Coffin Man

by James D. Doss

  Trying to catch up with Captain Boyle was (for those who had attempted it) like chasing that fabled will-o’-the-wisp across a Mississippi swamp at midnight. And Sarah was beginning to doubt that she had actually seen the man who now competed with Charlie Moon for walk-on appearances in her dreams.

  But her luck was bound to change, and it did. Sarah got a clear look at the fellow as he turned onto a red-bricked pathway that was hedged in on both sides by all sorts of bushes. It definitely was Captain Boyle, and the limping man was carrying the familiar cane. Tossing any thought of ladylike dignity aside, Sarah modified her gait from brisk strides to a trot. She did not call to mind a gazelle making a desperate dash across an African savanna to elude a hungry lion. Hers was a light, ladylike jog such as one might witness on the boulevard when Madam is chasing her favorite hat, which perky little lid has departed on the wings of the west wind.

  It would be gratifying to report that this admirable effort produced the desired result.

  It would also be gratifying to report that while she dozed, Charlie Moon’s aunt Daisy was transformed into a loving, selfless old soul who was destined to be elevated to sainthood within a year after her demise.

  Sarah Frank’s graceful sprint slowed to a hesitant walk. Where did he go? Puzzled, she peered this way and that. The fellow had certainly not sprouted wings and flown out of the park. Which (she theorized) left only one possibility: Captain Boyle had concealed himself in the brushy undergrowth that lined the bricked pathway.

  But why would he do that?

  The possibility that the charming young man might be luring her into some unseemly rendezvous never crossed the innocent’s mind. It did occur to Sarah that … Maybe he knows I’m following him, and he’s slipped away. The very thought of such a hurtful insult made the sensitive young lady’s face burn with shame—and produced a surge of prideful anger. If he’s deliberately avoiding me, I certainly don’t have a word to say to him! Her embarrassing predicament called for a facesaving withdrawal. I’ll go back to the park and tell Aunt Daisy that it’s time we headed for home. A prudent strategy, but Sarah’s intrepid feet had another plan.

  Shh … Listen.

  Plip-clop. Plop-clip.

  (The sound of footwear slapping the pathway’s worn bricks.)

  Clip-plop. Plop-plip.

  And so on and so forth as Sarah’s sandals sallied forth.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  SARAH’S SUDDEN AND UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTER WITH—

  But that would be giving too much away; let events unfold as they may. We shall merely follow the winsome lass and see what happens.

  * * *

  After treading along for about a hundred yards, even Sarah Frank’s feet were beginning to have second thoughts about pursuing a man she barely knew through a deserted section of the park. And not only that … If I find Captain Boyle, what’ll I say? It would be necessary to admit to the truth: “I thought I recognized you back by the duck pond, so I decided to follow you like a hound tracking down a fox.” But that did not sound very ladylike, and the dignified young woman was trying to think of a better way to explain her hurried pursuit—when she noticed several crumbling, moss-encrusted grave markers on either side of the red-bricked pathway. Sarah deduced (correctly) that she had crossed the unmarked boundary that separated U.S. Grant Park from Granite Creek Cemetery, and that she was now in the so-called historic section of that latter property. Much as little Dorothy might have done had she realized where the Yellow Brick Road was leading her, her adorable dog Toto, and their trio of oddball companions—Sarah stopped dead still to decide whether or not to proceed.

  But the comparison is of limited utility. Unlike Dorothy, Sarah Frank knew what lay ahead. Or thought she did. It’s only a little way to the modern section of the cemetery, where I left Daisy a few days ago. From somewhere far behind her, there was a rumbling drumroll of midsummer thunder. Right after that, I drove over to the park and sat down on the bench and met Captain Boyle and had a nice chat with him. But now Aunt Daisy was in the park and she was among the tombstones. Be they historic or modern, Sarah had no burning interest in cemeteries. The sensible option that presented itself was to ignore her wanderlust feet, turn around, and return to the bench where Aunt Daisy was either still dozing peacefully or rubbing her sleepy eyes, looking around and wondering, Where in the world has the flighty girl gone?

  And Sarah would have given up the chase except for two minor occurrences.

  First, a thought: This must be the same path that Aunt Daisy used last week to walk from the cemetery over to the park.

