Grave Undertaking (3 page)
Susan opened the door before I had a chance to ring the bell.
“I’m so glad you came over.” She stood smiling on the threshold wearing a long-sleeved denim shirt hanging over black jeans. Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her face glowed with a vitality impossible to capture in any makeup bottle. She held up her hands and puckered her lips, a kiss-but-don’t-touch gesture. Tufts of white feathers sprouted from her fingers.
“Are you molting?” I asked, giving her a quick peck on the mouth.
“I’m feathering my nest.” She looked past me to the swirling snowflakes visible in the light spilling from her open door. “Isn’t it wonderful? I couldn’t help myself. I had to stop.”
She was giddy. I felt sick to my stomach. My news would melt her joy faster than an August sun. “Stop from what?”
“You used to be a cop,” she teased. “Figure it out.” She pointed to her Subaru Forester in her parking space and then down at the ground.
I could see a depression scooped in the snow from the rear of the Subaru to her front door.
“I’ll give you a hint,” she said. “It’s not a body.”
She didn’t know I had a body on my mind. But, that was what it looked like—a body dragged up the sidewalk and into her condo. Then I noticed scattered green needles peeking through the white powder.
“You got a Christmas tree.”
She clapped her feathered hands together like a six-year-old. “Lying on a sheet in front of the fireplace. That’s how I dragged it in. Old lady Grimshaw across the way was peering from her window. Probably thought it was a victim of my surgical skills. She’s as much as told me women should have babies, not careers.”
I looked back across the parking lot to the opposite condo. A sliver of light winked out as the nosey neighbor yanked closed the crack in her drapes. “And now the undertaker shows up,” I said. “Well, let’s hope she stays awake all night wondering if she’s next.”
Susan stepped back and beckoned me into her living room. “Come on. I want to introduce you to a Miller tradition.”
I stomped my feet on her welcome mat and followed her into the condo where the heavy scent of evergreens hung in the air. I heard an a cappella version of “White Christmas" and thought this could be The Mormon Tabernacle Choir meets Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest. In front of the gas fireplace, a blue-green Fraser fir lay on a damp white sheet with its aromatic limbs bound in a mesh straitjacket.
“Usually the nest goes in the tree, not the other way around,” I said.
She plucked feathery strands from her fingers. “And usually these are stuck on the bird.”
Her glass coffee table had been shoved against the sofa so that the fir could be pulled into the room. Three unopened boxes of Christmas tree mini-lights were stacked on the hearth along with a shiny red tree stand and a tinsel star. A new CD case was propped up on the mantel, and the title A Mormon Tabernacle Holiday verified I’d been half right.
“While I was at the hospital, I realized Christmas is less than three weeks away, and I haven’t done one thing to get ready. Not an ornament, a wreath, or even a sprig of mistletoe. After my rounds, I stopped at Wal-Mart and bought some instant traditions. Except for the tree decorations which I’m making myself. Rather, I was until you came to help me.” She gestured to the dining table just off the kitchen. “Angels in a bag.”
Newspapers covered the top of her table. The jumbo-size container of Elmer’s Glue sat beside a clear plastic bag which overflowed with fluffy white feathers. A smaller bag contained wooden beads. Clothespins spilled out of an overturned box. Behind the box, a row of angels had come into being from glue, wood, and feathers.
I walked over and examined the six-foot tree. Sap oozed from the severed trunk, and I guessed no more than a day ago it had been on a mountainside within fifteen miles of here. Next to apples, Christmas trees were the largest crop in Laurel County.
“You didn’t buy this tree from a rustler, did you?”
“I got it from the Boy Scouts’ lot on Church Street, but now that you mention it, they did look a little shifty.” She held out her hands. “Here, give me your jacket. It’s dripping. I’ll put it in the sink before it ruins the feathers.” As she walked to the kitchen, she asked, “You serious about rustlers?”
