Game of Bones

by Carolyn Haines

  “What was in the coffin?” There had to be something to give it some weight.

  “Sandbags. Budgie tracked them back to a FEMA handout during a flood. Everyone along the river system was given the bags. Sand analysis shows it’s local. Anyone could have had those bags.”

  “But not anyone would want Sandra’s body.” It was really creepy to think about a body snatcher. Very Victorian, with shades of Frankenstein. I didn’t need that as the moon inched up the horizon. It looked so close, with all the topographic shadings clearly visible. “That’s just gross.” I told him about what Kawania had said about the students sighting something shambling around the mound late at night.

  Coleman’s laughter at least made me feel better. He didn’t believe them any more than he believed Cece’s “faulty vision,” as he put it. “Okay,” I continued. “Cece is on the trail of Kawania, who isn’t answering her phone. Cooley is MIA. Those students are jumping ship like rats. That’s all we know.”

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Setting night-vision cameras on top of Mound Salla. If Sandra Wells is shuffling around here looking for brains, we’ll catch her on video.”

  “I don’t think you’ll catch anything on film, but it’s a great idea to use cameras.”

  “Tinkie and I are finishing here. I’m going to do some more digging on Bella Devareaux. There’s something not right there.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Will do. You stay in the house. It’s cold now. You need to let your body rebuild and recover.”

  “Yes, Nurse Ratched.”

  He could call me all the names he wanted, but I would be relentless. That was my job, according to Doc. “See you soon. I’ll bring something from Millie’s for dinner.” I realized I’d missed a lot of good meals in the past two days because I’d been on the run from zip to zap.

  “No worries. I’m a long way from starving, but your hound and cat are pretty pissed at you.”

  “I’ll make it up to them.” Tinkie was signaling me. “Gotta go. Talk soon.” I slid my phone into my jacket pocket. “What’s up?”

  “Delane hasn’t checked out of the motel, but no one has seen her for a while.”

  “Maybe she’s with Dr. Hafner. Do you think Hafner has his competitor’s dead body?” That idea was just too creepy.

  “No, I don’t, and that is sick, even for you,” Tinkie said. “When she finishes up her story, Cece is going to join us here at the mound.”

  The moon was rising and the sun was slipping away. The long shadows of ten minutes earlier were fading into dusk. It was still winter in the Mississippi Delta and the days were short. The sound of the wind soughing through the trees at the base of the mound was mournful and nerve jangling. It sounded like the trees were singing a warning. “Let’s just get away from here. We’ll meet Cece somewhere else.”

  “Let’s put a camera at the trapdoor to the basement. We have one more. Let’s use it. Maybe the killer will return to the scene.”

  Tinkie was all perky about meeting a killer. Me, not so much. I snatched the camera and ran toward the barren area where the Bailey house had once stood. The volunteer trees that had jumped up around the old homesite were so thick not even the silvery moonlight could penetrate.

  While I was seeking a place to put the camera to best advantage, the huge moon rose completely above the horizon. It was big and pale gold, so close it seemed if I walked to the end of the mound’s plateau I could touch it. I’d seen beautiful moons in my past thirty-four years, but never one like the Crow Moon. It was mesmerizing. I was frozen with the camera in my hand as I stared into the golden orb.

  A sound deep within the woods stopped my thoughts and nearly my heart. It was probably a raccoon or possum rambling through the undergrowth, but I was on edge. I found a sturdy branch in an oak and planted the camera. It was time to go—past time. I made sure the camera lens was pointed at the area of the trapdoor that led to the basement where Bella Devareaux’s body had been found. The wide angle of the lens would cover a good bit of turf, and once I had the equipment set up, the need to leave pushed hard at me. I was about to call out to Tinkie when again I heard something in the woods. It was a strange slump, shuffle, shuffle. Slump, shuffle, shuffle. Like someone with a pronounced limp was moving about in the brambles, undergrowth, and leaves.

