A Grave Situation

by Libby Howard

  “I’m going with you.”

  I looked up at Judge Beck in surprise. “To the viewing?”

  He nodded. “Madison and Henry are finishing the dishes, then working on their homework. We’ll be back before they go to bed.”

  “I know, but are you sure? It’s a viewing for Olive’s uncle. You hardly know Olive.”

  “She’s been in our house several times visiting you and at both our happy hours and barbeque parties. She’s your friend. I feel I should go as a show of respect.”

  Our house. Our happy hours and barbeque parties. Our.

  “Okay,” I told him, feeling a bit off kilter by his comments and the implications.

  Judge Beck drove, pulling into a rather full funeral home parking lot and around back. We were both still wearing our work clothes—the judge in his suit and me in a pair of khaki pants and a silky tank with a navy jacket. Heading in, we signed the guest book and made our way through the crowd.

  DeLanie was toward the front, over to the left talking to a group of young men. I saw Olive by a well-dressed couple not much older than I was. She waved us over and introduced us to her parents— Shirley and Oliver.

  “Yes,” Olive laughed. “I’m a junior. Dad didn’t think he’d get a son, so instead of Oliver, I’m Olive.”

  “But you have a brother, don’t you?” I asked.

  “Branson.” Oliver chuckled. “Seven years after Olive was born. He was a surprise, our miracle baby. I wanted to go ahead and name him Oliver, but Shirley insisted on naming him after her father.”

  “I wasn’t having two children named Olive and Oliver as well as a husband named Oliver.” His wife laughed. “You got your junior. My daddy deserved to have a grandbaby named after him.”

  “I should be glad I wasn’t named Branson,” Olive commented. “Although being asked where Popeye was my entire childhood wasn’t exactly a picnic.”

  Olive escorted us around, introducing us to various family members. When we reached the front of the room, I saw a woman standing beside the casket. The resemblance between her and Olive’s father was pronounced, making me realize this must be Aunt Sarah.

  She was wearing a black sheath dress that had a row of decorative key-hole cutouts around the hem. Her gloves had the same trim at the wrists. Like many women in the room, she wore a hat—a round pill-box style with a wisp of lace at the edge. Her salt-and-pepper hair still retained quite a bit of its original black and was straightened into a chin-length bob.

  As we approached, I noticed her carefully applied makeup did nothing to hide the grief in her red-rimmed eyes and trembling mouth.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I told her after Olive introduced us.

  She nodded, reaching out to grip my fingers with the hand that wasn’t holding a balled-up tissue. “Olive told me you recently lost your husband as well?”

  I nodded. “Eli. He passed in March.”

  “Just before David did.” The words were soft and accompanied by a perplexing mix of sadness and guilt, along with a certain hardness in her expression. “We barely had time to deal with his loss before Ford was diagnosed. Six months later and he was gone as well. It was all so fast.”

  “It must be hard to suffer two losses in one year,” I agreed.

  “Do you have children, Mrs. Carrera?” Sarah asked, suddenly fixing me with an intense gaze.

  “No. Eli and I were never blessed.”

  “Ford and I had two boys. He loved his children. He took his responsibilities as a parent very seriously, but it was more than just duty to him, you know. He loved his children, each one of them.”

  I nodded, not sure if I was to glean any meaning from that statement beyond her reassuring herself that her husband had been a good father. Although it was a bit odd that she hadn’t added the usual “good husband” comments. Every relationship had their bumps, though, and I could tell from her obvious grief that she’d loved Ford.

  “Will…will things continue as planned for Saturday’s funeral?” I asked, not sure if the police had cleared the grave as a crime scene and moved David’s remains yet or not.

  “We’re not sure yet.” She uttered a soft, bitter laugh. “It would serve me right if the answer was ‘no.’ Some hurts never heal, you know. But the fires of old pain shouldn’t be stoked back up again. Angry as I was over that grave plot, I should have let the boy lie in rest.”

