Sarah had been suspicious, once.
There had been such a strange feeling, far back in the past, when she first began to realize how wrong Ravenville once. She’d looked at every passing car like it hid a body, every passerby on the street like they were fresh from a crime scene. She had once thought that everything in Ravenville was soaked in blood and barely scrubbed off, that if she pressed her finger too hard on any wall or car floor, it would cave in and a rotting corpse would come tumbling out, oozing pus and clotted blood like a revenant clamoring for a witness.
Not anymore.
She had been suspicious, once, but only when she thought she would be here forever. Watching for landmines in the house you’d be growing up in. Now that she knew she would be leaving, she worried less about what individual people did. It didn’t matter when everybody in this town had blood on their hands, or fingerprints on some crime lying around. There was no point in stressing about who was guilty or not, especially when most people were. So she faced Ravenville head-on, biding her time until she could leave and not look back, waiting for the window for the truth. She would leave, that she knew. And she would do it knowing the truth.
She wasn’t suspicious of Michael Jay. She had fair reason to be, given his body count and the fact that he’d never been caught. But she didn’t fear him, and she knew now that he didn’t care, for all the reputation he seemed to have.
So she’d approached him in the cafeteria, to see what he knew, because if anybody knew anything it had to be him. And he hadn’t said anything, but she had ultimately gotten something out of it. The Ravenville survival guide, abridged edition. She didn’t quite have anything tangible to be grateful for yet, from the lessons, but he had come through for her on Saturday and that was something she owed him for. It had been a lesson. Not the kind that he gave her, but the kind she knew she would have to take to heart.
She thought she could hear the sound of Matthew’s heart being pierced whenever it was quiet around her, but she took it as a warning. That she needed to listen to his lessons, if she wanted to get to the truth. She had to understand the defense mechanisms. She didn’t like it. She didn’t want to. But she wanted to leave, and she was going to, and she would do what she needed to survive until her ticket out. Otherwise it would be her own breath leaving through a hole in her chest.
So she listened to what he had to say, later on Monday night, in the dark of the woods, over the sound of chirping crickets and shifting dirt.
“Lesson three,” he began between sighs of effort. “It is close to lesson two, earlier today, but distinct enough that it’s applicable to other contexts beyond those of break-ins and searches. So it is its own lesson.”
“Are you just giving me lessons based on whatever’s happening at the time?” Sarah asked in a whisper. “Or do you actually have a lesson plan?” She wasn’t complaining, but she was beginning to notice that pattern.
“I was going to have a plan by today, but circumstances made it so otherwise.” Michael wiped some sweat off his forehead with a gloved hand. “Once this settles down, we will go to an actual schedule. But practical experience is useful.”
“True,” she agreed. “So what’s this lesson on?”
He stopped to catch his breath for a moment before answering. “Caution. In the same way that you need to be able to tell when somewhere was searched, being able to search effectively is also important. Information can be found anywhere, and I mean anywhere. If you are going to search somewhere, then you must search everywhere. People will notice they have been searched regardless of how well you hide it. So the most important part of a search is to maximize your efficiency.”
Sarah nodded. “Stealth doesn’t matter, just be fast?”
“Not fast, thorough. Especially in your situation, doing things defensively. You cannot afford to leave any information behind at all.”
“Okay.” She stopped and smoothed her hair out. “Is this related to why we’re digging up Matthew?”
“Immensely,” Michael replied as he shoveled another load of dirt out of the hole. “Because we made a crucial mistake in the rush of attempting to dispose of his body.”
“Look, it was my first time killing somebody, I’m not going to be over it anytime soon.”
“Well, you’ll have to be. I wasn’t referring to your reaction, but you will need to get used to the aftermath of violence at close hand. It’s just a fact.”
“Yeah, yeah. I don’t like it. Now what’s the mistake I made?”
Michael’s shovel met with sudden resistance, making a noise like it was just poking mud, and he tossed it aside before jumping down into the hole and beginning to brush the dirt away. Sarah tried to look away, knowing what he would unearth, but she couldn’t. She wanted to. But she couldn’t. She knew what Ravenville made of people, but as dirty clothes and skin turned into a pallor unseen on any living being were revealed beneath the dark dirt, the reminder was real.
Fear and disgust slithered down her spine like filthy water over pitted cobbles as Michael brushed the dirt off of Matthew’s face, expression still trapped in a forcefully empty silence. Eyes closed, mouth almost open, head limp like he had been made to fall asleep on the spot. The pallor of his skin betrayed that, as did the uncanny color of his lips. Michael nodded like he was satisfied that this was the right corpse and began pawing through the clothes on the corpse like he was looking for something. The dull thumps of flesh on flesh sifted through the air for a few moments before there was a thwack, like hitting plastic, and Michael pulled something from the dead body’s pants.
“We forgot to check his phone.”
He stretched out an arm, and Sarah reached down to pull him out, helping him out of the hole and up next to her. Matthew’s phone didn’t look particularly special, and it actually seemed to be the same model as hers, so Michael flipped it open and took a look. None of the buttons seemed different, but he was giving it a slightly more intense look than his usual expression, so she reached over and pressed the button to bring up call history.
He looked at her, and she blinked at him. “I have the same model. I just assumed that you didn’t.”
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Michael might have let out a huff of air, but she wasn’t sure if she could hear it over the sounds of the woods in the deepening night, and he began speaking anyway. “One of the first sources of information you can get about somebody is their phone. If I wanted to search somebody’s phone, I would be looking through their contact list, seeing who they know or what they might have in the notes.”
