The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold Page A

carols during the month of December. He whistled inside his huge station wagon and congratulated himself,
     felt full-up. Apple pie, cheeseburger, ice cream, coffee. Full. Better and better he was getting now, never using an old pattern
     that would bore him but making each kill a surprise to himself, a gift to himself.
    The air inside the station wagon was cold and fragile. I could see the moist air when he exhaled, and this made me want to
     palpate my own stony lungs.
    He drove the reed-thin road that cut between two new industrial lots. The wagon fishtailed coming up out of a particularly
     deep pothole, and the safe that held the sack that held my body smashed against the inside hub of the wagon’s back wheel,
     cracking the plastic. “Damn,” Mr. Harvey said. But he picked up his whistling again without pause.
    I had a memory of going down this road with my father at the wheel and Buckley sitting nestled against me—one seat belt serving
     the two of us—in an illegal joyride away from the house.
    My father had asked if any of us kids wanted to watch a refrigerator disappear.
    “The earth will swallow it!” he said. He put on his hat and the dark cordovan gloves I coveted. I knew gloves meant you were
     an adult and mittens meant you weren’t. (For Christmas 1973, my mother had bought me a pair of gloves. Lindsey ended up with
     them, but she knew they were mine. She left them at the edge of the cornfield one day on her way home from school. She was
     always doing that—bringing me things.)
    “The earth has a mouth?” Buckley asked.
    “A big round mouth but with no lips,” my father said.
    “Jack,” my mother said, laughing, “stop it. Do you know I caught him outside growling at the snapdragons?”
    “I’ll go,” I said. My father had told me that there was an abandoned underground mine and it had collapsed to create a sinkhole.
     I didn’t care; I liked to see the earth swallow something as much as the next kid.
    So when I watched Mr. Harvey take me out to the sinkhole, I couldn’t help but think how smart he was. How he put the bag in
     a metal safe, placing me in the middle of all that weight.
    It was late when he got there, and he left the safe in his Wagoneer while he approached the house of the Flanagans, who lived
     on the property where the sinkhole was. The Flanagans made their living by charging people to dump their appliances.
    Mr. Harvey knocked on the door of the small white house and a woman came to answer it. The scent of rosemary and lamb filled
     my heaven and hit Mr. Harvey’s nose as it trailed out from the back of the house. He could see a man in the kitchen.
    “Good evening, sir,” Mrs. Flanagan said. “Got an item?”
    “Back of my wagon,” Mr. Harvey said. He was ready with a twenty-dollar bill.
    “What you got in there, a dead body?” she joked.
    It was the last thing on her mind. She lived in a warm if small house. She had a husband who was always home to fix things
     and to be sweet on her because he never had to work, and she had a son who was still young enough to think his mother was
     the only thing in the world.
    Mr. Harvey smiled, and, as I watched his smile break across his face, I would not look away.
    “Old safe of my father’s, finally got it out here,” he said. “Been meaning to do it for years. No one remembers the combination.”
    “Anything in it?” she asked.
    “Stale air.”
    “Back her up then. You need any help?”
    “That would be lovely,” he said.
    The Flanagans never suspected for a moment that the girl they read about in the papers over the next few years— MISSING, FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED; ELBOW FOUND BY NEIGHBORING DOG; GIRL, 14, BELIEVED KILLED IN STOLFUZ CORNFIELD; WARNINGS TO
     OTHER YOUNG WOMEN; TOWNSHIP TO REZONE ADJOINING LOTS TO HIGH SCHOOL; LINDSEY SALMON, SISTER OF DEAD GIRL, GIVES VALEDICTORIAN
     SPEECH —could have been in the gray metal safe that a lonely man brought over one night and paid them twenty dollars to