The Dead of Ashwood series. Book 2: Buried Loyalties

A year in Ashwood Hollow is enough time for red clay to pack down over a fresh grave, but it isn’t nearly long enough for folks to forget the name of the man who held the shovel.

I stood on the back porch of Mom’s old trailer with a hammer tucked through the loop of my worn canvas tool belt, listening to the cicadas saw away in the pines. The sun was dipping low over the tree line, painting the sky the color of crushed blackberries and bruised peaches. Right beside my elbow, perched on the fresh-planed pine rail, a tall mason jar of sweet tea was sweating in the heavy evening heat, the sugar sitting dark and thick near the bottom.

Standing right at the edge of the woods, barely five feet past the hydrangeas, was a figure that hadn’t been there ten minutes ago.

He was young—twenty at the oldest. His clothes were soaked, muddy creek water dripping from the hem of his dark work jacket in steady, rhythmic pats onto the clover. His dark hair was plastered flat against a pale, boyish forehead.

And in the center of his chest was a jagged, blackened hole the size of a fist.

He wasn’t screaming. He wasn’t crying out for a preacher or his mama. He just stood there under the pine boughs, his hands buried deep in his pockets, staring straight through the screen door at me with cold, hollow eyes. Then, slowly, deliberately, he raised one dripping arm and pointed a finger toward the south.

Toward the creek.

“Grab your boots,” Eli said, his voice flat, hard, and stripped of all the dinner warmth. “Miller, let’s go. Caleb, Maren—get in the truck.”

The quiet year was over. The dirt in Ashwood Hollow was coughing up its secrets again, and the dead were waiting by the water.

A year ago, you couldn’t have paid me to stand out here in the open. A year ago, the kudzu had climbed up the cinder blocks, tangled through the rusted skirting, and tried its level best to pull the whole trailer down into the dirt. Back then, every floorboard groaned like it was holding a grudge, and the air smelled like damp wool, stale tobacco, and old regrets.

Now, the yard smelled of fresh sawdust and turned earth. I’d spent three solid months hacking those vines down to the pale roots with a bush axe until my palms were one big blister, then turned around and built a wrap-around porch out of rough-sawn cedar. Maren had driven two hours over to the nursery in Tupelo to pick out three dozen hydrangeas, planting them in a neat border along the gravel skirt. They were blooming a soft, washed-out blue—the exact shade of the fresh coat of paint we’d rolled over the trailer’s dented tin siding.

Even the ceiling inside the spare room had been scrubbed and patched. The old water stain that used to look like the state of Florida after a bad hurricane was buried under two coats of thick white primer. Every time I drove a sixteen-penny nail into the framing, it felt like an exorcism. I wasn’t just fixing rotted wood; I was pinning down eight years of running, hammering the past flat so it couldn’t stand up and chase me in the dark.

The screen door gave a long, rusty creak—a sound I’d deliberately left ungreased because it let me know when the world was walking up behind me—and Maren stepped out onto the porch boards.

She was barefoot, wearing a loose linen shirt with the sleeves rolled to her elbows and a pair of faded jeans that had white primer smeared across the right knee. She carried a damp dish towel in one hand, but her hazel eyes were bright and steady. That sharp, measuring look of hers—the one she used on suspects down in the interview room—hadn’t gone anywhere. But when her gaze settled on me, the corners of her mouth softened into a faint, easy smirk.

“You’ve been staring at that bottom step for twenty minutes, Foster,” she said, leaning her hip against the railing next to my sweet tea. “You planning on building it, or are you just trying to talk it into place?”

“Wood needs to be reasoned with first,” I said, picking up the mason jar and taking a long, cold pull. “Rush into pine with a hammer and it’ll split on you every time.”

“Is that your professional carpenter opinion?”

“That’s my stubborn opinion.”

She laughed, a low, quiet sound that rumbled in her throat, and reached out to brush a speck of sawdust from my cheek. Her fingers were warm and slightly calloused from years of gripping steering wheels and service weapons.

Living together had started out as an unspoken arrangement born of necessity—a spare room with four solid walls so I wouldn’t freeze to death in my truck cab. But somewhere between late-night coffee, drywall dust, and learning how to sleep through the night without waking up swinging, the temporary had turned permanent. She had moved her boxes out of that sterile little rental house in town and brought them out here to the dirt road. We had built something real out of broken pieces.

“Eli just hit the blacktop down by the creek,” Maren said, nodding toward the gap in the trees where the county road wound through the bottomland. “He called from the cruiser five minutes ago. Said Miller’s already turning green from the backroads.”

“City boy shouldn’t have eaten that gas station biscuit before getting in a squad car with Eli,” I remarked, setting the tea back down. “My brother drives like he’s trying to outrun his own shadow.”

“He drives like a cop with a lead foot,” Maren corrected. “Go wash the cedar shavings off your neck. The smoker’s about done, and if you leave the cornbread to me, you know it’s going to come out like a brick.”

By the time I came out of the bathroom with my hair damp and a clean shirt pulled over my shoulders, the crunch of tires on gravel was rolling up the drive.

Eli’s cruiser rolled to a halt under the big water oak, kicking up a rooster tail of powdery red dust that drifted through the evening light. My brother killed the engine and stepped out, looking taller and broader than he had in years. The heavy, starched-tight stiffness he used to carry around his shoulders—the armor he wore when he thought the whole county was laughing at our mama’s name—had faded away. He wore his uniform trousers with a short-sleeved polo, his badge clipped to his belt instead of his chest.

Out of the passenger side scrambled Detective Miller.

Miller was twenty-six, sharp-nosed, and built like a folded-up pocketknife. He had grown up outside Chicago and still carried himself like he was waiting for a subway train to run him down. He adjusted his belt, tugged down his cuffs, and took a deep, uncertain sniff of the heavy air, looking around at the wall of pines like he half-expected a bobcat to drop out of the canopy.

“Smells like hickory and pig,” Eli boomed, hauling a twenty-pound plastic bag of ice and a cardboard six-pack out of the back seat. “Tell me you didn’t let Maren near the grill, Caleb. I’m too hungry to chew on charcoal.”

“Heard that, Chief!” Maren called from the kitchen window, her voice ringing clear through the screen. “Keep talking and you’re getting hot dogs from a can.”

Eli grinned, taking the porch steps two at a time. When he reached the top, he didn’t hesitate; he caught my forearm in a firm, solid grip, clapping me on the shoulder with his free hand. It was the kind of touch that used to be impossible between us—simple, easy, and rooted in blood that wasn’t bitter anymore.

“Looking good out here, Caleb,” Eli said, eyeing the new cedar railing. “Mama wouldn’t recognize the place. Might actually look like decent folks live here.”

“Don’t go giving me too much credit,” I replied, nodding toward the young detective trailing up the stairs behind him. “Evening, Miller. You survive the washboard ruts?”

Miller offered a quick, tight handshake, his palm cool. “Chief Foster takes those blind curves a little fast for gravel, Mr. Foster. But the view’s nice.”

“Call him Caleb, Miller,” Eli said, pushing through the screen door. “Call him Mr. Foster and he’ll think you’re handing him a court summons.”

We gathered around the kitchen table under the warm, yellow glow of the overhead lamp.