Chapter Eleven

Dean and Erika waited a few minutes after Sam had left in the Impala before following him out of the house. They walked to the garage in complete silence, neither quite sure of what they should say.

Erika watched as Dean loaded the supplies he'd gotten out of the trunk of the Impala. She saw a canister of rock salt and realized they weren't kidding about salting the corpse. Shaking her head, Erika made room in her significantly smaller trunk for the materials. She watched him pull two guns out of the duffle bag and she flinched.

"What?" he asked, noticing her reaction.

"I thought we were just going to pour salt on it and burn it," she said, eyeing the bulge in his shirt where she knew he kept the first of his guns.

"We are," he said.

"Then what do you need the guns for?"

He understood her aversion, but shrugged. "I always keep one on me. I never know if I'm going to need it."

Erika nodded her head, assenting.

"Fine," she said, resigned. She knew she would eye it the entire night but refused to ask him to leave it behind, knowing it wouldn't matter even if she did. Then, of course, there was always the possibility that he would need it. That thought in her head, she decided she could deal with it for the time being.

She watched Dean load the remainder of their supplies into the trunk without saying a word—she didn't know what she would say even if she wanted to talk. For now, she was content to let him do all the work. When he'd finished loading, he walked around to where she was leaned against the car and held his hand out.

"What?" she asked, looking at it as though he'd grown another finger.

"Keys," he said, watching her expectantly.

She stared at him, confused, until it dawned on her.

"Oh, I don't think so, Dean," she said, walking away from him. "Not in a million years."

"That's not fair and you know it," he called after her and started following. "I let you drive mine."

"That was different," she said, letting him catch up with her. "That was… earlier."

"Yeah, it was," he said sarcastically. "So fair's fair. Hand them over."

Swallowing the nervous lump in her throat, she took the keys out of her front pocket and dropped them into his eager palm. He gave her a menacing smile before climbing into the driver's seat. Erika wearily walked around and let herself drop in beside him. Regretting her decision already, she watched as he turned the key roughly in the ignition.

"Careful," she said, wincing. "This isn't the Impala."

"You're telling me," he said, pulling the lever to make the seat go farther back. He already felt like he was in a damn matchbox.

--

When they pulled up to the gate of the cemetery, dark storm clouds rolled around in the skies and the wind was starting to pick up. It was getting to be spring, which meant storms. Erika normally enjoyed them, but tonight she wanted them to pass straight over. Let Knoxville get hit, she thought. Tonight they had work to do.

Dean stayed in the car while she went to the gate to enter her passwords. She pulled the gate aside when it opened, allowing him to pull the Firebird through. Shutting the gate behind her and engaging the lock, Erika climbed back into the passenger's seat.

"Do you know where we're going?" she asked, watching him scan the cemetery.

"Vaguely," he admitted. "Where's the oldest part of the cemetery?"

"Back and to the left," she said. "Is that where this McAlister guy is buried?"

"I think so, yeah," he said. "It says he was buried on a family plot after he was hanged. Since it was way back when, I'm guessing it would be with the older section."

"Makes sense," Erika said. Dean wove the Firebird around the tighter curves of the cemetery, working his way around to the back. He parked at the edge of it and climbed out, scanning the tombstones in hopes of catching one that read McAlister. He wasn't exactly surprised when he couldn't find it right off the bat. He rarely ever caught even the small breaks.

"Okay, let's spread out," he said, slinging the duffle bag over his shoulder and grabbing the shovel before slamming the trunk. "You take left, I'll take right. Hopefully one of us will find it before too long."

Erika nodded. "You're the expert."

They fanned out, scanning the names on the headstones as they walked. Some were as old as the late eighteenth century, and Erika had to take a closer look to make out the lettering on the stone. She'd yet to see a headstone later than 1920, though, and she kept looking. After a while she got bored and started reading epitaphs without really looking at the names. When she realized what she was doing, she groaned and wondered how many she'd overlooked.

