The Gravedigger's Ball

by Solomon Jones

  Coletti took a few moments to gather himself, and when he was able to look her in the eye, he spoke.

  “I don’t know if it was chance that you were there today, either,” he said as he looked at Lenore. “You seem to know a lot about me. Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

  There was a long silence as Lenore prepared to talk about the subject she hated most—herself.

  “My identity’s always been wrapped up in someone else,” she said softly. “Even after I left Dunmore and went to Princeton on scholarship, I never felt like I was my own person. I was always Sean O’ Hanlon’s daughter, or Mary Smithson’s sister, or John Wilkinson’s wife. I was never just me, and I guess I was always more comfortable that way, because it’s scary being me.”

  She looked from Coletti to Mann and back again. “I’ve always known things about people that they don’t know about themselves. I look at them and the truth just comes to me. Sometimes I share that truth, but mostly I don’t. I’ve learned that people don’t like to hear the truth.”

  “So where does this ability come from?” Mann asked skeptically.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “My mother used to tell me I was born with a veil over my face, so if the old wives’ tales are true, I guess that veil meant I was a seer.”

  “Did you see what was coming today?” Mann asked.

  “I don’t know—I don’t think so. When Mrs. Bailey and I talked last week and arranged for her to meet me at Thirtieth Street Station, the only thing I saw was that I needed to be here. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t question it. I just did what I knew I had to do.”

  “So you felt like you had to be here?” Mann asked.

  “Yes.”

  The detectives looked at each other. Then they stared at Lenore. From the expressions on their faces, she could tell that their suspicions had deepened.

  “Run us through the timeline of your morning with Mrs. Bailey,” Coletti said.

  “My train came in at eight fifteen, and she met me in her own car—a gray Honda, I think. We were at the cemetery by eight thirty-five. I remember, because I looked at my watch when she pulled into the driveway off that street by the river. I think it’s called Kelly Drive.”

  “What did the two of you talk about?” Coletti asked.

  “The Gravedigger’s Ball, mostly. She wanted me to serve on the event committee this year and replace her as chair next year. She felt like the event needed new blood with new ideas—and new money, of course—and when we got to the cemetery, she walked me around the graves so I’d know what the money was for.”

  “And what would that be?” Mann asked.

  “The money? It’s for upkeep and maintenance. At a historic site like Fairgrounds Cemetery, repairs or restorations have to meet certain standards so the site can maintain its designation. That increases costs considerably. In fact, from what I understand, it’s not unusual for repairs on one mausoleum to run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Multiply that by a dozen repairs a year and you suddenly have a budget that runs into the millions.”

  “Maybe Mrs. Bailey’s death had something to do with those millions,” Mann said, thinking aloud.

  Coletti agreed that money was always a possible motive, but a cemetery budget didn’t point to an obvious suspect. He thought to himself that there had to be something else, or someone else, that tied Lenore to Mrs. Bailey.

  “Did you see anyone or anything that seemed unusual or suspicious?” Coletti asked.

  “No, because there wasn’t anyone else there. We walked and she talked and when we stopped at the last grave I saw you. That’s when I asked her where Mary was buried, and she pointed to that evergreen tree. When I started to walk over to the grave, she told me to hurry back because she had something she wanted to tell me—something that would explain why it was so important for me to work with her on the ball.”

  Lenore felt a chill at the thought. She folded her arms across her chest and squeezed herself tightly. “That was the last thing she said to me.”

  Mann and Coletti looked at each other as Coletti pulled out his notepad and placed it on the desk. “Do you remember this poem?” he asked.

  She looked at it and nodded. “That’s what was written on the paper we found near the grave. Why?”

  “Because this might be what she wanted to talk to you about,” Coletti said. “The lines are by Edgar Allan Poe. They’re from a poem called ‘The Raven,’ and the next stanza contains a name that shows up eight times in the poem.”

  “What name is that?” she asked.

  “Lenore.”

