by Libby Howard
A woman approached me from back behind a row of refrigerators. She was sporting a perm the likes of which I hadn’t seen since the eighties.
“I’m looking for a dishwasher,” I told her with a tentative smile.
She grinned. “The mechanical kind, I’m assuming. Otherwise you should go two blocks down to the temp service. They’ve probably got a two-for-one on dishwashers, but you don’t gotta pay ours overtime.”
I forced out a polite laugh. “The mechanical kind. My budget is around two hundred. Oh, and do you deliver them? And install them?”
She nodded. “That’s an extra fifty, unless you need plumbing work done too.”
I did some quick math in regards to my meager savings account. “It’s replacing an existing dishwasher, so I don’t think there’s any special plumbing needed beyond what you’d usually do to swap out a broken appliance with one that works.”
She pursed her lips and inclined her head. “Well then, come on over here with me and take a look at what we’ve got in your price range.”
I followed her over to a grouping of four virtually indistinguishable dishwashers. They were all white. They all had buttons with the symbols or text worn nearly off them. They all had a variety of dents and a few rust spots. I swallowed hard, thinking of how Eli and I had bought top of the line appliances, carefully selecting them for features and appearance. Of course, that top of the line dishwasher was now broken, where these dated, dented ones worked.
“How are they on energy efficiency?” I asked.
The woman looked at me as if I were insane. “They all work. We give you a sixty-day warranty and the option to purchase a service plan. I don’t know anything about energy efficiency.”
I opened one up, eyeing the racks. Clearly, they weren’t customizable. Would half my dishes even fit in here without being able to fold part of the rack down or remove the baskets? I felt like such a snob turning my nose up at the lack of features. They worked. And they were in my price range. I didn’t have six hundred dollars or more to buy something with all the bells and whistles, and unless the dishwasher fairy was going to visit my house in the night and leave me a stack of money, I wasn’t going to come up with the cash in the next two weeks. It was either this, or confess to the judge and the kids that I didn’t have the money to replace the broken appliance. And wouldn’t for a few months at a minimum.
That would be mortifying. But having someone install a dented, rusty replacement was just as mortifying. Either way I was going to need to swallow my pride and make a decision.
I looked up to see the woman eyeing me with a bit of sympathy as if she could sense my dilemma.
“We did get another one in yesterday that’s not on the floor yet,” she told me. “One of the contractors sold it to us for wholesale. It was a custom order that didn’t get picked up. I could let you have it for three hundred with the installation thrown in.”
That was pushing my budget a bit, but I was willing to take a look at it, so I stood and followed her back into a cement floor storage room full of parts and dismantled appliances. It reminded me a lot of Mr. Peter’s house before his nephew had begun cleaning it out.
“This is it.” The woman stopped and gestured Vanna White style to a gleaming dishwasher, so new it still had the energy efficient sticker on the door. It automatically adjusted water and energy based on the load. It had a special top-rack zone jet system. It had independent rotating spray arms. It had a smart dry feature. It had a sanitizing wash setting, a zone booster, customizable racks. It was amazing.
It was bordello red.
I was in college in the seventies. I remembered how everyone’s houses were lined with wood paneling, that the main three colors for appliances were harvest gold, avocado, and copper. I’ll even admit that I had a sort of fond nostalgia for that era in home design—not that I wanted to replicate it in my current house, but still a fond nostalgia. But beyond that, I was a neutral-tone, stainless steel kind of gal. That I could have lived with. The current, nonfunctional dishwasher was one of those hideously expensive ones where the front was made to match the cabinetry, hiding all the modern appliances out of sight behind a lovely wood finish. I knew I couldn’t afford that. I knew I couldn’t afford stainless steel. I’d reconciled myself to the fact that I’d end up with a plain, white, non-matching dishwasher. I’d almost reconciled myself to one of the dented, slightly rusted, absolutely featureless dishwashers out in the showroom. But this lipstick-bright red?
“Awful, isn’t it?” The woman made one of those snort-laughs. “I’ll bet the customers were drunk off their whatoozies, and when this thing came in they had a major case of the regrets. Nice dishwasher though. These things go for eight, nine hundred bucks. Course, no one wants a red dishwasher. And most of our customers are putting appliances in rental places and investment properties. They don’t want something with all these electronic thingamajigs to go wrong. Basic stuff that’s hard for tenants to break and cheap to fix or replace. That’s what moves the most here. Still, thought you might want to take a look at it since it seems you wanted something a bit more than what we usually carry.”
These were my choices. Tell everyone we’d be dishwasher-less for a few months until I saved up the money. Buy a rust-and-dent base model from the showroom and have a bit left in change. Or spend my whole savings account on this red monstrosity that had all the features I could ever dream of and would look like an appliance murder in the middle of my kitchen.
“Can I think on it and let you know by the end of the week?” I asked the woman.
She laughed. “Honey, this thing ain’t going nowhere. And if you want one of the white ones out there in the showroom, we’ve got plenty. If you let me know by the end of the week, I can probably get Rodney to swing by first thing Monday and install it for you—if you’re local, that is.”
