Quiet in Her Bones Singh, Nalini (the top 100 crime novels of all time .txt) 📖

at least an hour. I’d managed to uproot the roses, but it was hard going through the packed soil.

Sweat plastered my T-­shirt to my skin despite the cold, and my back ached, but I thrust the shovel into the earth and dug. I hadn’t been able to sleep or even relax after my epiphany. I’d stayed awake, eating fudge and chocolate, and drinking Coke while staring at Diana and Calvin’s house, waiting for the lights to go out. The house had finally gone dark at ­eleven-­thirty.

Then I’d had to wait for everyone else in the Cul-­de-­Sac to go to sleep.

Isaac, of course, had been up, and I’d seen glimpses of light through the trees that told me Anastasia’s family was still awake, but the holdouts had surrendered before two. I’d waited another half hour until all was silent, unbroken even by the passage of distant cars, then crept out of the house, picking up the shovel I’d seen in Shanti’s vegetable patch on my way.

As I’d crossed the Cul-­de-­Sac by the light of the moon, the streetlights off for some reason, a small part of me had said this was a very bad idea, but that voice was wiped out by the overwhelming wave of certainty in my blood.

The roses, the way Diana babied them, the way she wouldn’t let anyone else near them.

“It all adds up,” I muttered. “It all adds up.”

I dug and dug, until I’d made a hole so big I had to stand inside it to dig any further.

“Sarah’s dead. Diana buried her here.” My head felt thick, my tongue woolly.

I stopped midshovel, unsure what I was doing here in the dark, but then the break in my certainty faded as fast as it had struck, and I began digging again. It all made sense, the pieces fitting together like a jigsaw.

Diana had killed Sarah because Sarah had been having an affair with Diana’s perfect Calvin. Then my mother had helped Diana bury the ­body—­because my mother would do that for her best friend. But the two fought for some reason, leading Diana to no longer trust her to keep the secret, and so she’d killed her.

I paused. No, something was wrong with that picture.

That image of my mother helping Diana in the morning sunshine. There had been no hole, just dug-­up plants and a ruined and trampled garden bed. Maybe Sarah had used a shovel to dig them up when she left, for reasons I couldn’t yet see.

Stopping, I shook my head.

No, Sarah was dead.

My mother and Diana must’ve buried her the night before, just been doing the tidy-­up the next day.

Yes, that was it. That made perfect sense.

My brain throbbed against my skull, the echo going through my bones.

The scrape of movement on wet grass was light, but it crashed like a drum against my ­over-­sensitized hearing. Twisting in the hole, I looked up in time to see the shovel coming down at me. I had a moment of ­incomprehension—­wasn’t I holding the shovel?—­before instinct made me throw myself sideways inside the small space.

I hadn’t dug a very wide hole. It was only big enough to jump inside and go deeper. But it proved just big enough to avoid the first blow.

The sharp edge of the shovel dug into the soil beside my head.

Grunting, the person wielding the garden implement wrenched it out. I thrust up the end of my own shovel into their gut in that increment of time. But I had barely any purchase, and my bad leg was threatening to buckle.

Hissing out a breath, my ­attacker—­a formless silhouette, black against the spotlight of the ­moon—­staggered but didn’t fall, and then they were coming at me again. And I knew. I’d done Diana’s job for her. I’d dug my own grave. She’d kill me, scrape the dirt over me, and have the roses replanted before morning broke.

Why would anyone look for me in my neighbor’s rose garden?

I had nowhere to go, no way to climb out of the hole without exposing myself to her. Realizing in the last second that we’d been fighting in silence, I opened my mouth to scream, hoping to wake up the other ­neighbors … when I heard a voice.

“Calvin? What are you doing?” Diana’s bewildered tone.

Above me, Calvin spun on his heel. “It’s a burglar. I came out to see.”

“What? What are you talking about?” A familiar face looking down into the hole. “Aarav, oh my God, what are you doing down there?”

“Don’t turn your back to him!” Panic was a screaming banshee inside my head. “He killed and buried Sarah here!” I’d gotten it wrong. So fucking wrong. It had always been Calvin, not Diana.

“Ignore him, Diana.” Calvin lowered the shovel with which he’d tried to hit me. “Ishaan told me the boy’s under the care of both a neurologist and a shrink. Serious psychological and mental problems. Jesus, Aarav, I almost took off your head.”

My eyes had adjusted to looking up at the moonlit world and now I saw Diana turn toward her husband, then glance back at me. “Calvin?” Her voice trembled. “Why would you attack him if he’s just digging in the garden?” The silk of her nightgown fluttered in the breeze, the matching robe she’d thrown over it liquid silver in the moonlight. “It’s weird, not dangerous.”

“I wasn’t thinking, Di. Just decided to get some air because I couldn’t sleep, then got scared when I heard someone out here.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “We should call an ambulance, get him sectioned for his own safety.” He reached for her.

Diana stumbled back a step. “You’re a surgeon, Calvin. You’re obsessive about protecting your hands. Gardening is the one thing with which you never help me. Why would you go back to my garden shed, remove a shovel from its hook, then come out here when you could’ve just called Ishaan or the cops?”

“Diana.” Calvin’s voice was ice calm, the tone of a surgeon dealing with a histrionic patient.

But Diana was