  Second, a sound. Or, more precisely, a series of sounds.

  Scuff. Clink. Scuff-scuff. Scuff-clink.

  That sounds like someone digging. With a hand trowel, she imagined, in rocky soil. But where? The young woman cocked her head to ascertain the direction from which the various scuffs and clinks were originating. Over there, to my left. Digging in the modern section of the cemetery where there were still plots to sell was surely a commonplace enough event. But this historic section had (she supposed) been fully populated many decades ago; the recently deceased need not apply for space. I bet someone is sprucing up one of the historic grave sites.

  Our scholar’s conclusion was sufficiently correct to merit a grade of A. (But not an A+, which is reserved for those deductions that are the very essence of perfection.)

  Sarah Frank peered through an opening in the undergrowth. No, she did not see Captain Boyle. What she did observe was the tombstone that Daisy Perika had paused to inspect last week (Maude Plimpton, 1869–1888). Yes, this was the very spot where the tribal elder had held a conversation with a female spirit who was—to Daisy’s intense disappointment—invisible.

  Sarah didn’t get the least glimmer of a ghost of any description or gender. What the girl did behold, a yard or two beyond the Plimpton tombstone, was a battered little vehicle that (to the imaginative girl) suggested the hybrid offspring of a pigmy pickup truck and a golf cart. It looks like it’s been in a wreck. The banged-up cemetery cart had also been recently painted. Within a few paces of the vehicle, she spotted a large man in brand-new blue bib overalls. He had a purple bruise on his cheek and an ACE bandage around his forearm. This flesh-and-blood person was on his hands and knees, tidying up a small patch of earth with a trowel. Oh, I remember him. As Sarah watched, Freddy Whitsun placed a small bouquet of white roses on the grave.

  Isn’t that sweet. Stepping through the hedge, the sentimental girl wiped a tear from her eye.

  Freddy Whitsun got up slowly, the painful progress of his ascent punctuated with guttural grunts and moaning groans. The unfortunate had begun to wonder if he would ever fully recover from the humiliating accident wherein he had been attached to the runaway electric vehicle.

  As he turned to present his homely face, Sarah smiled. “Hello, Mr. Whitsun.”

  The cemetery custodian who had replaced the recently deceased Morris Meusser blinked bleary, bloodshot eyes at the semifamiliar face. “Do I know you, miss?”

  Sarah reminded him that she had been with Charlie Moon when Chief Parris’s deputy had been called to the cemetery on Sunday morning, when Mr. Meusser’s body had been discovered in his quarters. And that she was the person who had transported Charlie Moon’s aunt Daisy to the cemetery on Tuesday. In a Ford pickup. A red F-150.

  As the significance of this information dawned on him, Whitsun nodded slowly. “Oh, yeah.” You brought that old Indian woman who I was following when my overall suspender got hooked to the cart and I was drug halfway across the cemetery. Aunt Daisy’s latest victim exhaled a melancholy sigh and tipped the bill of his ABC Hardware gimme cap. “How’re you doin’, young lady?”

  “Oh, fine.” Which reminded Sarah why she had been treading along the bricked pathway. “Have you seen a man pass by in the last minute or so?” Her dark face blushed invisibly as she regretted her query, but in for a dime, in for a dollar. The girl pointed toward where she had come from. “I was over in t
he park and I saw someone I know, but before I could say hello he walked away and … well, I was trying to catch up with him, but he must have…” Her words petered off like the end of a cold trail.

  “No, ma’am, I ain’t seen nobody around here but you.” Freddy Whitsun grunted again as he leaned to pick a coil of yellow nylon rope off the ground. “But when I’m busy I don’t pay much attention to nothing but my work, so I guess anybody could’ve come by here without me noticing.”

  “He walks in the park quite often, so I suppose he might come over here from time to time.” She had a hopeful thought. “Maybe you know him.”

  “I know almost everybody in Granite Creek County.” The cemetery custodian stuck the trowel into his hip pocket. “What’s this fella’s name?”

  “Erasmus Boyle,” she said. “Actually, it’s Captain Erasmus Boyle.”

  Whitsun’s face went blank as a chalkboard slate that’d just been wiped clean with a damp rag.

