No Body

by Nancy Pickard

  “By then, even little Port Frederick wanted a new cemetery. But Erasmus objected, because he would lose the burial fees. Finally, however, he seemed to recognize the writing on the tomb, and so he devised a plan that would profit both the town and himself. He offered to open a new cemetery on a plot of land he owned at the edge of town, the place we now know as Union Hill. He offered to sell burial plots in the new cemetery, in lieu of taking burial fees. Well, he was a bit ahead of his time in regard to small towns, but he wasn’t the first by any means to propose such a scheme, the forerunner of our modern cemeteries.

  “At any rate, the town agreed—by that time, they would probably have agreed to anything, just to get the cemetery moved—and he was in business.

  “In fact, he was in lots of businesses. Erasmus, you see, had three sons and three daughters. The sons were Americus, Justice, and Honor . . .”

  Across the table from me, a twinkle appeared in Edwin Ottilini’s eyes, but with Stan at the table, the old man was far too tactful to smile outright.

  “. . . and they joined their father in the undertaking business. The daughters married well and handily: one married the owner of the livery stable, a business that was obviously useful to Erasmus; one married a man who did upholstery, and who also just naturally joined the Pittman carpentry and undertaking firm; and the last one married the owner of the local sawmill. Now that was really convenient, because he could furnish all the lumber to the Pittman enterprises at a healthy familial discount. As you see, Erasmus had all the comers on the burial business.”

  I paused to gather my thoughts and check my notes. No one seemed impatient for me to get on with it; even Stan was observing me now, if only with a passive, detached sort of curiosity. For all the animation he showed, I might have been talking about somebody else’s family, which he no doubt wished I was.

  “And then Erasmus hit his first and only patch of bad luck,” I continued. “Right as the new cemetery opened, one of his children died. She was Sarah, the daughter who was married to the sawmill owner, a man named Benjamin Clark. Sarah died in childbirth, leaving no other children. I found her death notice among the old newspaper clippings that Miss Grant had collected. Interestingly enough, a few weeks later, Benjamin remarried. There doesn’t seem to have been any question of foul play in Sarah’s death, so the husband’s actions were only suspicious from a diplomatic point of view. It was, perhaps, not entirely tactful of him to marry again so soon.”

  One or two of the trustees evidently felt it safe to smile, and did.

  “Soon after that, Port Frederick lost a citizen to the grippe, and that man became the second to be buried in Union Hill Cemetery. You will not, however, find his remains there today. In fact, I don’t think we’ll ever find them, or the remains of any of our ancestors who were supposedly buried there.”

  A restive murmur circled the conference table.

  I raised my volume slightly. “You see, when Erasmus lost his daughter, and the son-in-law remarried, he also lost access to all that cheap lumber at the sawmill. With the opening of Union Hill, he was going to have to purchase all his lumber at full retail price.” I felt my own excitement growing as I got closer to the end of my story. “In going through Erasmus Pittman’s old accounting ledgers, I discovered that after his daughter died, he began to purchase considerably less lumber than he used to, and yet his woodworking businesses continued to grow. In the years following the opening of Union Hill, he did an increasingly large trade in furniture and, of course, coffins.”

  I looked around at each of the men in the room.

  “So where was he getting the lumber to fill all those orders for all those chairs and tables and bedsteads?” I inquired rhetorically.

  “Who cares?” Roy Leland shifted his massive body in the vulnerable old cherry-wood chair, which, like so much antique furniture in Port Frederick, had been constructed more than a hundred years before by the Pittman boys. The big man cried out impatiently, “What I want to know is, where’s my great-great-granddaddy’s coffin?”

  “You’re sitting on it, Roy,” I said.

  30

  “Grandfather?”

  Roy rose a few inches from the seat of his chair and remained there, stuck in space, as if he were afraid to sit back down again. Finally, gingerly, he lowered himself. The other men peered at their own chairs with suspicion and at me with even greater doubt. Only Stan looked at me with absolute and awful comprehension in his eyes.

