No Body
Page 19
“Huh? Oh. No, I just told her about the blackmail, that’s all. I wouldn’t pay anymore, and I thought maybe she’d make him quit. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. Too embarrassed, I guess, didn’t want to upset her. She was an awfully good secretary, you know . . . reliable, conscientious, honest as the day is . . .”
It was too much, and I raised a hand to stop it.
“Why did he blackmail you, instead of your dad?”
“Because,” Stan said bitterly, “he knew my dad would just explode like Mount Saint Helens and fire him, and probably Sylvia, too. And what he wanted was the money, of course. Oh, he knew the real sucker . . . more worried about my company’s image and my family’s reputation than about little things like truth, justice, and breaking the law. Part of the deal was that I couldn’t tell my dad.”
“Did you?”
“God, no.”
“But if your father didn’t know, he didn’t have any reason to kill Sylvia! Anyway, why kill her? She wasn’t doing him any harm, she didn’t even know about the extortion. If he was going to kill anybody, it should have been the Jackal.”
“Yeah!” He brightened, but only momentarily. “Yeah, but there’s only our word on it, and who’s going to believe us now?”
“Did Sylvia call your dad that night, Stan?”
“He swears she didn’t, and my mom says the phone never rang. And he didn’t leave the house all night, not until his regular time to go to work in the morning.”
“Well,” I said brightly, “that’s an alibi. Does he have a witness to any of that?”
“Sure.”
I waited.
“Mom.”
We held each other’s eyes for a long, defeated moment. I looked away first, embarrassed at having nothing helpful to offer in the way of advice. We sat for a few moments in a mutually depressed silence until I broke it with a question that had been bugging me for some time.
“Stan,” I said, “why did you go ahead with that office party, in spite of the fact that one of your employees had recently died?”
“Oh, you know how it is. Those things have a life of their own. I mean, once you’ve bought the dip, you might as well go ahead and dunk the chips. And to tell you the truth, nobody liked John Rudolph much anyway, except Sylvia, and his wife, I guess. He wasn’t anything special, Jenny, just this horny little guy who died, that’s all. I know it sounds callous, but I don’t suppose we thought much about him at the party.”
I accepted the answer. But it did seem to me that for such an inconsequential man, John Rudolph had surely gone out of this world dramatically, and now his wife was dead, and his lover, too. As we sat there in silence again, my brain began playing games with the words . . . inconsequential, sequential, consequence, sequence, essential, quintessential, consequential. . . as if once I had scratched the word inconsequential it split open and other words poured out. Stan interrupted the flow of irrelevant words by voicing painfully relevant ones.
“So what happens next, Jenny?”
“Didn’t your lawyers tell you?”
“Yeah, but make me believe it.”
I told him, and he seemed to believe it.
28
Stan went back to work, what little of it there was after the news of his father’s arrest. For my part, I didn’t want to go back to work, but I didn’t want to go home, either. I didn’t even want to talk to Francie.
I slipped out of Stan’s office while she was on the phone, and then out the back door to the memorial park. Over the weekend, the spring rains had started again; now the first cold sprinkles of the day fell on my hair and shoulders. The sky above was gray as a slate tombstone; my mood below was more the color and weight of lead. It seemed the appropriate moment for a walk in a graveyard.
I started off around the memorial park, toward the entrance to Union Hill Cemetery, not even caring if I got wet and chilled. The sprinkles stopped, however, thus aborting the particular route of martyrdom that would have sent me to a hospital with pneumonia. Regardless, I trudged on.
At the gate, I paused to survey the full expanse. And then I marched from stone to stone, reading some of them again, thinking about none of them. The holes in the ground still lay open like doors to dark apartments waiting for the residents to return. Down one long, uneven row I went, then up another, until I worked my way through the entire cemetery, covering even more ground than I had a few days before.
