Mrs. Murphy dimly remembered Harry’s reading aloud from one of her many history books but that was hardly her main concern. “Listen to me. Humans put their dead in boxes. You know that if you found a hand it means the body wasn’t packaged.”
“So what? It’s my hand!” Tucker hollered at the top of her lungs, although with a moment to reflect she knew that Mrs. Murphy was right. Humans didn’t cut up their dead.
“Tucker, if you destroy that hand then you’ve destroyed evidence. You’re going to be in a shitload of trouble and you’ll get Mother in trouble.”
Dejected, Tucker squatted down next to the treasured hand, a gruesome sight. “But it’s mine.”
“I’m sorry. But something’s wrong, don’t you see?”
“No.” Her voice was fainter now.
“A dead human not in a box means either he or she was ill and died far away from others or that he or she was murdered. The other humans have to know this. You know how they are, Tucker. Some of them kill for pleasure. It’s dangerous for the others.”
Tucker sat up. “Why are they like that?”
“I don’t know and they don’t know. It’s some sickness in the species. You know, like dogs pass parvo. Please, Tucker, don’t mess up that evidence. Let me go get Mother if I can. Promise me you’ll wait.”
“It might take her hours to figure out what you’re telling her.”
“I know. You’ve got to wait.”
One miserable dog cocked her head and sighed. “All right, Murphy.”
Mrs. Murphy skimmed across the pastures, her feet barely grazing the sodden earth. She found Harry in the bed of the truck. Nimbly Mrs. Murphy launched herself onto the truck bed. She meowed. She rubbed against Harry’s leg. She meowed louder.
“Hey, little pussycat, I’ve got work to do.”
The twilight was fading. Mrs. Murphy was getting desperate. “Follow me, Mom. Come on. Right now.”
“What’s gotten into you?” Harry was puzzled.
Mrs. Murphy hooted and hollered as much as she could. Finally she sprang up and dug her claws into Harry’s jeans, climbing up her leg. Harry yelped and Mrs. Murphy jumped off her leg and ran a few paces. Harry rubbed her leg. Mrs. Murphy ran back and prepared to climb the other leg.
“Don’t you dare!” Harry held out her hand.
“Then follow me, stupid.” Mrs. Murphy moved away from her again.
Finally, Harry did. She didn’t know what was going on but she’d lived with Mrs. Murphy for seven years, long enough and close enough to learn a little bit of cat ways.
The cat hurried across the meadow. When Harry slowed down, Mrs. Murphy would run back and then zip away again, encouraging her constantly. Harry picked up speed.
When Tucker saw them coming she started barking.
Breathing hard, Harry stopped at the bank. “Oh, damn, Tucker, how’d you get over there.”
“Look!” the cat shouted.
“Mommy, I found it and it’s mine. If I have to give this up I want a knuckle bone,” Tucker bargained. She picked up the hand in her mouth.
It took Harry a minute to focus in the fading light. At first, she couldn’t believe her eyes. Then she did.
“Oh, my God.”
* * *
10
Albemarle County Sheriff Rick Shaw bent down with his flashlight. Officer Cynthia Cooper, already hunkered down, gingerly lifted the digits with her pocket knife.
“Never seen anything like this,” Shaw muttered. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a cigarette.
The sheriff battled his smoking addiction with disappointing results. Worse, Cooper had begun to sneak cigarettes herself.
Tucker sat staring at the hand. Blair Bainbridge, feeling a little queasy, and Harry stood beside Tucker. Mrs. Murphy rested across Harry’s neck. Her feet were cold and she was tired, so Harry had slung her around her neck like a stole.
“Harry, any idea where this came from?”
“I know,” Tucker volunteered.
“Like I said, the dog was sitting on the creek bank with this hand. I ran back home and called, then hopped in the truck to meet you. I don’t know any more than that.”
“What about you, uh . . .”
“Blair Bainbridge.”
“Mr. Bainbridge, notice anything unusual? Before this, I mean?”
“No.”
Rick grunted when he stood up. Cynthia Cooper wrapped the hand in a plastic bag.
