In a Midnight Wood

by Ellen Hart

  “Sam’s been on my mind a lot since his remains were discovered in the cemetery at Holy Trinity. That’s my church, by the way, so it seemed doubly awful. I can’t imagine why he was put there.”

  Jane sat back down, switched on the recorder, and asked her opening question. “When Sam went missing, what did you think happened?”

  “I guess I assumed he’d taken off for greener pastures. He always said he hated small towns. He was kind of a daredevil, you know, liked to take risks, so leaving all the comforts of home wouldn’t have stopped him. He worked at a hardware store the summer between his junior and senior year. I suppose I figured he’d saved his money to bankroll his getaway.”

  “Both his mother and Emma Granholm mentioned that he didn’t take his motorcycle. They thought it was strange.”

  “Yeah, I thought so, too, but then it would have been a lot cheaper for him to hitchhike. Instead of spending money on gas, he could’ve spent it on food. But now we know none of that happened.”

  “Did Sam ever talk about his father with you?”

  “So you’ve heard the rumors. No, not much. Everybody knew he hated his dad, but I never remember him giving any reasons.” Pausing a moment, he added, “We didn’t really have that kind of friendship—where you open up about something painful. We were mostly social friends. I don’t recall a deep conversation with any of the guys on the swim team. Maybe we were all shallow, but my guess is most guys are like that.” He removed a large, black Moleskine notebook from his top desk drawer. On the front was a label that said 1999. “I’ve kept a journal since I was in junior high. When my sister died, my mom said I should write about how I felt, that it would help me. It really did, so I just kept doing it. I didn’t write every day, but I did record a lot of what was happening. So when Sam was found, I dug it out. I found the rumor about his dad, and I highlighted it. In reading over what I wrote about the early months of my senior year, I was struck by how many other rumors were going around—not about Sam, but in general, so I highlighted those, too. I suppose it’s all part of being in high school, but I’ve always been kind of sensitive to rumors.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “Yeah, an important one. When I was in Cub Scouts, a rumor went around that one of the assistant cub masters secretly worshiped the devil. I actually believed it, mainly because he seemed so creepy. Years later, when I was in junior high, the same guy was arrested and charged with molesting boys. I know rumors aren’t always true, but sometimes where there’s smoke—”

  Jane took his point. “I’d love to know what some of the rumors were.”

  “Well,” he said, opening the notebook and flipping through the first few pages. “Okay, here’s one. Believe it or not, it was a very big deal at the time. People were saying that on January 1, 2000, the middle of our senior year, our school would blow up. It was all part of the Y2K scare. The principal even called a school assembly to address it.” He continued to page through his notes, stopping here and there to read before moving on. “Another rumor was that one of the teachers had seduced a student. We figured it was Mr. Hoffman, the football coach. He was always off in some dark corner, whispering to one of the cheerleaders. A couple guys said he kept porno magazines in his desk, but nothing ever happened to him.” He turned another half dozen pages. “Oh, and this one was big for a while. People were saying that two guys, Dave Tamborsky and Monty Mickler, weren’t just friends.”

  “Meaning?”

  “That they were gay and getting it on with each other. I will say, they did seem unusually tight.”

  “Any truth in it?”

  “Mickler’s married now, so probably not, but who knows?” He continued to search the pages of the journal. “Okay, the last one I recorded was about some girl in our class getting into a car with a stranger and being attacked. Apparently it happened sometime during the summer. Never heard any other details, but that one was whispered about for months.” He closed the book. “That’s all I recorded. Make of them what you will.”

  “I’m curious,” said Jane. “What about drugs? Was that a big deal back in high school?”

  “Not the hard stuff, at least not in my crowd. We all drank, illegally, of course, and it was pretty easy to get weed. But that’s it.”

  Jane glanced down at her list of questions. “Did you ever see Sam get into any fights? Anybody have a grudge against him?”

  “The only fight I remember was with his brother.”

  “Scott? Do you know what it was about?”

