Grave Errors

by Carol J. Perry

  “What made James think someone in Florida was trying to kill him? And who is ‘someone’?”

  “Chief didn’t tell me the details, but Billy thinks it has something to do with Happy Shores. Chief’s not so sure. Me either. The M.E. hasn’t come up with cause of death for James Dowgin yet, but it seems kind of unlikely that he’d die of natural causes in a public cemetery, doesn’t it?”

  “Emily and James both worked for Happy Shores,” I said, helping myself to a second egg roll. “And they both took soil samples from the wild woods area. And now they’re both dead. What if they found something wrong with the dirt? Something really bad?”

  “Checked with city hall. All of the soil and water tests came back okay. Main problem with the mall site seems to be that it might be displacing some pileated woodpeckers or snail darters or something.”

  “I know, but I keep thinking about that trowel full of dirt. Aunt Ibby has been doing some more research on soil contamination. She has another book for you. Shall I call her and see if she’s ready to come up? At least hear what she’s got to say about it?”

  “Okay with me.” He gave a noncommittal shrug, then grinned. “Tell her we have plenty of crab Rangoon.”

  I phoned my aunt and by the time I’d set another place at the table there was a gentle knock on the kitchen door. “I’ll get it,” Pete said.

  Aunt Ibby carried a slim dark red book under her left arm and balanced a pie pan in her right hand. “Key lime pie,” she said, putting the pie with its mile-high meringue on the counter and handing the book to Pete. “Here. It’s a nineteen-twenty self-published memoir. I found it just this morning in the genealogy department. A retired World War I soldier named Charlie Putnam wrote it. I think it will answer some questions. I put a bookmark in the chapter I think will interest you both. My goodness, it smells good in here. Is that the crab Rangoon?”

  My aunt investigated the assorted open cartons of Asian delights, concentrating mainly on the golden brown, crab and cream cheese filled wontons. I cut myself a slice of pie and concentrated on that. Pete put down his chop sticks and opened the red book, focusing his concentration on the bookmarked chapter.

  Within about half a minute, he pushed his chair back, put the book down and stared across the table at my aunt. “Holy crap, Ms. Russell,” he said. “Have you told anybody else about this?”

  CHAPTER 35

  “Not a soul,” my aunt said, placing a plump wonton on her plate. “Not even Maralee. Saved it for you.”

  “This is dynamite—if it’s true,” he said.

  “Of course Sergeant Charlie Putnam is long gone,” she said, “and I doubt that there are any surviving witnesses to his story, but it surely has a ring of truth to it, doesn’t it?”

  “What is it?” I wanted to know. “What’s dynamite?”

  Pete picked up the book, opened it to the marked section and, wordlessly, handed it across the table to me.

  “Don’t get any of that meringue on it, dear,” my librarian aunt warned, moving my plate out of the way. “I borrowed it from genealogy. They’re very picky.”

  The section of interest was approximately in the middle of the book. A quick peek at a couple of the preceding pages showed me that this particular volume of Sergeant Putnam’s memoir covered his army days between 1918 and 1920.

  In 1918, when the United States was still fighting in the trenches of Europe, Salem was apparently not a bad place for a young soldier to be. There was a serious influenza epidemic going on, but Sergeant Putnam had escaped its ravages, and wrote about how much he enjoyed the city’s motion picture theaters, the vaudeville shows and the roller skating rinks. He mentioned that the military, facing chemical weapons for the first time, had leased property in various Massachusetts counties, to establish laboratories and testing sites where researchers could mix poisons and test the substances’ killing potential. It was at one of these sites—in Salem—that young Charlie Putnam served his country.

  In 1920, after the armistice was signed Charlie wrote that the government closed down the project. There was no more need for chemical weapons. He reported in his memoir that he and his buddies dug deep pits behind their barracks and buried artillery shells and glass jugs full of lethal compounds and that was that.

  There was a grainy black-and-white photo of the young soldier in his uniform standing in front of rows of what looked like hundreds of glass bottles. A long barracks building was in the background.