I came up against the outermost edge of the cemetery and leaned against the fence. I looked down. The ground sloped away to a flat place, and then down a cliff to the ocean. I hooked the toes of my shoes in the holes in the fence, hoisted myself higher, and leaned over for a better view.
There were three flat rocks lined up at the edge of the flat place. They looked as if they had been placed there deliberately, rather than having simply been washed up by nature, so I climbed over the fence and scrambled down to inspect them.
When I got close, I saw that the rocks were pushed firmly into the ground and spaced about two feet from each other. Affixed to each one was a piece of tin, like a pie plate, which somebody had flattened and cut into an oblong. On the tins were crudely hammered names and dates, evidently of birth and death, Esther, 01–39; Roland, 52–39; Susanna May, 39–39.
As I stood looking down at “Esther,” I realized my feet were sinking ever so slightly into the damp earth. I moved in front of “Roland.” Again, the ground beneath my feet felt spongy, giving. Curious now, and paying attention, I stepped in front of the last tin marker.
“Graves,” I said aloud. And they weren’t empty. Whoever had been buried in them was still buried in them.
The Jackal had been right when he said some of them were still here, waiting for me to find them. But who were these people? And what did their presence—their bodily presence—mean, if anything?
I walked briskly to the cemetery gate, and from there to my car.
“They were victims of the Great Depression, Jennifer.”
Miss Grant’s eyes were moist with sympathy as she passed a plate of buttered English muffins to me. A cup of English Breakfast tea sat on a table by my elbow, raising thin curls of steam into the cozy room.
“Do you mean, Miss Grant, that they died during the Depression and couldn’t afford gravestones?”
She finished chewing and swallowing before she spoke.
“My dear, they couldn’t even afford a grave or a burial, and certainly not a tombstone. They were given those plots for free by Spitt’s father, which was a fine and noble thing to do, but I’m afraid the Pittman generosity did not extend to a proper grave marker, and so the poor things had to provide their own from whatever materials they found to use.”
“Who were they, Miss Grant?”
She named an old and perpetually impoverished family of the town. I had been to school with several of them; she had taught almost all the living ones.
“They’re still there,” I said, “in the cemetery.”
“Yes, dear.”
“That should mean something, shouldn’t it?”
“I don’t know, dear.” She smiled encouragingly at me, as if I were taking an examination she was sure I would pass. “Should it?”
I asked her why she hadn’t included their names among her records, and she gave me the perfectly reasonable answer that they were not really part of the cemetery proper. Before I left her apartment, I also asked her opinion of the arrest of Spitt Pittman for the two murders.
“Oh, well. It’s absurd, of course. Except . . .” Creases appeared between her eyebrows. “It would be so like Spitt to try to economize in that way.”
“Economize?”
“By burying two bodies in one coffin.” She pursed her lips and shook her head in a disapproving fashion that would have done nothing for Stan’s peace of mind.
Damn it, it had to mean something.
One hundred and thirty-three bodies gone, three remaining.
For lack of any better ideas, I drove
back to Harbor Lights. I entered through the public wing, which was conspicuously empty, since people don’t like to think their friendly funeral director will hasten them to their graves, and then I slipped back into the cremationurn display room. Again, I pulled out the cardboard boxes and began to pore over the archives, hoping something might trigger an intelligent, even original thought.
I was reading through the newspaper death notice for Erasmus Pittman for the fourth time when the coincidence really struck me. The old man had died and been buried in Union Hill Cemetery on June 30, 1886. And the last time that cemetery was used, excepting those Depression graves, was 1886.
Quickly, I ran my finger down the list of “Dates of Death” in the record compiled by Miss Grant. There was none later than June 30, 1867. He had, indeed, been the last person to be buried in his own cemetery. Why? For sentimental reasons? That seemed highly unlikely. There was remaining acreage that might have been put to profitable use, and God knew, the Pittmans were nothing if not profit minded. If they hadn’t continued burying people in that cemetery, there had been a reason.
“But what, damn it, what?”