“Locust Point,” I told her.
“Oh yeah. Rodney can totally get to you early Monday if you like.” She fished a bent card out of her pocket and handed it to me. “Just call and let me know.”
I stuck the card in my purse and headed back to the office and my pile of skip traces, weighing the pros and cons of each option. How hard would it be to paint an appliance? Could I maybe glue something over the red? It would be awesome to have a dishwasher with that top-rack zone jet system and independent rotating spray arms. And the sanitize feature…
Red. I winced and wished that four hundred dollars would fall out of the sky and make this decision so much easier.
I ended up leaving work a bit early to swing by the cemetery, because I was nosy, and I knew there was a ghost waiting home at my house that needed me to help solve her murder. The canopy and police tape were still up around David’s grave, as was the cluster of ghosts, so I kept going and parked by the offices. Melanie was inside, surrounded by paperwork. She looked up with her usual calm, cool smile, but I could see the tightness around her mouth and the dark circles under her eyes that her concealer was doing little to mask.
“Mrs. Carrera. How can I help you?”
I quickly decided to be as straightforward as possible, but to phrase this as a concerned owner of my husband’s grave plot.
“I’ve been thinking about what happened Saturday,” I started out.
She nodded. “I’m sure all of us have. It was quite a shock. I can assure you that is not something that has ever happened here before.”
“How could you know that, though? It’s not like you exhume bodies all the time. There could be murder victims hidden in other graves. Maybe there’s someone who has discovered this is the perfect place to dispose of his serial-killer victims. This sort of thing could have been going on for years, some crazy murderer putting his victims in other people’s graves.”
Melanie’s left eye twitched, her smile becoming stiff. “I sincerely doubt there is some sort of crime ring using our cemetery to hide bodies, Mrs. Carrera.”
“How could someone, an employee of yours, manage to fill in a gr
ave plot without noticing a tarp-wrapped body in there? Someone probably paid him to look the other way. And if they paid him to look the other way once, they most likely paid him to do it dozens of times. Several friends and I were discussing having you open our loved ones’ graves to check.”
She paled. I was sure she was calculating the cost of having to open hundreds of graves, then refill them and lay down fresh sod. And of course, after what had happened, people would insist the cemetery needed to do this at their own cost, since they were clearly negligent in allowing such a horrible mistake to happen to David Driver’s grave.
“I can assure you that your husband’s grave has not been violated in such a way, Mrs. Carrera. Please tell your friends that there is no need to worry. There is no need to go about disturbing their loved ones’ eternal rest in this fashion.”
“But if it happened with David Driver’s grave, what guarantee do we have that it hasn’t happened to others?”
“This was a terrible one-time occurrence, and we’re taking precautions to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“What sort of precautions?” I tried to look panicked, as though I thought there were murder victims double stacked in all the graves out there.
“We’ve fired our current excavation crew and are in the process of replacing them.”
“But if you have a bad employee looking the other way about this sort of thing, then firing him won’t change the past,” I argued.
“It wasn’t an employee,” Melanie said, clearly deciding to throw someone else under the bus. “We don’t like people to know it because we pride ourselves on being a family operation, but we contract out the excavation work. It takes two to three people, and it didn’t make sense to have them on the payroll full time so six months ago we started using a contractor. We’ll be bringing this function back in house so this sort of thing won’t happen again. And I can assure you that this was truly a one-time issue. We weren’t even using this contractor when your husband was buried.”
I nodded, trying to look relieved. “Oh, good. Now I can tell DeLanie Driver that she doesn’t have to sue you. She can sue this contractor instead. Do you have their name?”
Melanie got even whiter and fumbled in her desk drawer, pulling out an invoice and copying the name, address, and phone number from it to a sticky note with shaky hands.
“Here.” She thrust the sticky note to me. “Give this to her. This is the contractor we were using.”
As I left the office, I looked down at the note and wondered if I had time to pay Baughman’s Excavating a visit.
Chapter 11
Baughman Excavating was a small operation. Their offices were in the industrial section of town in what looked like a strip mall for companies that dealt in the trades. There was the company name in black stenciling on a primer-gray steel door. I opened it to find a six-by-eight office barely big enough for an old metal desk and two chairs. A blonde bearded man in his thirties looked up at me and shut the filing cabinet he’d been rifling through.
“Can I help you?” He looked rather frazzled, his hair oddly spiked as if he’d spent the last few hours pulling on it.
“Are you Bob Baughman?” At his nod I continued. “I was at the cemetery Saturday for the relocation of the Driver remains and I was wondering if you could answer a few questions about your contract work with Windy Oaks.”
He reached up with one hand and jerked his fingers through his hair, causing it to stand even more on end. “You the police? A lawyer? Is she gonna sue us? I’ve spent all morning looking for the paperwork for that job and haven’t had time to get a lawyer yet, so maybe you could come back?”
