Mausoleum
Page 24
I watched from nearby. Grace stood with me briefly, before she wandered off to her father’s grave. I waited until they slid the casket in and locked the thing up. Then I went up to a middle-aged gentleman who wore his shirt buttoned to the neck. Earlier, I had seen him park his pickup down on the road. I offered my hand. “Chance Grose? I’m Ben Abbott. May I extend my condolences?”
“Thank you, sir. And I thank you for the welcome your town gave my little brother. I’m sure he was mighty happy here.”
What could I say but, “I recognized you from the film they made about Brian.”
“Yes, sure, that nice young lady was a-shootin’ up a storm.”
We passed a couple of pleasantries and I said, “You made a long drive. Do you have a place to stay?”
He said he had towed a camper and parked it at the VFW. Then he threw back his head and fixed his gaze on the mausoleum, which was reflecting the sun like neon.
“I do believe that is the finest looking structure I have ever seen.”
“Brian certainly enjoyed it,” I said.
“I hate to leave him here, with strangers. He weren’t much for mixing with his own family, but he is kin. But how could you separate a man from something he so obviously admired? Excuse me a moment, Mr. Abbott. Just want to get another look around it.” He circled the fence, head pitched high, moving backwards and forwards for perspective.
Stealthily, I poked at my cell.
Quietly, I spoke into it.
“Pink? I need Albert and Dennis, a heavy lift crane, and a huge truck…Cost? Damn the cost. Bill the Cemetery Association. Attention: The President.”
***
Having arrived in pieces, the blight came apart as easily as Lego blocks.
Lorraine Renner got a fat contract to film the disassembling and loading. The Bastion Mausoleum Company wished to assure restless consumers that “Built for the Ages” wasn’t necessarily etched in stone, and eternal rest should never restrict an American’s right to mobility. Lorraine was assisted by Sherman Chevalley who was surprisingly fleet-footed on crutches and was heard by more than one disbelieving on-looker to say, “Yes, dear,” more than once.
Brian’s casket rode in the back of his brother’s pickup.
“Albert,” said Pink. “Dennis. Come here.”
I nudged Lorraine. “You’ll want this.”
Sherman, ever sneaky, had mastered eavesdropping with the shotgun mike and would miss not a word as Pink laid a gargantuan arm on each of the brothers and drew them near. “Now, boys,” he said. “You will not screw up this important job.”
“Sure, Pink.”
“Nothing bad will happen to this truck. Nothing bad will happen to the load. You will drop the load in Arkansas, exactly where Mr. Grose wants it.”
“Hey, come on, Pink, what do you think we’re—”
Pink tightened his grip. Albert and Dennis grew expressions usually seen on an anaconda’s dinner.
***
The mausoleum truck and Chance Grose’s pickup truck rumbled out the gates. Pink finished loading tools.
“How’s the Trans Am running, Miss Botsford?”
“It’s making a clunking noise.”
“Yeah, it’ll do that,” said Pink and left quickly.
Charlie Cubrero came hustling with a bale of salt hay on his shoulder, a rake under his arm, and a sack of grass seed and a pick ax in his hand. Donny Butler kept a close watch on him as Charlie scrabbled the bare ground the mausoleum had occupied with the pick, raked it smooth, scattered the grass seed and mulched it with the hay. It was his day off from the Kantor farm.
Under ordinary circumstances, Charlie would be moldering in an ICE detention center. Federal law enforcement agencies are not famous for admitting wrong, much less apologizing, but the boys at ICE had discovered that getting sued by Fred and Joyce Kantor was an extraordinary experience best ended by fifty lawyers hammering out an agreement to stop suing in exchange for releasing Charlie Cubrero into Kantor custody with a green card. Which made a happy ending for all—with four exceptions. Dan Adams, who was going to have to get used to living on a banker’s salary instead of developer dreams. The inaptly named Angel, whose long-term future was being settled in humanity’s favor in numerous competing jurisdictions. Me, whose special friend Marian refused all my phone calls, emails and text messages. And Grace Botsford, whose promise, “It will all work out,” made me fear that the worst was yet to come.
***
That night, after we sent Brian Grose and his mausoleum home to Arkansas, I slept in my clothes, next to my fire gear, listening for the Plectron.
