He appears to be considering this idea for a few seconds and my hopes soar. But then he says, “Right, and what’s going to stop you three from running for help the second I’m gone?”
“Put us in that grave,” I say. “It’s a deep hole and we won’t be able to climb out of it. We’ll have to wait until the funeral tomorrow for someone to come along and find us.”
Joel looks at me with disgust. “You must think I’m stupid,” he sneers. “Danny boy here is well over six feet tall and it would be a piece of cake for him to put one of you on his shoulders so you could climb out of there. Plus, you could all start yelling and that would draw attention the same way the gunshots would.”
I was sort of hoping he was stupid enough not to see the solution. Had to try though.
“Although,” Joel says with a new ring of hope in his voice that I don’t like at all. He is looking over at the mound of dirt. Just beyond it is a shovel and parked down by the back fence is a backhoe. “If I put all three of you in that hole and cover you up with enough of that dirt there, I won’t have to fire any shots, and you won’t be able to yell.”
“You’d bury us alive?” Allie says with horror.
Joel shrugs. “It’s all for the greater good.” He shifts his attention to Danny. “You get down in the hole first and lie down.”
I watch Danny closely, half expecting him to leap at Joel, or try to run... anything but what he finally does. He dutifully walks over, steps in between the protective sawhorses surrounding the grave, and then sits down on the edge of it. Just as he’s about to push himself down into the hole, he hesitates, his face turned upward.
“He’s here,” Danny says. “Arthur Fletcher is here and he’s mad as hell.”
“Oh, shut up with that ghostly gobbledygook,” Joel snaps. “Get in the—” Joel stops what he’s saying and gapes in the same direction as Danny.
When I hear Allie whisper, “Oh my God,” I look that way, too. Not far beyond the grave there is a stately old oak tree, its trunk as big around as two Dannys. And materializing from the trunk right before our very eyes is the ghostly figure of an old man. It’s thin and wispy to start, though the shape is unmistakable, and over the next few seconds the figure grows more visible, more formed, yet still ephemeral in nature, shape without real substance.
All of us stand mesmerized, staring as the shape grows more solid and then swoops toward us, seeming to fly right over our heads. Joel ducks and lets out a girlish-sounding scream, then he aims his gun at the apparition, pulling the trigger. There is a phht sound and then he pulls the trigger again, and again, each one a little louder. The smell of gun smoke fills the air, and I’m afraid Joel’s wild firing might hit me, or Allie, or Danny.
“Get down!” I say to Allie and, to my surprise, she runs forward, dodges around the sawhorses, and then jumps into the grave.
The apparition has disappeared, but then a second later it reappears in the tree trunk, once again taking shape and form. Seconds later it starts to swoop toward us, and Joel starts firing again. I run toward the hole after Allie, get to the edge, drop to my butt beside Danny, and slide down the eight-foot wall. For a second, I’m in free fall and then I land with a bone-jarring thud.
I hear bullets whizzing overhead and I grab Danny’s leg and tug as hard as I can. “Get down here!” I tell him. To my surprise, he drops into the grave. We’re momentarily safe from the bullets whizzing by overhead, but I realize that now Joel has us right where he wants us.
Then I hear voices, several of them, very human in nature.
“Drop the gun!” I recognize this voice. It’s Devo. “Hands over your head,” he says next.
“It’s the police,” I say to Allie, and she squeezes her eyes closed with relief. There is a flurry of activity above with muffled voices and pounding feet. Danny is sitting on the floor of the hole, staring at the dirt wall. I decide to risk a holler to let people know we are down here.
“Hello up there. Can someone help us out of here?”
The first thing I hear is Joel in a high-pitched, girly voice squealing, “What is that? Make him go away!”
There are more muffled sounds and finally a head peeks over the edge of the grave above me. “Hildy, is that you?” Brenda Joiner says.
“It is,” I answer. “Me, Allie, and Danny. Can you get us out of here?”
“Yeah, hang on. Let me find a ladder of some sort.”
