“I love your sick mind,” Theo said. “How are you still single?”

  “Eat your heart out, Ivan.”

  “Sorry, I must have missed how we landed on murder,” Tuck said.

  “Occam’s razor,” said Tamar.

  “Gesundheit,” said Theo.

  Tuck wisely ignored him. “Occam’s what?”

  “Occam’s razor,” Edie repeated. “The simplest explanation is the best explanation.” It was a motto she’d tried to instill in her staff at the Times—along with the official motto, Salva veritate. With truth intact. But the truth was never simple, seldom whole. She touched The Lump automatically. If Occam’s razor had its way, she might have to have it and the larger lump of her left breast razored off. Goose bumps broke out up and down her arms.

  “And murder is the simplest explanation why?” Tuck peered uneasily into The Hole.

  “Can’t be a legitimate interment because the church has been defunct for years,” Edie recited. “Disinterment for medical research unlikely due to decay. Disinterment for historical research unlikely because, well, that would have been news, and I would have known.” She knew she sounded like a know-it-all but had never figured out how to avoid that particular pitfall. She avoided Hannah’s gaze instead.

  “Maybe it’s not news yet,” Tuck said. “I mean, this can’t have been dug before last night. We were all here, and no hole.”

  “Last night?” Theo said. “Can’t have been dug more than about an hour ago.”

  “How do you know?” Edie asked, bracing herself for another idiotic joke. He and Hannah seemed utterly incapable of taking anything seriously.

  Theo bent down, straightened up again with a handful of crumbling black earth. “The soil’s still wet,” he said, pressing it into a small, dense lump. Edie’s fingers probed surreptitiously at The Lump beneath her arm again. Mortified she hadn’t thought of that; astonished Theo had. He should have been dumber. Anybody that good-looking deserved to be dumb. “It hasn’t rained for days,” he added, brushing his hands off on his pants. “Whoever dug this did it very recently.”

  “Which means whoever dug this is probably coming back,” Hannah said. “Probably soon.”

  “Well,” Tamar said, and stubbed her cigarette out on the nearest headstone, “that’s enough nightmares for me for one evening.” She stuffed the butt into the small ornamental urn they had repurposed as an ashtray, nobody quite remembered how long ago. Full of ashes anyway, or so Hannah’s reasoning went. The rest of them just went along. “Going to be up late as it is.”

  “Need a lift?” Hannah asked. “About time I clocked back in.”

  “Me too,” Theo said, still rubbing his hands together, though most of the dirt had come loose. Staring off into the dark. “Can I—”

  “You can walk.” Hannah poked her cigarette into the urn, made a show of checking her watch. Raised her eyebrows. “Or maybe run.” She vanished under the oak with a perfunctory backward glance at Tuck and Edie. “Let us know if Freddy Krueger comes to call.”

  Theo chuckled, dirty hands on his hips. “Such a fucking tease,” he said, apparently to himself. Then, like Hannah, he spared one backward glance for Tuck and Edie. “Stick together, kids.”

  They watched him disappear after Hannah and Tamar. Stood on opposite sides of The Hole in awkward silence. Edie did not want to walk back to the Times office. Not without some answers, not without a story. For the first time since The Lump appeared, since her waking hours stretched and her sleeping hours shrank so dramatically, she felt wide awake. Murder or not, here was something worth investigating. She stubbed her cigarette out in the urn and turned her back on The Hole.

  “Where are you going?” Tuck asked.

  “To church,” she said.

  12:30 AMTuck

  Edie would not go away. Tuck had tried to kill the conversation—something he usually managed to do without trying—but she was perfectly capable of playing both parts herself. Mostly posing rhetorical questions, thinking out loud, unable to leave the mystery of The Hole unresolved. She chattered at him as she crossed the churchyard, still moving insistently toward the Anchorite.

  “Must be really hurting for news, huh?” he asked, risking outright rudeness in the hopes that she would finally relent, lose interest, and leave. Unlike the rest of them, he had nowhere to be and nowhere to go and was justifiably protective of the building. He’d been rationing his cigarettes, but under the circumstances considered another one justified. A fourth would be flirting with extravagance. He felt around his pockets for the pack, tripping over his own feet in his haste to catch up to her. She had a surprisingly long stride, weaving between headstones and weeping angels like it was some sort of nocturnal steeplechase.

