The ground had eroded, evidently during the heavy rains. In this particular row, Aggie could see the tops of encasements that had once been underground closeting the deceased’s casket in a protective vault. Or maybe it was a coffin? One of the tombstones was knocked over and lying in the muck.
“Back in the day, they used to bury a person facing the rising sun.”
She wasn’t surprised to hear Collin O’Shaughnessy’s voice nearing her as he strolled up the path. Mr. Richardson had indicated yesterday that Collin would be meeting her here today. She still wasn’t sure she liked the idea or even understood what he was doing here.
“Is that a—?”
“A casket?” Collin followed Aggie’s stare at the wooden box corner that peeked up from beneath a pool of water and sodden earth. “More than likely.” He nodded. “And you need me, because if you notice, there’s no stone to mark that plot.”
Aggie frowned. She shifted to look at Collin, who stood beside her with the casual air of someone who was used to daily interactions with the dead.
“I don’t understand your point,” Aggie admitted.
Collin gave her a sideways smile, the crease in his cheek deepening. “It means there are other graves here that aren’t on record. So the plots we do know are marked by the tombstone or what we have on record. That one—there’s no marker, so we hope we can find a record. If not, then I’ll put more of my expertise to work.”
“But if you’re here to find the record, then what am I to do?” Aggie pulled her cardigan closer around herself as a breeze kicked up, and with it the rustling of dying leaves in the autumn-colored trees.
Collin shook his head. “Oh no, I’m here to help determine if there are more unknown graves and also the age of them, et cetera. You’re here to dig up any records—forgive the pun.” His eyes twinkled behind his glasses. “And then draw a new map of the yard. Don’t be overwhelmed. I’ll assist with that.”
Aggie pinched the bridge of her nose, a sudden headache coming on. She drew in a deep breath, but the smell of the cemetery wasn’t the crisp, refreshing fall smell she preferred. Instead, it smelled dank, moldy, and wet.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” she muttered. For a moment, she was captivated by a lost feeling. That deep, disturbing hollowness that captures a spirit and begins to pull it into the pit. Images of her mother’s graveside service filtered through her mind. The abandonment loss from her father’s absence. The cold reality that Mumsie was probably too old to travel, but not too old to call and express her shared grief.
The emptiness caused her to spin away from Collin and hike up the path. The gentle slope upward meant the water grew less puddled. The grass had troughs cut through the side where the rains had created their own paths, slicing past stones, upending some and unearthing other elements.
She paused, her eyes narrowing. A stone several yards away was tilting precariously to the right, the ground around it having been on the edge of one of the water’s miniature ravines. Curious, Aggie tilted her head and frowned.
“What is it?” Collin had followed her.
Aggie pointed. “Are there flowers on that stone?”
Collin’s hands were in his trousers, but he gave a nod, a ginger strand falling over his forehead. “It appears to be. Perhaps a rose?”
Aggie eyed the mud and slop, then her ballet flats. Oh well. She stepped onto the grass and felt the squish of the ground beneath her foot. The mud seeped around the sole of her shoe. She could feel water on her foot. Investing in a pair of rain boots was going to be a must.
“Going exploring?” Collin quipped from his dry perch on the cemetery asphalt path.
“Au contraire,” Aggie shot back. Her shoe made a suction sound as she took another step forward through the flooded row. She glanced at the stone ahead with the flower at its base. She could make out some of the etching on its front. “I thought this was the old section of the cemetery? Fifteen Puzzle Row?” Aggie tossed the observation over her shoulder, making her way to the next marker.
“It is. From what I’ve been told,” Collin affirmed.
Aggie pointed as though he were beside her. “Then how come that stone is from 1946?”
“I haven’t a clue.” Collin seemed to debate whether he’d join her in the muck. Apparently, he cherished his leather loafers more than she did her own shoes.
Aggie hopped over a puddle, which sent only a spray of mud onto her jeans as her right foot landed on the sodden earth. She peered over the back of a gravestone to the right of her.
“See? That row looks to be people having died around the turn of the century . . . 1907, 1893.” Aggie took a few more tentative steps to survey another marker. “1901?” She looked back at Collin as if he would supply some explanation.
