Aggie bristled at the stereotype that was in error. “Actually . . .” She started to correct the older man and educate him on how community-minded Millennials had proven to be, but then stopped. It’d do no good. “Do you have any suggestions as to where I could find more information about local history in that era?”
Mr. Farber shook his head. “You can keep looking through the archives here. Or you can just take a gander down at the local nursing home. There’re a few old-timers there who might remember some of it. Probably not too many from World War II, but I know there’s a few Korean War vets there who worked at the plant.”
Aggie offered the librarian a smile. “Thank you for your time.” She had turned to go when Mr. Farber’s voice stopped her. She spun back around and was surprised by the serious expression on his face.
“You know, they’ve bulldozed most of the ammunition plant. They said it used to be haunted, so now there’s really just a few small buildings left over.”
“Haunted?” Aggie raised an eyebrow.
Mr. Farber nodded. “Ghosts. From the family cemetery. I guess quite a few people saw them over the years. Causing trouble. Sorta like they were out for revenge.”
“Vengeful ghosts?” Aggie blinked.
Mr. Farber chuckled. “Well. Who knows. I heard my dad say once that someone thought maybe they were behind the blowing up of the post office.”
“Why would—um, ghosts—blow up a post office?” Not to mention how, Aggie finished in her thoughts.
Mr. Farber chuckled again and waved her off. “Aww, it’s just my daddy’s hearsay, and he liked to tell stories. But he figured if the families who lived there were forced to sell out to the government, the loved ones they left behind in the earth couldn’t have been none too happy with the government.”
“Soooo they blew up the post office?” Aggie couldn’t hide her cynical tone.
Mr. Farber smirked and rolled his eyes. “Well, that was the only other government building in town at the time. Except the town hall.”
“And the town hall is still standing,” Aggie concluded.
Mr. Farber shook his head. “Oh, the town hall now isn’t the one they had back in the forties. No, that one isn’t standing anymore.”
This was getting weird. Aggie took the bait and allowed Mr. Farber’s unfinished theory to tempt her. “So, what happened to the old town hall?”
Mr. Farber waggled his brows as though he’d always believed his daddy’s ghost story. “Town hall burned down. Not long after the post office explosion.”
“Burned down?” An eerie sensation knotted Aggie’s insides. She envisioned poltergeists swooping through the night air, exacting their revenge for the loss of family land and the desecration of their graves.
“Yep,” Mr. Farber said. “Now you see why, if there was a murder around that time, it probably took a backseat to the sabotage on government property.”
“I can’t believe Mill Creek was accustomed to having someone murdered here, so it’s hard to imagine they’d just stop investigating it.” Aggie threw out the comment, playing devil’s advocate.
Mr. Farber nodded. “One would think that, yes. Mill Creek wasn’t known for violent crimes, and isn’t today either. But you could head out to the ammunition plant too, if you wanted. They have a small museum there. Not sure what you’d learn, but there you be.”
Aggie allowed the silence to stretch between them. When Mr. Farber offered no further explanation, she gave him a polite nod and another “thank you.”
Explosions, murder, disappearances, and ghosts.
Mumsie’s personality of eccentric self-preservation made more sense now. Mill Creek was a strange little town, with a past of postwar mysteries it seemed no one had ever succeeded at solving. And Hazel Grayson’s murder appeared to have been the impetus to it all.
CHAPTER 29
So you just take your time now!” Mrs. Donahue’s voice filtered through Aggie’s phone and into her ear.
“Thank you.” Aggie tossed her phone onto the passenger seat of her car. Mrs. Donahue had been kind enough to call with an update on her grandmother’s condition. Aggie wished she hadn’t, because the moment her phone rang, she had a surge of panicked adrenaline that left her feeling nauseated. She wanted to tell the elderly woman to call her only if Mumsie had awakened, or worse, had died. Calling to let her know nothing had changed after only two hours was thoughtful but going to put Aggie on an emotional roller coaster.
She turned off the ignition and adjusted the rearview mirror so she could take a quick inventory of her face. The ladies were right. She did have raccoon eyes. Aggie rifled through her bag and pulled out a tissue, wiping the black from beneath her lower lashes.
