Free GRAVEWORM by Tim Curran

Called him. Invited him to dinner. Sent him cards. Showed up at the office. She was smitten and nothing was going to stand in her way. That’s how they had hooked-up and how Frank Duvall had been kicked to the curb. Frank still glared at Steve, but he was adult enough not to take it beyond that. Something Steve was grateful for because Frank, though middle-aged with a paunch, was rugged from a life of hard work outdoors and he had a set of guns on him like a weight-lifter.
    Now for two years they had been in the same holding pattern.
    When they were together, Tara devoted herself entirely to him, whether that was a relaxing conversation out on the patio or a meal she was whipping up for him or some especially wild sex in the bedroom. But those dates were sometimes weekly and very often only two or three times a month.
    The rest of the time… Tara’s jobs, the house, and Lisa, Lisa, Lisa.
    Steve liked Lisa and being an average snotty little teenage girl, she tolerated him, but was not exactly friendly. It was an act. Something teenage girls seemed to carry in their genes, apparently. Some annoying defensive mechanism perhaps. But now and again, Lisa would thaw and act almost like a normal human being. Steve knew if they lived under the same roof, though, that it would change.
    Because he thought Lisa wanted to like him.
    But her older sister was standing in the way.
    Laying there, all of it rolling through his mind while he tried to sort out not only his life and Tara’s but what was going on with her now, he had to wonder if maybe she had reached the breaking point and he should be ready to catch her when she fell.
    Yet, he felt it was more than that.
    Something he could not understand or recognize was driving her.
    No, he would not go over there. At least not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Then he would find out what this was about, one way or another. With that, he let himself unwind and go to sleep. A sleep plagued by dreams in which Tara kept running from him, heading toward the brink of some nameless abyssal pit.
    It was probably a good thing he didn’t go over to the Coombes’ house.
    Because he wouldn’t have liked what he found.
    But at the same time, by not going, he was not only betraying his love for Tara but betraying himself. By ignoring those deep-seated instincts that waged war within him, he was leaving Tara alone and vulnerable when she needed him most.
    And something in him knew it.
     
    18
    2:11 AM
    The clock was running…
    When Tara had the hole dug deep in the clearing beside a dirt road well outside Bitter Lake, she carried her packages from the trunk of her little Dodge Stratus and dumped them in. The rug with the torso in it was a little more work, of course. As the crickets sang and night birds called in the starry sky above, she pulled it out and let it fall to the grass. It made a heavy, solid sort of plopping sound that made her skin go cold.
    After that, she had to lean against the car and catch her breath. And not because of exertion.
     
    2:17 AM
    She steeled herself and gripped the rug by the knotted twine and dragged it over the ground to the hole and then, very unceremoniously, pushed it in. And it hurt. Not the strain of it all, of everything she had done this night, though her limbs were heavy and her back aching… no, this was a psychological pain that somehow manifested itself physically. Inside her chest, inside her pumping heart, she hurt. Hurt because here she was dumping the butchered remains of Margaret Stapleton into an unmarked grave in the woods. Margaret. Dear, sweet, old fashioned, no-nonsense, heart-big-as-the moon Margaret. Laying her to rest without so much as a prayer or a goodbye wish.
    There was something almost criminal about that.
     
    2:34 AM
    Tara filled the grave in, patted it down, kicked leaves and sticks and loam over the spot so it would look undisturbed. Then she went back to the car, tossing the shovel in the trunk and wiping the black dirt of the grave from