  CHAPTER 3

  It was 11:30 A.M., a half hour after the stream of police officers going in and out of the woods had slowed to a trickle. The radio transmissions had lost their urgency. The commanders were closemouthed. The police officers guarding the media barricades were tense.

  The gaggle of reporters was abuzz about the murderer, to whom they’d affixed a moniker—the Gravedigger. As excited as they were about the gruesome story, they’d stood in drenching rains for nearly two hours, and they were growing increasingly unruly, having been promised a statement more than once. Most of them were from national news outlets. They had no choice but to wait.

  Kirsten Douglas was from Philly. She didn’t wait for anything. The crime beat reporter from the Philadelphia Daily News had already called nearly every source she had in the police department, and all of them were mum. Kirsten guessed they’d been told to say nothing. That meant she had to get her story the old-fashioned way. She had to dig for it.

  With brown eyes that were kind but intense and a round, welcoming face, Kirsten looked more like a mother than a crime reporter. Her brown curly hair was unruly. Her clothes were earth-toned and frumpy. She looked every bit of her forty-five years, and still, people found her attractive. Not because of how she looked, but because of her willingness to listen. That quality made people want to talk to Kirsten Douglas. That was what made her so good at her job.

  Packing her notebook and pen into the oversized pockets of her old raincoat, Kirsten broke away from the pack and walked toward the park’s exit.

  “Hey, where you going?” an Inquirer reporter shouted after her.

  “I’ll be back,” Kirsten said. “I’ve gotta get something out of my car.”

  She walked for three minutes, though it seemed like forever, passing by the front of the golf driving range as she exited the park. Police cars blocked traffic from entering the park, and police cars and vans darted up and down nearby streets. But as the rain poured down in ever-thickening sheets and Kirsten turned right on Thirty-third Street, she decided that she would somehow get around them.

  Walking along the border of a struggling neighborhood known as Strawberry Mansion, she looked across the street at abandoned houses and refurbished ones that shared the block with a garage. One of those houses had once belonged to jazz great John Coltrane, and its ramshackle appearance starkly contrasted the shiny state historic marker out front.

  Kirsten had seen such neighborhoods many times during her years as a crime reporter. Along the way, she’d won accolades and national awards while filing stories on everything from street gangs to the mob. Her skills had won her the grudging respect of cops and criminals alike, but it had also earned her enemies. Kirsten didn’t care. She was much more concerned with finding the truth than making friends, so she walked along the gate that separated the driving range from the street, and when she found her way in, she took it.

  Ducking through a hole in the fence near the rear of the driving range, she made her way toward the line of trees. Once she walked into the forest, she felt as if she’d entered a different world.

  She could still see the swirling dome lights and yellow barricades in the distance, but it was dark behind those trees, and the lack of light made her feel all alone. It also made her feel something she’d never experienced in all her years of dealing with thugs and murderers. It made her feel fear.

  Swallowing
hard, she began the difficult trek through slick leaves, fallen tree trunks, and thick brush. Thankfully, there were paths cut through the forest to accommodate the disc golf course, but those paths were empty now, and the terrain was made more difficult by her unfamiliarity. She walked up muddy slopes, stepping on planks that had been placed along parts of the path like crude bridges. She leaned against fallen trees, pulled on hanging vines, and cut her hands on the ends of errant branches.

  For fifteen minutes, she walked through the forest, doubling back more than once and passing a tree that bore a heart with the words “Tom and Jean forever.” When, finally, she figured out how to move through the forest by following the paths along the empty disc golf course, the clouds overhead thickened, the woods got darker, and Kirsten was forced to depend less on her sight than on her other senses. She could smell the wet leaves and the pungent urine of animals that had marked their territory. She could smell the moss on the trees and the alcohol in discarded beer bottles. Mingled somewhere beneath those odors, she could smell herself. She was sweating.

