Beside her, perched on the edge of a straight-backed velvet chair, sat my eight-year-old nephew, Leo.
He had not moved from that chair for seven hours.
His small, scuffed school shoes barely brushed the Persian rug; his knobby knees were locked together, and in his thin arms he crushed Barnaby—the threadbare plush bear Rachel had given him on the morning of his fifth birthday.
Leo’s face was chalky, his hazel eyes wide and glassy, but he was not weeping.
While my mother wept in the sunroom and cousins spoke in muted tones about tragic twists of fate, Leo kept leaning over the quilted ivory silk of the casket lining, whispering the same phrase into the hollow of his mother’s ear:
“Please don’t close it yet…
Mom told me to wait until I heard the sound.”
My name is Sarah, and every instinct in my marrow told me that something monstrous had taken root in our house.
Three days ago, the county coroner had signed a preliminary certificate declaring Rachel’s death an accidental trauma resulting from a fall down the oak staircase of her renovated Victorian home in Montford.
Her husband, Marcus Vance, had told the sheriff’s deputies that Rachel had tripped over a laundry basket in the dark around two in the morning.
A shattered step, a fractured cervical vertebra, an instantaneous end.
Yet seventy-two hours before that midnight tumble, Rachel had dialed my cell phone while I was inspecting bridge foundations outside Hendersonville.
