What We Buried

I parked behind it and stepped out into rain that had started as mist and turned mean. Mud pulled at my shoes. Somewhere in the trees, a woodpecker hammered the same stubborn note over and over.

“Ma’am, you can’t come through here.”

The deputy standing beside the SUV looked young enough to have been in diapers when Celeste disappeared. His name tag read Hollis.

“I’m Amaya Baptiste.”

His hand moved toward his radio.

“I know who you are,” he said.

That landed harder than it should’ve.

“Then you know why I’m here.”

“I know why everybody’s here.” Travis Hollis glanced past me toward the road. “Doesn’t mean anybody gets to walk onto a crime scene.”

“Crime scene?” I asked.

He looked away.

The detective who’d called me came around the SUV. Malcolm Cole was broad-shouldered, gray at the temples, and dressed like he’d been awake all night. His gaze dropped to my shoes, then rose to my face.

“Ms. Baptiste.”

“Amaya.”

“Amaya.” He held out a plastic sleeve. Inside was a photograph, blurred by rain and glare. “You shouldn’t have driven out here.”

“You said the remains were likely Celeste’s.”

“I said we had reason to believe that.”

“Then let me see where she was found.”

His mouth tightened. “That’s not how this works.”

“Twenty years ago, your department told my family she drowned in the bayou. Nobody found a body. Nobody found her car. Nobody found anything except a story that got repeated until it sounded like fact.”

Hollis shifted beside him.

Cole studied me. “The original case wasn’t handled by me.”

“No. But you’re handling this one.”

A truck rolled up behind my rental, tires grinding over gravel. Darius climbed out before the engine stopped.

He looked almost exactly like the man I remembered, only harder around the eyes. His shirt was buttoned to the throat despite the heat. He shut the truck door and stared at me as if I’d appeared at his house instead of standing beside a police barrier.

“Amaya,” he said.

I hadn’t heard my name in his voice for twenty years.

“Darius.”

He came to the gate, stopping just short of the tape. “You need to leave.”

I laughed once, but nothing about it was funny. “That’s your first sentence?”

“It’s the only one you need.”

Malcolm glanced between us. “Mr. Baptiste, this is an active scene.”

“I understand.”

“No, you don’t.” I stepped closer to the tape. “I’m the person who has a right to know what happened to my sister.”

Darius’s jaw flexed. “You have a right to grieve. You don’t have a right to interfere.”

“Interfere with what? You already decided she drowned.”

“That was twenty years ago.”

“And now you’re suddenly interested?”

Rain ticked against the leaves. Darius looked toward the property, toward the house hidden beyond the trees. The old place had once been painted white. Now the boards were gray and warped, the windows dark, the porch sagging under vines.

“What did they find?” I asked.

Malcolm answered before Darius could. “Bones, clothing fragments, and a ring.”

My stomach turned.

“What kind of ring?”

“Silver. Small blue stone.”

Celeste wore a blue stone ring on the night she vanished. I remembered it flashing when she pointed at me across the kitchen table, furious about something I couldn’t now place.

Or maybe I remembered the ring because everybody had told me about it afterward.

“What else?”

“We’re still processing.”

“Where?”

“Near the old pump house.”

Darius’s head snapped toward Malcolm. “You said the location wasn’t public.”

“It isn’t.”

“You just told her.”

“She’s family.”

“She’s not part of this investigation.”

I looked at him. “You don’t get to decide that.”

His eyes cut to mine. “I’m trying to keep you from making this worse.”

“For who?”

Nobody answered.

A black sedan appeared through the rain and stopped near the gate. Simone stepped out, holding her coat over her head. She had always cried easily. Now she looked like she’d forgotten how.

“Darius,” she called. “Mama’s asking where you are.”

Then she saw me.

The coat slipped from her hands.

For one second, none of us moved. I saw the girl she’d been at seventeen, sitting on Celeste’s bed and painting her toenails while I read a magazine on the floor. I saw the woman she’d become in the tightness around her mouth.

