The Garden (Haunted Series)

by Alexie Aaron

  “Don’t know em.”

  “They’re buried in your garden, and you don’t know them?” Mia challenged.

  The man shook his head. “Depends when they were buried.”

  Mia decided to accept his answer as the truth. “I intend to replace everything I uproot. I chose this time of year before the plants woke up. Do you have a problem with that?”

  “No, as long as you do as you say,” he told her.

  “What if I find Sugarland Pete, Little Eddie, Bosco and their friend? Can I dig them up?”

  “I expect so. Bodies don’t help the plants any. I was telling her majesty that blood and bone weren’t good for the young plants.”

  “Did she listen to you?”

  “She killed me. I’m buried over under the yews,” he said dryly as if making small talk.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. You want me to find you and bury you in a Christian way?”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  “Can I have a name to put on the stone?”

  “Gerome Humphries.”

  “Mr. Humphries, I’ll do right by you.”

  “I’d appreciate it, Miss,” he said and disappeared.

  “Nice fella. Okay, there’s a Gerome Humphries killed by a woman planted under the yews in the back corner. He mentioned he warned her majesty that blood and bone weren’t good for the young plants. So she killed him. Now I don’t know if this is Eleanor or not. Maybe run Humphries name by Audrey, see what she can pick up.”

  “Does he know about the others?” Ted asked.

  “No.”

  “K. Back to work, Igor. Find me that last body, over.”

  “Gotcha, over.” Mia turned to Cid, and together they continued the grid.

  “How many?” Alan asked aghast. He had just put his briefcase down and had asked innocently, “What’s new?”

  “Thirteen, a baker’s dozen. Now don’t get excited, they are possible graves. Only two have been confirmed. One is a murder victim. Told Mia himself,” Ted informed the tired-looking lawyer. “How was your day?”

  “Hard. Long. Frustrating.”

  “I take it Bonner and Centers weren’t talking.”

  “Oh they talked, but not about what they were doing at the house. They have enough to hold Centers but nothing on Bonner. Bonner said he was curious about what was going on in his family home when he was attacked with a shovel. Didn’t identify Centers. Said it was too dark.” He looked around and asked, “Is Burt or Mike here?”

  “Burt’s upstairs in the library watching Mia and Cid in the garden. Mike’s bringing in food and drink. We haven’t heard from Audrey yet.”

  “Audrey is up to her neck in microfilm. She will be here in a few hours. What’s Mike bringing? I haven’t eaten since the crack of dawn.”

  “Don’t know, but it will be hot, filling, and fattening.” Ted raised his hand and listened to his com. He typed a few keystrokes and looked at Alan and said, “Fourteen.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The squeaking of the rope above him was annoying. Burt chose not to look up. One time staring at the blackened face with the protruding tongue was enough. He concentrated instead on his team members in the garden below. From here the day-glo marked graves resembled chess moves. At one point Mia accidently sprayed Cid’s boot. Cid retaliated, and now Mia sported vibrant pink and orange stripes in her tresses. She didn’t complain, just sat on the ground and laughed.

  He heard footsteps approaching, and he turned around and put down his camera donned with an impressive telephoto lens. Alan stood there looking drawn and pinched.

  “You know there’s a corpse dangling over your head,” Alan mentioned. “How is it I’m seeing this? I couldn’t before.”

  “There is something that is fueling the activity here. It seems to be growing, hence the appearance by our lady of the noose. I try not to let her bother me. You come up to watch the kids?”

  “I understand we have fourteen possible graves in the garden.”

  “So far. They are about done. Mia wants to keep the GPR and run it in the subbasement of the house. I think it’s a good idea. But it’s up to you.”

  “Me?” Alan sat down on the desk, accepted the offer of the camera and closed one eye and focused in on Cid and Mia. “Is that a personal choice with her hair?”

  “No that’s Cid’s.”

  “Alright, moving on. When they finish, I expect they are going to want to dig.”

