Echoes among the Stones

by Jaime Jo Wright

  Now he was speaking Italian. The man was either a well-traveled conundrum or liked to play up his foreign persona with extra dramatic flair.

  “Sure.” Aggie shrugged off his happiness. For a fleeting moment, she recalled a time when she’d made s’mores with her mother and had burned a marshmallow and Mom threw it away. Funny how such memories sometimes paralleled life far too closely.

  “I’m going in,” Aggie said brusquely, as if she’d been waiting for Collin the entire time. She fumbled with the key on her key ring. Mr. Richardson had given her a spare the first day she’d met him here. The first time she’d seen Fifteen Puzzle Row and before she’d begun the slow but steady spiral down into some sort of darkness that lingered over this place.

  She moved to put the key in the doorknob, then drew back. The door was already open a crack. Just a hair really, but still, it was unlocked, and all it needed was a nudge of her toe and it would open.

  “Weird,” she muttered.

  “Is it open already?” Collin asked over her shoulder.

  Aggie ignored him and pushed the door with her hand. It swung open, silent and slow. Like a small melodrama playing out before her eyes. She stared as daylight stretched into the boxlike office. Her eyes captured the vision that lay before her. She stared for so long that Collin edged by her and poked his head into the office.

  “Crikey!” he said.

  Aggie lifted an eyebrow. Okay, now he was overplaying the vernacular expressions just a tad too much. British, Australian, or whatever it was he claimed to be, the man was a melting pot of terminology.

  Collin gave Aggie a quick glance over his shoulder, obviously missing her look of censure. “Well now, I didn’t expect this!”

  Okay. British there. It tinged his words with a delightful hint of Mr. Darcy mashed with Doctor Who.

  Aggie shook off her question of who Collin O’Shaughnessy really was and followed his gaze. The office had been ransacked. Papers strewn across the desk and the floor. Index cards lay everywhere, from a shelf on the wall to the far corners as if they’d exploded from a confetti machine. The desk chair was tipped over, revealing the metal feet on the bottoms of its wooden legs. And the computer monitor’s cords hung unattached, the CPU missing, and with it the contents of the cemetery’s digitized records.

  “Please tell me they back things up on the Cloud.” Aggie couldn’t help the desperate whine that escaped her.

  “Blast if I know.” Even the twinkle had faded from Collin’s eyes. He was already reaching for his phone—an old flip phone with a dent in its top.

  “Who are you calling?” It was a silly question. Aggie already knew the answer.

  Collin replied anyway, no criticism in his tone. “The police, of course.”

  Aggie moved past Collin into the room, intending to look closer. The warmth of his fingers wrapped around her wrist, pulling her back. Aggie stumbled into him, her shoulder colliding with his.

  “Stay with me, Love. They won’t want you traipsing over the evidence.”

  Evidence.

  A crime had been committed.

  Aggie swallowed back the sudden onslaught of tears. Not the frightened sort and not the terrified sort, but the kind that was married to barely concealed frustration. How had she come so far into the depths of a place she never wanted to visit again? All in the course of a few days? Between skeleton models seemingly falling from the sky to dollhouse murder scenes to roses with cryptic ink messages, and now violated office spaces. Aggie wanted nothing more than to climb into her car and whisk herself back to Chicago.

  But she couldn’t go back. There was nothing to go back to. No job, no future, and worst of all, no mother. Maybe that was it. This dull nausea in the pit of her stomach. Maybe that was why Aggie wanted nothing more than to flee the cemetery and escape from Mumsie’s house and her influence. Every piece of it demanded that Aggie remember Mom. Remember those last days. Remember the days in between the good and the bad. Remember her smile, her scent, her voice . . .

  Death wasn’t a promoter of healing. It was destructive and wicked, and now Aggie felt as though she were in its employ. It was not a career choice she had ever wanted to make, yet death held too much influence to say no.

  “You’re shaking.”

  His observation was astute. Aggie looked down at her arms. She’d wrapped them around herself, clutching her elbows until her knuckles matched the white of her shirt.

