Dragonfly by Jax Hill 

That Sunday morning, it was Easter. That meant nothing to me. My dreams were dead. I’d told Jack and Jazz that Pete and I would come fishing, and that I thought the girls were coming, too, Maggie, Caroline and Marigold. I didn’t tell them about Mateo. I figured I’d introduce him when we got there. Jazz told me Franz and Tawny were coming, and that Angel was bringing Sully, too. Len, he’d been called back to work — some crisis at the rehab — but he would be back, he’d promised Angel, by the time we got back from fishing in the evening.

Maggie and Angel and Caroline had gone to the cemetery early.

They wanted to see the grave again, for it to be real.

I didn’t care if I never saw that place again.

Pete surprised me by getting up that morning and saying he would go fishing. He’d been in bed practically the entire time since the funeral. If you could call it a funeral. I didn’t know how to reach him, but I understood how he felt. What he’d always relied on — his own strength and power — had failed him in the clutch. He didn’t think there was anything left for him. He said he might as well go fishing. It was one thing he still knew how to do.

And that’s what it felt like. Since the day we’d sold the fish market, we’d lived this extraordinary life on the high wire, learning to laugh and love and dance up there. Then, on Friday afternoon, we’d all tumbled off the tightrope and came crashing back into reality. Time to get back to real life. Time to go fishing.

When I introduced Mateo to Pete, Jazz and Jack on the dock, they didn’t ask any questions. They just shook hands and said he was welcome to come fishing. There would be 12 adults on the boat counting Mateo plus the two boys ... I tried to think back to the summer, the last time we’d been out on the water together, and who all had been there. We’d been so happy just to be together. And we’d had such good luck that day.

A far cry from this gray morning.

We were waiting for the girls on the dock. They pulled up in Maggie’s car, and the three ladies climbed out looking rather ... happy ... all things considered.

Maggie dashed up to Pete, grabbed the front of his shirt to pull his face down toward her, and nearly shouted at him, “Pete — he’s all right! He’s all right, and he’s coming to find you. He said, ‘Go tell Pete and the guys that I’m coming.’ Everything is going to be okay.” She grinned at him with idiot satisfaction, while the rest of us stared at her, bewildered.

“We went to the grave!” Marigold cried out, sounding every bit as happy and rejuvenated as Maggie. “But he’s not there — he’s not in the grave. Because he’s not dead!”

Sully and Van had climbed out of the car, too, and they were doing a little two-step that Torstein had taught them sometime in the spring. They were laughing and dancing.

“You are all freaking nuts,” Pete said.

“No we are not,” Caroline said. “We saw him. We spoke to him! He told Maggie to tell you that he’s all right, and he’ll find you soon. Right, Angel?”

Angel just stood there, beaming at us, saying nothing. It was as if she had a secret so potent, so powerful, to speak it would diminish it.

“What are you talking about?” Phyllis said. “What on earth do you mean?” I could tell what she was thinking. She was thinking they’d gotten into someone’s happy pills.

Maggie let go of Pete’s shirt-front, threw her arms around Phyllis and said, “Torstein’s alive! We saw him — we went to the grave, and the crypt was all demolished, and the casket was lying open on its side, and there was nobody in it.”

“No body in it!” Marigold echoed, sounding slightly hysterical. She giggled at her own joke and then joined the boys in their little line dance.

“Oh, God,” Jack said. You could tell he was daring to hope that somehow what Torstein had said was true, and he’d found a way to come back to us. I just feared that Nikolai’s goons had come back to do something worse to the body than they’d already done.

 “C’mon,” Jack said. “Let’s go, let’s go see.”

He sped off toward the street and his car, Pete running hard beside him and Jazz following along.

Bruiser and I grabbed Phyllis and pulled her into Bruiser’s car with us and Mateo while Pete, Jazz and Jack piled into Jack’s car. As we dashed away, we heard Maggie calling to Mateo, “You didn’t kill him after all!” I was left to wonder what anyone else who heard it would think ... I hadn’t told them how Mateo came to be with us that morning.

It was still early morning, the sun had only just risen. Easter or no, the streets were empty, and we sped all the way to Green Lawn. The cars screeched into empty parking spaces and we ran full-out to the crypt.

Maggie was right. It was demolished. The heavy marble door had been splintered like an explosion. The east-facing wall looked like it had imploded, and the casket had been blown off it’s pedestal, laid on its side, open, empty.

“What the hell?” Pete said. “What the hell?”

“What have they done with him?” Jazz said, touching the lining of the coffin where his head had laid.

“He said he’d come back,” Jack said. “He said he’d find us!”

“It’s not possible, Jack,” I said. “It’s not possible he could come back...”

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