A Grave Situation

by Libby Howard

  “Let’s talk about the good times,” Olive finally said. “You wanted David to be defined by his life, not his death, so let’s let tonight be one of happy memories and a celebration of life, not of sorrow. We can’t do anything about David’s remains or that other body right now. Or about Uncle Ford. Let’s try to think about the good things in life, no matter how short it might be, and drink to those who’ve gone before us.”

  Suzette started to fill wine glasses, pulling an extra two from a cabinet against the back wall. “It’s not like anyone is going anywhere tonight with cars stuck in the cemetery and us drinking. I’ve got a spare bed up in the loft, and I can make up the couch into a place to sleep.”

  “I’ve got plenty of room at my house,” I said, warming to the idea with Judge Beck’s nod of approval. “Why don’t you stay with us for the night. We’re just down the street, and we’ve got two spare bedrooms made up and ready for a guest. There’s apple muffins for breakfast, and I can drive you to get your car in the morning.”

  The woman blinked up at me. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to put you out, dear. I’ve just met you!”

  “You’re Olive’s cousin,” I assured her. “Which means you’re welcome to stay in my house. Olive can take the loft here, and you can have your pick of my two guest rooms.”

  “You’re getting the better deal,” Olive teased. “Kay makes the best muffins. Suzette’s idea of breakfast is cold pork chops or instant oatmeal.”

  “Hey!” Suzette protested with a grin. “Sometimes I pick up a box of Pop-Tarts.”

  Olive rolled her eyes. “See?”

  DeLanie laughed. “Okay. Thank you, Kay. Are you sure…” Her gaze slid to Judge Beck. “You don’t mind, sir?”

  He smiled, toasting her with a glass of red wine. “I don’t mind at all, DeLanie. As long as you leave a few apple muffins for me, you’re absolutely welcome.”

  The woman took a deep breath, then smiled back, lifting her glass. “Then let’s talk about the good memoires, starting with that time Olive and her brother convinced David that an entire bucket of frogs would be happy living in our bathtub.”

  Olive laughed. “Or when you made that cake for David’s birthday and forgot to set the oven timer?”

  DeLanie shook her head with a chuckle. “That thing was like a piece of charcoal.”

  “After you put the fire out,” Olive added.

  “Good thing I had time to run to the grocery store and buy a replacement.”

  “Good thing David didn’t mind having a wedding cake for his birthday.” Olive laughed.

  And that was our night—all of us telling stories about our childhood as we ate pizza and drank wine. And then at the end of the night, we left all the cars in Suzette’s driveway while Judge Beck, DeLanie, and I walked back to my house. DeLanie was quickly settled into the third-floor guest room—the one that included a sitting area in the turret and exposed oak beams along the ceiling. I went down to set up the coffee on an automatic timer and noticed Taco standing over his food bowl, a reproachful expression on his face.

  Oh no. My poor cat. Not that he was starving to death or anything, but I was a horrible cat-mom for having forgotten his dinner.

  “I fed him, you know.”

  I jumped at Judge Beck’s voice in the doorway and nearly spilled the bag of cat food across the floor. Taco sprang upon the few nuggets that fell.

  “Thank you. I was feeling guilty about being so late at getting him his dinner.”

  The judge leaned back against the doorjamb, folding his arms across his chest. He’d changed into a pair of pajama bottoms with Pac-Mans all over them and a worn T-shirt advertising some brew pub that had gone out of business ten years ago.

  “What are you doing tomorrow, Kay? After you take DeLanie back to her car, that is.”

  His voice was deep with a sort of resonance that reminded me of when Taco purred. Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was the emotion-laden tone of the evening. Maybe it was something else, but I suddenly wanted a man’s arms around me.

  I pushed that idea away and considered the judge’s question. I had thought after dropping DeLanie off, I’d pop over to the Legion and help Matt tally up numbers from the golf tourney, but that thought went right out of my head.

  “I don’t have any plans. Heather drops the kids off at four, doesn’t she?”

