Dead Silence (The Body Finder 4)

She kept reading, page after page of entries about her mother’s first words and her first steps. She learned more about her grandfather—her mom’s dad—a man Violet was sure she would have liked, probably loved even. She saw the gradual change in her grandmother’s passages as, over the months and years, she’d learned to believe her husband’s words about her being a good person, a worthy person, until eventually she’d accepted her ability. She’d even begun to call it a gift.

Like Violet, her grandmother spent as much time outdoors as possible, so there were numerous accounts of the animals she’d discovered. Several times her grandmother had used her garden as an excuse for why her fingernails had dirt caked beneath them. But in the privacy of her journal she told another story. A tale of giving those animals the peace they craved.

Of silencing their echoes.

Violet knew what that was like. She had Shady Acres, where she’d buried more than her share of the animals she’d come across. Her way of finding her own silence.

If only it were that easy now, she thought, listening to the imprint that clung to her.

She learned too that it hadn’t been a secret in her grandparents’ household, much like it wasn’t in Violet’s.

It wasn’t until she came to a passage written during the spring of 1976—over thirty years earlier—that Violet sat up in her bed, every part of her body singing with awareness. She reread her grandmother’s entry, which had been written hastily, as if she couldn’t get the words down fast enough:

March 23, 1976

I’m not sure what it means that a body doesn’t have an echo. None at all. I wasn’t even sure the poor little mouse was dead when I first saw it, curled in a ball in Maggie’s hands. I told Maggie to drop it, afraid it was just stunned, that it might come to at any second and bite her in an effort to escape. I almost didn’t realize I’d yelled at Maggie until she started crying. But I didn’t go after her, not right away. I had to be sure about the mouse.

It was dead though. Dead as dead. I uncurled its body, which was already cold and stiff, so I had to pry it apart. Its chest had been ripped apart. Mauled was more like it. But the strange part was the emptiness surrounding it, the lack of . . . anything.

I have a theory. John’s going to help me find out if I’m right.

April 1, 1976 (April Fools’ Day)

This is probably a good day for my experiment because surely I’m wrong and then the joke will be on me. I’m dying for John to get home.

April 1, 1976

It worked! Which means I was right. I’m not sure whether I should be so elated by this revelation, but I am. Probably because it means I understand one more thing about my gift, one more thing I didn’t before.

Tonight, John brought home a live chicken. We had to wait until Maggie had gone to bed and then one of us had to kill it. I thought he’d want me to do it, since it was my idea. Instead, he did it. I told him he didn’t have to, that I didn’t need an answer that badly, but he could tell I was lying. I did want to know. I can’t explain why.

Before he did it, I almost changed my mind again. I thought about Ian and how he smelled (and tasted) after he’d gone hunting with his daddy. I was worried about what might cling to John in the wake of the chicken’s death. But somehow, I couldn’t tell him that. I wanted to know that badly. I was willing to take that risk.

He didn’t make me watch, but I was sure he must have cried. His eyes were red when he came back and the chicken was limp in his hands. Its head was hanging at a strange angle and there was a scent of chicory coming off it . . . and off John. Chicory! I could live forever with chicory!

Turns out, the heart was the key. It seems like such a simple solution now, like something I should’ve known all along. The mouse’s was gone, torn out when whatever killed it was trying to eat it, I assume, since most of its chest was missing. As soon as I removed the chicken’s heart the chicory scent vanished. It was just a chicken then. A dead chicken.

The strange part was, the scent didn’t just vanish from the chicken, it vanished from John too. Whatever chicory I’d smelled on him was gone now. Forever, I suppose.

Violet read the entry again and again, her own heart pounding in her chest now. When she was certain she hadn’t misread it, that she understood exactly what her grandmother was saying, she reached for her cell phone.

Sara answered, her voice sounding thick and bleary. Violet glanced at the alarm clock on her nightstand. It was 1:04.

“Sorry, Sara, I didn’t mean to wake you.” Suddenly she wished she’d waited till morning, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to. She had to know.

She heard rustling, and Sara cleared her throat. “It’s okay, Violet. What’s going on?”

“I had to ask you something. The boy, the one from the lake house . . . his body, was there anything strange about it?”

A brief pause, and then, “Strange how?”

Every muscle in her body tensed, as if this was the moment of truth. “His heart . . .” Violet said, thinking how weird this might sound if she was wrong. That maybe she’d awakened Sara for nothing. “Was it . . . missing?”

There was another pause, but this time there was no rustling sound coming from the other end. “How did you know that? How could you possibly know that?”

“So it’s true then?” Violet relaxed, practically sighing into the phone.

“I got a call from someone at the medical examiner’s office today. But I still don’t understand . . . how did you know?”