Unhallowed Ground Read online

  He turned and walked out of the store, pushing down the hurt her reaction had caused him. While the Suhrs weren’t his blood relatives, they’d been important to him his entire life. He’d spent half of his childhood in their home and feed store as they’d watched him while his parents had been at work.

  Still, she wasn’t exactly being rational about the whole thing.

  Kelly only walked about halfway home when his phone went off in his pocket. He pulled it out and checked the caller ID, seeing it was Ryan.

  “Hey, what’s up?” he asked, dodging around a corner of a building to get out of the wind.

  “Kel, can you come down to the site? Dad wants to start getting us all organized.”

  “Sure, I’m not busy. Any shot you can give me a ride? I’m next to Stacy’s Café,” Kelly said.

  “Oh yeah, cool. I’m just about to leave the house to head out there,” Ryan replied. “Five minutes. Someday, you’re going to have to get that piece of shit in your garage running, you know.”

  “Well, if this job ends up paying what you said, maybe I can get a completely new piece of shit. See you soon.” Kelly hung up and moved to go inside the café to grab two coffees.

  Five minutes later, Ryan pulled up to the curb and Kelly got in, handing over one of the cups.

  “Cool, thanks,” Ryan said, wedging the coffee into the cup holder in his center console.

  “No problem. I probably need to sign those papers again for your dad,” Kelly said, staring out the window as they pulled away from the curb. “Insurance and that crap?”

  “Yeah, all that good stuff,” he replied, glancing over at Kelly. “So, hey, has anyone said anything to you about this job?”

  Kelly quirked a brow and looked over. “Why?”

  Ryan reached up and adjusted the knit hat covering his dark hair with one hand. “Eh, I dunno. I went over to Dani’s house this morning, and her grandma was there. I told her about the new project we were starting, and she went off.”

  “Actually, yeah, Mrs. Suhr just went bug nuts on me right before you called,” Kelly said, frowning. “This really upset her.”

  “Damn. I knew people would be a little weird about a cemetery getting dug up, but this was like...almost violently angry.” Ryan tightened his thin hands around the steering wheel. “Old Madgie was downright scary about it.”

  “Grace freaked out, too,” Kelly said. “She actually raised her voice then slammed the door to the back office, pretty effectively ending the conversation about it.”

  “Hard to imagine Mrs. Suhr upset at all.”

  “I know, I feel really bad. I know all the old folks around here are paranoid old farmers, but damn,” Kelly replied, shrugging.

  “You’re still all right with this though, aren’t you?” Ryan asked.

  “Oh, heck yeah.” Kelly almost smiled. “It’s kinda weird, but money’s money.”

  “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I talked to my dad about it more this morning. Looks like he wants you and me in the lot across the street, digging the new graves. Dad said you’d get them lined up straight. He’ll work with the others and the funeral director on the other side.”

  “That makes my life a lot easier,” Kelly said, relief obvious in his voice. “I’m not freaky about it, you know, but if I’m just digging the new holes, maybe Grace will forgive me someday.”

  Chapter

  3

  They didn’t find any snow on the ground at the worksite, despite the bitterly cold temperature. While the roads were slicked with ice from the freezing fog rolling in every evening for the previous week, the dirt field they were slated to work in looked relatively untouched aside from the sheathes of ice coating much of the overgrown prairie grass.

  Ryan parked his car near his dad’s work truck, the older man not too far away supervising the off-loading of the heavy equipment from an RGN trailer. Kelly spotted the familiar backhoe he’d run on several other jobs already present. It was a little rusty and beat up, but it always worked like a charm. Since it lacked all the electronics of the newer equipment the company had accumulated over the years, it suffered far-fewer malfunctions despite its age.

  Ryan’s father, Henry McKessel, shook the hand of the truck driver who’d brought in most of the equipment throughout the morning before turning to see the two younger men approaching.

  He broke into a wide smile and reached for Kelly’s hand. “Morning, boys. I’m real glad you signed on for this one, Kel. Sorry about the short notice. Getting outside workers here this time of year is a pain in the ass.”

