I blinked. “Susan?”
“My mother’s name.”
“You named a kitten after your late mother?”
For one genuinely unhinged second, that was the detail my brain fixated on hardest. Then my eyes dropped back to the hole he’d been digging, and every ounce of blood in me went cold again. “Greg. Why are you burying a kitten?”
“God, no — I’m not burying anybody.” He dropped to his knees again, lower this time, and pressed his ear almost to the dirt. “Listen.”
I held my breath. For a moment there was nothing but the tick of the porch light cooling and the far-off hush of the highway. Then — a second cry, thinner and more frightened than the first, rising up from somewhere beneath the wooden garden edging.
Every trace of anger drained out of me at once, replaced by something closer to dread. “What was that?”
“Her brother. Or sister. I don’t know which yet.” Greg pointed a dirt-streaked finger at the narrow gap under the edging. “They were nesting under here. I could just reach Susan. The other one crawled back too far.”
