The Gravedigger's Ball

by Solomon Jones

  Lily looked at the picture, and her face cycled through a number of emotions, not the least of which was fear.

  “No,” Lily said after staring at the picture for just a few seconds.

  “I have no idea what it means,” said Violet.

  Both women looked sincere when they spoke, but Coletti had a nagging feeling that they knew more than they were saying.

  * * *

  The interrogation room was hot, and so was Sandy Jackson. She and a homicide detective had been questioning Vickers, the manager of Fairgrounds Cemetery, for the last forty-five minutes, and with each passing second, his answers grew more convoluted.

  They still were uncertain about how much the manager knew, but they were sure that he didn’t want to be involved. That was apparent in the way he kept hedging on his answers.

  First, he didn’t know the man who’d volunteered at the cemetery. Then he wasn’t sure. By the time the manager changed his mind again, Sandy was just about ready to employ a choke hold. She walked out into the hallway to get some air. That was when she spotted Charlie Mann.

  “What are you doing out here?” she asked.

  “Computer stuff,” Mann said as he looked at two sheets of paper he was holding. “Penn sent over the names and pictures of Workman’s students.”

  “Any hits?”

  “Not yet, but I’ve got a couple other irons in the fire. I just left IT to check on the information from the Baileys’ computers. Ellison’s is filled with porn and not much else.”

  “What about his wife’s?”

  “Her C drive was corrupted, but they think they can repair it and save the information. It might take another half hour or so.”

  “Good, because I need your help.”

  Charlie smiled as he looked her up and down, his eyes drinking in the curves that were bursting at the seams of her clothing. “What’d you have in mind?”

  Sandy liked his eyes on her, but she wasn’t about to let him know it. She was all business now, and she needed Charlie to be that way, too.

  “I’m questioning Vickers, the manager from the cemetery. I need you in on the interrogation.”

  “I thought he was cooperating.”

  “He was,” Sandy said. “But I think he’s scared.”

  “You think he knows something?”

  “I think he knows everything,” Sandy said. “He knew Workman and the guy who volunteered at the cemetery last year. He knew the volunteer was the one who found the raven and trained it, and he knows a lot more than that, but he’s trying to hide it.”

  “Okay,” Mann said. “Let’s go.”

  Sandy opened the door to the interrogation room, and Mann walked in smiling. He nodded a greeting to his fellow detective. Then he made a beeline for Vickers.

  “I’m Charlie Mann,” he said, shaking Vickers’s hand. “I saw you at the cemetery this morning, but I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Vickers said nervously as Mann sat in the chair across from him.

  “I’m not going to waste a lot of your time,” Mann said. “Clarissa Bailey’s dead, Irving Workman’s dead, and the guy who trained the raven is out there somewhere. Whoever knows who he is and what he wants is in danger. I think that’s you, Mr. Vickers, and the bottom line is this: if you don’t help us find this guy, he’s going to find you, and you’ll be dead just like Clarissa Bailey and Irving Workman.”

  Mann stared at Vickers, and the nervous little man with the twitching nose and beady eyes looked back at him with eyes that seemed incapable of a steady gaze. It took Vickers a few minutes to absorb the truth in what Mann had said, but once he did, he shared some truth of his own.

  “They always said that something was hidden at Fairgrounds,” Vickers began. “None of us believed it, really. It was just part of the mystique of the graveyard, and trust me, mystique is good for donations, so we don’t discourage it. But beyond the mystique there were legends, and I knew all of them because that was my job: to know them and package them so our tour guides could thrill the tourists with ghost stories. I didn’t really start believing that any of them were true until Professor Workman came along.

  “I won’t bore you with all the things you already know about Poe and the secrets and the message and Lenore. What I will tell you, though, is that the man Workman brought in to volunteer had problems that we couldn’t solve.”

  “What kinds of problems?” Mann asked.

  “He was just … strange. Eerily quiet. Angry. I was always nervous that he would explode one day and take some mourners or some tourists or even some of our employees with him.”

  “If he made you that uncomfortable, why didn’t you try to get rid of him?” Sandy asked.

  “It’s like I told you earlier, Professor Workman was one of our biggest donors. I wasn’t about to risk offending him. It was easier to just wait it out, but then…”

  “Then what?” Mann said as Sandy and the other detective looked on.

  “Then he found the raven,” Vickers said. “At first, we were really happy because it gave him something to do other than standing around making everyone nervous. But when his time was up as a volunteer, he kept coming back, creeping around the back way, trying to avoid people on his way to see the raven. We pretended not to notice, but we saw him. For about ten months he spent a few hours each day with that raven. Then suddenly he just disappeared. It was the strangest thing. I hadn’t seen him for weeks, but I never felt as if he were gone. His presence was still in the cemetery, still making everyone nervous.”

  “What can you tell us about his identity?” Sandy asked.

  “I never knew his name,” said Vickers. “He never told us, and we were afraid to ask. Workman never told us, either, so we kind of just stayed out of the guy’s way and never spoke to him.”

  Mann placed the pictures of Workman’s students on the table. “Do you recognize him in any of these pictures?”