  “Actually, I think it would be best to bring Father Santos here. He has a group of professionals that will unearth the graves and transport and bury them in consecrated ground. Unless the body is of a victim in an open investigation, or a missing person, you won’t have to bring in the police. They find old graves all the time when they develop farmland. But we will have to find names to go with the bodies. That’s what I hope Audrey can help us with.”

  “What happens once they are moved? Will they continue haunting the house?”

  “If they choose to move on, they will not be a problem. If they are volatile and stubborn, they will be dealt with. But not all your problems are in that garden.”

  “Eleanor’s body is in the family mausoleum,” Alan said glumly. “Do we burn the witch in her grave? I saw that on television once.”

  Burt kept his graveside antics to himself.

  Alan started laughing and handed the lens to Burt.

  Burt focused and watched as Mia attacked Cid with white spray. He now had a skunk stripe up the back of his black hoodie. Burt chuckled and said, “I figured that was coming. Mia believes a little revenge is good for the soul.”

  ~

  Audrey parked her car and hurried inside. She had news. She found the group in the kitchen enjoying an Italian feast. There were open bottles of red wine, and someone had washed the Gruber crystal glasses. She stared at the motley crew and the elegant expensive stemware and shook her head.

  “Come in and grab a plate,” Mike instructed. “We are celebrating Burt losing the garden bet.”

  Audrey walked over to the cupboard, passing by Mia and her day-glo striped hair and Cid who resembled Pepe Le Pew. They were laughing at something Ted had just said. Burt scooted over, and Audrey sat between him and Alan.

  “I have news!” Audrey bubbled as she dished up some mostaccioli. “You know the gentlemen that are supposedly buried in the garden? Well, they weren’t hobos. I looked up the names and found an ad trying to locate members of a missing jazz quartet. Bosco, Sugarland Pete, Little Eddie and Spinner Spazinski.”

  “Whoa!” Mia exclaimed. “So how’d they end up in our garden?”

  “It was during prohibition, perhaps they got on the wrong side of a turf war,” Alan offered. “Maybe this is just a dumping ground.”

  “With that cemetery a half mile down the road? I doubt it,” Burt argued.

  “You could ask them,” Mike said, nodding in Mia’s direction.

  She glared at him. “Most dead people don’t know how they died, only they aren’t alive anymore,” she warned. “I’m not going near Spinner Spazinski until he is above ground.”

  “So now we have names. I wonder if anyone is still looking for them?” Mike asked.

  “It wouldn’t be hard to find out,” Alan said. “I’ll have Brenda do a search. Audrey, would you happen to have a copy of the ad?”

  “Yes, in my briefcase.”

  “Remind me to collect it.”

  “You got it. I have more information. Seems that around the same time the quartet disappeared, Too Tall Terry skipped town with Moran’s bankroll.”

  “Not Bugs Moran?” Alan asked.

  “Yes.”

  Mia raised her hand. “For us uncultured slobs from Kansas and the sticks, could you tell us who Bugs Moran is?”

  “An Irish mobster that ran the north side before the St. Valentine’s Day shindig,” Alan elaborated.

  “So we have Too Tall Terry missing with a great deal of money. It couldn’t be worth much today,” Burt reasoned.
<
br />   “Ah but that’s where you’d be wrong. You see Bugs had a fondness for gold coins. He always said, “In a fire, paper burns and gold may melt, but it’s still gold.” Audrey smiled. “My daddy was big on the local Irish lore,” she explained.

  “So how much gold are we talking?” Mike asked.

  “No one knows. It wasn’t like Moran to claim the theft with the police. He had his way of dealing with things.” Alan pulled the trigger on his imaginary gun.

  “So before we all make the leap to Sanctum Man being the ghost of Too Tall Terry, we may want to figure out how Bonner and Centers knew about this,” Burt cautioned.

  “Family stories passed down. Just like family recipes,” Cid suggested.

  “I could check Eleanor’s early journals, but I think she was born in 1932. She wouldn’t have been alive at the time,” Audrey figured.

  “She have any siblings?” Cid asked.

