TheCart Before the Corpse

by Carolyn McSparren

  “No doubt there are strict health regulations about that sort of thing.” She pulled into a space in the lot behind Bubba Rice Lunch and Catering. “Besides, the hole would be too big. You can’t afford it. However, I see no reason he can’t be buried in a top hat with his whip beside him.” She glanced at me. “Oh, dear, it’s not my choice. I am butting in.”

  “Butt on. I think it’s a great idea. He loved wearing his top hat,” I said and began to snuffle. “He had a beautiful handmade English holly whip that he only used for formal occasions. I wonder where it is.” I turned in my seat to face Peggy. “We have to find it. He has to be buried with it.” I choked. “He loved that whip. Oh, God.”

  She wrapped her arms around me and patted my back. When I subsided into gulps and hiccups, she said, “Let’s get some food into us before we both collapse.”

  This late we found a table and ordered a pair of chicken salad plates and iced tea. While we waited for it, Peggy reached across and laid her hand on mine. ”I know how terrible this must be for you.”

  “It’s horrible, all right, but I’m worried to death about how I’m going to pay for it all. I don’t imagine many people will show up from Aiken or Southern Pines or Wellington or Ocala, but I don’t want him to feel slighted.” I took a gulp of my iced tea. “That is about the dumbest thing I’ve said recently. He’s not around to care.”

  “The thing about funerals,” Peggy said as she stirred a couple of artificial sweetener packets into her tea, “Is that they are an awful lot of fun.” She caught my expression and smiled. “The only difficulty is that somebody has to die before you can have one.”

  I started to say something, but she held up a hand. “Think about it. The only other ceremony at which you see friends and kin you seldom see is at a wedding, and they are generally frantic and nobody gets to talk to one another. That’s why God invented wakes. We get together, eat, drink, toast the deceased, remember our lives with him or her, remember how much we love the people we seldom see, do a fair amount of weeping and a lot of laughing, and hang onto one another literally for dear life.”

  “It’s a woman thing, isn’t it?” I asked. I remembered listening to the women in my grandmother’s kitchen laughing as they cooked and served and cleaned up. As a child, I listened to tales of making wreaths at Christmas, and how she crocheted amazingly ugly dolls to fit over the toilet paper rolls, and the ambrosia she made every Christmas that nobody else knew how to make. At Hiram’s wake I’d be surrounded by strangers. Even worse, I might be completely alone.

  “Most of the ceremonies of life and death are women things, Merry. It is a skill the generations pass along to one another.”

  Suddenly I wanted to talk to Allie and my mother.

  Chapter 17

  Tuesday afternoon

  Merry

  “Mom, I can’t come to the funeral,” Allie said. “We’re launching an important IPO on Friday.”

  She had finally returned my call, as I was driving out to Hiram’s to feed the horses their afternoon hay and check on Yoder. I heard voices in the cell background. “You’re still in the office. Can you talk?”

  “Actually, We had such a crappy day that we took off early. I’m in a bar. I am drinking my first and only white wine and I’m with two girlfriends. I am not trolling for Mr. Goodbar.”

  “Glad to hear it.” She was old enough to drink in bars if she wanted to, even New York bars, which television and movies always made out to be strictly for hook-ups with serial killers. I should talk. “Hey, I’m a mother. I get to worry.”

  “Don’t. I’m much choosier than you were.”

  Ouch.

  “Sorry. And it’s not just the IPO. I’d just get in the way. I so did not know the man. Or how to talk to his friends or even tell stories about him. How embarrassing is that?”

  Steve, my mother’s husband, was the grandfather she loved and who adored her.

  She knew Hiram only from an occasional photo or article in a horse magazine, and checks on her birthday and Christmas when he remembered. Maybe that was one of the reasons she’d learned to equate money with love. She hadn’t learned it from me. I never had any money, although that in itself may have driven her to want wealth above all else.

  “Relax. I wasn’t really expecting you to come,” I said and hoped I’d kept the disappointment out of my voice. “I was feeling a little overwhelmed and needed to hear your voice.”

