Death & the Gravedigger's Angel

by Loretta Ross

  “That’s what we thought. We weren’t counting on Tyler Jones and his Church of the Army of Christ. And I’m using ‘church’ there ironically.”

  “They showed up to protest, right?”

  “Yeah. We had no idea they were coming. I don’t even know how they found out about it.” Robinson laughed bitterly. “Except I do now, don’t I? Augustus Jones had ‘infiltrated’ the mosque posing as a magazine reporter. He must have called and told them.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was a madhouse. The Episcopal Church is on private property and they were able to keep them back, but the street and the cemetery are public. Normally when a group like that plans a protest at a funeral or such, volunteers show up to form a barricade. But this all happened so fast, with the accident and then having to plan the funeral immediately, we never even considered asking for help. We saw them outside the church. There were a lot of military personnel there, so we put the Muslims in the middle and the Army on the outside, but Tyler Jones and his people were right there. We’re carrying this poor woman’s body to the cemetery and they’re waving signs in our faces and spitting and shouting that God hates us and that Zahra was burning in hell. We’re soldiers, man. Soldiers fight. You know how it is. Things got heated and there were some clashes between the protesters and the mourners. I mean, what did they expect?”

  “And that’s when Tony hit Tyler Jones and threatened him? Walking between the church and the cemetery?”

  “He didn’t so much hit him. He shoved him away and Jones fell down. And he didn’t exactly threaten him, either.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He just asked him how he’d feel if it were someone he loved who was dead.”

  Death hooked his fingers in the space between the boards on the top of the picnic table and leaned back, looking up. The leaves were still mostly green, just a few yellow and brown among them, but there were fewer now than there had been just a week ago. The sky beyond them was a brilliant blue with a few fluffy, high-flying clouds. He sat up and drew his gaze back to Kurt Robinson.

  “That’s a perfectly normal thing to say, but you have to admit it sounds a bit ominous in retrospect, when you realize Jones’ son wound up dead in Tony’s car the next day.”

  “Yes, I know. And I know why they think Tony killed him. But I also know Tony and he’s not a killer.”

  “You still haven’t told me about Dexter and why he brought August Jones here in the first place.”

  “Man, it’s like I said. Jones showed up at the mosque that morning and wanted a ride down for the funeral. He was posing as a magazine writer. We thought he was a magazine writer.” Robinson laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “He said he wanted to do a human interest article on how members of the two different faiths came together during a time of grief.”

  Death considered. “So Dexter gave him a ride. But that gas station is between here and town. Did he bring him out here?”

  “Yeah, a bunch of us met out here. Jones came along, said he wanted to do some interviews. Dex gave him a ride out and then he and I and the other pallbearers had to leave early to meet the body at the church. Jones said he’d catch a ride with someone else and honestly, I forgot all about him. I never thought a thing about him. Even after they found Tony with his body, I didn’t know that’s who it had been. Not until one of the news stories reported that he’d been posing as a reporter to infiltrate the mosque and they showed a picture of him with some of the members. Dex saw the same report and called me. That’s when we decided it was probably best to just not say anything.”

  “Not the smartest decision you’ve ever made,” Death said.

  “We didn’t have anything to do with him.”

  “But you knew where he was and what he was doing the day he got killed. Not speaking up makes it look like you’re covering for someone.”

  “We’re not!”

  Death sighed and shook his head. “Okay, so just tell me this: when and where did you see him last?”

  “I last saw him just before we left for the church, about three o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “Where?”

  The picnic table they were sitting at was made of metal and weathered oak, with broad, thick gray planks forming the benches and the eating surface. Kurt Robinson reached out and rapped his knuckles on the wood.

  “He was here,” he said. “Right here at this table. He was sitting there, just where you’re sitting, talking on his phone.”

  eleven

  Wren pulled to a stop next to a late-model burgundy sedan that sat canted at an awkward angle on the side of the county blacktop. A tall, imposing elderly lady stood leaning against the driver’s door, her arms crossed and her mouth drawn down in a disapproving frown.

