 Penguin presents Nothing Stays Buried by P. J. Tracy, read by Sarah Borgias, prologue. Something horrible was going to happen to Marla. Somewhere down the road there had to be payback for her perfect childhood, her perfect career at the veterinary clinic, her perfect apartment in Minneapolis, her consistently perfect life. Her friends who adored her envied her in equal measure and secretly waited for the tragedy to come because they believed in the law of averages and the irrefutable balance of good and bad in every life. And also because in the darkest moments of their own less than perfect lives they had to believe that some day Marla would get hers. Good things come to good people. Her father was fond of telling her on those rare occasions when the shower of her good fortune made her feel just a little bit guilty. But if that were really true, why did the rest of the world believe the opposite? The notion that goodness was punished was so pervasive that even the language was permitted with warnings. Only the good die young, nice guys finish last, no good deed goes unpunished. Phrases like that had often given Marla pause, made her think she should try harder to do something bad occasionally, like forget to return a library book just to even out the scales. And then she'd run over the bunny. Stop crying Marla and stop calling it a bunny, it was just a goddamn rabbit. Her father had tried to comfort her with semantics, probably the same one that ate every lick of my spinach plants last week, every last lick. But he hadn't known the worst of it because she could never bring herself to say it aloud. The bunny hadn't died right away, she'd seen it in her rear view mirror, trying to drag itself off the road with its front legs because the hind legs wouldn't work. She'd had to go back and run over it again. It had been the right thing to do, but oh my God, that image in her rear view mirror would be with her to the end of her life. And although her father had felt great sympathy for her distress, he hadn't felt a bit for the rabbit. How could that be? How could you feel sorry for someone for being sad and not feel sorry for something being dead? She spent the next week imagining that the bunny had been a nursing mother and that somewhere baby bunnies were cold and mulling in a hidey hole, slowly dying of starvation. She never admitted that to anyone because people tended to think you were a bit unbalanced when you empathized with animals to the point of torment. But empathy was the disease Marla had inherited from her mother. And there were no boundaries to it. She couldn't help connecting to everyone and everything she encountered. She couldn't stop speculating about their lives, their families, their pain. Even that of silly rabbits that ate her father's entire spinach crop, and then ran out in front of a speeding car. Normally Marla didn't mind the night drive out to the farm, especially on a Thursday, when the freeway was empty. Tomorrow night the frenetic weekend race to Lake Cabins would fill the two lanes heading out of Minneapolis with a jam of lights, white and red, crawling, bumper to bumper, for 60 miles before it started to thin out. But tonight, and every other summer weeknight, the road shot straight and true into deeper and deeper blackness, where the exits were few and far between. Her exit, just three miles up, was what worried her. That particular two-lane road was one bunny shy this week, thanks to her, and she greatly feared a repeat of last week's carnage. She took the ramp more slowly than usual, stopped at the top and spent a long time looking both ways before easing right onto the two-lane road. There was no moon tonight and the darkness seemed to swallow the beams of her headlights as if she were shining them down the throat of a monster. She slowed even further as she approached the S-curve through the woods where the bunny had once lived. And that was the only reason she didn't run right over the large black shape in the middle of the road. As soon as her headlights hit the thing, she recognized it as one of those large plastic bags, the volunteer crews used to pick up the occasional litter on road cleanup days. Still, it had startled her, and she could hear her heart pounding in her ears as she pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped. She sat there for a minute trying to catch her breath, her fingers still curled tight around the wheel, eyes wide open. Sample complete. Ready to continue?