“At least half an hour,” I said. “The plunger didn’t work, so I had to use the snake, and of course there was the cleanup. And there’s no window in the bathroom, so I bet the church looked deserted.”
The chief nodded and scribbled some more.
“There’s also the question of how Mr. Hagley got here, if his car wasn’t in the parking lot,” the chief said.
“That’s right,” I said. “He usually drove himself. He has a dark blue sedan.”
“We’ve already put out a BOLO on it. Go on—you were checking the whole church.”
“Anyway I had just gotten back to Robyn’s office to collect Nimitz when I heard a pounding noise.”
“Nimitz?” the chief looked puzzled.
“Larry Baker’s toucan,” I explained. “Robyn is watching the bird while Larry’s deployed overseas. At least she was until they put her on bed rest. I was going to take the wretched bird home where he’d be easier to manage. But when I heard the noise I went to look out a back window.”
“And determined that the noise was coming from the crypt,” the chief said.
“Columbarium, technically,” I said. “Not that most of us at Trinity don’t call it the crypt, but we try not to in front of Robyn or Mother or the half-dozen sticklers who get touchy about it.”
“Looks like a crypt to me—but thanks for the warning.” The chief stood and walked over to peer through the doorway. “Did you check the other room?” he asked.
“Other room?”
“Behind the door in the far wall.”
“It’s a fake,” I said—and inside I could hear Horace saying the same thing.
“They were thinking long-range when they built it,” I added. “Actually, Gothic George wanted the crypt to be three or four times as big, but a fiscally prudent vestry overruled him.”
“Gothic George?”
“The Reverend George Burwell Nelson Page,” I said. “Rector of Trinity at the time the crypt was built. Known as Gothic George for his taste in architecture—never met a gargoyle he didn’t like. Or so the story goes—it was all before my time.”
“And mine as well. How long ago was the cr—the columbarium built?”
“In the late forties,” I said. “Space in the graveyard was getting tight, and Gothic George thought cremation was going to be the answer. Turns out he wasn’t wrong—just a few decades ahead of his time. It’s still only about two-thirds full, although I suspect most of the vacant niches have been sold. And you can blame him for its crypt-like appearance. He really wanted to put it underneath the church—beneath the existing basement—but when the vestry saw the cost estimates they put their collective feet down.”
Just then my phone rang. I glanced at it and grimaced.
“It’s Robyn,” I said. “I don’t know whether she’s heard the news already or whether she’s just worried because I haven’t texted her to let her know I’ve gotten home safely. I should answer it.”
The chief nodded, and I pressed the button to answer.
“Hey, Robyn,” I said. “Can you hang on a sec?” I pressed the mute button and looked back at the chief. “I think we should tell her,” I said. “You know how gossip gets around in Caerphilly, and I think it’s better if she hears the news from me. Or you, if you prefer.”
He thought for a moment, then nodded.
“Tell her,” he said. “We’ll need her help unraveling this. Though I can probably wait until morning to talk to her at any length.”
I unmuted my phone and put it on speaker.
“Meg? Is something wrong?”
“You’re still lying down, right?”
“Of course I’m lying down. Don’t nag me; it’s not good for my blood pressure. What’s happening down there?”
“It’s Mr. Hagley.”
“Oh, dear. What’s he up to now?”
“He’s not up to anything,” I said. “He’s dead.”
A pause
“Oh, dear,” Robyn said. “I feel so guilty.”
“Guilty?” I echoed.
“I have had a great many uncharitable thoughts about him lately,” she said. “If only I’d known he was not long for this world.”
“The fact that he’s dead doesn’t mean he hasn’t been a complete jerk lately,” I said.
“Still, I hope he didn’t suffer too much,” Robyn said. “How did he die? Was it his heart?”
“He was murdered,” I said. “I found his body in the columbarium. Someone hit him over the head with a crowbar.”
“A crowbar?” Her normally low, calm voice rose to a squeak.
“Calm down,” I said. “Is there someone there with you?”
“Yes, Matt’s here. Oh, Meg—a crowbar?”
“Yes.” I decided if her husband was there, maybe it was the best time to break the rest of the bad news. “A crowbar with which someone also pried the front of Mrs. Hagley’s niche, and knocked her urn over.”
“That wretched man! He couldn’t be bothered to wait for the paperwork!”
“Paperwork?” I was relieved that annoyance at Mr. Hagley seemed to be displacing some of her distress.
The chief looked surprised.
“Mr. Hagley has been badgering me for weeks now about taking his wife’s ashes home. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve explained the proper procedure to him. It’s not as if I can just walk out to the crypt, pop the niche open, and hand him her urn. The last time he called me, he lost his temper and said if I didn’t give him his wife back he’d go out and fetch her himself. But I never thought he was serious. And why am I getting so worked up about that when the poor man’s dead now?”
“Calm down,” I said. “Talk it over with Matt, and tell him to bring you some of that herbal tea Rose Noire recommends.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’m just sad that the poor misguided man has come to such a sorry end. I assume someone attacked him while he was trying to reclaim poor Dolores. You’ve called the police, I hope.”
“Chief Burke is sitting with me now.”
