“When was that?” Sarah asked him.
“I figure the beginning of December. We didn’t fiberglass it until Monday, so someone could have gone in over the weekend when we weren’t around and opened the thing up. It was just screwed together at that point.”
“You think Cathy might have done it?” Sarah said.
“Sure. She used to hang around, visiting Eldon and helping him work on her boat. Besides, Eldon could have found lots of other places around the yard to hide something.”
“But how could she get into the shop by herself?”
“Easy,” Pearly said. “There’s a trick shingle next to the side door. Slide it out and the key is right there. Eldon made it because he’s always losing his keys. He can’t keep track of the things for love or money. That’s why he keeps his truck keys over the visor.”
“Okay, so maybe it was Cathy after all,” Oliver muttered reluctantly. He turned to Sarah. “Pearly is going to give the stone to the police.”
“Pearly is going to look it over first, because he’s not sure it’s any of the police’s business,” Pearly said.
Sarah pushed back the trash bag some more. “It’s just the top half of the headstone.”
“We know that much,” Oliver replied.
“Whose is it?”
Pearly looked over the rail. “We’re not sure. The writing is too worn to read.”
“Do you have some tracing paper?” she asked Oliver.
“Sure he does,” Pearly said, obviously delighted to have an accomplice. “Let’s go inside where we can work on it and see what we find.” He groaned faintly as he lifted the stone and headed for the kitchen door.
Oliver’s house stood at right angles to the barn, and a few paces away. Sarah followed Pearly with Wes bumping companionably against her leg. Oliver brought up the rear, somewhat less companionably.
Chapter 14
The door opened into a large kitchen. A fireplace on one side of the room had been fitted with a big wood-burning stove, and beside the hearth was a dog bed and an assortment of stuffed dog toys. On the mantle, a framed photograph showed a younger Oliver and a woman with two children, a boy and a girl. The modern appliances were arrayed defiantly along the opposite wall. A stack of dirty dishes covered the counter beside the sink, while the kitchen table hid under piles of magazines and newspapers. Wes trotted over to a water bowl beside the refrigerator and drank noisily.
They went into what had once been the dining room, where a drafting table occupied one wall, with a computer hutch next to it. The walls were lined with book shelves and Sarah’s quick glance caught a collection of what looked like engineering texts, boating books, and hundreds of mystery stories.
Pearly lowered his burden onto what would normally be the dining room table in the event the room was ever used for such a purpose, pushing aside a collection of papers, letters, and assorted boat fittings in the process.
Pearly looked around the room warily. “You don’t have any of those crazy machines running around, do you?” he asked.
Oliver shook his head.
“Machines?” Sarah said.
“He makes vacuum widgets and mechanical spiders,” Pearly said ominously.
“You mean like a Roomba?” Sarah said.
“It is like a Roomba,” Oliver said, proudly, “only Rugzilla has a bit more power.”
“A bit more power is an understatement,” Pearly grumbled. “That thing will suck your shoes off. Just kick it out of the way if you see something coming.”
Oliver scowled.
“You build robots?” Sarah said, intrigued.
“Force of habit,” Oliver replied. “I was an electrical engineer before I moved to Maine.”
“How about you two clean the rest of that junk off the table, so we can get a look at the stone.” Pearly said, heading for the kitchen. “I’ll make us some coffee.”
Oliver and Sarah cleared the table in silence and placed the headstone on it. Oliver’s grouchiness seemed to have lifted by the time Pearly returned with coffee mugs, and they soon produced a rubbing of the stone with tracing paper and a soft pencil.
“The letters weren’t cut very deeply into the stone to start with, and the salt air must have weathered it away more than normal,” Oliver observed.
“It looks like the right number of letters to spell Gerhard Burndt,” Pearly said.
“The way the stone is broken off catty-corner, you don’t have the birth date,” Oliver added. “The death date looks like it might be 1828.”
“It could be a 23,” Sarah said. “Or even a 26.”
