Echoes among the Stones

by Jaime Jo Wright

“See now, you ain’t makin’ a lick of sense.” Ollie gripped her chin as he stared into her eyes.

  Imogene frowned. Who had gone and made her world explode and turned Oliver Schneider from a timid farm boy into a sergeant?

  “Hazel . . .” She pushed against the sidewalk, vaguely realizing there were crumbles of clay and debris beneath her palms. She stumbled to her feet, falling into the crouching Ollie and bracing herself with her hand pressing down on his shoulder in a way that kept him from standing.

  Her stomach roiled, then calmed, then—

  “Holy Joe” were her last muttered words before she released the contents of her stomach. It splattered on the walk, but mostly on Ollie’s back.

  “Oh!” Imogene clamped a hand over her mouth as Ollie’s hands wrapped around her arms and he stood. She swayed, blinking her eyes furiously, fighting the black curtains someone was pulling over her eyes. Ollie let her fall into him even as she focused on the man just beyond Ollie’s left shoulder.

  “Sam Pickett,” she breathed. Then her eyes went dark, and all she could feel was Ollie’s shoulder and chest as her body relinquished to his care.

  CHAPTER 16

  Aggie

  The shovel that had threatened to collapse Collin O’Shaugnessy’s skull had revealed over fifteen sets of different fingerprints, and every one of them was accounted for with a reliable alibi or they were unidentifiable because they were partials rather than registered in the system.

  “Well, that doesn’t surprise me,” Mumsie mumbled with her rose-stained lips against her teacup just before taking a sip. The smell of lemon and mint drifted into Aggie’s senses. “Every citizen of Mill Creek has touched that shovel since the day Floyd Barber bought it for the cemetery and practically screwed a brass dedication plate into its handle.”

  She lowered her cup, and her green eyes twinkled. A sassy twinkle with a hint of a smile that was far too knowing. “Honestly, you’d think he could do better for his dead wife than dedicate a gravedigger’s shovel to the place he buried her.”

  Aggie choked on her tea—not sure whether it was the pharmaceutical flavoring of it or her grandmother’s comment.

  It’d been a monotonous several days since Collin had been assaulted. Nothing—absolutely nothing—had happened. Aggie didn’t know if she should feel resentful for the beginning touches of small-town boredom starting to affect her attitude, or grateful she had the opportunity to toy with boredom in the first place. She’d searched Google for Mill Creek history and Hazel Grayson’s name. So far, no luck. It seemed Mill Creek was as much off the internet map as it was off the national map. Small town, little interest, and no one seemed to care enough to give Mill Creek more of a web presence than a landing page with links to a few of the businesses in town.

  “I’m less worried about the shovel and its fingerprints and more concerned about what Collin found at the cemetery,” Aggie muttered, unsure as to why she was taking Mumsie into her confidence tonight.

  Mumsie clicked her tongue with an impish scowl that perched on her face below her permed curls that still had strands of black woven through the otherwise steel gray. “He’s an archaeologist, Agnes, so of course he’s going to find a grave.”

  Mumsie’s reference to Collin’s revelation of finding new graves brought back the same creepy sentiment that had invaded Aggie the first time Collin had showed them to her. Right after getting stitched up from his head wound.

  “But two unmarked graves in Fifteen Puzzle Row?” Aggie mused. She still couldn’t figure out how people could bury anyone and not mark it on something. Collin was wading through the politics and ethics of analyzing the graves for age. No one seemed too excited to find out who was buried there, or when or why, so much as to make sure they were put on the map. Mr. Richardson had paid her a visit the day following the discovery and insisted Aggie catalog them “asap.” Apparently, the cemetery board had hired Collin with less of an intent on uncovering historical details than identifying potential issues for future sales of plots.

  “But—they were unmarked graves.” Aggie frowned, staring blankly at the television opposite Mumsie’s recliner that had a game show flipping letters and taunting them with word riddles.

  “Not everyone had the funds to buy a marker by which to flaunt their dead relatives.” Mumsie sipped her tea again, then smiled. “Dancing in the Dark!” she announced to the television.

  “No.” Aggie shook her head. “It’s Dancing in the Deep.”

  “It can’t be,” Mumsie argued with a tilt of her head. A curl bobbed. “The a’s have already been turned. There’s an a in the last word.”