  I looked up from the book. “You think that Charlie was stationed in the wild woods?”

  My aunt nodded. “Sure do, though it probably wasn’t all woods back then. There aren’t any records I could find of the testing labs or the disposals. But there was a record of a small, fifty-acre farm being leased to the army for housing troops. It appears to have been located just about in the center of what we call the wild woods today. I believe the mall site is a little bigger than fifty acres but not by much.”

  Pete caught my eye. “See what I mean? This is dynamite. If that mall site is contaminated with poison gas or God knows what, there’s no way they can start building anything there.”

  I finished the thought. “If Emily Alden and James Dowgin discovered something toxic in the soil samples they took, they probably reported it to the Shoreses.”

  “Bingo,” Aunt Ibby said. “Do you have any idea what it would cost to clean up a mess like that?”

  “Millions, I’d guess,” Pete said.

  “Many millions,” Aunt Ibby agreed. “Did you get fortune cookies, dear?”

  I passed the blue-and-white bowl to her. “That could be why Happy and Trudy are so anxious to get the grader and cement truck to work. Maybe they know exactly where the bottles were buried and they plan to bury them for good. Under a parking lot.”

  “All this is going to be hard to prove,” Pete sounded worried. “We’ll have to get permission to do some more soil tests.”

  “You said the tests had all come back okay,” I said. “My friend at city hall told me the same thing. Maybe we’re wrong about all this.”

  Aunt Ibby selected a fortune cookie and passed the bowl to me. “The initial testing doesn’t cover every inch of huge acreage, you know. It’s possible that Emily and James just happened to dig on Charlie’s waste pit. If the army didn’t record what went on there, there’d have been no reason to do an active search for bombs and poisonous chemicals. Nobody alive knew anything about it.”

  “The dust-up at city hall about the birds could keep the construction tied up for a while,” I said. “Might give us enough time to get more tests done. That’s if we knew exactly where to dig.”

  “There’s no we here, Lee. You promised to keep out of it, remember? That’s even more important now that there could be poison gas implicated.” Pete frowned. “But I’ll bet you’re right about the location.”

  “If Happy and Trudy do know where the toxic dump is, it must be somewhere within the space where they plan to pour the paving for the parking lot.”

  “Big area,” he said.

  “I wonder,” Aunt Ibby said, “if the city hall has records of the land they leased to the army during World War One.”

  Pete snapped his fingers. “Wouldn’t be a bit surprised. I’ll put somebody on it first thing tomorrow. Say, did either of you watch the weather tonight? Any more rain coming our way?”

  Aunt Ibby nodded. “Sure is. That tropical storm, Penelope, is working its way up the coast. It’s already at the outer banks of the Carolinas. We’ll be getting bands of rain from it by tomorrow or the next day. Wanda says we may even be under a hurricane watch before long.”

  “The rain may postpone the groundbreaking ceremony they’re planning, and the birds’ rights protesters will delay things even more.” Pete helped himself to a fortune cookie and passed the bowl to me. “I’ll see what the chief wants to do about getting more samples taken. It’s still private property you know, so without proof of anything illegal going on, we may have a hard time with this.” />
  “Everything happens for a reason,” Aunt Ibby said.

  “What?”

  She waved a tiny slip of paper. “My fortune. ‘Everything happens for a reason.’ What does yours say?”

  I opened mine. “‘Finish the work on hand,’” I read. “Good advice I guess. Yours, Pete?”

  “‘If you are happy you are successful.’ Can’t argue with that one,” he said. “I’ll be even happier with a big slice of that pie.”

  “No problem.” I cut a generous slice of pie for Pete and set out coffee mugs for all of us. The conversation turned from toxic waste dumps and the Dowgin brothers to plans for my class’s Day of the Dead celebration. I remembered to tell Aunt Ibby about the sugar skull cookie idea and she agreed to help as I’d known she would.

