GRAVEWORM by Tim Curran

police found out nothing, Bud would not give up so easily. He was always bitching about the young, modern force: “Goddamn little boys with laptops playing cop, mouths barely off their mommies’ titties. Encounter sessions and support fucking groups. Tasers and pepper spray. Jesus! In the old days we took a man down with our bare hands like real cops. We got bloodied, we got bruised, but we got paid to do a fucking job and we did it. Me and Bobby Stemick, Frenchy Levesque, Jib Hanlon, Mike McKean… we were real cops. Not like now, not like now…”
    Bud was old, but at heart was still a cop. Stubborn as all hell.
    Tara did not need this new wrinkle.
    Think!
    She had to have a story.
    And then she did.
    “ Sorry to call you so late, Tara, but… well, thing is, Margaret’s not here. Bed’s not slept in. Before I start raising hell about it, I just want to make sure she’s still not there.”
    Tara licked her lips. They were very dry. Like her hands. Dry with grave dirt, soil packed under her fingernails. “No, she’s not here, Bud. I mean, I can go look around, but no one was here when I got home last night. Lisa’s down in Milwaukee with her Uncle Joe and Aunt Claire for a week, so I just figured Margaret didn’t come over. No reason for her to.”
    The lie came from her lips perfectly, as if she were reading from a script. Even the bit about Uncle Joe and Aunt Claire in Milwaukee. They were real all right, except that they were in Belgium for a month visiting Claire’s nephew who was in the Army and had just married a Belgian girl over there. Tara had spoken to Claire about it on the phone three days ago. If the police tried to contact them, they would be unavailable. Yes, yes. It was amazing how good of a liar Tara was. She had never been worth a damn at it before. But now… yes, things had changed and she was not the same person.
    She would lie.
    She would swindle.
    She would even cover-up crimes or commit murder if it meant getting Lisa back and God help anyone who stood in her way.
    “ Well, she went over there around four as usual, Tara.”
    Tara waited. Then she said, “What did she say? She must have known Lisa was gone.”
    It all hung on this. If Margaret had said she was going to watch Lisa, then there would be questions. Uncomfortable questions.
    Bud said, “I didn’t talk to her. She just left while I was varnishing a chair in the garage. Called out to me how she’d be back late as usual. Figured she was going to your place.”
    “ This sounds funny, Bud. I don’t like it.”
    “ Yeah. Well. I better look through the house one more time. She’s not so young anymore, you know.”
    In other words, maybe she fell and hit her head or had a goddamned stroke and I better go look for her corpse. Tara could hear the dread and pain in his voice and something inside her ran warm at the sound of it. It bubbled up her throat, brought tears to her eyes and she wanted to admit it all, scream it out at him over the phone, but she didn’t dare.
    She could not afford pity.
    Not for others.
    Not for herself.
    “ I’ll let you know,” Bud said and hung up.
    Tara set the phone back in its cradle. She knew this was not over by a long shot. Yes, people turned up missing from time to time, she knew. Even in Bitter Lake. But usually they were younger people fleeing debt or bad relationships. Teenagers who ran away. And sometimes hunters disappeared out in the deep, dark woods during deer season and nobody found them. It happened. More often than the authorities liked to admit.
    But not elderly people.
    Like old, firmly-rooted trees, they did not just vanish.
    And when they did, it was usually because they had dropped dead in a remote location or lived alone and nobody found their bodies for weeks.
    Tara did not like what would come next.
    Because much as she dreaded it, the police would come to see her. They would be asking questions. And not just once either. This would be an ongoing thing and she would have