Fatal Reservations (21 page)

The West Martello Tower gardens on the Atlantic Ocean came to mind. This is one of the most peaceful spots on the island, with an amazing display of tropical foliage overlooking a small beach and then the long turquoise stretch of the Atlantic Ocean. The surrounding beaches and streets would be teeming with visitors, but I should be able to find a solitary spot in this garden. I buzzed over on my scooter and at the entry to the fort, pushed past a small group of elderly tourists and into the thickly planted recesses of the grounds.

Barely registering the blooming orchids and the grand old trees and the weathered brick remains of the fort overlooking the Atlantic, I sat on one of the stone benches for a while, trying to inhale the calm and push
thoughts about Wally and Lorenzo out of my head. A phone call came in from my mother, but I let it go to voice mail.

Half an hour later, feeling a little more normal and collected, I bit the bullet and called Mom to explain what had gone on with Lorenzo the night before.

After a string of worried questions, most of which I couldn’t answer, she asked, “Where are you now? Make sure you give that sweet Wally a hug for me and tell him I asked about his mother.”

“Will do, but I’m taking my coffee break at West Martello garden,” I said. “Say, you and Sam should put this place on your list of possibilities for your wedding. They have the cutest little gazebo overlooking the water. But it’s pretty inside, too, all red brick with tons of orchids, in case you hit bad weather on your big day.”

“I am a million miles from wedding planning,” my mother said. “At this point in our lives, we’ll be thrilled to make it to the grocery store. I suspect you and Wally will get to the altar well before we do.”

“Doubtful.”

She shifted into doting and psychic mother mode. “Oh, sweetie. What’s going on?”

“Nothing really.” I sighed. “Literally nothing. I’m pretty sure I’ve been dumped, but so nicely that I can’t be sure. I’ll let you know as soon as I figure that out.” Obviously, I had been dumped. But it seemed better all around to ease her into this news.

She uttered some reassurances that neither of us believed, and then more credit to her, she signed off rather than quiz me about the details of what had just happened. We hung up and I left the calm of the garden to
head over to the cemetery—a different and less comfortable kind of quiet.

I waited for Miss Gloria at the sexton’s office as we’d planned. The cemetery is larger than you might imagine, crisscrossed by a grid of roads covering a big city block. So no point in striking off to hunt for her; there was nothing to do but wait. I texted her in case she’d brought her phone and tried not to think about what had happened in the staff meeting. I inhaled the scent of freshly cut grass, listened for the sound of a leaf blower in the distance, and felt the sun beat down on my head.

But my inner child wanted to scream, “I’ve been dumped—it’s not fair!” over and over and over. I pushed the thoughts away again, this time trying one of Lorenzo’s techniques—something he would suggest to his clients while he was shuffling his deck of cards. A meditation of gratitude.

“Think of all the people in your life for whom you are grateful,” he’d say, “and notice them one by one in your mind.”

My mother. My father and stepmother. Mom’s boyfriend, Sam. My stepbrother, Rory. Miss Gloria. My friends Connie and Ray. Wally.

Tears immediately welled up in my eyes. Before I could start bawling and embarrass myself in public, I spotted Miss Gloria making her way down the path that led to the office.

“Sorry I’m late,” she called, breathless. “I was having a little chat with Jane about reconstruction of some of the monuments and where my money could be best used if I leave them some funds in my will.”

I groaned. “That gloomy thinking again.”

“No,” she said, “it’s thinking ahead. Everyone should do it, even a young sprite like you.”

“I can barely keep track of what’s on my plate in the here and now, never mind the hereafter,” I said, giving her a little squeeze as we began to walk. “So tell me what you’ve learned.”

“It’s very cool,” she said, her white curls bobbing with energy. “Almost like reading Lorenzo’s tarot cards. You can kind of tell what was on people’s minds, and how they felt about the deceased person, and how well they had worked through the grief about the death. The saddest monuments are erected after a child has been lost. The carved lambs and cherubs.”

“Terrible,” I said. “I can’t imagine.”

“The saddest one in the whole cemetery may be the angel facing the cherub across a plot of stones. Do you remember seeing that?”

I shook my head. “Maybe you’ll take me by.”