“But in this way, we just want to know if he called anybody before trying to kill me?” She finished with a question in her voice. Michael nodded, turned his head to actually look at the call history, and immediately made a face of disgust before handing the phone to her. She took it, and her heart sank.
She had known there was something suspicious about the whole invite she got. But seeing that there was a call to Brad Mansill placed only minutes before she had pulled into that clearing felt like the bottom had fallen out of her ribcage, and her fears were falling through it. The fact he had placed a follow-up call, several in fact, made it even worse.
Sarah pressed the volume button, checking the level, and understood. “It’s on silent,” she said. “He probably did that to avoid being noticed. Damn.”
“Agreed. And it is odd.” Michael plucked the phone from her hand and slid it into one of his pockets, striding over to the other side of the hole and picking up his shovel. “It’s still not enough to prove anything, but there is something unusual here. If it weren’t so late, then it could be an acceptable time to begin wondering about this.”
“But it is, and you want to rebury him and go home, because the lesson’s over.”
Michael didn’t respond verbally, instead lifting off the top of the dirt pile besides the hole and dumping it back over the corpse. Sarah stared at the half-hidden face, trying to capture all the details she could to her memory. The color, the uncanniness, the features that denoted a body devoid of life instead of one with a mind driving it. She had to. This boy didn’t die for no reason. He couldn’t have.
A shovelful of dirt broke her line of sight and reverie, hiding his face once more and for the last time. Sarah adjusted her grip on her own shovel and began the work, refilling the whole bit by bit. It was hard to tell the color of the dirt apart from the shovelhead, to tease the outlines of the handle against the ground or the trees against the sky, and she tried to remember anything she could from the first time burying him. She didn’t rush, being sure to be slow and intentional with each movement of the shovel, but she did begin to wonder.
The silence had settled after a few minutes of work, just the shing of the dirt against the metal of the shovel. But she broke it with a question.
“Where did you learn all this?”
Michael looked up from his own efforts at her, not breaking the flow of movement, and she elaborated. “If getting caught by the police is where it all ends, whatever that actually, you know, means, then how did you learn all this? You couldn’t have trial and errored your way through this, did you?”
He paused, shovel held above the hole, and shook his head. “No, I didn’t,” he answered. “On my first kill, I tried to bury the body. I tried to do it quickly, because I thought disposal was the easy part. So I was sitting outside a house, covered in dirt, watching several police cars go racing past me towards the woods. I knew why they were going there. One of them slowed down and stopped, but he left quickly. In any other situation, we would have been caught. That was my lesson. A lucky break. I inferred what I did wrong from there, both in placement and in depth, and made sure to never replicate that mistake again.”
“So you just figured it out after one time?”
“Yes.”
“Nobody taught you?”
“No.” He made sure to lift even the last few piles of dirt onto the hole, keeping the disturbances down. Sarah remembered that part. “Very little teaching goes on in Ravenville.”
She nodded, though mostly to herself, as Michael was already retrieving the pile of sticks, leaves, and forest floor debris that had covered the grave originally while she evened out the dirt. Another question entered her mind, though, as she was helping him arrange the cover in more silence. She held her tongue while he made minute adjustments, making sure the division wasn’t too strong, tilting leaves and moving stricks around to break up the smooth outline of a pile and give the illusion of natural cover over both the grave and the area around it, like this was a normal accumulation of things that fell off of trees, but as they both stood up and began walking back to the cars she sprung.
“You said we.”
Michael stopped in his tracks. “Did I?”
“Yeah, in your story. You said we. Did you…do your first kill with somebody else?”
He didn’t respond, or move, until he resumed walking. “Yes.”
“Okay. Alright. Was it a friend? Is...that why you had two shovels in your car?”
“I have two shovels in my car because it is always wise to have a spare,” he grunted. “I told you the story of how I almost got caught to illustrate a point. You cannot bet on being lucky.” His free hand yanked the trunk of his car open before reaching for Sarah’s shovel, prying it from her grip. “I do not need to tell you the details of my first kill, and honestly, I don’t think you would like to hear it. You don’t like violence. Why would I regale you with the details?”
“I, well, that’s fair I guess.” She was stammering and she knew it. Seeing the corpse had sent her a little tumbling. “But it’s a pretty good question, because you do all the payback stuff alone, and–”
“And that is not your problem.” He slammed the trunk shut and turned to face her. “That is not your business. In fact, the only thing that is your business is listening. I am not your friend, nor am I doing this out of the goodness of my heart. I am doing this because it is entertaining. I thought I made that clear.”
His car was already unlocked, and he opened the door and slid into the seat. It started smoothly, and he lowered the window to look at her. “The next lesson will be next Monday. You can take some time to get over what happened, if you need it. I will have a plan, and you’ll listen.”
He drove off without any further words, and Sarah stood there in the woods, letting his partings root in her head. She knew he was not his friend, but the resistance was strange. Maybe it made sense in Ravenville, just for people like him, who had to cut everybody else off in order to be able to cut people apart, but she still didn’t believe him. The notion that somebody could just figure out how to become such an efficient killer, without training or preparation, she didn’t believe that at all.
There was much about Ravenville she didn’t believe.
Sarah pulled her coat tighter around herself, sighed, and walked over to her car.
Whether or not she believed it, she would take the knowledge he had. Maybe she would use it to find out where he had gotten it from, one day, and maybe even soon. But in the meantime, she would take the advantage.
It would get her out, or it would get her truth.