They stole down the street like cats, keeping to the shadows and holding their knapsacks away from their bodies so that the trowels and picks didn’t bang together. They walked past evidence of the night that had already ended: trees strung with toilet paper, rural mailboxes dripping with eggs. Cassie walked ahead, and Connor watched her footsteps in the moonlight, careful to step exactly where she had.
The pet cemetery was a small gated area bordered by silvery pines.
Everyone in town had buried something here—a cat, a guinea pig, a goldfish—although many of the graves were unmarked. By silent agreement, Connor and Cassie moved toward one of the few headstones in the cemetery. It heralded the resting place of Rufus, an unpopular mastiff that had been the only creature to escape the sharp side of old lady Monahan’s tongue. Rufus had been dead for six years, and Mrs. Monahan for three, so Cassie didn’t really think they’d be offending anyone by digging up the dog’s bones.
“You ready?” Connor was looking around nervously, but he already had his pick in hand. Cassie nodded. She pulled out her tools and waited for Connor to strike the first blow.
The dog was buried so deep that Cassie wondered if there’d been a coffin. The Monahans had been the richest family on the lake, after all, and Rufus was their only child. She scraped at the soft earth with her hands, shoveling out what Connor loosed.
He was standing four feet into the pit, his legs braced on the sides of the dug walls for fear of stepping right on Rufus when he least expected it. He leaned over and chipped the edge of his trowel against something unforgiving. “Holy shit,” he said.
Cassie wiped the sweat out of her eyes. “You find it?”
Connor swallowed. He had turned a shade of gray. Cassie reachedPicture Perfect
69out a hand to pull him up, and when he was on level ground again, he fell to his knees to vomit. He wiped his hand across his mouth.
Cassie stood with her hands on her hips. “For God’s sake, Connor,”
she said. “How’re you ever going to sew a dog’s intestines back together if you can’t even handle seeing them already dead?” Shaking her head, she leaped into the pit, wincing a little when her sneaker struck bone.
She leaned over and started pulling the thin white curves up, one by one, tossing them inches from Connor’s feet. In a way she was surprised.
She’d been thinking of the skeleton as one big piece, like in the cartoons, not something that time could break into fragments.
Finally, she reached through the dirt and pulled out the dog’s skull.
Bits of hair still covered the crown. “Awesome,” she breathed, rolling it out of the pit toward Connor.
He was sitting with his back to the grave, his eyes shut tightly. “You ready to go?” he said, his voice scratchy and rough.
Cassie felt a grin split her face. “Jeez, Connor,” she said. “If I didn’t know you better I’d think you were scared shitless.”
Connor stood up in one fluid motion, turning and grasping Cassie’s arms with a strength just beneath the point of pain. He shook her so hard her head snapped back. “I amnotscared,” he said.
Cassie narrowed her eyes. Connor never treated her like this. He never hurt her. He was the only one who didn’t. Angry tears burned under her lids. “Coward,” she whispered, saying anything that would strike his heart and make him sting as badly as she did.
They stayed like that until time stopped, and all Cassie could feel was the cut of Connor’s fingernails in her skin and the heat of his gaze as it swept her face. A tear streaked out of the corner of her eye, and Connor let go of one of her shoulders to wipe it away.
He had never touched her like that, either. So softly that she wondered if she had imagined it, or if it had been the night air. “I’m not a coward,” he whispered, coming so close the words fell onto her own lips.
Neither of them knew how to kiss. They both turned in one direction, then the other, and finally they came together in a quiet sigh. Heat funneled up through Cassie, burning her fingertips where she touched Connor’s shoulders. She was certain she would leave her marks.
She opened her mouth to him, and when his tongue touched hers, all she had the power of mind to think was,He tastes the same as me. Years later, when Cassie thought about her profession, she tried to understand what exactly had made her choose anthropology. Unconsciously, she had made her decision at age fourteen, that night at the pet cemetery. But she never knew if it was because of the marvel the bones themselves held for her, or because of a first kiss under moonlight, or simply in tribute, since it was the last time she saw Connor alive.
They stood in the cemetery for an hour, learning each other all over again. The moon turned them white, two ghosts lost in a kiss, glowing bones at their feet. Then they walked slowly back to Cassie’s house, joined at the hand, this time with Connor leading.
CHAPTERSEVEN
TO celebrate the resurrection of Lancelot of the Dark Ages, Alex told Cassie he’d take her out to dinner. “Le Doˆ me,” he said, dialing a number he’d memorized. He glanced at Cassie. “You might want to straighten up a little.”
Of course she had planned to, she’d been buried in sand and plasticine all day; but it still hurt to know that Alex had found something wrong with her.
“Louis? Alex Rivers. Yes, tonight; nine o’clock. Just my wife and I.
In the back, please.” He gently placed the phone into the receiver and lifted the skull from the dining room table, bending the jaw back and forth in mock conversation like a deadly parody of Sen˜ or Wences.
“ ’S all right?” he mimicked.