“Amaya,” she whispered.

I wanted to ask her if she’d known. I wanted to ask all of them.

Instead I said, “Did you know they found her here?”

Simone’s face crumpled.

Darius turned on me. “Enough.”

“No.” My voice shook, but I kept it low. “I’ve spent twenty years being told she left angry, drove toward the bayou, and drank herself into the water. If she was here, then somebody lied.”

“Watch yourself,” Darius said.

“Why? Because the dead can’t contradict you?”

Hollis murmured, “Ma’am - ”

“Don’t.” I kept my eyes on Darius. “You called me home. You all did. Every time there was a birthday, a funeral, some damn family emergency, you expected me to show up and pretend Celeste was a closed subject.”

Darius stepped through the opening in the tape.

Malcolm blocked him. “Stay out of the scene.”

Darius stopped inches from the detective. “That property belongs to my family.”

“It’s evidence now.”

“My family has been living with this for twenty years.”

“Then you know why I need you to cooperate.”

Something passed between them - recognition, maybe distrust. Darius looked back at me.

“You want closure?” he said. “Take the body when they release it. Bury her. Say whatever you need to say at the grave.”

“And then what?”

“Then you go back where you came from.”

The words struck clean and deep.

I looked through the gate at the house. A curtain shifted in one broken window, though there was no wind inside the building. My skin prickled.

“I’m not leaving,” I said.

Darius’s expression went flat. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then explain it.”

“I don’t owe you an explanation.”

“You’re my brother.”

“And you’re late.”

Simone flinched.

The phrase hung there, ugly and final.

I turned toward Malcolm. “How do I get the identification?”

“Medical examiner’s office will notify next of kin.”

“I am next of kin.”

“Your family’s attorney may have listed Darius as the contact.”

“Of course he did.”

Malcolm reached into his coat and handed me a card. “Call me this afternoon. I’ll tell you what I can.”

Darius grabbed my wrist before I could take it.

His fingers were warm and hard around the bone.

“Don’t call him,” he said.

I looked down at his hand, then back at his face. “Let go.”

For a second, he didn’t.

Then he released me.

The place where he’d touched me burned.

I took Malcolm’s card and walked back to the rental. Mud sucked at my shoes. Behind me, Simone began to cry, soft and furious, and Darius told her to get in the car.

I drove into town with the wipers fighting the rain.

Evangeline Heights had changed in all the ways towns changed when nobody had enough money to leave. The old movie theater had become a church. The grocery store wore a new sign over the same cracked windows. A mural of a blue heron covered the wall beside the courthouse, its painted eye bright and watchful.

I pulled into the sheriff’s department and sat there with the engine running.

I wanted a coffee. A bathroom. A locked room where nobody knew my name.

Instead, I went inside.

The lobby smelled like wet coats and burnt coffee. A woman behind the counter looked up from her computer.

“Amaya Baptiste?”

I nodded.

She picked up a folder from beneath the desk. “Detective Cole said you’d come.”

The folder was thin. Too thin.

“Is this the identification paperwork?”

“Some of it.”

“Can I see it?”

She hesitated, then slid it across.

The top page carried the parish seal and a case number. Beneath it, typed in black letters, was the name:

CELESTE BAPTISTE.

The room tilted.

Not a rumor. Not a family story. Not a woman who’d vanished into a bayou and stayed there because nobody had looked hard enough.

Celeste Baptiste.

Confirmed remains.

I touched the page with one finger. The paper was cold and damp from the rain on my hand.

At the bottom, beneath the signature line, someone had written in red ink:

REOPEN INVESTIGATION - PENDING REVIEW.

“Who wrote that?” I asked.

The woman behind the counter went pale.

Before she could answer, the lobby doors opened.

Darius stood there.

He crossed the room, took the folder from my hands, and closed it.

“You’re done,” he said.

I stared at him. “The case is reopening.”

His face gave nothing away.

“Not for you.”

End of chapter one. 39 more chapters in the full book.