  The thing that keeps me from smacking her upside her head is that she does get it eventually. “I could fly down to Atlanta on Saturday and stay until Sunday afternoon. Would that help?”

  Go and pat needy mother on the shoulder. As if. “And miss an April weekend in Manhattan with your friends? No way would I do that to you. A simple graveside service. No biggy. I’ll report afterwards.”

  “Maybe we can do an FTF next weekend, okay?”

  I smiled. I always did when she went all acronym on me. “A face-to-face might be just what the doctor ordered.”

  “I’ll send you a time when I know my schedule. You can tell me all about it then. Mom, did somebody really kill him? I mean, nobody you actually know gets killed, much less family.”

  “Somebody actually did.” I didn’t add that at the moment I was at the head of the line as First Murderer, at least in the eyes of law enforcement.

  *

  Agent Stone-Face had already parked his white Crown Vic with its antenna farm and black-walled tires in front of Hiram’s barn. I’ve never known why the cops don’t simply put blazing lights on top and signs on the side. You’d have to be from Katmandu not to know you’re being tailed by an unmarked police car.

  Wheeler, however, wasn’t sitting behind the wheel waiting for me, but back in the stable with an actual muck fork in his hands and an Atlanta Braves baseball cap on his head. He wore starched jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt emblazoned with Georgia Bureau of Investigation. “You did say four o’clock?”

  I wear a stainless steel watch that has survived a million dunkings in horse liniment. It read four minutes after four. “What about ‘close enough for government work?’”

  “Not the government of the state of Georgia. What am I supposed to do with this thing?” He bounced the prong end of the muck fork on the ground.

  “You weren’t seriously planning to pick up horse manure, were you?”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  I took the fork. “Go sit on a hay bale. Watch and learn.”

  He arched an eyebrow at me. I wish I could do that. I can wiggle my ears, but that doesn’t express quite the same degree of disdain.

  “Where’s Yoder?” he asked. He arranged the creases in his jeans and sat on a bale outside Heinzie’s stall.

  “No idea. He should be here.” I kept my voice casual, but my stomach clenched. If Jacob thought he was under suspicion, he might well have high-tailed it for the hills or his lady friend and left me to deal with this place alone. I prayed I was over-reacting.

  I pulled the manure cart from beside the barn entrance to the front of Heinzie’s stall. Since the horses spent most of the day out, only a single pile of road apples lay like a nest of brown roc’s eggs in a corner of his stall. I scooped them up, picked up a small pile of wet shavings, checked the water bucket and moved across the aisle to do the next stall. “I am very good at mucking stalls. How’s that for a talent to put on your tombstone?” I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes.

  “You okay?”

  “Blood sugar,” I lied. “Move over.”

  He did.

  “I have to figure out what to put on Hiram’s tombstone.”

  “Name, date of birth and death, obviously.”

  I gulped. “He deserves more than that when some kid in the twenty-third century comes checking out old graveyards for a term paper. Something pithy so he’ll say, ‘Wow! What a guy.’”

  “That could go either way. What a great guy or what a rotten guy. Which was he?” Wheeler asked.

  I picked up the
manure fork and walked into Don Qui’s stall. “A guy who didn’t deserve killing.”

  I launched the fork like a lance. It stuck into the wood below the window and quivered there. I wanted to gnaw it down to the metal like an angry beaver with a sapling.

  “I’ve spent this whole damned day on the logistics of death and I’m not through yet. When do I get to pay attention to who killed him and why?”

  He came into the stall, yanked the manure fork out of the wood and handed it to me. “You don’t. I do.”

  “Right. Like anyone around here is interested in anything but kissing the governor’s ass.”

  “Screw the governor’s ass.”

  “I’d rather not.” We glared at one another across my lethal weapon. I swear he broke first.

  The corner of his mouth lifted. “I’d rather not as well.”

  He took the fork, and I followed him into the aisle. “So, who gets the money?” he asked.