  He nodded, unfolding his arms and taking a few steps toward me. “At five. Let’s go have brunch. Then maybe go to a pumpkin patch.”

  “A pumpkin patch?” I squeaked. “To buy pumpkins?” It must be the wine because my mind felt totally scrambled.

  “And go through the corn maze.” He took another step forward, his gaze intent. “It’s a big corn maze. They’ve got hot cider, and goats you can feed, and we can take the hay wagon out to the pumpkin patch and pick out what we want. We’ll buy some carving tools and come back and make jack-o’-lanterns. Halloween is Thursday, you know. We should decorate. And get candy for trick-or-treaters. Do you get trick-or-treaters here?”

  I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t breathe. “Yes, we do. But you don’t want to wait until Madison and Henry get here and all of us go to the pumpkin patch together?”

  “No, I want to go with you. Just us. We can get pumpkins with Madison and Henry another time if they want. Tomorrow…I want it to just be us.”

  I focused really hard on taking slow steady breaths. It had been almost a decade since I’d carved pumpkins, and longer since I’d actually gone to the pumpkin patch to pick them out. Years.

  “I’d like that. It sounds like fun.” I shifted the bag of cat food in my arms, then realizing I was still clutching it, I stuffed it back into the cabinet, much to Taco’s chagrin.

  Judge Beck stooped down and picked the cat up in his arms. “Piggy. You’ve already eaten, and you weigh more than some dogs I know.”

  Taco nestled into his arms, purring like a motor and rubbing his head against the judge’s bicep. I felt a sudden stab of envy. Then a stab of guilt.

  Where was Eli’s ghost? He was usually that comforting presence in the house at night, but I hadn’t sensed the spirit since I’d returned from Suzette’s. Walking around the kitchen island, I reached out to take Taco from the judge’s arms, feeling a zing at the brush of my arm against his.

  “I’ll see you in the morning then,” I murmured, feeling suddenly sweaty, warmer than the worst hot flash, and torn between wanting to escape to my room and do something I’d be mortified about come morning.

  “See you then,” he murmured back.

  I escaped, trying not to run, not to squeeze Taco too tight as I climbed the stairs to my bed and a night of restless dreams that jumbled together Eli and the man who was asleep one floor directly below me.

  Chapter 7

  I was up before the sun, missing Daisy as I performed my backyard yoga solo. It had dipped down to freezing in the night, and my breath plumed out in front of me as I did my poses. Yoga wasn’t exactly an aerobic activity, and even with heavy-duty tights and a long-sleeved shirt, I was cold and rushing a bit to finish up. When Daisy returned, I was going to suggest we move our morning exercise to my basement until spring and warmer weather returned.

  After I’d finished, I jogged around the front of the house to retrieve my paper from where the nameless delivery woman had thrown it from the window of her station wagon. It was a bit of a hunt, but this morning the paper was clearly visible half sticking out of my boxwood. Jogging back to the rear entrance of my house because I was too darned cold to try to unlock my front door, I dashed inside to the welcome warmth and the tantalizing scent of fresh brewed coffee. Relishing the time alone, I sat at the counter with my hot coffee and spread out the paper.

  Yes, paper. I spent enough of my day clicking through the internet. Getting my news the traditional way allowed me to be that old woman with an actual newspaper at the breakfast table. Or kitchen island, as it was.

  The joy of small-town newspapers was that the local stuff was front and center, with i
mportant state and national news taking a less prominent spot below the fold, or even back in the back sections. Sure enough, right next to the lead article about last night’s high school basketball game—priorities— was the headline Extra Body Found in Local Grave. The sub header announced that the police suspected murder.

  Well, duh. As I’d speculated last night, the guy was hardly wandering around the cemetery wrapped in a blue tarp, only to fall into an open grave. Although I guess that sort of thing was technically possible. Glancing through the article, I realized I’d made a glaring error.

  The body was that of a woman.