It takes an interminable amount of time for anyone to return and for a moment I fear that we’ve been forgotten with all the hubbub going on above. Finally, someone comes back with a metal extension ladder that is lowered down into the grave. I let Allie climb up first and then she and I manage to coax Danny into climbing out. I’m the last one up, and when I reach the top, I’m surprised at the number of people there are. In addition to several police officers, there are firemen, and at least three other adults milling about. There are also two teenage boys off to one side chatting with Devo and Bob Richmond.
“We weren’t trying to hurt anyone with it,” one of the boys says. “We were just looking to have some fun. But when we got here tonight, we heard that guy over there threatening to kill a bunch of people. We called you guys and then used it to try to distract him. It worked,” he says with a wicked grin. “I think we scared the crap out of him.”
“I’ll say,” the other boy says with a chuckle. “That dude screamed like crazy.”
Brenda has taken Allie and Danny off toward her car, and I approach Bob and the boys. “Hildy, are you okay?” Bob says.
“I am. My ankle is a little sore from dropping down into that grave, but I don’t think it’s anything serious.” I look at the two boys, putting the pieces together. “I take it you two are somehow responsible for the ghost?”
The boys smile sheepishly. “It’s not against the law, is it?” one of them asks Devo.
“I don’t think we’ll find a specific law to address this issue,” he says, scratching his head.
“Exactly what is the issue?” I ask.
One of the boys steps aside, revealing a small device that looks like a movie projector. “We’re making a movie for a school project. We’ve been experimenting with this gizmo to try and create a holographic image that appears to be moving through space,” he says. “Over there we’ve suspended a small screen between two trees so that the image that we display on it appears to be coming out of the tree that’s behind the screen. We projected one on a headstone, too, and it looked like a ghost coming up from the grave. We have a Halloween CD with several images on it that we can project.”
“I’ve seen something like that at someone’s house,” I say, recalling the very spooky Henderson house one block over from my house. The Hendersons are known for their love of Halloween and they always go all out on the decorations, sound effects, and such. The kids, and many adults, love it. “Were you two here on Saturday night playing with this?” I ask, realizing with relief that the ghost I thought I saw that night did exist and it meant I wasn’t crazy or hallucinating.
The boys look guiltily at Bob. “Yeah, we were,” one of them says. “But other people come out here, too. That big guy who just climbed out of the hole over there, we’ve seen him out here before a couple of times.”
Bob looks puzzled by this and I tell him, “I think I can explain that.” I roll my eyes toward the boys. “But I best do it in private.”
Bob nods his understanding and he tells the boys to go home, take their ghost-making machine with them, and to stay out of the cemetery. Relieved that they aren’t in any serious trouble, they gather up their projector and head toward the tree where the ghost image emanated from earlier. I gather they need to take down whatever it was they were using as a screen.
Bob looks at me and smiles. “This isn’t your usual shift, is it?”
“No, it isn’t. But this is what happens when gun-wielding maniacs show up at your house.”
“I think you’re going to have to come down to the station and explain some things for me,
” he says. “I need to question Joel, but there are a lot of holes in this story. Can you help me with that?”
“I think I can fill in most of them for you. Let me go and talk to Allie and Danny first, and make sure they get the care they need.”
And just like that, I’m back on duty.
Chapter 30
Late in the afternoon on Wednesday, I leave the hospital and drive over to the police station, where I let myself in through the back door and head for Bob Richmond’s office. I’m happy to see that the break room isn’t a pig sty already after my cleaning efforts over the weekend, and I hope that maybe the other folks who use this room are taking the hint and doing a better job of keeping it halfway neat.
“Hildy!” Bob says when I enter his office. It’s by far the most exuberant greeting I’ve ever gotten from him and I smile broadly, feeling oddly pleased about it.
“Are we still on for our shopping spree?” I ask him.
“We are. I just need to wrap up this report. Give me two minutes.”
I stand by quietly as he types away on his keyboard. He’s a two-fingered typist, but he’s quite adept and fast at it. When he’s done, he saves what he was working on, shuts down the program, and then spins around in his chair to look at me.