I slammed the record shut, leaned back against the sofa, put my feet up on the coffee table, closed my eyes, and let everything I had read and observed float through my consciousness. After a few moments, I got up and stalked out of the room, back to Stan’s office, no longer caring who saw me.
“Stan.” He looked up from the telephone he had been about to dial and replaced the receiver. “Your family gave Union Hill Cemetery to the historical society in . . .”
“Nineteen fifty-two.”
“Why didn’t you use it before that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there was room for more graves. Why not use it?”
“We couldn’t, Jenny.”
“Couldn’t? Why not?”
“Well, because of the terms of the will, my grandfather’s will. He left the property, along with everything else, to my father, along with the proviso that the cemetery remain inviolate, protected, never to be used for profit again. As my father said, they were patriotic, my ancestors.”
“Yes,” I said.
Maybe, I thought.
I walked slowly to the cremation-urn display room thinking: it was the sons, Americus, Honor, and Justice, who did it, who stopped the use of the cemetery upon their father’s death. But why? Why? On my way down the long hall, I stopped to stare at each of their pictures in turn. Why, fellas? Why did you do it?
They didn’t reply.
Neither did their brothers-in-law, the liveryman, the upholsterer, the smithy who ran the forge, the . . .
Where was the sawmill owner, the man who had married the other Pittman daughter? He was a natural to join the firm, but his portrait wasn’t on the wall.
I trotted back to my cozy den to look him up.
Yes! Here he was, mentioned in the death notice for his wife, in 1848.
“In this city, the 21st instant, Mrs. Sarah Clark, wife of Mr. Benjamin Clark, the proprietor of the local sawmill, in the 25th year of her age, in childbirth, infant not surviving. She was a dutiful wife, an affectionate daughter to Mr. Erasmus Pittman and his wife of this town . . .”
It was the year the cemetery opened. Upon checking back through Miss Grant’s record, I saw that Sarah Pittman Clark was the first person to be buried in Union Hill Cemetery.
I ran my finger down the long lines of names in Miss Grant’s record of burials to see if I could find Benjamin Clark, not quite sure what I was looking for but figuring I should take this investigation of his life and times to its logical end. And there he was, having died in 1880 at the age of sixty, from “surgery in Boston.” Miss Grant had compiled quite a bit of information on Ben, listing the names of his parents, his children, and his wives, and the dates of his marriages. It looked as if Ben had remarried a few weeks after Sarah died. Now that was interesting, or was it? I thought about looking up a few of his descendants to inquire about him but decided that might require more effort than it was worth.
Instead, I went “Christmas shopping.”
It’s a method I use for last-minute shopping when I have a long list and no time: I enter a department store with my gift list and an iron determination to match every name on that list with a gift from that store before I depart. It always works and has the added bonus of including gift wrapping. In the same way, I made up my mind not to leave that room until I had figured out why the Pittman boys had closed their cemetery, and what a missing portrait had to do with it.
I opened my eyes once, to pore over the ledgers from the Pittman businesses. Then I leaned back and closed my eyes again. My shopping was nearly done.
The next time I looked up, I knew.
As I walked one last time down the corridor to Stan’s office, I winked at one of the paintings.
“I’m on to you, you old rascal,” I whispered.
I could have sworn he winked back at me.
Then I requested the pleasure of Stan’s company to the foundation board meeting, which would begin in half an hour. He was, he told me, exhausted and embarrassed, and he didn’t want to go.
“I think you’d better,” I advised him.
29
I was right on time for the board meeting, with Stan in tow like a reluctant barge being tugged against the current. I hadn’t been able to tell him much on the drive over, because I was still feverishly working out in my mind exactly how to present my conclusions so they would make as much sense to him and to the rest of the world as they did to me.
I flung open the door to the office. When it flew back and the knob hit the wall with a bang, I knew I was chugging along on all cylinders again.
“Hi, Faye!”
“Regular coffee,” she replied.
I pulled Stan into the conference room after me.
