Death & the Gravedigger's Angel

by Loretta Ross

  Nichelle and Randy were putting the other horses in stalls, draping rough blankets over their backs and making sure they had food and water.

  “Dry off yourself,” Nichelle told her husband. “Randy can help me get these guys settled. Can’t you, sweetie?”

  “Glad to help,” Randy agreed. “What else do we need to do? These other two horses need their saddles and stuff off ?”

  Sugar and the mare were still out in the common area. There were two empty stalls waiting for them, but one of those was the one from which Sugar had been taken by the drunk in the dead man’s uniform. Both animals were staying well away from that part of the barn.

  “Yeah. Here, we’ll start with Sheila. I’ll show you what to do.”

  “But—” Robinson protested.

  “But nothing. Just sit down and take it easy now.”

  While Nichelle and Randy worked to rid the mare of her tack, Death went back to the other door, cracked it open, and peered out across the dark parking area and toward the road beyond.

  “What are you looking for?” Kurt asked. “What’s the matter?”

  There was no one in sight, and no sign of headlights on the driveway or up on the road. Death held up a hand for silence and listened, but he couldn’t hear anything but the sound of the rain beating on the barn’s tin roof.

  “I was looking to see if there was any sign of a police car,” he said. “Deputy Jackson is supposed to be on his way out.”

  He turned back to find the Robinsons staring at him, wide-eyed and wary.

  “I know where August Jones’ cell phone is,” he told them. “I know where it is and how it got there.”

  _____

  Wren toed off her left shoe, leaned down to pull her sock off, and then stuck her bare foot back into the wet sneaker. She was standing next to the pool table, and she reached down into the corner pocket, took out a pool ball, shoved it into her sock, and tied the top of the sock to make a cosh. It occurred to her that she was ruining a perfectly good sock, but that, at the moment, was the least of her worries.

  The pool cues were in a holder on the wall and she crossed the floor carefully, avoiding the random boxes full of games and things that she had stacked there earlier, ready for auction. There had been no further sounds from within the dark house since she’d heard breaking glass. She wanted to think it was a coincidence, a windblown tree branch shattering an aged window pane. She didn’t believe it for a minute, though.

  Someone had taken her spark plug wires. Now they, whoever that person was, were here, inside the dark house with her, stalking her under cover of night.

  She considered the room she was in, trying to remember the layout and examining and discarding her options for hiding places. There were no closets in this old house, none at all. It had been built at a time when closets were taxed, so people had relied on chests and wardrobes instead.

  There was a trunk in the room. She’d been admiring it earlier. It was carved from cherry wood and served a dual purpose as a coffee table and a storage place for vintage jigsaw puzzles. It wasn’t nearly big enough to hold a human, though. The liquor cabinet had a glass front and was, in any case, still filled with liquor.

  It occurred to her that she could make Molotov cocktails, but she couldn’t think of a single scenario, given her current situation, where that would be anything but a terrible idea.

  Otherwise, there was nowhere to hide except for behind or beneath the pool table. Either place would be obvious to anyone coming in. Neither would offer more than minimal cover if the intruder was armed, and hiding under the table would hamper her own ability to maneuver.

  From somewhere in the depths of the house there came a light thunk, as of a cabinet door closing.

  A pair of sturdy side tables flanked the door of the game room and Wren turned her attention to them. Climbing on a table would put her at an unexpected level and perhaps give her an edge. Plus, being just inside the door would allow her to strike at someone as soon as they came in.

  The door opened inward, so waiting on the hinge side meant she would be hidden behind it when it opened. The open door would keep her from striking immediately, though, and anyone with an ounce of sense would check behind the door first thing, weapon at the ready.

  A door opened and closed nearby and she could hear someone moving through the morning room next door. They were searching, opening drawers and dumping out her carefully packed boxes. They weren’t even trying to be quiet.

  Wren pocketed her useless phone and the charger and climbed up on the table next to the door. She stood with her cosh in her left hand and the pool cue in her right. Her back was against the wall.