Great. Now her eyes looked washed out—except for the long eyelashes she’d inherited from Mom, who in turn had inherited them from Mumsie. Her brown eyes were fawn-colored and tired looking, the pupils tiny due to the sunlight. She ran her fingers through the raven hair and pulled it up in a messy bun. A few more swipes of her hands to her face succeeded in brushing away an errant lash and remnants from the sandman in the corners of her eyes, leaving behind the smattering of freckles that matched the color of her eyes. Typically, they were light enough to cover with concealer. Aggie gave up. She didn’t know why she was primping anyway. She was at the cemetery of all places, and she highly doubted the dead looked any better than she did.
But Collin looked . . . smashing. Aggie wanted to duck down into the driver’s seat as he exited the cemetery office, Mr. Richardson behind him. In her exhaustion, she almost did. She hadn’t expected Mr. Richardson, let alone Collin, to be at the office on a Sunday. Her hopes of privately scouring paper work with the sole agenda of finding information about Hazel were thwarted.
“Agnes!” Collin’s use of her full name halted her in her position behind the open car door.
She couldn’t hide the shocked look that spread across her face, which left her speechless. Only Mumsie called her that—well, and Mom had.
“Ah!” Mr. Richardson edged in front of Collin, waving a document at her with a big grin. “We’ve had success!”
“Pardon?” Aggie’s bewilderment wasn’t getting any less.
“Exhumation!” Mr. Richardson all but did a happy dance in his orthopedic shoes and gray slacks. His sweater looked like one from the nineties, with big squares of blue, purple, and green splashed across it.
Even Collin appeared a tad too pleased.
“Have you been drinking?” Aggie scowled.
“Brilliant deduction!” Collin flashed her one of his golden grins that creased his face in all the right places. “But horribly wrong. Although I did have a tonic water a bit ago.”
Aggie rolled her eyes and stepped away from the car, shutting the door, trying to collect her thoughts and wits and the twist from her intentions.
Mr. Richardson held the document toward her. Aggie took it but looked at Collin, a question in her eyes. He winked.
“That, Love, is approval to open the mystery grave I discovered.”
“What about the other two graves?” She didn’t know why it mattered. Apparently, one disinterment was enough morbidity to bring a brilliant twinkle to both Collin’s and Mr. Richardson’s eyes.
“Not approved!” Mr. Richardson replied. He glanced at Collin as though he might have overstepped the bounds of announcing the bad news. “The coroner saw no reason to exhume the poor souls. There’s nothing suspicious about the graves, and based on Collin’s calculations and mapping, they appear to fit the time frame of the other graves in Fifteen Puzzle Row.”
“Except for Hazel Grayson’s grave,” Aggie inserted.
“Well, yes.” Mr. Richardson waved her off. “But we have good reason to figure why she was buried there.”
Of course they did. Aggie bit her tongue and mentally chided herself. She was going to cross the border into serious snippy-land if she wasn’t careful. For a moment, she had the startling realization that she was becoming more like Mum
sie than she realized.
“And the third grave?” she asked.
“We’re all quite curious to see what we find.” Collin reached for the approval paper work that Aggie had just skimmed. “I’m hoping it’s not the remains of a family dog.”
Aggie’s lip curled. “You think it could be?”
“One never knows for sure until one digs.” Collin waggled his ginger brows. Good grief. The man was borderline giddy over the idea of digging up a dead body.
“Well, it’ll take you forever with your paintbrushes and picks,” Aggie joked, trying to be funny but falling miserably short.
“We called in a backhoe!” Mr. Richardson’s volume of excitement made Aggie think in all caps and exclamation points. He was going to give her a headache soon.
“Won’t that destroy what’s in the grave?” Aggie directed her question to the expert. “You said there’s no vault, no coffin.”
Collin nodded. “It will enable us to clear away the topsoil. I can map how deep they can go and then I’ll proceed from there.”
“The coroner wants to be present,” Mr. Richardson added, “and the police will have personnel here as well. You know, in case it’s more than a dead dog or someone accidentally buried backwards.”
