Map

Maddie reflected that her mom had done a great job parsing out the estate; everybody got what they would've chosen for themselves anyway - right down to the map. It had taken her a minute to figure out the scribbles, then Maddie had remembered a paper inserted into the Bible that Mom had kept from the time she was a girl; it was filled with random (she mused at first) letters and numbers. "Not code," Maddie thought to herself now, "but initials with longitude and latitude." The guy who had tried to ruin her father back in the day (false accusations, public humiliation); the teacher who'd proclaimed that James was "the slowest turtle in the rabbit race" (she remembered how hard James had cried); the first person to try to show Anna his "casting couch". The list was a full page and two entries on the flip side. That Maddie had been left a map of where the bodies were buried was uniquely touching, and the awe with which she held that map might have been palpable if she'd not been alone. That her mother had, for all intents and purposes, been a serial killer did not affect Maddie negatively; she had been an amazing mom with boundaries of steel, and she had done hard things with great love. That tucking the map back into the Bible and putting it on the shelf above her desk in the bedroom effectively made her an accomplice disturbed her not one bit; she had no children, and the maybe the people at the thrift store would get a kick out of it one day.