  The footsteps left the morning room and crossed to the study. She could hear them searching in there, dumping things out and throwing things around. The intruder seemed angry. When they left the study, they slammed the door behind them. The vibrations travelled through the walls and shivered up her back. A heavy tread approached the game room. Yellow light showed under the crack in the door, casting a fleeting beam across the faded rose carpet.

  They were so close, Wren could feel their presence. The doorknob jiggled and turned and a tall, gaunt man came in. He held a flashlight in his left hand and a gun in his right.

  The light, after the darkness, made Wren’s eyes water. From her odd, high angle, his features were a sharp silhouette against the glare. She didn’t recognize him, though she felt she would if only she could see him properly. She was to his left, so his gun hand was on the other side. He’d have to turn and point it across his body to aim at her.

  She leaned down and struck swiftly, before he had time to register that she was there. She swung the cosh at his right hand, as hard as she could, catching him in the meaty part of his palm and forcing his arm to fly out and hit the solid old door.

  The gun went off as it flew out of his hand, skittering away among the confusion of boxes. A sound of breaking glass and a glugging, dripping noise suggested that the bullet had lodged somewhere in the liquor cabinet.

  The cosh, on the rebound, caught the tip of the flashlight and broke the lens, plunging the room back into sudden darkness. The intruder was bent forward and hunched slightly by the force of Wren’s attack, and before he could straighten up, she struck again. She swung the pool cue down with all her strength, aiming for his head, but she managed only a glancing blow that caused him to stagger but did not fell him.

  She swung it a second time, holding it vertical this time and striking him between the shoulder blades with the butt of the cue. He fell forward and scrambled awkwardly away from her, into the room. She jumped down and bolted into the hall, still carrying her weapons and pulling the door closed behind her.

  eighteen

  Nichelle Robinson lowered herself into the chair beside the desk and her husband went over to stand next to her. He squeezed her shoulder and they turned to face Death and Randy.

  “We didn’t kill August Jones,” she said, voice level. “We don’t have his phone.”

  “I know you don’t have it,” Death said. “And I know you don’t know where it is. But it’s here.”

  The rain was beginning to ease up now and they could hear a car approaching along the road and up the driveway. Death went over and opened the door a crack, watching a Rives County Sheriff’s Department cruiser roll up and stop beside his Jeep.

  Orly Jackson got out, wearing a neon yellow slicker over his uniform. Death held the door open for him and waited while the officer ran up and dashed in dripping.

  He pulled off his raincoat and dropped it over the door into Sugar’s abandoned stall.

  “You said you found August Jones’ cell phone?”

  “We haven’t found it yet,” Death said, “but I’m sure it’s here and I know how it got here.”

  “So help me God, Bogart, if you’ve dragged me out here in the rain on another wild goose chase I’m going to kick your ass.”

  “I’ll pretend like that scares me later.”


  “Tell us why you think it’s here,” Kurt demanded.

  Sugar, still saddled in the common area, shook his head, rattling his bridle, and clomped over to stand beside Death. Death leaned against the nearest stall and scratched the horse’s nose absently while he spoke.

  “August Jones was stabbed outside the crypt, then dragged inside and left for dead. If he really had been dead, that would have been an excellent place to hide his body. No one was likely to go in there again for years, if ever. And even if someone could smell August’s body decomposing, there was another fresh corpse there that was supposed to be there. They’d most likely just think it was a case of poor embalming and avoid the area until the smell went away.”

  “Okay,” Jackson said, nodding along.

  “So I’ve been wondering, why take his cell phone? If it really does have a recording of the murder, the killer would need to get rid of it. They already had it somewhere where it was never likely to be found. All they had to do was take the battery out so it couldn’t be tracked.”

  “Maybe they wanted to destroy it?” Nichelle offered.

  “But they didn’t destroy it. They didn’t even take the battery out. Because it was still turned on and working when the police tried to GPS it.”

