‘There’s A Dead Body Under the Pine Tree Next to the Farmhouse’

Rollin Jewett’s varied past includes acting stints in The Bodyguard, Unsolved Mysteries, Miami Vice and others, penning Carmen Electra’s first film (cult classic American Vampire with Adam West), and being a contestant on Jeopardy. Rollin is also an award winning off-Broadway playwright with plays produced all over the US as well as internationally. As an author, Rollin’s short stories and poetry have appeared in various magazines, journals and anthologies, including the Night Picnic Journal, Aphotic Realm, Door is a Jar, Coffin Bell, Gathering Storm, and Gravitas, among others.

There’s A Dead Body Under the Pine Tree Next to the Farmhouse 

In…two…three…four…

Out…two…three…four…

Quiet, rhythmic breathing fills the small yoga studio as Aza listens to the soft tick, tock, tick, tock of the mounted wall clock. She lies on her yoga mat and feels the soft, pebbled foam beneath her. She notes the white speckled ceiling tiles that look sadly worse for wear. She hears the soft instructor’s voice telling them to continue counting their breaths.

Azalea Sutherland loves routine. She loves waking up every morning, reading the news, stopping for a pastry on her way to work, and settling into her desk, comfortable and ready to start the day. She loves taking the long, winding road to her grandmother’s house outside of Atlanta every Wednesday evening. She loves sitting on the front porch, drinking iced tea, and admiring the hydrangeas that are just beginning to bloom. 

And she loves her Saturday morning yoga class. But today, Aza’s routine is different. She can’t seem to keep track of her breaths or her heartbeat. Time doesn’t slip away before the hour is up. She doesn’t exchange idle chatter with the tall, older man to her right as he pulls on his shoes and socks as the session comes to a close.

Aza is sure they introduced themselves at some point, yet she can’t remember his name. They normally swap mild pleasantries, never more than that, but she likes him. To her left is a different story. A short woman with a culturally appropriated hairstyle is bickering with the person in front of her. This is normal. She always finds someone to disagree with. Aza avoids her too.

A few small bits of foam are left clinging to the carpeted floor of the studio when Aza rolls up her mat. She makes the short walk a few doors down and purchases a smoothie. She pauses in front of a rosebush to take a photo of her drink, but she stops when she sees the last image in her camera roll. She has done nothing but stare at it for three days. It feels like a shadow–it clings to her. Always present. Always there. Not quite malicious, but dark nonetheless.

Aza returns to her car to see the woman from yoga class bickering with someone over parking too close to her car. She tries to tune out their voices as she shifts her drink and her mat to dig through her bag for her keys. It takes her longer than it should–the raised voices and the memory of the photograph steal away her concentration. At first, the image had been so very normal, full of people she knew well. But Aza quickly came to realize something had been amiss, and that feeling clung to her. 

It takes a moment for Aza to realize her hands, seemingly independent of her own volition, have found her keys and unlocked her car.

Patton Sutherland: Grandfather. 

Aza is inside her car, but the woman is now standing in front of her vehicle. She seems to be trying to block the other person from leaving, but instead she has trapped Aza in her space as well.

Charlotte (Lottie) Sutherland: Grandmother. 

Aza sighs. She wants to go home. She wants to resume her routine. She wants this uncomfortable feeling, this ridiculous foreboding, to simply go away.

Ellis and Wyatt Sutherland: Uncles. 

The woman has other plans. She hasn’t stopped talking, and Aza hasn’t absorbed anything she has said. Her voice, muffled through the metal and glass of the car, is getting higher. More agitated. 

Trina: Aunt. 

Stuck in place for the moment, Aza pulls out her phone, this time with the intent to face the photograph. Patton, Lottie, Ellis, Wyatt, and Trina. The photo is old. Slightly blurry from the haste with which she captured the picture. If she had to guess, the image is probably at least thirty years old. 

It’s summer time. Trina is in a mini skirt, loose peasant blouse, and a braided leather band wrapped around her forehead. The brothers are in shorts. Patton is in linen pants. Lottie is of course in a dress that has some sort of cheerful pattern. It’s not a candid–they’re all lined up and smiling for the camera. They’re outside, maybe at the lake, most likely Lanier. It’s hard to tell.

