Death & the Gravedigger's Angel

by Loretta Ross

  The back door to the room swung open and Eric Farrington strutted in. He saw Death and Randy and his eyes lit up.

  “Hey, Bogart! I was just thinking. Did you ever see that show about wife swapping? Well, I thought—”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “No. And pray I don’t tell Wren about this conversation.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Reynolds asked Farrington. “I thought I gave you a job to do.”

  “I did it. It’s done. I did a helluva job, too.”

  “He did, Chief.” Officer Grigsby had come in behind the jailor. “Those cells are practically sparkling. Of course, there were only two he could clean. The others are occupied.”

  “Well, good. Now he can go move the prisoners out of two of the other cells and clean them. And keep doing that until he’s got them all.”

  Farrington’s face fell. “But if I put prisoners in the clean cells they’ll just get them dirty again. And if they see me having to clean them all, the prisoners I haven’t gotten to yet will mess up the ones they’re in.”

  “Yeah.” Reynolds smiled. “It’s gonna be a helluva job. Maybe while you’re doing it, you can think about all the reasons you shouldn’t be running around with a civilian trying to ‘execute a search warrant.’”

  _____

  “And-a-fifteen-and-a-fifteen-got-a-fifteen-and-a-sixteen-and-a-sevente—” Wren broke off in mid call. “Just a second here. Do you two know that you’re bidding against each other?”

  It wasn’t her responsibility to point it out and a lot of auctioneers wouldn’t have, but not doing so would have felt dishonest. Integrity was one of the cornerstones of Keystone and Sons.

  The two women bidding from opposite sides of the crowd craned their necks to see one another.

  “Mother?”

  “Darlene! What are you doing? I said I was going to buy it.”

  “I didn’t see you and I thought you were losing out, so I was bidding for you.”

  Wren tapped the top of the little wooden jewelry chest she was selling. “Okay, let’s go back to the last bid we had from a third party.” She pointed to a gentleman in the crowd. “You bid eleven, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay, then, starting with eleven … ”

  Later, after she’d handed the stepladder and microphone off to Roy’s son Tim, Wren wandered around the kitchen of the house where the auction was being held. They weren’t selling the house; the owners had opted to go through a realtor in the hopes of getting a higher price. It was a split-level ranch style home from the seventies, with an open floor plan and a lot of blond paneling.

  “Whatcha doin’?”

  She turned at the voice to find that Felix Knotty had come in behind her. Like Death, Felix was a Marine combat vet, but his war had been Vietnam. He’d been friends with the twins since they’d gone to school together and he worked now as an odd-job man for the auction company.

  “Just looking around. You know, I’ve never really looked at any of the places we’ve sold from the perspective of a home buyer before.”

  “Are you thinking you might like to live here?”

  “No, I can’t see it. It feels sterile and mildly depressing and there aren’t any trees in the yard.” Wren shrugged and turned in a circle. “Anyway, we need to get our financing in order and figure out what we’re looking for. It’s kind of scary. How do you know you’re choosing the right place? What if you make a mistake?”

  “Are you talking about the house or about Death?”

  “What? Why, the house of course!”

  “I’m just saying. You’re uprooting your whole life for a man you’ve known for less than a year. And a damaged man at that. That doesn’t scare you?”

  “No! Not at all!”

  “How do you know you’re doing the right thing?”

  “I just do. It just … ” She searched for an explanation. “It just feels right. It feels like the most right thing I’ve ever done.”

  Felix smiled. “Well then, I wouldn’t worry about the house. That’s just a detail. Finding the right person is the main point. Once you’ve done that, the details will work themselves out.”

  _____

  “Come to do some more horseback riding?”

  Death’s “no” was drowned out by Randy’s “yeah, he did!”

  “No, I didn’t. You know I didn’t.”

  “But you could, as long as you’re here.”

