An Unsettled Grave

by Bernard Schaffer

  The door opened and Carrie entered a small, cluttered living room filled with threadbare furniture. Mrs. Pugh vanished into the kitchen to fetch her a cup of coffee, ignoring Carrie’s initial refusal. Mr. Pugh came in, a tall man, with sallow bags hanging beneath his eyes like loose chicken skin. His dark gray hair was slicked back against his head, and he wore a pair of loose blue overalls. He sat down on the worn reclining chair next to the couch and held out his hand for Carrie to sit as well.

  “You’re a police officer?” he asked, looking at her badge. “I’m sorry to hear that. Pretty girl like you, dealing with all the craziness in this day and age. The world’s gone all wrong. I never thought I’d see the day when this country went wrong along with it.”

  Carrie slid her notebook and pen out of her jacket pocket. “I was wondering, Mr. Pugh, if you could answer a few questions for me about your daughter.”

  “What would you like to know?”

  “Well, to be totally honest, I’m not exactly sure what kind of investigation was done when she went missing. I was hoping you could fill in some gaps for me. Did anyone ever come and talk to you about the investigation? Let you know how they were proceeding?”

  “Oh sure. Right after it happened, the chief at the time was here. He went all over the house with a fine-tooth comb. Thought she might be hiding somewhere, I guess.” He leaned forward in his chair, making sure his wife couldn’t hear, and said, “I think he was also making sure we didn’t do nothing to her. He didn’t come right out and say it, but I read enough about these things to know the parents are always suspects.” He held out his hands. “I didn’t take offense, you understand. He was just being thorough.”

  Forever our Chief, Forever our Greatest Defender, Carrie thought. “I went to the police station,” she said. “It seems the case file went missing after Chief Auburn died.”

  “It wasn’t Walt Auburn who worked the case,” Mr. Pugh said. “Walt was the Liston police chief. Back then, our towns were still separated. We live in Patterson, you see. It was after all the trouble that the towns decided to combine. Regionalization is what they called it. Taxes going up is what it was.”

  Mrs. Pugh returned, holding a steaming cup of coffee that she set down in front of Carrie on top of a saucer. Carrie thanked her and took a sip as the woman sat down on the couch next to her husband’s chair. The coffee was boiling hot. Carrie set the cup down, feeling a raw place on the roof of her mouth with her tongue.

  “Liston had a few officers at the time, but we only had one. He was called the chief, but really, it was just him,” Mrs. Pugh said. “That poor man had to do everything. When people needed him, they called him on his house phone if it was after hours. It’s no wonder he did what he did.”

  “That’s enough, mother,” Mr. Pugh said to his wife. “Let the past lie.”

  She lowered her head and folded her hands in her lap.

  “Anyway,” Mr. Pugh continued, “after the towns combined, they built a new police station and shipped all the records there. We heard some of them got misplaced, and apparently, one of them was Hope’s.”

  “But no one ever followed up?” Carrie asked, writing on her notepad. “Or you never heard, if they did?”

  “It doesn’t matter, dear,” Mrs. Pugh said, interrupting. “Hope’s alive. She’s alive and well.”

  Carrie dropped her pen on the table. “Excuse me?”

  It was Mrs. Pugh’s turn to smile, but this one was warm and wide and alive. “She lives on a farm. Out in Ohio, or West Virginia or such. She has at least two children, both grown, and maybe even a grandchild by now.”

  Mr. Pugh’s eyes closed as his wife spoke, his hands braced against the armrests of his chair.

  “Any day now, the phone is going to ring, or she is going to knock on that door and I’ll see her standing there.” Her eyes fell on Carrie once more, growing moist again. “At first, when I answered the door and saw you on the porch, I just,” she said, swallowing, her voice fading away. “I guess you’re too young to be her, anyway,” she said, wiping her finger under her eye.

  “We saw something on the news a few years back about a missing girl that got found,” Mr. Pugh said, reaching over to lay his hand on his wife’s. “Many years later, after she’d gone missing. They’d located her working out on some farm out in the Midwest. They reunited her with her parents on live TV.”