“The angel sits on Mary Navarro’s tomb. She was only forty-four when she went. But her daughter died four years earlier, at the age of nine. So the tomb reads, ‘To the sacred memory of a brokenhearted mother.’”

“That’s brutal,” I said, following her down a worn path shielded by shade trees and bristling with bromeliads. How I wished she’d taken a normal volunteer job, like helping with the Friends of the Library’s book sale or the animal shelter or even showing off gold coins and other treasure at the Mel Fisher Museum, for heaven’s sake.

“I was sad when my sweet Gordon died,” Miss Gloria went on, “but he had a good life and we had a good, long marriage. But a baby, oh my. That child never had a chance to figure out the first thing about life. Who she
should be and where she might go.” She whirled around, narrowed her eyes, and took my hand. “Imagine what your mother would have missed, never seeing the woman you turned out to be. What a talented and loving person you are. I feel that way and I’m not your mother. I’m your roommate.” She dabbed her eyes with a tissue and swung out ahead of me. “Come on, I’ll show you the angel.”

This was turning out to be a very emotional day.

After she described the meaning of the sculptures and engravings on half a dozen monuments, we approached the double family plot where I’d seen the iguana yesterday. The gamey smell seemed to have grown stronger, strong enough to make me gag.

“Something smells awful,” I said. “And this heat isn’t helping.”

“Iguana poop,” said Miss Gloria.

“It would have to be one of heck of a big reptile, a lot bigger than the one that scared me yesterday. Do you smell it? It’s like something died here.” I covered my nose with my hand. “Unless a whole pack of the darn things moved in overnight.”

“It does smell funky,” said Miss Gloria, pinching her nostrils together.

I pointed to the crypt, close to ground level, where the cement had heaved, leaving the opening.

“Maybe I should call Jane over to check it out,” Miss Gloria said.

“I’ll run up and get her,” I said.

“It’ll be faster if I text her,” said Miss Gloria. She whipped her phone out of a voluminous pocket and tip-tapped furiously on the keyboard with a little stylus. Within minutes, Jane arrived at the grave and Miss
Gloria explained that it appeared the odor under the tomb had gotten stronger.

“I saw our gravediggers and that nice stone mason, Isaac, working on the other side of the cemetery about an hour ago,” Miss Gloria said to Jane. “Can we ask them to come over and see if they can push the cover off this crypt?”

Jane laughed. “Nothing’s quite that simple around here. We certainly can’t dig up a grave without the owner’s permission.”

“But what if the owner is dead?” I asked. “Isn’t that how it works by definition? The owner of the plot dies and gets buried?”

“No, it’s the living family’s property. But I brought a flashlight,” Jane said, pulling a black light out of her backpack. “Before we make a big fuss, let’s take a look and see if we see anything.”

We crept closer to the grave and she shone the beam into the crevice. A large green iguana darted out of the hole, causing us all to screech in unison and leap backward. I tripped over the wrought-iron gate and crashed to the ground.

“Are you all right?” Miss Gloria asked.

I did a quick body scan and brushed the dirt off my palms. “I’m fine—I don’t like those animals. Not up close, anyway.”

Jane tapped a hand to her chest. “That got my heart racing.” She grinned. “So we definitely have an iguana infestation. I can call the nuisance animal patrol and see if they’ll put out some traps.” She squinted and rubbed her forehead. “But you’re right; I’ve never known them to smell this bad.”

The cherub statue that Miss Gloria had described to me earlier flashed to mind. As the odor mushroomed,
so did my imagination. I thought about the child-sized statue Miss Gloria had shown me. And then how when I was kid, I liked to hide out in small spaces that felt like private little caves. I studied the hole—was it possible that a small child could have crawled in and gotten trapped? I blurted out, “What if a kid hid in there and—”

“Don’t even say it.” Miss Gloria held up her hand.

“That’s it, I’m calling Lieutenant Torrence,” I said. “This is creeping me out. Maybe he’ll be willing to bring some officers over to take a look. Would that do the trick? Can you open a grave if the police suspect there’s a child in jeopardy?”

