Buried in Lies, page 1
buried in lies
the girl who ran away, book 1
Robert J. Crane
Ostiagard Press
Buried in Lies
The Girl Who Ran Away, Book 1
Robert J. Crane
copyright © 2023 Ostiagard Press
1st Edition.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Teaser
Author’s Note
Other Works by Robert J. Crane
Acknowledgments
chapter one
On the day Ty Foster walked into Sunvail High School with a rifle and started shooting, all I remembered was that I ran away. Like Sir Robin in Monty Python. Ran out the door, into the heat of the Arizona sunshine, beating down on the sand and sage brush, ran across the blistering desert black top out of my little town, ran until my feet were bloody and my cheeks were dry from the tears I cried.
I ran until I couldn't run anymore, then I crashed at the edge of the desert, my face dusty, my T-shirt coated with dust and my throat choked with dust, baking in the heat. I lay there under that blistering sun until I seemed to wake anew, staring at the sun scorching down upon me from out of an endlessly blue, cloudless sky.
My feet hurt; they were bloody and scraped. I stared at them, bare and covered in the desert dust, against the backdrop of a patch of shrub oak. My T-shirt felt soaked at the collar, like I'd spit on it, warm like blood, but lacking the coloration. I brushed my hand against it; water. My chicken-like legs were long, tawny brown, and bare coming out of my baggy shorts. Nothing fit me right; I was tall and skinny, 5'7” and a hundred and ten pounds, and I felt every pound of it as I struggled against the pull of gravity keeping me against the sand.
I looked around; I knew where I was immediately. At the mouth of Fawn canyon, about five miles outside Sunvail, Arizona. Down Slate Road, past the old mine. All alone, I came back to myself, and all I knew was that I'd run from...something.
My head ached, and so did my shoulder as I broke gravity's pull. The head rush when I sat up was intense, like I'd been lying down in the desert forever. In the far distance I could hear sirens and, closer, the rumble of an engine. My long black hair fell around my shoulders, dust coating the raven strands. I spat out a few as I blinked, looking across the forbidding desert landscape.
A hundred yards away an old white pickup truck was cutting across the landscape, leaving a trail of white behind it as it rattled along the unpaved road. I coughed, still tasting dust, and waved. “Hey,” I said, my voice high yet scratchy. “Hey!”
Five miles outside of town. No shoes. Aches and pains everywhere. I started toward the truck. Maybe I could catch it before it passed. I recognized it dimly, the knowledge of who it belonged to bouncing inside my aching head. I waved my arms, trying to get the driver's attention.
It must have worked, because he stopped, the cloud of dust enveloping the white pickup as he came to a stop and flung the door open. An older man with a bristly white walrus mustache stepped out. He wore a seafoam green button-down shirt that was tucked in, giving me full display of his ample paunch. “Ava?” he called to me.
That was me. Ava Garcia. Teenager. High school student. Barefoot and bloody, waking up in the desert without any idea what had happened to me.
“Mr. Sutherland,” I said, limping toward him on aching legs, legs that felt like someone had just taken hammers to them. I felt a pain in my side, too, like a stitch, as I came to a halt some ten feet from him. “I just woke up, I think...over there.” I pointed at the spot in the live oak shrub where I'd come to–
“You all right?” He crinkled his brow, creasing lines on his sun-aged face. He looked me over very intensely.
“I think so? I don't know,” I said, because I didn't.
“Were you there when it happened?” he asked, extending an arm to me from feet away, as if he could stretch and wrap it around my shoulder. “At the school?”
“When...what happened?” I couldn't remember anything about how I'd gotten here. Not yet.
He twisted his face again. “I don't know, exactly. But something happened.” His voice fell. “Something bad.” His voice got quiet, hushed, and he looked me over. “We should get you to the doctor, Ava.”
“What happened, Mr. Sutherland?” I asked. It felt like the answer was there, clawing at the edge of my brain, this dim awareness that something awful had happened. I didn't remember yet about Ty Foster, about the screams, the crack of gunfire, about the deaths.
But I would. Before it was over, I'd remember.
I'd remember everything.
chapter two
Sunvail, Arizona. Population 1,920. The sign blurred into the background as Mr. Sutherland kept his silence and I held mine. We drove up State Route 50, the main street through town, passing dusty cars parked alongside each other in front of the taco shop, with its yellow stucco and overhanging sun awning.
