by Rain, J. R.
Myself, I was here for work.
Sipping a latte something or other from Starbucks, I made my way through the cemetery, picking my way carefully behind grave markers. I’ve never put much stock into the supernatural (well, that is, until recently...long story), but walking over somebody’s grave just seemed wrong. After all, everything they had ever done and everything they ever were was summed up into one spot of earth. The least someone could do was avoid walking over them.
Like a good investigator, I already had Evelyn’s plot location in hand, and after studying a map of the grounds upon entering the cemetery, I had a fairly good idea where I was going.
Fairly. This was still confusing as hell.
My breath misted before me. Steam billowed up from that little hole in the Starbucks lid. Birds flitted overhead and the sun was rising to the east, casting my elongated shadow over the gently sloping hill. Hard to believe that within such a beautiful hillside were thousands upon thousands of corpses.
An old poem came to mind: The ghosts of the tribe/ Crouch in the nights beside the ghost of a fire/ They try to remember the sunlight/ But light has died out of their skies.
But not on this hillside. Here, the morning sun blazed full force, galvanizing the dead.
I took in a lot of air and found breathing suddenly difficult. It was impossible for me to walk through any cemetery without thinking of the little boy I had condemned into one for eternity. My little boy.
When I found my breath again, I moved on, feet crunching over the dewy grass. Soon, after a handful of false starts, I found the correct row, and five minutes after that, I was standing over a freshly turned grave.
The casket, I knew, was gone. It was now marked evidence somewhere. Grave robbing is serious business. No one wants to think they’re loved ones may not be where they’re supposed to be. Although cranky and bitchy, I knew that Hammer was still approaching this case seriously. Except he was already overworked as it was. I wasn’t overworked. I was underworked if anything. And Roxi was right. The last thing I needed was to take on a charity case.
Say that to my conscience.
I got into this business to help. To give back. To heal. To stop the pain. To ease the pain.
To be anything other than what I had been before.
A small wind, which flapped my loose jeans at my ankles, brought with it the subtler scents of nature. But mostly I smelled the freshly turned soil at my feet.
What the hell was going on here?
I knelt down and looked closely at the ground around me, picturing in my mind what must have happened here. Someone, or perhaps many someones, had dug up the body and removed it from this very spot. Later, the grave had been officially exhumed and found to be empty.
I considered the possibility that perhaps her body never made it to the grave site. Seemed a good question, and one that I would follow up on.
For now, though, I studied the grave site, noting where a tractor had recently sat. No doubt a small crane had been used to raise coffin. No doubt the caretakers also used some sort of backhoe to dig up the site. And, for all I knew, there was some sort of machine that could do both. The Ford Gravedigger 1000 or something. Digs, lifts and buries—all in one.
I stood and walked around the site, not sure what I was looking for, but keeping my eyes on the ground, looking for anything that stood out. Nothing stood out. No graverobbing business cards left behind. No broken-handled shovels. No deep shoe impression with, say, a rounded inside heel to indicate someone had recently walked through here with a noticeable limp.
I stood on the hillside and soaked in the sun. A bluish light seemed to dance before me, but that was probably just an odd refraction of the sunlight, the mist and the green grass.
The blue light was smallish, about the size of a little boy. It seemed to hover before me briefly, before I blinked and it disappeared.
If it had been there at all.
Chapter Seven
I was in a strange office.
It was the Forest Lawn’s groundskeeper’s office, and it was a little creepy. There were exactly three open coffins lined up along the far wall. Mercifully, the coffins were empty. There was a pile of marble grave markers on one side of his desk, and a pile of bronze markers on the other side his desk. The bronze markers were empty. Meaning, they were awaiting names to be engraved. Names of those who were not yet dead. Someone, somewhere was going to die, and his name was going to appear on that bronze plaque.
Creepy.
The caretaker was a middle-aged man with thick glasses. Surprisingly, there wasn’t dirt under his fingernails and there weren’t clumps of it tracked in from the outside, either.
“Are all cemetery caretakers as clean as you?” I asked.
He asked me to repeat what I had said since I tend to talk beneath the normal hearing range. I spoke up a little louder, always a little nervous at this point in a conversation. It’s hell being shy.
He grinned and sat back, which immediately put me at ease. “Ah, yes, the stereotypical myth of cemetery caretakers perceptually covered in clumpy graveyard soil. Actually, very few of us stick our fingers in the stuff. We have equipment for that.”
“Could you describe the day that Evelyn Drake was exhumed?”
“You get right to it, don’t you?” he said.
“There are graves to dig.”
“You got that right,” he said. “Anyway, it was a weird day.”
“I bet. Were you there when the casket was opened?”
“I was nearby.”
“What happened when the casket was opened?”
“Shit hit the fan.”
“Because it was empty.”
“Yup.”
“Where’s the casket now?”
“In the back.”
“The police didn’t confiscate it?”
“Nope. But it’s roped off. We were told not to let anyone near it.”
I showed him Detective Hammer’s card. He took it from me and called the number. A few exchanges later and the caretaker was hanging up again. “He says you’re reliable enough.”
