside him. It was warm in the car, but I still felt chilled. People think it doesn’t get cold in Southern California, but late-October nights can be quite frigid, and this one was hats and gloves worthy.
We drove in silence for the fifteen minutes it took to traverse the Valley. Forest Lawn cemetery was right behind the Warner Bros. lot. I figured Mom had chosen it because it would make haunting her old stomping grounds quick and easy—no commuting required! The gate to the graveyard was open, so we drove straight through. At first I thought it strange that there was no one standing guard, but then I realized the well-being of the residents had long since been compromised, so why bother with security?
I fought back a wave of nausea as we bounced along the access road that snaked between the grave sites. The combination of whiskey and weirdness was making me dizzy, and I had to keep my eyes glued to the dashboard to keep the contents of my stomach where they belonged. Nathan’s fancy halogen headlights cut a slim, oblong path through the black night, giving the outing an eerie Blair Witch Project vibe, complete with creepy backstory, bumbling investigators, and vengeful dead witch ripe for resurrection.
“We have to walk from here,” Nathan said as he slowed and parked in a turnabout. The day’s rain had given way to a cloudless night, and the moon was rose colored and nearly full. Nathan handed me a flashlight, which I shined on the ground to light my steps. Nathan somehow knew where he was going, so I fell in behind him as he led us across the squeaky, wet grass. We were high up on a hill, and city lights winked at us from below: “We know what you’re doing, you naughty girl,” they said. And I forced myself to look away.
I tried to count the headstones as we trudged between them—fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. The car had been completely gobbled up by darkness, and without Hansel or Gretel to leave a trail of bread crumbs, it was the only thing I could think of to help us find our way back. I tried to walk between the graves, not on them, but the beam from my flashlight was weak, and I couldn’t see the dull granite gravestones until I was practically on top of them.
We rounded a small grove of trees—twenty-one, twenty-two—and Nathan suddenly stopped.
“There,” he said, pointing.
I looked up. I couldn’t see their faces, but I could see their lanterns—three of them, glowing like a tiny constellation of stars—about a dozen grave lengths ahead. As we approached I saw the three torchbearers. All men. Two were young, maybe in their late teens, and the third was balding and stout. Nathan greeted the portly one with a nod.
“Good evening.”
“Good evening.”
The chubby ringleader gave the signal to the two teens, and they started digging. The boys worked in tandem, like two sides of a kayak paddle rising and falling on opposite sides of a boat. Mom had only been buried this morning, so the ground was still soft and loose. Their shovels made rhythmic thumping sounds as they tore into it, and I let myself slip into a memory of practicing piano to my metronome: 123, 223, 323, 423 . . .