Chapter 1 - The Coffin That Answered
The first blow cracked the coffin. The second made the funeral director lunge for me. On the third, my dead sister screamed.
Twenty minutes earlier, I'd walked into Saint Agnes Chapel carrying the cheap blue flowers Lucía loved. She was twenty-seven. Yesterday, Aunt Celia had called to say she'd died of a sudden heart problem. No hospital name. No doctor willing to talk. No chance to see her face.
Now a closed oak coffin stood beneath a chandelier, and Celia kept saying, "Remember her the way she was."
"Open it," I told funeral director Warren Pike.
"The family requested a closed service."
"I am her family."
My uncle's old friend, Councilman Dean Mercer, gripped my shoulder. "You're grieving, Rafael. Don't make this ugly."
Then something inside the coffin scraped. A weak, desperate sound, like fingernails against wood. I pressed my ear to the lid.
"Lucía? It's me."
Two tiny knocks answered.
The chapel chandelier had been lowered for repairs. Three thick brass cups that held its glass shades sat on a worktable beside the altar. I grabbed the heaviest one and swung. Pike seized my sleeve. I hit again, harder. At the third strike, the thin decorative panel split.
I tore it open with bleeding fingers.
Lucía lay beneath the silk lining, alive, gagged, her wrists bound with white cord. Purple bruises climbed her throat. She sucked air through her nose and stared at me like she was afraid I might disappear.
"Call nine-one-one!" I yelled. "NOW!"
Nobody moved until a woman in the second pew pulled out her phone. I cut Lucía's gag with Pike's forgotten letter opener. She coughed, and I held her head while she fought for breath.
"Who did this?" I asked.
She pointed toward the rear doors. At Aunt Celia.
Celia's phone began to ring. Its bright screen faced me. The caller was saved under one word: DAD.
Our father had been buried sixteen years ago.
May you like
Celia saw that I had read the screen. Her face collapsed.
"Don't answer," she whispered. "If he hears her breathing, he'll know he has to kill both of you."
