Page 81 of The Fundamentals

It was Valerie’s minivan parked in front of the long ranch house, with its headlights still on and the driver’s door open. Aubin and I glanced at each other. “If this was a movie, we’d be really dumb to get out right now,” she commented.

I looked behind us. No, the bodyguard wasn’t there, still. “We should turn around,” I was saying, and that was when someone smashed against the passenger window. My sister and I screamed and she threw the BMW into reverse, and then in the headlights and a cloud of dust, I saw Ward’s mom. She was yelling something to us and she waved her arms over her head. I couldn’t see him anywhere or his grandma, either.

“Like hell are we getting out now,” Aubin said, but she rolled down her window. “Stay right there,” she barked to Valerie. “What’s going on here? State your name and purpose!” She shook her head. “Good Lord, I don’t know why I said that. What is the matter with that woman?”

Valerie seemed like she’d been in a bar brawl, which knew because three of Aubin’s friends had also been involved in one of those when she was in college, and the pictures that had been posted were very unflattering. Those girls had nothing on how Ward’s mom looked right now: her hair was in a crazy, knotted halo around her head; she had a long, bloody scratch down one cheek; the sweatshirt she wore was torn at the neck, dipping down and open to expose her shoulder and one bra cup; her eyes were huge and her face was without any color; and she seemed to be covered in a layer of dirt.

“She looks worse than Jess did after my bachelorette. I never saw any woman lower than that unless she’d been in prison,” my sister remarked. She peered outside the car, checking for any movement, then stuck out her head again. “Where’s your son?” she hollered.

Valerie raised her arm and pointed to the big white pine in front of the house, and I saw tears start to rush down her pale cheeks. She put her hand over her mouth and shook. I put my own hand on the door handle to go to her.

“No, wait,” Aubin ordered. “This could easily be a trick.” She raised her voice. “Where’s the grandma? Where’s Diane?”

Valerie took her hand off her mouth to point it toward the house, which was totally dark. For the first time, she answered us verbally, too. “They’re dead,” she cried hoarsely.

My sister turned to me and neither of us spoke. With all her sangfroid, Aubin looked just as shocked and disturbed as I felt.

But of course, she recovered fast. “We’re calling the cops, right now.” She held up her phone and looked at it. “No service? Where are we, Antarctica? This is ridiculous.”

“You can usually get a bar if you stand on the porch of the house,” I said. “That must have been where Valerie was calling us from.” I stared through the windshield. “We need to go talk to her.”

My sister nodded grimly. “You take the spray, I’ll take the knife.” We slowly got out of the car, both of us looking into the darkness surrounding it. It was cold tonight and my hands shook as they gripped the hot pink canister, but that was from fear and adrenaline, not the temperature. I uncapped the spray, ready to put it right into Ward’s eyes. I approached his mom and Aubin walked toward the Memorial Tree, that big white pine.

“Valerie?” I asked cautiously. She hadn’t moved or even put her arm down from how it pointed toward the house. “Valerie, are you ok?”

“You said it,” she told me. Up closer in the beams of the BMW’s headlights, she looked even worse. I couldn’t really tell the color of her wide eyes because her pupil covered all of the iris, and I could see that she wasn’t just dirty—she was filthy. Her hands, especially, were caked with mud and there was blood on them like there was on her cheek.

“What do you mean? What did I say?” I took another cautious step towards her.

“You said that his grandma would know where he is. She did. She told me.” Her arm, which had pointed at the house, now swung around to the white pine where Aubin stood.

“Oh, good Lord,” my sister called. “Sissy, don’t come over here. It’s Ward. I think.”

“Is he…”

My sister’s face had also gone dead white. “There’s a body and I’m pretty sure it’s him, but there are other bones here, too. I don’t know much about anatomy but I think they’re also human.”

“They are,” Valerie said. “It’s Diane’s husband. He didn’t run off and leave them.”

“Those bones are Ward’s grandpa?” I gasped.

“She put him there. Diane told me she put him there, and then she planted the tree. The Memorial Tree.”

Good Lord. I couldn’t speak and even Aubin was at a loss.

“I came here to talk to her, after what you said to me this morning,” Valerie went on. Her voice was so flat and strange, it could have been an old recording. “I looked around and I found Ward’s car parked in an outbuilding. Diane’s car, the one he was supposed to drive to Florida to get away, was parked next to it. I walked up to the house.” She moved her arm to point there again. “I said, ‘Diane, you know where my son is. You better tell me.’ She did know. She told me that she killed him.”

“It’s an emergency!” my sister yelled into her phone. She had run over and climbed up on the railing of the front porch to get a signal. “There’s been a murder! At least one. Emergency!”

“She couldn’t let Ward draw attention to her,” Valerie went on. “She was so angry last winter, when he got arrested in Detroit after your disagreement. I didn’t understand why, exactly. She was acting like she was afraid, but it wasn’t for his sake. It was that she thought that if the police started poking around in our family, they might start to wonder what had happened to her husband. He’s been under the tree all along.” We both looked at it. “She always said that Ward reminded her of his grandfather and I thought it was a compliment. Tonight she told me that she loved him, but he was trouble just like her husband had been. She said it was better this way. It was better that Ward was dead.”

She started to talk about when he’d been a little boy, an angel, but I reached now and grasped her shoulders. “Valerie. Where is Diane? Where did she go?”

“She’s in the house. She poisoned them, Sissy. She said she was tired and it was all too much, that she was done. I think she must be dead by now.”

I stared. “She’s dead, too?” I latched onto the fact that Ward’s dad wasn’t here, either. “Where’s Kevin? Is he all right?”

“He’s on his way to Florida to look for Ward there. She told me that I could go ahead and let Kevin know, that he would be too late to say goodbye to her, and then she went into her bedroom and locked the door. I called him but he’s not answering, so I tried to get ahold of you. Then I got a shovel and started to dig under the tree.”

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