But that’s not all. There’s one more very important detail.

Aza doesn’t take the key out of the ignition, but she does open the door and stands up.

“Excuse me, can you please move?” she asks. Confrontation is not part of the routine. Neither is running this woman over with her car–although she is mildly tempted.

The woman looks surprised. She looks at Aza’s car and realizes she is in the way. She juts out her chin but moves, as if this request is an inconvenience to her.

Before pulling away, Aza scrolls through her contacts until she finds the name she is looking for. 

“Hello?” a distracted voice on the other end asks.

“Hey Trina, it’s Aza,” Aza says. Despite the use of caller ID, she knows Trina won’t realize who she is talking to. “Are you in the studio today?” she asks. Her aunt replies with an affirmative. Aza tells her she is coming by. There’s something she wants to ask her about. She’ll be there in about thirty minutes.

Woman: unknown.

***

Aza arrives at her aunt’s pottery studio half an hour later. It’s hardly more than a shack, surrounded by flower beds that have had years to become overgrown, but Trina insists it's more akin to a cottage. Aza parks and walks around to the back which has a garage door that Trina keeps open on nice days like this one. She’s sitting at the wheel, centering a large mound of clay. 

Aza feels a sense of unease. She doesn’t quite know what to say–despite never having felt uncomfortable in Trina’s presence all her life. She wants to get to the point, but suddenly questions exactly what that point is. 

Instead, she notices that Trina is not dissimilar to the woman from yoga class. Closer to seventy than sixty, Trina wears her hair in a singular, long white braid. She’s barefoot. Aza thinks of the younger version of Trina in the photograph. She’d been barefoot then too.

Unsurprisingly, Trina does not notice Aza’s hesitancy. She gives her an idle wave but doesn’t stand. 

“Hey there,” she says with the rich southern lilt the whole Sutherland family has, the one Aza never seemed to adopt.

Aza forces a smile and they exchange greetings. Comments about the weather. Work. How Aza’s parents are doing in Germany. Won’t her father’s job move him back to the States anytime soon? Always no. Trina asks her this on a regular basis, but she forgets most things, so Aza always answers her.

The older woman is making a comment about the bowl she is trying to throw for an upcoming craft fair, but Aza cuts her off. 

“I drove up to the farm the other day,” she says before she can stop herself. Trina is still blissfully unaware of Aza’s discomfort. 

“Oh, how was Mama?” Trina asks. She finally seems satisfied that she has centered her clay and begins to shape the piece.

Aza shrugs absently, fiddling with the hem of her shirt. “Fine…actually, there was something I wanted to ask you about. Something to do with Grandmother,” Aza says, noting the slight pitch change in her own voice.

Trina nods, waiting for Aza to continue. She takes a breath. She knows this is absurd. She knows it doesn’t have to mean anything. But something deep within her tells her that it does. 

She paints the scene for Trina: It was like any other Wednesday. When Aza got off work, she drove the hour it took to get out of the city and down to the family farm. Grandmother met her on the porch with a pitcher of tea and an earful of gossip. Dinner was taking a while, so they got out some old boxes of photos. Most of them were familiar.

But in the bottom of a box, there was a photograph Aza hadn’t recognized. At first, Grandmother hadn’t noticed the extra woman in the photo. The back was labeled summer, but the year had been smudged. The names of the Sutherlands present in the photo were labeled neatly. Grandmother remarked that Marigold, Aza’s mother, must have been away at summer camp. That’s when they’d both noticed the other woman. Lottie’s normally bright, cheerful eyes turned cold and hard. She had tucked the photo back into the box and changed the subject. Aza had pressed her for details, and Grandmother had adamantly refused to answer any of her questions. Neither Aza nor her mother (who had been apprised of the situation later) could explain it.

When Aza finishes, Trina takes her foot off the pedal and laughs. She keeps laughing. Aza’s face burns, and she says nothing.

