Deeper Than The Dead by Tami Hoag Page B

to himself was when he got caught up in Dennis Farman’s disruptive vortex. She felt guilty for not knowing him better, and wondered how many other kids she was seeing only in the periphery of her vision.
    “That chicken smells really good,” she said, pushing to her feet. “Think you’ll eat some dinner?”
    Once again he didn’t answer her. She felt his mind was still on the last question she had asked him, that he was still wrestling with something, but she couldn’t pull it out of him. He had to want to give it to her.
    “If you decide you want to talk about it,” she said, “don’t be afraid to come to me, Cody. Or tell your mom. You don’t have to keep all those feelings bottled up inside you.”
    Anne turned for the door, took a step, then another. Then Cody Roache said something that ran a chill straight through her.
    “Dennis said there were bodies buried in the woods.”
    Anne turned back around slowly.
    “What do you mean, Cody? He said that yesterday? After you found the body?”
    Cody Roache was as white as a sheet, his dark eyes huge behind the too-big lenses of his taped-together glasses.
    “Before that,” he said in a tiny voice.
    Anne came back to the bed and sat down. “I don’t understand. When did he tell you this?”
    “A while ago. We were in the woods playing commandos and he told me there were dead bodies buried there.”
    If he had told her this two days ago, Anne would have written it off as something Dennis would say just for shock effect. But as it turned out, there
had
been a body buried in the woods.
    Maybe Dennis had been there on his own some other time and had seen something happening. From the corner of her eye she could see Cody staring at her intently, waiting for her to say something, but she didn’t know what to say.
    “Do you think Dennis killed that lady?” he whispered.
    “No,” she said. “No, of course not. What exactly did he tell you, Cody? Did he tell you he had seen a body?”
    “He said there were bodies buried there and they were rotting in the ground and we were running over the top of them and stepping on them. And then there was that lady!”
    She needed to call Detective Mendez. If there was a chance Dennis had seen something . . . She wondered if Dennis had told his father . . . and if Frank Farman had passed that information on to Mendez.
    “I’m scared,” Cody said.
    Anne looked at him sitting there curled into a ball in his red pajamas, his dark hair standing up in tufts.
    “What are you scared of, Cody?”
    He swallowed hard. “Dennis.”
    “Dennis didn’t kill that lady.”
    “How do you know?”
    Because Dennis was an eleven-year-old boy and certainly not capable of doing what had been done. But Anne said none of that to Cody. Instead, she gave him the pat answer adults always give children when they don’t want or know how to tell them the truth.
    “Because. I just know,” she said. She took a deep breath and let it out, trying to decide what to do next.
    “Thank you, Cody,” she said, standing up. “You did the right thing telling me this.”
    Cody didn’t look so sure about that. “Don’t tell Dennis I said it.”
    “Don’t worry about Dennis,” Anne said. “Feel better. I would like to see you back in school tomorrow.”
    She spent another few minutes with Renee Roache discussing what had happened and the fact that Detective Mendez would probably want to speak to Cody. Then she left the Roache home and the smell of chicken roasting, to go in search of Dennis Farman.

17

    The Farmans lived not far from the Roaches in a two-story house painted battleship gray. Everything about the exterior was neat and tidy, squared off and symmetrical. No frills. Very military, she thought.
    One of the Farman daughters answered the door. Both girls were in junior high school, enough older than Dennis that they probably did all they could to deny his existence. Anne couldn’t imagine anything more annoying to teenage girls than little