The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

stared at the small boy he held in his
     arms.
“Who are you?”
he found himself asking.
“Where did you come from?”
    I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was that the line
     between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.

FOUR
    I n the hours after I was murdered, as my mother made phone calls and my father began going door to door in the neighborhood
     looking for me, Mr. Harvey had collapsed the hole in the cornfield and carried away a sack filled with my body parts. He passed
     within two houses of where my father stood talking to Mr. and Mrs. Tarking. He kept to the property line in between two rows
     of warring hedge—the O’Dwyers’ boxwood and the Steads’ goldenrod. His body brushed past the sturdy green leaves, leaving traces
     of me behind him, smells the Gilberts’ dog would pick up and follow to find my elbow, smells the sleet and rain of the next
     three days would wash away before police dogs could even be thought of. He carried me back to his house, where, while he went
     inside to wash up, I waited for him.
    After the house changed hands, the new owners tsk-tsked at the dark spot on the floor of their garage. As she brought prospective
     buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag Mr. Harvey carried and spilling
     onto the concrete. The beginning of my secret signals to the world.
    It would be some time before I realized what you’ve undoubtedly already assumed, that I wasn’t the first girl he’d killed.
     He knew to remove my body from the field. He knew to watch the weather and to kill during an arc of light-to-heavy precipitation
     because that would rob the police of evidence. But he was not as fastidious as the police liked to think. He forgot my elbow,
     he used a cloth sack for a bloody body, and if someone, anyone, had been watching, maybe they would have thought it strange
     to see their neighbor walk a property line that was a tight fit, even for children who liked to pretend the warring hedges
     were a hideout.
    As he scoured his body in the hot water of his suburban bathroom—one with the identical layout to the one Lindsey, Buckley,
     and I shared—his movements were slow, not anxious. He felt a calm flood him. He kept the lights out in the bathroom and felt
     the warm water wash me away and he felt thoughts of me then. My muffled scream in his ear. My delicious death moan. The glorious
     white flesh that had never seen the sun, like an infant’s, and then split, so perfectly, with the blade of his knife. He shivered
     under the heat, a prickling pleasure creating goose bumps up and down his arms and legs. He had put me in the waxy cloth sack
     and thrown in the shaving cream and razor from the mud ledge, his book of sonnets, and finally the bloody knife. They were
     tumbled together with my knees, fingers, and toes, but he made a note to extract them before my blood grew too sticky later
     that night. The sonnets and the knife, at least, he saved.
    At Evensong, there were all sorts of dogs. And some of them, the ones I liked best, would lift their heads when they smelled
     an interesting scent in the air. If it was vivid enough, if they couldn’t identify it immediately, or if, as the case may
     be, they knew exactly what it was—their brains going, “Um steak tartare”—they’d track it until they came to the object itself.
     In the face of the real article, the true story, they decided then what to do. That’s how they operated. They didn’t shut
     down their desire to know just because the smell was bad or the object was dangerous. They hunted. So did I.
    Mr. Harvey took the waxy orange sack of my remains to a sinkhole eight miles from our neighborhood, an area that until recently
     had been desolate save for the railroad tracks and a nearby motorcycle repair shop. In his car he played a radio station that
     looped Christmas