The chief pointed at the phone and held out his hand.
“And I think he’d like to talk to you.”
Chapter 5
I was just as happy to let the chief tell Robyn about the other vandalized niches. I drifted closer to the door so I could watch Horace at work. I never ceased to marvel at the transformation Horace had undergone since discovering his calling as a criminalist. Growing up, he’d been painfully shy and awkward. In fact, he still was shy sometimes in social situations. But give him a complicated crime scene—even one involving a fairly gory body—put a crime scene camera or a jar of fingerprint powder in his hand, and the eager, capable, professional Horace emerged like a butterfly from a cocoon.
I watched him busily photographing and peering at things on the periphery of the crime scene—doubtless he was waiting to begin bagging things and hauling them away until Dad could examine the body undisturbed. A thought struck me.
“Whoever did this managed to cause an awful lot of damage in a really short time,” I said. “The hammering sound didn’t go on for more than a minute or so. Could he possibly have pried open all six niches that quickly?”
“I suspect what you heard wasn’t the sound of him prying open the niches,” Horace said. “He could do that fairly discreetly. A faint pop. I think what you heard was him trying to crack open the bronze urns. That would be pretty noisy. See, that one’s kind of dented.”
He fixed his flashlight on one of the fallen urns. Yes, something had made some ugly marks on it—probably the crowbar—though the vandal hadn’t even come close to breaking it open.
“But why?” I asked.
“Dunno,” Horace said. “Maybe they found the ring in the glass jar or the china urn. Maybe they were looking for more.”
“They thought maybe it was customary for Episcopalians to take the contents of their jewelry boxes with them when they go?”
“Maybe they confused us with Egyptians,” Horace sa
id.
The chief, who had been pacing up and down while talking to Robyn, appeared at my side.
“Robyn has something she wants you to do.” He handed me the phone, and I could see that the mute button was on. “Actually, it’s something she wanted to dash down here and do herself, but I convinced her that was a bad idea.”
I took the phone and unmuted it.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“The chief needs to know as much as possible about those poor souls whose remains were disturbed,” Robyn said. “I’m not quite sure why—surely he can’t possibly think any of their families had anything to do with this?”
“I’m sure he has to cover all the angles,” I said. “And he probably does have to notify their families about the vandalism.”
“That’s true,” Robyn said. “He does. But we need to follow up very quickly with a reassurance that Trinity will do everything we can to rectify this situation!”
“That’s nice,” I said. “But just what can we do to rectify the situation?”
“Well, that’s what I need you to find out,” Robyn said. “What they want us to do. The easiest thing would just be to tuck their loved ones back in their niches—once the columbarium is no longer a crime scene, of course. But it’s possible that they might want us to have a little ceremony.”
“Or maybe even a full-fledged second funeral.” I could think of a number of people—including several I’d inherited DNA from—who would jump at the chance for a do-over on something as dramatic as a family burial.
“Also possible,” Robyn said. “And there’s always the chance that some of them may be so upset that they could decide to take their loved one’s ashes back and reinter them elsewhere. Which would be terrible, but if that’s what they want to do, we should be as helpful as possible. The crucial thing is that someone has to approach them very tactfully and sensitively. Soothe their ruffled feathers. And find out what they want us to do.”
I had had a feeling why she was telling me this, and I didn’t like it.
“Meg,” she went on. “I’m counting on you. You’re the only one I trust to do it!”
Which meant that if I refused, she’d probably start threatening to climb out of bed and overexert herself again.
“I’ll do what I can,” I said.
“There are some files you can use to figure out who the next of kin are,” Robyn said. “In the overflow room. You can look under—”
“I’ll find the files,” I said. “And I’ll talk to the next of kin as soon as the chief lets me—he will probably want me to wait until after he’s notified them. But right now, it’s past midnight. I’m hanging up so you can go back to sleep now.”
I suited the action to the words. And stared at the phone for a while, daring Robyn to call back.
“I assume the files you’re talking about are the ones that will help me figure out who to notify about the vandalism,” the chief said. “I’d appreciate it if you could give me whatever information you can before you go home.”
“Information coming up.” I headed back to the church proper, and the chief followed me.
“If these were recent burials, I’d probably know just who to call,” he said as we crossed the graveyard. “But only two of them happened since I came here. And the rest are nearly a quarter of a century old.”
He watched in silence as I unlocked the back door and nodded approvingly when I locked it up again behind us. After all, there might be plenty of police on the premises, but they were focused on the crime scene, not the main building. I led the way up to the main floor, crossed the foyer to the office wing, and unlocked the overflow room.
It was a long, narrow room a few doors down from Robyn’s study that had gained its name under Robyn’s predecessor, Dr. Womble, who was a bit of a pack rat. While he was rector, this room, like half of the basement and all of the attic, had been packed with a century’s worth of accumulation. Mother and Robyn had changed all that. The Ladies of St. Clotilda, Trinity’s chief organization for good works, had held several huge rummage sales, and I’d lost track of how many times we’d filled the Dumpster with stubby candle ends, tattered vintage Christmas pageant costumes, mildewed pages from disintegrating hymnals, fading mimeographed copies of church bulletins from the 1960s, empty communion wine bottles, broken office furniture, and every other kind of ecclesiastical clutter.
