Skeleton Key

by Jane Haddam

  Her machine began to beep again. Eve clamped the headset on her head and picked up.

  “Road Maintenance Department. Can I help you?”

  “There’s a telephone pole down on Capernaum Road? Are you kidding me?”

  “Ask Rita. It’s Rita who would be kidding you.”

  “Jesus. In the middle of the night like this. What would bring a telephone pole down in the middle of the night like this?”

  “Wind, maybe.”

  “There isn’t enough wind to blow over a matchstick. You’d need a major hurricane.”

  “So maybe it’s been down for a long time and somebody just noticed it now.”

  “Not likely. Half the world uses that damned road as a shortcut You sure Rita didn’t say anything about an accident, about some car knocking over a telephone pole on Capernaum Road?”

  “Nope.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Craig?” Eve said. “Do you ever think that you’ve had enough of it? Your life, I mean. Do you ever think that you really have to change everything around right now?”

  “I think that if I ever win the lottery I’m going to retire to Florida. Are you drunk or something?”

  “No. No, just a little tired. I’m sorry.”

  “You can tell Rita we’ll be out there in about twenty minutes.”

  “She says the report says that the pole may be leaning into a set of power lines. You may need SNET as well as CL and P.”

  “Right Shit. Just what I need when it’s right before Halloween.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Do you realize you apologize for everything?” Craig said. “You apologize for stuff you didn’t even do.”

  “Sorry,” Eve said again—but there was nobody to hear her. The dial tone was buzzing in her ears again. She took the headset off again and pushed her chair away from the computer.

  It wasn’t stupid, or drunk, to ask the kind of questions she was asking now. Eve was sure of it. Everybody had to ask those questions. The lucky ones asked while they were still in high school, when they had a world of time to do something about their dissatisfaction.

  She got up and went into the living room. There was a fireplace there with a big mirror over the mantel, but nothing else except boxes of files and manuals, pushed up against the wall on the north side of the room. Eve went to the mirror and looked at herself. The image she got back was murky and inconclusive. She went out the front door that stood at one end of the living room and out onto the front stoop. With the door open, she would be able to hear the machine if it beeped.

  What was it that people did that put realness in their lives? That was what she didn’t understand. How did people end up with families, or jobs they had for twenty years, or nice little niches in groups like the Friends of the Library or the Town Benevolent League? How did they start? To Eve, life was like a dust storm, pulled this way and that, with no particular direction.

  There has to be something else besides this, she told herself—and then she realized that she was freezing. She was standing on the stoop in her light cotton shirt and polyester-made-to-look-like-cotton vest, and the air around her had that unyielding hardness that meant a major frost.

  She turned around and went back into the house and closed the door behind her.

  I’m forty-nine years old, she told herself, and I have to do something about it.

  8

  Because it was the Friday before Halloween, the noises out back had been awful all day, and even more awful once it got to be dark. Martin Chandling found himself having to go out back to take a look at least once every half hour. He wouldn’t have bothered, except that a couple of years ago they had had real trouble. That was when Jackey Hargrove had gone in with two of his friends and tipped over half a dozen gravestones and then tried to dig up a grave. It only went to prove that Jackey was just as stupid as everybody thought he was, because the grave he had tried to dig up had a cremated man in it, and if he had managed to get down to the box, all he would have found was a marble urn with a pile of ashes in it. Still, Martin thought, you had to be careful. There had been a couple of incidents in other parts of the state in recent years. Down in Danbury, there had been a real mess, complete with desecrations. All Martin needed now was to have one of his two-hundred-year-old skeletons pulled out of the ground and dragged into Washington Depot All he needed now was to have something come along and make him lose this job, which he had had as far back as he could remember, maybe as far back as time. Other people might have found it disturbing, living in a little house right next to the cemetery grounds, but Martin rather liked it. It was quiet, and cool, too, even in the summer, because of all the shade trees. He thought he would have felt differently about one of those new cemeteries, run by a corporation, with professional landscaping and paved roads between the graves. This cemetery went all the way back to 1697. One whole section of it, up in the back near the rotting wood building that had once been a church, was given over to the members of a single family. That was why this was called the Fairchild Family Cemetery, even though there were other people besides Fairchilds in it. Martin often wondered what it had been like for them, when they were still almost the only family here.

  Actually, Martin could remember a lot of his life before coming to the Fairchild Family Cemetery. He couldn’t have forgotten it if he’d wanted to, because his brother Henry lived at the cemetery with him, and always had. Sometimes it seemed to Martin as if he and Henry had done everything together all his fifty-six years. They had even gotten married together, once, back in 1962, but it hadn’t lasted long for either of them.

  “I could understand it if you were twins,” Martin’s wife had told him when she left. “I still wouldn’t like it, but at least I would understand it. But you aren’t even close. There’s three years between the two of you and your sister Esther besides. I don’t understand what it is you think you’re doing.”