  A chill crept over me, one the hot strong coffee couldn’t ease. I sensed something in the corner of the kitchen, a shadowy form that wasn’t the one I’d come to think of as my husband.

  Another ghost. A woman. Young. Upset. Needing my help.

  I should have known from the moment those men had uncovered the body that I’d get a visit from a ghost. Judge Beck had noted that I seemed to be especially adept at coming across murder victims, but little did he know I also seemed to draw their ghosts to me. And past experience told me this spirit wouldn’t rest until her murderer was found and brought to justice.

  I read on, trying to ignore the ghost in my kitchen. The paper said the woman had died from an apparent gunshot wound to the chest, although the police had told the reporter they wouldn’t be able to announce anything else until the medical examiner took a look. Gunshot wound. So this definitely was a body dump because I couldn’t see some woman wandering around the cemetery being shot conveniently in front of a grave and falling backward into it.

  I shivered again from a combination of the ghost in my kitchen and the thought of a gruesome execution.

  A woman, not a man as I’d originally thought. That bothered me. I’d assumed the body was a man’s and the idea that a woman had been killed and tossed in the grave seemed more frightening than if the victim had been the other gender. I frowned, thinking of the press of spirits I’d felt around the grave while they’d been digging for David’s casket. They’d been angry. Upset. Maybe they weren’t so stirred up over the disturbance to David’s remains as the fact that a murder victim was being unearthed.

  Maybe the anger I’d felt was a need for vengeance, a desire for one of their own to have some justice when it came to her murder. And with the body being unearthed, justice did seem like a possibility now.

  And the two that had pulled free from the group to whisk around the grave plot…had one of them been this woman’s ghost? The ghost in my kitchen? A few of the spirits I’d encountered did seem to stick around where their bodies were, but others remained close to the place they’d been murdered. Some just seemed to wander around, latching onto items of significance, or even following me around once they realized I could sense them, like this one.

  Like Holt. Who thankfully hadn’t been here since football season started. Was it bad that I hoped he was hanging around the team locker rooms and would be far more interested in his favorite sport than in gluing himself to a sixty-year-old woman?

  “Who are you?” I murmured to the ghost, wishing for once that I had Olive’s ability to communicate with the dead. I didn’t want to upset my friend by enlisting her help in this one, not when she had to deal with her uncle’s death and the family drama. True, this woman had been buried in with Olive’s cousin, but that was probably the only connection. It had been a coincidence, a convenient dump site for a body. No doubt the murderer was connected somehow with the gravediggers, or the cemetery, or had been burying a family member or friend nearby when a fatal argument broke out, or…

  Why had her murderer decided to put her in a grave as opposed to just leaving her in an alleyway, or in the woods, or at the bottom of a pond? Someone had wanted to hide the body. And although hiding a body in a cemetery grave seemed like a brilliant idea, it would have required some cooperation with either the cemetery personnel and/or the people who were in charge of filling in the gravesites.

  Which meant there had to be a connection somewhere. I thought of Melanie and wondered if she was harboring any deep dark secrets. Probably not. If she’d been the one who killed this woman, I couldn’t believe she would have been so calm and collected during the early part of the exhumation.

  Unless her poker face really was that good.

  “Morning!” a voice called from the dining room.

  The ghost vanished with the word. Gone. Poof. I looked up to see DeLanie walk into the kitchen. I’d loaned her some pajamas, but she’d obviously washed up and changed back into her clothing from yesterday.

  “Morning,” I returned her greeting. “Coffee is over there. Help yourself. I’ll get the muffins out, then if you don’t mind, I’ll run up for a quick shower and to change out of my workout clothes.”

  “No hurry.” She smiled at me as she headed over toward the coffee. “Whatever your schedule, I’m good. I really appreciate you letting me stay last night and giving me a lift over to my car this morning. And the muffins, which I’m sure are amazing. Olive is lucky to have such wonderful friends.”