  Collin’s hand was warm as he unlatched her fingers from her left arm and wrapped his around her freed hand. He drew her over to his car—a little rusty thing that must run on diesel fuel because she could smell tiny bits of it wafting in the air.

  “Sit.” He waved at the hood of the car, and Aggie planted her backside on the green paint with the obedience of a child who didn’t know what to do.

  Shut down. This was what she did in moments of crisis. Well, it wasn’t exactly a crisis so much as—Aggie squeezed her eyes shut. It didn’t matter. She tried to convince herself she was strong and independent, but really she just wanted security. She had for years. It just wasn’t kind enough to offer itself to her. She didn’t have words or thoughts or even emotions. She just became a blank on which the moment could write whatever it wanted, and tomorrow she’d awaken and refuse to ever think of it again.

  “I’m fine,” Aggie insisted, even as Collin pulled an unopened bottle of water from his car and held it out to her. She waved it away.

  “Sure you are.” He didn’t believe her.

  She would stay composed. Not fly off the handle, as Mumsie would call it. But everything in her body wanted to launch into a version of her father’s raving, arm-waving explosion of emotion. Aggie took deep breaths and regulated her reaction.

  “Mr. Richardson is on his way.” Collin hoisted himself onto the hood of his jalopy, and the car groaned in protest against their combined weight. “Officer Benton there said it sounds like teenage vandalism. They hauled off with the computer for a lark.”

  “Curious.” Aggie couldn’t hide the derision in her tone. “The same way they dropped a skeleton in my grandmother’s backyard? I’m suddenly being harassed by the disturbed youth of America.”

  Collin chuckled. “I believe they always blame kids when there’s no other obvious explanation for something.”

  “Don’t they have a surveillance camera?” Aggie inquired.

  “Here?” Collin’s gaze swept over the flooded expanse of the cemetery. “What for? To catch a ghost?”

  “Well, obviously there was something of interest in the office. Something they wanted that computer for.”

  “Sure,” Collin nodded. “To play video games on. Or maybe shoot pellet guns at for target practice.”

  “Pellet guns?” Aggie raised a dark, well-sculpted eyebrow. One she’d spent time on that morning and now wondered why it’d been so important to look her best for acres of dead people.

  Collin twisted off the cap and handed the water bottle to Aggie. “Drink up. My mother says staying hydrated is the best medicine for mental health.”

  Aggie glared at the bottle, then at Collin. “What are you implying?”

  “Nothing. Just that you need water.”

  “There’s enough water around here as it is,” Aggie groused, but then she took the water bottle and held it.

  “Drink up, Love.” Collin directed.

  “I’m not your ‘Love,’” Aggie muttered as her lips met the rim of the water bottle.

  “It’s just a nickname. If you keep glaring at me with those pretty eyes, you’ll gut me. So take pity on a bloke, all right?”

  “Gut you?” Aggie curled her lip and gave him a stern eye. “Really? Pull some more cliché overseas phrases from your back pocket, why don’t you?”

  “Never mind.” Collin slipped off the hood of the car and ran his fingers through his sunshine hair. “This is why I play with insects. They make a lot more sense than a female.”

  Aggie tipped her head, irritation swelling in her. “A female?
Really? You’re going all Neanderthal on me?”

  Collin’s mouth thinned as he surveyed her from top of head to tip of toe. His cheek dimples deepened, and Aggie felt herself flush.

  “A man has a right to be a Neanderthal now and then, Love. Same as a woman has a right to be a—well, never you mind.”

  “Very funny.” And it was. That was the part that made her fight the tiny smile that played at her lips. Collin wasn’t afraid to speak his mind, even if he encased it with colloquialisms and a dapper smile.

  Moments later, Mr. Richardson arrived in his wool sweater and loafers, with stooped shoulders and a bit of a wild-eyed look about him that communicated he was as bewildered as she was at the break-in. It wasn’t even typical cemetery vandalism. Damage to gravestones, or flowers and flags ripped from their memorials. This was more direct, and regardless of what platitudes the cops might offer in suggesting it was a wayward teenager, it also felt more deliberate.

  Only Aggie couldn’t explain why.

  Clean it up.