  “No idea. Actually, as I think about it, it was a few days before he went missing. I was on my way to meet my girlfriend at Boogaloo’s, a burger joint that used to be across from the Rialto theater. As I was walking through Liberty Park, I saw them. At first, I thought they were wrestling. You know, just having fun. But it became apparent pretty quickly that they were trying to beat the crap out of each other. I ran over and did my best to break them up. After Scott took off, Sam said he thought his brother was about to ruin his life. Someone had to knock some sense into him.”

  “What did he mean by that?”

  “No idea. And he didn’t elaborate.”

  “How well did you know Scott?”

  “He was a year younger than me, so not well. He was quiet, more studious than Sam, though that’s not saying much. He was definitely entrepreneurial. He’d started a lawn service that summer. Used to cut grass and do gardening work around town. Other than that, he’s more or less of a blank.”

  “Is there anything else you remember from that time, something that might shed light on who might have had it in for Sam?”

  He hesitated. “Well, I’m not sure it’s related, but there was this all-night party at the beginning of our senior year. It was at the Lang farm. Corey Lang’s parents had left for the weekend, so he invited everyone he knew to come have an end-of-the-summer blowout. Something happened that night. I never found out what it was, but Sam was part of it. I asked around, but nobody knew anything, which couldn’t have been true. Probably people were just being careful, or they wanted to forget about it. I’m afraid that’s all I know.”

  Jane underlined it in her mind. “Can you give the names of his close friends?”

  “Um, well, there was me, of course, and Kurt Steiner—we’re both still in town. Then Todd Ott—he moved away. Lives out east, I think. And oh—” He snapped his fingers. “There is one other guy. Kind of an outlier, not someone any of us knew very well. I’m ashamed to say it was probably because he was black. At the time, there were only a few black families in town. His name is Darius Pollard. He works at Pollard Automotive Repair. His family owns it.”

  “In town?”

  “Yeah. Over on Fourth and Brick Town Road.”

  The receptionist popped her head into the room and said, “Jim, your three-thirty is here early. What do you want to do?”

  “I should let you get back to business,” said Jane, rising from her chair. She switched off the recorder and then unhooked their mics, placing everything back in the canvas bag. “This has been helpful.”

  Hughes stood and shook her hand. “I hope someone can make some sense of what happened. I have to say, I don’t have much faith in our police department. But who knows? Maybe they’ll surprise all of us.”

  “Maybe,” Jane agreed, though like Hughes, she wasn’t about to bet money on it.

  * * *

  Jane waited in a coffee shop for Cordelia to pick her up. When she finally arrived, she bought herself a double macchiato. Jane asked if she really wanted that much caffeine so late in the day.

  “I think I’ll risk it,” Cordelia said as they made their way back to the truck. Climbing into the passenger’s seat, she added. “I’m not sleeping all that well anyway. That mattress is lumpy.”

  “You want to switch?” asked Jane. “You could take my room for a night and see if it’s any better.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  As they drove east through town on their way back to
the house, Jane decided to take a quick detour.

  “How did the interview with Jim Hughes go?” asked Cordelia, digging through her large sack purse.

  “It was good. You can listen to it if you want.”

  “I should have been there. We could have done good cop/bad cop and really put the screws to him.”

  “That wasn’t necessary.”

  “You never know,” said Cordelia. “You were probably hampered by the lack of my awesome intuition.”

  “Can’t be helped. You were busy.”

  “True. And I can’t be two places at once. Once again, Janey, all I can say is, I wish they’d figure out this quantum physics thing so I could be.”

  “Two places at once?”

  “Or exist simultaneously in different universes at the same time.”

  “Spreading joy and enlightenment.”

  “And oodles of pixie dust.” She pushed her hair away from her face and examined herself in the visor mirror. “By the way, Emma wanted me to tell you that she’s inviting us—and a bunch of her friends—to the restaurant at Dellmann’s Resort up on Chipping Lake.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yup. The owner is an old buddy. I hear the food is fabulous.”