  “That’s what happened to Hope, too,” Mrs. Pugh said, tears streaming down her face. “I prayed on it, and that’s what the Lord told me. She’s alive, and someday, she’s going to come walking right through that door.”

  CHAPTER 6

  “Hey, Chief,” Carrie said into her phone, leaning her head back against her car’s headrest. “When you get this message give me a call. I’m out here on this missing person’s case, and there’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to find my way back in the dark. I’m going to use my department credit card to get a room. Hope that’s all right,” she said. She grimaced at the building in front of her and said, “I doubt it’s going to be expensive.”

  She ended the call and opened up her text messages, going to the first name on her favorites list. The profile picture was of her and Nubs at the little girl’s birthday, their faces pressed together, grinning with mouths full of cake frosting.

  * * *

  “Hey, sweetie, are you on your iPad?” she typed. She watched the bubble, hoping it would turn from Delivered to Read.

  “Hi!” the response came.

  “How was school today?” Carrie typed.

  “Good.”

  “You just going to give me one-word answers now?”

  “Sorry, Aunt Carrie,” Nubs wrote back. “Love you. Gotta go!”

  “Hey, what’s the rush?”

  “Grannie says I have to take a bath.”

  “’k baby. I love you too,” she wrote, setting her phone aside.

  * * *

  The sign for the Honeysuckle Inn was red and bright, with the cartoonish image of a woman blowing a kiss. Carrie knew right away what the motel was for. It was the kind of place men brought hookers to, so far away from their families that there was no chance of getting caught. She’d learned about it from a waitress at Ruby’s Diner, who talked while Carrie ate a greasy Reuben that was stuffed with so much corned beef she could barely fit it into her mouth.

  “You go down to the end of the street, make a left at the stop sign. It’s on the right side.”

  “Is it clean?” Carrie asked, feeling the sandwich’s dressing spill out of her mouth. She grabbed a napkin and pressed it against her face.

  “Since the bedbug thing last year, I didn’t hear anything,” the waitress had said, wiping the counter in long circular motions.

  Carrie decided she didn’t want the rest of her sandwich.

  After dinner, Carrie parked her car in the motel’s lot, making sure not to drive over any of the broken beer bottles scattered on the ground. She grabbed two bags out of her trunk. Her work bag filled with police gear, and a go-bag she carried at all times. She’d had to trek through enough filthy crime scenes and handle enough dead bodies that she knew to always keep a few spare changes of clothes on hand.

  She pushed the button on her key fob to lock her vehicle, looked around the dark lot once more, and patted the gun on her side, making sure it was there. As she walked, she pressed the key fob in her pocket one more time, listening to it beep, just to be certain.

  The clerk inside the small rental office was a heavyset woman with orange hair and green eyeshadow that went as high as her eyebrows. She cracked her gum and sneered at Carrie as she walked in. “Hi there. You’re new.”

  Carrie said hello and reached into her purse for her wallet. “I need a room.”

  The clerk took Carrie’s driver’s license and credit card and wrote down the information in a ledger sitting on the desk in front of her. “There’s a fifty-dollar charge to have any unregistered guests in your room, and I do mean any, so don’t try and cheat us, because
we’ll know. Don’t care how many you bring in, as long as you don’t make too much noise, and as long as you pay the fee, understand?”

  “It’s just me,” Carrie said.

  The clerk cocked one green-shadowed eye at her and smirked. “Sweetie, you don’t want to take any chances with us, believe me. My advice to you is to just pay the fee. Don’t throw away all your hard work over fifty freaking dollars.”

  “Just give me the key, please,” Carrie said, holding out her hand. “One guest. Me. Nobody else.”

  “Suit yourself,” the clerk said, punching Carrie’s credit card numbers into the machine on her desk.

  The room was on the second floor. None of the rooms around it looked occupied. The air smelled like cheap carpet and bed linens and some kind of astringent used by the cleaning people. The first thing Carrie did was turn on all the lights and inspect the bed, sheets, and pillows, looking for any signs of insect life. The sheets were stiff and smelled of harsh cleanser, but they seemed clean.