“He’s always thought highly of me.”
“But he said not to touch anything.”
I felt my gorge rise at the thought of touching the casket. I’m a private eye, after all, not a medical examiner. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Chapter Eight
My life is weird, I thought, as the groundskeeper led me through a rear wood shop where a guy with goggles was actually building a coffin.
I learned that the cemetery offered these simplified boxes to those who could not afford the more expensive wooden caskets. I found the whole business of death unnerving. The coffin builder stopped working and watched us quietly as we moved through his shop. Saw dust rested lightly on his shoulder and there was a nail in his mouth. His eyes were impossibly big behind the goggles. The hair on my neck was standing on end.
I nodded politely and pardoned myself as we moved past him. He made no sound or movement. Instead he watched us until we exited through a side door. The hair on my neck and shoulders prickled.
“Why do I feel like I just walked onto the set of a horror movie?” I asked in the next room, shivering a little. A very discomfiting experience, to say the least.
“Probably because Boyd is about as weird as they come,” said the caretaker. And I figured that if a cemetery caretaker was telling me someone was weird, well, you could damn well take that to the bank.
We walked through a storage room full of gardening equipment...and then I saw it. Lying flat on the ground with the lid closed was a freshly exhumed coffin. Yellow police tape encircled it and the staff themselves had placed some cones around it.
With the steady—and disturbing—sounds of coffin-making going on behind us, I found myself slowly circling another eternal bed for the dead.
I said, “How often does your cemetery exhume graves?”
“Not often.”
“How much is not often?”
<
br /> “Once every other year or so.”
“Was there anything unusual about this exhumation?”
“Other than the coffin being empty? No. It was a routine dig.”
The caretaker stood off to the side of the cones. He looked bored and a little nervous. I would be nervous, too, if a coffin showed up empty on my watch.
“Have you ever experienced anything like this before?” I asked.
“A missing body? No.”
“Have you heard of any recent cases of grave robbing?”
“Not at the cemeteries, no. There were a few cadavers stolen from a research facility over at UCLA, and there were a few misplaced cadavers at a nearby crematorium, but that’s all I’ve heard.”
I nodded like this all sounded normal. Yesterday I had been sitting in my office, wondering if my phone would ring. Today I was circling an empty coffin in a creepy back room of a cemetery.
Yeah, my life is weird.
“Other than the corpse being missing, was there any indication of foul play?” I asked.
“If you’re asking if the grave looked like it had been freshly turned, the answer is no. There was old-growth grass.”
“Can I see inside the coffin?”
“The detective said not to mess with it.”
“I won’t mess with it. I’m just going to look.”
The caretaker looked long and hard at me. The back room was mostly dark, although a few open doors permitted the bright morning sun in. A single dusty, yellow bulb was on overhead. The caretaker continued staring at me behind his thick glasses. There was sweat on his brow, even though the morning was still fairly cool. If the guy wanted to pull out a nail gun and shoot me between the eyes and then bury me in an undisclosed plot in the cemetery, no one would ever know.
“Fine,” he said. “The detective seemed to know you, and I’m not the police. You fuck things up, you can answer to LAPD, not me. I’ll be in my office.”
He left the room and I went over to the casket, walking between the cones and stepping over the police tape. I didn’t know much about caskets, but it was obvious to me that this one was nice. If I had to guess, I would say the stained, polished wood was solid cherry. Presently, there were clumps of dirt embedded in the various grooves and fittings, caked especially where the poles, the long wooden handles, lay against the sides. Soil wafted up strongly from the whole thing. I thought I would smell death, too, but I didn’t. Or maybe, hanging out here all morning, I was already getting used to it.
I stood over the casket for a good minute before I mustered the courage to open it. I took in some air, reached down, grabbed the wooden lip and lifted....
I held my breath, holding the open lid, and could not have been more relieved to see that the coffin was clean. Not perfectly clean. There was some darkish stains that could have been soil or even make up. Or perhaps even hair dye. But all in all, I had gotten lucky. A good thing, too, since my pumpkin scone was hovering somewhere between my heart and throat. I swallowed hard, forcing it down and went to work examining the inside of the coffin.
I wondered how thoroughly the interior of the coffin had been examined, and decided probably not too much. Once the coffin had been found to be empty there had probably been an initial investigation, and then the case was sent off to Hammer. A missing corpse, for a busy L.A. homicide detective, ranks fairly low on the to-do list.
I found myself drawn to the cushions in the top half lid; that is, the part of the casket that would cover the face and upper torso. The material here was thickly padded silk, and I shortly discovered something odd. The padding here was compressed somehow. Smashed. I had no explanation for it, other than the mortician might have damaged it during the funeral preparation, or perhaps the body itself had bloated during the decaying process, or even the crane they used to lower the casket had swung about, shifting the body, causing pressure on the padding.
I didn’t know. But I knew that pressure was one thing, this was another. This was smashed. By my estimation, the area in question was directly above where her chest would have been. Most of the padding here was soft, except the small area, perhaps a diameter of six inches, where it was pressed down noticeably.
