A Maidens Grave

reason for her trip?
    Maybe it was a sign that she shouldn’t go, shouldn’t have made those plans. It was an omen.
    All she wanted to do now was go home. Back to her rented house, where she could lock the door and have a cup of tea. Okay, a hit of blackberry brandy. Fax her brother in the hospital in St. Louis, tell him and her parents the story. Melanie fell into a nervous habit, twining her blond hair around her bent middle finger, the other digits extended. This hand shape was the symbol for “shine.”
    Then there was a sudden jolt. Bear had turned off the asphalt and was following the gray car down a dirt road. Stoat was frowning. He asked Bear something Melanie didn’t see. The big man didn’t answer but just spit out the window. Another turn and another, into hillier country. Getting close to the river.
    They passed under an electric wire covered with a hundred birds. Big ones. Crows.
    She looked at the car ahead of them. She still couldn’t see him clearly—the driver, the man from the wheat field. At first Melanie thought he had long hair, then a moment later he seemed bald or crew-cut, then appeared to be wearing a hat.
    With a skidding turn the gray car spun to the right and bounded down a narrow weed-filled driveway. Melanie guessed that he’d seen the dozens of police cars up ahead—the cars racing toward them to save them. She squinted and looked. No, nothing ahead of them. The busturned and followed the Chevy. Bear was muttering, Stoat was looking back at the police car.
    Then Melanie turned and saw where they were headed.
    No! she thought.
    Oh, please no.
    For she knew her hope about the men surrendering to the trooper who was fast approaching was just a fantasy. She understood where they were going.
    The worst place in the world.
    The gray car suddenly broke into a large, weed-filled field. At the end of the field, on the river, squatted a redbrick industrial building, long abandoned. Dark and solid as a medieval fort. The acreage in front of the plant still held a few of the fences and posts from the animal pens that had subdivided the area long ago but mostly the field had been reclaimed by the Kansas prairie of mid-high grass, sedge, bluestem, and buffalo grass.
    The Chevy raced right for the front of the building, the bus following. Both skidded to a stop just to the left of the door.
    Melanie peered at the ruddy brick.
    When she was eighteen, and a student herself at the Laurent Clerc School, a boy had brought her here, supposedly for a picnic but of course to do what boys of eighteen will do—and what Melanie too wanted, she believed at the time. But once they’d snuck inside, carting a blanket with them, she’d looked at the gloomy rooms and panicked. She’d fled and had never seen the perplexed boy, or the building, again.
    But she remembered it. An abandoned slaughterhouse, a place of death. A place that was hard and sharp and dangerous.
    And dark. How Melanie hated the dark. (Twenty-five years old and she had five night-lights in a six-room house.)
    Stoat flung open the bus door, dragged Susan and Mrs. Harstrawn out after him.
    The police car—a single trooper inside—paused at the entrance to the field. He leapt out, pistol in his hand, but he stopped short when Bear grabbed Shannon and put a gun to her head. The eight-year-old surprised him byspinning around, kicking his knee hard. He flinched in pain then shook her until she stopped squirming. Bear looked across the field at the trooper, who made a show of putting his gun back into his holster and returning to his car.
    Bear and Stoat pushed the girls toward the slaughterhouse door. Bear slammed a rock into the chain that bound the door closed and snapped the rusted links. Stoat grabbed several large bags from the trunk of the gray car, where the driver continued to sit, staring up at the building. The glare still prevented Melanie from seeing clearly but he seemed relaxed, gazing with curiosity at the turrets and black windows.
    Bear yanked open the front door and he and Stoat pushed the girls inside. The place stank of cave more than building. Dirt and shit and mold and some sweet-sickly decay, rancid animal fat. The interior was a maze of walkways and pens and ramps and rusted machinery. Pits surrounded by railings and parts of old machines. There were rows and rows of rusted meat hooks overhead. And it was just as dark as Melanie remembered.
    Bear herded the students and their teachers into a semicircular, tiled room,