  Had Tinkie slipped past me and into the woods? She was stealthier than I realized and maybe she was trying to put one over on me. I turned around and saw her standing at the edge of the mound, looking down into the parking lot. She was nowhere near the creature moving in the woods. Behind me, the noise continued, making the hair on my neck stand on end.

  Facing the woods again, I waited, watching the dancing shadows created by the moon and wind skitter about in the deadfall and rattling branches. In the bright light, I saw something through the trees and underbrush. Someone. The person moved awkwardly, stumbling from tree to tree almost as if he were blind. Something was definitely wrong.

  “Tinkie.” I said my partner’s name, hoping she’d hear me. I certainly didn’t want whatever was in the woods to hear me.

  “Tinkie!” I called a little louder, my gaze never leaving whatever was stumbling around. The person stepped into a shaft of moonlight and I saw long dark hair and a blue blouse stained with what looked like blood. It was a woman. She lifted a hand in front of herself as she shambled forward.

  “Tinkie!” I yelled her name. The woman turned to look at me, pausing mid-step just as my partner joined me.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  I pointed to the woman on the edge of the woods.

  “What the heck?” Tinkie took two steps forward for a better view. “Who is that? What’s wrong with them?”

  “I don’t know.” I could feel my heartbeat thumping in my chest. As much as I loved a good ghost story on a stormy night, this was too real.

  “What’s going on with that person?” Tinkie asked, her voice rising. “They look—Holy crap, that’s Sandra Wells!”

  “No.” I wouldn’t believe it. She was dead. I’d seen her body. I would not believe this—and I would not look.

  “Let’s get out of here.” Tinkie grabbed my arm. “Sarah Booth, I don’t care what it is—that thing looks like Sandra Wells. Her body is missing. Maybe this is why. She’s running around the woods up here at this dig. Maybe this place is cursed. Maybe those archeologists should never have started digging up the bones of dead people. I don’t know. I don’t care. We’re leaving!” She grabbed my arm and tugged me with her across the moonlit plateau of the mound.

  Behind us, limbs crackled and snapped and the wind sang a dirge in the trees. I glanced back. Dead Sandra had begun to follow us. She stayed at the edge of the woods, but she could move pretty fast for a corpse. I froze. I couldn’t look away.

  “Damn! She’s coming! Run!” Tinkie pushed me hard to get me going and then she tore toward the edge of the mound. She cast one last look at me as I hesitated. “You’d better run, Sarah Booth, or she’ll eat your brains!” And then she started down the incline.

  I looked back at the pitiful creature that came toward me. If that was Sandra Wells, whatever had made her unique and human was gone. The creature loped and faltered toward us, a sad imitation of what once had been.

  I didn’t know which rule in the Daddy’s Girl rulebook would cover the etiquette of what to do when approached by a zombie, and I sure wasn’t going to wait around to ask Tinkie for the finer points of good manners. She wasn’t waiting either. The top of her head disappeared down the side of the incline, her golden, glitzy hair more of a halo than real. I was hot on her heels. No way did I want to confront whatever was haunting the dig site. While I didn’t believe in zombies, I couldn’t deny what was right in front of my eyes. And hopefully the cameras we’d set up would capture it—whatever it was. It sure looked a lot like Dr. Wells, but I refused to wait for it to get close enough to make a positive ID.

  Tinkie was talking on her phone as she slid do
wn the grassy side of the mound. When we got to the bottom, we made a run for the car. It wasn’t until we’d pulled out and were at least a mile away from the mound that Tinkie blew out her breath. “What the hell was that?”

  “Clearly, it was a zombie.” My remark earned another hard slug to my arm, but I was too traumatized to even react. We drove as fast as we dared, focusing on the road, the moon, and each trying to sort what we’d witnessed.

  There was nothing else to say until we arrived back in Zinnia. “We should check those cameras,” I said to Tinkie. “We have evidence of what we saw. You realize no one is ever going to believe us without proof.”

