by Neil Plakcy
“I mean you have no reason to nose around in Tony’s investigation.”
I knew enough about women not to argue, even though I felt that my new job managing Friar Lake certainly gave me the impetus to look into who the body belonged to and how it had ended up there. So I just smiled and pointed out the patches of daisies and black-eyed-Susans, and even a stand of raspberry canes beginning to come into fruit.
“It’s really a pretty property,” I said, trying to change the subject.
Lili wasn’t believing me. “Uh-huh,” she said, staring out the passenger window.
I pulled into a cleared space of gravel in front of the chapel. “Rochester’s staying in the car this time,” I said. “I don’t need any more unfortunate discoveries today.”
We both hopped out quickly, closing the doors behind us before Rochester could weasel his way out. I was still barefoot, and the gravel was sharp against my tender soles. The front door of the chapel was locked, which was a good sign. We walked along a concrete path around the corner and through an arched passage into a broad yard that I recognized from the plans. Roses had been trained up the sides of the chapel, and in the silence we could hear the buzz of bees and the chirp of crickets.
“I’m feeling a bit creeped out,” Lili said, rubbing her bare shoulders. “Too many memories of life in war zones coming back. I want to walk around a bit on my own.”
I knew that when Lili was faced with troubling situations, she preferred to approach them through the lens of her camera. I guess we all have our coping mechanisms.
“Try not to get yourself in any more trouble while I’m gone.” To soften the words, she leaned over and kissed my cheek.
She walked back out of the yard, and I began checking the door locks. I found a side entrance into the chapel with a broken lock, and pushed the door in.
The room was cavernous, three stories tall with an arched roof, and lined with hard wooden pews. The light coming through the stained glass windows threw jeweled squares over the solid wood floor. It was spookily quiet except for a low scratching sound.
I stood on the scuffed wooden floor, and realized I’d have to familiarize myself with church architecture pretty quickly.
Through my bare soles I could feel the way thousands of footsteps had smoothed the way before me. I rarely go into churches, except ones that have become historical sites, and I felt like an interloper. I hoped that the souls of all the dead monks and friars who had passed through the place weren’t going to get cranky over Eastern’s plans to secularize the place.
To my right I could see where the two wings branched off, and the rounded space at the far end. The long-gone crucifix left a ghostly shadow on the wall above the dais. That reminded me of the dead body down by the lake. Who was it? If Lili was right about how long the body had been in the ground, that meant the Benedictines had already decamped for western Pennsylvania by the time it was buried.
To the outsider, Bucks County looked like an idyllic place. In the spring, dogwoods and magnolias blossomed, and in the summer bright red strawberries glistened in the U-pick fields and acres of farmland swayed with corn stalks. The fall brought a blaze of color as the leaves changed, and in the winter the landscape was cloaked with a white blanket.
Revolutionary War landmarks dotted the river towns, children rode their bikes along the narrow sidewalks, and McMansions on immaculately groomed acre lots housed wealthy commuters. But pockets of poverty hid around the curves of country roads, and Rick had told me stories of domestic violence and drug abuse in the midst of the suburbs.
I knew enough not to generalize about felons—after all, I was one myself. But even out here in the countryside, people were willing to commit murder to achieve their goals. Whether the body down by the lake belonged to an innocent victim or a hardened criminal, it was still a reminder that danger could lurk around any corner.
I shivered and walked forward. The dais was raised about two feet above the floor, and a beach-ball sized hole loomed in the vertical support wall. The scratching noises were louder, and I worried that animals nested under there. I’d have to hire an exterminator to come in and clear the place out. Great. More displaced souls to haunt the space.
I decided against having a close encounter with any home-protecting wildlife, and returned to the open yard, where I spotted Lili down on her right knee, focusing on the outline of the chapel against the sky. I didn’t want to disturb her, so I walked behind the chapel to a grove of old-growth maples and pines. A doe grazing in the sunshine raised her head, looked at me, and then took off through the woods.