Eventually Trina shakes her head and dabs at her eyes with the backs of her wrists–hands still covered in clay.

“Oh honey, is that what you’re all worked up about? You know what your uncle Ellis was like back in the day. She was probably just some old fling that Mama would rather leave unsaid,” Trina says, putting her foot back on the pedal. She picks up a nearby sponge and begins to smooth her creation. That’s the thing about Trina–she’s flighty and forgetful. Aza’s mother thinks it stems from using too many drugs in the seventies. Most of the time it’s endearing if a little sad, but today it means Aza needs Trina to take her seriously.

Aza shakes her head. “She loves telling me those old stories, especially if Ellis is in the room and can embarrass him. Besides, I’ve seen photos of his girlfriends before. Their names are always labeled.”

Trina shrugs. “Why does it matter?”

It wouldn’t have. If Lottie had brushed it off, she wouldn’t have thought anything of it. But she’d never acted in such a way around Aza. She knows this family has secrets. And based on Lottie’s reaction, Aza thinks she has stumbled on a deep one.

Trina gives her a sympathetic look and shakes her head. “I don’t know what you think you’re digging up, but sometimes you’ve got to just let the past lay. I’d let it go.”

That’s something Trina will never understand. She lets everything go. Aza lets nothing go. 

Aza lets her change the subject, and she sits on a nearby stool. They talk for another hour. Well, Trina talks for another hour, but that’s not new. Eventually Aza makes her excuses.

***

She’s back in her car and making another phone call. The Sutherland matriarch herself answers with a traditional, “Hi sugar!”

Aza asks if she can come over, and Lottie’s voice becomes guarded. This is not part of the routine. Aza asks if they can go through more photographs. Lottie asks if this is about the other night. Aza gives a vague response. Lottie makes up some excuse about the girls from bridge club coming over and says some other time.

***

Two days later, Aza stands in front of the Sutherland family farm. It’s a beautiful old house. Patton built it for Lottie in the early seventies. He’d promised her her dream home, and that’s what she got.

Aza had come in on the long, winding driveway lined with pine trees. The surrounding woods give way to a huge front lawn that surrounds the house itself. The white, two story building looks much older than it is, but in a charming way. Lottie had planted all the flower beds herself back in the day, but now there are gardeners for that–under her careful supervision of course. There are rose bushes, hydrangeas, zinnias, lilies, lilacs, hostas, azaleas and several other plants Aza cannot name. Magnolia and wisteria trees dot the lawn. Wicker furniture and great big hanging ferns line the front porch. It looks more like a photograph than a real place.

Aza should get back in the car. She knows she should get back in the car. Trina has taken Lottie to a doctor’s appointment in the city. The housekeeper doesn’t work on Mondays. The house is empty. 

Get back in the car, get back in the car, get back in the car, Aza chants to herself as she walks up the aggregate walkway.

Get back in the car, get back in the car.

She puts the key in the lock and turns the handle.

If she’s going to be stupid, she might as well be smart about it.

Despite not having any mud on her shoes, she takes them off, just in case. She calls a quiet, “hello?” and when she receives no response, she hurries up the stairs.

She makes a beeline for Wyatt’s old room first. He’d been the quiet brother. She’d never heard a wild story about him. She knew the secret could be his, but telling his stories was something they all loved. It kept him alive. She’d been following her gut so far, and she wasn’t going to question it now.

Aza finds nothing. She didn’t expect to. 

She moves on to Ellis’ room. Here, she takes her time. She knows where her final goal will lead her, but she won’t leave any stone unturned first. There are dresser drawers full of report cards and old school projects. Boxes under the bed full of toys and books. Aza is painting a picture of his life, and this room has all the colors she needs.

Ellis Sutherland is a judge. For much of Aza’s life, that’s what she has called him–the Judge. He had attended the University of Georgia and graduated summa cum laude, then got his law degree from Emory. He’d advanced quickly in his field–Aza doesn’t know his exact title now, but knows he makes a lot of money. He is a good ole boy through and through.

