Death & the Gravedigger's Angel

by Loretta Ross

  “I see. And how about Death? How’s he doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. Listen, man, I deal with a lot of vets. I can tell when somebody’s having problems. You can see it in their eyes and the way they hold themselves, wary and tense and always braced for an attack. Your brother saw combat, didn’t he? Afghanistan?”

  Randy sighed. “Yeah. He went down. We almost lost him. He doesn’t like to admit it, but he’s disabled. His lung capacity is shot.”

  “I see. And how’s he doing otherwise?”

  The young paramedic scrubbed a hand through his short dark hair and shook his head. “Man, I don’t know. Can you tell me?”

  “You’re his brother. You’re the one who knows him, probably better than anyone in the world. How does he seem to you?”

  “Different.” Randy sighed and drummed his fingers on the desk. “This thing with his lungs has slowed him down a lot. People, I think, people who didn’t know him before probably don’t realize how much it’s affected him. But it has. He used to be all action and motion. Now just taking the stairs up to his office wipes him out. And he has nightmares. Don’t tell him I told you that. I think he likes to imagine that no one knows, but I do. I’m pretty sure his girlfriend does too.” Randy laughed a little. “His taste in women has improved, I’ll give him that. But he’s going slow there, too. I suppose there’s no reason to rush it, it’s just … ”

  “You think he should?”

  “I just wonder why he doesn’t. I can tell he’s head over heels for her, and it’s obvious she feels the same way. When they get in a room together, they both just light up. But he acts like he isn’t sure. He’s always been decisive. I just wonder why he’s so uncertain now.”

  Robinson started to answer, then stopped and turned his attention to the window behind Randy, in the wall overlooking the parking lot. Randy tipped his head in that direction then and heard running footsteps himself, pounding across the gravel toward them at a breakneck pace.

  They waited, and the door burst open to admit Robin Keystone.

  “Hey! I’m looking for Randy Bogart! Oh, Randy! There you are.”

  “Yeah, I’m right here, kid. What’s wrong?”

  “Can you come up to the old house real quick? Grandpa Roy just crashed his truck into the ravine.”

  _____

  With his long legs eating up the distance, Randy easily outraced Robin. He ran up through the old pasture, jumped an ancient, sagging fence, and wove his way between the trees.

  He heard the shouting long before the wreck came into view.

  “Oh, for the love of Pete, woman! I am fine!”

  “You are not fine! You weren’t fine to begin with, you crazy old fool! Now you’re gonna sit right there and not move until Randy gets here and checks to see if you’ve rattled any of your tiny little handful of tiny little brain cells loose!”

  “Sam—”

  “You leave me out of this!” Sam Keystone told his twin. “I’m not getting in the middle of this argument. Anywho, what part of ‘footbridge’ did you not understand?”

  Randy pulled up from his mad dash and worked his way into the crowd surrounding the ruined bridge. Roy still sat in his truck, wedged at a steep angle down into the ravine with his front fender mashed against the opposite wall and his front tires dangling about three feet above the creek.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Leona turned on him. Her face was red and her eyes stormy. “This crazy old fool decided to drive his truck over the new footbridge to see if it would hold him. The damn thing gave way and dropped him into the ravine. I told him he had to stay where he is until you could check him over, even if he says he’s fine.”

  She turned completely away from Roy, so he couldn’t see her face, and fisted her left hand in the front of Randy’s shirt. Her hands were soft and wrinkled but her grip was fierce. Her eyes glittered.

  “Please tell me he’s fine,” she whispered.

  Randy patted her shoulder and extricated himself from her grasp. “Well,” he said, “his lungs are okay.”

  The truck was wedged in tight. Randy tested it gingerly for stability and concluded that it wasn’t going anywhere without a lot of help. Satisfied that it was stable, he climbed down the bed, slid the back window open, and eased himself into the cab beside Roy.

  “Good thing you’re skinny,” Roy observed. “Your brother couldn’t do that.”

  “No, I don’t reckon he could.” Randy had noticed that Death and Wren were absent. “He and Wren off making out somewhere?”

  Roy cackled. “They said they’re at the library, but that’s what that noisy old woman and I used to say when we were their age, too.”

  Randy grinned. He was making a visual assessment as he talked, and the older man looked good. He’d been wearing his seat belt when he crashed, so that was good. He was alert and active and so far he’d responded to everything anyone had said. Randy pulled out the penlight he always carried and shone it in Roy’s eyes, fighting him as he tried to bat his hands away.

  “Gah! Don’t do that! Now I’m gonna see spots for the next hour!”

  “I’m checking your pupils to see if you’ve cracked open your skull. Hold still.”

  Roy groused but complied.

  “How fast were you going when you hit?”

  “I wasn’t going fast at all. I just wanted to test and see if we could safely drive across the bridge.”

  “Yeah? And what did you decide?”

  “So it needs a little work. Smartass.”

  “I thought it was only supposed to be a footbridge anyway.”

  “Well, we’re not exactly engineers. But we need a bridge that people can drive over. There are things in the auction that are going to have to be hauled away. I figured it was better for me to chance it first than for one of our customers to.”