  “That obvious, huh?” she said, undeterred. “Everybody’s lost interest in the Hostile Incidents.” He could hear the capital letters. Wondered if she’d coined the term herself or simply gave it her editorial stamp of approval. “And there’s not much else happening around here. Except this.” She gestured over her shoulder at The Hole.

  “Which is probably nothing.” Was, in fact, nothing but negative space. Which didn’t seem particularly newsworthy. Still, Edie was determined.

  “Probably,” she conceded. “But so far none of our simple explanations seems to fit.”

  “There must be something simple we haven’t thought of.”

  “Probably,” she said again. Then fell silent. He crossed his fingers in his pockets, hoping that meant she’d give up and go. But no, like a dog with a bone, she refused to let the matter drop. She jogged up the steps and stopped on the porch. The porcine gargoyles gaped down at her in silent, tongue-wagging hysterics. “When did you say this place was … decommissioned?”

  “About a hundred years ago.” He harbored a special loathing for the gargoyle on the left, which had a nose ring like a Spanish bull and eyes that seemed to follow you no matter where you stood. “Technically it’s maintained by some historic preservation society, but they haven’t done much to preserve it besides keep the university from knocking it down.”

  “Hm.” The sign glared at them in the midnight gloom. White letters on bare, mismatched boards. DANGER, KEEP OUT. “Even a hundred years ago, I bet they kept a record of everybody buried here.”

  “So what?”

  “So, let’s find out.”

  He pushed the door shut when she tried to pull it open. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  He pointed to the sign. “You’re the editor of the paper, so I know you can read.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yes, but can you believe everything you read?”

  “When a condemned building has a ‘Danger, Keep Out’ sign on the door, I tend to believe it, yes.”

  “It’s not condemned. You just said it’s being ‘preserved.’”

  “I said it’s being preserved from demolition, not that its structural integrity has been preserved.”

  She wrinkled her nose, squinting suspiciously at him. “Why do you know so much about it, anyway?”

  He didn’t have a good answer for that. He got tongue-tied between unlikely excuses, and she took advantage of his silence to push past him and heave the door open, DANGER be damned. The hinges groaned, and a shaft of watery moonlight threw itself down the aisle like a silver carpet. “Coming?” Edie asked. He saw no way around it, silently cursing her for being so curious and himself for being such a bad liar.

  Their footsteps were muffled by a century’s dirt and decay on the flagstone floor. The echo bouncing back from the modestly vaulted ceiling warped and wobbled, as if they were two scuba divers walking underwater. Edie tugged her gloves off to better navigate the touchscreen on her phone. The flashlight was more like a miniature floodlight, blooming through the dark of the nave until it climbed the wall behind the altar.

  “Whoa.” Edie stopped suddenly and Tuck walked right into her. She pointed the light up at the massive, weird mosaic of Saint Anthony. Paint had been applied directly to the plaster, embellished with shards of mirror and colored glass gems that glittered like the embers of a fire dying out—deep bloody reds and oxidized orange. The saint himself held, in one hand, a leash tethered to a stout, squatting creature that could have been a pig or an ugly hairless dog. In the other, he clutched an even uglier doll, with cabbage-like leaves sprouting out of its head. The doll had no hands or feet, but instead four hairy, rootlike protuberances where its hands and feet should have been. Which was not to say that there were no hands or feet at all. The most unsettling part of the icon was the half dozen disembodied hands and feet floating in midair above the hermit’s head—a grotesque mobile of amputated limbs. “What is that thing?”

  “Which thing?” There were so many to choose from. Edie pointed to the freaky, frondiferous doll.

  “It’s a mandrake,” Tuck told her. “Physicians like the Antonines used them as a sedative for amputations.” Saint Anthony stared down at them with mouth agape in speechless horror.

  “Is that what all that’s about?” Recovering from her shock somewhat, she directed the beam up at the severed hands and feet.

