Buried Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  “Eggs, Jane? I scrambled up a mess of them?” asked Lula, still standing at the stove, spatula raised.

  “Johnny who? You know that man out there?”

  “Since he was a boy. John Sullivan. Grew up on the next farm over. Went off to college, didn’t he, Lula? Works for a newspaper now up in Chicago.”

  “He’s a newspaper reporter?” asked Jane. “Does he work for Kankakee Realty, too?”

  “No,” said Lula, “he doesn’t.”

  Jane noted that Lula used present tense and stabbed at her eyes with a tissue when she answered.

  “Why was he wearing an agent’s blazer, I wonder. With Roger Groveland’s name tag,” said Jane.

  “Don’t know,” said Fuzzy. “Maybe he was doing an undercover investigator job like on the news? Like the people who get jobs in restaurants so they can show the filthy kitchens and such.”

  “Don’t be so foolish, Fuzz,” said Lula.

  “What was he doing here?” Jane asked, more to herself than to Fuzzy and Lula. If Munson hadn’t been in here yet to question the Neilsons, how furious was he going to be that Jane was hearing it all first?

  “Don’t know for sure, but I saw him at the roast last night and figured he was visiting his folks and came on by,” said Fuzzy, handing his plate to Lula for seconds.

  Fuzzy spent the next few minutes carefully buttering a piece of toast. He balanced a pat of butter on a knife, carefully spreading it from corner to corner, framing the bread in butter. Then, like an oil painter working on a canvas, he filled in his square with more butter, building it up on the toast so it looked like some dairy farming display, a topographical map carved out of butter. Lula glanced over from the stove and laughed.

  “Stop playing with your food, Fuzz.” She exchanged his buttered toast with a perfectly balanced slice from a plate near the sink. “You sure as heck don’t need to put your cholesterol through the roof again.”

  Fuzzy stared at the toast for a few seconds. He shook his head at Lula and she stared right back at him. He turned the bread upside down, then back around and smiled and took a bite. Lula watched him like a hawk. Jane thought she might grab the butter away, so afraid did she seem that he was going to start doctoring this slice. Fuzzy shook his head again, then retrieved his thoughts about John Sullivan. He told Jane that John was a real go-getter, always on the job. He had been asking everybody there last night if they still wanted an airport and if not what the heck did they want to do with the town.

  “Did he want the airport?” asked Jane.

  “Don’t know why he’d care. Lived up near Chicago somewhere. Farmed a little on weekends with his dad, but never cared for it too much,” said Fuzzy. “I don’t believe he did, do you, Lula?”

  “Can’t say as I can tell what anybody else cares for,” said Lula. “They do one thing, but it’s so they can do something else anyway. He probably farmed so his dad would leave the land to him instead of his brother; then once he got the land, he’d up and sell it right away. Folks do that all the time: throw some dirt up in the air and make it all cloudy so you can’t see the sharp edges of what they really want. Us, we want to grow our vegetables and a few flowers and cook them and eat them and sell the extras.” Lula wiped her hands on her apron. “And maybe sell a little dirt now and then to get some extra money to buy a big-boy bed for our new great-grandson. So he’d know it come from us. And look what happens to us and our farm—just ’cause we know what we want and we do what we want and don’t bother anybody else.”

  Jane saw that Lula was about to cry, but she put the brakes on by putting dishes away and wrapping extra food. She slid the last piece of toast over to her husband.

  “Here. Don’t say I never gave you nothing,” she said, and began running a fresh sink full of hot, soapy water.

  Jane had never heard such a long speech from Lula. Like her mother, Lula was a doer not a talker. When Jane was in her twenties, she had gone a few times to a womens’ discussion group that a colleague at work had begun. “What the hell you talk about with all them women?” Nellie had asked. Jane had told her that they talked about everything … their feelings, their hopes and dreams … and that it was great to have people who listened. Nellie had sniffed and remained silent, and when Jane couldn’t stand the quiet anymore and begged her mother to tell her what she thought about it, Nellie had laughed. “I don’t think anything at all of it. I don’t think anybody goes to that thing because they want to listen, though. You all just want to hear yourselves talk.”

