Black Water Tales: The Secret Keepers by JeanNicole Rivers Page B

of the event, but she heard Sheriff Handow as he spoke to one of the EMTs.
    “A single shot to the heart.”
    “To the heart?” the EMT asked, scratching at the wrinkles that emerged in his forehead.
    “To the heart,” the officer confirmed.
    “Odd …”
    The funeral was only days later.
    That day was a blur in Regina’s memory; the only thing she could recall vividly was the itch of the decorative white lace collar on the black velvet dress that her mother had purchased for her to wear.
    Mrs. Valentine was buried several feet off the gravel path and the women dropped their bikes and walked the short remaining distance through the grassy graveyard aisles. A huge tombstonewith a stone angel perched just on top keeping constant vigil over the fallen soul read the name of Fayleen Valentine. As they approached the tombstone, the sun ducked demurely behind a bundle of clouds and the platinum sky bore its silver rays down on them.
    The girls stood next to one another at one side of the burial bed. Nikki looked down solemnly on the rectangular patch of dirt in front of the tombstone where her mother lay rotted under six feet of dirt and grass. Regina stared down at her black and white Converse tennis shoes, her hands intertwined tightly behind her back. The young nurse wondered how she could be so comfortable in the emergency room so near death and yet so uncomfortable here in the graveyard with death in all its grand finality. Regina followed Nikki’s lead when the girl slid to her knees and began pulling weeds that were growing from her mother’s dirt. Regina had never visited Mrs. Valentine’s gravesite before and she wanted desperately to offer comforting words to her best friend. But she found her mouth extremely dry every time she cracked her lips to say anything. Even if she could summon enough saliva to allow her to speak words that were not hoarse with discomfort her mind offered not one organized and effective thought and she decided to focus on the lesser task of breathing, which seemed to be enough of a challenge at this point.
    “You haven’t asked about DeFrank,” Nikki said, still not taking away any of the attention that she was giving to the maintenance of her mother’s grave.
    Regina swallowed the lump in her throat, figuring that Nikki was now ready to talk about death since they were surrounded by it.
    “I have just been taking this thing one creepy, horrifying step at a time,” Regina told her. “Have they questioned him? Do they really think that he had anything to do with it?” Regina asked.
    “I don’t know, maybe, but considering the fact that he’s dead I doubt they would ever be able to prove anything one way or the other,” Nikki said without even looking up, as she was now sweeping the dirt off the sides of the tombstone. A light gasp escapedRegina. After picking all of the weeds Regina sat back on her heels and brushed her hands against one another to rid them of the excess dirt. The wind carried the faint sound of dragging footsteps through the cemetery. A startled Regina looked over her shoulder at the landscape behind her, realizing that she was more spooked than she thought she had been at the news of Glen DeFrank’s death. She scolded herself silently for having such a morbidly creative imagination before resuming the conversation with Nikki.
    “What’s wrong?” Nikki asked.
    “Nothing. Glen DeFrank is dead?” Regina asked again as if she had not heard the first time.
    “Yes,
he
is,” Nikki repeated with ice on her tongue. She stopped grooming her mother’s grave in order to review the concerned look on Regina’s face.
    “Don’t tell me you’re upset about this, Regina? After his parents died he became a weirdo and he probably put Lola in that hole,” Nikki argued. Unharnessed frustration rose in Regina’s chest and was on the tip of her tongue before she was able to find the root of it and tame her reckless emotion which resulted in her not being able to get