  “Problems, Ms. Weeks?”

  “Flat tire.” Millie Weeks, the head of the Rives County Historical Society, shook her cell phone as if it had offended her. “Roadside assistance said it’s going to take four hours to get someone out here to change it for me. Four hours!”

  “Got a spare?”

  “Of course. I don’t suppose you know someone you could call to come help me?”

  “Pfft!” Wren waved her hand. “Just hang tight. I’ll have you back on the road before you know it.”

  She pulled in ahead of Ms. Weeks and, though the road was deserted but for the two of them, flipped her emergency flashers on. She hopped out, reached in the back of her truck, and pulled out a tire iron and a hydraulic jack.

  Ms. Weeks gave her a dubious look and Wren grinned back. “Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.”

  She got the jack situated and jacked it up just enough to hold it in place, then popped off the hub cap and went to work on the lug nuts.

  “You know, I was thinking about you just the other day,” she said. The nuts were on tight. She fitted the four-way, then got up and stood on the left arm and bounced a couple of times until it broke loose and slid her off. “I was wondering if it would be all right for me to come talk to your mother. I wanted to ask her some questions about a man she knew when she was a child.”

  “Oh, Wren. I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. I mean, you’re welcome to visit anytime, but Mother’s memory isn’t what it used to be. She’s still in good health physically, praise the Lord, but her mind wanders. And then, of course, you’re going to kill yourself changing this tire.”

  Wren just laughed and moved on to the next bolt.

  “Who did you want to ask her about?”

  “The man who lived in the house we’re getting ready for auction. The old Hadleigh House. His name was Aramis Defoe. I found a school picture of a class he taught and your mother was one of the children.”

  “Oh, yes. The Gravedigger. Of course. My Aunt Delia had a terrible crush on him. I only knew him when he was old and I was young, but I understand he was very handsome, once upon a time. Such a tragedy.”

  Wren had all the nuts broken loose, and she was spinning them off and collecting them carefully into the upturned hub cap. “What do you mean? What was the tragedy?”

  “Well, how he died, of course. There were parishioners who didn’t want him buried in the cemetery, even after all the work he’d done there. He dug all the graves out by hand, you know, and never charged a penny. And if a family couldn’t afford a stone, he’d carve them one, and not ask anything for doing that either.”

  Wren pushed herself up off the ground and stood to face the older woman, a sick feeling in her stomach. “Ms. Weeks, did Aramis Defoe kill himself ?”

  “You didn’t know? The coroner ruled it an accident, as a favor to the pastor, but everyone knew what really happened. He overdosed on sleeping pills, right after he finished carving that angel statue for his grave.”

  _____

  “I rode that big gray horse today,” Death said.

  Randy closed the door to the stairwell and dropped into one of the visitor chairs beside Death’s desk. “Wow. I wish I’d been there! I’ve neve
r seen a horse with two asses before.”

  “Ha, ha, ha.” Death turned the page in the newspaper he was studying. “Hit your head again?”

  “Umm, no.”

  “I wasn’t asking. I was offering.”

  “Oh. Ha, ha, ha.” Randy leaned forward and propped his chin in his hands. “Whatcha doing?”

  “I’m going over everything I can find that has pictures or video of Zahra Dozier’s funeral. I’m trying to get a feel for who was where, when.”

  “Ah. Grasping at straws.” Randy leaned back and propped his long legs up in the other chair. “I ran into Orly Jackson at a fender bender earlier.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. He said he went up to the city yesterday and showed the horse thief picture around at the library and that research place. No one recognized the dead man.”

  Death grimaced. “Yeah, that might not have been the smartest suggestion we ever made.”

  “Why not?”

  “I keep forgetting, and I think Jackson does too, that the dead man whose picture they have is not the person who actually bought the uniform. That was most likely the person who was buried in it, the one whose body the dead man stole it from. And that person, that’s someone we don’t know anything at all about.”