  It was still early when I’d packed the last of the Chinese food into a covered bowl, and wrapped the remaining couple of slices of pie in foil for Pete to take with him to work in the morning. The dishes were done, the kitchen cleaned up and Aunt Ibby and O’Ryan had left us to go downstairs to watch Jeopardy.

  Pete looked at the clock. “Too late for a movie, and we sure don’t need any more food. Want to go for a ride before it starts to rain?”

  “Good idea,” I said. “Where to?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we’ll just ride around until we get lost.”

  “That might be fun,” I said. “I’ll get my coat. Let’s go.”

  Carefully locking the doors behind us, we left via the back stairs and hurried through the yard to Pete’s car parked in the driveway. He held the passenger side door open for me, and I paused a moment to look at the fence where I’d sometimes seen the white cat, Frankie. She wasn’t there.

  Pete noticed. “Looking for that cat?”

  “Kind of,” I admitted. “She creeps me out when I do see her, and I worry about her when I don’t.”

  “Not much point in worrying about cats,” he said. “All the ones I’ve ever met are pretty independent. They do as they please, go where they want. Anyway, they have nine lives.” He climbed into the driver’s seat and we backed out onto Oliver Street. “How many of his lives do you think O’Ryan has used up?”

  “I don’t even want to think about that,” I told him. “We have no idea how old he is or—as Aunt Ibby would say—who his people are.”

  We turned onto Bridge Street, heading toward Beverly. “Let’s swing by the wild woods,” Pete said, taking a right onto a narrow road. There was no street lamp on the corner, and no identifying sign giving the name of the street. I didn’t recall that there ever had been.

  There were a few cars with their lights off parked along the edge of the street. “Just kids making out,” Pete said with a grin. “A cruiser comes by every hour or so just to be sure everything’s okay. Look, babe. There are lights on again in the diaper laundry. Let’s check it out.”

  There were still a few sections of cracked paving in front of and next to the blue building. Pete pulled into what I guessed must be the remnants of a parking lot for the old diaper delivery trucks. There was a large dump truck parked there, just below a long wooden loading platform. Bright light shone from a large roll-up door and we heard the clank of metal-on-metal as two men tossed sections of pipes and pieces of ductwork from the platform into the waiting truck bed.

  “They’re salvaging what they can before the demolition begins,” Pete said. “Looks like copper pipe there. That’ll bring a few dollars. Mind if I stop and speak to those guys for a minute?”

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  He climbed out and I rolled the window down so I could hear what was being said. Nosy me. One of the men reached down from the platform and handed Pete a piece of paper which he glanced at, nodded, smiled and handed back. The other man kept tossing things into the truck. Noisy things that kept me from overhearing anything. Then Pete turned back toward where I waited, waved to the men and called. “Good luck with the tubs,” and climbed back into the car.

  “What was all that about?” I asked. “I tried to listen.”

  “Of course you did. I saw you sticking your head out the window.” He chuckled. “Don’t worry. You didn’t miss anything. I checked their paperwork. They have permission from the owners to strip the place.”

  “What was that you said about tubs?”

  “Seems the laundry washed the diapers in a series of gigantic tubs in very hot water with special detergent. They’ve managed to remove the water pipes okay but they’re going to have to come back with special saws and more man power to get the huge tubs out of there. Quite a job.”

  “I guess they’re earning their money,” I said.

  “Yep. There are a whole bunch of five-gallon drums of detergent in there too. They haven’t figured out where they can sell that but it must be worth something.”

  “Good recycling,” I said. “Dakota Berman and Emily Alden would approve.”

  “What made you think of those two?”

  “Just popped into my head. Dorothy and I were talking about it. Emily and Dakota didn’t like to see things go to waste that could be useful to somebody else.”

  We drove away from the lighted clearing and headed along the shadowy, woodsy part of the street. Pete had dimmed his headlights (as a courtesy to the young lovers I presumed), and as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I saw tiny flickers of light among the trees. “Look Pete. Fireflies! That’s something you don’t see often in a city this size.”