“Tommy Lee told me Earl Statton lost two acres of trees last night,” I said over the sound of the opening refrigerator. “Must have been a well-organized theft with trucks and laborers. He figures they hit between midnight and five. Those trees are probably already on lots from Charlotte to Charleston.”
Susan returned bearing a glass of chardonnay and a mug of Newcastle Brown Ale. Her festive spirit wasn’t making my mission any easier.
“That’s despicable,” she said. “How long did it take to grow those trees?”
I took the ale and sat at the table, careful not to disturb the pile of feathers. “From twelve to fifteen years.”
“Those creeps. They not only stole the trees, they stole all the time some poor family put into raising them.” She slid into the dining room chair beside me and took a healthy sip of wine. “And at Christmas too. It’s almost sacrilegious.”
“And in a few weeks, those trees will be worthless. It’s nearly impossible to recover them and get them back in time to salvage any profits.”
“Did Tommy Lee call you for help?” she asked. Then she mimicked a Texas drawl. “You in a posse fixin’ to ride the range in search of them rustlers?”
“No.” Suddenly, I felt closed in. Susan was right beside me. She was getting ready to make Christmas decorations on her dining room table, and I was ready to get a buried body out on the table.
“Good,” she said. “Then we can get started on these angels. Stevie taught me how to make them. The clothespin’s the body, the wooden bead is the head, and two white feathers are the wings. Then you clip them on the tree. The Miller tradition is a tree with nothing but lights and white-feathered angels.”
“Sounds easy enough.”
“It is.” Her voice lost its bright edge. “The first craft I remember learning. We used to decorate a fir by Stevie’s grave with them each Christmas. I guess Dad stopped after I went to New York and I never picked it back up.”
I had learned about Susan’s brother on our second date when I asked her if she had any brothers or sisters. “Only Stevie,” she had said. “He died a long time ago.” The way she had said it kept me from pressing for more information and she had offered none.
Susan twirled a feather between her fingers, and then stroked the plume across the back of my hand. “You would have liked him,” she said.
“If he was anything like his sister, I’m sure I would have.”
Susan shook her head. “He wasn’t like me, but I sure wanted to be like him. Stevie was the adventurer, the first to jump off the wet rocks into the darkest creek waters, the first to climb white pines so high the limbs became thin as fingers.”
“He was older, right?”
“Seven years. I was only five when he was killed.” She took another sip of wine, and tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “Late one afternoon, Stevie took me out to a lightly traveled, narrow two-lane blacktop that ran at the end of our dirt road to teach me how to ride his bicycle. He thought if I could get the feel of my balance without having to pedal over gravel or dodge roots, I could master it. He couldn’t do anything about the seat set too high or the boy-style crossbar, so I had to mount the bike like a pony, throwing my leg over the saddle and then pedaling while standing up.”
“Must have been a challenge for a five-year-old.”
“I guess, but if Stevie could do it, then I wanted to learn. He had me stand by the edge of the road as he demonstrated how to get the bike rolling downhill while swinging a leg up over the crossbar. He’d just pushed away when I heard the sputter of an engine behind me. A pickup crested the hill, weaving and swerving as it sped down toward us. I screamed at Stevie, and then jumped across the ditch to hug the fence post on the other side.”
Susan took a deep breath. She looked down at the feather. “I can still see him looking back over his shoulder, squinting against the fireball of the setting sun and trying to balance as the bike slipped onto the dirt shoulder. The truck veered away from me, crossing over into the other lane. Then the driver must have realized he was on the wrong side of the road and cut back sharply, sending the pickup straight at Stevie. He tried to jump off the bike, but it was too late. He was in mid-air when the right fender caught him on the thigh and slammed him against the strands of a barbed wire fence. The driver spun the truck out of the ditch, dragging the mangled bicycle under the rear axle. He never stopped.”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. I said nothing, knowing she had more to tell me.
