Graveyard Games by Sheri Leigh

when he stuck two fingers in his mouth and
whistled.
    Chris glanced over his shoulder. "Gotta go."
Shane motioned to him. "Take care of yourself, Dusty."
    He headed down the hill, not looking back at
her. Like a trained puppy dog, she thought as he climbed carefully
over the chest-high spiked fence.
    She watched them get into the Mustang. Shane
stepped hard on the gas, dust flying from underneath his tires as
he skidded down the path running next to the fence and up onto
Hubbard, heading toward town. He never was one to use a front
entrance, she thought.
    He's lying—or he's covering up for
someone.
    She knelt in front of the
headstone, putting the yellow rose down. She traced his name, the
dates. Dominick William Chandler. May God
Have Mercy Upon His Soul. Dusty frowned.
That was another of Julia's touches.
    God have mercy, she thought, looking up, her
eyes falling on the space Shane had vacated.
    May God have mercy
upon his soul.

Chapter Four
    The door was closed.
    She had to pass it every day, and it was
beginning to bother her. In spite of what was going on back in
Chicago, it bothered her so much she almost wished she were back in
her apartment, even if her roommate’s cat liked to curl around her
head like a hat at night. She didn’t know which was worse, the
investigation hanging over her head, or the closed door she now had
to pass every day.
    A month, that’s what she told her father and
stepmother—and Jack. She told him, too, making the call in Nick’s
Jeep, calling from her cell on the outskirts of town, where she
actually could get more than just a few bars on her phone. After
that, she’d called her roommate, Kathy, who had agreed to ship her
some of her clothes and personal things. She was taking a month
off. A mourning vacation. None of them had been happy about it,
including her. She didn’t want to stay here, with memories of Nick
around every corner, but she couldn’t go either. Not yet.
    And still, the door stayed
shut, a poster of Murphy's Law thumb-tacked to
it . "It's okay to
be a pessimist once in a while, Nick,” she remembered saying when
she gave the poster to him.
    She passed it on her way to breakfast. She
passed it coming down the hall late at night, when she was tired
enough she might be able to get some sleep. She passed it, wet and
shivering and wrapped in a towel, after taking a shower. She had
passed it at least twice a day, every day, for the past two
weeks...but she still didn’t have the nerve to look inside.
    Julia hadn’t mentioned cleaning it out or
going through his things again. She had changed his sheets and made
his bed and Dusty had watched all of that with mixed feelings of
horror and awe. Then the door had been shut again.
    It scared her.
    Not so much the fact that the room was there
and she had to go by it, or that all of his things were still in
it, or that there were clean sheets waiting for him. Those things
bothered her, but it was more than just that.
    It was the door—the closed door.
    One of Julia's favorite gripes when they
were kids had been that Nick never shut his door when he was
changing. Dusty had always been able to go by on her way to her
room and see him sitting on his bed, doing his homework, reading,
munching on pretzels and drinking Mountain Dew. Sometimes he would
call her in, sometimes he was gone—but the door was always left
wide open.
    In the middle of the night, if she would get
up to get a glass of water or go to the bathroom, she would hear
him breathing. Sometimes, if the moon was full—and Nick left his
shade up, his curtains open and, whenever possible, the window
gaping—she could see him curled up, the covers mostly kicked
off.
    It was unsettling to see the door shut. It
was unnatural. Julia had shut the door and had somehow managed to
shut Nick out of their lives without having to deal with it, and
Dusty didn’t have the nerve to open it back up. She passed it,
feeling guilty, knowing it just wasn’t right for it to be