What Did We Bury?

INMATE FOUND DEAD IN CELL: Ellis Rucker, 28, found unresponsive in his cell at Kessler Correctional early Thursday. Prison officials say foul play has not been ruled out.

Clara read it twice. Then she set her phone face-down on the nightstand and lay there staring at the ceiling for a long time, listening to nothing at all until the silence became unbearable and she got up. These days it feels like she just wants to sleep forever.

There were arrangements to make.

The funeral home was called Hendricks & Sons. It was beige and carpeted and smelled like lilies and something chemical underneath the lilies.

She hired private security guards on Thursday afternoon. They were professional and quiet and did not ask her why she needed them. She told them anyway: no reporters, no one not on the guest list, no exceptions. She told them to keep the front curtains drawn if there were people gathering outside.

One guard nodded. "Yes, ma'am."

"I'm not trying to make a statement," Clara said. "I just want to bury my husband."

She wasn't sure, even as she said it, whether she believed that was still possible.

The protesters arrived before noon on Saturday.

Clara saw them from the window of the black car as they pulled up, maybe thirty people arranged along the sidewalk across the street, some holding signs, some just standing there with their arms crossed. A few signs bore the victims' names in block letters. Others read JUSTICE FOR THE RUCKER VICTIMS and one, held by a gray-haired woman near the back, said simply: HE DESERVED IT. She recognized some of them from the trails, families of the victims.

Two news vans idled at the front. A reporter turned to look at the car as it pulled in.

“Don't look," Clara said.

Beside her, Ellis's mother, Ruth, was already looking. "Animals," Ruth said softly. “Absolute animals."

Mara sat across from them both, her knees pressed together, her hands folded in her lap. She was looking at nothing. There was no correct answer, no right way to accompany your mother to your dead brother's wake when you were not sure whether he had actually done what they said he did.

The car stopped. A guard opened the door.

Inside, the flowers were white and there was soft piano music coming from a speaker in the corner and the coffin was at the far end of the room, half-open, the lid raised just enough that you could see Ellis's face from across the room.

Clara made herself walk toward it.

He looked smaller than she remembered. That was the first thought she had. He looked smaller and very still; it didn’t feel like him. He always had a bigger than life personality, but now he was like a shriveled potato, like all life had been sucked out of him before he even died.

She put her hand on the edge of the coffin. She couldn’t touch him.

Ruth came up beside Clara and immediately began to cry.

"My baby," she said. She pressed one hand to the edge of the coffin and one hand to her mouth. "My sweet boy. My sweet, gentle boy."

Mara had not come to the coffin yet. She was standing near the door with her coat still on, watching her mother, and her face was doing something complicated, not grief exactly, but something adjacent to it. It was hard to describe, it would've been easier if she could put a name on it.

Clara caught Mara's eye. Mara looked away.

Ellis had been many things, Clara thought. Ellis had always seemed to belong a little to everyone. He moved easily through the world, making strangers feel important, remembered, loved, and Clara had spent eight years beside him trying not to notice how often she felt like just another person caught in his orbit. It was not that he did not love her. He did, in the same open, generous way he loved everybody, and after a while the warmth of it had begun to feel strangely lonely. Still, she had spent the last three years making calls, hiring attorneys, writing letters, and sitting across from him behind the glass while he stared at the table and said very little.

But she always believed in him. She wasn’t sure she knew what believing him had required. At some point, it seemed that she was the only one who believed him; even he had given up trying to defend himself. Over time, she noticed herself going from an outspoken defender to a droplet trying to make a wave in an ocean. It was like just her against the world.

The door slammed opened.

Someone forced themselves in. One of the security guards moved immediately. "Sir, I need to see your name."

"I'm not on your list," the man said. He was already looking past the guard, already looking at the coffin.

His name was Daniel Marsh. Clara had memorized all the victims and their families. His daughter had been twenty-two when she was killed, a nursing student. She knew all the faces.

Daniel Marsh walked three steps into the room before the guard caught his arm "Sir."

"Get off me." He wasn't shouting. His voice was controlled in the way that voices get when there's nothing left to spend anger on, when the anger has calcified into something quieter and heavier. He looked at the coffin. He looked at Ruth, still bent over it, still crying.

"He doesn't deserve that," he said. "He doesn't deserve one tear."

Ruth's head came up.

"My baby," she panted while weeping, "was innocent."

"Your baby killed my baby." Daniel Marsh's voice finally cracked on the last word, just slightly, and then sealed itself shut again. “He killed my daughter and three other people and now he's in a box and you're standing there crying like the world did him wrong."