“The state police found the pickup truck a mile away, sideswiped against a tree. The driver was unhurt and so drunk he couldn’t remember how he got there. Stevie died at the rural clinic because there wasn’t a surgeon able to get to him in time.” She laughed bitterly. “The backwoods of North Carolina wasn’t a lucrative place to practice. So, here I am, the rural surgeon who wasn’t there for him.”
I wasn’t surprised those clothespin angels had become a tradition. Amid the joy of the Christmas holidays, Susan would always grieve for Stevie. I stared at the feathers, beads, and clothespins and knew I couldn’t wait another minute. I stood up, crossed to the bookshelf and turned down the stereo.
“What’s wrong?” asked Susan. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Tommy Lee didn’t call me about tree rustlers,” I said. “He told me about them when I saw him this afternoon. I needed his advice.”
Susan set the feather on the table and gave me her full attention. “About what?”
“About what was found this morning up in the Eagle Creek Methodist Church cemetery.”
Susan didn’t ask the obvious question. She patiently waited for me to tell her. I skipped all the preliminaries and jumped right to what concerned me. “Did you know a Sammy Calhoun?”
She looked away and reached out for her glass. I sensed she was stalling for time. Whether it was to try and remember Calhoun or decide what to say, I didn’t know. The tremor in her hand sent a ripple through the wine as she brought it to her lips. She swallowed, and then whispered, “Sammy Calhoun, I haven’t heard that name in a long time.”
I waited.
“He used to work in Asheville. I met him through my Aunt Cassie. He was a detective. Last I heard he moved to Texas. Why? Is he back?”
“I’d say he never left. This morning a skeleton was found buried on top of a vault. The original grave was dug nearly seven years ago.”
The blood drained from Susan’s face. “And you think it’s Sammy?”
“The sheriff of Walker County found a wallet with the bones. Contained a driver’s license for Samuel Calhoun. He was buried with moldy cowboy boots and a green windbreaker.”
Susan’s gaze wandered around the room, never lighting on anything in particular. “I’m sorry to hear he’s dead.” Then she made the connection. “If another sheriff is handling it, why did you see Tommy Lee?”
“Because there was something else in the wallet. Your picture.”
She flinched, as if my words slapped her. “My picture?”
“Yes. I didn’t want to say anything to Sheriff Ewbanks till I talked to you, and I didn’t want to talk to you till after I checked with Tommy Lee.”
“I met him through Cassie,” she repeated. “I can’t help who has my picture. Was it just me?”
“Yes, a close-up smiling at the camera. I only saw it for a second, but it was long enough.”
Susan stood up and started pacing in front of the kitchen. “Could you tell where it was shot?”
“No. Looked like some buildings behind you. What difference does that make?”
“Just that it could have been taken by anybody. Sammy could have gotten it from my aunt. He’s not in it, right?”
“No, but it’s still in his wallet. Tommy Lee says you should come forward. I can tell Ewbanks I saw it but wasn’t sure it was you.”
“Why get me involved in something like this?”
I was surprised at her defensiveness. To me the easiest way to get uninvolved would be to make a simple statement to Ewbanks and let him follow other leads. “Look, Susan, I went to Tommy Lee because you are involved. Like it or not, yours is the only photograph in a murdered man’s wallet.”
“Murdered?”
“Yes,” I said, letting my exasperation get the better of me. “He didn’t bury himself.”
Susan started to cry.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m upset that you’re upset. Maybe you’re right. We can wait a day or two and see what happens. Maybe they’ll get a lead off the gun.”
“Gun? What gun?”
“They uncovered a pistol that could be the murder weapon. Rusty but they might get a trace on it. Little Colt semi-automatic. Twenty-five caliber.”
Susan reached out and steadied herself against the wall. “Excuse me,” she managed to say as she headed for the bathroom.
I turned up The Mormon Tabernacle Choir until I could no longer hear her vomiting.