  “It couldn’t hurt.” Robinson joined the argument. “It’s good exercise and relieves stress. Helps rebuild confidence. And Sugar likes you. He’s not going to dump you off and you’re not quite clumsy enough to fall off on your own. And it’s not like your brother would think less of you if you did fall off.”

  “Right,” Randy agreed. “You’re my big brother. I’ve thought you were an idiot all my life.”

  “Ha ha. Listen, I came out here because I wanted to talk to you about that missing cell phone.”

  “Man, I don’t know where it is. I don’t know anything about it beyond what I told you. Jones was talking on it the last time I saw him and that’s the last time I saw it, too.”

  “I know. But it pinged on this property a week after he was killed. There’s at least a chance that it’s still here somewhere, only hidden well enough that no one could find it.”

  “I don’t see how that could be. You know the cops searched for two whole days. They pulled up the floorboards in the cabins, looked in the attics, brought in the dogs and metal detectors, and crawled through the woods on their hands and knees. They even went through my wife’s underwear drawer. I don’t even go through her underwear drawer! And you know what they found? Nothing! A whole hell of a lot of nothing!”

  Death sighed. “I understand that. Look, I’m just trying to do what you asked me to do. I’m trying to clear Tony Dozier. The best way to do that is to figure out who killed August Jones. Now the cops, they have all kinds of fancy forensics to fall back on. Maybe they’ll find something at the murder scene that points to the killer. But all I’ve got is my eyes and my gut. I just think if I could get a better idea of the layout, I could maybe come up with some idea of what, exactly, happened that day.”

  Kurt Robinson frowned and thought about it. “So would you like a guided tour of the property?”

  “It might help, yeah. Could you do that?”

  “Oh, sure. Absolutely. On horseback.”

  _____

  “You know, I’m glad you suggested this,” Death said. “I think I could get to enjoy horseback riding.”

  “Shut up,” Randy growled. Like his brother, he was mounted. His horse was a big chestnut stallion. Randy was clinging to the saddle horn every bit as desperately as Death had on his first ride. Death could swear the horses looked amused.

  He certainly was.

  “If you look off to the right, that’s south, you can still see remnants of an old barbed-wire fence. That’s the property line between our land and the Hadleigh House.” Robinson drew his own mare to a halt and pointed toward a line of trees. “The gully that Roy put his truck in runs down along the other side of that fence, crosses over onto our property just past this rise, then turns south again and crosses under the road through a culvert. The cops went through the gully with dogs and metal detectors and had a guy crawl through the culvert, but they didn’t find squat.”

  Death looked back up at the Hadleigh House, high overhead and nearly hidden behind the trees. A trail of pin oaks, younger than the surrounding woods, wound its way up the hill.

  “Your driveway used to be connected to the Hadleigh House drive,” he observed.

  “Yeah. This was all part of the plantation back in the day.” Robinson led the way over a low rise and stopped beside a small bridge that carried the camp’s driveway over the creek. The gully wasn’t as deep here, but it was wider. The water was shallow and danced and sang over the rocks.

  “If the creek leaves the property here,” Randy asked, �
��what’s the creek that runs between your land and the cemetery?”

  “That’s a little tributary to this creek. We’re ringed on three sides by water.”

  “How much does it restrict access on foot?”

  “It doesn’t, really,” Robinson said. “This is the only place you can drive across the creek, but there are a lot of places where you can get a horse down and back up the other side if you want to ride across, and you can climb down and cross it on foot almost anywhere.”

  Death grimaced. “You know that doesn’t help me a hell of a lot?”

  “Yeah. I know.” Robinson nodded across the bridge. “Our property this way is a little, rough quarter-circle—or quarter-oval, really—between the creek, the road, and the fence line. Do you want to look at it or head on toward the north and the cemetery?”

  “Let’s go look at the cemetery and the woods between here and there.”

  Kurt Robinson turned his horse to the north and led the way through a low meadow that ran between the creek and the rise. Trees were beginning to lose their leaves now and here and there the gray-white gravel road was visible between the branches.