  Sarah’s expressive countenance mirrored her disappointment. “You’ve never heard of him?”

  The custodian hesitated. “That name’s a familiar one.”

  The happy girl flashed a pretty smile. “Do you know where I could find him?”

  Turning as if to avert his face from her gaze, Whitsun nodded. After another, longer hesitation, the custodian muttered, “But I don’t think he’d want me to tell you.”

  “Oh.” This revelation was acutely embarrassing. “Well … it wasn’t all that important; please just forget that I asked.” As Sarah turned to depart, her gaze was pulled to the custodian, who was looping the end of the rope through a sturdy eyebolt on the cemetery utility cart. If being given the brush-off by Captain Boyle “wasn’t all that important,” then why was she so interested in such a mundane matter as Freddy Whitsun and his yellow nylon rope? Because, by means of some deep warning instinct, she was certain that something important was about to happen. Sarah Frank couldn’t imagine what.

  THE SLEEPER AWAKENS

  Just as Sarah Frank had imagined, Daisy Perika did awaken and rub her sleepy eyes. Moreover, she looked around with an inquisitive expression. It would be gratifying to report that she wondered, Where in the world has the flighty girl gone? but Daisy’s cooperation has its limits. Her actual thoughts were, Good, that silly Ute-Papago orphan has gone off to toss popcorn at the ducks or annoy some poor homeless person. This is my chance to slip away and find it!

  Find what?

  It would appear that Charlie Moon’s aunt is not ready to reveal that piece of information.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  A LYNCHING

  As Freddy Whitsun was tying the nylon rope onto the electric cart’s steel eyebolt, a worrisome thought occurred to the custodian. He gave Sarah Frank a wary look. “I expect Cap’n Boyle brought you here to see me.”

  Sarah was at a loss for words at such a peculiar suggestion. But not thoughts. Mr. Whitsun might be right. His speculation certainly fit the facts. Had the enigmatic young man been—in a literal sense—leading her down the garden path?

  “I guess I ought’n to be surprised.” After grimacing thoughtfully at a stout cottonwood limb that stretched out about six feet over his head, Freddy Whitsun tossed the free end of the rope over the branch and grabbed it as it fell. The big man gave the nylon rope a hard tug and seemed satisfied. “Boyle’s just one more person hereabouts who’s mad at me. I did my best to apologize and make amends, but I guess he means to stir up all the trouble he can. I expect he knows what I’m fixing to do and wanted you to come and be a witness.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean—” Sarah watched in horror as the custodian’s dexterous fingers began to fashion a noose in the rope. She heard her mouth ask, “What are you doing, Mr. Whitsun?”

  “You’d best leave now, young lady.”

  “You aren’t actually planning to…” She could not get the awful phrase past her lips.

  “Yes ma’am, I am.” Whitsun stepped onto a stubby pine stump. “You run along now.”

  “No!” She stamped her sandaled foot on the ground. “You mustn’t do that!”

  The big man took his ABC Hardware cap off and slipped the noose over his shaggy head. “And why not?”

  This stopped her cold. But not for long. “Because it’s wrong.”

  “Say’s who?”

  “Say’s God!” Her voice was steady now. “Suicide is a mortal sin.”

  A man can’t spit around here without hitting a Catholic. But the fervent Christian’s assertion had gotten his attention. The mortal who was about to embark on a one-way journey to an uncertain destination paused to explain, “I don’t have no choice—I have to do it.”

  Sarah stepped past the Maude Plimpton tombstone. “No you don’t.”

  “Yes I do.”

  She approached the stump and looked up. “Why?”

  “Because all I do is mess up.” Whitsun sighed. “If I go on living, I’m bound to keep on causing all kinds of trouble. But once I’m dead as a rusty doornail, that’s the end of it.”

  Sarah shook her head. “No it’s not.”

  “You’re just a kid—what do you know?”

  The little trooper straightened her back like a West Point cadet. “I know that anybody who doesn’t face up to the hard things in life is a … a coward!” There.

  The noosed man snorted. “What’ve you ever faced up to, Little Miss Goody Two-shoes?”