Susan waved to me from the front door. I honked a goodbye like everything was normal, like a shadow hadn’t fallen across our relationship, a shadow cast by a skeleton.
She had emerged from the bathroom, shaken and apologetic, claiming to have been stunned by the fact that someone she once knew had been murdered. She begged me not to say anything to Ewbanks. “I don’t want to be dragged into an awful crime I know nothing about,” she had said. “If I could help, I would.” I had looked into those tear-filled brown eyes and melted.
Now, driving through the snow-filled black night, I felt uneasy. Had I made a mistake involving Tommy Lee? Would he feel obliged to talk to Ewbanks? Or was I letting Susan’s emotional reaction cloud my judgment? The real problem was that my own curiosity had been aroused, but I had no business prying into a past Susan wanted closed.
One thing I did know—the bodies of Pearly Johnson and Senator Hugh Richards wouldn’t be going anywhere tomorrow. Sheriff Ewbanks would be dealing with snow on the grave and snow on his county roads.
The radio weathercast now predicted six to eight inches. Even Pace’s bursitis had underestimated the accumulation. I had the choice of driving five miles out to my cabin or spending the night at the funeral home. The only obligation I had at the cabin was my roommate, George Eliot. George was a Peruvian long-haired guinea pig, and her three water bottles and self-filling feeder ensured she would survive the blizzard for a few days.
Although the jeep could navigate the roads without any trouble, it wasn’t the roads I was worried about. Other drivers were the greatest hazard to my safety. Give a southern good-ol’ boy a snow-packed road and he’ll do something stupid with it every time, usually involving a souped-up Camaro and a six-pack. I decided I’d enter the funeral home vertically instead of horizontally.
I drove down Main Street without passing another vehicle, which in my hometown wasn’t unusual after eight at night. The light from Gainesboro’s streetlamps became pyramids of animated snowflakes, and the dying business district took on a charm that temporarily masked the ravages caused by the strip malls along the nearby interstate. At least Wal-Mart wasn’t offering funeral services—yet.
Clayton and Clayton Funeral Directors operated from the same white antebellum home my grandfather purchased in 1930. Set back on a rolling hill on the outskirts of town, it projected a tranquility and stability that served our clients well, and it was also a home in every sense of the word. Mom and Dad still lived on the second floor.
Jack Clayton had been a pillar of the community, a revered citizen and friend to those in need. So, when one day he pulled out of a funeral procession and passed the hearse, not only was the family he was driving shocked, but the whole town was shaken by the revelation: my father suffered from the early onset of Alzheimer’s.
That had been over six years ago. For the next three years, he and Mom tried to run the business while searching for a buyer. None of the chains were interested, and my uncle Wayne had neither the finances nor the desire to take on full responsibility. By then Dad’s condition had deteriorated to where there were more bad days than good days and all the cheat sheets and memory tricks he had devised no longer served to get him through basic interactions.
So, I left my job on the Charlotte police force, abandoned my criminal justice studies at the university, and returned home to help. The choice cost more than my career; my marriage didn’t survive the strain and Rachel had moved to Washington D.C. and all the things Gainesboro was not. Although the divorce was amicable on the surface, bitterness filled my life and threatened to consume me with self-pity.
Then about two years ago I met Susan Miller. She had appeared at a graveside ceremony, standing with the family of a seven-year-old girl her skills had not been able to save. Their grief was her grief, and her tears had touched my heart. Now I feared an intruder in the grave of Pearly Johnson would become an intruder between Susan and me. Where one grave had brought us together, another might tear us apart.
I turned onto the unblemished snow-covered side street by the funeral home. The second floor lights were on and I caught a glimpse of my father peering through his bedroom curtains at the wintry spectacle captured by the outside floodlights. He could have been standing there for a minute or for an hour.