  Nellie had gone on to tell Jane that if they just cleaned a closet or wiped down their kitchen counters or made a pot of soup they were just as likely to feel good about all their hopes. Plus they’d have a meal on the table and nobody else would know all their business.

  When Nellie or Lula gave up any conversation longer than a recipe or a grocery list or a harangue on the way their children dressed, kept house, or raised their children, it was an event. It sure as hell wasn’t because they wanted to hear themselves talk. They weren’t women who wanted that at all.

  Jane considered what Lula said about Johnny Sullivan’s weekend farming. Was he trying to butter up his father in order to inherit the land so he could turn around and sell it? Perhaps Sullivan was asking questions about the airport as an interested heir apparent to a desirable runway location? It sounded like John Sullivan might have been playing reporter or gentleman farmer on weekends in Kankakee, but the real question now was why, last night, was he dressed to play Roger Groveland, Realtor? And was that the role that had finished him, that ended with him playing dead?

  When Jane went back outside, Tim and Charley were engrossed in a serious discussion with Munson. Jane could see the corners of Tim’s mouth twitching, but she wasn’t sure whether he was amused or angry. There was no doubt about Charley’s expression. He was angry. He was using his right hand to count the fingers on his left. It was his tell. When she had first noticed it, Jane thought that it was his way of counting to ten to stay in control of his temper. Charley had denied this, explaining that as he counted, he gave himself reasons for whatever argument he was mounting in a conversation. As Jane walked over to the three men, she saw him start all over at the thumb and realized Charley must have a lot of reasons for the way he felt.

  “You can’t touch those bones anyway. Not your jurisdiction,” said Charley.

  “And whose jurisdiction is it, Professor? Yours?” asked Munson.

  “I believe this site falls under the Human Skeletal Remains Protection Act, and if I’m correct, everything in the vicinity of this site has to remain untouched until we determine …”

  “What do you mean by untouched?” Munson asked, his cell phone in hand.

  “The act forbids anyone from disturbing what might be human remains in unregistered graves—” began Charley.

  “Look, as far as I can see—” cut in Munson.

  “And if I remember the wording of the act correctly, ‘disturbing’ includes excavating, removing, exposing, defacing, mutilating, destroying, molesting, or desecrating any skeletal remains, unregistered graves, and grave markers,” said Charley.

  Munson stopped, considering Charley’s recitation.

  “The way I see it, you have your work to do and I have mine. I am not forbidding you to continue, just hold up for a while. I am also informing you that my people will have to go over this area.” Munson held his hand up to stop Charley from interrupting. “A murder has been committed here, and my duty is to the …” Munson stopped. “Your duty might be protecting the long-dead remains, Professor, but I have to work with what happened last night.”

  “The new body trumps the old bones, Charley,” said Tim, looking back and forth at the two men. “Never thought I’d say this, Detective Munson, but I do believe I agree with you.”

  Jane was only a few feet away from the three men, but only Tim had noticed her; and after he spoke, he looked at her, expecting approval. His look said, see, I can be a good boy and behave even when I want
to drive Munson, the homophobic son-of-a-bitch, crazy.

  “Mr. Lowry,” said Munson, his voice a low growl, “how the hell did you get here?”

  “Isn’t it possible that Charley can continue to examine the site while your people comb the field and the yard?” asked Jane, trying to placate and distract at the same time. “If he limits his work to the immediate area?”

  “This scene is already a mess. There were a hundred people here last night, tramping through the property, dropping plastic forks and napkins. We’ll be lucky to turn up anything of use,” said Munson. “Of course,” he added, “the bones are kind of interesting.”

  Charley looked at Jane. They had been married fifteen years, and if you could average the number of looks, real eyeball-to-eyeball encounters that a married couple has per day—say, conservatively, ten, because meaningful, forget-everything-you’ve-ever-known-and-felt-and-thought-and-lose-yourself-in-my-eyes looks aren’t as common as one might think—that would mean that Jane and Charley had exchanged 53,750 direct looks, and Jane could tell that out of all of them, this one was the one she was meant to recognize.