  Now that the cops had left, pictures taken, statements made, it was all there, still as messy as ever, and apparently, Aggie had now been tasked with righting the ransacked office before getting back to the job she was hired to do. Connecting the dots from grave to grave, matching them with records, exhuming the history from unmarked graves. All of it was for naught considering the two-thousand-plus index cards scattered about the room, not to mention the random folders of papers and even some old photographs.

  “Them cards there. Those are all records of plots.” Mr. Richardson gave his arm a broad sweep. “They used to at least be in order.”

  “We’ll set it to rights,” Collin assured the elderly man, who raised an eyebrow at him.

  “She’ll set it to rights,” Mr. Richardson corrected. “We didn’t bring you here to sort through paper work.”

  “Of course not—” Collin began to affirm when the man broke into his sentence.

  “Got thousands of graves in this cemetery—two thousand, I believe—and they all need accounted for. Or found, to be specific.”

  The graveyard was indeed large, boasting many graves, but Aggie could hardly fathom there being two thousand graves on the acreage. Still, the index cards weren’t lying. She picked up one of the cards.

  Plot 162

  Purchased by: Parkson, Edward

  Purchase year: 1964

  Deceased: Parkson, Elsie

  All the information was there, along with . . . she eyed another card . . . along with all the information that wasn’t there. The card she skimmed was lacking a purchase year and also the name of the deceased. It was also typed in 1952 for someone who’d purchased a plot in 1929. Apparently, they’d been playing records catch-up for quite some time.

  “Yes, well, I’ll set right to work on that,” Collin was saying when Aggie pulled her attention back to the two men beside her.

  “Darn tootin’ you will.” Mr. Richardson lifted a bushy eyebrow. “You have all that fancy machinery and gadgets. Leastways we’ll know there’s a body there before we sell what we think is an empty plot and wind up digging old bones up to the surface. And there isn’t a one of those plots already flooded that’s gonna return their contents to their original glory. So, let’s be sure those bodies are marked and stay underground.”

  Aggie cleared her throat, and both men turned to her. “How do we mark the graves once Collin identifies them? What if we can’t find their gravestones?”

  “Gravestones?” Mr. Richardson barked. “Heavens, woman, are you thinkin’ Mr. O’Shaughnessy is goin’ to uncover the plots and find some fancy nametag in the dirt to tell us who’s been buried there?”

  Aggie opened her mouth to respond, then snapped it shut. Really, that was a good question. “Well, how do you figure out who was buried there?”

  Mr. Richardson gave her an offhanded wave of arthritic fingers. “Well then. There’re the records that were on the computer, but we can’t cross-check those anymore. Then there’s allllllllllllll this.” He dragged out the word as if he were talking to a juvenile. “Paper, m’dear. Paper. It’s why it’s gotta get sorted and logged. Then you chat with people who might know somethin’, if you can’t find a lead from the records. Pretty much everyone in town is connected somehow. Heck, my seventh cousin pastors the Lutheran church and we don’t even share the same last name, but we know we’re cousins. People around here know the local history.”

  Seventh cousin? Aggie grimaced. Either Mr. Richardson and his townsfolk were all historians and ancestral geniuses, or she needed to rethink her own view of family history. She could maybe identify a second cousin—under duress.

  Collin and Aggie exchanged glances over the mess. “So,” Collin started, “you’re suggesting that if the records don’t match an unmarked grave, we simply interview residents of Mill Creek at random in hopes we stumble upon someone who happens to recall the death of a distant relative who was buried without a headstone in plot number eight-two?”

  Aggie bit her bottom lip at the cynical wit emanating from Collin’s eyes.

  Mr. Richardson shook his head. “Naw. Ain’t no one goin’ to know what you’re talkin’ about if you talk in plot numbers. Plots, man, plots! Families! If there’s an unmarked grave near a mass of other graves, stands to reason they’re probably related and in the family section of the graveyard.” The old man tugged on his sweater, muttering to himself, “Young folks these days don’t use their heads. They have search engines to do their thinkin’ for them.”

  Aggie was feeling the weight of the monumental task before her and Collin, and honestly, more on her simply because Collin at least had equipment and expertise to put to use.