  “It’s got to be connected to the church cemetery, don’t you think?” Randy asked. “I mean, you’ve got clothes taken from a corpse and you’ve got a cemetery not half a mile away. There has to be a connection.”

  “It seems that way to me too, but Jackson swears it’s not. He searched the whole cemetery and found no sign of any of the graves being disturbed. He also talked to the guy who operates the backhoe to dig new graves, and he said he hasn’t buried anyone out there since late last winter.”

  Death stilled suddenly, his hands hovering over the paper, his breath caught in his throat.

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” he breathed.

  Randy leaned forward. “What is it? What did you find?”

  Death turned the paper toward him and pointed out a picture in the middle of a page.

  “It’s the Doziers’ wedding picture,” Randy said.

  “Yeah. Tony had one taped to the wall in his room at the mental hospital.”

  “Okay. And?”

  “And I know where he was when he found August Jones dying by the side of the road.”

  _____

  “I found a notebook full of studies for the angel,” Wren said. She pulled the flat tire off the car and rolled it to the side, letting it fall into the grass. “She wasn’t drawn as an angel, though. She was just a woman in a scene from a war, offering soldiers water from a well. I just wondered who she was.”

  “I know he called her Agathe,” Ms. Weeks said.

  Wren got the spare that she’d earlier taken out of the wheel well in the trunk and rolled it into place. The car wasn’t quite high enough to put it on, and she pumped the jack a few more times to raise it.

  “Well, Mr. Defoe fought in the First World War. As I understand it, he was a brilliant man. And, of course, he was a wonderful artist. But they said he was never the same after the war. He was obsessed with death. Spent hours wandering around the cemetery, talking to the people buried there. And I remember one night, when I was very young, a pair of teenage brothers had been killed in a car accident. Their father propped the hood of their car up against a tree, to warn everyone that the road there was dangerous. It’s still there, to this day, though so rusted and overgrown you can hardly see it. Anyway, Mr. Defoe spent all night digging their graves, side by side. When the preacher went out to the cemetery to check on him in the morning, he found him cowering in one of the graves. Sometime during the night he’d gotten confused and he thought he was back in the war, digging foxholes.”

  Wren fitted the spare tire on and began replacing the nuts. “Sounds like post-traumatic stress.”

  “Back then they called it battle fatigue. Now see here. Am I going to be safe driving on that thing?”

  “Absolutely.” Wren tightened the lug nuts, going around the wheel in a star pattern until she’d tightened them all, then lowered the car to the ground and tightened them again. “You still need to get your tire repaired and put back on as soon as you can, though. This isn’t a full-size spare. It’s only a donut. You’ll need to drive carefully and don’t go over fifty.”

  The sound of an approaching vehicle reached them and they both looked to their left expectantly. After a few seconds, a sheriff’s department cruiser came around the bend and Orly Jackson pulled in behind Millie Weeks’ car, flipped on his bubble lights, and got out.

  “You ladies need any help?”

  “Sure,” Wren said “Put Ms. Weeks’ flat tire in her trunk for her, would you?”

  “Why do I gotta do the heavy lifting?”

  “Because you didn’t get here in time to call dibs on the easy part.”

  Grumbling, he did as she asked while Wren retrieved her jack and tire iron and tossed them into the back of her truck.

  “Have you heard from your boyfriend?” he asked.

  “No?” Wren got her phone off the truck seat and looked at it. “Oh, he texted me. It just says, ‘call me when you get a chance.’ Why?”

  “Because I’m on my way to meet him. He says he knows how to find where Jones was stabbed.”

  _____

  Death and Randy were waiting in Death’s jeep when Wren, with Jackson following her, pulled up at the entrance to the veterans’ camp. Death leaned across his brother to shout at her between their vehicles.

  “Park and hop in.”

  Wren did as he asked, climbing in behind him as Jackson walked up next to the driver’s door. Wren looped her arms around Death from behind, wrapping him in a hug while being careful not to actually touch him with her hands.