“That’s still about right for when he died. We could look it up and see,” Oliver said.
“The last name looks like it starts with a ‘B’,” Sarah added, squinting at the paper. “Do you think this really is Gerhard Burndt’s headstone? I don’t know much about him except that he was one of the founders of Burnt Cove, and nobody knows for sure where he’s buried.”
“A lot of Germans settled this area in the 1700's,” Pearly said. “Here, Waldoboro, and along the St. George River. The town was originally named Burndt Cove after Gerhard, but there were hard feelings when the Germans torpedoed the Lusitania during World War One, and a bunch of people led by Cyrus Huggard called a special town meeting to have the name changed. Half the town belonged to the Burndt family, and they weren’t too happy with the idea, but the Huggard tribe had bought up most of Squirrel Point below the village by that time, a big chunk of town, and they threatened to secede. The place nearly had a war of its own before they finally voted to drop the ‘d’ and become Burnt Cove. There were hard feelings between the two families for years after that. Those people in Burnt Cove just love to fight with each other.”
“Nobody really knows where Gerhard was buried,” Oliver added. “Most people think his grave is in the Oak Hill cemetery and the stone sank into the ground, or got lost over the years. Some people figure one of the Huggards may have desecrated it after the Lusitania business, but nobody can say for sure,” Pearly concluded.
Sarah ran her fingers over the stone. “Wasn’t Myra the last of the Burndts?”
“She and her sister,” Pearly said. “The family girled out. Evan was the last of the Huggards.”
“It’s ironic they should marry. The end of the feud.”
“Not hardly,” Pearly said. “They fought like cats and dogs.”
“Do you think Cathy or Eldon found Gerhard’s grave and hid the stone to protect it?” Sarah asked.
“Protect it from who?” Pearly said.
“Cathy is a bug on town history,” Oliver said. “Maybe she was keeping it until she could be sure it was Gerhard’s.”
“It’s kind of romantic to think that Cathy might have found his final resting place,” Sarah said.
“We don’t know this is his stone, for sure” Pearly pointed out, “and even if it is, we don’t know where the actual grave is. People just assume he’s buried somewhere in the Oak Hill cemetery, since he lived next door.”
“It was the oldest house in town, until it burned down back in the early 1940's,” Oliver said. “The Oak Hill development’s driveway runs right through where the back yard used to be.”
“I think we’d better keep this quiet for a while,” Pearly said.
“Until we call the cops,” Oliver said.
“Don’t be such a fuss-budget.”
“Why would Cathy hide it in the boat?” Sarah said.
“She had to hide it somewhere,” Oliver replied, “since it was illegal for her to take it in the first place. Nobody would have ever found it either, if Eagle-eye here hadn’t noticed the boat was down at the bow and cut the stone out.”
“Wish I hadn’t, now,” Pearly grumbled.
“But it’s not exactly convenient to get at,” Sarah said.
“Getting at it isn’t hard,” Oliver replied. “Fixing the hole afterwards is a pain.” He shot Pearly a dark look.
“Maybe she didn’t need to get at it
easily,” Sarah said. “Maybe it was in the way of one of the construction projects in town, and she and Myra were blackmailing the contractor.”
“All they’d need is a photograph to prove they had it,” Oliver added, “and they wouldn’t dare to leave it at the construction site where it could be taken away.”
“It would be nice to find out where the stone came from,” Sarah said, “but I don’t see how, without knowing who hid it in the boat, or where the bottom half is.”
“I thought you said Oak Hill was the most likely place,” Pearly said.
“Yes, but there’s construction going on all over town,” Sarah replied.
“We keep talking about Cathy, but why couldn’t it be Eldon and Myra? Or just Eldon?” Oliver said.
Pearly strode over to the mantlepiece, picked up what looked like a gallon wine jug on a stand, and brought it back. An exquisitely detailed model of a three-masted schooner sailed across a tiny sea inside the bottle.
He handed the bottle to Sarah. “That’s Eldon’s work.” He eyed Oliver, adding, “Hard to think someone who could do that kind of thing would be involved in a murder.”