"Are you sure we're in the right place?" she called to Dean, who was walking down a row fifty feet away.

"Not really," he answered and Erika ran her fingers through her hair in frustration.

She'd almost resolved to go sit in the car when she watched Dean stop suddenly at a small white stone.

"Bingo!" he called out and she jogged over to his side. "Michael McAlister: Born 1908, died 1931."

"Great," she said, eyeing the angry clouds over their heads. "Let's do this and get the hell out. It's going to rain like crazy sometime tonight."

"Well, hope it holds off," Dean said, throwing his duffle to the ground and taking off his jacket. "We're going to be out here a while. Digging up dirt is a hell of a lot easier than shoveling out mud."

"I was afraid you'd say that," Erika said, looking to the sky again. "What do you need me to do?"

"There's not a hell of a lot to do," he said, rolling up his shirt sleeves. "We've only got the one shovel, so I'm going to dig up the damn thing. When I finish we'll torch it and get out of here."

"What about Sam?"

"Sam's gonna occupy Andy Griffith for a while, long enough for us to do this and get out," he said. "I'm supposed to text him when we're done so he knows when it's safe to leave."

"And then it'll be over?"

"Then it's over," he said and pushed the shovel into the ground.

Sam pulled up in front of the school at four-thirty on the dot, only seconds before he watched Burke's cruiser park a few feet behind him in his rearview mirror. Certain his story was believable, he fixed Burke with a mildly nervous smile and waved. He would take a notebook and pen into the building, jotting down fake notes while Burke walked him through the scene. With any luck, Dean and Erika would be able to take care of the corpse before too long and he could get out of there.

"Sam!" Burke called, shutting his car door and walking toward him. "How are you doing this afternoon?"

"Fine," Sam said.

"I've gotta say, your call surprised me some," he said, hooking his thumbs in his front pockets.

"Yeah, I know," Sam said. "I'm sorry about that. I wasn't planning on doing my homework this early, really. It's my final, you know, but with everything that's going on I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to talk to you."

Burke seemed pleased by this and Sam relaxed a little.

"Now, I don't blame you," he said. "We've been getting a lot of publicity and maybe this'll be good for an easy A."

They started walking up the front steps of the school, stepping under the stark yellow crime scene tape that remained from the night before. Burke pulled a key out of his pocket and unlocked the front door, holding it open for Sam to enter ahead of him. Sam looked around and noticed the frosted glass door that was also marked off with crime tape. He guessed it was the office, and looked at it from the corner of his eye as Burke led him straight down the hallway that he and Dean had used a few nights before.

"The first thing we noticed," Burke started, "Was that the locks on the back door had been tampered with. They were picked, in other words."

Sam bit the side of his cheek to keep from smiling as he pretended to write Burke's words down.

"We know because the tumblers were scratched," he said. "The person that did it probably didn't have much experience, because there are easier ways of doing it as well as ways to cover your tracks."

At this Sam grinned, filing it away to tell his brother later.

­­­­­­­­­­­--

Dean tossed the shovel up out of the whole and pulled himself out, gratefully accepting the water bottle Erika held out for him. He drank heavily and let out a long breath, wiping his arm over his forehead.

"Do you want me to take a turn at the shovel?" she asked him. "I feel like an idiot just sitting here."

"It doesn't usually take this long," Dean told her. "Most of the time it's me and Sam working together."

"Here, let me take a shot," she said, pulling herself off the ground. She pulled a rubber band from her pocket and tied her hair up and out of her way. She noticed the way Dean was looking at her and said, "What?"

"I didn't think spoiled little rich girls knew how to do manual labor," he teased, watching her snatch the shovel from his hand.

"Shows what the hell you know," she said. "Do I look like some wimpy debutante to you?"

Looking her over, he grinned. "Not even close."

"Then you're smarter than you look."