The garage behind the funeral home had been constructed to shelter four vehicles: a hearse, a family limousine, a personal car, and an ambulance. From 1930 to 1962, Clayton and Clayton Funeral Directors also provided emergency rescue service for Laurel County. Dad told of many a night being roused from his bed to transport a birthing mother whose baby wouldn’t wait or a bleeding driver who had tried to straighten out a mountain road. When the county established its own paramedic unit, my father and my uncle Wayne gladly sold them the ambulance as backup. I had always wondered why the community wanted a business whose revenue came from burying the dead to be responsible for keeping someone alive. It must have been a tribute to the integrity of Clayton and Clayton that no one saw the conflict of interest.
I parked my jeep in the bay once occupied by the ambulance and tromped along the hidden sidewalk to the back door. My Docker moccasins were no match for the snow and I felt the cold powder penetrate my feet from heel to toe. Fortunately, I kept extra clothes and boots in a spare closet just for such an unexpected overnight visit. Weather respects neither the living nor the dead.
I slipped my shoes off on the back porch and entered the kitchen in damp stocking feet. Mom stood at the kitchen sink, wearing a calico apron and washing up the supper dishes. “Trying to sneak up on me?” she asked without turning around.
“I knew you saw me through the kitchen window.”
She looked over her shoulder and smiled. “Yes, and for a moment your hair was as white as mine. Dry it with a towel before you catch your death.”
Mom and Uncle Wayne both had hair the color of cotton, but where she stood a smidgen under five feet, my uncle topped six. Mom was a rotund bundle of energy; her brother, an easy-loping “tall drink of water,” as the locals described him. Walking together, they looked like a bowling ball and a bowling pin.
“Do you want something to eat? There’s some cold chicken in the refrigerator.”
The mention of food triggered a pang in my stomach. My last meal had been a bowl of granola and apple juice at breakfast. “Thanks, and I’ll finish cleaning up. I’m here for the night, if that’s all right.”
Mom grabbed a plate from the shelf. “I’ll rest easier knowing you’re not out on the road. Sit down and I’ll fix you a plate.”
I slid into my customary place. The chrome and Formica kitchen table had been in the funeral home as long as I had. Mom set a blue and ivory dinner plate in the spot once reserved for my favorite “Peter Rabbit rounding the cucumber frame” bowl. She retrieved a platter with three pieces of cold fried chicken and a Tupperware container of coleslaw.
“I can make you something hot if you’d like.”
“No, this is fine.”
She gave me silverware, and then said, “I’ll put on a kettle for tea.”
She brought a gas burner on the white enamel stove to a blue flame and centered her kettle over it. “Your dad was fascinated by the snow. That’s why we ate so late.”
“He was still at his window when I drove in.”
Mom untied her apron and hung it on a peg under the red electric wall clock. It was nearly eight.
“Oh,” she said as she sat across from me. “Before I forget, your uncle Wayne wants to talk to you.”
“I hope he’s not thinking of driving in tomorrow.”
“No, talk by phone. He asked me to have you call him as soon as I heard from you. He doesn’t like leaving messages on that answering contraption.”
“Mom, he needs to get used to it. The world’s turned into a bunch of machines talking to each other. People expect it.”
“Not your uncle.”
I didn’t argue. Mom would vigorously defend her brother and I saw no upside to offending my favorite source of fried chicken. “Yeah, Uncle Wayne probably has the only rotary phone left in the county.”
“And it still works fine,” Mom said. “So, call him when we finish our tea.”
“Tonight?”
“He said it was important. He’ll be up late. His GRIT Magazine came today.”
I laughed out loud. GRIT Magazine made Reader’s Digest look like a sleazy tabloid. The publication dated back to the 1880s and used to be sold by kids door-to-door in rural communities across the country. Uncle Wayne said it was his first job and his first reading primer. For years, he insisted on keeping a copy in the family visitation room because “the happy stories will lift their spirits.” I finally got him to stop when the Yankee retirees kept mistaking it for a southern cookbook.