“It’s hard to imagine anybody with hands like his could make something so tiny,” Sarah said, marveling at the delicate rigging and ant-sized figure at the ship’s wheel.
“It isn’t the size, it’s the steadiness,” Pearly said.
Oliver frowned. “Making ships in bottles doesn’t mean—”
“You know how Eldon is with secrets,” Pearly retorted. “If he knew anything about this, everybody in the world would know too. The trouble with Eldon is when he starts nosing around, he’s like a rhinoceros sniffing at your hip pocket—you can’t miss it. He means well, but you still get nervous.”
“Nervous? You mean like the three guys he beat up?”
“They shouldn’t have accused Cathy of killing Myra when he asked where they’d last seen the girl.”
* * *
Sarah and Oliver stood at the rail of Cathy’s boat and stared at the rough-cut hole in the flotation tank.
“It’s too bad,” Sarah commented.
Oliver glanced around, but Pearly had gone off to Eldon’s truck with the trash bag. “It won’t be that hard to fix,” he said quietly.
“No, I mean about the stone being broken. How could that happen?”
“The break looks old. It could be a fault in the marble where water got in and froze, starting a crack that grew over the years. Or maybe somebody didn’t like him and broke it.”
“It must have been tough for Gerhard Burndt” Sarah mused. “First, his headstone is broken, then people forget where he was buried, and when his grave is found, someone takes half the stone away in a trash bag.”
“Must be hell for him,” Oliver observed solemnly.
Sarah glanced at Oliver, but his eyes, blue-gray this morning, looked serious. She let it go.
Wes sat and leaned comfortably against Sarah’s leg. She patted his head and he looked up, panting happily. “What kind of a dog is Wes?”
“Springer Spaniel. Always had them.”
“He’s so friendly. Why do you call him Wes?”
“He’s named for Weston Farmer.”
“And who is Weston Farmer?”
“He was a yacht designer. It’s a family tradition, naming pets after yacht designers. When I was a kid, we had a cat named Nathaniel Herreshoff, the man who designed your boat. We called him Nat-the-cat.”
Sarah digested this for a moment. “But you haven’t always been a yacht designer like your father? You were an engineer?”
“Yes.” Oliver let the single word hang in the air, and Sarah was beginning to think that was all he was going to say on the subject. Finally, he added, “I took some yacht design courses, and I had worked in a boatyard as a kid. My father always said there was no money in yacht design, and I should do something else for a living. There are only a few hundred full-time yacht designers in the whole world. Mostly, I just build them.”
“The stone looks like it was half-buried for a long time. The back has dirt stains on it,” Sarah said.
Oliver didn’t seem fazed by her sudden changes of subject. “The bottom half would be harder to get at if it sank completely underground. I wonder where it is.”
“I bet Myra told Cathy or Eldon where to look. Who else would be likely to know?”
“Myra was the most tight-lipped, paranoid old woman I’ve ever known,” Oliver said. “I expect she kept the place a secret to protect Gerhard. Protect him from what, only she would know, and her mind was a little strange. She’d need a good reason to tell anyone.”
“Maybe Pearly is right, and it isn’t about blackmail, or Myra being murdered,” she said. “Myra knew she was dying. Maybe she wanted to pass on the location of his grave for the future.”
“But why dig the thing up if it wasn’t blackmail?” Oliver paused. “Maybe that’s what Myra and Cathy were arguing about last fall.”
Pearly wandered back empty-handed. “Don’t forget to fix that flotation tank. I’ll bring some paint over tomorrow so you can touch it up. And don’t forget the lead. You won’t need it now.”
“Make Eldon fix it, if your so sure his girlfriend put the stone in there.”
“Have you forgotten about the rhinoceros already? Just keep quiet until I sort things out.” With that, he headed for the truck.
“You won’t believe what I’m going to charge to fix your hole,” Oliver called after him.