  “So what’s your stupid theory this time?” Jackson asked.

  Death spared him a brief look. “I don’t think the killer did take it out of the crypt.”

  “But it wasn’t there!”

  “I know. But the killer wasn’t the only one in that crypt between the time August Jones crawled out of it and we found it again.”

  “Jack Harriman?” Jackson asked.

  “Who?” Kurt demanded.

  “Jack Harriman,” Death explained. “He was the drunk who broke in and stole the uniform off of O’Hearne’s body. He and O’Hearne were rival Civil War enthusiasts. O’Hearne had bought an authentic Confederate cavalry uniform at one of the Keystones’ auctions, years ago, and decided to be buried in it. Harriman found out about it somehow. Apparently he wanted it for himself, and maybe he objected to a museum piece being used for grave clothes. Anyway, he made a deal with the funeral director to leave the crypt open.”

  “Right,” Nichelle said. “I read that in the paper. He told them something about slipping a picture of an old sweetheart into the coffin or something.”

  “Yeah, that. Well, the night after Zahra’s funeral, while Tony Dozier was driving around searching western Missouri for an allied military installation and August Jones was dying in his back seat, Jack Harriman took the license plates off his motorcycle and drove down here to steal the clothes off a dead body.”

  “It was stormy that night, like it is tonight.”

  “Not quite as bad a storm,” Kurt Robinson said, “but stormy, yeah.”

  “Right. And Harriman was riding a motorcycle. There was no bridge over the ravine on the driveway up to the Hadleigh House yet. He must have ridden up the Vengeance Trail, past the point where he was going to die before morning.”

  Nichelle shivered. “Creepy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why didn’t he just ride right up to the cemetery?” Randy asked. “It’s not like anyone was apt to pay him any attention.”

  “The same reason he removed the license plates,” Death said. “He was paranoid. He was also drunk and getting drunker by the minute. He had a six pack of beer and a bottle of whiskey. He hid his bike in the old slave quarters behind Hadleigh House and hiked from there, down here through your woods and out the other side to the cemetery. When he got inside the crypt, he finished off his beer and liquor, got the uniform off the body in the coffin, and stripped down and put it on himself.”

  “Gah!” Nichelle shuddered. “That’s disgusting.”

  “Well, he had to be really drunk by then. He left his wallet and keys and everything in the pocket of the clothes he’d been wearing, but I’m guessing that he found August Jones’ cell phone lying in the crypt and stuck that in his pocket just out of habit. Pick up cell phone. Stick it in your pocket.”

  “Oooooh!” Jackson said.

  “Then he locked the gate behind himself and headed back for his bike, much drunker than he’d been when he arrived. On his way back, he stumbled across the stable and decided that, since he was dressed as a cavalry officer, he should go for a ride. The storm likely already had the horses on edge, and the stench of formaldehyde and body liquor would have put them in a full-blown panic. But they were shut in their stalls, so he was able to get on Sugar’s back just the same, get the gate open, and ride away. How he managed to get as far as he did, drunk and bareback, I can’t imagine.”

  “I can explain that,” Jackson said. “Harriman came from Kentucky. He’d worked around horses his whole life. He was even a jockey for a while back in his twenties, though he never won any big races or anything like that.”

  “That makes a lot more sense then.” Death nodded. “So, he gets on horseback and makes his way back up the hill, missing the shed where he hid his motorcycle. He got back on the Vengeance Trail, passed out, fell off, and died there.”

  “But by then, he didn’t have the phone anymore.”

  “No. Because it fell out of his pocket here, in the barn, when he was trying to mount an uncooperative horse, and the horse kicked it back under the manger and against the wall.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah. I’m pretty sure. It was the moving beer can that tipped me off, though I only figured it out this afternoon. I had my phone, set on vibrate, in my desk drawer, and there was an empty soda can on my desk. The phone rang and the vibrations made the can slide across the desk. I remembered seeing the empty beer can do that when it was on that shelf, and that’s when I realized what must have happened. August Jones’ phone was set to vibrate. Someone was trying to call the phone, and the vibrations were travelling up the wall and making the beer can move.”