  She kicked off her shoes and unslung her gun and holster from her belt. She set them on the nightstand and collapsed backward on the bed’s rough comforter. She closed her eyes and just as she felt her body settle, the phone in her pocket vibrated.

  “Hello? Detective Santero speaking.”

  “It’s Chief Auburn. Sorry for calling so late. I just got back into the office.”

  “That’s fine, thanks for calling me back,” Carrie said, sitting up. “Did you guys find the rest of the little girl?”

  She could hear the hitch in Auburn’s voice. She’d gotten the drop on him. “Who said we were looking for a little girl?” he asked.

  “Hope Pugh, went missing back in nineteen eighty-one, right?” she said.

  “Yeah,” Auburn said. “You goddamn county people must have one hell of a time keeping track of everybody else’s old cases.”

  That was a laugh, Carrie thought. Better to let him think that than get her new buddy Lou in trouble for blabbing. “Speaking of cases, I asked your clerk if I could see the case file. He told me it was lost.”

  “Actually, I’ve been thinking about that missing case file all day,” he said. “There’s one place we can still look. We’re going to need those reports if we locate the rest of the body. Are you still out and about, or do you want to stop by in the morning?”

  Carrie stood up, grabbing her gun and belt, while cradling the phone against her ear. “I’m on my way.”

  * * *

  Steve Auburn was standing at the front door, holding it open, as she pulled into the police station lot. The dome light over the entryway reflected off the surface of his bald head, making it shine. She could see the outline of hair growing where he hadn’t had the chance to shave it that day. It grew in a ring around his head, even across the front, leaving the top part bald and looking like the tonsure of a medieval monastic order.

  Carrie hurried toward the door, clutching the front of her coat in her fist. The temperature had dropped with the sun, bringing a cold, cutting wind with it. She shivered inside the station’s lobby, warming herself under a ceiling vent as Auburn welcomed her and thanked her for coming to help.

  The portrait of the deceased Chief Walter Auburn loomed behind the man standing in front of her, and Carrie could see the resemblance in their faces. Walter died in ’81, but he was younger in the face than Steve, painted without any blemishes or wrinkles. They’d done so much to beatify the man in the portrait that she was surprised the back of his head wasn’t spouting sunlight surrounded by baby angels blowing trumpets. “Is that your father?”

  Auburn nodded. “That’s him.”

  Carrie pointed at the placard beneath the painting. “He got killed on the job?”

  “He certainly did,” Auburn said. “He didn’t die alone, though. Took out a whole gang, all by himself. They killed him, but hell if he didn’t kill every last one of them bastards in the process.”

  “That’s amazing,” Carrie said. “I mean, it must have been awful for you and your family, but still.”

  “It’s all right. I was just a kid at the time,” Auburn said. “I don’t remember much.”

  “It’s good you honor him like this, keeping his painting up.”

  “Gives me a lot to live up to, to be honest. Being the son of the town’s most famous hero is no fun, I promise you that. I’m pretty sure they gave me the chief’s job just because of my name.”

  “Well, maybe someday another gang will show up and you can wipe them out too, right? Like father, like son. I mean, except for getting killed in the process,” Carrie said, letting out a small laugh.

  Her laugh rose up between them like smoke, dying somewhere among the ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights. Auburn worked his tongue around the inside of his mouth, scraping something off his teeth with it, not responding. He found what he was seeking, swallowed it, then turned down the hall, saying, “Come on, we’ll check some boxes in the basement. I think I remember seeing a few old case files in there.”

  * * *

  Police departments, no matter where they are in the world, hate throwing things away. Old equipment that’s long obsolete. Broken telephones. Leather holsters for weapons and gear no one carries anymore. The reason is simple: All police departments run on public funds. When those funds are spent, the public expects their tax money is being put to good use. No police administrator wants to get caught throwing anything away, because it’s an admission, however slight, that money was spent on things that weren’t really needed. It all winds up in some back room or utility closet or anywhere else it can be stored out of sight. As Carrie followed Steve Auburn through the basement door and down the steps, she knew they were in the right place.