“I’m not the police or a lawyer,” I assured him. “I work for Pierson Investigation and Recovery Services, but I’m not here on any official capacity. I’m just trying to find out what happened.”
“You and me both, lady,” he grumbled. “This is gonna ruin me. I’m not a big business. It’s just me and my brother running things here and my nephew Jake when we need a hand. We don’t have any big equipment, just the little digger and a few attachments. Outside of the cemetery, most of our work is running utility lines in new home construction or trenching for drainage pipes. Now we just lost the cemetery contract.” He shook his head. “Word gets around that lady at Windy Oaks is blaming us, we might find ourselves out of business.”
I wanted to feel sorry for the guy, but they had buried a murder victim in a grave. Either they were blind, or they knew what was going on and took the chance no one would ever find out. But before I could mention it, something else hit me.
“You said it’s just you and your brother and nephew? There were three men there Saturday, and you weren’t one of them.”
“We didn’t get a call to do that relocation on Saturday.” He scowled. “I read about it in the paper and wondered about that. Guess they were using someone else for Saturday, which ticks me off since that would have been the weekend rate for us. We were supposed to have an exclusive contract with Windy Oaks. That’s why we gave them such a good price.”
“Would they have used in-house staff maybe?” I asked. “The cemetery manager did mention they were a family business.”
“Right,” he scoffed. “Family meaning the owners. Most of their staff isn’t related, although that woman in charge of it all is some sort of niece of something. They’ve got their own equipment, mainly mowers and stuff, but they probably have a bucket attachment for one of the tractors. Their landscaping guys could have been doing that Saturday job for them, although they should have called us. We had a contract.”
“It was probably last minute,” I told him. “There’s a chance they didn’t even know until a few hours before.”
“Still shoulda called us,” he groused. “It’s our contract. Saturday afternoon? I’d have dropped everything for a few hundred bucks on a Saturday afternoon.”
Few hundred? I knew they charged over a thousand to open the grave for Eli’s remains. What kind of profit were these cemetery people making? Although I probably shouldn’t be getting sidetracked by that sort of thing.
“You did open and close the Driver grave when he was buried six months ago, though?” I asked.
He looked down at the folder in his hand. “I’m not the best at keeping records, but I found it. If I’ve got a file on it, it means we did the job.”
“The three of you were there? And didn’t notice a body wrapped in a tarp in the grave? You didn’t see anything?”
Bob opened the file. “We all take turns. The job really only takes two people—one to run the excavator and the other to shovel and make sure everything is where it needs to be and that we’re not knocking over headstones or making a mess. Most funerals are on Friday evening, or on the weekend, so we’re real busy Thursday through Sunday night. Mornings we go in early, before the gates open, and dig the graves for that day. The cemetery staff comes by after and puts up the canopies, the casket stand and drapes, and the chairs and stuff. Oh, and they put a drape over the dirt so nobody can see it and everything looks all nice. Then at night, once the gates close at dusk, we come back and fill in.”
“The casket’s already lowered by then?” I asked.
He nodded. “They lower the casket right after the mourners leave, but keep the canopy and the stand there until the gates close, partly for safety and partly to look nice and respectful for people coming and going. At dusk, they take down the canopies and the casket stand and haul everything away—drapes and chairs and all. By the time we come in, it’s just the box that holds the dirt and the hole in the ground. When we’re done, we haul the dirt boxes over to the supply shed before we leave. The next morning, the landscaping guys put down sod and the caretaker has someone put the little metal marker on the grave, to mark the spot until the granite marker gets made.”
“And the gates are locked when you get there? You have a key or something?”
He nodded. “The gates are always locked. It’s a pain in the butt. I’m h
auling a trailer with the digger and I’ve got to get out, unlock the gates, pull through, then lock them back up. And do it again when we leave.”
“And you’ve never found them unlocked when you get there?” I prodded.
He shook his head. “The cemetery is real careful about that. They don’t want vandals or anyone messing with the graves at night. There’s someone who spends the night in that house up front, but I don’t think he patrols the grounds or anything. I know sometimes people stay too late and get locked in and have to knock on the door and have the guy let them out. That’s how strict they are about when they lock and open the gates.”
“Anyone else have keys that you’re aware of?”
“No, but I’m sure there’s lawn crews and former employees that might have them. It’s not exactly a high-security system there and I doubt they’ve changed the locks in the last five years or so.”
“Is there anything you remember about that night David Driver was buried? Were you one of the people there, or was it your brother and nephew?”
“You sure you’re not a cop?” he asked in an accusing voice. Then he sighed and looked through the papers in the folder. “Invoice was for two of us. I signed off on it, so I must have been there. Probably me and Junior from what we charged, which means I would have been running the digger and Junior with the shovel.”
I imagined this Junior taking a payoff and not letting his uncle know that there was a body in the open grave, but that didn’t seem all that smart. There was too much chance that his uncle would have glanced down and saw what was going on. Either they were both in on it, or neither was.