“If you follow me, I can show you!” Tucker yapped and ran toward the cemetery.
“She’s got a lot to say.” Cynthia smiled. She loved the little dog and the cat.
Shaw inhaled, then exhaled a long blue line of smoke, which didn’t curl upward. Most likely meant more rain.
Tucker sat by the graveyard and howled.
“I, for one, am going to see what she’s about.” Harry followed her dog.
“Me too.” Cynthia followed, carrying the hand in its bag.
Rick grumbled but his curiosity was up. Blair stayed with him. When the humans reached the iron fence Tucker barked again and walked over to the angel with the harp tombstone. Cooper flung her flashlight beam over toward Tucker.
“Right here,” Tucker instructed.
Harry squinted. “Coop, you’d better check this out.”
Again Cynthia got down on her knees. Tucker dug in the dirt. She hit a pocket of air and the unmistakable odor of rotten flesh smacked Cynthia in the face. The young woman reeled backward and fought her gag reflex.
Rick Shaw, now beside her, turned his head aside. “Guess we’ve got work to do.”
Blair, ashen-faced, said, “Would you like me to go back to the barn and get a spade?”
“No, thank you,” the sheriff said. “I think we’ll post a man out here tonight and start this in daylight. I don’t want to take the chance of destroying evidence because we can’t see.”
As they walked back to the squad car Blair halted and turned to the sheriff, now on another cigarette. “I did see something. The night of the storm my transformer was hit by lightning. I didn’t have any candles and I was standing by my kitchen window.” He pointed to the window. “Another big bolt shot down and split that tree and for an instant I thought I saw someone standing up here in the cemetery. I dismissed it. It didn’t seem possible.”
Shaw wrote this down quickly in his small notebook as Coop called for a backup to watch the graveyard.
Harry wanted to make a crack about the graveyard shift but kept her mouth shut. Whenever things were grim her sense of humor kicked into high gear.
“Mr. Bainbridge, you’re not planning on leaving anytime soon, are you?”
“No.”
“Good. I might need to ask you more questions.” Rick leaned against the car. “I’ll call Herbie Jones. It’s his cemetery. Harry, why don’t you go home and eat something? It’s past suppertime and you looked peaked.”
“Lost my appetite,” Harry replied.
“Yeah, me too. You never get used to this kind of thing, you know.” The sheriff patted her on the back.
When Harry walked in the door she picked up the phone and called Susan. As soon as that conversation was finished she called Miranda Hogendobber. For Miranda, being the last to know would be almost as awful as finding the hand.
* * *
11
At first light a team of two men began carefully turning over the earth by the tombstone with the harp-playing angel. Larry Johnson, the retired elderly physician, acted as Crozet’s coroner—an easy job, as there was generally precious little to do. He watched, as did Reverend Herbie Jones. Rick Shaw and Cynthia Cooper carefully sifted through the spadefuls of earth the men turned over. Harry and Blair stayed back at the fence. Miranda Hogendobber pulled up in her Falcon, bounded out of the car, and strode toward the graveyard.
“Harry, you called Miranda. Don’t deny it, I know you did,” Rick fussed.
“Well . . . she has an interesting turn of mind.”
“Oh, please.”
Rick shook his head.
“Pay dirt.” One of the diggers pulled his handkerchief up around his nose.
“I got it. I got it.” The other digger reached down and gently extricated a leg.
Miranda Hogendobber reached the hill at that moment, took one look at the decaying leg, wearing torn pants and with the foot still in a sneaker, and passed out.
“She’s your responsibility!” Rick pointed his forefinger at Harry.
Harry knew he was right. She hurried over to Mrs. Hogendobber and, assisted by Blair, hoisted her up. She began to come around. Not knowing what another look at the grisly specimen might do, they remonstrated with her. She resisted but then walked down to Blair’s house supported by the two of them.
The police continued their work and discovered another hand, the fingertip pads also removed, and another leg, which, like its companion, had been cleaved where the thighbone joins the pelvis.
By noon, after sifting and digging for five hours, Rick called a halt to the proceedings.
“Want us to start in on these other graves?”