  “You didn’t look yet?” Jackson demanded.

  “We were waiting for you, because you’re the police and we wouldn’t like to be accused of tampering with evidence.”

  “That’s uncharacteristically levelheaded of you.”

  “Also, the floor’s dirty.”

  “Yeah, that’s more like it.”

  Orly Jackson unhooked his flashlight from his belt, went into the empty stall, and lay down on the floor so he could look under the manger. There was only about two inches of clearance.

  “See anything?”

  He had his cheek pressed into the dirt and his left eye closed so he could see into the deep, narrow recess. “Yeah, there’s something back there, I think. You know, I should probably leave it there and call the city police to come retrieve it.”

  “You know if you do they’ll be jerks about it,” Death said. “They’ll announce to the press that they’ve found the missing cell phone and they won’t even let you listen to it until it’s been presented in court and everything’s all over.”

  The deputy cursed and climbed back to his feet. “Hang on a minute. I’ve got to go to my car for my camera and gloves and an evidence bag.”

  “Why didn’t you bring them in with you?”

  “I thought you were just yanking my chain again.”

  _____

  Wren was still wearing her LED headband, but she didn’t want to take the time to turn it on just there, with only a single door between her and a dangerous man. With the thought of barricades foremost in her mind, she crossed the hall and entered the smoking room.

  It was a small, cozy room, furnished with deep armchairs and footrests and old-fashioned ashtray stands. There were Tiffany lamps and an antique gramophone, a small fireplace (too small to hide in) behind an iron grate, and a small, plain door in the back wall that led to the pantry off the kitchen.

  The room still smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and pipe tobacco. Wren felt her way across it, staying as silent as she could. She hadn’t done any work in here yet, and the scattering of furniture was unfamiliar to her. She bump
ed into dusty, upholstered beasts of armchairs crouching in the shadows and barked her shin on a low table. Across the hall, back in the game room, the intruder was throwing things around and muttering to himself.

  He was looking for his gun, of course. It wouldn’t be easy to find in the dark, but she supposed she’d best assume that he would. Hopefully, by the time he came out, he wouldn’t have any idea where she’d gone.

  She was remembering a conversation between the Keystone twins the day they’d gotten the electricity turned on in the old house. “Whoever buys this old mausoleum,” Roy had said, “the first thing they need to do is get an electrician in here and get the place up to code.”

  “Is it that bad?” Sam had asked. “Are we going to be safe working here?”

  Roy had shrugged laconically. “Hasn’t burned down yet. Ah, it’ll probably be okay. I wouldn’t want to live here, though. This wiring is from the 1920s, and it’s all tied to the one fuse box in the kitchen. I got a box of spare fuses, by the way. I’m gonna put ’em in a drawer in there, in case we need one.”

  If the lightning strike had caused a widespread outage, there was nothing Wren could do. But it was possible that it had simply blown a fuse, and if that was the case then replacing the fuse would turn the lights back on and allow her to plug in her phone and try, again, to call for help. For that matter, if it was a blown fuse, it was possible that the lights weren’t out in the entire house.

  She found a lamp on a table by the window. It took her several precious seconds to find the switch in the dark and when she flicked it, nothing happened.

  She eased through the small door into the tiny, dark pantry and took time to switch on her LED headlamp. Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined three walls, leaving an upside down L-shaped path from the door into the smoking room to the door into the kitchen. Her light caught a bare bulb screwed into a ceramic receptacle in the ceiling with a chain dangling from it. She reached up and pulled the chain, but that light wasn’t working either. She headed for the kitchen door, then stopped and took a second look at the contents of the shelves.

  Under a half-inch coating of gray dust, blue in the light from her lamp, lay old Tupperware canisters, moldy, mouse-eaten boxes of crackers and cereal, and several dozen Mason jars.