  Kelly’s hand was engulfed by Henry’s work-hardened paw, and he grinned as he returned the handshake. “Hey, you’ve always treated me more than fair. The timing on this worked out really good for me, too.”

  “Seasonal layoff from the feed store again?” Henry asked, shoving his hands into his coat pockets.

  “Yup, same old,” Kelly replied. “Been pretty cold, how hard do you think the ground’s gonna be to work?”

  The older man gave a shrug and looked back over his shoulder at the field behind them. Small, eroded headstones peeked up from the dead grass in a haphazard fashion, most of them long-ago toppled and lying hidden.

  “We haven’t had much snow yet, so it’s pretty dry. Tree huggers want this done before spring comes along and fills the creek up,” he said, turning back toward the boys. “I don’t think it will be too bad. The forecast looks pretty agreeable for the time being, though you know as well as I do how reliable that is.”

  Kelly stared across the abandoned cemetery, the headstones dotting the landscape drawing his attention. He failed to respond when Henry quit talking, his mind wandering off to debate whether or not Grace’s fears had any merit.

  “Kel?” Henry asked, his neck jutting forward. “You spacing out?”

  He shook his head and pulled himself back in, giving up an embarrassed smile. “A little. It’s been ages since I’ve been out here.”

  Henry nodded and snorted, digging his cigarettes from his pocket. “Yeah, I somehow suspect that you and Ryan came out here back in high school to sneak in a few beers now and then. Hell, everyone in this town always has.”

  “It’s not like there’s a whole lot else to do when you’re not working,” Ryan said, frowning as his dad lit up.

  “Don’t tell your mother, Ryan.” Henry locked gazes with his son, knowing both he and his wife were constantly on him about his occasional smoking. “Anyway, the plan is to pretty much excavate this entire yard. The county does have most of the burial records for it, but there will be some specialists sent to verify we got everyone.”

  “And then we’re putting them across the highway?” Kelly asked, looking back over the road.

  “Yeah. We’ll get them interred nicely around the old church over there. Gotta be careful near that old stone building with the machinery,” the older man said, staring over at the aged structure. “I’d just as soon tear that creepy-ass thing down, but the Historical Society deemed it too important to do away with. God, I love all this government bullshit.”

  “Yeah, but it’s giving us a sweet payday,” Ryan said.

  “A payday with our own tax dollars,” Henry corrected. “Still, someone thinks it has to be done, so here we are. I didn’t even want to put the bid in, but the stupid council wasn’t particularly subtle in telling me I’d have trouble pulling future permits if I didn’t. I thought I was being a smart ass with the amount I asked for, but...”

  “That’s not cool,” Kelly said, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Nor legal, but again, look where we live. Who would I go to with a complaint? These small-time politics are a real bitch,” Henry replied, before looking out at the cemetery again. “Once we get all the lead coffins out of there, then some sort of hazmat team will come in to do soil samples or whatnot, but that’s their deal and we’re done at that point.”

  “So, why the hell are the coffins made out of lead?” Ryan asked.

  Henry
shook his head and looked at the boys again. “Because the Victorians had more money than brains, and you add this church’s weird cult mentality back into it... I don’t really know. It’s the real reason we’re digging this place up. EPA types screaming about lead contamination in the soil getting into the creek. We dig ‘em up, put the remains into new boxes, then you two will replant them over the highway.”

  Kelly felt an immediate twist in his gut. He’d thought a cemetery this old would be filled with wooden coffins that should have decayed away to practically nothing over the years. Hearing about the strange lead coffins meant it would probably be considerably different. Surely, there would be something left of the bodies if they were inside metal containers.

  Ryan looked over at his friend, noticing the color had drained from his face. “What’s up with you? Chickening out?”

  He shook his head and frowned, embarrassed Ryan could pick up his emotions that easily. “Lead coffins just sound really odd. I’m not much of a history buff, but I’d never heard of those before. You think there will be much left inside of them after this long? I’d thought we’d be finding just a few bones or something.”