  “Well, now you’re gonna need a new bridge.”

  “Gee, thanks. How long did you have to go to school to get so smart?”

  “I’m just sayin’. I suppose you could just leave your truck here and let people drive over that.”

  “I’d say ‘everybody’s a comedian’ if you were even remotely funny.”

  “I think you’re okay,” Randy concluded.

  “But I might be a little bit sore tonight and I should take it easy for the next couple of days,” Roy prompted.

  “Are you feeling sore?”

  “No. I just want you to tell my wife that. The least I can get out of all this is a good back rub and a little bit of babying.”

  “I see. You’re a grifter.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  Randy helped Roy get his seat belt unfastened and climb through the back window and up out of the truck. While they’d been talking the Robinsons had come from the camp, driving around on the roads rather than walking, and a man in overalls was coming up the road with a tractor.

  “Who built that bridge?” Nichelle asked.

  “We did,” one of the Keystone sons told her.

  She tsked and shook her head.

  “You know,” Kurt said, “if you needed help building a bridge, you should have said something.”

  “Are you a good bridge builder?” Robin Keystone asked.

  “I’m not,” Kurt said. “I can barely build a sandwich. But it just so happens that my wife is an engineer.”

  _____

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Wren whispered.

  She and Death were sitting next to each other at an old wooden table in the reference room at the library. The Rives County Library was in a building that had been, back in the sixties, a car dealership. The circulation desk and adult fiction were in the main showroom, where a massive card catalogue still took up one wall. Nonfiction, the children’s section, and a new computer room were in a low ell at the back that had once held the car repair shop. The reference room stood off to the side in a light, airy room that had been converted from a sep
arate garage where the dealer had parked his own private car.

  Death sighed and closed the book in front of him. It was a book of plat maps and aerial photos of Rives County, and he was looking for private tombs where someone might choose to be quietly buried in an antique uniform.

  “I’m thinking about lies and murder and judgment, and how maybe mine isn’t as good as I thought it was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t see Tony Dozier as a killer, even under pressure, but maybe I’m wrong. He had the motive and he obviously had the opportunity. We can’t prove he had the means, but he had a lot of chances to dispose of the murder weapon.”

  Wren folded her hands under her chin and leaned against him, just letting her shoulder press his. “What about the other people at the camp? They’re all his friends, right? Maybe he’s covering for one of them, if he feels like they did it for him. And his wife is dead, so he probably feels like his life is over anyway.”

  “Probably,” Death said. His voice sounded tight and he cleared his throat. “The cops are thinking along those lines, too.”

  Wren slipped her hand into his and squeezed. He returned the pressure, and when he looked down and met her eyes, his own eyes were damp.

  “You know,” he said after a minute, “I think I’m going about this wrong.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m sitting here trying to psychically sense what a bunch of people I barely know might or might not do under certain circumstances. I need to concentrate on the facts of the case, starting with the most basic fact.”

  “Which is?”

  “August Jones was stabbed to death.”

  “Okay … ?”

  “Stabbing is a messy kind of murder. It’s going to leave evidence. But so far no one’s found a crime scene. That suggests it happened somewhere hidden. Somewhere people don’t go often, and somewhere that hasn’t been searched. He got a call from somewhere out around the vet camp before he died, and the police pinged his cellphone on their property before the battery went dead in it. So that suggests he was murdered somewhere in the general vicinity of the camp. Does this make sense so far?”

  “Absolutely. But where?”

  “I don’t know. I need to think about this. Where would I arrange to meet someone if I wanted to get them alone so I could stab them to death?”

  They sat for a few minutes in pensive silence.

  “You know,” Wren said, “we have the loveliest conversations.”

  Death snickered. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

  “Oh, don’t be! I love being your sounding board.”

  There was a book of local history open on the table in front of Wren and she idly turned the page, then started and leaned in to look more closely at the picture in the middle of the page.

  “Well, I’ll be darned! Would you look at this? He wasn’t always a gravedigger after all.”

  Death sat up as well and leaned in, his head close to hers. “What are we looking at?”

  “It’s a school picture from a one-room schoolhouse. Liberty School students in 1932. Aramis Defoe was the schoolmaster.” She read through the children’s names and smiled suddenly. “Look!” she said. “This little girl right here!” She put her finger beside a picture of a child of about ten, with a turned-up nose and long pigtails. “Do you know who that is?”

  Death scanned the caption, matching names to their owners, and frowned. “Elvina Griffith? Am I supposed to know who that is?”

  “You should know. She pinched your butt the first time you met her.”

  “Oh no. It can’t be. Mother Weeks?”

  “She married William Weeks, but her maiden name was Griffith. And the gravedigger was her schoolmaster. I wonder if she remembers him?”

  _____

  “No, no, no,” Nichelle said. She turned and nodded at Death and Wren, who’d just driven up and were walking over together hand in hand. “I’m going to show you how a flying buttress works. Come over here, Wren. I need another volunteer.”

  “What’s going on?” Death asked, circling to where his brother and Kurt Robinson were standing a little to one side, watching the proceedings. “Is Roy okay?”