  “I’m trying to get the timeline nailed down,” Death said. “Jones was murdered on the 7th. That is, he was attacked on the 7th and then died in Dozier’s car sometime during the night of the 7th to 8th. Because he had an arrest record—”

  “Who had an arrest record?” Randy interrupted.

  “Jones. Pretty much all the members of the CAC have been arrested at some time or other. Trespassing, disturbing the peace, etc.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, so because he had an arrest record, they were able to identify his body immediately. But they didn’t find out he carried a cell phone until several days later, because it wasn’t registered in his name. They started pinging it on the 13th and it showed as being somewhere on this property. That was a Tuesday, the Tuesday after the funeral. Who was here then, do you remember?”

  Robinson sighed. “That was almost a week after the funeral. You’ve gotta understand that we only started this place up a couple of years ago. We’ve been putting it together on a shoestring. During the summer we have stuff going on pretty much all the time. Like a summer camp only for vets instead of kids. But aside from the one Nichelle and I live in, none of the cabins are insulated or set up for winter weather. So, after Labor Day, things start slowing down. We still do programs at the weekends, but weekdays are pretty slow.”

  “Just you and Nichelle, then?” Death asked.

  Robinson hesitated, then sighed again. “Us and Dexter. He spent a couple of days here that week.” He pulled up his horse and turned to look at Death directly. “He wouldn’t kill anyone. I swear to you. On my grandmother’s grave, I swear to you. Dexter wouldn’t kill anyone.”

  fifteen

  “I had a possessed rabbit once.”

  “I’m not even surprised.”

  On the square in downtown East Bledsoe Ferry, the Heritage Days festival was in full swing. On the northeast corner a Ferris wheel towered majestically over the courthouse. A merry-go-round spun gaily to the south and the air was filled with calliope music and the scent of peanuts and cotton candy. The easy joy around them reminded Death perversely of the Doziers and all that they had lost. The police were at a standstill, waiting for the results of tests on things they’d found at the crime scene, and Death resolved to enjoy the company of his own loved ones and cherish this time with them.

  He and Wren were standing in front of a game booth. His Marine Corps marksmanship had won her a stuffed animal and the carny was trying to get him to wager it in another round for a chance to win the largest prize, a giant stuffed teddy bear.

  “He was three feet tall and green and his name was Chauncey,” Wren was saying. “I won him in a drawing when I was, like, nine.”

  “Someone had a drawing for a possessed rabbit?”

  “Oh, I don’t think it was possessed when I won it. I think that happened later, the night of the Ouija board.”

  Death grinned. “That sounds like the name of another horror movie. What happened The Night of the Ouija Board?”

  Wren leaned one hip against the game booth counter and turned so she could look up at him. “Well, I had this Ouija board. I got it—”

  “At an auction?”

  “Of course. I was ten or eleven, something like that, and my cousin Jenny was spending the night. We opened it on the floor between us and we both crossed our hearts and swore not to push the pointer. And you know how, in the movies, there’s always flickering lights and curtains that move with no wind and then the pointer slides across the board and says it’s going to kill you and you hear voices and so on and so forth?”

  “Yeah. So what happened?”

  “Nothing. Neither one of us pushed it, so it didn’t move. It was terribly anti-climactic.”

  “This is the most unbelievable ghost story I’ve ever heard.”

  “Why? Because nothing happened?”

  “Because neither of you cheated and pushed the pointer.”

  Wren stuck her tongue out at him.

  “So what made you think your rabbit got possessed?” the carny asked.

  “Okay, so, the house I grew up in was really old. It’s gone now. But the upstairs was just one room, under the eaves, with slanty walls on two sides and a stairwell in the corner. That was my room. There was a railing by the stairway, but it was the same height as my bed so my dad wouldn’t let me push the bed against it because he didn’t want me to roll out of bed and wake up dead.”

  “I approve of his logic.” Death grinned.