  “Me, as you no doubt already know.” Of course he knew. No reason for Robertson not to tell him. Wills become public knowledge the moment they are probated. Why make Wheeler wait? “Now, if I just knew what money, how much, where it is, and how to get it, I’d be able to pay the funeral home mega-bucks for what they call a simple graveside service. God only knows how much a big send off in a church with an organ and a choir would cost.”

  “I would imagine his accountant could tell you how to locate his money.”

  “Robertson is setting up an appointment with him for tomorrow if he can squeeze me in.” I began to stomp up and down the aisle waving the fork like a cheerleader’s baton. At one point Wheeler ducked.

  “Watch that thing.”

  “Watch yourself. Peggy and I have to go back to the funeral home at nine tomorrow to pick out a casket and a vault for Hiram, approve the grave site, find out when and if the Episcopal priest can and will perform the service and lend us his pall, check out headstones . . . ”

  “Pallbearers?”

  “What?”

  “Honorary ones, at least, to walk behind the coffin up to the gravesite from the hearse. You’ll need at least one limousine to take them from the funeral home to the graveside. And one for you and Mrs. Caldwell and whatever other family attends.”

  I smacked myself in the head. “Pallbearers? Who on earth can I get? He didn’t know anybody around here but women and Jacob Yoder.”

  “There’s Robertson and his accountant.”

  “Oh, lovely bosom buddies for life. Can you have women pallbearers?”

  “How about the people he knew in the horse world?”

  “Nobody’s going to drive over from Aiken of Southern Pines or up from Ocala and Wellington. They’ll send flowers. Oh, God, flowers! I’ll have to order some in case nobody else sends any. They may send memorials or telegrams or phone me, but they won’t actually come.”

  “Thought those big guns flew private jets. They may get together and come in a group.”

  “That’s all I need!”

  “In any case, don’t forget you’ll need boutonnieres for them.”

  “What?” I yelped. “That’s for weddings.”

  He looked so calm leaning against the wall that I wanted to clock him on that wolf snout of his. “Funerals, too. Usually white rosebuds.”

  “Do I get to carry a bouquet?” I heard the hysteria in my voice. Chuckles the Clown peeked over the horizon like Kilroy over the fence line. I would not lose my cool in front of this man.

  “How big is your refrigerator?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  “Because by the time you get home tonight, you’ll have enough chess pie and sweet potato casseroles and homemade zucchini bread to feed Mossy Creek.”

  “They’ll all have to be thanked.” I collapsed on a hay bale and dropped the fork. “In writing.” I glared up at him. “You’re enjoying this.”

  “No, I’m not. But I am an expert at what goes on after somebody dies by violence. Many times there’s no body to bury. Don’t let it overwhelm you. Don’t you have family that could come down and help?”

  “My mother would come if I begged, but I won’t. She has been married to my stepfather for twenty years, I’m divorced and an only child, and my only child is launching an IPO in New York on Friday. I’m it. If it weren’t for Peggy Caldwell, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “She’s certainly very helpful,” he said. I caught something in his voice.

  “Wheeler, if it weren’t for Peggy, Sheriff Shiny-Badge would have brushed Hiram’s death off as an accident.”

  “I doubt even he could have managed that after the medical examiner’s findings, but Peggy had already gotten in front of it. She did find the body, after all.”

  “And the person who finds the body is the killer? First you go after me, then after Peggy?”

  “I’m not going after anybody. Yet. Find me another of those fork things. We’ll get this done and the horses fed fast.” He pushed the cart from in front of Don Qui’s door. “Then I want to see the inside of the workshop.”

  “Don’t you need a warrant?” I handed him a fork from the rack beside the door.

  “It’s technically a crime scene.”

  “But your people released it.”

  He dumped a small pile from Don Qui’s stall into the cart and moved it down to the next stall. “Everybody watches too much Law and Order. I could get a court order, but it would be faster if you’d give me permission to search.”

  “Permission granted. But I get to watch.”

  “Dang,” I heard and spun in time to see Jacob Yoder turning and striding away fast.