  “I’ll admit I can’t prove it,” I told them, “but here, in as few words as possible, is what I’m convinced happened to our ancestors: when they died, their relatives bought plots in Union Hill Cemetery from Erasmus, and they also arranged for him to make the coffins, transport the bodies to the cemetery, and bury them.”

  “And he didn’t?” my favorite banker, Jack Fenton, spoke up.

  “And he did,” I replied. “Briefly. Just until their backs were turned, I suspect, and then he brought the coffin back to the surface again and had his boys fill the grave with dirt. Then, probably at night, he transported the coffins back to his shop where he removed the bodies so that he could reuse the lumber! And from all those coffins, he constructed many of the heirlooms we have today in our houses and offices.”

  “If he was so damned smart,” Roy said, as if he’d caught a flaw in my reasoning, “why didn’t he just use the same coffin over and over?”

  “Because they were measured and made to order, Roy,” I said. “A family might have wondered why he had supplied a six-foot coffin for their five-foot grandmother, not to mention that her coffin would have bad nail holes where the custom hardware had been attached to carry the previous occupant.”

  “But the expense of all that transportation!” the banker objected.

  “No expense, Jack,” I rebutted. “It was only a horsedrawn wagon, after all, and his sons did the hauling. His expense was not in labor, but in material.”

  “All right, all right.” Roy acquiesced in a voice that seemed weak for so large a man. “So we know what happened to the coffins. But what did he do with my great-great-granddaddy?”

  “I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure, Roy. But he might have cremated him. Or taken his body out to sea and, well, dumped it.” Upon seeing the look on Stan’s face, I added quickly, “With maybe a little ceremony or at least a prayer, of course.”

  “Stanley?” Jack Fenton looked, for the only time since I’d known him, bewildered. “Is this possible, Stanley?”

  My old school chum raised a haggard face and haunted eyes. “My dad has a favorite hymn,” he said slowly. “It was his dad’s favorite, and his father’s before him. It’s even engraved on the tombstone of Erasmus and Seraphim Pittman.” A tiny, tired smile began to play at the corners of his mouth. “‘Saving Grace.’”

  I desperately fought the urge to giggle.

  “Oh, yes, Roy, God help me,” Stan said mournfully. “It’s more than possible, it’s probable to the point of certainty. Nice work, Jenny.” The tiny smile grew into a wry grin.

  At the opposite end of the table, Edwin Ottilini cleared his throat. “But if the practice was so successful, why did they stop it?”

  I spoke up again. “Probably because the three ‘boys’ were afraid somebody would catch them at it, or maybe they didn’t approve. But,” I glanced with sympathy at Stan, “it’s also true that by the time Erasmus died, metal caskets were taking over the market. There wasn’t nearly as much demand for wood anymore.”

  Only Stan laughed openly, but it began as a weak, rather helpless-sounding chuckle.

  “Well, I don’t see what’s so damn funny,” Roy Leland said. “We own one of those beds your great-great-granddaddy made back in the Civil War, Stanley, and a dining-room table, too. Dammit, boy, all these years we been sleeping in somebody’s casket and eatin’ off somebody’s coffin! It ain’t funny!”

  Stan groaned. He put his head in his hands, and I had an awful, sinking feeling he was going to cry. Instead, the weak chuc
kles grew into a cascade of laughter. Finally, he had to wipe his eyes with the handkerchief Edwin Ottilini passed down the table to him.

  I gave the “boys” and myself a little extra time before I went on to the next order of old business.

  It was late afternoon when the meeting finally adjourned.

  “Jenny.” Stan pulled me to one side of the conference room while Pete Falwell waited to give him a ride. “Do we have to tell the police about this business at Union Hill?”

  I thought about it. “Well, the statute of limitations is sure to have run out on whatever crime your ancestors committed. And there’s nobody to arrest anyway.”