His eyebrows rose over the gold rim of his wire glasses, and he shrugged.
Aggie rested her hands on her narrow hips. She blew out a puff of air to push a strand of hair from her cheek. Yes. All the stones in this row on her left were definitively from the late nineteenth century to early twentieth century.
Aggie skipped over an exposed area of a grave, unwilling to look down into the divot to see if she saw anything other than just washed-away earth.
“Something seems . . . well, dodgy,” Collin called to her.
“Dodgy.” Aggie muttered the non-American slang expression to herself. Dodgy was right. It was as if someone had slipped a grave into Fifteen Puzzle Row because they’d run out of room. Or something.
She paused in front of the tilting tombstone. It wasn’t tall. It was just an average marker of worn gray granite. Nothing fancy. But there was most assuredly a rose at its base. A small pink rose, like a bud that was picked before it could bloom. Picked too early.
Her eyes skimmed the name on the stone.
Hazel Elizabeth Grayson
b. January 19th, 1927 – d. July 18th, 1946
Grayson. The name sounded vaguely familiar, but then it wasn’t an uncommon surname either. She bent and lifted the rose, even though she felt as if she shouldn’t. As if she was disturbing something sacred.
Who would have sloshed through this muck to put a rose on a grave of someone who had died over seventy years ago?
Aggie moved to put the rose back in its original position when she caught sight of something on one of the outside petals. It was black, inky, with the pigments bleeding into the veins of the flower petal. She frowned, pulling it closer so she could try to interpret it.
It was writing. Writing on a flower petal with what she assumed was a permanent fine-tip marker.
Her breaths came shorter now. She’d stumbled onto someone’s homemade epitaph for a long-dead Hazel Grayson.
Not over.
Not over? Aggie drew back. “What’s not over?” she mumbled. She turned the rose in her hand, but only the one petal was marred with ink.
“Pardon?” Collin asked from yards away.
Aggie cast him a disturbed look. His smile faded as he caught the angst that crossed her face, probably stretching from her brown eyes to the light spattering of freckles to the corners of her lips.
“Is something the matter?” Concern edged his voice, enhancing his accent.
Aggie frowned, shaking her head. She looked back at the rose, at the petal that slipped loose from its stem and floated toward the ground. It drifted softly until its pink softness rested on the mud at the base of the gravestone.
Not over.
Aggie had no desire to be in the middle of an untold story. A story someone had penned remembrance of onto a rose petal.
She dropped the rose, ignoring the way her shoe crushed it into the messy ground.
“Everything’s fine,” she called back to Collin.
Lies.
But sometimes lies were far better than the truth. Sometimes, at least, a lie didn’t hurt as much.
CHAPTER 7
Imogene
The rain was fitting. Umbrellas created a black canopy over the mourners that gathered
beside Hazel’s grave. It was open, like a muddy chasm ready to swallow the coffin whole. And it would. Not long after the graveside service, they would return to their vehicles, and the gravediggers would lower Hazel into the ground and shovel the suffocating muck onto her.
The muffled sounds of her mother’s sobs wafted through the air and met Imogene’s ears. She felt her brother Chet’s presence next to her, his uniform of dark blue so authoritative. But he had not used that authority. Four days since Hazel’s murder and there was nothing—nothing—but the empty echoes of their old farmhouse. The pungent smell of bleach and ammonia drifting through the registers after cleaners had tried to right the evidence of wrong that had been left behind. Staining the moment Hazel drew her last gasping breath.
Imogene wanted to weep, but she couldn’t. She wanted to believe the empty platitudes people spoke to her. The funeral clichés. She even wanted to believe people were sorry—and they were—and yet it didn’t mean anything. It didn’t take away the gut-wrenching agony of loss. Grief was a pond of quicksand, and escaping it was a mythical hope that left Imogene more bereft than when she simply allowed the sorrow to consume her. It was a slow suffocation, but what did it matter? She was practically dead anyway. Without Hazel, without her beloved younger sister, she was . . . lifeless.