  “Yeah. Ignis sacer.”

  “Ignis what?”

  “Saint Anthony’s Fire. It was a sort of medieval epidemic. Caused gangrene and hallucinations and made people feel like they were being burned alive.”

  “What fun,” Edie said. Her flashlight roved over the mosaic, illuminating the patches of pale greenish lichen creeping in from the corners and cracks in the plaster. The larger rosettes were starting to resemble ears of cauliflower. Tiny mushroom caps had popped out among the glass gems, dimly aglow with weird phosphorescence that reminded Tuck of the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling of his childhood bedroom. “Smells a bit like a pile of withered limbs in here, actually.”

  Tuck almost laughed. Damp and decay made the whole building feel like a mausoleum. “Fitting for old Saint Tony. He lived in a tomb for a while, or so says the lore.”

  Edie lowered her flashlight, looked away from the saint and back at Tuck instead. “Why do you know so much about this?” she asked again. He hadn’t come up with a good answer since the first time she asked.

  “‘I collect spores, mold, and fungus,’” he said, nonsensically.

  “What?”

  “Microbiology.” He neglected to mention he’d never finished the degree. Couldn’t afford the loans. Had already defaulted on the payments, already accrued late fees and interest, already been reported as a financial delinquent to all the credit bureaus. “Mycology, really. Saint Anthony’s Fire was just another name for ergot poisoning.”

  “I hate to admit it,” Edie said, “but Hannah’s right. This place is deeply fucking weird.”

  “You wanted to come in here,” he said.

  “And you’ve clearly been in here before,” she said, with a flicker of a smile. Found out. “So, where do you think they keep the burial records?”

  He sighed, resigning himself to the search. Cooperating with her inquisition seemed easiest, and Tuck—worn down by years of debt and drudgery—often opted for the path of least resistance. “The office upstairs,” he said. “Come on, it’s this way.” He led her down the aisle, toward the rickety spiral staircase at the back of the nave. “Careful. That third step is tricky.”

  He hadn’t warned her soon enough. She slipped, grabbed his shoulder, and almost pulled him over backward. “Sorry,” she said, whispering now, the funereal hush of the Anchorite getting the better of her. He didn’t need the flashlight. Knew the steps by heart.

  “You wanted danger,” he said. “Watch your head.” At the top of the stairs, a wall sconce had come loose and fallen across the walkway. Edie ducked underneath and kept close behind him, following like a shadow. The corridor dead-ended at another oak door, which moaned mournfully when he threw his shoulder against it, the hinges crusted over with rust. None of the electric lights worked, but there were plenty of white tapers in a box that had been mostly protected from the elements. He lit the two in the candelabra on the desk, which cast just enough light to read by. A stained glass window on the west wall transformed the moonlight to a swirl of watercolor. “Okay,” Tuck said, “knock yourself out.” He backed into the corner, shuffling his feet, trying to nudge the backpack and sleeping bag crumpled there deeper into the dark. Edie was already busy pulling the bookshelves apart. There was surprisingly little dust. Too much moisture. Each volume fell open to reveal enormous water spots, some even growing mold where the papers met the pasteboard.

  Smoking in a room so full of books had never seemed a good idea, but nothing was dry enough to catch, really, and Tuck needed another smoke to smooth his fraying nerves. They’d thrown caution to the wind already, so why not? He tugged his gloves off, shook a cigarette out of the pack, and leaned forward to light it by the taller candle’s flame. Fuck the ration. The night had taken too many strange turns to worry about how he’d pay for smokes tomorrow. Maybe the unnecessary expense would finally force him to quit. He puffed quietly, ignoring Edie and watching out the window. The Hole was a long, dark void in the graveyard below.

  “What’s this?”

  He looked her way. “Find something?”

  “Not what I was looking for, but—is this yours?”

  Tuck’s heart dropped into his stomach like an elevator car in free fall. He’d forgotten the journal—the battered field notebook he’d filled with jottings and sketches and still occasionally leafed through, doodled in. She’d picked it up off the desk and opened the cover, and there was his name, blurred and water-stained like everything else, but it said, unmistakably, in his clumsy childish writing, Wes Tucker.