  “But then no one would have ever known what happened to that woman. Her parents deserved some closure, even if her murderer is never caught.”

  Sarah sighed. “I fear more than one secret has been unearthed with that woman’s body. And it’s my own damned fault.”

  She turned to greet another guest, leaving me a bit confused. Judge Beck had held back in conversation with Oliver and Shirley. Olive had moved away after introducing me to her aunt and was over speaking with what looked to be a couple of work colleagues. Feeling a bit awkward just standing around, I walked over to the casket and paid my respects to a man I’d never known.

  Olive’s uncle looked peaceful in his repose, even though cancer had clearly taken the girth from a man who had once carried quite a few extra pounds. My gaze quickly moved on to the huge sprays of flowers decorating the casket and the pictures of Ford in his younger days.

  The pictures beside the casket were fairly recent, but off to the left was a huge collage of photos that included some of a little boy fishing, riding in a wagon, standing next to other children. I followed the photographic story of Ford’s life as a happy child and mischievous teen, only to halt at one showing a handsome man in his late twenties.

  I stared, everything clicking into place. The resemblance was uncanny, and there was only one reason for there to be so besides sheer coincidence. Ford was related by marriage, not blood, but this picture told a different story.

  A quick scan of the room allowed me to locate DeLanie. I made my way to her, thinking about Sarah’s comments, about DeLanie’s refusal to name David’s father, about Ford’s closeness to a child that had been an out-of-wedlock son to his wife’s cousin.

  “Can we speak a moment in private?” I whispered to DeLanie. She looked up at me, and from her expression, I realized she knew what I needed to discuss with her. Waving me into a side room, she carefully closed the door and turned to face me.

  “Yes. David was Ford’s son. And yes, Sarah knew.”

  “How…” Duh. I knew how. I was just so shocked that the man I’d seen in the pictures would have cheated on his wife with her own cousin.

  “It’s not what you think,” DeLanie told me. “About eight years into their marriage, Sarah and Ford were having trouble. They’d split up. They’d been apart for nearly a year and it looked as if divorce was likely. Ford and I…well, it just happened. We all grew up together, and looking back, I think he was searching for some comfort, and I was lonely after breaking up with a long-term boyfriend. We weren’t together very long before he and Sarah decided to try to make their marriage work. I don’t blame him. He always loved her, and they had the two boys together.”

  “But you were pregnant.”

  She grimaced. “That was a surprise. I didn’t expect Ford to leave Sarah or anything, but I wanted to have that baby and keep him. I was willing to lie and say it was my ex-boyfriend’s or some other man’s. Few in the family knew about Ford and me, and I’m sure they would have accepted I’d gotten pregnant from a one-night stand or something. But Ford refused. He said he wasn’t going to lie about his own child, and that he’d step up to the plate and love the baby just like he loved his other two sons.”

  “That was the rift between you and your cousin Sarah?” I asked.

  “We didn’t get along as kids, and weren’t all that close even after we grew up. But yes, she was not only going to have to see me at family events and know that I’d had a brief physical relationship with her husband, as well as having David a constant reminder of that, knowing that Ford would shower the same love and affection on David as he did his an
d Sarah’s two boys… it was unbearable.”

  “But the grave.” I shook my head in disbelief. “Ford is part of your family by marriage, but David was by blood. You shouldn’t have had to move him so Ford could have the cemetery plot.”

  “I got tired of fighting.” DeLanie’s shoulders slumped. “It’s been a battleground between the two of us since she found out. With David and Ford both gone, I’d hoped to finally patch things up between us. I won’t deny that it hurt, though. It’s as though she wanted David erased completely from our family. And I’m not sure moving his remains is going to change how she feels.”

  I thought of the woman I’d just spoken to, how she did seem to harbor both guilt and the feeling that what had happened had been some sort of karma for her not letting go of past hurts. “Only time will tell,” I finally told DeLanie.

