Beyond the Grave

by R. W. Wallace

  She’s my only friend, only companion.

  And when the diggers come to exhume her, she’ll go with the casket.

  I’ll be all alone.

  But—and this is a very important but—she will have the possibility to help with making sure the people responsible for her death will be punished, and that will be worth a little loneliness on my part.

  She’ll actually get to leave the cemetery, something we thought impossible until two young women were exhumed not too long ago. Also done by Evian, by the way, and it seems likely their killers were the same ones who were behind Clothilde’s demise.

  Evian has one hell of a case on her hands.

  From what I saw of her when she came to exhume our friends Lise and Manon not so long ago—and the way she solved the case, along with four others—I’m sure she’s the right woman for the job. She has that no-nonsense feel about her that makes me sure she’ll do whatever necessary to solve the case. The fact that she’s already put one police officer behind bars on this case shows she’s not afraid to ruffle a few feathers.

  I just wish I could ruffle those feathers with her.

  As promised, not long after the sun crests the horizon, the parking lot fills up. One police car—Evian and her young colleague I still don’t know the name of—one hearse, and one tiny lorry belonging to the gravediggers.

  Clothilde hasn’t said much since yesterday, clearly too nervous to be either talkative or moody. She’s biting her nails and running her hands through her unruly hair, yet more nervous gestures I haven’t seen since our very first year together.

  The diggers get to work while Evian stands at parade rest next to Clothilde’s tombstone. Her young colleague follows her example. He has clearly decided she’s a good role model and will copy whatever she does to learn the ropes of the job. I’d say he’ll go far—so long as this case doesn’t blow up and take everybody’s careers with them as collateral damage.

  “I guess this is it, then,” Clothilde finally says as the first mound of dirt is dug up.

  My heart lifts to see she’s going to say goodbye after all. “Guess so,” I reply.

  “I’ll probably be back in no time,” she says. “Lise and Manon didn’t stay away for long when they were exhumed.”

  “True.” I nod. “But take any opportunity you find to help them find the guys who killed you, you hear me? If you get the chance to move on, you take it.”

  She chews her lip as she glances around the cemetery. “You’ll be all alone here.”

  I shrug. “Don’t sweat it. There are new arrivals all the time. And hey, if there’s someone I really like, I’ll omit to tell them they need to wrap things up in order to move on.” I wink to show her I’m joking.

  She chuckles nervously. Clears her throat.

  And throws her arms around me.

  My first ever hug from Clothilde.

  “Figure out how to even out your guilt, will you?” she says in my ear. “You’ve done so much good here. You deserve to move on, too.”

  I have nothing to say to that, so I simply nod and hug her back.

  It’s not like I’m the one to decide when I’ve undone all the wrongs I did while I was alive.

  A hollow thud sounds. Clothilde jumps and shivers.

  “Casket,” one of the diggers yells.

  “Jeez, that’s creepy,” Clothilde says. “I felt that in my bones.”

  “You don’t have bones.”

  “Exactly! Creepy.”

  Stepping forward and looking into the hole, I see they’ve unearthed the bottom quarter of the casket already. I think it must have been white originally, but thirty years in the ground takes a certain toll.

  “Looks like your uncle got you a pretty—”

  Another thud. This time it’s my turn to shudder as my entire being is rattled from the inside out. “What the—?”

  “Guys!” a tall dark-haired digger yells. “I, uh…I got another one.”

  Officer Evian leans forward to look into the hole. “Another what?”

  “Uh…” The man scratches his head, leaving his hair full of fresh dirt. “A casket?”

  Evian’s voice has a brooks-no-nonsense tone. “There’s a second casket?”

  Clothilde and I share a glance, then jump down into the pit to have a look.

  Indeed, only a centimeter or two from Clothilde’s white casket, a dark brown wooden box juts out of the black dirt. It’s not white or pretty like Clothilde’s, but even only seeing this little of it, it does seem to be a casket.

  The way I felt when the guy hit it with his shovel kind of confirms it, anyway.

  “Never knew we were that close,” I quip as I fight a smile from breaking out.

  Clothilde huffs. “Really? You think this is the right place and time?”

  I fight my lips into a straight line. And make the mistake of meeting Clothilde’s gaze.

  We break into peals of laughter, hours of stress and excitement turning into manic glee. We hold onto each other, ghost tears breaking out of our eyes and the memory of muscle cramps tearing at our stomachs.

  The living people around us shift around uneasily, looking at each other, not understanding why they feel so weird all of a sudden.

  “There shouldn’t be a second casket down there,” Evian says. She points to a gangly woman who came in the gravediggers’ lorry. “Should there be a grave so close to this one? I don’t see a tombstone.”

  That’s because I never got one.

  “Yeah, they’re not going to find any paperwork for your grave,” Clothilde says calmly.

  “What?”

  Her eyes meets mine. “Oh, shit. Did I never tell you that?” She glances at my casket and her mouth opens in an O.

  “Tell me what, Clothilde?” The laughter is completely gone from my voice.