“Are you caught up on your sleep finally?” he asks me.
“I think so. I slept for twelve hours straight last night. I’m revved up and raring to go. How about you?”
“I’m a little behind you, but I did get a decent bit of sleep last night, so I’m okay. Can’t deny that I’m looking forward to climbing in the sack tonight, though.”
As he utters these words, I hear a noise behind us and turn to see Detective Steve Hurley enter the office. “Someone is impatient,” he says with a grin. “If you two are that eager, I can back out and return later.”
Realizing what his words implied, Bob blushes to the tips of his ears. “No, no,” he says, a little too fast. “I was simply referring to sleep.” He glances my way and then quickly looks at his feet, his face beaming red.
“So, I hear you are the hero of the day, Hildy,” Detective Hurley says. “I heard you nabbed a ringleader involved in a local militia, thwarted a bioterrorism plot, solved two murders, and cleared the name of Danny Hildebrand. Not bad for your first week of work.”
Now it’s my turn to blush. “I think the militia fellow found me rather than the other way around and I got lucky on the rest of it,” I tell him.
“She’s minimalizing it,” Bob says, looking happy at the change of subject. “She did some stellar work. She and that dog of hers.”
“Roscoe is a hero, too,” I agree. “What’s happening with Joel?”
“The feds have taken over the case, now that all the heavy lifting has been done by us peons,” Bob says with a roll of his eyes. “They threatened Joel with the death penalty unless he agreed to talk, and he sang like a bird. He’s given up the names of twenty-two other members of the militia group, most of them high-tier operatives. It turns out they were planning a multi-level assault using ricin and the other poisons. They had one plan that targeted several government buildings where they intended to poison the water cooler bottles and the water supplies. The last time I talked to someone at Homeland Security, they weren’t sure what the hoped-for outcome was supposed to be, though most of the buildings they had listed as targets do house judges and district attorneys. A different group was going to create ricin bullets and randomly fire them at people who attend anti-gun rallies, creating panic and supposedly proving their favorite pro-gun statement that it isn’t guns that kill people, it’s people who kill people. And there was a third plan, one that had a much larger scale and longer timeline that involved the mass murdering of several targeted groups primarily represented by people of color.” Bob pauses and shakes his head, a look of disgust on his face. “There are some sick and twisted people in this world,” he says.
“Yes, there are,” I agree.
“How’s Danny doing?” he asks.
“Much better. I spent a lot of time with him in the hospital today because Allie couldn’t be there. The feds are questioning her today, trying to get some background info on Joel and how she came to be hooked up with him. Turns out the guy targeted Allie and her brother and came up with the whole plan regarding the cemetery exchanges and the manipulation of Danny. That guy is scary smart.
“As for Danny, now that he’s back on his normal meds, he’s calm, alert, and talking sensibly. No more hallucinations. Joel was very clever in the way he manipulated things, stealing the drugs he needed from the nursing home and then substituting those pills for the ones that Allie was carefully putting into Danny’s medication box each day. As soon as Allie left for work, Joel would make the changes and Danny had no idea. Though he did notice that his pills looked and tasted different. But I think by then his head was too fogged up to get the significance of it. Or maybe he did, and he just checked out, knowing he couldn’t do much about it since Joel made it clear that if Danny said anything or didn’t do what they asked of him, that Allie would be killed. Joel really did a number on Danny, both mentally and physically, giving him drugs that not only didn’t control his schizophrenia, they exacerbated it. And some of them put Danny in a hypnotic-like state that made him highly controllable and suggestible.”
Bob nods. “Yeah, the fed I talked to said Joel told them it took some time and experimentation to get the right combination of stuff to make Danny pliable, but still leave him intact enough on a cognitive level to be able to do the stuff they needed him to do in the lab to extract the poisons. And apparently you got involved a few months ago and messed everything up for them.”
“If only I’d known that was what I was doing,” I say, shaking my head. “I should have realized something was wrong sooner. The way Danny was behaving, lucid one second and blabbering gibberish the next, that’s not the way he’s ever presented before.”