  “Probably.” She sighed. “And I know how this looks. It makes Ford seem a top suspect in Mary’s murder. He was upset over losing a son. He didn’t want David to date a recovering addict. I know he thought that perhaps Mary was responsible for David’s using again.”

  “Even a sick man can fire a gun,” I told her. “And he may have had help disposing of her body.”

  DeLanie shook her head. “If Ford was angry enough to kill her, then he would have just left her wherever he’d shot her. He never would have put her body in with David. If he blamed her for his son’s death, then putting her body in that grave would have been a desecration. It was someone else. Ford didn’t do it.”

  If Ford was guilty, then the murderer was beyond earthly justice. But if Ford had killed Mary, then perhaps whoever helped him with the body could still be charged. And perhaps whoever helped him with the body wasn’t all that attached to David. It seemed to fit—Ford kills Mary out of anger and grief over his son’s death. Sarah finds out and doesn’t want her husband to spend his remaining time in jail, so she disposes of the body in the one place no one would look for it.

  Except Sarah didn’t seem physically capable of hauling a body into her car, to the cemetery, across twenty feet or so to the open grave plot, then shoveling dirt on top of it. It just didn’t fit with the woman out there beside the casket. And if she’d disposed of Mary’s body in David’s grave, she hardly would have insisted it be dug up and her crime exposed.

  I was back to wondering who wanted Mary dead, and who either felt the grave was a convenient dump spot, or disliked David enough to think his grave was a fitting spot for a body disposal.

  It brought me around to the ex-boyfriend again. And me with no clear way of figuring out who he was.

  Chapter 18

  I was in the middle of hacking into Mary Allen’s Facebook account when Chuck Norris walked into my office.

  This clearly wasn’t a social call, and judging from our last meeting, I knew he wasn’t popping in to update me on the case in the spirit of mutual cooperation. His presence in my office this morning meant one thing—he’d hit the same dead ends I had and was hoping to dig for information.

  He eyed my screen, then pulled a rolling office chair up next to me and took a seat. “Find anything?”

  I kept scrolling through Mary’s friend’s list. The key to seeing all of someone’s social media posts was through connections. I just had to find that right friend of Mary’s, the one with a gazillion friends and followers who automatically approved any and all friend requests, then sneak in through the backdoor, so to speak. Most people left a lot of information open to the public. Even more people changed their default security settings to share a lost dog flyer, then forgot to change them back, posting merrily away for months or years without even realizing their pictures of last night’s dinner and updates on their foot surgery were there for the world to see.

  Mary had been more careful. Outside of a few tagged pictures, very little of her posts were visible to me. I was hoping to change that, but Detective Norris didn’t need to know that so far, I was hitting a big fat zero.

  “So far, I’ve found out that Mary went to the lake a year ago last summer with some girlfriends, that she likes puppies and thin-crust pizza. You?”

  He shifted in his chair. “Not much.”

  I turned to him. “I’m not going to tell you squat unless you cough up something more than ‘not much.’ You do know that, right?”

  A sheepish grin spread across his face. “You learn fast.”

  I turned back to my computer, refusing to be charmed into spilling it all. “Tell me something I don’t know or head on out that door because I’ve got work to do.”

  “You know, withholding information on a murder investigation isn’t a good way to ingratiate yourself with the local police force.”

  I shot him a sideways glance. “It’s hard for me to know what’s pertinent when you don’t share information. For all I know, Mary liking puppies was exactly the clue you were looking for.”

  The chair squawked as he leaned back. “Sadly, no. We’re looking at someone who knew both David and Mary—knew them well enough to pick David’s grave as a disposal site. That’s too odd to be a coincidence.”

  “So family, friends, a jealous ex, someone from their mutual past who held a grudge,” I added.

  He nodded. “Although their mutual past was less than a year. Any of David’s family who might have been a suspect wouldn’t be pushing or agreeing to have that grave dug up.”