“As the ground is not disturbed I wish you wouldn’t.” Reverend Jones stepped in. “Let them rest in peace.”
Rick wiped his forehead. “Reverend, I can appreciate the sentiment but if we need to come back up here . . . well, you know.”
“I know, but you’re standing on my mother.” A hint of reproach crept into Herb’s resonant voice. He was more upset than he realized.
“I’m sorry.” Rick quickly moved. “Go back to work, Reverend. I’ll be in touch.”
“Who would do that?” Herbie pointed to the stinking evidence.
“Murder?” Cynthia Cooper opened her hands, palms up, “Seemingly average people commit murder. Happens every day.”
“No, who would cut up a human being like that?” The minister’s eyes were moist.
“I don’t know,” Rick replied. “But whoever did it took great pains to remove identifying evidence.”
After the good Reverend left, the four law enforcement officials walked a bit away from the smell and conferred among themselves. Where was the torso and where was the head?
They’d find out soon enough.
* * *
12
The starch in Tiffany Hayes’s apron rattled as she approached the table. Little Marilyn, swathed in a full-length purple silk robe, sat across from Fitz-Gilbert, dressed for work. The pale-pink shirt and the suspenders completed a carefully thought-out ensemble.
Tiffany put down the eggs, bacon, grits, and various jams. “Will that be all, Miz Hamilton?”
Little Marilyn critically appraised the presentation. “Roberta forgot a sprig of parsley on the eggs.”
Tiffany curtsied and repaired to the kitchen, where she informed Roberta of her heinous omission. At each meal there was some detail Little Marilyn found abrasive to her highly developed sense of decorum.
Hands on hips, Roberta replied to an appreciative Tiffany, “She can eat a pig’s blister.”
Back in the breakfast nook, husband and wife enjoyed a relaxing meal. The brief respite of sun was overtaken by clouds again.
“Isn’t this the strangest weather?” Little Marilyn sighed.
“The changing seasons are full of surprises. And so are you.” His voice dropped.
Little Marilyn smiled shyly. It had been her idea to attack her husband this morning during his shower. Those how-to-please sex books she devoured were paying off.
“Life is more exciting as a blond.” He swept his hand across his forelock. His hair was meticulously cut with short sideburns, close cropped on the sides and back of the head, and longer on the top. “You really like it, don’t you?”
“I do. And I like your suspenders too.” She leaned across the table and snapped one.
“Braces, dear. Suspenders are for old men.” He polished off his eggs. “Marilyn”—he paused—“would you love me if I weren’t, well, if I weren’t Andover-Princeton? A Hamilton? One of the Hamiltons?” He referred to his illustrious family, whose history in America reached back into the seventeenth century.
The Hamiltons, originally from England, first landed in the West Indies, where they amassed a fortune in sugar cane. A son, desirous of a larger theater for his talents, sailed to Philadelphia. From that ambitious sprig grew a long line of public servants, businessmen, and the occasional cad. Fitz-Gilbert’s branch of the family, the New York branch, suffered many losses until only Fitz’s immediate family remained. A fateful airplane crash carried away the New York Hamiltons the summer after Fitz’s junior year in high school. At sixteen Fitz-Gilbert was an orphan.
Fitz appeared to withstand the shock and fight back. He spent the summer working in a brokerage house as a messenger, just as his father had planned. Despite his blue-blood connections, his only real friend in those days was another boy at the brokerage house, a bright kid from Brooklyn, Tommy Norton. They escaped Wall Street on weekends, usually to the Hamptons or Cape Cod.
Fitz’s stoicism impressed everyone, but Cabell Hall, his guardian and trust officer at Chase Manhattan, was troubled. Cracks had begun to show in Fitz’s facade. He totaled a car but escaped unharmed. Cabell didn’t blow up. He agreed that “boys will be boys.” But then Fitz got a girl pregnant, and Cabell found a reputable doctor to take care of that. Finally, the second summer of Fitz’s Wall Street apprenticeship, he and Tommy Norton were in a car accident on Cape Cod. Both boys were so drunk that, luckily for them, they sustained only facial lacerations and bruises when they went through the windshield. Fitz, since he was driving, paid all the medical bills, which meant they got the very best care. But Fitz’s recovery was only physical. He had tempted fate and nearly killed not only himself but his best friend. The result was a nervous breakdown. Cabel checked him into an expensive, quiet clinic in Connecticut.