  “Yeah. Nice of you two to finally show up,” Randy said.

  “We had our phones turned off. We were at the library.”

  “Sure you were.”

  “Shaddup,” Death said, flicking his little brother in the head with his index finger.

  “Nichelle is helping them design a bridge that won’t collapse when you drive over it,” Kurt said.

  “Oh, right. Corps of Engineers. That’s nice of her.”

  Kurt shrugged. “You’re helping our friend, we’re helping yours.”

  Nichelle had Leona and Doris Keystone standing side-by-side. She put Wren across from Leona, facing her, and grabbed Robin Keystone to stand next to Wren.

  “Robin’s standing with the girls!” seven-year-old Matthew Keystone crowed. “He’s a girl!”

  “You be quiet,” Robin told his cousin. “I’ll do anything the sexy lady pirate wants me to.”

  Nichelle raised an eyebrow at him. “Lady pirate?”

  Robin turned red and started stammering helplessly.

  “Because I have a peg leg?”

  Roy’s truck had been dragged from the ravine. It was parked off to the side and he sat on the tailgate watching. “We’re sorry, ma’am,” he called. “He’s fifteen. His brain cells are drowning in hormones. I keep telling everyone we need to muzzle them at that age but nobody listens.”

  Nichelle snickered. “It’s okay. I think that might be the nicest inappropriate thing anyone’s ever said to me. No—” She grabbed Robin’s shoulder. “You stay there, next to Wren. Now, Wren and Leona and Robin and Doris, I want you to take each other’s hands and make a bridge, like you were playing ‘London Bridge is Falling Down.’”

  They did as she asked. She looked around and singled out Randy. “Now you, come here. I want you to get between them and try to pull their hands down.”

  “You say that like you think I can’t,” Randy said, joining the group. “You could have at least picked big guys for the bridge. You’ve got the four smallest adults here.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “I’ve seen this before,” Kurt confided to Death. “It’s pretty wild.”

  Randy squeezed between the two pairs and easily pulled their hands down.

  “Right,” Nichelle said. “Now, I need four more volunteers. “Size isn’t important.”

  She selected four more of the Keystone teenagers and had one stand behind each of the four parts of the “bridge.”

  “Now, you four are the flying buttresses. I need each of you to put your hands on the shoulders of the person in front of you. You don’t need to push or brace your weight or anything. Just stand there with your hands on their shoulders.”

  They did as she directed and she nodded at Randy. “Pull their hands down now.”

  He tried again and found that, this time, he couldn’t do it. He pulled down harder and harder and finally wound up swinging from their hands with all his weight.

  “Look,” Matthew jeered. “Randy looks like a monkey!”

  “Yeah,” Death agreed. “And now he’s acting like one too.”

  Randy stuck his tongue out at them both.

  “So is this what we need for our bridge, then?” Sam asked. “A flying buttress?”

  “No. Flying buttresses are used for vaulted ceilings. The vault pushes the wall out and the flying buttress redirects the lateral force to the ground. I just showed you because I thought you’d think it was neat. But we do need to consider the lines of force when we’re designing anything.”

  While Nichelle lectured Randy and Wren and the Keystones, Death leaned back against a nearby tree and watched. “She seems like a remarkable lady,” he told Kurt.

  “You have no idea,” he said. “After she got injured, we were at Landstuhl. You’re probably familiar with the place?�
�

  Death nodded. He’d spent some of the darkest days of his life at the US Military hospital in Germany.

  “When she was released, we drove down to France before we flew home. There was this aqueduct she wanted to see in Nimes. Built by the Romans in the early first century AD and still standing to this day. The bridge that carries the aqueduct across the river is curved slightly, with the arch facing upstream. For centuries historians thought it was built that way on purpose, because the curve means that the force of the river itself strengthens the structure.”

  “But it wasn’t?”

  “Apparently not. Some kind of hi-tech scan they did of the bridge a few decades ago, I didn’t understand all the technical details to be honest, but this scan showed that the stones had deformed over the centuries because of the way they expanded and contracted every day from the heat of the sun. They grew stronger together, the way couples and families and groups of friends do. Nichelle says the aqueduct is an analogy for people, especially people like us.”

  Death tipped his head to the side and gave Kurt his full attention, because the man, with a motion of his hand, had included Death in that “us.”

  “People like us?”

  “Broken people.”

  The former Marine’s lips thinned. He didn’t like the label, but couldn’t honestly deny it.

  “See,” Kurt said, “people always think that, when someone is broken, when they’re badly injured, scarred”—he nodded in his wife’s direction—“lose a limb, people think that, whatever they do, they can never be put back together as strong as they were before. But that aqueduct, which has stood for right at two-thousand years now, you know what it was built with? Broken pieces.”

  Death considered. “I suppose you could say that.”

  “It’s true. It’s true of every bridge and building and structure that’s ever been built of stone. They don’t build them from complete stones. They break the stones into pieces and put them back together again. It’s all a matter of how you shape the pieces, and how you fit them into a whole.”

  Death looked down and watched a bug crawling across a fallen leaf like it was scaling a mountain. “Even when all the pieces aren’t there anymore?”