  Charley’s look was an iron hand clamped over her mouth. No one said anything.

  “Don’t know what to make of someone who shoots somebody dead, then piles up a bunch of bones in their lap,” said Munson.

  Even Tim understood that it was no time to burst into a rousing chorus of “Dem Bones.”

  “Mrs. Wheel, we’ll start our interviews with you up on the porch if you don’t mind.” Munson took her elbow, wanting to guide her away before she could consult with Charley, but she stopped him.

  “Our son is in the house, Detective Munson, and he is naturally upset,” said Jane. “I need to have a word with my husband. I’ll join you in a moment.”

  No need for Munson to know that Nick was calmly munching doughnuts and watching cartoons inside. Jane waited until he was halfway to the house before turning back to Charley and Tim. “What?” “Otto.”

  “Who?” asked Tim.

  “The family cat. Some of his bones are missing.” Charley talked low and fast. “I don’t know anything about the gunshots and time of death or anything, but I’m guessing that whoever piled those bones into our Realtor’s lap did it as an afterthought, carrying the bones over in his pockets or bare hands. I don’t know. Maybe he either dropped them or maybe tried to set them up to make it look like it was something more … I don’t know … ominous.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Tim, “because someone getting shot down dead in a cornfield isn’t really, you know, scary enough.”

  “Shush, Tim,” said Jane. “Charley means that the bones make it seem like a cult crime or something. You know, some kind of sacrifice or something.”

  “Not just that, Janie. Remember, I was up last night. Out of the tent. Over to check on the site. I heard something or someone over there. They’re going to find my footprints leaving the tent, leading them to the table set up by the shed, then going to the path following you. I’d like to think about all this … and see if I can find any bones scattered around. Maybe someone left a trail if they dropped anything they had scooped up from the table,” said Charley.

  “But I think I heard the shot. I thought it was thunder or something. I dozed off, then woke up. I couldn’t get back to sleep,” Jane whispered. “And when I got up and saw you weren’t in the tent, I started down to the cornfield, and I talked to you when you were in the outhouse, remember?”

  “What did I say?” asked Charley.

  “Mrs. Wheel?” said a polite young uniformed officer. “You’re wanted now.”

  “Ocupado,” said Jane.

  “Why would you think I would say that?” “Because that’s what you said. I figured it was a habit from the dig you were on in South America.” Charley shook his head. “What?” Jane asked.

  “I was never in the outhouse,” said Charley.

  Jane had pulled out her cell phone on her way to talk to Munson. She considered it carefully. Would it be Nancy Drew’s best friend now? Would she need George and Bess if she had her trusty link to civilization and police backup? Jane dialed Bruce Oh’s number, wishing she had remembered to ask Nick to record it as a speed-dial number. She knew she could learn how to do it herself, she was sure she could, but the time, the energy, the rapidly decreasing brain cells all seemed better spent on other tasks. Right now, stalling her way up to the porch, though, she realized one number would be so much easier than trying to remember seven. Of course, since it was so early in the morning, Oh would be out taking his morning walk before the world woke up and needed him. Claire would already be up and out at a sale. Jane left her usual cogent message:

  “Hi, hello, I’m in Kankakee, well, outside of the town really, about three miles west at Fuzzy’s farm; and last night I thought I saw a scarecrow fall, but it turns out it’s this man who was misidentified as an old friend, but it’s not. He’s dead and every-thing, the old friend, but he’s not this dead guy, but … damn it. A murder. As usual. Call me.” And as the time’s-up beep sounded, Jane remembered to say, “It’s Jane Wheel.”

  As if he wouldn’t know.