  A hand to her cheek, the truth tumbles out. “They came in the middle of the night. Three guys, all wearing masks and not saying a word while they worked. They dug down right next to my slot—even hit my casket at one point—dropped your casket in, and closed the whole thing up. Even brought in some sort of mat of grass to put on top, to make it look undisturbed.”

  My mouth is hanging open. “So nobody knows where I’m buried?”

  “Except those three guys, no.”

  At first I’m angry at her for not telling me, but as I take a mental deep breath, I think it through and realize it wouldn’t actually have changed anything to know. Except possibly to feel even more stressed out about the situation I’d left behind when dying.

  In the living realm, the gangly lady has her nose in some sort of screen. “I don’t see anything,” she says. “There’s not supposed to be anybody else here. And it’s against regulations to have an unmarked grave.

  Mouth set in a severe line, Evian studies everybody present. “Dig it out, too,” she finally says. “And none of you mention this to anybody.”

  Nods all around, and the diggers go back to work.

  We stay in the pit to watch as our caskets are dug out. Shivering with every shovel hitting wood.

  “Looks like you’re going on an excursion, too,” Clothilde says, her eyes distant.

  “Looks like it.”

  Four

  Emeline Evian stares at the additional brown casket, willing it to give up its secrets.

  She was sent to Toulouse from Paris to look into the potential murder of two young women. A quick search showed that the two women from this graveyard were not isolated cases, and Emeline got to open no less than forty cases that were open and closed as suicides by less-than-conscientious police officers in the past.

  When Emeline had come back to the graveyard to make sure the two original girls—Lise and Manon—were respectfully put back in the ground, she’d somehow had the idea to look into similar cases going back thirty years.


  And now, while exhuming one Clothilde Humbert, who apparently killed herself in a hotel room in 1988, here is an unexpected casket. No headstone, no trace in the administrative files, no sign of anyone having cared enough to pay for a decent casket.

  Will there never be an end to the surprises on this case?

  Emeline has already informed her superior in Paris that the case will take a lot longer than planned. After two weeks in a hotel room, she’s tired of spending her evenings sitting on her bed and watching TV, eating takeout in her bed alone, and never feeling like she’s quite in private. So she put in a request for funds to rent an actual apartment. If she stays over a month—which seems highly likely at the moment—the price will be a lot easier on the taxpayers’ money than the current solution.

  She’s supposed to look at a cute one-bedroom near Jeanne d’Arc this afternoon—unless this Monsieur X turns out to be too interesting.

  A prickling at the back of her neck makes Emeline turn to look behind her.

  Nobody there.

  Emeline shrugs off the feeling. Too early on a case to be seeing things that aren’t there.

  She eyes all the people present. She needs them to stay quiet about this second grave—and would love for them not to blab about Clothilde either. There’s something special about this girl. A reason why she was buried in a place only her uncle knew about and with nothing but a first name and a date of death on the headstone.

  The administrator of the cemetery shouldn’t be a problem. She seems annoyed as hell that there’s an extra body she didn’t know about in her cemetery and will not wish for the information to get leaked. Still, Emeline will have a word with the woman before they part ways.

  Malik Doubira, Emeline’s young and impressionable partner, should know how to stay quiet. It’s part of the job description, after all, and if Emeline is reading him right, he’s looking at her with a healthy dose of hero worship, so getting him to do her bidding for a good cause won’t be a problem.

  The problem is with the gravediggers. There are two of them and they seem to be used to working together, never getting in each other’s way and anticipating when their colleague needs more space for certain maneuvers.

  They haven’t said much to show they find it unusual to find two caskets where they were expecting only one but they have to be thinking it. The question is, will they talk about it amongst themselves in a “huh, that was weird” kind of way? Will they tell their significant others tonight, making it sound like this huge excitement they had at work today? Will they know it’s weird enough that the papers would be interested in the story if they knew about it?

  Emeline could attempt to order them—a second time—not to say anything. They might even listen. But it would also underline to them the importance of the find.

  If she doesn’t say anything more and pretends like this is no big deal, maybe they will, too.

  Emeline thinks she sees movement out of the corner of her eye and turns to look. Nothing.

  She always gets this way in cemeteries. Probably because it’s the kind of place that’s eerily quiet and brings images of slasher movies and gangly animated skeletons.

  She suspects she isn’t the only one to feel it. One of the diggers, a stocky man in his forties with a full mop of graying hair and the beginnings of a potbelly, stands up and looks around, one hand clenching and unclenching on the handle of his spade.

  “Look alive, Vincent,” his colleague tells him, not unkindly. “Don’t forget there’s another one after this one.”

  Vincent shakes his head as if trying to get rid of something, then bends back down to continue working. “Who cares if there’s one or two,” he mumbles. “As long as I get paid, I don’t care.”

  Perfect. Emeline decides to go with the not-saying-anything-more-about-it option. Adults aren’t that different from kids; tell them they can’t do something and it’s the only thing they’ll want to do. Tell them nothing and they won’t even realize there was something they could have potentially done.