  Wren smiled up at him and went on with her story. “So I had Chauncey at the foot of the bed, between the bed and the stair rail, facing away from me like he was looking out the window. That night Jenny and I both had the same nightmare that he was possessed, and when we woke up he was at the head of the bed facing me.”

  “You don’t think Jenny might have moved him?”

  “I think I’d have woke up. Besides, how would she know about my dream?”

  “I still don’t see how that necessarily equals a possessed rabbit.”

  She considered. “‘Possessed’ might be too strong a word. He was definitely uncanny, though. After that, he moved around a lot on his own. And he seemed to have an extra-beady glint in his little plastic eyes.”

  “What ever happened to him?”

  “He got stolen. I have a shirttail relative who’s really light-fingered, and he came in my house when I was gone one day and stole Chauncey to give him to a girl he was seeing. She turned out to be a total psycho. I’ve always wondered if she was always that way or if the rabbit was responsible.”

  They stood there in silence for a couple of minutes thinking about it.

  “Was there a point to this?” the carny asked.

  “I think the point is that giant stuffed animals freak her out,” Death explained.

  Wren beamed and hugged his left arm, leaning her head against his biceps. “I love it that you understand me.”

  “But this bear is totally cool,” the carny argued, “and I guarantee that it is 100 percent not possessed.”

  “Thanks,” Death said, “but I think we’ll stick with the smaller one. Which one do you want, honey? The blue one?”

  Wren nodded. Death accepted the stuffed animal and handed it to her as they turned away.

  The square was jammed with people and it never ceased to amaze Death, who’d grown up in St. Louis, how many of these people he recognized, even with half of them being in eighteenth-century costumes. He remembered how his life had been a year earlier. He had been fresh out of the military and fresh out of a VA hospital, abandoned by his wife and bereft of his supposedly dead brother. He had been broke and homeless, living in his car with pain and depression as his constant companions.

  And now he was here, surrounded by friends, with Wren on his arm and his brother somewhere in the crowd.

  “Penny for your thoug
hts,” Wren said.

  He smiled down at her. “I was just thinking we should ride the merry-go-round. You want to?”

  “Okay! But we have to make it to the stage on the other side of the courthouse in time to get good seats for the talent show. Both of the elder Keystone couples are in it.”

  “Can do.”

  _____

  Robin Keystone was smiling broadly at the girl he’d had a crush on for the past two months. It was a frozen sort of smile, with clenched teeth and a manic gleam in his eye, and the pretty fifteen-year-old in the long dress and poke bonnet looked terrified.

  Randy Bogart mentally face-palmed and inserted himself into the encounter before it could get worse. He walked over and dropped an arm over Robin’s shoulder and addressed the girl.

  “Hi there! Sarabeth, right?”

  She nodded warily.

  “Sarabeth, you’re going to have to forgive Robin here. He doesn’t mean to come off all creepy and stalkerish. The thing is, he wants to tell you that he thinks you look very pretty in that costume, but he’s shy.”

  Robin turned bright red and for a minute Randy was afraid he was going to faint or throw up. Sarabeth was blushing too, now, and she ran a hand down her skirt hesitantly.

  “Do you like it?” she asked. “I made it myself.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, it’s awesome,” Robin stammered. “I saw you earlier, in the parade. That stagecoach you were riding in is really cool. Your uncle builds those, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, he does! My sisters and I help him do the research so they’re totally authentic. Would you like to see it?”

  “Yeah, I’d love to!”

  Randy clapped Robin on the shoulder and stepped back to watch them leave. “Yeah, I rock,” he said to himself and went to find his brother.

  He met Death and Wren getting off the merry-go-round, and Wren waved a blue teddy bear at him. “Randy! Come with us. We’re going to go see the Keystones in the talent show.”

  He fell in beside her and the three of them made their way around the courthouse. They were passing the bandstand, a large white gazebo across from Death’s office that was currently occupied by a barbershop quartet, when Randy’s eye fell on a group huddled around the street sign on the corner. He reached over and smacked the back of his hand against Death’s shoulder.