“Then Uncle Wayne might be up till nine,” I said. “Maybe even nine-thirty. I’ll call him after I see Dad for a few minutes.”
“Your father had a good day,” Mom said. “I think the snow kept him focused.”
“One day at a time,” I said. It was how we lived with Dad—on a rollercoaster of emotional ups and downs, learning to communicate with fewer and fewer words. His medical treatment now included Aricept, which seemed to have slowed the degenerative progress of the disease, but neither that drug nor anything the doctors foresaw on the horizon promised the return of husband and father to our family.
“How was your day?” asked Mom. “You get finished at Eagle Creek before the storm?”
“There was a complication, a serious complication.”
“Oh?” The wrinkles in Mom’s round face deepened.
Before I could continue, the shrill whistle of the kettle penetrated the kitchen. “Why don’t you make our tea, and I’ll tell you about it.”
A plate of Mom’s Christmas butter cookies had been served with the tea, but my description of the events at the cemetery had so far kept either one of us from eating them. I was grateful for Sheriff Ewbanks’ admonition not to tell anyone too many details. Although I’d confided in Tommy Lee and Susan, it gave me an excuse to stop the story with the discovery of the wallet and to emphasize the official procedures the sheriff said he would have to follow.
“Of course, it should be kept a secret until they notify next of kin,” said Mom. “I wouldn’t want to know.”
“I expect they’ll be able to do that quickly.” I relaxed and grabbed a cookie. Mom’s reaction was more of concern for possible loved ones than curiosity about the body.
“And poor Senator Richards’ family,” she added. “A delayed burial and now all this snow.”
“Reverend Pace said the public memorial service can go on as scheduled. It wasn’t tied to the interment.”
“That’s a blessing. Reverend Pace is the perfect man to comfort them.”
“Pace said there isn’t much family. Evidently Richards’ relationship to his sister was cool at best, and the senator had been divorced for years. That’s another reason he wanted to be buried next to Turncoat Turner.”
“Don’t speak ill of the dead, Barry.”
“Sorry. I just meant there weren’t family ties to keep him from resting beside his hero.”
Mom took a cookie. “Must have paid a pretty penny to get Pearly Johnson moved. If someone ever wants my plot, you get a good price.”
“Mom, I’d never sell your grave.”
“Don’t be silly. Your dad and I will be in a better place than a patch of dirt. And he’ll be in his right mind again. If you’re in your right mind, you’ll take the money. Just keep us together, and maybe not too close to a road. They’re always widening them.”
“Tell you what, Mom. When the snow melts, we’ll go look at some backup plots.”
She laughed and got up from the table. “Why don’t you take a glass of milk and the cookies up to your father. Then you’d better call your uncle.”
I found Dad still standing at the bedroom window, his head rhythmically bobbing up and down as he watched the flakes tumble through the floodlight. His face was so close to the pane that his breath fogged the glass. His right hand rested against the sill. One suspender dangled to his knee while the other looped over his shoulder. Belts had been traded for suspenders since they were easier for him to manage when using the bathroom. A pair of gray flannel pajamas lay across the foot of his bed. I suspected he had started to get undressed and caught a glimpse of the snow. Perhaps during the time he had eaten dinner, he had forgotten about it.
With cookies in one hand and milk in the other, I couldn’t knock on the open door. I cleared my throat softly, and then whispered, “Dad.”
His reaction came a few seconds later. He turned and the light of recognition sparkled in his eyes. It was a wonderful sight. “Barry,” he said.
“Yes,” I replied.
“It’s snow,” he said, and turned to make sure the snowflakes still fell. “Snow,” he repeated.
When my father spoke, he kept his sentences short. Too often his words collapsed in on themselves as the thought he wanted to express evaporated.
“Yes, Dad. Snow.”
He kept staring out the window.
“Dad, I brought cookies and milk.”
Again, I waited for him to respond. After a few seconds, I started to speak again.