“You mean a murder victim?” Aggie recalled Collin’s ominous thought the day he’d discovered the grave.
“One never knows,” Collin answered, his excitement leveled out a bit.
Mr. Richardson shook his head. “Doubtful. Very doubtful. I’m more convinced it is an old burial ground for Native Americans.”
“Good heavens!” Aggie gasped. “You can’t exhume that! That’s sacred.”
Collin cast a slightly irritated glance at the old man, then shook his head at Aggie. “There’s nothing to indicate such. No evidence of Native American anything in this area. Reason being, the cemetery would never have been started here if this had been sacred burial grounds.”
“Unless no one knew!” Mr. Richardson waved his index finger in the air to make his point.
“What if it is?” Aggie wondered if tribal representation would also attend the exhumation.
“Again, from an archaeological perspective,” Collin said and shot a look at Mr. Richardson, who opened his mouth and then snapped it shut, “there is nothing to indicate such. If we were to find anything that did, exhumation would cease immediately. From what I’ve been able to surmise, the grave is by no means older than a century, which eliminates the possibility altogether.”
Mr. Richardson finally had no response.
Aggie looked at the cemetery behind the two men. It was dried up now. The last few weeks had been sunny with autumn winds that helped the earth release moisture. The graves in the lower area were still sunken with tilted stones, but at least the mud had turned into a hardened clay. Tomorrow, she’d walk the upper-east section of the cemetery with the old map to see if the stones there matched up to the document. Any new ones that failed to be added needed to be marked so that a new map could be created.
She didn’t at all feel like doing it.
“How is your grandmother?” Collin asked.
Aggie tore her gaze from the expanse of graves and drew in a deep breath, letting it out through her nose and trying to squelch a yawn. “She’s still non-responsive.”
“Oh. Yes. So sorry to hear about Mrs. Hayward,” Mr. Richardson said.
Mrs. Hayward. Imogene Grayson Hayward. All names Aggie never associated with Mumsie. She was just persnickety Mumsie, with faded beauty and a wit as sharp as a blade.
“The cemetery board will understand if you need to take some time away.” Mr. Richardson’s sympathy seeped through the cracks in Aggie’s barely maintained composure. She hadn’t expected that it would be the old man who’d make her want to cry again. What was with all the old people in this town anyway? All so curiously stubborn in their ways but with a gold streak of kindness that almost—almost—made Aggie wish she’d grown up in Mill Creek.
“Thank you.” Aggie nodded. “I-I might do that.”
“You need to get some rest, Love.” Collin stepped toward her.
Aggie took a step back and reached for her car door. If he touched her, extended a hand toward her, or gave her that warm, caring gaze one more time, she’d become a puddle. That was not acceptable. She reached inside herself for strength and stamina. Not that there was anything wrong with weakness, but she wasn’t ready to be weak. She wasn’t sure she ever would be.
“I think I’ll do that.” Aggie opened the door.
“I’ll pop in straightaway after I’m finished here,” Collin said.
He didn’t need to “pop in,” and Aggie opened her mouth to say so but stopped. He wasn’t family. He was a co-worker. Okay, a friend. But a friend of short acquaintance, and really she didn’t want him babysitting her.
“You don’t have to,” Aggie finally managed to say, giving Collin an offhanded dismissal.
The warmth of his eyes penetrated her. “I know.”
The afternoon sun was waning. Aggie needed to get back to the hospital to relieve the Three Stooges. Larry, Curly, and Moe. That was the only way she could think of the three ladies she met just hours ago. They’d imprinted themselves on her for more reasons than their entertaining personalities. She couldn’t wipe Jane’s sincere praying out of her mind. Couldn’t seem to tamp down how much it reminded her of Mom. Couldn’t explain how the Three Stooges’ steady natures made her own world seem like it was completely spinning out of control.
Aggie straddled a straight-backed chair, her arms crossed over its back, the lamps turned on in every corner of Mumsie’s study. She stared at the dollhouse. The creepy, awful thing with the imitation murdered body of Hazel sprawled on the floor. She studied the stains on the miniature bed, twisted and analyzed the stains on the real bed behind her. Almost to perfection.