Hour after hour I heard the living room clock bong. Hour after hour the fire alarm was silent. I couldn’t stand it anymore and went for a walk on the dark streets of the town. If the call came, the volunteers’ cars and trucks converging with their blue lights flashing would give me ample warning to race home, jump in my gear, and run to the station in time to board the attack pumper.
Chapter Twenty-six
Here’s what happened next.
In the dull light of early dawn, Grace Botsford closed the front door of her saltbox and climbed into her thirty-year old Trans Am and drove up Main Street toward Mount Pleasant. After she passed Trooper Moody’s cottage, she unbuckled her seatbelt.
At the top of Mount Pleasant, just past Brian Grose’s place, she turned the car around and faced it down the hill and stepped hard on the gas. The old street racer rumbled to life and down it rolled heading for the bend in the road that had done in her father with a lethal assist from Angel.
Suddenly she screamed.
I couldn’t blame her. Who wouldn’t scream if someone unfolded himself from the narrow slot behind the front seats, and said, “Grace, you have an innocent passenger on board.”
She slammed on the brakes, went into a skid, got the car under control and pulled onto the shoulder, screaming, “Get out! Get out!”
“No.”
“Ben, I know what I’m doing.”
“I know what you’re doing, too, and that’s why I’m not getting out.”
Her eyes were huge. She was breathing hard. Otherwise she was, as always, still as sculpture. The damned-est thing was she did not look crazy. Annoyed was more like it. She glared at me the way you would glare at some dolt blocking a grocery aisle while you were trying to get shopped, get home, and cook dinner.
I said, “The Frenchtown Diner will be open by now. Why don’t we drive down and have a cup of coffee and a little breakfast?”
I did not expect her to reach inside her cardigan sweater and pull a pistol from a shoulder holster. But she did. And she pointed it at my face. Her hand was steady, her grip sure. She flicked off the safety without looking down at it. “Get out.”
“Grace, what’s the gun for?”
“In case I don’t die in the wreck I’ll blow my brains out before they bring the ambulance. Get out.”
“You think of everything, don’t you?” Including the snug holster so that even badly injured she could reach the gun to finish the job.
“Leave me to this Ben. I am doing what’s right.”
“It’s not right. If you want to ‘atone’ for the sin of shooting Brian, atone with good work.”
“I have done plenty of ‘good work.’ Dad and I both. And I know that I am leaving our ‘work’ in good hands, and for that I thank you, Ben Abbott. It gives me peace. But if you try to stop me from doing what I must, I will shoot you. I will attempt to just wound you.”
“Okay,” I said. I pitched the passenger seat forward, opened the door, and climbed over the seat. Halfway out I tried once more. “Grace.”
“Out!”
“If you kill yourself, I will resign from the Association.”
“What?”
“I won’t be president of the Village Cemetery Association. I won’t look after our burying ground for the next fifty years. I’ll leave it to ‘undesirable inhabitants.
’”
“You would never do that.”
“I will if you kill yourself.”
“Would you give up everything you love in our town in exchange for one miserable life?”
“I will move away. Start over somewhere else. I will leave Newbury to its own devices.”
“You can’t desert everything you care about.”
“Aren’t you?” I asked.
She blinked. “Would you rather see me go to prison?”
“I don’t see that happening. You were very careful. You’d make a wonderful criminal. No one knows but me, and I don’t have any proof.”
“Lieutenant Boyce suspects.”
“She doesn’t have any proof either—I presume this gun in my face is not one that would interest her.”
“Of course not. I registered it years ago, while I took shooting lessons. Lieutenant Boyce knew about them, by the way.”
“Lots of people learn to shoot. No proof, no case. And one of these days, I’m hoping, Lieutenant Boyce will remember how much she loved her own father. He was her hero. A cop. Shot in Bridgeport.”
Grace Botsford blinked, again. She looked like she was going to cry. Instead she engaged the safety, shoved the pistol back in the holster, made sure it was clipped, and buttoned her sweater over it. I climbed back in the car. We buckled up and drove down to Main Street, hung a left at the flagpole and grabbed the last two stools at the Frenchtown Diner.
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