  “Two older brothers, both deceased,” Audrey said, walking out of the room. She came back in with the family bible in hand. From it she pulled a black and white family photo and set it on the table to be passed around. “Robert died in 1970, and the other, John, died of the flu thirty years ago. David Bonner is his grandson. John Bonner could have passed down the rumor of a treasure to his family before he died.”

  “If there were gold coins on the property, I imagine the people here at the time would have spent them,” Mike pointed out.

  “Not if the mob was still looking for it,” Cid argued.

  “In 1933 it became illegal to hoard gold. Citizens had to turn in their gold coins and bullion if it was over one hundred dollars. If the Bonners had more than that, they would have been facing stiff penalties, possibly jail,” Alan informed them. “If it was found after the initial collection, it could have been too dangerous to deal with, not to mention hard to explain.”

  “Alan, how come John’s family didn’t inherit the mansion?” Mia asked. “I thought property was passed from father to eldest surviving son and so on.”

  “That’s an interesting point which the Bonners’ lawyer argued at trial. But Robert passed the deed of the mansion to his sister. ‘For services rendered,’ I believe was the reason stated.”

  “I hate to admit where my mind just went,” Mia said in a low voice. “Let’s pretend it was for something less icky.” She reached for the picture and studied it. The Bonners were a stocky group. Eleanor was much younger than the brothers. A dozen pictures flashed in her head. She’d seen the younger brother somewhere before.

  Ted, who had been silent the whole discussion, summed up, “We have a possibility of gold coins on the property; a giant of an entity that warns all away from his sanctum; four dead jazz musicians, dead for unknown reasons, buried with a Gerome Humphries who claims he wouldn’t allow his mistress to use blood and bone to nourish her plants so she killed him and buried him under the yews; plus, we have nine other unknowns also buried in the garden. Sounds like Saturday afternoon horror movie to me.”

  “John’s the dirty bugger!” Mia blurted out as the realization of where she’d seen a photo of him before. “John’s the pervert with the bondage pit in the wall. Audrey, who was Eleanor, Robert and John’s father?”

  Audrey traced the tree with her finger. “Richard.” She looked at Mia and said, “Rebecca’s Uncle Richard.”

  “She mentioned that her uncle Richard was in charge when her father went missing. Who was her father?”

  “Terrance.”

  There was silence in the room, until Ted gave a low whistle.

  “Too Tall Terry was Terrance Bonner,” Mike announced. “So Terry comes home with a jazz quartet, why?”

  “Maybe they all were en route to a speakeasy. The quartet could have been a cover or simply staying here…” Cid theorized.

  “Hold on, before we come up with fifty scenarios people, let’s get some facts under our belt,” Burt said, bringing them all down to earth.

  Alan looked stunned. Audrey waved a hand in front of his eyes.

  “Sorry, I was accessing my memory trying to figure out if we find this gold, who does it belong to legally?”

  “Terrance’s heirs?” Ted suggested.

  “He stole it,” reminded Mia.

  “I don’t suppose Moran has any living heirs?” Alan asked looking at Audrey.

  “Don’t know. I’ll ask Dad.”

  “I hate once again to be the adult in the room, but aren’t we jumping the gun? We haven’t found any gold coins yet. I don’t suppose you came across any buried treasure in the garden. Nor identified any of the bodies. Until we do, all this is conjecture,” Burt reminded them.

  “He’s right,” Mia said. “Our job here is to clear this house of paranormal problems so it can be used as an abuse shelter. This talk of gold and treasure may supply us with motives and maybe conversational tidbits for the next time Sanctum Man comes for tea. Until then, let’s use the GPR in the subbasement. I would like to rule out that something worse than the scandal of theft is generating all that feeling of evil down there and in the garden. Until we take away the fuel, the haunting will continue.”

  “Alan, how hard would it be to get in to see Eleanor’s grave?” Burt asked.

  “Near impossible at this point. David Bonner isn’t going to let us near her. We are the enemy.”

  “We could trade him, oh, some porn for permission?” Mia said evenly. “He wouldn’t want those getting into the wrong hands, would he?”

  “I’m an attorney, blackmail is against the law,” Alan said stubbornly.