"They did," Ruth yelled. "They did do him wrong. The police, the coroner, they all lied."

"My daughter is in the ground." He pointed at the coffin. "That monster never gave her a goodbye. You don't get to stand there and-"

"Get him out," Clara said.

She hadn't stood up. She'd said it from the chair, in a voice that came out quiet and level, and the room went still.

She stood up.

The guard had Daniel Marsh by the arm again and Marsh wasn't fighting it, but he wasn't moving either. He was standing there with his jaw tight, and his eyes were wet, and Clara could see what this cost him, being here, doing this, needing this.

She walked to the center of the room.

"He's dead," she said. She looked at Daniel Marsh, not unkindly. "Whatever you came here to do, you're not hurting him. He can't feel any of this."

"Good," Marsh said.

"Then go." Clara's voice didn't waver. "Go, because this isn't for him anymore. It stopped being for him. This is for the people who have to keep living after him."

The room was completely silent.

Marsh looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at Ruth, and his expression shifted into something harder to name between contempt and grief, and said quietly, “You shared a bed with him for years. Don’t stand there acting innocent. You don’t deserve peace either.”

Clara held his gaze. "I know," she said.

The guard walked him toward the door.

From across the room, Mara had watched all of it.

She had watched her mother straighten up from the coffin, Clara step into the middle of the room, and Daniel Marsh's face when he said his daughter was in the ground, watched it and felt a knot in her chest she couldn’t untie.

When Mara had pulled her mother gently away from the confrontation, Ruth had turned on her.

"You never believed him either," Ruth said. "Don't think I don't know that. Don't think he didn't know that."

Mara had no answer. She had no defense. It was true.

She slipped through a side hallway, past a bathroom and small office, to a narrow corridor behind the building. The protesters’ chants drifted faintly from the front, ragged and half-hearted.

Her phone would not stop buzzing. Hundreds of messages unread.

Another buzz. Then her email.

She squinted at the screen, not believing what she was reading.

It had started while she was gone. One phone, then another, then three at once, alerts filling the quiet room.

The cousin from Georgia looked down at his screen. The aunt went pale.

Clara looked around at the faces and felt the first cold thread of something move through her before she even knew what had triggered it.

"What is it?" Ruth asked.

Nobody answered right away.

Outside, the chanting from the protesters had stopped. The sudden quiet was more alarming than the noise had been.

Then Gerald, the funeral director, appeared in the doorway of the lobby. He had his own phone in his hand and his expression was the particular blankness of someone trying to stay professional while processing something he didn't know how to process.

"Mrs. Rucker," he said. He seemed uncertain which Mrs. Rucker he meant. He looked at Clara. "I think you should come see this."

Everyone made their way to the TV in the lobby. A news anchor was speaking with the careful, measured urgency of breaking news, the red banner along the bottom reading: NEW VICTIM. INVESTIGATION REOPENED.

Clara stopped in the doorway.

The anchor was handing off to a correspondent outside what looked like a police precinct, and the correspondent was saying that investigators had been called to a location in the city early that morning, they weren't releasing the address, and that the victim had been found in a manner consistent with the method used in the original murders.

Consistent with the method.

Clara heard that phrase and felt something happen in her body, not relief, not vindication, something like being hollowed out.

Ellis was lying in the coffin; dead for three days.

The room processed this in stages.

Ruth was the first one to make a sound. A sound that was almost a laugh, almost a sob, something that collapsed in the middle and came out as: "I knew it. I knew it. I knew my baby didn't do it."

She said it again and again, louder each time, and each time she said it the room got a little smaller, a little more airless.

Near the doorway, Daniel Marsh had not left yet. He was still near the entrance with one of the guards, and he was staring at the screen, and his face had gone a color that wasn't quite white and wasn't quite gray.

"Copycat," he said. "It's a copycat. Someone who followed the case."

Nobody responded.

"He was guilty. They had evidence. There was physical evidence, they showed us-" His voice was unraveling, and he seemed to know it, and he pressed one hand against his mouth like he could hold himself together that way.

On the screen, the District Attorney appeared at a podium. She was a composed woman with steel-gray hair and the expression of someone delivering news she had hoped never to deliver.

She said investigators were pursuing three possible explanations. The first: Ellis Rucker had been wrongly convicted, and the actual perpetrator had killed again. The second: Ellis Rucker had acted with an accomplice who had now resumed the killings. But that theory did not line up with their findings. The third: a copycat with detailed knowledge of the original crimes. That, too, seemed unlikely, because parts of the killer’s method not yet released to the public, appeared in this new case. It was as if the killer was mocking them for getting the wrong person. For now, investigators were following the first explanation. The case had been reopened.