Now the room held a long row of neatly labeled, securely locked file cabinets and a lot of empty space that came in very handy for temporary storage. Right now, for example, Trinity was running a drive to replenish the county food bank. A neat stack of a half-dozen boxes occupied one corner, waiting for the regular Monday morning delivery to the food bank.
I could see the chief glancing around with curiosity—at the décor, no doubt. Mother and Robyn had been of one mind that a file room didn’t have to be bland. The lime-green file cabinets looked quite striking against the bright teal walls. I’d have suggested putting Nimitz in here—he’d have fit in beautifully—but there was no way we wanted his messy self near the food or the files.
“Do you know where to find the records we need?” the chief asked.
“Not precisely,” I said. “But I should have no trouble figuring it out. Mother and I helped Robyn organize them, once we all figured out that Dr. Womble’s notion of filing was to shove all the loose papers on his desk into cardboard copier-paper boxes at random intervals. Finding anything was rather like conducting an archaeological dig.”
I tried looking under C—for columbarium—with no luck. But then B for burials produced results. I pulled out a folder whose neatly organized contents proved to be exactly what I thought I’d remembered seeing: A neat map of the graveyard with all the plots numbered. A precise diagram of the columbarium, showing the numbers of the niches. For both graveyard and columbarium, a typed list of who owned each spot and whether or not they’d already taken up residence.
And behind that very useful folder lay a series of folders whose numbers corresponded to the graves and niches.
“Let’s start with the file on the Hagleys’ niche,” the chief said. “Because notifying Mr. Hagley’s next of kin is going to be one of my first priorities, and if Robyn’s files contain that, it would save some time.”
I consulted the list, found the proper numbered file, and handed it to the chief. I looked over his shoulder as he leafed through it.
“Deed of sale for the niche—steep price for a few square feet of rock and air,” he said. “And the records from Mrs. Hagley’s burial a year and a half ago. And yes, instructions on what Mr. Hagley wants for his own funeral. Seems there’s a son down in Richmond. Charles Hagley.”
The chief copied down the son’s contact information, and then handed me back the file.
“I assume you could arrange for me to have a copy of the complete contents of the relevant files,” he said. “There could be other information that would come in handy.”
“I could make a copy now,” I offered.
“Tomorrow will be fine,” he said. “And by tomorrow, I’ll have a better idea if there’s anything else I need a copy of.”
I nodded, and put the file on top of the cabinet—why refile it and have to hunt it down all over again in the morning? I was already looking up the next file.
“James Asmundsen Washington,” I said, handing the chief the relevant file. “Buried eleven years ago.”
“Mr. Washington I remember,” the chief said. “Retired gentleman. Active in the Lions if memory serves. I think his widow still lives in town.”
At least at the time of her husband’s death she had, in a part of town where most of the houses were modest bungalows on small but tree-shaded lots.
“Do you know her?” the chief asked.
A reasonable question—after all, if Mr. Washington was buried here, the odds were that his widow was at least nominally a member of the congregation.
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” I said. “But she could be one of the pe
ople who only come occasionally. Or one of the shut-ins. Robyn would know better.”
“One of the shut-ins is definitely a possibility,” the chief said. “Her husband was seventy-nine when he died. Unless she was considerably younger than him, she’s probably rather elderly. We’ll find her, but I’d rather not bother Robyn about it just yet.”
“Good point.” I stacked the Washington file on top of the Hagley one. “I bet Mother will know. Who’s next?”
“Since we seem to be moving in reverse chronological order, let’s have Lacey Shiffley.”
Lacey’s file wasn’t as informative as the other two. A copy of the purchase document for the niche, and a few documents related to the burial. Burial only—no funeral service; and the space to list the next of kin said, rather pointedly, NA.
“Downright peculiar.” The chief frowned and shook his head slightly. “Hundreds of Shiffleys in this county, and not one of them she wants to claim as family?”
“Ask Randall,” I said. Our friend Randall Shiffley was currently the de facto head of the sprawling Shiffley clan. Under other circumstances, that might have made him reluctant to share family secrets with outsiders—but since he was also Caerphilly’s mayor and county manager the prospect of helping the chief solve a murder in his jurisdiction would probably outweigh any inclination he might have had to keep the family skeletons hidden.
“And no burial service,” the chief went on. “That can’t have pleased Dr. Womble. The man did a lovely funeral, you have to admit.”
I nodded. The chief placed Lacey’s file with the other two. I was already looking up P. Jefferson Blair.
“Not much here, either.” I handed Blair’s file to the chief. “Next of kin a Mrs. Parker Blair in Middleburg, Virginia.”
“His mother,” the chief said, scanning the file’s contents.
“Who’s probably getting along by now,” I pointed out. “Blair was thirty-five when he died—he’d be close to retirement age by now, and his mother would have to be in her eighties.”
“If she’s still with us.” The chief sighed and shook his head. “Still, Middleburg’s a small, close-knit community. Shouldn’t be too hard to track down the family, assuming there’s anyone left.”
Toucan Keep a Secret Page 3