  Turning onto Eleventh Street, Jane said, “That’s too bad. I have a prior engagement.”

  “You do?”

  “Leslie Harrow, the mayor, invited me to dinner at her house.”

  Cordelia’s eyes darted to the bottle of wine in the backseat of the cab. “I see,” she said. The wheels inside her mind appeared to be grinding furiously. “You must have met her at the party last night. She’s very attractive. Good for you, Janey.”

  “Come on. What makes you think she’s a lesbian?”

  Cordelia tapped her head. “My gaydar, Janey. More accurate than Doppler. Then again, there was this guy following her around all evening. He was clearly smitten.”

  “You were watching her?”

  “Well, she’s an attractive woman, and I’m not dead.”

  “But you already found the love of your life.”

  Berengeria Reynolds was a vintner who lived in California. Cordelia had been together with her for several years. It was a long-distance romance, and an exclusive one.

  “I can still look.”

  “Of course you can,” said Jane. “I just want to underscore that I’m merely having dinner with her. I’m not looking for a relationship.”

  “Julia’s malign influence lives on.” She held up her hand. “I know. One should never speak ill of the dead—”

  “But you’re about to.”

  “She was an evil, narcissistic gorgon. A wolf in wolf’s clothing. And you loved her, to my utter amazement, to her dying breath.”

  It was time she had a conversation with Cordelia about what had happened. It would have to wait though, because they were reaching their destination.

  “Hey, where are we going?” asked Cordelia as they pulled into the parking lot behind Holy Trinity.

  “I want to see the graveyard where they found Sam Romilly’s remains.”

  “Ooh, yippie skippy. Graveyard research. My favorite.”

  “It will only take a few minutes. You can stay in the truck if you want to.”

  “And be ravaged by the undead? Thank you, no.”

  A stiff wind blew leaves across the cemetery grounds as they made their way across the grass. The grave was easy to find because it was enclosed with yellow crime-scene tape. The large granite marker that had once presided over Ida Beddemeyer’s grave sat to the side. Next to it was the coffin, covered by a tarp that had partially blown off.

  “So,” said Cordelia, wrapping her shawl more tightly around her shoulders, “what’s to see?”

  Jane was already down on her hands and knees, crawling under the tape so she could get a closer look. While she’d been waiting for Cordelia, she’d checked the online archive of obituary notices from the Fergus Falls newspaper and found details of Ida’s funeral. Ida had been interred the same day Sam had gone missing. The funeral was at eleven in the morning. The only way Sam’s body could have been under the coffin was for him to have been placed there before the burial. Nobody knew what time Sam had died, but it had to have been before eleven that morning.

  The pit was the width of two graves. One side, the one that had held Mrs. Beddemeyer’s casket, looked a good two feet deeper than the other. The question was, had the grave been altered before or after Sam died? If it had been done before his death, then the homicide had been premeditated. It seemed far less likely that someone would be messing with a grave in broad daylight, so Jane felt that it was reasonable to conclude that the grave had been altered the night before, which meant Sam’s death was a homicide. Jane looked up when she heard Cordelia say, “Do you work here?”

  “Yes, I do,” said a gray-haired workman in dark blue coveralls. He was standing next to Cordelia with a square-tipped shovel over his shoulder. “I’m the head caretaker.”

  Cordelia squinted at the name on his coveralls. “Mr. Judge, is it?”

  “Judge is my first name.”

  “Really? Do you do a lot of judging?” She tittered.

  “Jokes like that get pretty old, ma’am.”

  “Yes, well.” She tutted, looking around and sending Jane an SOS with her eyes.

  “How long have you worked here?” asked Jane, getting up and brushing dirt off her jeans.

  “Started in 1989. This will be my thirty-first year caring for the cemetery.”

  “What’s it like burying people for a living?” asked Cordelia.

  He eyed her warily, finally saying, “Everybody’s got to die.”

  Jane walked up, shook his hand, and introduced herself.