Once, when Aza was a teenager, she’d been left at the Sutherland farm while her parents were away. Her grandparents were out, and so she did what many teenagers often do. She snooped. Under Ellis’ bed, she’d found a loose floorboard. She’d wiggled it until it finally pulled away. She’d shrieked with laughter and with fright when a magazine covered in naked women stared back at her.

But now, ten years later, Aza thinks...What if there’s more? What if the bones of this house hide more than a silly secret from Ellis’ youth?

She isn’t wrong. She shoves the bed a few inches to the right, lifts the floorboard, and removes the stack of magazines. Beneath them is the smoking gun: a large, yellowed envelope. Aza doesn’t bother to go through it. She can return it later if she needs to, but she won’t risk getting caught. She returns things to where they were and hurries downstairs. She pulls on her shoes and opens the front door.

Grandmother is staring at her. Aza knows immediately that she isn’t surprised. 

“Grandmother—”

Lottie holds up a hand. Aza doesn’t say anything. Trina is standing next to her, stunned in a way that she wishes Grandmother was. 

She tries again. “I only just got here…”

Lottie just stands there. It was never her way to yell or cause a scene. 

“I just want to talk about it,” Aza pleads, letting a little of her desperation creep into her voice. She wishes she could explain it. She wishes she could forget about it. But she can’t. If only Grandmother could understand that. 

Lottie shakes her head this time. “Go home, Aza.” She doesn’t say anything else. She brushes past her. Trina stands frozen, glancing between them, until she follows Lottie into the house. The envelope remains safely down the back of Aza’s pants.

***

Aza sits on the floor of her small living room. Papers are strewn around her. It’s almost midnight. Ever since that fateful Wednesday evening when she had found the photograph, she has been building the story, piece by piece. 

It takes a certain amount of imagination, but Aza can now see the timeline of events so clearly. The contents of the envelope–letters and photographs and check stubs– fill in the gaps, round out the tale she’d already begun to tell. Everything she suspected, everything she feared, was right. 

The woman had been an old flame. She and Ellis had fallen fast, and they’d fallen hard. Ellis knew she wasn’t right but didn’t want to admit it. Patton told him to get rid of her. She didn’t want to be gotten rid of.

So they’d killed her.

***

It’s after midnight. Aza knows that after Patton died, Lottie had some sort of security system installed. She wonders just how extensive it is, but finds that she doesn’t particularly care. 

The Sutherland farm is nearly two hundred acres of field, mountain, and forest. Aza knows Patton and Ellis could have buried their transgressions anywhere. She’ll come back if she has to. She’ll come back every night for the rest of her life.

She starts at the south end, well away from the house. The Sutherlands never had any neighbors, so she doesn’t worry about the wide beam of her flashlight. She wanders. She doesn’t go into the trees–Aza had seen enough black bears out here to know better. She’ll try there during daylight. 

She first walks the perimeter of the south fence. It’s worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s looking for a confession that was never uttered. She doesn’t give up though. The full moon helps guide her way. 

Aza then moves north, closer to the house. Grandmother doesn’t keep a vegetable garden anymore, but the large plot remains tilled in tribute. Aza feels slightly sick when she thinks about what might have fertilized the plants that grew there. She is fairly certain she is still far enough away from the house to remain undetected, but she extinguishes her beam anyways. 

By the lunar light, Aza spends the next two hours inspecting every fence post, every rock, every mound of dirt that could possibly be out of place. She uses a pitch fork to shovel away all the hay in the barn to see the dirt floor. 

It’s not quite morning, but Aza can feel the air beginning to change. She has moved in circles until she is close enough to the house to see it clearly. It stops her in her tracks.

The flower beds. 

Grandmother’s beautiful, perfect, lovely flower beds. Flower beds that for almost all of Aza’s life, she wouldn’t let anyone touch. She can’t do it now, but she’ll come back with a shovel and rip up every single plant that dares grow there. She will shred every flower, tear every leaf, cut every root. She will dig until she hits magma if she has to.

Aza returns to her car.

***

A shower and very little sleep later, Aza is standing in front of the library. It’s hardly more than a harsh cube with odd lines and a severe expression. She’s never thought much about this building’s appearance other than its ugliness, but today it feels like an omen.

