He picked it up, horrified to be doing so and yet unable to stop himself. It was small, like a piece of chalk. George held it up to his face, panting, sweat running into his ass crack. A bone. He was sure it was the hip bone of something very small. Fuuuck! He dropped it, shaking his hand. It’s human, he thought, and very quickly unthought it. It was not human; it couldn’t be. It was too small. The shock was still present as George began his long crawl back to the trapdoor. What was he going to tell his wife? This house had been his idea of a new start for them, even with its grisly history, but the minute she found out about this—and what was “this”? George thought. He’d almost reached the front of the trapdoor again, and he shone his light back and forth as he went, scared something was going to jump out at him. And then the beam of his flashlight illuminated something else and he jumped, hitting his head on a beam and then falling backward onto his ass. But he still had his flashlight. He swept it over the darkness, panting softly. You’ve already seen one dead body, idiot, he thought. But George did not want to see another dead body, even though he was pretty sure now that there were two back there. He wanted to be sick again.

And there it was: just five feet behind the trapdoor, lying sideways among the garbage like a bloated, gray cabbage; how had he missed it on the way in? George screamed. Dust swept into his mouth as it yawed open, and then he was coughing and crying. He sounded like a fucking dying racoon. Someone had decorated the dead man’s body with garbage, piling it around him like a tomb. There was a cardboard sign with writing propped near the feet of the corpse, and there was something wedged in his mouth between two gummy, grotesque lips.

George shone his flashlight toward the mouth that would give him nightmares for years to come and saw the metal barrel of a gun. Someone had rammed the weapon, backward, into the dead man’s mouth so it stared with a single eye at George. His eyes went back to the sign, the writing slanting off the cardboard in a drunken scrawl. He wondered what the man had done to deserve having a gun rammed down his throat the wrong way. And who had been angry enough to do the ramming? He lunged for the trapdoor, getting one last, horrified look at the face he would later find out was the missing man, the murderer. Someone, probably the someone rotting in the ditch back there, had left a message.

I’m sorry. I was wrong. I just wanted to do the right thing.

* * *