  “I know,” he said. “Fireflies and bumble bees. They’re both getting scarce. The new mall will displace a bunch more of them I suppose.”

  “That’s kind of too bad, isn’t it?”

  He shrugged. “Progress. Babies don’t need cloth diapers anymore and maybe the city doesn’t need fireflies and bees.”

  We drove into Beverly and rode along the waterfront past Lynch Park with its popular beach and beautiful rose garden. “Sometimes you can smell roses and salt water when you drive past here,” I said.

  “And in the summer, coconut suntan lotion,” Pete added.

  I love it when our minds seem to work alike.

  CHAPTER 36

  “Finish the work on hand,” the fortune cookie had instructed, and that advice was foremost on my mind as I drove to work the next morning. With the radio tuned to my favorite 70s station, the windshield wipers matched the rhythmic backbeat of Blondie’s “Sunday Girl” as Aunt Ibby’s (and Wanda’s) prediction of rain proved to be correct.

  There was certainly plenty of work on hand needing to be finished, and most of it had to do with my job as Television Production instructor at the Tabby. All the other things gnawing at the edges of my mind—like poisoned dirt, white cats, and dead bodies in the cemetery that didn’t belong there—would have to be put aside in favor of Dia de los Muertos.

  The city business, permits and the like, needed to be confirmed before we could do anything else. As soon as that was taken care of, the twins could begin the distribution of their brochures to merchants. I’d volunteered to take care of publicity which meant using all the media contacts I could muster, all the favors I could call in and all the tricks of the trade I could implement to pull this off on budget and on time.

  I joined the group in the diner. The twins were in their preferred spots at the counter, but everyone else was seated in the booth. Rain gear in various fabrics and colors hung from the coat hooks and was draped over the ends of the booth. Umbrellas poked out from beneath the seats. I added my hooded yellow slicker to the pile. “Morning,” I said. “How’s everybody?”

  The medley of replies was typical of Salem rainy weather complaints. Dorothy looked around at her classmates and mumbled, “Sissies.” It was a deserved remark, considering Dorothy’s recent far, far north environment, and it brought smiles from the others.

  “She’s right,” Therese said. “We are sissies. Save the crabbing until we get some real bad weather.”

  “Like that hurricane,” Hilda said, consulting her phone. “It’s off the mi
d-Atlantic coast now, off Maryland. headed east northeast at ten miles an hour. Sustained winds at sixty miles an hour. Northeast preparing for impact.” Her tone was matter-of-fact. “That’s us.”

  “It’ll probably go out to sea,” Shannon said. “That’s what they said on the radio.”

  “Hope so,” I said. “I heard the same report.”

  “There’ll be great surf on all the beaches then.” Shannon beamed. “Maybe some of those hot surfers will be around. I love watching them.”

  “Me too,” Hilda said, putting her phone on the table. “Maybe we can get some good pictures of surfers for Mr. Doan’s station.”

  “Right, Hilda,” I said with a laugh. “You’re thinking like a professional. But today, hurricane or no hurricane, we need to step up the pace and get things moving on our project. Halloween comes early in Salem. We have only a few weeks before the craziness starts.”

  “That’s true. We have a lot to do. But, you know, that’s a smart idea, about the surf pictures,” Therese said. “And if we get hammered by the storm we can get some great disaster pictures. Maybe we can get the big Boston stations interested.” She paused, both hands in the air. “Not that I’m wishing for a disaster. I’m just saying.”

  Roger walked over to the booth and leaned toward me. “Let us know when you’re ready to go upstairs, Lee,” he said. “We’ll accompany you.” It was the first time I’d heard genuine cop-voice from either twin and it made me smile.

  “Thank you, Roger. I appreciate that.”

  He returned to his stool at the counter and spoke briefly to Ray, who turned in my direction giving a mock salute. Hilda had apparently overheard the exchange between Roger and me. “Is the situation bad enough that you need bodyguards?” she whispered. “Should we all be worried?”