  Wheeler dropped his fork and sprinted after him. “Yoder. Hold up. I want to talk to you.”

  “Later. I am busy.”

  “Now! Right there, unless you want me to violate your parole for running from an officer of the law.”

  Jacob stopped, but didn’t turn around. “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “I sure do.” I said as I came up to them. “It’s four-thirty. You said you feed and pick stalls at four.”

  “Thirty minutes only is not much.”

  I could smell alcohol on him, but whether he’d been drinking beer or hard stuff, I couldn’t tell. I’d have to discuss that with him, but I wasn’t looking forward to it.

  “They think it’s a big deal.” I waved at the five equine heads hanging over the fence as though they were on the verge of starvation. “Please finish the stalls and fill the water buckets. I’ll put out the feed. Where’s your list of who gets what?”

  “I know what they eat.” He edged around Wheeler. “I will do it.” He sounded sulky, but obviously putting out feed and mucking stalls was preferable to speaking to the GBI. “You want to talk to me, you come along,” he said to Wheeler.

  The agent glanced at me. “Alone. Ms Abbott, please wait for me outside the workshop. I won’t be long.”

  With those words Yoder visibly relaxed. “I know nothing.”

  I wanted to hear whatever constituted nothing in his book, but Wheeler lifted that damned eyebrow at me again, so I slunk off around the corner of the barn and stopped out of sight.

  A moment later Wheeler stuck his head around the corner. “Didn’t your mother tell you it’s not nice to eavesdrop?”

  “Didn’t yours tell you it’s bad manners to sneak up on people?” I walked off with my head held high.

  He’d said outside the workshop, but it was my workshop, after all. Or would be, once the will was probated. I left the padlock open and hanging from its hasp. The fluorescent lights under the rafters furnished Hiram plenty of light for fine work at his workbench and in the center of the barn, but the back and right side were in shadow.

  I walked past the sagging vis-à-vis to the two carriages against the back wall waiting for restoration. The one on the left by the harness racks was a real beauty—an antique dogcart set up for a pair. The two horses in the pasture would fit perfectly with it.

  On closer inspection, however, the up
holstery leather showed bare patches, the wicker sides of the dog compartment under the seat hung ragged, and the coachwork was deeply scratched and scored as though it had been run through brambles. The singletree to which the two horses would be attached hung from one rusty chain just in front of the dashboard, and the spokes of the wheels looked as though they’d been driven through heavy brush and over tree limbs. It needed restoration, but nothing any good carriage maker couldn’t handle. Whoever sent it along to Hiram was doing him a favor, giving him some income as he was getting started. Probably one of his old clients who knew how precise his work was.

  Actually, in some ways he was an even better craftsman than a driver. The carriages he and his owners drove were always immaculate, and if they needed repair, he did the work himself, not generally the sort of thing one would expect of a professional driver. He’d always had a workshop wherever we lived, and I’d worked alongside him every chance I got. My mother flipped out when she found me using a circular saw when I was seven. I still have all my fingers, so Hiram was a good teacher.

  The second carriage was an obvious antique doctor’s buggy from the mid nineteenth century. I’d be willing to bet it had been stored in some farmer’s hay barn since the last time it was used. Since doctors regularly traveled the back roads of the south by horse and buggy well into the twentieth century, it could have been stored since the nineteen twenties.

  It was a wreck. God knows why anyone would want to restore it. A brand new one would be cheaper and better constructed. They aren’t rare. One of the shafts that would have held the single horse leaned against the back wall. The other lay on the ground in two pieces. Both were badly warped.

  The fabric of the canopy was in shreds as was the black horsehair upholstery. Varmints had appropriated most of the stuffing to line their nests. The entire equipage was filthy, and half of the spokes in the wheels were broken. All the brass was black with age. The glass in the lanterns was broken or missing. Whoever commissioned the restoration was spending a pretty penny for what had to be sentimental reasons.

  I couldn’t return either of them until I discovered the clients’ names.