Chapter 12

12

I was planning to drive home, but instead, I take a detour. I drive to an entirely different location—a place I last visited two weeks earlier, and until five minutes ago, I had no intention of ever returning to.

It takes me another twenty minutes behind the wheel. It's hard to drive when my thoughts are racing through my skull. I turn on the radio to try to calm myself, but the loud pop music just makes me more agitated. I attempt to find an easy-listening station, but I eventually give up and turn it off entirely.

After what feels like far longer than twenty minutes, I reach my destination. I step out of my Lexus and stand there, gazing at the steel bars in front of me, not wanting to go inside but knowing it's the only way I'll find peace.

I hate cemeteries.

I hug my jacket close to my chest, square my shoulders, and then enter the gates to the cemetery where I buried my husband two weeks earlier. Despite the chill I get when I think about what is lying beneath the ground, it is quite a pretty cemetery. The undertaker showed me photographs when we were planning the funeral, and I knew Grant would approve of the rows of pristine white graves surrounded by plush green grass. The periphery of the cemetery is dotted with bright-red roses, and an immaculate walking path allows visitors to easily traverse the cemetery without trampling the grass.

When the undertaker sold me the plot, he asked if I would like to buy two adjacent plots so that someday I might rest in peace beside my husband.

"No," I told him. "No need for that."

The echo of my heels clacking against the ground sounds like thunderbolts in the quiet cemetery. There are a handful of other living people here, visiting the graves of their relatives, but most of the visitors are quiet. I suppose a cemetery isn't a place for boisterous conversation.

The undertaker sold me plot number eighty-six. That has little meaning when I'm looking out at the rows and rows of nearly identical gravestones. But I remember where they laid my husband to rest. It's hard to forget.

I take the walking path to the middle of the cemetery. A slight breeze is tickling my neck, and once again, I get the distinct feeling somebody is watching me. But of course, that's why I'm here.

I diverge from the paved path and start walking through the grass. I traverse the green blades, my heels digging into the dirt with each step. It takes me another few minutes to find it, but it's not hard since I purchased a more elaborate headstone than most of the other ones here. We did, after all, have money to spare. Of course, I had no idea, when I bought this headstone, that I would soon be providing for the future of Grant's eight—and a half—illegitimate children.

And now I have arrived at the polished black granite headstone. The words etched into the stone read In loving memory of Grant Lockwood.

Below the words are the year of his birth and the year of his death and underneath, in script letters, Loving husband of Alice.

Nice touch, right?

I stare at the gravestone for much too long as a cool breeze lifts my hair from the back of my neck and the loose strands dance in the wind. This is the same headstone that was here when we buried Grant two weeks ago. Nothing has changed since then.

I drop my gaze to my feet. The grass is intact, right where it was replaced after Grant's coffin was lowered into the ground. I stare at the grass, half expecting a hand to suddenly rip through the soil and wrap its fingers around my ankle.

But no zombie hands are coming out of the ground. Grant is staying put in his coffin. Unless…

It was a closed coffin. We made that decision because of how badly Grant's body was mangled in the accident. But my point is, I never actually saw my husband lying in his coffin. What if it was empty?

But how could that be? Such a thing would surely be noticed. If a body just up and walked out of the morgue, they wouldn't just shrug it off. I certainly hope not, at least.

I fix my gaze on the ground one more time. I am seized with the sudden urge to grab the shovel I keep in my trunk in case of snow and start digging. If I could get to that coffin, I could verify that Grant's body is inside. And if I could do that, I would know that it is not, in fact, my husband who is following me.

But I'm being paranoid now. It's obviously not Grant who is following me. Grant is dead . He is absolutely dead. I saw his dead body, and even though I'm not a doctor, it was pretty clear from looking at him that he was very, very dead. And it's a good thing he is.

Because I'm the one who killed him.

And if he were still alive, he would be pissed .