Aza spends the next few hours scouring the internet and the library’s rolls of microfiche. Patton would have been the architect, but Ellis was the kingpin. 

She goes through old local newspapers and college yearbooks. She inspects every blurry, pixelated photo and compares it to the one on her phone. None of them match the woman. They erased her from existence.

***

Aza stands facing him. They don’t bother with pleasantries. He knows why she’s here.

She has never been in the Judge’s office before, but it is exactly as she pictured it. Everything is rich, warm tones–from the burgundy leather seats to the mahogany desk he sits behind. He’s in an expensive, perfectly tailored pale gray suit. There isn’t a hair out of place on his head.

On the wall, there are rows of legal books. On some of the shelves are pictures–his petite blonde wife and his petite blonde daughter–sandwiched between his diplomas. In the corner there’s a coat rack with his robes and an old election sign tucked behind a filing cabinet.

Ellis motions for her to take the seat across from him. She stays where she is. 

“Now why are you here, Aza?” he asks, steepling his fingers in front of his mouth. His voice is too casual. But that’s Ellis–there hadn’t been a day of his adult life where he hadn’t been in charge–hadn’t been the one giving the orders. He’d never had anything to be afraid of. It’s clear he isn’t afraid of Aza now, either. 

She’s proud of her calm exterior. It hides the maelstrom of emotions inside her.

“You seem to have some idea why I’m here, Ellis.” They like to pretend that there are no secrets in their family. Aza knows that in this, Ellis will be well informed. By Lottie, or Trina, or even her own mother. He’s been tipped off, that much is clear. 

He studies her for a moment. She refuses to flinch.

“Yes, but I want to hear it from you.”

“Who is she? The woman?”

He nods. This is expected.

“I’ll answer you if you tell me something first. Why is it you want to know so damn bad?” He points a finger at her, accentuating the last three words. 

They’d never been close–she and Ellis. And even less so as she got older. When she was younger, the Judge had scared her. Now, she distrusts him.

Aza stands a little straighter. She says, “Because I think I know what happened to her. I think I know who happened to her. But I want you to say it.” She wants to let her gaze turn into a glare, to let him feel the anger she feels for this woman. But she doesn’t.

“I’d like to hear it from you.” His gaze is steady and cool. 

“I think she was an old girlfriend of yours. I think she wasn’t ‘suitable,’ but she ended up pregnant anyways.”

“Keep going.”

Aza’s voice is rising. The words she’s been building up inside her come spilling out as if they’d been pressurized.

“I think you or Grandfather or both of you tried to pay her off. I think you tried to force her to get rid of it, and when she wouldn’t, you took matters into your own hands. I think you knew what it would do to you, to the family name, to your career. You made it so she wouldn’t be a problem anymore.”

For a long, taut moment, silence hangs between them. Neither moves. They’re playing a game of chicken, and they’re both determined to win.

“Azalea Sutherland,” Ellis finally says, “Are you accusing me of murder?”

“Are you denying it? Are you going to pretend Grandfather did all this behind your back?” There’s a slight crack in Aza’s voice, but her resolve is final. 

Ellis shakes his head. “Shit, Aza. You’ve decided this whole family is goin’ to hell in a handbasket, haven’t you?” He lets out a short, hard laugh. He keeps going.

“You seem to know the story better than I do, but let me fill you in on a few little details. You’ve got the beginning just right, but it’s the ending where you need a little help. She was an old girlfriend of mine, and she wasn’t right for the family. I wanted to marry her anyways, despite the fact that we were too young, and especially when those two little lines turned pink. But good ole Patton paid her off, and here’s where the story might get a little murky for you. She took the money. She had the abortion. And when she came back two months later asking for more because she had cancer, he paid that too. He paid every damn hospital bill until she died, which of course wasn’t even a year later.”

The world stops.

“You’re lying.” 

Silence fills the room. Ellis lets her sit with his words. Aza can hear her heart beating. It’s getting faster. The story she’d told herself– she’d armed herself with–is fracturing around her.