  Kirsten leaned against a tree to rest as the rain began coming down harder. It was now close to impossible to see where she was going. That frightened her, so she took a deep breath and closed her eyes in an attempt to calm herself. Then she listened as a wind gust swept through the trees, increasing in volume until it sounded almost like a jet engine roaring to life. Kirsten’s eyes snapped open when she heard it, and she looked around frantically for something to reassure herself. Unfortunately, there was only the rain.

  It fell in a steady drumbeat that stabbed at her consciousness until her nerves were frayed. The sound of it made everything seem large and imposing, including the tree she was leaning against.

  Suddenly, she felt that tree move, and she looked up, expecting to see someone bearing down on her. Instead, she saw two squirrels chasing each other down the trunk.

  She felt her heart beating wildly and her breath coming faster. Placing her hand on her chest, she leaned against the tree once more and tried to keep her imagination in check.

  “Get it together, Kirsten,” she whispered in a quaking voice.

  A moment later, she heard the sound she’d been seeking since making her way into the trees. She heard the crackle of police radios.

  Leaning forward, she listened intently and traced the sound to an area beyond a knoll fifty yards to her left. She moved toward it, but the sound, instead of growing louder, seemed to fade. As she stopped and looked around, trying once more to get her bearings, she heard something behind her. It sounded like footsteps.

  Kirsten whipped her head around in time to see a pasty white face near a tree just twenty yards to the rear, but when she looked again, the face was gone. Kirsten told herself that it was an animal of some sort. She told herself that a cop had followed her into the woods. She told herself that it was one of her media colleagues. But when she heard the footsteps moving once again, she told herself to run.

  Weaving between the trees, she moved quickly toward the knoll where she’d heard the radio chatter. She turned around once and saw a black coat. She turned around again and saw staring eyes. She didn’t turn a third time, because she knew that if she did so, he’d be upon her.

  Kirsten ran, her body screaming out as she tried to shake the feeling that her pursuer was only a few steps away. She ran, ignoring the pain in her legs and the burning in her lungs. She ran, heeding the only sensation that mattered now—fear.

  Scrambling up the knoll, she heard the police radios once again. She tried to scream, but she couldn’t, because she was out of breath. She tried to run faster but slipped on a pile of wet leaves. Digging her hands into the muddy embankment, she struggled to the top and felt something touch her ankle.

  Gasping for breath, she kicked with all her might while pulling herself up and over. Seconds later, she slid down the other side, saw police officers in the distance, and stumbled toward the thicket of trees where the cops milled about.

  Quickly, she looked around for the white face and black coat she’d seen on the other side of the hill. When she saw neither, she tried to convince herself that she’d imagined it all, but deep down she knew what she’d seen.

  She continued toward the officers and was about to call out to them, but then she saw what they were doing, and her reporting instincts overtook her fear.

  Kneeling by a tree to catch her breath, she saw a section of the woods sealed off by crime scene tape. Beyond that tape were ten supervisors, including Commissioner Lynch. Eight more officers were from the crime scene unit. Four were guarding the scene. None of these cops were the ones who interested her, however. The others were the story.

  She watched as two patrolmen carried a plastic body bag toward the middle of the group. Two more joined them to hoist a muddy corpse. She glimpsed the body before it was zipped into the bag, and she saw that it was covered with thick red mud. As the rain poured onto it, the dirt was washed away, revealing a blue uniform shirt and a face frozen in fear. Kirsten had seen that man in many news reports about the meth case two years before. Now she was seeing him again, only this time, he was dead.

  Quickly, Kirsten grabbed her cell phone from her pocket and snapped a picture. Then she texted the picture to the paper’s Twitter account, along with the words, “Gravedigger 2? Officer Frank Smith pulled from shallow grave.”

  It took a few seconds for the text to go through. When it did, Kirsten began dialing her editor’s number. That was when she felt someone standing over her. Slowly, Kirsten looked up from her phone. When she saw his chalk-white face, with his crooked, brittle mustache and coal-black eyes, all hell broke loose.