  “The funeral director being sent out here has been on a few exhumations with these sorts of things,” Henry said. “I guess they were surprisingly common back then. He said there’s usually the entire skeleton left, but depending on how they were sealed, there can be a little more and pretty nasty. That’s another reason I’d prefer to keep you two across the highway. I know you’re both grown men, but if it’s a puke fest... I don’t want something triggering Ryan’s asthma.”

  Ryan groaned and rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. I think I can handle it.”

  “Well, I’m more than happy to be on the other side of the road from that,” Kelly said, raising his hands slightly. “I might come over out of curiosity for a look, but yeah, I’m good with just digging holes. Leave the gross work for the ones getting the bigger paychecks.”

  Henry snorted and plucked his cigarette from his lips before dropping it to the ground and crushing it. “Well, we’ll see how gross it is. They already told us we’d have to wear masks while working on this side. Funeral director said that was likely overkill, though. Probably just more government hyper-paranoia. As long as they pay me what they’ve promised, I’ll wear whatever they ask if they send anyone along to spy on us, or if it stinks bad enough.”

  “Whatever they want?” Ryan laughed, reaching over and patting his father’s shoulder.

  “Well, within limits.” Henry gave a self-satisfied grin before turning away from the boys and walking toward his pickup to get the papers Kelly needed to sign.

  “Don’t make it weird,” Ryan said, looking back at Kelly with a deep frown.

  “Your dad’s funny,” Kelly replied, looking toward the old stone church on the other side of the highway. “I honestly didn’t think there would be anything underground to really dig up. Lead coffins? That’s messed up.”

  “Yeah, he hadn’t told me that little detail before, either.” Ryan followed Kelly’s gaze toward the church. “I guess these guys were real winners. Bad enough for the Catholics and Protestants to put aside their differences to run them the hell out.”

  Kelly quirked a brow and turned to face Ryan. “I thought these nut bags were Catholic. It’s called Saint Francis.”

  “No,” Ryan locked gazes with his friend. He and his family were Catholics, and they’d been told long and hard within their church about the cult. “There’s more to a religion than what they name their church. This place was the original Catholic church in Brayton, but they built the bigger one down the road and left this building here. The others then bought it and moved their crazy-assed congregation in, but the name stuck. They had nothing to do with the real churches in town, not the Catholic one or the Lutheran one you and the Suhrs attended.”

  While Kelly had gone to church as a kid, he’d wormed his way out of it after he was fifteen. Being a teenage boy, he thought he had much better things to do on Sundays than get out of bed early. He’d heard rumors about this abandoned church and those who once attended it, but with his serious skepticism, he’d blown it off.

  Kelly gave a small nod, seeing the offense Ryan had taken at his assumption. “Sorry, I didn’t know. I’ll admit, I’ve spent most of my life tuning it all out. The cult, the other churches, the goddamned stupid rumors—all of it.”

  Ryan snorted and let his smile return, his head pivoting back in the direction of the town several miles away. “Well, hope those rumors ain’t true, Kel, because the nearest place to hide is a long damn way from here, and you know how dark it gets away from those stupid street lights.”

  “We won’t be working at night,” Kelly said, his words coming out as more of a question than a statement.

  “It gets dark by five this time of year. Have you ever known my dad to let us punch out at a consistent time?” Ryan asked, his smirk fading as a shadow of paranoia washed over him.

  Kelly didn’t like the sudden dissipation of Ryan’s jovial nature, the tension in his stomach worsening. The fact was Henry made them all work until Henry himself was tired. The old man was something of an overachiever, never willing to call it a day until he’d outrun all of his younger employees.

  “Well, this just got really spooky,” Kelly said, a frown cropping up as his eyes moved back toward the old church.

  Henry returned holding a clipboard covered with the numerous forms Kelly always had to sign before starting a job with him. He passed it over, noticing the darker mood that had settled over the boys.