  Fine. Let Mumsie win the game show. Aggie continued as though they hadn’t interrupted their prior vein of conversation. “Most people at least put out a simple marker.”

  “Not always.” Mumsie pursed her lips and tore her attention away from the puzzle that had proven to make her even more right than she’d been just a minute before. “Some people are as poor as a hobo hopping trains during the Depression. The last thing they were going to do is pay someone to practice art on marble.”

  “But it’s Fifteen Puzzle Row,” Aggie protested. “The graves are all from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before the Depression.”

  Mumsie feigned a surprised look. “So, there were no poor people before the stock market crashed? Well, I’ll be!”

  “You know what I mean, Mumsie.”

  Mumsie’s eyes narrowed. “Of course I do. All I’m saying is I understand why they won’t let your young man dig around and upset those old corpses. For pity’s sake, let the dead rest in peace.”

  “I don’t think he’d have to do a full exhumation.” Aggie pulled her feet up to rest on the seat of the cushiony chair on which she sat beside Mumsie. “Collin mentioned samples.”

  Mumsie’s face contorted. “Cutting off the flesh?”

  “No!” Aggie tried to temper the roll of her eyes. “If they’re that old, there wouldn’t be flesh. It’d just be bone. Decomposition would have completely run its course by now.”

  “Not completely,” Mumsie countered with another wave of her wrinkled hand. “If there are skeletal remains to be found, then decomposition is most certainly still in play.”

  Aggie bit back a sigh.

  “And for that matter,” Mumsie added and gave her a side-eyed look of censure, “you deliver quite the evening morbidity for conversation.”

  Aggie didn’t know whether she wanted to hug Mumsie around that adorable old neck of hers or strangle her—rhetorically speaking, of course. She chose neither.

  “Well, it’s all strange to me. I’ve been looking at the cemetery plotting map, and it’s a mess. Not to mention, there’s a grave smack-dab in the middle of it all from 1946.” Aggie squelched the small niggling of guilt as she took the cowardly way out and subtly baited her grandmother.

  “That Hazel Grayson again? You don’t let sleeping dogs lie, do you?” Mumsie set her teacup on the narrow side table between them.

  “Well, it’s odd.” So was everything else about Mill Creek since her arrival here. Aggie had been keeping a mental inventory, and it was one weird event after another. Mumsie’s continued skirting of Hazel Grayson when Hazel’s cookbook sat front and center in the kitchen was just another strange loophole in a mystery Aggie wasn’t even sure was a mystery. Then there was the dollhouse, the bedroom upstairs—okay, now that created a real shiver.

  Aggie hadn’t revisited it since that night over a week ago. Something about it felt . . . sacred, or maybe that wasn’t the right word. Not sacred. Perhaps raw? She felt as though, if she were to pry into it even a little bit, it wouldn’t be that unlike someone pouring straight-up whiskey over a gaping wound. No one wanted to be the victim in that scenario, but then no one wanted to wield the whiskey either. So, Aggie kept quiet.

  She continued to study Mumsie, who hadn’t responded now and whose eyes were so trained on the game-show host, one might tease her she was afraid he would disappear.
Aggie didn’t have the heart to taunt her grandmother, even though she knew Mumsie certainly would have were the tables turned.

  “Who was Hazel Grayson?” Aggie didn’t bother to mince her words.

  Mumsie’s cheek twitched, its pastel pink circle where she’d applied a powder blush that morning the only color in the old woman’s face.

  “Mumsie? You did know her. I found her cookbook in your kitchen.”

  Mumsie turned her head, the twinkle and sass gone from her eyes. “Oh, that thing. I bought that years ago at a church rummage sale. Don’t make a story where there’s none to be had.”

  “But you knew her?” Aggie pressed. She could see Mumsie teetering on the edge. The woman’s mouth opened as if she were going to speak, and then it snapped shut.

  Mumsie’s eyelids closed, perhaps to collect herself or her thoughts. Aggie watched her profile, the high cheekbones, the fine curve of her brows, the delicate lashes and wrinkles that, if turned back in time, would have been on the verge of Elizabeth Taylor beauty sans the violet eyes.

