“Where is she?” Alan said again, amazing himself with his own calmness. Davey was crying now, genuinely scared, it seemed, and Alan reveled in the feeling. “I’ll kill you,” he whispered in Davey’s ear, almost lovingly. “I’ll kill you and put the body where no one will find it, unless you tell me where she is.”
Davey spat out a milk tooth, his right top incisor, and cried around the blood that coursed down his face. “I’m—I’m sorry, Alan,” he said. “But it was the secret.” His sobs were louder and harsher than Marci’s father’s had been.
“Where is she?” Alan said, knowing.
“With Caleb,” Davey said. “I buried her in Caleb.”
He found his brother the island midway down the mountain, sliding under cover of winter for the seaway. He climbed the island’s slope, making for the ring of footprints in the snow, the snow peppered brown with soil and green with grass, and he dug with his hands like a dog, tossing snow soil grass through his legs, digging to loose soil, digging to a cold hand.
A cold hand, protruding from the snow now, from the soil, some of the snow red-brown with blood. A skinny, freckled hand, a fingernail missing, torn off leaving behind an impression, an inverse fingernail. A hand, an arm. Not attached to anything. He set it to one side, dug, found another hand. Another arm. A leg. A head.
She was beaten, bruised, eyes swollen and two teeth missing, ear torn, hair caked with blood. Her beautiful head fell from his shaking cold hands. He didn’t want to dig anymore, but he had to, because it was the secret, and it had to be kept, and—
—he buried her in Caleb, piled dirt grass snow on her parts, and his eyes were dry and he didn’t sob.
It was a long autumn and a long winter and a long spring that year, unwiring the Market. Alan fell into the familiar rhythm of the work of a new venture, rising early, dossing late, always doing two or three things at once: setting up meetings, sweet-talking merchants, debugging his process on the fly.