  “What’d I miss?” he asked, after passing Kelly the clipboard and a pen.

  “We were just thinking the utilities don’t run out this far,” Ryan volunteered, not quite willing to admit to his father he’d scared himself. “You’re bringing out the gens and lights, right? Are we working past dark?”

  “Oh for shit’s sakes,” the old man said, facing his son. “I leave the two of you for five minutes and you’ve talked yourselves into having the jibblies about this?”

  “We just want to know what to expect, that’s all,” Ryan replied, shuffling his feet against the ground.

  Henry’s expression didn’t soften and he shook his head. “Of course I’m bringing out the gens and lights. We’re going to work until we’re done every day. If that happens to be after sunset, then we stay until after sunset. Honestly, you kids...”

  Kelly tried to absorb himself in the forms he was filling out, wanting to be invisible from Henry for the time being. Best friend or not, he wasn’t about to get involved or try to rescue Ryan from his dad.

  Ryan grumbled and scooted closer to Kelly after Henry wandered off to continue checking the equipment that had arrived at the site. “You know, I think he’s freaked out about this.”

  “What makes you say that?” Kelly asked, not bringing his eyes up from the clipboard.

  “Because, if it didn’t freak him out, he wouldn’t have put in such a high bid. You heard him, he didn’t want to do this at all, but the county pushed on him about future permits.” Ryan leaned closer, seeing what Kelly was filling out.

  The pen in Kelly’s hand stopped moving, and he looked over at his friend. Ryan was right, of course, and he knew Henry well enough to understand the more something bothered the old man, the quicker he tended to get angry and start going after others about it.

  The nervousness in Kelly’s stomach doubled and his brows knit together. “Crap.”

  Chapter

  4

  Kelly hadn’t spent much time at the work site after finishing up the paperwork for Ryan’s dad. He’d gone over the backhoe he was to use, making sure the old machine was going to work for him as reliably as it always had.

  He and Ryan didn’t say much to one another as they drove back to Kelly’s house. Both of them were lost in their thoughts about the job’s details. While the two young men had convinced themselves earlier they were tough enough not to get weirded out by the job,
they were both unsettled.

  There was something else nagging at Kelly, and just a few blocks from his house, he asked Ryan to stop the car and let him out.

  “Why?” Ryan asked.

  Kelly cocked his head toward the window, the Suhrs’ feed store on the other side of the street. “I’m feeling guilty as hell for what happened with the old woman this morning.”

  “I hope this doesn’t mean you’re going to back out on the job to make amends with her.”

  “No, but I can’t just leave it like it was. If I don’t confront it now and get her forgiveness, it’s going to eat away at me bad,” Kelly said. “I don’t like having people mad at me, and I can’t afford to lay awake all night thinking about it.”

  Ryan nodded. “Okay, fair enough. You want me to pick you up in the morning to head out to the site?”

  Kelly popped the car door open and slid out before leaning back down to look at his friend. “Yeah. Henry gonna push us to be there ridiculously early like always?”

  “Zero-dark-thirty,” Ryan replied with a smile. “Like always. See ya then, Kel. I’ll give you a call when I leave the house to pick you up.”

  He offered a quick smile and shut the door, standing on the curb until Ryan drove off. Kelly hesitated before crossing the street, needing to gather his nerves before he walked into what might be a confrontational meeting.

  Grace was behind the counter as always, and she lifted her eyes from a magazine when he walked in.

  “Kelly, you have good timing.” She smiled and reached under the counter, bringing up an envelope. “You saved me the trouble of getting a stamp on your paycheck.”

  He hesitated for a moment before going closer. After her reaction that morning, Kelly hadn’t been sure what to expect, but this wasn’t it. “You got that ready quick.”

  She passed it to him and closed the magazine, folding her hands on top of it. “It’s not exactly terribly busy this time of year. I had to pay some other bills, so I went ahead and got it ready for you. You have to eat while you wait for Henry to pay you.”