  “What about the newspapers?”

  “That’s up to you, Stan.”

  He stuck his hands in his pockets. “The timing couldn’t be worse, Jenny.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “Maybe somebody who was here at the meeting will tell the paper,” he suggested.

  “I doubt it.”

  Stan stared down at the carpet, as if the answers were woven into the pile. “Nuts,” he whispered.

  I thought that pretty well summed things up.

  He released a huge whoosh of breath through his mouth.

  “Some families have skeletons in the closets, you know? Mine, we ought to have skeletons, but we don’t! Well, I don’t know what to do, but I do know I’ve got to get over to the jail to see my dad. Maybe he’ll have a suggestion or two.”

  “I’m sure he will,” I said.

  Stan tried to smile, then said in wistful tones, “Actually, it’s rather peaceful with Dad in jail. I’ll be kind of sorry when he gets out.”

  I patted his arm, and again, he tried to smile. It was that brave effort, more than anything, that erased my sense of triumphant discovery, drained my energy, and ruined my day.

  Before I left for home, I called Miss Grant to give her the “good news.” In amazed tones, she repeated almost every sentence I said to her, so that by the end of our conversation I had begun to worry about her hearing.

  “Thank you so much, my dear,” she said at the end of my recital. “I’ve been so worried there would never be an adequate explanation, as I’ve been telling Lewis.”

  “Telling Lewis?”

  “Your friend Mr. Riss, dear. We were just sitting here, relaxing and chatting over a nice cup of tea when you called. But my, you should see him now, taking notes like anything!” She laughed fondly. “Do you have anything you wish to say to him, dear?”

  “Yes,” I said grimly. “But it’ll wait.”

  31

  By the following weekend, Geof was home again, but busy catching up with things at the station, so I didn’t ask him to accompany me on my regular Sunday trip up to the hospital to see my mother.

  It was a dreary ride in a dreary month, through landscape as unadorned as a hospital room and as gray as linens from a hospital laundry. The hilly, curving roads were slick enough to cause unwary drivers to skid off the road, like the mind of a mental patient slipping off its track.

  I had avoided thinking about the case all week, but now that I faced miles of empty road, I let myself consider the evidence against Spitt. His fingerprints were all over the morgue and on John Rudolph’s coffin, as well. But so what? It was his funeral home. But he had access to the funeral home at any time of the day or night. Again, so what? So did Stan, and some of the employees probably had keys, possibly even Sylvia. But then there was the phone call from Russell’s house . . . except we only had his word on that, and his opinion of her state of mind. So all the police really had against Spitt was opportunity, access, no believable alibi, fingerprints, and a motive.

  “Damn,” I said to the empty road.

  Put that way, it didn’t look so good. It looked terrible, in fact. And the defense was going to have its work cut out in trying to make a temperamental, philandering, tightfisted old son-of-a-gun in an unpopular profession look innocent. The publicity that Lewis was giving to Union Hill Cemetery wouldn’t help the cause, either, suggesting, as it would to some people, a lack of moral fiber, almost a genetic defect, in the Pittman family.

  I turned onto the gravel drive that wound through the for bidding stone gates of the Hampshire Psychiatric Hospital. My mother’s room was on the fourth floor, the fifth door to the left of the elevators.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  She was lying on her left side, so I kissed her right cheek, then her forehead. At the sound of my voice, her eyelids fluttered over her beautiful, Swedish blue eyes, but that was the only response. Illness had wasted the flesh from her tall, willowy body, leaving the flawless skin pasted to her bones so that she looked like an outline of herself. She wore a soft pink nightgown, tied under her chin, and she lay on soft, pastel cotton sheets, one of several sets that I had brought from home. The nurse’s aides were nice about accommodating my small efforts to make her more comfortable. It was probably useless, though, since the chemical imbalance that had disintegrated her brain had long since rendered her oblivious to the fabric content of sheets. But maybe, just maybe, she was still vaguely aware of the content of love, and so I kept coming, kept chattering to her as if she could hear me, kept holding her thin, cool hands in my own warm ones. I pulled up a chair beside her bed and took one of those cool hands and began to massage her fingers, one by one.