Mara stood at the edge of the lobby and took it all in. Her mother leaning against the wall with her hands pressed together, talking to God or to no one, saying I knew it I knew it I knew it. Daniel Marsh crumpled onto one of the lobby chairs, staring at the floor.

She looked at Clara.

Clara was sitting on the floor. Not in a chair, on the floor, down against the wall beside the doorway, her back against the baseboard, her knees drawn up, looking at her hands. She looked smaller than Mara had ever seen her look. She looked like a person who had been holding a door shut for years and had just let go.

Mara crossed the room and sat down beside her.

"I didn't believe him,” Mara said.

Clara didn't look at her.

"I know," she said.

"I should have." Mara looked down at her hands. "He wrote me. I didn't write back. I kept telling myself I needed more time, that I'd figure out what I thought, that one day I'd know for sure and then I'd know what to say." She stopped. "I ran out of time."

Clara was quiet for a long moment. "I wanted it to matter while he was still here," she said. Her voice came out flat and hollow, like something had been taken out of it. "That's all I wanted. Not this. Not another person dead and everyone suddenly deciding to reconsider. He needed someone to believe him before he died. Not after."

Mara had nothing to say to that. She sat with it instead.

A guard came to Clara a quarter of an hour later and told her, apologetically, that they needed to close the wake. The crowd outside had grown but it has been quiet somewhat since the news broke, but the reporters had multiplied and some of them were shouting questions through the door.

She stood up from the floor and smoothed her dress and became herself again in the way that she always did, that controlled and particular way, like she was fastening something shut from the inside.

Mara walked to the coffin.

She stood there and looked at her brother, at his face, which was wrong, which was not his face, which was the memory of his face laid over something that was no longer him. She thought about the messages on her phone. She thought about the last time she'd seen him in person, two years ago now, in the visitation room, through the scratched plexiglass, and how he had looked at her with an expression she had interpreted as anger and now thought might have been something else. Exhaustion.

She had not answered his letters. She had not answered his calls from the prison. She had told herself she needed time, that she wasn't ready, that she didn't know what she thought yet.

She had run out of time before she'd figured it out. I don't know if you did it. Maybe I'll never know.

She stood there for another minute. Then she put on her coat.

They left through a back exit, Clara, Ruth, and Mara, moving quickly through the narrow corridor and out a door that opened onto an alley. Guards flanked them on either side.

There were reporters there too, waiting. They always found the back exit.

"Mrs. Rucker, do you believe Ellis Rucker was innocent?"

"Clara, did Ellis know about an accomplice?"

"Is there another killer? Do you have any comment on the DA's statement?"

"Did the state let an innocent man die?"

Nobody answered. Ruth kept wanting to answer, but Clara grabbed her hand and pulled her along. Clara walked fast with her shoulders back and her face composed and her eyes fixed at a point about twenty feet ahead of her.

Mara walked behind them.

They had almost reached the car when her phone went off again.

She almost ignored it. She nearly climbed into the car and let the door shut behind her and let whatever it was wait until they were somewhere quiet. But some feeling made her stop.

She looked at the screen.

BREAKING: New killing casts doubt on Rucker conviction. DNA from the scene has been tested by multiple labs, all confirming that it matches evidence from the previous murders but does not match Rucker. The attorney’s office has opened a formal review of the original conviction and an investigation has been launched into the coroner for falsely testifying.

She read it once. She read it again.

Around her the reporters were still shouting and the alley was cold and Ruth was already inside the car and Clara had stopped a few feet ahead and turned to look at her, one hand resting on the open car door.

"Mara," Clara said. "Come on."

She knew now. She knew he was innocent.

It didn't feel like anything she had expected.

Clara stood very still. Something moved across her face, a single brief thing, and then it was gone. She looked at the car door in her hand. She looked at the alley. She looked at nothing for a moment.

Then she got in the car.

Mara followed her. The door closed. The car pulled forward and the reporters parted around them and then they were past them, out of the alley, onto the street, and the funeral home fell away behind them.

Nobody spoke.

Outside the windows, through the gray afternoon, Mara caught a last glimpse of the front of the building as they turned the corner. The protesters were still there, standing in the same loose and uncertain cluster as before. The signs were still up. On one side: KILLER. MONSTER. HE DESERVED IT. On the other: the victims' names, printed in careful block letters by people who had loved them and still did.

Nobody was chanting. Nobody seemed to know what came next.

The news vans were still broadcasting.

The funeral home doors were shut.

Everyone had come to bury a monster.

Now they didn't know what they had buried.

End.