Pearly didn’t seem to hear as he clambered aboard and swung the door shut with a rusty creak. The gears ground as he fumbled for reverse. He backed around and leaned out the window. “I put the stone behind your trash barrels. Don’t throw it out by mistake.”
Sarah watched Pearly drive off and said, “What’s with him and the headstone? Is he just protecting Eldon?”
“Pearly’s son drowned years ago when his lobsterboat sank, so Eldon is the closest thing Pearly has to a son, but there’s more to it than that. Everything is tied together in a small community like this. It’s like a spider web, and we don’t know all the connections. There’s Cathy, helping Myra stay in her house as long a possible. Lot’s of people were unhappy about that, including Cathy’s boss, Doc Caldwell, who thought Myra should be in a nursing home.”
Oliver leaned back against the side of Cathy’s boat so he was facing Owl, propping his foot on the trailer’s fender. “Then there are Myra’s lawsuits against the town and the planning board. That gets Sam Merlew involved.
“And speaking of the Merlews, Myra made trouble when they began selling the camp for house lots. Sam was frantic because they were desperate for cash to pay Kate’s medical bills, and Myra held up the sales for months. Hell, she was still making trouble for the Borofskys right up until she died.”
He leaned forward and poked at a spot of dirt on Owl’s varnish. “It goes on and on. Pearly grew up around here, and he’s worried about stirring up grief for a lot of people he cares about.”
Oliver glanced at his watch. “Let’s make a phone call, see what we can learn about graveyards.”
* * *
Back inside, Oliver turned on the speaker attachment for his telephone and dialed a number.
It picked up on the second ring. “Rosen.”
Oliver had designed and built a small daysailer for Lev Rosen, a retired lawyer, two years ago. After identifying himself, Oliver said, “I have a legal question for you.”
“Do I get paid for answering it?”
“Are you crazy? Where would I get that kind of money? I’m looking for a freebee.”
“You get what you pay for,” Lev replied.
“Suppose you were putting up a house and came across an old graveyard—you know, where the headstones had sunk into the ground over the years. What would that mean?”
“That’s easy. There are state laws governing what they call ‘ancient graveyards.’ If you buy a piece of property and you find an old cemetery, even if it isn’t shown on the d
eed, you have a legal obligation not to disturb it.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” Oliver said.
“You found an old cemetery up there in the woods?”
“I’m just asking for a friend.”
“Hah! They all say that. If you leave the cemetery alone, it’s no problem. If you want to do any construction work, you have to notify the town code enforcement officer, he has to verify that it’s a graveyard and what you’re doing is legal. For instance, you can’t build anything within 25 feet, that sort of thing. Or, you can petition to have the graves moved.”
“Petition?” Sarah murmured.
“Whatsay?” Lev demanded.
“What do you mean by petition?” Oliver said.
“That’s getting into more than a phone call, but for instance, if there are any descendants, you could try to get permission from them to move the graves. Or you could ask the court for permission. What are you up to?”
“It’s just a hypothetical question.”
“Hah! They all say that too. Next thing you know, I end up visiting them in jail.”
“Does that sort of thing happen often? I mean finding old graves on your land?”
“It happens, and it usually isn’t a big problem to deal with, but I expect there are a lot that never get found. Little family plots were pretty common around here in the old days. Mom and Pop buried out back, and the graves get lost over the years.”
“I suppose some people might just toss an old headstone aside,” Oliver said.
“And they’d probably get away with it, so long as some guy with a backhoe didn’t dig up the coffin.”
Chapter 15
Brian asked Sarah about her Explorer the minute she got into his Volvo. She told him about her “accident” without incriminating Eldon, or his truck.
“There are still some rough people in Burnt Cove,” Brian said as he backed out of the Merlew’s driveway. “Not as many as there used to be when I was growing up here, thank god. Even so, there are always a few bad apples in any small town.”
The Monday morning traffic was a lot lighter than it had been over the weekend. He gave her a tentative smile.
Gravely Dead: A Midcoast Maine Mystery Page 10