I stood straight, hands on hips, perplexed.
Was this simply an irregularity in the design? A place where the cushion was attached to the wood behind it, perhaps? I reached down again but could not find a seam. But I did find something else.
I reached into my jeans pocket and extracted my key chain. And from it I selected a little light, which I turned on. I aimed the light on the depressed cushion and leaned in a little closer.
Ah. There was a tear. Very faint. And a slight discoloration to the fabric.
I stood straight again, frowning. I considered the ramifications of what I was seeing and feeling. Had the grave robbers caused the damage? Had the body even made it into the grave? Or had it been stolen, let’s say, before the burial?
Too many questions. Too much gorge, which I continued to fight. Damn pumpkin scone.
A thought occurred to me. A really horrible thought that made my heart race and sweat break out on my brow. I knew what I had to do next. I had to test my theory, even if to discount it. I paced the big storage area. Hammering from the next door wood shop seemed to keep pace with my creaking footfalls.
This is nuts, I thought.
I continued pacing.
Seriously nuts. I don’t get paid enough for this shit.
Hell, I’m not getting paid at all, tacos notwithstanding.
But a young man needed help, needed answers.
I stopped pacing and moved over to the casket. I took in a lot of air. And I mean a lot of air.
And then I climbed inside.
Chapter Eight
Fifteen minutes later, I was still shaking as I drove my nondescript Camry out of the cemetery, and merged into traffic on Highway 134.
I needed a drink. Bad.
But I haven’t touched the stuff since the accident two years earlier. Nor would I, but now, in this situation, I saw the benefit of having one or two drinks. Anything to help me come to terms what had happened back in the cemetery storage room.
Back in the casket.
Traffic picked up a little and I applied more gas. My arms were still shaking. I took a deep, shuddering breath. On me was a smell I couldn’t shake. Soil and dirt and something else. Death.
I needed a drink.
The casket had been snug. Although it had clearly been built for a woman, it was surprisingly comfortable. The makers had not held back on the padding, either.
Prior to climbing in I had examined the lid’s closing mechanism. There was nothing on it that would indicate it would lock from the inside. It seemed to swing open and shut readily enough.
Once inside the casket, I reached up and lowered the lid slowly.
Sealing myself in.
Traffic was backing up as the 134 East merged with the 5 South. Someone honked. Someone answered with another honk. A car nearby was thumping the bass. I ignored them all.
As I shut the lid, an overwhelming sense of panic overcame me and immediately pushed the lid back open, relieved beyond words that the lid had opened easily enough.
Thank God.
Lowering it again, I lay back on the slightly dirty pillow, my skin crawling, and certain that I was going to heave at any minute. But in the meantime, I went to work. I turned on my key chain light again, casting a powerful blue-white beam into the enclosed space.
I was all too aware that I was lying in something that was meant to be buried six feet deep. In something that was supposed to contain the corpse of a murdered young woman. I was all too aware that this disturbingly cozy box was supposed to have gone undisturbed for perhaps all eternity.
All of it added up to some serious goosebumps, shivers, and an inability to control my breathing.
I was on the 5 Freeway now, moving faster, but knowing the freeway could stop at any moment—as it suddenly did now. I drummed
my fingers on my steering wheel as I relived those final moments in the casket.
With my key chain light casting an eerie blue light in a setting that didn’t need to be any more eerie, I noted there was just enough space for me to raise my right arm. Which I did.
Aiming the small light with my left hand, I raised my right fist and placed it where it would have been most comfortable knocking on the inside of the casket.
It landed, of course, in the same area of the depressed cushion. The area of the slight discoloration. Someone, I was certain, had been knocking from the inside of the casket.
Breathing hard, I opened the blade to my small pocketknife. Hammer’s evidence, be damned. I cut through the fabric of the cushion above my chest, and soon spread it open, revealing the unpolished wood beneath.
The wood behind the cushion was split and seriously damaged.
And when I raised the lid and sat up, gasping for fresh air, I was not too surprised to see Boyd the coffin-maker standing inside the storage room doorway, watching me.
Chapter Nine
Dr. Vivian Carter was recommended by a new friend of mine, an older investigator I had recently worked with on an unusual case a few weeks back.
Aaron King, who also specialized in finding the missing, had produced her card and tucked it in my shirt pocket. He said only that she would help me, and that she was helping him, too. I hadn’t asked for help and I had been mildly offended, but who was I kidding? I was a royal mess, and an old guy like Aaron saw through my feeble charade.
Now I was sitting across from her in a lounge chair, unable to meet her direct gaze. She was a lovely woman, older than me by perhaps five or ten years. But I wasn’t here to admire her loveliness. I was here because my life was spinning out of control.
“How are you, Mr. Spinoza?”
“I’ve been better.”
The light from her desk lamp reflected off her own thick glasses. Her hands were folded neatly in front of her. She was unmoving and stoic, but also so calm that I found my shyness slipping away quickly. She tilted her head slightly to the right and some of the desk lamp light caught along her slightly upturned nose.