  He looked through the pictures several times to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. “No, he’s not there.”

  “Okay,” Mann said as he removed the pictures from the table. “I need you to think hard, Mr. Vickers. Can you remember anything at all Workman might’ve told you about the man who volunteered at the cemetery?”

  Vickers thought about it for a moment. “Yes, there was one thing. Workman told us that he was in the master’s of fine arts program at Penn.”

  Mann wrote that down as he asked his next question. “And you’re absolutely sure that you never had a name or address for him?”

  “I’m sure,” Vickers said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if he has an address for me. That’s why I didn’t want to be involved in this. I don’t want to be his next victim.”

  “You won’t be,” Sandy said.

  “You can’t promise that.”

  Sandy paused, knowing he was right. When she answered him, she spoke quietly, in a tone that was reassuring in its compassion.

  “Mr. Vickers, we understand your concerns,” she said while staring at Charlie Mann. “We’ve dealt with murderers and suffered because of things they did. We don’t want that for you or anyone else, so believe me, we’ll protect you as best we can.”

  As she spoke, Mann thought back to Mary Smithson, and the way she’d driven a wedge between him and Sandy. Though Lenore had helped him deal with the pain, the rift remained, and despite his flirting eyes and teasing smiles, he still wasn’t sure how to repair it.

  He was barely listening when Sandy promised Vickers that there would be double patrols on his block and a detail at the cemetery. He was stuck in thought when the other detective escorted Vickers out. When Charlie got up to leave, however, he had no choice but to pay attention, because Sandy gently placed a hand against his chest to stop him.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To check with Penn,” he said while avoiding her eyes. “Workman was an English professor, so the guy was probably getting an MFA in creative writing. It’s a long shot,
but I know a couple of professors in the creative writing program who might be able to give me some names.”

  “Are you all right?” she asked softly. “You seem distant.”

  Mann looked up at the ceiling. “I thought about the day I shot two people. That happens every once in a while. I’ll be all right.”

  She watched his face go through a range of emotions that stemmed from that day. His eyes showed uncertainty, then apprehension, then guilt.

  When she saw that his expression had moved from guilt to pain, she tried her best to wipe that pain away. “You did the right thing, you know. You had no choice.”

  “That’s what they keep telling me,” he said, squeezing the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “But nobody told me that it’s a lot different shooting a person than it is shooting a target.”

  Sandy went and locked the door to the interrogation room. Then she sat down on the table, looked Mann in the eye, and shared something she’d never told him before.

  “The first time I shot a suspect, it was a foot pursuit down at Thirteenth and Walnut. It was around ten o’clock at night on a Thursday, so the traffic was relatively light.

  “I came around the corner of Thirteenth Street and I saw this guy. He looked to be about seventeen or eighteen years old, and he was reaching inside the passenger door of this burgundy Buick—one of those long Roadmasters from the nineties. When I got a little closer, I saw that he wasn’t reaching in, he was trying to get out, but the driver was holding his shirt. I hit my siren once, just to get their attention, and I guess I startled the driver just enough to make him let go. The boy popped out the window and fell hard on the sidewalk, and I finally saw what the two of them were struggling over. It was a gun.”

  Sandy’s eyes grew vacant as she stared into a past that sometimes crept up on her in quiet moments.

  “The boy was on that sidewalk with his torn shirt, and if he’d have stayed there a little longer I could’ve counted every one of his ribs. That’s how skinny he was. But he didn’t stay. He couldn’t—not with that gun in his hand. He looked back at me, and he looked at the man in the car, and in that split second, he made a decision that changed everything. He ran.

  “I got out of the car and chased him up Thirteenth toward Chestnut, past the theater and past the bars, past the bookstore and past a lot of people who were watching the whole thing like it was some kinda movie.

  “I don’t think the boy expected me to be as fast as I was, but when he turned on Chestnut Street and ran to Twelfth, I could see him getting tired. It’s strange to say it now, but I could feel him getting scared, too. I tried to yell my location into my handset, but I was breathing heavy, and the dispatcher couldn’t understand me. She was yelling for me to repeat my location, other cops were jumping on the air to say they were en route, and that’s when it hit me: we were alone—just me and this scared boy with a gun—and it was this awful, frightening feeling.

  “I watched him run past Twelfth Street. He turned on Eleventh, running toward Chestnut, and I was gaining on him. He turned down the back street behind the parking lot. There were Dumpsters on one side and a brick wall on the other, and in front of us, there was nothing but the dark. I saw him raising the gun and turning around, and right then, even before I saw the terrified look in his eyes, I was sorry for what I was about to do.

  “The first bullet grazed his arm, and I could see him grimace in pain. Then he tried to raise the gun again, and the second bullet hit him dead center. The only thing I could hear was the echo of that shot, bouncing off the Dumpsters and brick walls. I couldn’t hear the sirens. I couldn’t hear the sound of the body hitting the ground. All I could hear was the gunshot.

  “A few seconds later I heard something else. I didn’t recognize it, at first, but the more I heard it, the louder it got. By the time my backup got to the scene I realized what I was hearing. It was the sound of my own breathing. Five years later, every time I remember that boy’s face or hear a gunshot, it reminds me of that night … and the sound of my own breathing.”