  A fair question, and Miss Frank told him more than a thing or two. Which recitation included the violent death of her parents when she was a tot, and how she almost got sent to jail for a murder over in Utah and would have if Charlie Moon hadn’t come to her rescue, and how she’d had to fight off a coyote down on the Southern Ute reservation who intended to eat Mr. Zig-Zag, and—

  “Who the heck is Mr. Zig-Zag?”

  “My cat.”

  “Oh.” That struck a chord. I had me a black kitty when I was five years old. Whitsun’s brow furrowed as he tried to remember the fuzzy little creature. What was his name?

  “And that’s not all.” Sarah seated herself on a rectangular slab of weathered limestone that Whitsun had pushed aside from the grave he’d put the flowers on. She took a deep breath and told this virtual stranger what she’d never said out loud to a single soul in the whole wide world: “And more than anything, I want to be Charlie Moon’s wife—but he hardly knows I’m alive. And he’s going to marry someone else.”

  Despite his pressing personal problems, Mr. Whitsun was beginning to get interested. “Who?”

  Sarah looked up at the massive figure looming above her like an overalled bear. “What?”

  “Who’s ol’ Charlie Moon going to marry?”

  “Patsy Poynter. She works over at the public library.”

  From time to time, the handyman checked out volumes by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. The reader breathed a low whistle. “That little blue-eyed blonde’s sure a looker.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Sorry, kid.” Freddy Whitsun realized that some kind of compliment was called for. “You’re cute as a spotted puppy under a red wagon.”

  Sarah glared at the peculiar man. “Now take that silly noose off your neck and get off the stump.”

  As Whitsun shook his head, the yellow rope scratched his sunburned neck.

  Remembering how TV-show police dealt with jumpers and hostage-takers and the like, Sarah thought she might as well give that a try. If I can just keep him talking long enough, maybe he’ll lose interest in killing himself. “You wouldn’t want to die without making a confession.”

  The self-condemned man astonished his softhearted, would-be savior with this reply: “I hadn’t thought about it, but I guess you’re right.” But a difficulty occurred to the non-Catholic. “Don’t you need a priest to do that?”

  “Not in extenuating circumstances.” Sarah summoned up all her courage. “You can confess to me.”

  The potential confessee arched a doubtful brow. “And you wouldn’t tell a so
ul about my sins?”

  Her head bobbed in an earnest nod. “Cross my heart and hope to die!”

  Reassured by this sacred oath, Freddy Whitsun proceeded to tell the girl about his many messings-up. The man on the stump started off with some bad things he’d done in grade school (dipping a red-headed girl’s pigtail in purple ink), and proceeded with a long, seemingly endless list of failures that sounded more like dumb mistakes than sins to Sarah, who was pleased that her ploy to delay the suicidal man was working so well. So far.

  Skipping some unseemly incidents that were too graphic for a young lady’s ears, the repentant sinner finally worked his way up to his most recent troubles. “Everything I’ve done has come back to haunt me.” Whitsun proceeded to provide a lurid account of the pair of “spirits” that had appeared at his bedroom window during the wee hours.

  “When you say spirits, do you mean … ghosts?”

  The haunted man groaned and nodded his head.

  I bet he’s been reading some scary ghost stories. Or watching them on TV. Sarah remembered those terrifying apparitions who’d haunted Scrooge. “Ghosts like in ‘A Christmas Carol’?”

  This reference produced a puzzled expression.

  Sarah explained the gist of Mr. Dickens’s plot, dwelling for quite some time on the scene where Marley’s ghost appears at the miserable miser’s bedside. She was about to move on to the Sprits of Christmas Past, etc., when Freddy Whitsun halted her narrative with an impatient gesture.

  “I can’t stand on this damned stump all day listening to fairy tales—my back is starting to ache.” Sensing that he had hurt the storyteller’s feelings, Whitsun admitted that he vaguely recalled the tale, and agreed that his experience was much like that. Except in his story, there were only two haunts and they always appeared together. “One of them reminds me of my worst sins and tells me how much trouble I’ve caused and how I ain’t fit to live. The other one says—more or less—I ain’t so much a sinner as a halfwit who’s to be pitied.” I don’t know which one of ’em aggravates me the most. “They show up a few hours after the sun goes down and don’t leave me alone till dawn—I don’t hardly get a wink of sleep.” The defeated man seemed about to burst into tears. “I just can’t take it anymore.”