  If DeLanie was feeling a little awkward or maybe a bit hungover in the light of day, she sure didn’t show it. The woman had a strained, tight look about her face, but that was understandable given what had happened last night. Determined not to rub salt in the wound, I flipped over the paper and stuffed it under a basket of fruit, got out the muffins, and once again told my guest that she was free to help herself to anything. Then I headed upstairs to shower and change.

  When I came down, DeLanie was finishing the last of her coffee, a handful of muffin foils on a plate beside an open newspaper. Although she must have read the news about the body, she didn’t bring it up and neither did I. We walked up to Suzette’s for my car and I managed to squeeze it around Judge Beck’s SUV, noting that no one in the cabin seemed to be stirring. It wasn’t surprising. Suzette wasn’t an early riser, and everyone had had an emotional, long day yesterday.

  We drove most of the way to the cemetery in silence, pulling through the gates and navigating the winding lanes through the sections to where DeLanie’s family plots were located.

  “The police tape is still there,” she commented softly as the canopy and tarps came into view.

  “It’s Sunday,” I reminded her. “The police will probably keep it as a crime scene until midweek to give the forensic people and the medical examiner’s office a while to process everything.”

  “I just want it over with,” she told me. “I want David settled in his new home with the head stone and everything proper-like. I know he wouldn’t have cared. I know he wouldn’t have wanted me to be crying and worrying over his body like this. I just wanted him with family. I didn’t want to feel like he was an outcast.”

  I reached over to grab her hand. “He’s not an outcast. The cemetery is full of generation after generation of loved ones. And the new section where he’s going to be moved? Eli’s there. My husband. I buried him the month before you lost your son.”

  DeLanie turned her hand in mine and squeezed my fingers. “Oh, hon, I’m so sorry. I just assumed that you and the judge…”

  I blinked away sudden tears. “My husband died this past spring. Eli Carrera. He was a surgeon, practicing until his accident ten years ago. We don’t have family locally, so I bought a plot for him when he died. But I want you to know that he’d welcome your son. If you’re worried about that sort of thing, about him being all alone out in a different section, Eli would welcome him. He was like that. He was that sort of man.”

  “Thank you.” She gave my hand another squeeze. “I know it’s silly, but that does make me feel better to know David will be among friends. Maybe family is more than those you’re related by blood to. Maybe family is something you build.”

  It was a sentiment I’d thought about quite a bit in the last seven months. I pulled up next to DeLanie’s car and dug a business card out of my purse. “If you need anything, please give me a call. This is my
work number, but Olive has my home phone and so does Suzette, and you know where I live.”

  “Thank you.” She took the card and glanced down at it. “Pierson Investigations. Well, one thing you could do for me is to let me know if you find anything out about the body they discovered in my son’s grave. I feel a bit responsible to follow up on that, you know.”

  I nodded, knowing exactly how she felt. “I’ll contact you, although I doubt the police will release any additional information for a few days—or weeks if the M.E.’s office is backed up. So far the only thing that’s being reported is that the body was that of a woman and she died of a gunshot wound.”

  DeLanie recoiled at that, making me realize that she must not have read the front page of the paper after all. Her brown eyes blinked at me for a moment as she pulled herself together. “A woman?”

  “Does that mean anything to you?” I winced, realizing that I sounded less than sympathetic. “I mean, I’m sure her being in David’s grave was just a coincidence, a convenient place to dispose of a body. I’m sure it has nothing to do with your son at all. I just wondered….”

  She shook her head, pocketing my card and opening the car door. “No. I’m just shocked. I guess I thought it was a man’s body down there. I never thought that a woman might…. Although I know women are murdered plenty often enough.” She exited my car and turned to me, a forced smile on her face. “Thank you again, Kay. Olive speaks very highly of you, and I can see why. I appreciate your kindness and hospitality.”

  And with that, she was gone. I watched her start her car and back around, driving down the road to exit the cemetery before I put my sedan in park and got out, walking to the edge of where the police crime-scene tape had been stretched.