  Charlie Mann looked at Sandy with a question in his eyes, and she answered before he could ask.

  “As bad as I feel that I was on this side of those bullets,” she said, taking his chin in her hand, “I’m glad I wasn’t on the other side. I know you feel guilty about what happened on the train platform and in that warehouse, but think about the sound of your own breathing and how good it is to be alive, because if you would’ve hesitated a moment too long, maybe you wouldn’t know that feeling anymore, and I wouldn’t know how it feels to touch you.”

  He looked into her eyes. They were glistening in the room’s pale fluorescent light. The scent of her Angel perfume filled his nostrils. In that moment, she wasn’t a woman who chased criminals and fired bullets. She was simply a woman, and she was beautiful.

  He leaned over and brushed his lips against hers, softly at first, and then with a hunger that had been building with each passing second that their relationship had been in question. In that kiss there was tension, there was fear, there was anger, and there was relief.

  They were each in need of someone who could relieve the emotions they’d been holding inside. They needed someone who could understand where they’d been and why. They needed to know they were safe from the world that existed outside that moment. They needed each other.

  He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to experience what they felt for each other: love. It was stronger than life. It was stronger than death. It was stronger than any mistake they’d made in the past, and it was enough to carry them into the future.

  Just then, Mann’s iPhone began to vibrate. They ignored it at first, but it persisted. They both knew that the identity of the caller didn’t matter. No matter what that person called themself, their name was duty, and Mann had an obligation to answer.

  She sighed heavily and kissed him once more before he answered the call.

  “Hello?”

  He listened to the voice on the other end explain what they’d found on Clarissa Bailey’s hard drive. Then he disconnected the call and turned to Sandy.

  “That was IT. They found the cryptogram on Clarissa’s hard drive. It was decoded.”

  “So what does the cryptogram say?”

  “It says, ‘Start at the evergreen tree.’”

  CHAPTER 13

  As night settled upon what was left of Professor Workman’s house, the billowing black smoke and leaping flames were a distant memory. A few crime scene cops remained, working by jury-rigged theater lighting, but the bodies of the victims were gone.

  A security detail was posted around the perimeter of the house, and so were the media, though their frequent on-air reports had long ago become stale and repetitive.

  Coletti looked around and knew that it was time to leave for Dunmore. There was nothing more for him to do in Elkins Park. He shook hands with his old friend who now worked for Cheltenham Township. Then he headed for his car. As he did so, Kirsten Douglas walked to hers.

  She followed him until they’d left Ashbourne Road, but she got confused when he turned into a mall parking lot a few minutes later. He parked his car across from the bank. Then he got out and walked back to Kirsten’s car while motioning for her to roll down the window.

  “Why are you stopping here?” she asked.

  He pointed to a brightly colored sign in the middle of the mall’s parking lot. Kirsten saw it, but she couldn’t believe it.

  “Wendy’s?” she asked incredulously. “You stopped in the middle of a murder investigation to go to Wendy’s?”

  Coletti looked down for a few seconds before staring off into the distance. “You’re right—I shouldn’t have done this,” he said, shaking his head with fake regret. “I really should’ve gone to McDonald’s.”

  Kirsten watched as Coletti walked toward the restaurant. He opened the glass door and turned around before he went inside. “You coming?” he asked.r />
  She wanted to be professional, to stay on task, to do the right thing, but the smell of burgers and fries was wafting out the doors, and she hadn’t eaten at all since early that morning. She put her car in park, turned off the engine, and walked in behind Coletti.

  A few minutes later, after Kirsten parked her car and got in Coletti’s, he took a triple cheeseburger out of his bag and mercilessly tore it apart. Kirsten wanted badly to do the same, but not in front of Coletti. He grinned with grease-stained lips when he saw her hesitation.

  “Pretend it’s fried raven,” he said, stuffing fries into his mouth while starting the car.

  She laughed. But a few seconds later, she was devouring a hamburger. Crumbs scattered across the seats, ketchup spilled on their clothes, and with each bite, their inhibitions faded just a little.

  Within minutes, the hunger pangs were gone, and when they got on the road, their wariness began to give way to camaraderie. But even as they relaxed just a little, they both knew that the core problem remained. A killer was on the loose, and he needed to be caught before more lives were lost.

  Kirsten placed a call to Sean O’Hanlon to tell him that she was bringing Coletti along. O’Hanlon responded with a long silence before he agreed to see the detective.

  As Coletti drove north on Route 309 for the beginning of their two-hour trip, they were each lost in their own thoughts. Coletti wanted to know if it was possible for Lenore’s father to know anything about a child he hadn’t raised, and Kirsten wondered if traveling with Coletti would get her the story that she desired. Neither of them really wanted to be the first to speak. It was Kirsten who broke the ice.

  “So, how close do you think you are to solving the case?” she asked while sipping her soda.

  Coletti looked at her, and his mind took him back to the last time he’d traveled with a woman. The trip was to Graterford Prison to see Father Thomas O’Reilly, and the woman was Mary Smithson.