  “Yes.” Mumsie’s admission was quiet. Low. As though someone had dragged it from her and she was resigned to having to speak the truth.

  A thrill of confirmation shot through Aggie. She dropped her feet to the floor and twisted in her chair. “How? Were you friends? Acquaintances? I’m just so curious as to why she’s buried in the middle of Fifteen Puzzle Row when all the other graves from the forties tend to be up the hill in another section of the cemetery. And—” Aggie hesitated—“why would someone put a rose on her grave?”

  “A what?” Mumsie’s head snapped around to level Aggie with an intense emerald stare.

  Aggie sensed the first pang of regret. “A r-rose?” The word rolled off her tongue with a question mark at the end. The hesitant kind that accompanied Aggie’s wince.

  Mumsie’s mouth tightened into a fine line. Her lipstick staining some of the minuscule wrinkles at the edges of her lips. “No one knows Hazel Grayson anymore.” Her whispered words were edged in stunned surprise.

  Aggie reached across the side table and laid her hand on Mumsie’s sweater-covered arm. “Mumsie?” She was worried now. She shouldn’t have pressed. The woman was staring down her own imminent death, considering how old she was. The last thing Aggie wanted on her conscience was inducing her grandmother into a stroke.

  “I’m fine, Agnes.” Mumsie gave Aggie’s hand an absent pat. She sniffed delicately. “I just—they say the war ruined lives . . .” She met Aggie’s eyes, and a haunting sadness lingered in hers. “But no one tells, no one accounts for the aftereffects. How it altered everything. No one was the same again. Ever.”

  Aggie didn’t respond. She allowed the clapping of the game-show audience to fill the room. The ding of the monetary reward being selected. The contestant yelling out a letter.

  “Well, isn’t that funny?” Mumsie was watching. An ironic smile touched her lips now. “The puzzle. It’s an event. The Battle of Normandy.” She sniffed. “Horrible as that was, no one remembers the smaller battles. The ones we fought for years, long after the bombs stopped falling.”

  Aggie waited, but Mumsie had nothing more to say.

  It was predawn, the sky still dark outside her bedroom window, the stars still twinkling. Aggie rustled through her suitcase, yet unpacked, for a sweater. Shoving her sleeves into its knitted coziness, she wrapped it around her torso and eyed the planner she’d tossed on top of the antique dresser. She didn’t need it anymore. Well, she never really had, not since she used an app to keep track of her schedule. Even so, it was nice to have something tangible, something she could still mark with a pen and pretend her life was organized when really it wasn’t. Aggie thumbed through the pages before closing it and dropping the planner into the wastebasket, which teetered at the sudden weight but didn’t topple.

  Goodbye, old life. Goodbye, dreams and aspirations.

  Aggie grabbed her phone and couldn’t help but swipe it on to access her photo gallery. Her mother’s smile filled the screen. The sparkling green eyes, the healthy blush to her face, the age lines around her eyes, and the gray streaked through her dark hair.

  “I miss you,” Aggie breathed into the empty bedroom. She looked around. There was no one to hear her speaking to the dead. To her mother, who’d stopped fighting when Aggie finally gave her permission. The moment was etched in her memory more clearly and poignantly than the worn stones at the cemetery.

  “It’s okay, Momma. I’ll be fine. You go now and rest, all right?”

  She could still almost feel the warmth of her mother’s pale hand beneath hers. Momma’s eyelids fluttering as though she heard, her eyes sunk into her face, her frame a skeletal version of happier days. Pre-chemo days.

  Before that, Aggie had been Momma’s cheerleader. Phrases like “You’ve got this” and “Kick cancer’s butt” weren’t uncommon. But that night? That night Aggie heard the labored breathing, smelled the inevitable tinge of loss in the air, and witnessed her mother’s strain to keep fighting carved into every shadow and crevice and bruise on her face.

  Aggie had bent over Momma at that point, releasing her hand and embracing the shell of her body, laying her head on her mother’s shoulder. Her face pressed against her mother’s neck, she kissed the skin there and stroked her mother’s soft cheek with her left hand. Tears burned as the knowing—the knowing—became all too real for Aggie. There was no more fighting. There was no more to be done but to breathe that last deep breath of life, release it, and with that breath release one’s spirit.