She jumped down about four feet into the progress Dean had already made and stuck the shovel into the ground, bringing the dirt up and over the side. She felt the wooden handle digging into her hands and though she wouldn't admit it to Dean in a hundred years, she knew she was going to have blisters by the end of the night. Biting her lip, she continued with her work while Dean watched.

"I have a question," he asked and Erika stopped shoveling to look up at him.

"What?"

"Why doesn't the idea that ghosts are real freak you out?" he asked and watched her consider the answer. "Most people don't believe, not really, even if they've seen one with their own eyes. And here you are, digging up a body to torch, no questions asked."

Erika shrugged, leaning her arms on the handle of the shovel. "I don't know. Jo told me once when we were teenagers and of course I didn't believe her. I thought she was trying to scare me."

"Jo?" Dean asked. "Ellen's daughter?"

"The very same," she said. "Anyway, that's when Jo told me how her dad died. I knew she wouldn't lie about that, not in a million years, so I've had a very tentative belief in this kind of thing since."

"Tentative belief is a long way from participating," he observed.

"It is," she conceded. "When these murders started at my school, it killed me to think that someone would target the people here. After Burke told me all the details, though, I called Ellen. She said that she knew someone who could help."

"And that's where we come in," Dean said.

"Bingo," she said, going back to her task. "You guys showed up that night, before I'd even had time to prepare myself."

"Yeah, we're good at that," he said, ducking away from a pile of dirt she'd thrown in his direction. "Hey, watch it."

She threw another pile that landed in his lap. It was immature, she knew, but it had her smiling again. She listened to him curse and brushed the dirt off her hands with satisfaction.

Hey, you couldn't be grown-up all the time.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­--

Sam had been walked through almost every insignificant detail of the entire building before Burke decided to let him near one of the murder scenes. He'd started taking actual notes before long, noticing some things that cops look for at a scene that he hadn't known previously. At least that way if Burke wanted to see his notes, he could show them and get away with his story. He followed the sheriff through the dark hallway and into the front office, where the first and third murders occurred.

"The first victim was the principal, Lyle Evans," Burke said, nodding his head in the direction of an office just down the hall. "The secretary, our third victim, found him the next morning when she came in to work."

Burke led him down the hallway and opened the principal's office with a key from his chain.

"No one's moved anything yet, I see," he speculated. "Anyway, Mr. Evans was found in that corner. He was stabbed to death with a pair of scissors."

Sam nodded his head absently and his eye caught something to his periphery. Rather than go for it himself and piss off the sheriff, he pointed with a pen.

"What's that?" he asked, hanging back while the sheriff turned to investigate.

"Hmm," Burke said, bending down to look at it. "If I didn't know any better, it looks like a hearing aid. They must have missed it when they collected the body."

"I thought he was deaf," Sam asked, genuinely concerned.

"Oh, not Mr. Evans," Burke said. "He couldn't hear worth a plug nickel without these, but he wasn't deaf."

Sam's heart lurched. "What about the other two victims? Weren't they deaf?"

Burke considered the question. "No, I don't believe so. We found the secretary—Shelley Collins—with a cell phone in her hand and the janitor with a pair of headphones around his neck. I don't think any of them were deaf." He studied Sam. "Why?"

Sam quickly shrugged, downplaying the fact that his mind was racing.

"I just thought that since the school was for the deaf, then the staff would be, too," he said noncommittally. "Hey, I need to use the restroom. Where is it?"

Burke nodded. "Straight down that main hallway, near the end of it. It'll be on your left."

"Thanks," Sam said, fingering his cell phone in his pocket as he left Burke standing in the office, alone. He walked until he got to the bathroom, and ducked inside to pull out his cell phone.

"Dean?" he asked into the mouthpiece. "I think we have a problem."

A/N: These were kind of filler chapters if you couldn't tell, though there is some relevant information to be found. Please review! I should have the next chapter up tomorrow sometime.