Mr. Sutherland slowed and rolled down his window, churning the handle in a slow circle to bring it down. “Hey, Randy?” he called to someone in the parking lot. “Where's the doctor?”
“At the high school,” Randy Harrington called back. I knew Randy. In Sunvail, everyone knew everyone. “In the gym.”
“'Course,” Mr. Sutherland said, slightly cringing. In Sunvail, the high school was the emergency shelter. Because it was the only building in town big enough. “Thanks, Randy,” Mr. Sutherland said, and rolled up the window, the engine rumbling loudly. Too loud, really, like it was magnified in my ears. Everything was loud – the voices, the engine.
I heard Randy turn back to Steve Kottar and say, “He's got Ava Garcia with him, and she looks like she's been through hell itself.”
I felt like it, too. Mr. Sutherland nosed the truck back onto Route 50, and on we went. To the high school. Because there was nowhere else to go.
chapter three
“I found her wandering outside town,” Mr. Sutherland said to Deputy Bill “Bick” Ramsey, and we were rushed right in. There was a crowd, but they blurred around me. Everything was a blur – the school, the sky, the people – it was all a blur, a loud blur with voices raised:
“That's Ava.”
“What happened to her shoes?”
“Somebody should tell Victor.”
Familiar voices, though I couldn't place any of them right then.
Mr. Sutherland's hand was on my back, pressing his fingertips gently into my T-shirt as he steered me into the gym and the noise subsided. Rollaway curtains had been set up, dusty and weathered, like they'd been in storage since the fifties. Probably had. Sunvail was not the wealthiest zip code in America. “Dr. Abdel-Meguin?”
“Ya laha min mufaja'a – bring her over here!” I raised my eyes from the faded white pine floorboards of the gym and I found myself looking at an olive-skinned woman with a white coat and light wrinkles at the corners of her hazel eyes. Her lashes were thick and dark, giving her a look like she'd applied mascara with a trowel, though I seriously questioned whether she actually wore any at all.
Dr. Abdel-Meguin led me to a dusty cot with faded sheets and settled me there. I looked around; Mr. Sutherland and his walrus mustache were gone.
“Do you have any p ain?” she asked after looking me over. I just shook my head. My feet didn't even hurt anymore.
The doctor poked at me for a minute, then shone a light in my eyes to dazzling coronal effect. “You seem fine.”
“Do I need to talk to the police?” I asked, dimly remembering that Mr. Sutherland had spoken to Deputy Ramsey on the way into the gym. I shifted slightly on the old cot because a spring was poking me in the ass. It squeaked in protest like I'd stepped on a mouse tail.
“If they want to talk to you they'll be by later,” she said. She seemed to pause there, to hover, almost. “Lie down.”
“I'm not tired,” I said, staring up at the bell-like light fixtures. They hung there as if they could ring out at any time. Maybe toll. She just stood there. “Is there...don't you need to take care of other people?”
She hesitated. Then: “No.” And a shake of her head that caused her lustrous, raven hair to sway.
“Doctor?” Deputy Ramsey poked his hatchet face through the curtain behind me and whispered. “I got Grace Thurman here asking about her husband.”
Dr. Abdel-Meguin said something under her breath in her native language that sounded like it might have been obscene, maybe. “Okay,” she said, pulling aside the curtain that separated me from the rest of the gym, “have her come back.”
They both withdrew, the tinkling rattle of curtain rings the only sound. Ding, ding, ding. There was the tolling.
Grace Thurman was a white lady in her forties. Wore sweaters and too much makeup. Dyed her hair weekly. Had it styled just as often, at the only beauty shop in town. I could hear her shuffle in in her orthopedic shoes. Grace worked at Scoop's Diner on Main, the premier restaurant in Sunvail. Out of three, total, if you didn't count the gas station. No one counted the gas station.
“Ms. Thurman?”
“Doctor, where's my husband?” Grace Thurman's voice was soft, hoarse. Her husband was my history teacher. Coached the boys' basketball team. Mr. Thurman was tall, round in the middle, like life had gotten hard and he'd gotten soft in response. Sometimes he ate Three Musketeers bars in class when we were doing worksheets.
“I'm sorry, Mrs. Thurman,” Dr. Abdel-Meguin said, soft. Sympathetic. “He's...”
The sound that came out of Grace Thurman was loud. Too loud. It hurt my ears.
And it hurt my heart.
chapter four
I sat on the cot, feeling the ancient metal springs poke into my back and ribs. Listened to Mrs. Thurman shuffle away.
