Page 74 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
Since then we’d heard lots of different stories about Lydia Faraday’s final resting place. Some people said she’d been dumped in an unmarked grave behind the Granger Fire Department. Others said her ashes were tilled into the earth beneath the football field overlooking the Aquatics Center, as final torment. Some people said she’d been buried under the building itself and now wandered the chlorine-scented halls after dark, searching endlessly for Nina. We’d heard that her bones were sunk in Byron Lake, where skeletal hands would reach out and clutch you if you swam too far past the buoys, and that she’d been buried under a false name in Shady Glen Serenity Park, the county’s largest cemetery.
This last story proved closest to the truth. Brent Manning had an inside source that summer: freshman Adelaide Burnes, infamous for being both chronically morbid and a D cup. Adelaide’s family ran a massively successful funeral home that dominated an entire block in downtown East Granger and served more than 80 percent of the mortuary needs of the greater Four Corners area—at least according to their billboards.
The point was, when it came to dead bodies, we trusted Adelaide. The girl knew what she was talking about.
It was a sweltering July night when Brent Manning went to the cemetery to find Lydia Faraday’s grave, to see whether there was proofof recent police activity. It was a crazy and pointless errand, but a bunch of us decided to join him when he floated the idea on Discord. We were itchy for something to do, somewhere to go, some excuse to get out of the house.
For days a thick haze had obscured our towns in a depressing pall of gray that refused to coalesce into badly needed rain. The pressure worked on our eardrums, squeezed our skulls, and lit flames beneath our skin. During the day, the temperature hovered in the nineties. Our towels mildewed in minutes. We drew our shades against the sun like vampires.
Plus, we needed more material for our podcast.
We asked Brent if he could score any beer.
He could.
Shady Glen Serenity Park covered more than thirty acres. It was intermittently lit and, as far as we knew, rarely patrolled. More importantly, the eastern entrance was a short half-mile walk from Valleyview Road, where Alex Spinnaker lived. His house served as a convenient cover and temporary base camp.
The rest of us followed the group’s progress via thumbnail pictures and messages that came through Discord. Nate Stern had a new dirt bike and captured the trip through the woods—the rocky trail bucking the camera up and down, trees lurching into sudden view, thick clouds of gnats turned silvery by the touch of his headlights. Olivia Howard flooded our Discord server with inconsequential details and observations, such as several pictures of what she claimed might be the remnants of an occult ceremony but looked to us like someone’s discarded chicken wings. Skyler Matthews recorded dramatic voice memos where she described the moon as “the color of old bone” and the gates of the cemetery as “looming forebodingly, like iron fingers pointing to a bad omen.”
We were impressed and asked her whatforebodinglymeant.
We straddled realities as a group of us assembled at the eastern entrance of the cemetery, bridging the distance through photographs and video capture, comments and voice notes.
@mememeup:is @spinn_doctor wearing a moon suit? He looks like he’s glowing
@gustagusta:wait, hang on guys aren’t we missing @ktcakes888?
@ktcakes888:I’m literally standing behind you
@hannahbanana:wish I was there with you!! <3
@spinn_doctor:are we all here?
@highasakyle:where?
@spinn_doctor:by the east gate. Right across from the gun store
@highasakyle:I’m on my couch, bro
@badprincess:can someone ask @brentmann to change audio settings?
It was like that.
According to Adelaide, Lydia Faraday had not been buried under a fake name but simply under her initials. She’d pointed Brent to an area containing the cheapest plots in the cemetery, where stubby hills cracked with rows of slab headstones reared over County Road 11 and overlooked a dribble of fast-food chains and auto supply stores bleeding out from downtown East Granger.
Those of us who were there—Spinnaker, Meeks, Topornycky, Kaitlyn and Ethan Courtland, Olivia Howard, and a handful of others—followed Brent through the gates and up the hill under a suffocating silence, clutching beers that warmed almost as soon as they were open. The heat stuck to our skin like a plastic film that showed even through the videos we streamed back to the server.
The group split up on the hill, weaving among the headstones with camera flashlights burning like so many fireflies against the dark. It was Sofia Young who found the grave, halfway up the hill, set a bit apart from the other headstones. The whole server responded to her shout, which brought a tangle of messages to the general thread.
@badprincess:what was that? Did you guys hear that?
@brentmann:it’s Sofia. She found something
@hannahbanana:hear what??
@badprincess:Wait, where are you?
@hannahbanana:I’m at home!!!