  It was Henry who was the older. He would be fifty-nine in November. Martin’s wife had been a schoolteacher, and Martin had always thought that that was the real problem there. It was a mistake to get involved with an educated woman. They always wanted to be someplace they weren’t, and they ran a man’s life ragged in the process. Martin’s wife had taken a job in Westport—“where I’ll be halfway close to civilization,” as she put it—and then married a professor at NYU. Martin thought about her sometimes, during all those crazy riots in the late 1960s. He hadn’t been able to decide whether she would like them or hate them. She had liked flowers growing in flower boxes in the spring, and instrumental music with a high twangy sound to it she bought in record albums put out by some outfit in Germany. She liked Christmas at her mother’s, too, which Martin had never been able to stand.

  He was standing on his own back porch, trying to listen to any sounds that might be coming from the cemetery. All he heard was his brother Henry, tramping along on the frosted grass and swearing, not quite under his breath. Other than that, the world might as well have been empty. There weren’t even any cars going by on 109.

  “Henry?”

  “It’s that Dallmer woman,” Henry said. “She’s probably dead in a ditch up there. Her car’s sure as hell about as dead as it can get.”

  Martin switched on his flashlight and waved it into the dark. He caught Henry, looking furious.

  “Her car’s where?” he asked. “In the cemetery?”

  “Of course it’s in the cemetery,” Henry said.

  “But how can it be in the cemetery? There aren’t any roads in the cemetery. Nobody’s supposed to drive in there.”

  Henry reached the porch and came up the steps. “It’s the Jeep with the wheels, the one she has done up like a damned tank. It went right over the meadow and in where the Gordons are buried.”

  “But…” Martin said.

  Henry went past him, into the house. Martin heard him pick up the phone and punch the pad. He hated Touch-Tone phones, all those weird beepings they made. If he’d had the money, he would h
ave gone to one of those antique stores and got himself a rotary model. The rotary models always reminded him of his own mother.

  Henry came back onto the porch. He looked angrier than he had when he went in.

  “I talked to Rita,” he said. “She says the Dallmer woman called the thing in stolen, almost an hour ago. Kids, she says. There were kids in it.”

  “How does she know?”

  “I’ve got to go back up and look around. I can’t leave some asshole teenager lying in a hole up there with a broken neck and then all the TV stations saying what a bastard I am when he dies. Did I ever tell you all teenagers are assholes?”

  “Yes,” Martin said.

  Henry walked down the porch steps and into the dark. “If it was that Dallmer woman, I could have left her where she was to rot, and nobody would give a damn. If it’s some kid, everybody will say they care even if they don’t. Assholes.”

  Martin shined the flashlight at Henry’s back. He didn’t want to be left here on the porch alone. It was close enough to midnight for him to be getting the heebie-jeebies. He didn’t like the idea of a fresh body out there, never looked over by a funeral parlor. Martin liked his dead men to be really dead, sucked dry of blood, immobile.

  “Henry?” he said.

  Henry stopped walking. Martin’s flashlight caught the red and black of his checked flannel shirt.

  “Come on if you’re going to come,” he said. “Don’t just stand there getting cold.”

  “All right,” Martin said.

  He came carefully down the porch steps and onto the bed of leaves that made up their backyard every fall. They were going to have to get around to raking it pretty soon. If they didn’t, the snows would come and dump on top of it all. Then, when the spring thaw came, the yard would be nothing but slime.

  “Hurry up,” Henry said.

  Martin drew up behind him and trained the flashlight on the ground just ahead of them. It didn’t help much.

  “I’m beginning to see the point of that priest used to be over at St. John’s,” Henry said. “Halloween is the devil in disguise. Halloween ought to be abolished. Maybe they should just get Jackey and his friends and put them in jail every October first, and not let them out again until Thanks-giving.”

  It wasn’t Jackey anymore, Martin thought. Jackey worked at a gas station in Middlebury. It was Jackey’s brother Skeet, who was just as bad and just as stupid. They were rounding up the hill now, though, and Martin could see the Jeep. It was lying all the way over on its side, with its oversized wheels mostly in the air.

  “That wasn’t an accident,” Martin said, waving the flashlight. “Look at it.”

  “I am looking at it,” Henry said. “What is it if it isn’t an accident?”

  Martin went up to the Jeep. “There’s no ditch here. There’s just an incline.”

  “So?”

  “So what would you have to do, to tip a Jeep over like this, with no incline and those wheels? You’d have to push it.”

  “Push it.”

  “Yeah. You’d get it up on that little ridge there and wait till it was leaning, and then you’d push it.”

  “Christ on a crutch,” Henry said. “What for? And if it was leaning, it could have fallen over.”

  “It wouldn’t have been leaning enough.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And if it had fallen, there would still be people in it They would be all caught up in their seat belts. We’d be able to talk to them.”

  “I think they got out of their seat belts and out of the Jeep and took off. I think they didn’t want to get into any more trouble than they had to get into. That’s what I think.”

  “Maybe Miss Dallmer did it herself,” Martin said. “Maybe she drove out here and tipped the Jeep over, and then went back to her house to call the police.”