  “And you, missy!” Mr. Richardson gave her a curious look. “I don’t know what young man is in your back pocket, but we’ll expect you to keep your love life off work hours.”

  Aggie choked, cleared her throat, and blinked. “Excuse me?”

  Mr. Richardson wasn’t paying her much attention. Instead, he was once again mumbling under his breath as he stepped over a manila folder on the floor. “Sendin’ flowers on work time.”

  She followed his reach as Mr. Richardson lifted a pink rose off the desk. Its petals appeared manhandled and smashed, nowhere near its original glory. He handed the rose to her, a glimmer of sternness in his eyes. “A rose is right nice and all, but it’s not the place here.”

  Not the place here. Aggie nodded with a blank expression, reaching for the long-stemmed rose, a frown firmly etched between her brows. “But this isn’t—”

  “No excuses now,” Mr. Richardson said as he neared the door. “Let’s just get to work and get goin’ on this before the cemetery board is down on my head and makes me have a stroke.” He stepped into the daylight and gave a haphazard flop of his arm. “I ain’t even bought myself a plot yet!”

  Then he was gone.

  Aggie and Collin stood in silence in the middle of the trashed office, the wilting rose bending in her hand.

  Finally Collin spoke. “I take it you know nothing about the rose?”

  Aggie shook her head, giving him an incredulous look. “Nothing. I know . . .” Her eyes drifted across the petals, and she noted darkness staining one of them. Lifting it closer, she fingered the petal, pulling it gently off its stem.

  Not over.

  The ink bled into the veins of the petal, making the words difficult to read but still obvious in their penmanship.

  “What’s this about?” Collin’s breath tickled her neck as he looked over her shoulder.

  Aggie sensed that coldness returning. The same draft that had brushed by her legs in Mumsie’s room last night. The same sensation that visited her in the wee hours of the morning when all she could think of was her mother and the look on her face after she had passed away. The frozen, empty expression that firmly planted an exclamation point at the end of her life. It was over. It was very much over!

  She turned to give Collin a confused shake of her head. “I don�
�t know. Death puts a finality to everyone’s story, doesn’t it?”

  “In my experience.” Collin gave her a nod, his brow furrowed as though trying to follow her train of thought.

  Aggie lifted the petal for Collin to see. “Then who believes it’s ‘not over’? Who sees something here as still very much alive?”

  Collin didn’t answer for a moment, but a breath released through his nose in a studious sigh. “Or,” he ventured, “who wants to be certain someone isn’t forgotten?”

  Someone.

  Aggie’s head snapped up. She met Collin’s inquiring eyes. “Hazel. Hazel Grayson.”

  “Who?”

  “The other day. In the flooded graves. There was a pink rose with the words not over written on a petal by the overturned stone of a Hazel Grayson.”

  “Who, might I ask, is Hazel Grayson?” Collin’s eyebrow rose in a sharp angle over his left eye.

  Aggie rubbed her thumb against the petal, her other hand still gripping the thornless stem of the rose. “I don’t know.” She swept her gaze over the tossed office. “But I suppose her story is in here. Somewhere.”

  “Or . . .” Collin’s voice had dropped to a lower tone, void of any humor. Aggie sensed her concern rise as he continued. “Or it’s her story that we won’t find. That they didn’t want us to find. That they made virtually impossible to find.”

  “A needle in a haystack.” Aggie nodded, toeing a pile of index cards on the floor.

  “That it is,” Collin agreed.

  But it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. For the two penned words on the rose petal had accomplished exactly what its author must have intended. It wasn’t over. Hazel Grayson, whoever she was—or her memory—was being kept very much alive.

  CHAPTER 10

  Imogene

  The powder plant stretched across thousands of acres of farmland. It had been erected quickly as the war progressed and the need for ammunitions became a demand. Now the demand was significantly decreasing, and chatter already had rumors flying that the on-site housing would close, and jobs would significantly decline. But for now, Imogene sat on the bus transporting workers from town to the plant grounds, her trousers loose around her legs and cuffed just above her leather loafers.