Friar Lake was turning out to be a lot wilder than I’d expected. I walked back to the dormitory building, where I noticed a broken window. I looked through it to a narrow monastic cell. The Benedictines hadn’t left any furniture behind, so the only thing in the room was a closet with an open door. It was going to take a lot of imagination and hard work to make this place into a comfortable retreat. All the emptiness continued to spook me and I turned back to where I’d seen Lili.
She was still there, aiming her camera at the stark outline of the wrought-iron spire against the bright blue sky. She snapped a final shot and stood up as my cell rang.
“Hey, Tony. We’re up at the abbey. We’ll meet you back down at the lakefront.”
I felt silly as I walked beside Lili to the car, tiptoeing over the gravel to avoid cutting my feet. Rochester greeted us as if we’d abandoned him, and I had to push back against his snout to keep him in the rear seat.
As I pulled up next to Tony’s unmarked sedan, I got a good look at him. He hadn’t changed much in the months since we’d last met; he was still tall and dark-haired, in his late forties. He had light-green eyes, which were arresting in combination with his brush-cut dark hair. They gave him a look of intensity that I was sure suspects found unsettling.
Lili and I hopped out of the car, once again leaving Rochester behind. He barked out his resentment as I introduced Lili.
“Pleased to meet you,” Tony said, shaking her hand. Then he looked to me. “Where’s the body?”
“Around by the lake,” I said. Lili and I led him through the muck, around the corner of the house. I’d have to wipe down my bare feet again, but at least the grass was soft and spongy. I pointed. “It’s pretty mucky out there. Be careful.”
Tony looked down at his black dress shoes, and I think that’s the first time he realized that I was barefoot.
“Crap,” he said. “I usually keep a pair of boots in my trunk but the sole started separating so I had Tanya take them to the shoemaker’s to be restitched.”
I’d heard about Tony’s wife when he investigated a murder at Eastern during the winter, but I had never met her. I knew she was a nurse, and that he had a young son. But we’d never become friends, the way I had with Rick.
Tony frowned as he bent down and took off his shoes and socks, then rolled the legs of his black dress pants up to the knee. He looked so comical I had to struggle not to laugh. His top half didn’t match the bottom at all—a perfectly pressed dress shirt, with a red and blue striped tie held in place by a diamond clip, contrasted with the little-boy look of rolled cuffs and bare feet. He walked through the muck, and I could hear it squishing under his feet.
He pulled a small digital camera from his pocket and took a number of photos, as Lili and I stood in the background and watched him work. When he’d covered all the angles, he put the camera back in his pocket and withdrew a pair of bright blue rubber gloves. He slipped them on and crouched down next to the upturned hand, which reminded me more and more of something from a low-budget horror movie.
Tony gingerly scraped away dirt covering the skeletonized arm, digging deeper the farther back he went. When he reached the shoulder, he gave up and stood. He peeled the gloves off as he walked back to us.
“I get a bad a feeling about this,” he said. “Looks like a body dump to me. How long did you say the property was abandoned?”
“The Benedi
ctines moved out about three months ago,” I said.
“Finding an unidentified grave on a property where there’s a regular cemetery is suspicious enough for me to order an exhumation,” he said. “I’m going to have to isolate this area and then make the arrangements with the ME’s office. This is going to be a big headache, you know that?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Can’t you just call the Benedictines and see if anyone in the order knows who it is?”
“I’ll do that, but I’m willing to bet they know nothing about it. Give me a hand with the crime scene tape?” he asked. “As long as you’re here and your feet are already mucky.”
“Sure.”
While he walked back to his car to get the tape, I turned to Lili. “So much for our pleasant little excursion out into the countryside.”
“Better to find this body now, than later, when you’ve got some kind of conference going on the property,” Lili said. “And better for whoever that is in the ground, too.”
A chill ran up my spine. “You’re right.” I took her hand and squeezed. “I’m glad you were here with me.”