  “And Mary’s family?”

  “Alibis for the date and time of death and no motivation whatsoever. She’s an only child. Her parents didn’t know she was engaged, didn’t even know about David, although they said she’d told them a few months before she went missing that there was some issue with an ex. She’d call them every month or so. When she hadn’t contacted them as usual, and they couldn’t locate her, they filed a missing person’s report. Although they told me they feared the worst, they were adamant that Mary hadn’t used since the time of her arrest at eighteen, then she’d stayed clean. No drugs. No alcohol. Regular church and NA meeting attendance. She cut out all her friends who were users and didn’t even socialize much with those in her recovery group outside of meetings. Her parents were surprised when I told them Mary had met David at a meeting and that he’d been in recovery as well. They said that she’d broken up with someone last fall and told them she was swearing off dating for a while, wanting to focus on volunteer work supporting other recovering addicts instead.”

  It sounded like she’d done just that, only to fall in love with one of those she was helping. Again, I thought how horrible it was that what should have been a sweet love story had turned tragic.

  “I’m looking for the ex-boyfriend as well.” I pointed to the screen. “Maybe he was waiting in the wings, and after David died he thought there would be a reconciliation, only to become enraged and murder Mary when that didn’t happen.”

  “Six months is a long time to wait in the wings,” Detective Norris commented. “And she wasn’t strangled, or bludgeoned, or stabbed. She was shot, which brings a premeditated component to this that you don’t get with enraged, jilted ex-lover.”

  “So psycho, enraged ex-lover who brought a gun because if Mary said ‘no,’ he wasn’t going to let anyone else have her,” I speculated, because I really didn’t have any other suspects on my list.

  The detective shrugged. “I’ll be straight with you here—do you know who David’s father is? His mother isn’t saying. There’s nothing on the birth certificate. I’m wondering if he was back on the scene, connecting with his thirty-year-old son, and blamed Mary for the overdose.”

  Oh, I felt so smug to know the answer to this one. “His father is to be buried in that very grave this Saturday. Ford Branch.”

  Detective Norris blinked. “That’s keeping it in the family.”

  “David’s funeral was right before Ford’s diagnosis of an aggressive form of cancer. He was very ill at the time. There’s no way he could have murdered Mary and disposed of her body in his condition, and even if he had, I don’t think he wo
uld have put the body of a woman he thought contributed to his son’s death in his son’s grave.”

  “Shot her, then felt guilty and buried them together?”

  “I’m still liking the ex-boyfriend for this,” I told him.

  He stood. “Well, I’m still liking the father. His wife clearly didn’t help him dispose of the body only to insist it be dug up six months later, but I’m sure the guy had other friends and family that would help him out. He had two other sons, right? I’m sure one of them would help keep his father out of jail and keep his mouth shut, and maybe he put Mary in David’s grave without the father’s knowledge.”

  It was a good theory—but mine was just as good. “So, you’ll let me know what you find out?”

  He eyed my computer screen again then dug a card out of his pocket and put it on my desk. “Only if you let me know what you find out there. I don’t know anything about searching for stuff on those social media accounts. I’d be real curious to know what you turn up.”

  “Likewise.” I pretended to be intent on the friends list as the detective let himself out of the office. I would tell him what I found, whether he reciprocated or not, because I wanted the police to catch the murderer. I wasn’t going to go running to him with a bunch of vague information and red herrings though. I wanted to prove my value to the local sheriff’s department, and to do that I had to show them I knew what I was doing.

  Mary’s affection for puppies and pizza didn’t seem to be a good lead, but I was curious about the lake trip. If she had close enough friends to go away for a long weekend with them, then they were close enough to share information with. I’d jotted down the people tagged in the pictures to speak to later, as well as the dates of the information I could access. If I could just develop a timeline, question a few of her friends, I could maybe find this ex-boyfriend of hers, the one she’d been worried about, the one whose anger had made her keep her engagement under wraps.