Fitz had related this history to Little Marilyn before they got married, but he hadn’t mentioned it since.
She looked at him now and wondered what he was talking about. Fitz was high-born, rich, and so much fun. She didn’t remember anywhere in her books being instructed that men need reassurance of their worth. The books concentrated on sexual pleasure and helping a husband through a business crisis and then dreaded male menopause, but, oh, they were years and years away from that. Probably he was playing a game. Fitz was inventive.
“I would love you if you were”—she thought for something déclassé, off the board—“Iraqi.”
He laughed. “That is a stretch. Ah, yes, the Middle East, that lavatory of the human race.”
“Wonder what they call us?”
“The Devil’s seed.” His voice became more menacing and he spoke with what he imagined was an Iraqi accent.
One of the fourteen phones in the overlarge house twittered. The harsh ring of the telephone was too cacophonous for Little Marilyn, who believed she had perfect pitch. So she paid bundles of money for phones that rang in bird calls. Consequently her house sounded like a metallic aviary.
Tiffany appeared. “I think it’s your mother, Miz Mim, but I can’t understand a word she’s saying.”
A flash of irritation crossed Marilyn Sanburne Hamilton’s smooth white forehead. She reached over and picked up the phone, and her voice betrayed not a hint of it. “Mother, darling.”
Mother darling ranted, raved, and emitted such strange noises that Fitz put down his napkin and rose to stand behind his wife, hands resting on her slender shoulders. She looked up at her husband and indicated that she also couldn’t understand a word. Then her face changed; the voice through the earpiece had risen to raw hysteria.
“Mother, we’ll be right over.” The dutiful daughter hung up the receiver.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. She just screamed and hollered. Oh, Fitz, we’d better hurry.”
“Where’s your father?”
“In Richmond today, at a mayors’ conference.”
“Oh, Lord.” If Mim’s husband wasn’t there it meant the burden
of comfort and solution rested upon him. Small wonder that Jim Sanburne found so many opportunities to travel.
* * *
13
Those townspeople who weren’t gathered in the post office were at Market Shiflett’s. Harry frantically tried to sort the mail. She even called Susan Tucker to come down and help. Mrs. Hogendobber, positioned in front of the counter, told her gory tale to all, every putrid detail.
A hard scratching on the back door alerted Tucker, who barked. Susan rose and opened the door. Pewter walked in, tail to the vertical, whiskers swept forward.
“Hello, Pewter.”
“Hello, Susan.” She rubbed against Susan’s leg and then against Tucker.
Mrs. Murphy was playing in the open post boxes.
Pewter looked up and spoke to the striped tail hanging out of Number 31. “Fit to be tied over at the store. What about here?”
“Same.”
“I found the hand,” Tucker bragged.
“Everybody knows, Tucker. You’ll probably get your name in the newspaper—again.” Green jealousy swept through the fat gray body. “Mrs. Murphy, turn around so I can talk to you.”
“I can’t.” She backed out of the box, hung for a moment by her paws, and then dropped lightly to the ground.
Usually Susan and Harry were amused by the athletic displays of the agile tiger cat but today no one paid much attention.
Blair called Harry to tell her Rick Shaw had elected not to tear up the cemetery just yet, and to thank her for being a good neighbor.
Naturally, with Blair being an outsider, suspicion immediately fell on him. After all, the severed hands and legs were found in his—well, Herbie’s really—graveyard. And no one would ever suspect Reverend Jones.
The ideas and fantasies swirled up like a cloud of grasshoppers and then dropped to earth again. Harry listened to the people jammed into the post office even as she attempted to complete her tasks. Theories ranged from old-fashioned revenge to demonology. Since no one had any idea of who those body parts belonged to, the theories lacked the authenticity of personal connection.
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