Listened to Deputy Ramsey come back. Hushed voices, just he and the doctor, the only ones still breathing in the gym other than me. Dust particles hung in the air as I looked up at the bell-like light fixtures shining down on me. I was still waiting for them to ring out like the ones at St. Anthony's.
“We are just going to leave the bodies in the school?” Dr. Abdel-Meguin asked, really hushing her voice. I shouldn't have been able to hear her, she was whispering, and two curtained areas away. But it was like they were next to me.
“Sheriff's on the way back,” Ramsey grunted, even lower. I could still hear him fine. “Guess the call caught him halfway to Prescott. Deputy Otis's got the hallways closed off.”
There was a pause. “Did you see it?” Dr. Abdel-Meguin asked.
It. The unspeakable.
“The scene? Yeah.” A pause. “You checked 'em all?”
“I checked them all,” the doctor said hoarsely. “They were dead before I got here. I was at the corporate campus doing company physicals when I got the call.” Her voice got tense. “We have to leave the bodies there until the sheriff gets back?”
“He wants to see it. Before we start...you know.” He shifted on his feet, sighed. “He'll be back soon. He's on his way.”
A cot squeaked; I could imagine Dr. Abdel-Meguin sitting on it. “I've never seen anything like...that...before.”
Ramsey grunted again. “Me neither. Never will again, either, I hope.” He made a low sound of disgust in his throat. “Damn Ty Foster for what he did.”
Ty Foster.
A sudden, sickening vision cracked through the fog in my brain.
Ty Foster – a big senior who wore metal band t-shirts and trucker caps, blond hair wispy and wild on his head, on his cheeks where a full beard crept down his face, pointing a rifle at me. The smell of acrid gunsmoke drifted through my nostrils. Dead bodies lay fallen in the hallway. “Ava...run,” he said, and I could hear it echo through my head like a taunt.
Nausea exploded from my stomach as the vision faded. I rolled to the edge of the cot and threw up right there.
“Poor girl,” I heard Dr. Abdel-Meguin whisper as I hung my head over the edge of the cot. She heard me throw up. “I wonder what she saw?”
Ramsey sounded calm. “Not much of nothing, I guess. She ran away.”
The doctor was quiet for a long moment. “She's a lucky one, I guess.”
I lay there on the edge of the cot, vomit-spittle covering my mouth. I didn't feel lucky. I felt sick, the nausea warring with my gut, his words ringing in my ears, heart racing as the adrenaline that had spiked in my blood tried to calm – and failed.
She ran away, he said. So calm. So matter-of-fact.
But I heard in it something else, something that hit me like a fist to the gut.
Coward.
chapter five
“Ava?” My father's voice echoed over the empty, dust-mote filled air in the gym. He pulled back the curtain a moment later, a worried look on his sepia-toned face. His voice was usually soft, but now it was high, inflected with that trace of a Spanish accent he'd never been able to shake, even though English was his primary language and had been for most of his life. I still heard the traces of his parents' Spanish every time he spoke. “Ava?”
“Right here, Dad,” I said, my voice cracking as I tried to raise it to make myself heard. The gym was nearly silent, Dr. Abdel-Meguin having wandered off, and Deputy Ramsey at the door, shoes scuffling somewhere behind my father.
My father rushed across to me, his shoes scuffing on the pine floor, his red tie flapping as he hurried over. He sank to a knee, skidding to a stop beside my cot. I reached up for him, and he pulled me tight to him like I was a little child again. “Oof!” he said, because I grabbed him and held him tight, pushing my dusty face against his neck and holding him there. “You got a grip on you, girl.”
“Daddy.” I didn't need to say any more. He held me tight for a few minutes, the smell of his cologne oddly strong as I hugged him tight.
“I don't know where my backpack is,” I said, when I finally got the strength to pull away from him.
He clasped my face in his hands, and held it there, staring into my eyes with his own, his warm, brown eyes looking back at me behind a thin veil of tears. “It's okay, Ava. That doesn't matter.”
“It's got my keys,” I said, really fixated. House keys. I didn't have my own car, though I did have an extra set for dad's car. Someone should, though I was a bad choice. I lost stuff. All the time. Like my backpack, now, apparently.
“That doesn't matter,” he said, cupping my face with his soft hands. “What matters is...” And his hands fluttered as he patted me on the cheek and fell into silence.
“Dad...” I said. But I couldn't get anything else out.