  “Judge Peterson,” he said in response.

  “Do you have a minute?”

  “For what?”

  “A couple of questions.”

  “About that grave?” he asked, repositioning the shovel.

  “Do you know who prepared it for Mrs. Beddemeyer?”

  “I did.”

  “By hand?”

  “No, we use a backhoe. The only things we dig by hand are baby graves and cremations.”

  Cordelia pressed a hand to her stomach.

  “How much notice do you need to dig a grave?”

  “Usually twenty-four hours.”

  “How long does it take to dig one?”

  “Oh, maybe an hour—in the summer. Winter, depending on the state of the ground, can take longer.”

  “Do you come and fill in the gravesite after the burial?”

  “That’s right. And then we tamp down the soil and plant grass seed.”

  “What about Ida? Did you notice anything out of the ordinary when you were digging her grave? Maybe … someone who was hanging around that shouldn’t have been?”

  He shook his head. “Well, now, as I think about it, maybe I should take that back. See, I was in a car accident in August of ’99, hurt my shoulder and back pretty bad. I got permission to ask a kid who’d worked for me the summer before to help with some of the digging. He was in high school at the time and liked the extra cash.”

  “So he was the one who dug the grave?”

  “With the backhoe, yeah. I was the straw boss.”

  “Do you remember anything about that day—anything that stands out?”

  He dropped the shovel in the grass, took out a pack of cigarettes, and lit up. “Well, now, there was this one thing.” He sucked in a lungful of smoke and blew it out the side of his mouth. “I don’t know if this comes under the heading of unusual, but while Darius and I were having lunch—”

  “Darius Pollard?” asked Jane.

  “That’s right. You know him?”

  “Pollard Automotive?”

  “His father is a buddy of mine. Anyway, we were eating our sandwiches when these two kids came past. One of them stopped and said something kind of nasty—racist, you know—to Darius. I didn’t catch it all, but Darius shot to
his feet, fists clenched, and told both of them to get the hell away from him. I thought we were in for an all-out brawl. The only reason I remember it is because I knew one of the kids. Well, I mean I knew his dad—Mitch Tamborsky, one of the local cops. The kid was his son. The father was an okay guy, but the son—he always struck me as an arrogant SOB. I wasn’t happy to see such bad blood between Darius and the cop’s kid.”

  “You’re saying this happened the day before Ida was buried?”

  “It had to have been. It was the only time Darius dug a grave for me.”

  At the very least, it meant that Dave Tamborsky knew there was an open grave in Holy Trinity cemetery. “What did the other kid look like? The one with Dave.”

  “Jeez, hard to remember. Nothing special stands out.”

  Jane wondered if it was the friend Jim Hughes told her about—Monty Mickler. “You’ve been very helpful,” she said, thanking him.

  He took one last drag off the cigarette, then pressed his fingers around the tip to extinguish it, and slipped it into his upper pocket.

  After he’d walked off, Cordelia moved closer to Jane and said, “You know what true-crime writers like to say.”

  “What?” asked Jane.

  “When you need a new lead, find the gravedigger.” She furrowed her eyebrows and offered Jane a conspiratorial wink.

  14

  Emma had known Patsy Dellmann since grade school. Dellmann’s Resort had one of the best restaurants in the area, so she hoped the evening would be fun for everyone. She was sorry that Jane couldn’t make it, but Cordelia was the real draw. All Emma’s friends wanted to meet the renowned theater director, and Cordelia, as Emma suspected, would not disappoint.

  The two of them had arrived late, around six-twenty, and were shown to a long table already filled with friends enjoying cocktails and appetizers. While Emma made apologies, Cordelia, wearing a black-and-gold metallic print gown with strappy gold sandals and a gold lamé turban, moved slowly down each side of the table, greeting everyone individually, taking each person’s hand in hers and squeezing it, favoring one and all with her high-beam smile. She could have been running for office, thought Emma, or about to win a prestigious award. Then again, she always managed to look that way.