  Henry made a snort and stomped off. He was looking through the weeds for footprints or other signs of someone running—although there couldn’t be much in the way of footprints out here. Martin walked around and around the Jeep, shining his flashlight at it. It looked the way it always looked when Faye Dallmer drove it in and parked it next to the house where Martin and Henry lived. One of the things Faye Dallmer liked to do was to take rubbings of gravestones. It had always seemed like something worse than a stupid idea to Martin. Maybe it really meant something, all those herbs and crystals she used. Maybe she was worshiping the dead.

  Henry came back around the other side of the car. “We’d better go back to the house,” he said. “We don’t want the cops showing up and nobody being there. They’d mark us down for being drunk and forget all about us.”

  “Uh huh,” Martin said.

  Henry was moving very quickly. Martin looked up at the moon for a minute—it was coming out of the clouds now, looking full and bright—and followed. Henry’s wife had been a nurse. When she left him, she told him that he had been more dangerous to her health than any of the infectious patients she cared for, even the one who had cholera. Martin had never been able to understand it, since Henry had never been a very physical man.

  “Christ on a crutch,” Henry said, coming to a full stop.

  Martin came to a stop just behind him, and then moved around to his side so that he could see what Henry could see. He still had the flashlight on, but he didn’t need it. The moon was full out now. The backyard was as lit up as it would have been on a fairly cloudy day. Martin aimed the flashlight at the back porch anyway, because it seemed to be the thing he was supposed to do.

  “Christ on a crutch,” Henry said again.

  Martin felt himself backing up, automatically. He didn’t remember deciding to move.

  “Henry?” he said.

  “When I get hold of Jackey screwing Hargrove, I’m going to kill him,” Henry said.

  “Skeet,” Martin said, just as automatically as he had moved backward. The muscles in his arms and legs were twitching. He was clamping his jaw so hard, it hurt.

  Lying across the porch steps in front of him was a skeleton, and there was no way of mistaking it for anything but the real thing. It wasn’t strung together in a whole the way fake skeletons and medical school models were. It was just lose bones, pushed here and there along the steps, barely held together at all. And the bones were dirty, not polished white. They looked wet and cold and gray, as if they were oozing slime.

  “Christ on a screaming, frigging crutch,” Henry said.

  And then Martin started to laugh, because he couldn’t help himself. They had been out here all these years, with never any trouble to speak of for either of them, and now this, now this.

  Martin started to laugh, and once he started he couldn’t stop. He laughed so hard that he sat down on the ground, doing nothing to break his fall. He felt his tailbone hit a rock and the pain shoot up his spine. It seemed to him to be happening to somebody else in some other universe. Then his stomach began to heave and he swallowed against it. He was laughing so hard he couldn’t inhale worth a damn.

  “This is funny,” Henry said, looking about ready to kill him. “You think this is funny?”

  Martin got an arm up and a finger pointing in the skeleton’s direction. The skull was hollow and blank. He could see how people could have something like that polished to use as an ornament on a desk.

  “It isn’t ours,” he said, when he could make himself talk. “That thing. It isn’t ours. It doesn’t come from here.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “It’s much too young,” Martin said.

  And that was the truth. Every single grave in the Fair-child Family Cemetery was at least a hundred and fifty years old. The bones were brittle and thin and dry. They weren’t—they weren’t—

  When the first of the bile came up in his throat, he wasn’t ready for it. It slammed into the top of his esophagus like a fist. He threw himself sideways and let it all come up. He wanted to keep it off himself. He didn’t exactly make it. His throat felt so raw and torn he thought he must be
throwing up ground glass.

  He was still throwing up, fifteen minutes later, when the cops drove into the driveway at their front door and Henry went around to let them in.

  9

  Margaret Anson had gone to bed, but she hadn’t gone to sleep. Bennis Hannaford knew that, because she could heard pacing in the room down the hall, punctuated periodically by the sound of drawers slamming, or maybe furniture being moved. Bennis tried to tell herself that this was simple maternal concern—Kayla was still out; it was the Friday before Halloween and half past midnight—but she didn’t believe it, and she didn’t think anyone else would, either. Her own family was screwed up enough so that she didn’t expect much of anything from anybody else’s, but Margaret had struck her as an unusually cold and ruthless woman. Bennis tried to remember what Kayla had been like, on the one or two occasions when they had met. The occasions had been too brief to allow her to form an opinion. Maybe Kayla would turn out to be just like her mother. Maybe it was the money that did that to people, although Bennis had grown up with money, and around people with money, and most of them hadn’t been infected with Margaret’s pinching contempt. Maybe it was just that she should not have made tins trip, for Abigail or anybody else. Bennis had a lot to do at home lately. She had people she cared about and responsibilities of a sort. It had been stupid to give in to her restlessness. It had probably been stupid to get restless in the first place. Sometimes Bennis thought she was the worst mess of anybody she knew. She couldn’t make up her mind about anything. She was practically forty, and she still didn’t know what she wanted to be when she grew up. Even Gregor got exasperated with her now and then. He was probably exasperated with her right his minute, sitting back on Cavanaugh Street by himself, wondering what it was she thought she was doing.