“For a mild-mannered college administrator you lead a very interesting life,” Lili said. “When I gave up photojournalism to come teach at Eastern I worried I might get bored out here in the boondocks. Then I met you.” She smiled. “You definitely keep things interesting.”
Tony returned with a roll of yellow tape and a couple of wooden stakes. I helped him secure a perimeter around the location of the grave. “You guys can go now,” he said. “I’ll be here for a while longer.”
“Let me know if I can help you with anything else,” I said.
Lili and I returned to the car, where I cleaned my feet off once more. As we backed down the driveway I saw Tony leaning against his sedan, talking on his cell phone.
Rochester lay down on the back seat and pouted, annoyed to have been left out of the fun, as I drove barefoot back to Stewart’s Crossing. “There’s most likely a body there, don’t you think?” I asked. “I mean, more than just the hand and the arm.”
“Most likely,” Lili said.
“I wonder if Tony will be able to match the remains to any missing persons report. Those have got to be computerized, right?”
“Steve. You’re not going to start hacking into police databases checking for missing people, are you? You’re not a cop and if you do anything like that you’re going to get into big trouble.”
“I know. I’m just curious, is all. I mean, we don’t even know if the person is male or female yet, how old, or any of that stuff.”
I turned to look at her. “What if that’s not the only body there? Suppose a serial killer has been burying his victims back there?”
“Stop. You’re getting downright gruesome.”
I concentrated on driving back to River Bend, though I felt like I was pouting just as much as Rochester was.
The first thing I did when we got there was wash my feet and put on clean shoes and socks. Then Lili fixed us dinner while I took Rochester for a long walk. He peed a lot but nothing else came out, and I was grateful for that. When we got back I found that Lili had boiled up some chicken for Rochester, and added white rice. “This’ll help settle his stomach,” she said. “And I made enough so you’ll have it for a few days.”
“How did you know that?” I asked. “You’ve never had a dog.”
“I’ve been around the world, Steve,” she said, as she drained a big pot of pasta for us. “I picked up a few tricks along the way.”
“I’ve noticed.” I stepped up behind her and kissed the nape of her neck.
She pushed back at me playfully, and we both laughed.
7 – The Strange One in the Bunch
That evening, Lili and I relaxed on my king-sized bed together, both of us preparing for working with the College Connection by reading The Hunger Games. By the time Rochester was bumping his head against me for his pre-bedtime walk, my mind was buzzing with ideas for a seminar with the CC kids.
“This book is cool,” I said. I closed it and pushed Rochester away so I could find my shoes. “I love the whole dystopian theme. I could get them talking about how this kind of thing could happen.”
“Says the man who didn’t even want to read the book to start with.”
“Just because someone was making me read it,” I said. I wondered about that. Was it that I was so far removed from being a student? Or did I just not like people telling me what I could and couldn’t do? Was that a remnant of life behind bars, or had I always been that way?
“Remember, these kids are coming from the inner city,” Lili said, sitting up. “They’ve probably got a good idea of what life is like already for these characters. You don’t want to talk down to them. Try and let them lead the conversation.”
“This won’t be my first time at the rodeo,” I said. “I do know how to teach.”
“I’m not saying you don’t. Just that these kids are different from the ones you teach at Eastern. They’re younger, they’re probably more jaded, and they see difficult things all the time.”
“Oh, you mean like finding dead bodies?” I said. “Creepy hands rising up from unmarked graves?”
I turned my hand over in a mimicry of the one we’d found at Friar Lake.
“That’s just tragic,” she said. “Get the dog’s leash so we can get moving.”
We walked Rochester together, and I was glad to have Lili there for company. Despite my joking, I had been unsettled by that disembodied hand in the muck at Friar Lake, and didn’t want to worry about every stray noise in the dark.
After Rochester had left all his doggy messages, Lili and I went back up to the bedroom, where we put the books aside and enjoyed each other's company before we went to sleep.