Mumsie’s attempt at early forensics was impressive to say the least. Aggie chewed on her cinnamon gum, popped it, and chewed some more. Apparently, after seventy years, the dollhouse had yet to shine light on any clues strong enough to draw a conclusion to the mystery of Hazel’s violent death.
Aggie glanced at her open notebook on the floor.
The ammunition plant—once called the powder plant—it really had no connection to Hazel, but somehow it felt as though it did. Of course, if she’d just asked Mumsie sooner, instead of tiptoeing around it, she’d know far more than she did now. If Mumsie never woke . . . well, did it matter if she ever helped Mumsie find closure to Hazel’s murder?
But then—Aggie tried to line up all the events in her mind—whoever had called Mumsie and sent her into a panic that caused her stroke, they mattered.
“Aarrrrrrrgh!” Aggie spit her gum against the wall.
Mumsie would have a fit if she’d seen that.
“I don’t think one is supposed to launch chewing gum at the walls.”
Collin’s voice interrupted the beginning of Aggie’s frustrated tantrum. She startled backward, the chair flipping out from beneath her, and landed on the hardwood floor.
“Way to let a person know you’re here!” Aggie winced. She’d also fallen on one of her stylish boots she’d taken off when she sat down. The red ones with the three-inch heels.
“Here.” Collin extended a hand. “Let me help you up. It’s my fault if you injured your bum.”
Aggie shoved herself off the floor, ignoring his hand and swatting at her jeans to knock off dust. “I didn’t injure my bum.”
“Splendid.” Collin directed his attention to the dollhouse and crossed his arms over his button-down oxford shirt. Aggie shot a glance at his pants. Tiny embroidered trout dotted the pressed khakis. Fish. Of course. The man dressed to the nines all the time. She wondered if he even owned a pair of basketball shorts or flannel pajama pants.
“Do you sleep in dress pants?” It slipped out before she could stop it.
Collin raised a brow. “No. But I do press my pajamas. There’s nothing in the world as splen
did as wearing pressed cotton.”
Aggie had nothing to say to that. It was so . . . un-American to iron pj’s.
“Any further clues?” He motioned toward the dollhouse.
Aggie averted her thoughts from Collin in pajamas. “I don’t even know why Mumsie keeps that horrible house. She’s stared at it for over seventy years, and still no one knows a darn thing about what happened to Hazel.”
She hurt for Mumsie. She ached for whatever Hazel had gone through. She wanted closure for them all. Most of all, she longed to bounce all of it off Mom, but two years after her death, Aggie only heard Mom’s voice in her head. An imaginary one telling Aggie all things she thought Mom might say in a situation, but none of it being from Mom herself.
“Have you checked with the local police department?” Collin inquired. “Perhaps they still have the evidence from the crime scene?”
“Seventy years later?” Aggie couldn’t hide the high level of doubt in her tone.
“It’s possible.” Collin tipped his head in affirmation of his suggestion. “Although, I’d wager not likely.”
“Well, I doubt they ever throw out evidence, but whether it’s anywhere anyone can find would be the trick.” Aggie considered the possibility. She supposed it’d be worth a visit to the precinct. The worst thing they could do was confirm her suspicions that none of it was available.
“So then, we assume this is all we have. The miniature and this very room.” Collin turned to the bed, the small table, the empty picture frame.
“Trust me, I’ve been staring at it all for two hours.” Aggie pinched the bridge of her nose.
Collin gave her a sideways glance. “And your grandmother has been staring at it for seventy years.”
Aggie tipped her back and released a sigh toward the ceiling. “I don’t even know where to look. I don’t know why seventy years later anyone other than Mumsie would even care. But the roses, the note . . . and good grief, you had someone hit you on the back of the head! That’s probably connected too. Someone isn’t happy with Mumsie. They’re not happy with us at the cemetery. This whole thing is so blown out of proportion. There’s hardly a soul alive in Mill Creek who was an adult during World War II, so why would anyone still care?”
Echoes among the Stones Page 24