The reverend finished his eulogy. Rain puddled at their feet. Imogene looked beyond Hazel’s coffin to the gravestones that lined a row—1901, 1919 . . . and now here Hazel was. Some thirty years after, the ground being opened again. Yet there was no family to surround her. Only strangers. Old, dead strangers who wouldn’t greet her body with any familiarity at all.
There was no comfort in that.
Imogene watched blankly as her mother placed a rose on Hazel’s coffin, her gloved hand sweeping across the wood until it reached the edge. Her fingers curled, and her hand shook. A deep guttural wail, and Imogene’s father put his hands on either side of the woman who grieved her youngest child, leading her away.
Her brother Ivan and his wife. They paused, and Ivan laid another rose on Hazel’s casket. Imogene heard him sniff. Saw her sister-in-law loop a comforting hand through Ivan’s elbow.
Good. Imogene swallowed a massive lump in her throat. Ivan didn’t deserve to survive four years of the war, separated from his wife, fighting in the Pacific against God knew what horrors, only to return home to more of the same. To his sister’s murder. Ivan had already been withdrawn, prone to long bouts of sullenness. Imogene had heard him in the barn, taking out his pent-up wrath on the cows. Shouting expletives as if one more would be the final bandage over a wound within him that refused to heal. Imogene never judged her brother. She just stayed out of his way.
Now she eyed him, hating herself for the fleeting, rebellious thought that winged through her mind. Ivan. Anger. She recalled the time he’d kicked the barn cat across the aisle and into the wall. Imogene had been furious with him but had waited to run to the cat’s aid until after Ivan had left. He hadn’t killed the poor thing, but it was stunned, and for sure must’ve been pained because the tabby had curled up on the front porch in the corner and not moved for at least a week.
Ivan caught Imogene’s study as he passed, his faithful wife, her hand, gloved in black, still hooked in his arm.
“Genie—” he choked. Paused. Reached out a hand toward her, then stilled.
Imogene wanted to throw herself into her older brother’s arms. As she had as a child. But so much had changed. So much was different now. There were ghosts in his eyes that she didn’t understand.
Lifting her hand, Imogene took her brother’s, feeling the warmth of his skin through the lace of her glove.
“I’m swell,” she whispered the empty encouragement to him. Don’t worry about me. She was stronger than Mother was. Mother would need Ivan.
“I’ll be at the farm later—help with chores an’ all.” Ivan’s comment was unnecessary. He was always at the farm, always helping Daddy. But grasping for words on a day like today meant avoiding the agony of saying goodbye. Simple, straightforward, everyday conversation was about all Ivan would be good for.
“See you later,” Genie acknowledged. She met her sister-in-law’s sad eyes as they passed. She didn’t know her well. Ivan wasn’t the social one of the family, and when he left the farm after a long day, he ostracized himself at home with his wife.
Chet moved beside Imogene. He was a bachelor and alone, so he took her arm and led her to Hazel’s casket. The other mourners were dissipating into the rain. The motors of several of the cars started up. The rumble of a truck clattered. Voices were low and muttered, reverent and respectful.
Imogene stood next to Chet, clutching her black handbag. She’d worn a black wool suit. One she’d made a few years before when Mother had chided her for being frivolous when the war efforts were on. Spending money on a black frock was ridiculous. But Imogene had to. She had to show her respects to the boys who came home in boxes. Mother couldn’t understand it. Said the dresses they had were good enough and folks would understand. But, for Imogene, they weren’t. They only showed the boys that what they’d died fighting for was coming true. America was slowly losing, the economy still poor, and the people were emptying of hope. Imogene was proud. Proud of her friends who were never supposed to have died so young.
Now she was proud of Hazel—but it was almost impossible to reconcile her death. There was nothing heroic in it. Just murdering thievery.
“You haven’t arrested anyone.” Imogene spoke the words less like an accusation and more as an observation. She didn’t miss Chet’s heavy sigh.
He stared down at the roses on Hazel’s coffin. “No. We’ve few clues.”
“There has to be something.” Imogene bit her tongue.
“It’s not that easy, Genie.” Chet’s voice was choked.