The next morning, Rochester gobbled more of Lili’s chicken and rice, and I continued to give him the medication the vet had prescribed. I wasn’t taking any chances on a repeat performance. We played out the same routine – I hid the pill in a chunk of peanut butter, which he ate, then he licked my finger clean. Then he spit the pill out, and I had to drop it down his throat. You’d think one of us would learn.
I liked the fact that Lili had begun leaving a few clothing and toiletry items at my house. It made our relationship seem that much more solid, and when she stayed over she was able to get ready for work with me and we could ride up to Eastern together.
As I pulled into a parking space behind Fields Hall, Lili said, “Remember, I’m going into Philly this afternoon to see my friend’s gallery show, and then dinner with some people. I’ll call you when I get home.”
“Have fun.” We kissed and then got out of the car.
“Remember what I said about thinking this job offer through,” Lili said. “Don’t just jump at it because John Babson says so. You have skills and you have options.”
“I wish I had your confidence in my abilities,” I said. “But don’t worry, I’ll think.”
As I walked Rochester to my office, I thought about what Lili had said. Did she really have faith in me – or did she just have her own vision of the person I could be? That was the case with Mary, for sure. It took me a long time to understand that when we met, she saw me as a ball of clay she could mold into her idea of the perfect husband. When I resisted her efforts – to get an MBA like my friend Tor or to seek a promotion at work—she got angry. Part of the reason why our marriage failed was because I couldn’t conform to the man Mary wanted me to be.
I didn’t want to recreate that pattern with Lili. I needed her to see me as who I was, warts and all. While Rochester sniffed around the base of a pine tree, I wondered if what I saw was the real Liliana Weinstock. Because we shared a Jewish background, she was familiar to me in many ways; but because she had been born in Cuba, and grown up in a Latin-influenced household in the US, she was also exotic. That blend was fascinating to me.
She’d been married twice and divorced both times, and had pursued a career in photojournalism around the w
orld before choosing to become an academic. Sometimes her intellect awed me; she had a PhD, took amazing photos and then manipulated them into awe-inspiring art through her computer skills. I had relied on my intelligence and skill with words and computers to slide through life and had overcome the brief interruption provided by the California penal system to resume my lifelong pattern by falling into my jobs at Eastern.
It seemed Lili had deliberately made herself into the person she was, while I had simply taken what came to me. In her view, at least, I was continuing in that same pattern by accepting the job at Friar Lake. Could she accept that I was that kind of guy—or would she give up on me the way Mary had?
Those were troubling questions so early in the morning. I was glad that I had a meeting scheduled with Joe Capodilupo, the director of physical plant for Eastern, so I could avoid considering them. I left Rochester snoozing in my office when I walked over to meet with Joe.
His department was headquartered in a converted carriage house at the back of the Eastern campus, near the road that led down to Friar Lake. The quaint stone and shingle exterior was a contrast to the bland efficiency of the inside. To the left, beyond a receptionist’s desk, was a series of cubicles and one big office. Tall metal storage cabinets lined the other wall. From the ones with open doors, I could see they were used to store some of the equipment that kept the campus humming.
There were nearly twenty buildings at Eastern, from the original stone ones like Fields Hall and the carriage house to the 1960s-era dormitories like Birthday House and the brand new, pill-bottle-shaped Granger Hall, donated by a pharmaceutical magnate, which housed the visual and performing arts. Every building had its own maintenance issues, and Joe supervised a team of engineers, plumbers, handymen and groundskeepers. It was a function of the college that students took for granted—until a toilet leaked, a cockroach was spotted or a boiler failed on a cold winter day.
Joe was a gruff, heavyset guy with white hair and a white beard, and he looked like he’d have been at home with the Benedictines if you slapped one of those black robes on him. He had already been involved in hiring the architect to do the drawings I’d seen, and had a contractor ready to get started as soon as the permits were approved. He was going to handle the actual renovation process.