Free Grave by Joan Frances Turner

out.”
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    FOUR
    NATALIE
     
     
     
    “Y ou gotta come see this,” he kept saying. Over and over.
    You gotta, you gotta—I didn’t have to do anything. This is my house now, it’s always been my house, I’m in charge here and if I want to walk up and down the hallway the whole day, then I will. If I want to not talk to anyone, then I won’t. Amy and all my other real family hate me, my Friendly Man just shows up to be horrible and say things that don’t make any sense. I might as well just walk up and down. The man, his dirty blond hair clipped short, his voice almost southern-sounding like you hear sometimes even this far north, I knew he’d worked here for years but I couldn’t remember his name. Like it mattered. He grabbed at my arm and I yanked it away, almost hissing.
    “Leave me alone,” I said. “Just leave me alone.”
    “Kid—”
    “Don’t call me kid .” Hissing for real, from behind my teeth, trying to make my face a slitty little Halloween mask like an actual cat. If I’d had fur to make stand on end, make me look and feel like a big deal you didn’t mess with, my man would’ve treated me better. “Don’t you ever call me that, I—”
    “ Miss Beach .” He looked past patience and I didn’t care. His skin, the patina of worked-in grime all over his clothes... he looked as close and musty as the hallway smelled and his big thick-necked body seemed somehow to blend into the floor and walls, dissolve into it, one great aura of unclean. “Ms. Beach, whatever the hell you want, I must humbly request you come with me and see what’s going on outside. I don’t know if I’m seeing things, or—”
    “So ask one of the others.” I shook his hand free and rubbed a finger against the wall, the protective glass covering a huge photograph of the lab staff circa... 1925, the writing said, even though their clothes looked awfully modern for that. Long rows of men in suits where only the collars looked really old-fashioned, one or two women in straight up-and-down dresses and short fussy hair. “I know they’re still wandering around here even though I told everyone to leave, I’d be paying your salary but nobody listens. Go ask them.”
    His thick curve of a mouth, pink lips rubbery and flabby all at once, he twisted it up like I’d just shoved something sour into his cheek. “I can’t,” he said, and something flitted fish-like across his face and swam away again, that look when you can’t decide whether to run from something or hit it in the face. “I can’t. You’ll see why. For fuck’s sake, you wanna be in charge here so bad, this is something you gotta see.”
    The layers of dust over the photograph glass left all the faces in shadow, dust so thick you couldn’t even make a proper clean line with your fingertip. If Amy thinks she’s too good for a little dirt she can just shut the hell up and grab a mop. I don’t have time for that, I’ve got serious work.
    I don’t have time for this either. “So what is it, anyway?”
    Because nobody around here listens to me, he just turned around and headed out the hall, like he was just so sure I’d drop everything and run after him, and since nobody tells me anything unless I go looking for it, I followed him out, through the A-Wing and across Residency and out the old double back doors. The beach was just a rumor back here, a quiet prickling sensation that traveled through the air so everything felt lighter, cleaner, and at the same time ponderous with the sheer weight of water. The grass was up around my shins, the woods bordering the lab grounds on three sides thick with leaves and blooms; at the far edge of the trees, a deer nibbled away, too used to humans to do more than stop and look up when it heard us. I was about to ask where the hell he was taking me anyway, I wasn’t getting lured into the woods on some pretense so he could kill me and take over, when he