  “Guess I must have left it,” he said. Sucking on the cigarette to play for time, wishing he had a better poker face. Any poker face at all. “Sometimes I sketch in here.”

  “Is that it?” She was looking past him, not at him. Had spotted the sleeping bag and the backpack kicked halfway out of sight. “What’s with the sleeping bag?”

  He flicked his ash into the opposite corner. The books were too waterlogged to hold a flame, but he wasn’t sure about the nylon and couldn’t afford to set fire to his few worldly possessions. “Just needed a roof over my head for a while,” he said. “Didn’t see the harm. Except for you, nobody has ever ignored the ‘Danger’ sign.”

  She was silent for a moment, straight dark hair casting half her face in shadow. “Theo knows, doesn’t he?” she said, which was not what he expected her to say.

  “Unfortunately,” Tuck admitted. “How did you know he knew?” He was learning not to underestimate her investigative instincts.

  “All the … names.” She shrugged, looking embarrassed on his behalf. “Churchmouse. Friar Tuck.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What a world-class dickhead,” she said.

  He smirked in spite of himself. “No comment.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Do I look like an idiot? He saw me come out, a few weeks back.”

  “Weeks?” She shifted her feet, biting her lip. “That seems … I mean, look at the mold in here. There are probably bats in the belfry. Never mind ergot, you could get mold poisoning. You could get rabies.”

  “Right, well, it wasn’t my first choice,” he said. “I ran out of options and need somewhere to sleep while I figure things out.”

  “I don’t mean to pry, b—”

  “There’s no story here, okay?” he said, more sharply than he should have. “I’m broke. I’m squatting. That’s it.” One of the candles guttered and sputtered, melting down into the bracket.

  “I wasn’t looking for a story,” she said. Voice shrinking at the accusation. “I’m just—I don’t know, what would you say, if it were me?”

  He blinked at her across the desk. The candlelight dying down to a murmur. “I try not to be a dickhead, but I’m not trying to be a hero either,” he told her. “I wouldn’t say anything.”

  She blinked back at him. Seemed at a loss for words at first, then gasped, “Tuck!”

  “Jesus, could you drop it?”

  “No, Tuck, look.” She backed against the bookcase, vanishing from the narrow beam of light slanting in from the window. “There’s someone in the graveyard.”

  He flattened himself against the wall. Practiced, by now, at sliding out of sight when anybody went by, just in case. “Could be Theo,” he said. “Or Hannah, coming back.”

  Edie shook her head vigorously. “Too short to be Theo, too broad to be Hannah.”

  And too dark to see much else. “Put the candle out.”

  Edie’s arm darted forward and with a soft hiss the flame turned to smoke. Tuck squinted down at the ground. It was difficult to make out much but Rorschach blots in the shape of a person. Probably a man, maybe—a hunchback? “What is that?” he breathed, though it was unlikely the interloper could see them through the colored glass, less likely still that he could hear them.

  “He’s carrying something,” Edie whispered. “It looks … heavy.”

  “Not heavy enough for whatever you’re thinking.” Tuck came away from the wall, squatted down to squint through a hole in the window where a couple of panes had popped out. Wind whistled through the gap at night, letting the outside in. No matter in the last warm gasp of September, but this far into October, the cold cut to the bone.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Shh.” He held his breath, watching and waiting for—what? The dark figure below lowered the bag from his shoulder. Like a sinister, necromantic Santa Claus. “He’s, uh, unloading.”

  “Unloading what?” The whisper tickled the back of his ear and he nearly jumped through the window.

  “Don’t scare me like that!” He hadn’t even heard her move, but he could feel her now, crouching right behind him.

  “Sorry.”

  “Shh.”

  The gravedigger looked around—glancing first toward the parking deck, then toward the Calhoun Center. He turned the bag upside down. Whatever was in it tumbled out into The Hole in pieces. “Oh God,” Tuck muttered. Head suddenly spinning—a glittering, gruesome whirl of disembodied arms and legs, hands and feet. “I think I might be sick.”

 

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