“Hey, don’t beat yourself up over any of this,” Detective Hurley says. “From everything I’ve heard, you did a fantastic job.”
“Thanks,” I say with a meager smile. I want to glow and bask in his praise but lurking at the back of my thoughts is the knowledge that Crystal seems to be out to get me, or my job. Maybe both. “Those kids at the cemetery deserve some credit, too,” I say. “However incidental. It’s ironic that the CD they were using had an image on it that bore such a strong resemblance to Arthur Fletcher. That thing had several people wondering if ghosts were real.”
Detective Hurley chuckles and then says, “I have to run. Keep up the good work, Hildy.”
“Thanks. Say hi to Mattie for me, will you?”
“Will do.”
Once he’s gone, Bob says, “By the way, before I forget, Brenda wanted me to let you know that the deer you saw in the cemetery the other night made it out okay. She said she knew you were going to worry about it. Apparently, it fell into the same open grave you guys ended up in, though luckily it wasn’t injured. The cemetery workers found it in the morning and were able to lift it out and transport it to a safe area.”
“Oh, good. I’m glad to hear that.” I then ask the first of many questions that have been burning in my mind for the past two days. “Have they figured out yet who killed Arthur Fletcher and why?”
“According to Joel, it was one of the other militia members who administered the strychnine to Arthur earlier in the day. They decided Arthur was too much of a risk because he was starting to balk at what they were doing with the poisonous plants. He was okay with the marijuana and he initially thought the lab they constructed was to extract THC from those plants. When he realized what they were doing with the other plants, he told them he didn’t want to play anymore. So, they eliminated him. It took about two hours for him to start seizing after he ingested the strychnine and he died quickly after that.”
“That mug of milk in the microwave?” I ask.
“Joel claims he doesn’t know how the strychnine was given to Arthur, but he
knows who gave it to him and that it kicked in when Arthur was in the kitchen prepping for bed. He started to feel ill, sat down in one of the chairs, and then seized shortly after that, making the chair fall over backward. That explains how they were able to get his stiff body into a sitting position later, and why there was livor mortis on Arthur’s back. His muscles seized up while he was still in the chair in a sitting position, but with the chair on its back on the floor.”
“And the gunshot?”
“Joel had a front row seat for that part, and he dragged Danny along because he was also starting to have reservations about what was going on. Danny overheard an argument between Arthur and someone in the militia about Arthur wanting to stop what they were doing, and it bit at Danny’s conscience. Joel needed Danny’s chemistry expertise and his continued cooperation, so he decided to ramp up the threats he’d been making with a little demonstration, to show Danny how serious things were. Joel propped Arthur up on the kitchen chair—basically just sitting the chair back up. Arthur was already dead, but Danny didn’t know that and Joel had him so doped up by then, he didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. Joel brought Danny into the kitchen and stood by him, talking into his ear about what they would do to Allie if Danny didn’t continue to cooperate. While he was saying this, another militia member put the gun under Arthur’s chin and fired. That was to make sure Danny knew they weren’t kidding.”
I squeeze my eyes closed, imagining the mental and emotional horror of what Danny went through. “That poor guy,” I say. “Though ironically, I think that watching them shoot Arthur like that was what did the militia in. It pushed Danny over an edge that left him so mentally unhinged that he became unstable. I think he’s going to need some heavy-duty counseling once we get his meds right to be able to cope with what he did and what he saw. Are the feds going to prosecute him for his role in all of this?”
“I doubt it,” Bob says. “Based on what they’ve told me so far, they have the masterminds and they don’t feel Danny would be prosecutable given his mental health issues. And while Joel didn’t kill Arthur Fletcher, he did kill Marla Riley. You were right when you guessed that one. The cop who was on duty outside of Marla’s room remembers him because he was wearing a surgical cap and mask and he kind of wondered why at the time since Marla wasn’t having surgery of any kind. No one else wore that kind of gear into the room, but Joel had a legitimate hospital ID badge, one he stole off someone else’s lab coat, so the cop just figured it was something he didn’t understand and let him by without a second thought.”
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