  She squinted in the dim light coming from the bare lightbulbs that hung from the rafters above them. There were damp crates of used traffic ticket booklets, being saved in case the State Police ever decided to do an audit. Boxes with ripped uniforms stuffed inside, being saved for their patches and buttons. Filing cabinets filled with every fingerprint card and mug shot photo ever taken by the department, from the days before digital photography and processing, and next to those filing cabinets, boxes of old cameras, dried-up fingerprint ink pads, crusty rollers, and yellowed ten-print cards that still listed “Negro” as one of the options under race.

  These are the archaeological places of police departments, with boxes packed against each wall that are labeled with markers, in handwriting so faded it cannot be read. They are inherited from the people who came before and kept because no one wants to be responsible for throwing them away.

  She walked next to Steve Auburn, reading him. A simple man. Wholesome. Overwhelmed. Unsure of why any of this had fallen on him, and wishing it hadn’t.

  Carrie knew if you asked Auburn why his police department did things the way they did, he would say the same thing as every other small-town chief: We do it this way because that’s the way we’ve always done it.

  A stack of molding boxes was piled in the farthest corner of the basement stamped with the words Property of Patterson Boro PD.

  “I’ve been through these, and never saw anything related to the Hope Pugh case, but maybe there was something I missed,” Auburn said. He shined his flashlight over the various boxes, searching behind them in the shadows. Most of the boxes contained artifacts from the old police station. Pens and used notepads and a beige rotary telephone sat on top of a stack of Pennsylvania Crimes Code books from the 1970s.

  Carrie picked up the first box and set it aside, then the next, and the next. The closest thing they found to case files was a long cardboard banker’s box stuffed with old handwritten accident reports. “I went through that box,” Auburn said. “It’s not in there.”

  Carrie set it aside and kept pulling things away until she reached the bottom. There, hidden behind the first row of boxes, sitting in an inch of brown basement water, was a large firesafe container. She heaved at it, inspected the lock, and called for Auburn to give her a hand.
>
  “I never saw that back there,” he said, helping her slide it away from the pile. “Damn.”

  “Do you have anything that can open it?”

  “There’s some old tools over here,” he said, turning his flashlight to a metal cabinet beneath the staircase. “Let me see what I can find.”

  Carrie ran her hands over the container’s metal lid. It was the size of a small beer cooler, made of rusted metal, and heavy. Why was it locked? she wondered. Maybe it held compromising photographs of some long-dead politician, saved by a long-dead police officer, just in case. She rocked the container back and forth, hearing the contents shift within. A policeman’s version of Schrödinger’s Box. Until it was open, it both contained the hidden treasure that would unlock the mystery of the missing little girl, and didn’t.

  Auburn returned with a crowbar. “Stand back.”

  He slid the crowbar’s flat end between the lid and crate, heaved, but it didn’t give. He jammed it in farther, stomping the length of metal with his boot, bending the crate’s flaps, but not opening it. His boot slipped and the crowbar shot up, striking him in the shinbone with a dull thud. “I’m going to shoot this damn thing!” Auburn shouted, clutching his shin.

  He worked the other side, bending that too, and then yanked the crowbar out, trying to fit it between the lock and metal sides of the crate.

  Carrie found a sledgehammer leaning against the wall and grabbed it. “Look out, Chief,” she said, gripping the sledge under the head of thick steel. Auburn was bent over, sweat dripping from his bald scalp. He slid back, watching as Carrie turned the firesafe on its back, the metal lock facing the ceiling. She raised the sledge high in the air, letting it rest against the wooden rafters and insulation above them, and swung it down hard.

  The lock cracked in two, and the bent lid flopped open, spilling the safe’s contents onto the floor. A file folder of newspaper clippings. Scattered documents. A large grocery shopping bag, stapled together, with the word Evidence written across it in black Magic Marker. On the first faded newspaper clipping, the smiling face of a little girl, twelve years old, stared up at Carrie from the basement floor, and from across the distance of four decades.