Ellis smiles grimly. “Now let me ask you something. If you really thought I was a murderer, why did you come storming in here and confront me? Why not go to the police?”

Aza opens her mouth, but he doesn’t stop.

“Maybe, just maybe, you didn’t even believe it yourself. Maybe you’re still so damn mad at this family, that you’re just looking for another crime. Something, anything, to ruin the Sutherland name. Am I getting a little closer?”

Aza says nothing. His words slice through her like a white hot iron. For a moment, she can’t breathe. Those fragmented shards puncture a hole in her.

She doesn’t even realize it, but she’s moving. She’s pressed up to his desk, and she stops herself before she leans over it. She can’t even form words. Her mind is blank as emotions take over on autopilot. He waits. So does she. She’s afraid she might cry. 

“Are you saying I made all this up because of him?” her voice is barely audible. His face remains calm. 

“It’s one theory.”

Aza turns on her heel to storm out, then pivots again to yell at him. She wants to hit him. Maybe she will. 

He starts speaking again, and she’s not quite aware of what she’s doing with her body. She thinks she’s moving.

“You sat this family down when you were eighteen and said he put his hands on you. That he’d been putting his hands on you all your life. Then he had the gall to up and die two days later. What bothers you more–the fact that he paid for that woman’s hospital bills not because it was blackmail but because he felt bad for her, or that the rest of us can’t seem to hate him as much as you do?”

The world stops turning, or at least Aza thinks it does.

In…two…three…four…

Out…two…three…four…

She isn’t sure if she actually took the breaths. She can’t seem to feel her own body. Ellis only stopped speaking a mere second ago, but Aza feels like she’s been caught in a flytrap and cannot move.

She pulls at her muscles, urges her arms and legs to move through the molasses of slowed time. There’s a delayed reaction, but finally her body seems to wake up, and the force of his words hits her.

Aza leaves without another word.

***

Aza returns to her routine. She wakes up, reads the news, buys a pastry, and goes to work. She does not take the long winding road through the hills of Georgia to visit Lottie, but maybe that’s just not part of the routine anymore. She goes to yoga class and exchanges pleasantries with the nice man to her right and is very careful not to park anywhere near the woman to her left. She buys her smoothie and doesn’t think about photographs.

She pretends everything is as it was. Her phone rings, but she pretends it doesn’t. It’s her mother. It’s Trina. It’s Grandmother. She doesn’t know if they’re going to disown her, berate her, or comfort her. She isn’t sure which would be worse. So she pretends.

It’s easy, for a while. A few weeks have gone by, and Aza thinks maybe it’s even getting easier. It’s a Sunday, and Aza has her windows open, and a pleasantly warm breeze filters through the curtains. She’s putting away produce from a farmer’s market when her phone pings. It’s not the first voicemail Aza has received of late, but the time stamp tells her it’s the longest. It’s from Lottie.

Aza finishes putting her purchases away and tries not to think of what Grandmother might say. She alternates between shame and rage and a deep chasm of hurt. 

Aza knows that she has compartmentalized the people in her family. Patton and Lottie have always been in very separate boxes–Patton in the small, dark obsidian box that she never, ever touches. She’s hidden it away so well sometimes she even forgets that he existed–forgets that he walked the halls of the farmhouse she loves so well.

But then there’s Lottie. Lottie is in this big, bright shining box that takes up a beautiful space in her life. Aza never blamed her for anything, but now, she sees that there is more connecting those two boxes than she’d ever let herself admit. 

Aza doesn’t know how to face her grandmother. She doesn’t even know if she wants to.

In want of distraction, Aza rolls out her yoga mat and lies down. After counting her inhales and exhales a few times, she completes a series of well practiced poses. She stretches her arms over her head towards the sky. She extends them out from her sides, parallel to the floor beneath her. She moves to the ground and crouches so that her forehead is pressed to her mat.

Across the room where she has left it, her phone stares at her. She can’t ignore it, but she can’t acknowledge it either.

***

It takes another two days for Aza to finally listen to the message.