  * * *

  Her scream was so loud that the air ripped in two. Everything else ripped, as well. The media horde she’d left behind pushed against the barricades while police fought to hold them back.

  Down in the woods, things were even worse. As the rain poured down, ten cops ran toward the sound of her scream. The officers carrying Smitty’s body slipped in the mud. The ones collecting evidence tried to keep the scene from being compromised in the confusion. The chaos was almost complete. Then Lynch assumed control.

  “Get a detail together now and secure the area!” he shouted to a lieutenant from the crime scene unit. “Nobody gets beyond the tape!”

  The lieutenant moved to obey the order, and Lynch removed his Glock from its holster. With a series of hand signals, he directed two groups of cops to circle around from both sides and move in the direction the scream had come from. Lynch himself moved straight ahead, and Sandy and two others went with him.

  “This is Car 1,” Lynch said into a handheld radio as he moved slowly through the woods. “What have we got?”

  There were a few minutes of radio silence before one of the cops spoke up. “This is 9215. We found her. She’s a little shaken up, but she’s fine. She’s about twenty-five yards in front of you, sir.”

  Lynch saw a group of officers huddled around a tree. Then he saw a woman stand up. Even as one of the cops draped her shoulders with a poncho to shield her from the rain, she looked deathly afraid. That was odd to Lynch, because the closer he got to her, the more clearly he saw her face. He’d never seen Kirsten Douglas afraid of anything before.

  Holstering his gun, he walked up to her. “Forget about what you’re doing down here,” he said, his brow furrowed in annoyance. “We’ll get to that later. What did you see?”

  She looked up at him with a mixture of fear and confusion, as if she were unsure how to explain. “There was a man,” she began, but she stopped mid-sentence as a chill ran through her body.

  “What did he look like?” Lynch demanded. “Which way did he go?”

  She tried to answer, but she felt very cold. The rain seemed to have soaked through to her very bones. It wasn’t the rain that made her cold, however. It was what she’d seen, and more than that, it was what she hadn’t seen.

  “He was white,” she whispered. “Too white. It was almost like he
didn’t have any blood at all. And he was wearing a black coat—a coat like you’d see in an old war movie.”

  “Okay,” Lynch said, turning to his men. “That’s the same description from the cemetery. I want these woods searched and I want him found. He can’t be far away.”

  The officers began to fan out, and Kirsten watched them with curious resignation. She knew they wouldn’t find what they were looking for, but she was afraid to tell them that. Not out of fear for her safety, but because she was afraid for her sanity.

  “Did he hurt you?” Lynch asked.

  Kirsten shook her head slowly from side to side, her eyes unfocused and staring straight ahead.

  “Then why did you scream?”

  She took a deep breath and tried to compose herself. After a few seconds, she looked up at the commissioner.

  “I came through these woods, hoping to see why you were taking so long to give us information about the missing officer,” she said. “But along the way, I thought I saw someone behind me, so I ran the last twenty or so yards until I got to this spot. I probably should’ve just kept running, but when I saw your men moving the body, I guess my reporter’s instincts took over. I stopped, took a picture, and posted it online. When I turned around, the man who’d followed me was standing right next to me.”

  “And that’s when you screamed?” Lynch asked.

  She nodded.

  “Where did he go after that?”

  Kirsten shook her head and sighed. “He went up,” she said, not sure if she believed it herself.

  “What do you mean, he went up?” Lynch asked. “Did he climb a tree? Did he run up a hill?”

  Kirsten looked into the distance and spoke as if she were in a dream. “You know, Commissioner, I’ve spent my entire professional career dealing in facts. Who, what, when, where, and why. Every time I wrote a story I could ask myself those questions, along with the other ones I learned in journalism school. Is it timely? Is it unusual? Is it news? And for more than twenty years, I could always answer all those questions, but not now. Not here. Not today. For the first time in my life, I’m not sure that what I’m dealing with is fact. And that scares me, Commissioner. It scares me more than some man standing over me in the woods.”