  “Is supposition against the law?” Mia turned to Ted and said, “David, theoretically, if I found some embarrassing photos your grandfather took of himself, wouldn’t you want to have them?”

  “Yes, hand them over!” Ted hammed.

  “Hypothetically, I could do this if I was able to pay my respects to Eleanor in person…” Mia let her voice trail off. She looked over at Alan and asked, “Well?”

  He put his hand to his brow and closed his eyes. “I can’t do it.”

  “You wouldn’t have to,” Mike said.

  “Why do you need access to her body?” Alan asked.

  “To make sure it’s there,” Mia lied.

  “DNA?”

  “Perhaps,” she said drawing out each syllable.

  Ted’s leg put pressure on Mia’s thigh and she changed the subject. “Mike, did you say you brought cannoli?”

  He got up and opened the refrigerator, grabbed a foil-wrapped tube and tossed it to Mia.

  “Thank you.”

  “Anyone else want dessert?” he asked, winking at Mia and her ruse.

  ~

  “That’s three Bela Lugosi awards for Mia,” Ted said to Burt as they readied the computer to receive the transmission from the GPR.

  Burt repeated in his Mia imitation, “Perhaps.”

  “That sent chills down my spine,” Ted admitted.

  Mike and Alan listened intently while Mia and Cid took turns explaining the operation of the GPR. They had taken all the light discs Ted had in his possession and placed them in a grid on the hard ground. They eased the machine carefully down the planks Cid and Alan found in the storage area.

  Audrey wrinkled her nose at the fetid smell of the subbasement. She handed Mia the boxes of salt she carried. “Have you ever visited a mushroom farm?” she asked her.

  Mia shook her head.

  “Well, the one I went to used buildings half in and out of the ground. There were wide expanses, and it was pretty much dark with the exception of the controlled lighting. The different varieties grown there made the place look like a formal garden of sorts. My first impression of this place was of a garden. I suppose you think I’m nuts.”

  Mia raised an eyebrow. “I’m hardly in any position, or mind, to call anyone nuts. It does kind of look like a field just planted,” Mia observed. “I can’t stand the smell. I hope there isn’t a mold problem.”

  “As long as it hasn’t made its way into the basement or u
p into the house, it won’t be a problem. I’m going to recommend this area be filled in and sealed off. I can’t see any way to use it.”

  “Except growing mushrooms,” Mia suggested.

  Audrey laughed. “You may have something there.” She tapped the side of her face with her forefinger. “I wonder if this place with all the land could be self-sustaining. Once we remove the bodies, that garden could be a fine place to grow herbs on raised platforms. They would be protected from windburn by the walls.”

  “Theft too. Nothing gets by or over those walls without notice,” Mia mentioned.

  “You said you were pulled through two sets of walls before you landed in the garden. I wonder if the space between is accessible somehow?” Audrey asked.

  “Next time I see Murphy, I’ll ask him.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Out and about. Ted asked him to not wander too far, we may need him if Sanctum Man makes an appearance.”

  “Why doesn’t he just stay in the house?”

  “Two things. One, there is a presence here that is disturbing. Tends to rile up the ghosts. Two, Murphy likes the woods. He is more comfortable amidst the trees than here with corporals, although he has a firm date to watch PBS with Cid. Before that was April and Antiques Roadshow.”

  “What about you? I understand you two have been friends for a long time.”

  “Audrey, it’s a very long sad, glad, story to explain Murphy and me. We used to be connected emotionally until I had an aneurism removed. It changed me in ways I’m not happy about. But that’s neither here nor there. Right now we better clear the area and let the guys work.”

  Mia’s job was to move the lights as the men approached them and to keep an eye out for manifesting spirits. Audrey was headed upstairs to dig into the journals she hadn’t had a chance to open yet. She passed Cid who had a large video camera on his shoulder. He winked at her with his black and blue eye. She smiled. She hurried through the basement, avoiding looking in the corners. Once she reached the main floor, she sighed. The kitchen was brightly lit, and the smell of freshly made coffee wafted over from the counter. She stopped and filled a mug before heading to the dining room and the books that awaited her there.