“You can call,” Jane agreed with some reluctance. “It can’t hurt to have them look. The sexton’s out of town until tomorrow. I’ll let know him what’s up. And I’ll run back to the office and get the owner’s name and number. When the cops get here, if they need to do more than look, they’ll be able to call for permission to open the vault.” She started off toward the office, then turned to face us again. “Miss G, if you don’t mind, see if you can track Isaac down? It wouldn’t hurt to get his opinion about what it would take for the guys to open things up.”

As Miss Gloria headed along the path to find Isaac the mason, I called Torrence and explained the issue.

“Do you have any idea how busy we are here?” he said in a short voice. “I cannot possibly come to the cemetery. Every single one of my officers is out on patrol. Not just on patrol—actively working situations.”

“Have you had any reports of missing children?”

The silence on his end told me the answer. “I can see if Bransford has fifteen minutes.”

I groaned.

“It’s him or nobody.”

“Him, then.” He might not believe I’d stumbled on a police emergency, but I felt it in every cell of my body. We could not, and should not, handle this ourselves. Someone with proper authority had to investigate.

Miss Gloria returned with a wizened black man, as thin as a rail, with ropy arms and of uncertain age—somewhere between fifty and ninety. “This is Mr. Isaac,” she explained. “And this is my roommate, Hayley.”

“Nice to meet you,” we said in unison.

Miss Gloria and I perched on the cement-block wall opposite the in-ground crypt and watched as Isaac poked around the bottom edges of the grave. “Nothing obvious is wrong here,” he said. “Other than the iguana markings, it doesn’t appear that anyone’s been digging. But it does smell worse than Mount Trashmore.” The Stock Island dump. He wrinkled his nose.

Within minutes, I saw a police SUV bump onto the sidewalk near the north entrance to the cemetery. Bransford got out and strode toward us. “This better be good,” he said when he arrived.

Before I could answer, Jane steamed back from the office, two city workers in tan uniforms huffing behind her. “The grave belongs to the Mastin family. They bought this plot some years ago when the first one filled up. They haven’t had the need to replace the old grave, so they just left it as it was. Edwin is on the way over from his restaurant, but he said go ahead and open it up if you feel it’s absolutely necessary.”

“Who the hell knows whether any of this is necessary,” Bransford grumbled.

Isaac moved forward to chip a little cement that had been used for previous makeshift repairs. Then he
helped the city workers slide the heavy lid off the grave. Once they had settled it on the grass, Isaac and the head worker crouched down and peered into the hole.

“There’s not a damn thing here,” said the worker, adding under his breath, “As if we didn’t have enough to do already.”

Bransford borrowed one of their shovels and poked around the interior, dislodging a brown animal even bigger than the green one that had frightened us earlier. The animal puffed up his head, hissing and bobbing as he bounded out of the grave. Bransford leaped back, yelping an obscenity. I stumbled away from the grave site and stationed myself across the road to avoid anything else with four legs and scales scrambling in my direction.

Edwin Mastin pedaled up on his bike, his face red and his shirt collar damp from the ride over.

“What’s the story? Is there a problem with my property?”

“Nothing but damn iguanas here,” said Isaac, who now stood by the wrought-iron fence.

“Sorry to have troubled you for no reason,” said Bransford. He brushed his hands off on his pants and then waved Mastin closer. “We jumped the gun on opening things up. Seems like your plot is going to need some work.”

“It was time we did some repairs anyway,” Mastin said, his big hands on his hips, looking down at the hole.

I leaned against a crypt designed to stack three deceased family members, one on top of another, watching the men try to put the grave back together. I decided that the leaf-blower noise I’d heard earlier was more
likely a wood chipper; probably one of the local landscaping companies trimming and grinding up palm fronds. The flat gray clouds scudding above the horizon made the sky look more painted than real.

Gradually the terrible odor I’d smelled earlier registered again, this time even stronger. I stood up straight and turned to peer at the multilayer crypt. The top layer had an opening, a couple of inches wide. There seemed to be scrape marks around the square seams. The edges of the block did not quite line up, almost as if it had been removed but then shoved back into place in a hurry. On closer inspection, the left seam was damp. Could that possibly be a whisper of blond hair sticking through the crack?

I crouched to the ground, took a couple of shuddering breaths, and tried to convince myself I was just jumpy. This was a cemetery, after all. People were buried here. Bodies belonged here. And some of the funeral parlors on the island probably had a better handle on the fine points of embalming than others.