Imogene glanced up at him. His jaw worked back and forth, holding back grief for his little sister. “Gosh, Chet.” She wrapped her arm around his. “I don’t blame you. Really. I just don’t want him to get away with this. I want you to stick it to him and make him pay.”
Whoever this “him” was.
Chet looked down at her. “We’re investigating it. Every angle. Trying to figure out who—” This time his words cut off with emotion. He blinked fast and shook his head. With his free hand, Chet reached up and patted Imogene’s hand, then pulled away. “I—I—need . . .” He waved toward the police car that sat yards away in line to leave the cemetery.
Imogene saw Chet’s escape for what it was. “That’s fine. I’m riding with Lola.” She referenced her friend, who waited by another car, driven by her husband.
Chet nodded and walked away, leaving Imogene alone with Hazel.
She reached out and laid her hand on the coffin. Oh, the feel of it was cold through her glove. It didn’t matter how pretty, how polished, or how detailed the casket was. It was still a box that would eventually decay. It would expose Hazel to the earth, her body becoming the dust from whence man had first originated.
Images scrolled through Imogene’s mind like those in a moving picture at the theater. Only Fred Astaire wasn’t dancing his way in a lively tap through her memories. It was Hazel. The moments she would throw her head back in laughter, her eyes lighting up the world around her. Those moments when Imogene would catch sight of Hazel, curled up in the hay in the barn loft, accompanied by at least two or three of the many farm cats that roamed the place, with a book in her hand. Usually a Grace Livingston Hill romance novel she’d picked up at the local store. She recalled the quiet humming—always humming—of some song Hazel had heard on the radio. She’d hum while she cooked dinner, hummed while she curled her hair, hummed while Imogene painted Hazel’s chipped nails from working at the plant, and hummed as her feet took her into the attic to bed at night.
All music had stopped. It ceased the moment the last breath expelled through Hazel’s parted lips, leaving her eyes open, staring up at Imogene as if to beg for help. To beg for life. To beg that everyth
ing be put right again.
A tear trailed down Imogene’s cheek. She swiped it away, refusing to lift her hand from the casket.
“Miss Grayson?”
The reverend’s voice was low. She lifted her head, looking through the wisp of black netting that draped off her hat.
“I’m not leaving her.” Imogene knew the reverend was there to urge her to finish her goodbyes. The gravediggers stood off to the left of them at a discreet distance. But it was obvious they were impatient, weary of standing in the drizzle, their overalls dampening with every drop.
“Miss Grayson, I—”
“Leave me.” Imogene’s direct interruption made the man of the cloth step back. She knew her green eyes snapped when provoked, and she knew she had an edge to her personality that wasn’t warm like Hazel’s. But for now, she was okay to let that show. There was no hurry, really. It was five hours yet until dark. She could stand here for at least four more of them, and it would be the epitome of rudeness for anyone to escort her away against her will.
The reverend cleared his throat, but when she paid him no further attention, Imogene heard his footsteps squash against the damp grass as he retreated.
She was left alone with Hazel again. Their last moments together. Imogene touched her fingertips to her lips, then pressed them on the coffin.
“My sweet sister,” she whispered. “It’s not right. Not right what they did to you.” Her words choked her breath, and Imogene paused to swallow the emotion. “But I’ll . . . I’ll make sure it’s made right. I promise you, sweetheart. I’ll make sure Chet finds who did this to you, and I’ll make sure they see justice.”
Imogene let her fingers drag from the top of the casket until her hand dropped to her side.
“I’ll forget nothing, Hazel, nothing. I promise.”
It was a promise Imogene fully intended to keep. Even if it took a lifetime.
“And they’ve found nothing?” Lola, Imogene’s best friend, and newly married to her war hero, Ben, poured tea into a cup and set it before Imogene.
Imogene shook her head, running her finger with its bright red nail around the rim of the cup. “Chet told me this morning that since the funeral, they’ve interviewed a few people who last saw Hazel. From the ammunition plant. She worked a full day, Lola, a full day and there wasn’t one person who saw anything suspicious!”
Echoes among the Stones Page 5