Azalea Sutherland. I will spare you the many lectures you deserve, both for tearing up my farm and for confronting your uncle in his place of business. Instead, I would like to tell you about your grandfather. I was married to Patton Sutherland for most of my life. We stopped counting the years after fifty. He built me this house. He gave me my children. He provided me with a comfortable life, even after he was gone. He would have never tolerated anyone even breathing in my direction if I didn’t want them to.

But you don’t spend more than half a century with someone and not know who they are. I knew he could be a cruel man just as he could be a loving one, and I knew he kept as many secrets from me as you think the rest of the family keeps from you. I didn’t even know what happened to that woman until years later. You resent him, and you have a right to. You expected this farm to be covered in dead bodies. Instead our closets are just full of skeletons. Maybe it’s time to let them rest.

Call me back. Bye Sugar.

***

Patton’s grunt of exertion is followed by a dull thump. Ellis’s ragged breath is the only sound that fills the warm night air. It’s autumn, but the weather won’t turn cold yet for some time. A few solitary leaves have begun to yellow, but there are no other outward signs that the season is in change. The only light that illuminates their efforts is the full moon.

They don’t risk using a tractor to dig the hole. No one would hear them, but they take no chances. They have about six more hours of darkness, and they use every single one. Later, during the daylight and the normal working hours of the farm, Patton will cover the dirt patch with equipment to disguise the lack of grass. Neither Ellis nor Patton ever speak of that fateful night again.

***

Aza had believed it. She had believed it in her core. But she wonders…had the story been even more nefarious? Maybe they were more clever than she had given them credit. Maybe, the story goes like this:

Patton and Ellis know the woman is sick. They are giving her money for her hospital stays to ensure her silence, but they run the risk of the worst happening: her recovery. Her recovery means years of hoping money is enough to keep her silent. They both know the real danger is basic human emotion. She will never truly give Ellis up. 

Patton uses his connections. He has friends at the hospital that won’t ask questions. They can’t risk a missing person, and this is so much neater anyways. Ellis even sends flowers to the funeral.

It feels so true. The letters between Ellis and the woman had been so tender, but had grown so hostile. She had loved him. The letters made Aza realize this wasn’t a fling. It was all consuming passion. The woman adored Ellis. She wanted to get married and be the perfect wife he needed. He’d wanted that too. But Patton made him break it off, and she wouldn’t let it go. She begged Ellis not to give her up. She would prove she was worthy of him. Ellis grew cruel. 

When she found out she was pregnant, she thought the Sutherlands would change their minds. Instead they gave her a tidy sum of money with the understanding she would no longer be their problem. 

It was all so heartbreakingly cliché.

But now, a few days later, as Aza looks out over the backyard of the Sutherland farm, she wonders if these stories are selfish. If she is robbing this woman of the truth by implicating her further into the quicksand of the Sutherlands. She had wanted to see guilt in their eyes–Ellis, Trina, and even Lottie. 

Aza uses one foot to move the swinging bench gently back. The momentum propels her lightly forward. On a nearby table there is a pitcher of sweet tea and a plate of cornbread muffins. Lottie is inside. Aza can see most of the fields from here, and she can hear the soft trickle of the creek hidden by the line of pine trees.

The day she’d told them about Patton, Lottie’s face was the only one she remembered. There was deep hurt, but no surprise. It was clear that Lottie hadn’t known what was happening, but neither was it a shocking revelation.

When Aza first saw the photograph of the woman, it ignited something within her. It smoldered into the sense of dread she has been carrying around with her–the unshakable sense that something was wrong. Something had been wrong, but it went back much further than that Wednesday night when Aza had discovered the photograph. The very roots of the Sutherland name were warped and twisted into this rotten thing inside her. Aza didn’t know if she would ever be able to clear away that rot. 

Bodies or skeletons?

Bodies or skeletons?

She will never know which is worse. She takes a breath. In…two…three…four…

Rachel Noli teaches high school English where she spends her days talking about reading and writing and wishing she spent more time actually reading and writing. She is currently pursuing a Master of Arts through Middlebury College. Her work has been featured in The Bread Loaf Student Journal and Grim and Gilded.