  Jane so badly wanted to know if Munson watched police television programs. Did any of these uniformed people watch those shows, the people running around the farm, armed not only with guns, but also with cell phones, evidence collection kits, and flashlights, which were still being used to peer into and behind bushes, even though it was now a bright, sunlit morning, to investigate Fuzzy and Lula’s tomato plants and cucumber vines? They all looked so unreal, so costumed and made up and rehearsed. Social critics always worried that violent programs desensitized watchers to real violence, but Jane worried more that it made day-to-day, ordinary life less real. Yes, she worried that people believed that the only real reality was now televised and everything else people did from morning to night was a rehearsal for when they would actually get a chance to strut their stuff, when it was scripted, edited, and produced. Is that what television and movies did to the world? Or was it just what television and movies and her previous career producing commercials had done to Jane?

  Munson had asked her in at least three different ways to describe her night. She told him the truth. She woke up. She had been restless. She looked out the cabin window. She may have heard something like thunder. Far away. She saw what she thought was a scarecrow fall down in the cornfield. She went outside to investigate.

  “Alone?”

  “I was sleeping alone in the cabin. Charley and Nick were in the tent.”

  “And you didn’t go wake your husband? Ask him to go with you?”

  Jane was a product of Catholic education. She knew her Ten Commandments and her sins from venial to mortal. And, being a Catholic-educated girl, she knew that it would be easy to tell a lie, confess it, receive absolution, and still arrive, soul intact, at heaven’s gate. On the other hand, as a woman who was as uncertain of her girlhood faith as she was of every other religion she had sampled through college and adulthood, she couldn’t in all honesty trust herself to lie. What if the confession didn’t work the way it was supposed to? What if all those little lies piled up and became a rocklike barricade against getting into the final look-see? What if all those lies and cheats and snide remarks and envies and pouts were all added together and, totaled up, became your number for getting into the biggest house sale of all? Oh my god, what if God made you wait outside the pearly gates until your number was called; and you, with your sinfully high number, watched all the afterlife trappings walk out the gate with the people who had lower numbers—read fewer sins—than you? In life how painful was it to watch the dealers who had slept in their cars walk out of the estate with the Bakelite and the fifties lamps and the vintage tablecloths? How excruciating would purgatory be if it were the longest line to get the best harps and wings?

  Get a grip, Jane told herself. She didn’t believe in wings and harps. Although she had bought an excellent old marimba at auction once, and she did have a
fondness for musical instruments. A harp would be elegant in the sunroom.

  No, she was pretty sure that the Vatican had erased purgatory from the rule books.

  What she had left from catholicism was a conscience, scrupulous and guilty at the same time. When Munson asked a question, she had to answer it truthfully.

  “Yes, I did go to the tent to wake Charley,” Jane said.

  A uniform came and whispered something to Munson. He nodded and rose.

  “To be continued, Mrs. Wheel.”

  The one thing that the police were unable to do with crime-scene tape was block off the scene from view. It might be possible to discourage people from walking through what they hoped was a clue-strewn, answer-laden piece of property, but no one tented it or managed to curtain it off from onlookers. Jane had clear sightlines from which to watch the man and woman who were being escorted to the scarecrow area, as Jane had decided to call the crime scene. Both silver-haired. Both tall and thin. They might have been brother and sister, but Jane knew they were not. John Sullivan’s parents.

  Mr. Sullivan was wearing worn jeans and a plaid shirt. He held a Cub’s baseball hat in one hand and wiped at the corners of his mouth with the other. His wife walked beside him, unbowed. Jane noted that she had remarkable posture, and when she looked down at the face that an officer uncovered on the ground, her shoulders sagged only slightly, then rose up to their former position. She turned away and began walking back toward the driveway. John Sullivan’s father lingered a moment. He waved the cap a bit and said something to the officer, who shook his head. Jane watched as he stretched the cap out toward the body of his son and realized, in that moment, that it was his son’s hat. When the police had shown up at the Sullivans’ door after Fuzzy had finally told someone the name of the dead man in the field, after someone had finally listened to him, someone had fetched Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan and driven them directly to the scene, not waiting for a morgue and cool concrete floors and fluorescent lighting. And Mr. Sullivan had picked up his son’s baseball cap, maybe from a hook by the back door. He had probably clutched it for dear life in the backseat of the police car, wanting to shout to the uniforms whispering in the front, “Can’t be my boy. Not Johnny. I got his cap right here.”