My bosses, the foundation trustees, were characteristically even more prompt than I. Officially, there were five of them, appointed to life terms, but the only young one among them had departed for Colorado some time before, leaving only the four remaining members to conduct business. They were powerful, intelligent, and demanding, and not one of them was a day under sixty-five years of age.
When Stan and I walked into the conference room, they were already seated in our donated antique chairs around our donated antique conference table, flipping through the pages of their copies of the agenda. Clockwise, from right to left as I viewed them, they were: Jack Fenton, chairman of the board of First City Bank; Roy Leland, chairman emeritus of United Grocers; Pete Falwell, president of the Port Frederick Fisheries; and Edwin Ottilini, senior partner in Owens, Owens, and Ottilini, Attorneys at Law.
Four pairs of shrewd eyes set in four lined and tanned faces looked up. I smiled, nodded to them. Four nods returned my greeting. And then they took in the presence of the young man behind me.
Pete Falwell stood up. Moving with the quickness of a senior tennis champion, he went at once to Stan’s side to wrap one arm around the younger man’s shoulders and shake hands with the other. “Good to see you, Stanley,” Pete said strongly. “Couldn’t believe what I heard on the news this morning. Still don’t believe it. Never will believe it. You give my best to your mother and father, and you call me if there’s anything I can do to help your family, you hear me?”
“Thank you, sir,” Stan said in a faint voice.
There were similar murmurs from the other three trustees, but they were looking over at me with an obvious question in their eyes: “What’s he doing here?”
“I invited Stan to participate in our meeting because of the first item on our agenda,” I told them. “Do you all have coffee? Yes? Well, I’m ready to start whenever you are, gentlemen.” I ushered Stan into an empty chair and then took my own place at the end of the table opposite the president of the board, Edwin Ottilini. The arrangement had always secretly amused me, making me feel like “mom” at a family gathering with “dad” and all the “boys.”
Although Roy Leland leaned forward in serious anticipation, an amused chuckle made the round of the other trustees, who appreciated the unlikelihood of Edwin Ottilini’s suggestion.
“Oh, they’re long gone, Edwin,” Pete Falwell said.
I rose to my feet. “Yes, they are.”
At the serious tone in my voice, the chuckles dried up, A slow smile began to spread across Roy Leland’s face. Stan looked only mildly interested, however; he wore the jarred, tired look of a man whose shock absorbers are all worn out.
“Jennifer knows,” Roy said in a stage whisper.
“No,” said Edwin Ottilini. Then, “Really, do you, my dear?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Where are they?” Pete Falwell demanded, slapping a palm on the table. “Where’s my great-grandmother?”
“I’ll get to that,” I promised him.
And I did. But first, I had to start at the beginning.
“Spitt Pittman’s grandfather was a man named Erasmus Pittman,” I began. “Like most of the men who became American undertakers, he was a carpenter and cabinetmaker who also happened to make coffins. It was a natural and easy progression for these men to go from making coffins to handling funerals and burials.
“But Erasmus was also the sexton of the largest, most important church here in Port Frederick. And that gave him even more control over the burials of his fellow citizens. In fact, as the sexton, he was paid fees to bury people in the churchyard. So by the 1830s, when he was middle-aged, Erasmus made their coffins, helped prepare their bodies, and buried them. Undertaking was a profitable and growing business for him.
“But he and the town had a problem: the conditions of the church graveyards all over England and America had become shameful. They were so horribly packed with bodies that sometimes the burial mounds literally climbed up the sides of the churches. Dogs unearthed the bodies, looking for bones. The sights and smells of the graveyards were hideous, and they were so unsanitary that they posed a clear and present danger to the health of the living. In fact, in Boston there was an outbreak of plague that was blamed on the unspeakable conditions of the graveyards. Several thousand people died in Boston that year, and other towns and cities began to appreciate the dangers and to lobby for new graveyards to be located in rural areas outside the city limits.