Page 38 of Outlawed

Chapter Twelve

The task I’ve been putting off, of course, is planning Dawn’s funeral. Burying someone makes it so final. Like a nightmare you never get to wake up from.

When Jackie offered to take over, I wanted so desperately to let her. But I couldn’t. I owed Dawn this much. By the time I had everything ready, I wanted to crawl into the back of the closet, pull a blanket over my head, and disappear from the world for a while. Who would have thought that my life would be so much easier in prison?

I turn from staring out the window of my workshop when Shepard walks in. He pauses near the door, his eyes taking in the shelves loaded with bottles and jars. He rarely comes in here, not because he’s not welcome or because it freaks him out, but because he knows it’s the one place I go to be alone.

For him to be here now tells me it’s not just so he can check up on me. “What is it?”

“We’ve just been granted permission to exhume your father’s grave. I’ll be overseeing it myself.

“When?”

“This evening. I want it done before the funeral tomorrow.”

“Alright. Can I come?”

He nods, moving closer to me. “If that’s what you need, then yes. But I can do it without you.”

“No, I’ll go. I know he’s not dead, but I still feel like I need to be there. Vindication, maybe.”

“You earned the right to feel that way, baby. You’ll get no judgment from me.”

I move into his embrace and lean on him for support. He doesn’t hesitate to put his arms around me and hold on tight. He doesn’t offer me any more words of comfort. At this point, there is nothing anyone can say to fix things. What happened, happened. There is no changing it now. Besides, if things hadn’t played out this way, there’d be no Hannah, and not even Dawn herself would have changed things if it meant that.

I tip my head back and look up at him. “Thanks for coming to tell me.”

“Anytime, Poppy.” He kisses my lips lightly.

I take a step back and offer him a small smile. “I’ll get Riggs to stay with Hannah.”

“What about Austin?” He grimaces at his name, so I’m surprised he mentioned him at all.

“I don’t need everyone there. As long as I have you, I’ll be fine.”

“You’ll always have me, Poppy.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

It’s anticlimactic in the end, watching the casket get lifted out and placed on the soil that’s damp from the rain that’s been falling for the last two hours.

“What the hell is going on with this weather?” one of the deputies asks. I don’t reply, and neither does Shepard. Yet, with how often he looks down at me, I’m starting to think he’s figuring out I might be the reason for the weather fluctuations lately. It’s hard to keep a grip on it when my emotions have been all over the place.

Shepard nods at the man standing beside the grave, documenting everything, then walks over and takes the crowbar his deputy offers him. Though the casket is in pretty good condition considering, it doesn’t take much for him to pry it open. He takes a step back to let me see. I frown, expecting it to be empty, but it looks like there are burlap sacks inside filled with god only knows what.

I look at Shepard, confused. “Drugs?”

Shepard shakes his head and uses a knife to slice open the top of one of the bags. Grain spills out. “Just regular sacks of grain.”

“I don’t understand.”

He gets to his feet from where he was crouched and walks over to me. “At a guess, there is as much weight in grain there as what Martin weighed around the time of his death.”

I’m stumped for a moment before I slap my forehead. Of course. A light casket would have people asking questions.

“Right now I have a warrant to serve at the medical examiner’s office as well as at the clinic and my team are crawling through every file Sheriff Anders ever wrote. It won’t change what happened, but maybe having some answers to all those questions in your head might help.”