  Forty-five minutes later, both caskets are on the path and the mound of dirt has been shoveled back into the grave. Normally, they would have left the mound of dirt but Emeline didn’t want anyone to be able to see, from the size of the hole, that there had been more than one casket.

  “Will they both fit in the hearse?” Malik asks, his dark eyes going from the long, black vehicle in the parking lot to the two caskets—one mostly white and regal, the other no more than a wooden box.

  Maybe there won’t even be a body in there.

  No, Emeline feels certain there’s a body. And she knows she doesn’t want to open it here, in front of so many witnesses. “We’ll make them fit,” she says. Asking for a second hearse would draw too much attention.

  As the caskets are carried out of the cemetery, Emeline takes a look around. Several hundred graves, some small and decrepit with washed-out names and dates and some closer to monuments, depicting angels praying and mothers crying. The church is a classic construct for a small village in this area, with its spire barely taller than the trees of the neighboring forest.

  There could be worse places to spend eternity.

  “But right now,” Emeline says in direction of the caskets, “I’m taking you on an excursion into the city. I’ve only known Toulouse for a few weeks, but I’m sure lots has changed since you last saw it thirty years ago.”

  Five

  “Is that the Ponts Jumeaux? No way!” Clothilde sits on the lap of the hearse’s co-pilot, a dour woman in her late fifties or sixties who hasn’t said a word since we got here, but sends frequent dark looks at her colleague, probably for accepting to squeeze two coffins instead of one into the space in the back.

  Clothilde hasn’t spared the woman a glance since she settled in and is treating her much like she did the tombstones back in the cemetery—accepting she’s there to have something to sit on but letting her feet go right through woman and car seat alike.

  The usual teenager I’m-not-interested-in-anything attitude is nowhere to be seen, though. She’s had her nose glued to the passenger window since we pulled out of the cemetery parking lot.

  During the very short trip from the cemetery gate to the hearse, I was able to move away from the casket for quite some distance. I didn’t try to go too far, because I wanted to follow Evian and our bodies to wherever she was taking us. However, the moment the doors closed on the hearse, we were stuck inside.

  I’m guessing we’ll always be contained wherever our bodies are contained.

  A subject to be explored later because I do believe Clothilde is right; we’re driving past the Ponts Jumeaux. “That’s definitely the Canal du Midi,” I reply to her from my seat right on top of the center console. “The three bridges and three canals are the same as the last time I came here to arrest drunkards and junkies.”

  The esplanade around the water has been spruced up since I last saw it, though. The construction of the highway circling Toulouse that was finished right before I died is…still there, cars speeding in all directions where there used to be small houses and a large rugby stadium.

  As the hearse turns right along the Canal de Brienne, I see the industrial area on the left has become dozens of six-to-eight-floor apartment buildings, all perfectly aligned in a decidedly non-French manner.

  I gape as we take the Catalan bridge across the Garonne toward the left bank and drive down the wide Allées Charles de Fitte. Apartment buildings have popped up everywhere. Most of them are covered in red bricks, staying on brand for Toulouse, but they’re all so big.

  “Shit, it’s the same here,” Clothilde says, pointing to our left as we approach the Purpan hospital five minutes later.

  Where there used to be an enormous cartridge factory…apartment buildings. Even bigger than the ones at Ponts Jumeaux and so many I can’t even count them.

  “Guess the cit
y has grown since we saw it last,” I say faintly.

  We’ve seen the world evolving from our cemetery, of course. The cars in the parking lot have changed shapes, becoming less and less boxy and both larger and smaller, depending on the demographic driving them. Clothing has changed rather dramatically—several times—some outfits making both me and Clothilde stare in disbelief, some making us laugh ourselves silly, and some that have made even a deceased police officer who thought he’d seen it all feel very ill at ease.

  I guess the biggest change we’ve seen remains the phones. One day, maybe in the late nineties, a man in a business suit came strolling into the cemetery with a bouquet of red roses for his deceased wife in one hand and a cordless phone in the other. He was talking into it, seemingly getting replies from the other end, so it appeared legitimate, though incredible. Today, everybody seems to have the things, and they can do the most wondrous things, from what I can gather.

  As we drive through the streets of Toulouse, I see the phones everywhere; every other person seems to have their head bent with their nose to the small screens.

  I haven’t really spent a lot of time thinking about how the urban landscape can change over thirty years. The answer? Quite a lot.

  Toulouse was already considered a big city when I was alive, but now it’s…a bloody metropolis.

  Sort of.

  There don’t seem to be any high-rise buildings anywhere. The tallest buildings we pass in the Saint Cyprien neighborhood were already there back in the day, and none of the new constructions seem to go past eight floors. So maybe big city would be a better description than metropolis.

  Finally, we arrive at the hospital—also greatly changed since I last saw it but at the same time achingly familiar—and Evian and her young colleague await us in front of the morgue entry.

  The second the back door opens, Clothilde and I both swoosh out. Clothilde moves away from us, clearly testing the limits of our bounds, but turns back after fifty meters or so.

  “I could go farther if I had to,” she tells me. “But it didn’t feel very comfortable.” A frisson goes through her, making her curls bounce around her head.