  “Greasy girl,” he teased. “You have car trouble?”

  “Not me. Ms. Weeks. I just changed her tire for her.”

  “Grease monkey looks good on you.”

  Randy rolled his eyes. “If you’re going to get mushy, I’m getting out.”

  Wren dragged one finger down Randy’s cheek, leaving a black smear, before sliding back and clicking her seat belt.

  “You said you found me a crime scene?” Jackson prompted.

  “Not yet. I was waiting for you. I know where to look now. Follow me.”

  Death waited for the deputy to return to his own vehicle, then led the way down the gravel road, past the cemetery to the church driveway, where he pulled in and turned around. Jackson gave him a confused, annoyed look but followed suit. Death drove back until he was next to the cemetery again and stopped and they all got out.

  “Remember what Tony said in his statement? Why he said he stopped where he did when he found Jones wounded beside the road?”

  “Yeah. He said he saw his wife’s ghost.”

  “He did see his wife’s ghost. Or rather, he saw something that it makes perfect sense for him to have mistaken for her ghost. Look at this.” He proffered a paper, folded open to a picture of a couple standing close together. The man was in an Army dress uniform and had one arm around the woman. She wore a long dress and a light hijab. A strong wind blew her skirts to the side and she had one hand up by her mouth, holding her veil in place. In her left hand she was clutching a bouquet of flowers.

  “It’s the Doziers’ wedding picture,” Jackson said.

  Wren took it and looked closely at it. “They looked so happy,” she said. Zahra’s smiling eyes looked back at her. She turned the paper a bit and her breath caught in her throat. “You know what she reminds me of, in that long dress and veil, standing in that pose?”

  “Yeah,” Death grinned. “Yeah, I do.”

  Jackson followed their gaze to the gravedigger’s angel standing beyond the weed-filled ditch, gazing out toward the east. “So you think he thought the statue was his wife’s ghost?”

  “It makes sense,” Wren argued. “He’d just buried her. It’s night, he’s driving down this dar
k road, and his headlights catch the statue. She’s standing in the same pose his wife was standing in, in her wedding picture. I mean, the statue is holding her hair out of her eyes and Zahra was holding her veil, and the statue has a ladle instead of flowers, but it’s close enough.”

  “He got out of the car and tried to run to her,” Death said, “but he fell down in the ditch and found August Jones, bleeding. That on top of everything else triggered a flashback, and he thought he was back in the war. You know the rest.”

  He paced along the edge of the road until he came to a point where the underbrush was flattened and crushed. Jackson and Randy crouched on either side of him and Wren leaned over his shoulder as he pointed out the swarm of flies and other insects buzzing around the foliage.

  “There’s blood here. That’s what’s drawing the insects. See? The trail of crushed grass leads off into the cemetery. If we follow it, it should lead us to the place where Jones was attacked.”

  Rather than trample the weeds further and destroy possible evidence, they circled around through the churchyard and found the spot from inside the cemetery. The cemetery grass had been cut since the murder and the trail wasn’t nearly so obvious. The weeds at the top of the ditch were barely disturbed, but Death’s Jeep, still parked on the road, served as a marker. Looking closely at the low fence around the graveyard, they could see bloodstained fingerprints on the weathered wood.

  “He was badly injured, staggering along. He made it over the fence and then collapsed just short of the road. If Dozier hadn’t seen the statue and thought it was Zahra’s ghost, he’d have probably died where he fell.”

  “We’ll never be able to backtrack through this cut grass, though,” Jackson said. “The blood will have soaked in by now.”

  “But we don’t have to.” Death was walking around looking at tombstones. “Here.”

  “What?”

  “More blood. He had blood on his hands from trying to stop the bleeding and he was weak from blood loss, so he’d have grabbed onto anything that offered support. He left bloody handprints on the tombstones he passed. The traces are faint, so it’s not obvious unless you’re looking. Here’s another one. He came from this way.”