  Maybe if I approached the crimes from another angle . . .

  “Mom, let me tell you about a woman I never knew.”

  Her hand, within mine, twitched, was still again.

  “She was twenty-six years old, this girl, and she was married to a much older man. They met in a veterans’ hospital when she was a nurse’s aide and he was there for treatment. You see, he was a Marine, and he lost his hands during a terrorist attack on the Beirut, Lebanon, Marine barracks a few years ago.”

  I thought, what gibberish this would seem to my mother if she could hear it. She had withdrawn from reality years before there were such things as terrorist attacks on peacekeeping forces in Lebanon.

  “I don’t really know why she married him, I can only guess that she treated him kindly in the hospital, and he fell in love with her, and she appreciated his maturity and the stability he offered to her.

  “But the marriage didn’t work out for her, Mom. She drank too much and maybe took a few drugs, but she was mainly addicted to men. It’s a funny thing, though; everybody seemed to like her anyway. It wasn’t just that she was pretty to look at, but she also had a sweet, lively personality, and everybody talks about what a hard worker she was, how conscientious she was, and honest. She was a funny mixture, really, of the ethical and the unethical, the moral and the immoral, the legal and the illegal.”

  For a few moments, I kneaded my mother’s fingers in silence, hardly aware of my own actions. I was thinking that Sylvia’s contradictions were not so unusual, not if you stopped to think about it. Most people, after all, were a mix of good and evil; we all had our spots of vulnerability to temptation, a thin place in the fabric of our morality where only a little pressure might cause a break in the weave. For Sylvia, that weak spot was sex. But for somebody else, it might be money. Or flattery, or rich food, or cocaine, or prestige, or nice clothes, or pride. Sylvia probably never even took home a single Harbor Lights pencil that didn’t belong to her, but she couldn’t resist a willing man. Another person might be faithful to his wife but never think twice about quietly going home with too much change from the grocery store. Everybody had a different weak spot. I wondered, very briefly, what mine was.

  “Spitt’s a good example, Mom,” I said.

  “He’s like Sylvia in that his temptations lie in the corporeal realm—food, drink, women. In that, you might say they were alike, but I do think he’s a basically honest businessman. Oh, he may hang fake pictures of his ancestors, but I’d be surprised to find out that Spitt ever stole a penny from anybody. And heaven knows he probably demands a scrupulous accounting of every penny that his employees spend! I suppose that’s one of the
reasons Sylvia was able to keep her job, even after their affair. I mean, she was conscientious about that sort of thing, just the quality Spitt would want in an employee, especially in a business like his where transactions are conducted in . . .”

  My hands froze on my mother’s fingers.

  “. . . cash.”

  Something, some message, was whispering its soft, sinister way from the deeper recesses of my brain. I felt my eyes look down and to the right, my lashes lower, my mouth open slightly, as if I were trying to eavesdrop on a whispered conversation behind me. Why did I feel as if I were at an intersection where two paths crossed and that I should stop, look, and listen?

  Sex, sex, and more sex, Ailey had said to me.

  Cash, cash, and more cash, I said to myself.

  My pulse was yammering in my ears sufficiently to drown out the whispering in my brain, but maybe I had heard enough already. I had uncovered the Erasmus Pittman scam by comparing his receipts and accounts and then determining that he wasn’t purchasing enough raw materials to account for the number of products he was selling. Receipts and accounts. Supplies and sales. Cash. What if somebody at Harbor Lights wasn’t supplying the customers with what they paid for? And what if Sylvia found out about it, just as I found out how Erasmus had cheated his customers? Only, I made my discovery from the safe distance of a century later, while Sylvia—pretty, sweet, conscientious Sylvia—was right there in person to point the accusing finger.