  Fly, Momma. Fly.

  And she had.

  Now Aggie sensed her legs give out beneath the weight of a memory she’d long suppressed. The stress of the last week was catching her off guard, lowering her defenses with exhaustion so that now she was remembering with clarity.

  “Oh, Momma . . .” A tear trailed down her face as Aggie sank onto her bed. She swiped at it, running her thumb over her mother’s face as she smiled back at Aggie from the phone’s screen. It was after Momma had passed away that Aggie lost motivation for her career, began to let things slide, and even cut ties with her father, who, for all sakes and purposes, had left them over a decade before.

  “I don’t want to admit it,” Aggie whispered to her mother, “but I think that’s why I came here. I knew Mumsie was fibbing. She always fibs to get her way . . .” A chuckle mixed with a sob escaped Aggie’s throat. “But she’s—a part of you.” Two more tears, both parallel to each other on Aggie’s face, ran their course and trailed down her cheeks and chin, landing on the screen. Her raven-black hair fell in thick, straight strands over her sweater, and Aggie swept it back over her shoulder.

  “Mumsie is a part of you, and I need you, Momma. I need you.”

  She sucked in a sob, opening her mouth to say more but halting suddenly as she heard a voice. A chill ran through her. “Momma?”

  Startled, Aggie lifted her head. But Momma wasn’t there. There was no ghost, no spirit visiting from heaven, just an empty room. Aggie frowned, straining to listen.

  Sure enough. She heard a voice.

  Standing, she tossed her phone on the bed and crossed the room to her door. Gripping the knob, Aggie turned it, opening the solid wood door a few inches.

  The hallway was dim, except for dawn beginning to awaken out the window at the end of it. The wood floors were uneven and dark, the walls covered with a printed calico wallpaper, void of any pictures.

  Mumsie’s door stood open. Aggie tiptoed across the hallway and peeked in through the six-inch gap. The four-post bed lay empty, its quilt and sheet tossed aside.

  “Mumsie?” she murmured softly, pushing the door wide. The distinct scents of rose water and baby powder met her senses. Aggie gave the room a quick sweep of her eyes and noticed Mumsie’s walker was missing too.

  She turned her back to the room and peered down the hallway.

  Mumsie’s study.

  Aggie’s heart pounded a bit harder, the momentary wallowing in her own
bitter grief fast fading in the curiosity and concern of the present.

  A voice came from the room. Faint. Watery. Unrecognizable.

  Aggie hurried to the door, which was closed tight. The only sign someone might be inside was the soft glow that escaped from the crack between the bottom of the door and the floor.

  She gave a light rap on the door. “Mumsie?”

  Silence.

  Aggie’s hand fell to the knob, but as her fingers met its coldness, she paused, unsure if she should twist it or not. It had to be Mumsie in there, but her reception would more than likely not be welcoming to Aggie.

  Another murmur, followed by a strangled cry, and Aggie twisted the doorknob without further thought. “Mumsie!” She surged into the room, her bare feet sticking to the hardwood floor as she stumbled to a halt. “Mumsie?” Aggie held her hand to her throat and steadied her breathing. “Mumsie, what’s . . . ?” Her words trailed as Aggie took in the sight before her.

  Mumsie sat curled in the middle of the floor. Beside her was her walker, its metal frame waiting for when she chose to stand. The bed with the stained spread was behind her, a backdrop of something frightening, something dark that enhanced the shadows on Mumsie’s face.

  The elderly woman held a framed picture in her hand. She ran her fingers over the face in the photograph, not unlike Aggie had with her phone only minutes before.

  Mumsie lifted a shaking hand and wiped tears from her cheek, still somehow unaware of Aggie’s presence. She focused on the photograph, and a watery smile tipped her lips. “It’s never over,” she murmured. “Never over.”

  Not over. The words from the rose left on Hazel Grayson’s gravestone and in the cemetery office were like a cold slap to Aggie’s face.

  Mumsie lifted her eyes but looked past Aggie, and her face was awash with a bright smile, one that made her ninety-two years fade away and leave behind someone much younger, more youthful, one who still had hopes that were bound to come true.

  “Honestly, you’ve taken long enough to show me.” Mumsie’s voice had a chiding, almost teasing tone.