  Tinkie was quiet for a long moment. “What did we see, Sarah Booth?”

  I wasn’t all that quick with an answer, either. “It seems we saw the reanimated corpse of Dr. Sandra Wells stumbling around the dig site.”

  “It did look like Sandra.” She fiddled with the buttons on her coat. “But did we think it was Sandra only because we know her body is missing? Because others had suggested they’d seen her?”

  “No, I’m pretty sure we thought it was Sandra because it looked exactly like her. Right down to the blue broadcloth shirt she often wore.”

  “No kidding. I’m just thinking maybe we were played.”

  “In what way?” Tinkie was smart and it would behoove me to listen to her. I drove down the Main Street of Zinnia and pulled into the parking lot of the Prince Albert hotel.

  “Think about all of this. The dig, the ritual killings, the tattoos. The very first day we find a talisman, a ward against evil, that amulet.”

  “Which may really be something intended to prevent the dead from returning to life.”

  Tinkie didn’t contradict me. She just kept talking. “I have a sense that all of this is being orchestrated by someone. We’ve been chasing our tails since the very beginning.”

  I couldn’t argue with what she was saying. “But a reanimated corpse. Who would do such a crazy thing? Why? And even more importantly, how? And how did it get from Memphis, or even from Tibb’s Funeral Parlor in Zinnia, to Mound Salla? Can you imagine carrying a body up that incline?”

  “I don’t have any answers, but we saw what we saw and, by the laws of science and all that is holy, there is no way to reanimate the dead. Not Dr. Frankenstein. Not Mary Shelley. And not anyone in Zinnia.” The creature we’d seen had frightened her badly and made her fractious. I knew exactly how she felt.

  “You think the whole thing is a charade? Why would anyone do that?”

  “Maybe to destroy the dig? Maybe to get rid of Hafner and Wells so a competitor could come in and take over? Maybe a publicity stunt for some reason I’m not seeing.”

  Tinkie had good ideas. And it was far easier to believe what we’d seen was some kind of prank or setup than a true zombie. “We have to find Hafner, which is why we’re here at the Prince Albert. Someone is going to know something, and I put my money on him. We just have to make him talk.”

  “Call Coleman.” Tinkie wasn’t kidding.

  “I can’t do that. He needs to heal.”

  “You know damn good and well he isn’t in bed. He’s up doing something. We’re just asking him to talk to the hotel staff. They’ll tell him a lot more than they’ll tell us.”

  She wasn’t lying, but I couldn’t, in good conscience, involve Coleman in the case. He had been shot, for pity’s sake. Doc had warned me to make him stay at home and heal.

  Tinkie pulled out her phone. “DeWayne, run by Dahlia House and pick up Coleman. We need him at the Prince Albert. We’re onto a lead he needs to follow and then we want to have dinner at Millie’s. You and Budgie are invited. My treat.” She hung up and looked at me. “A man has to eat. He can sit at a table and ask a few questions while he’s filling his pie hole.”

  “He needs to rest.”

  “If you honestly think he’s lying around, you’re deluding yourself.”

  Coleman wasn’t the kind of person to lay about. Tinkie was dead right about that. At least if he was with us, I could make him stay calm and see that he had a good meal in him. “You win.”

  “But of course, my dear. Now get Cece here. I hope she hasn’t already left for the mound. We need a powwow of the best and brightest. Then we can make Budgie and DeWayne retrieve the zombie footage.” She grinned. “Because I’m not going back up there. I can tell you that wasn’t a zombie and, intellectually, I know I’m right. But my body tells me to run in the opposite direction. Let DeWayne and Budgie take this one.”

  “I agree.” I did as she bade me, and then motioned her out of the car. The one thing we could get at the Prince Albert that we couldn’t get at Millie’s was a drink. I was badly in need of some liquid fortification, but I would have to settle for caffeine since I was on the job.

  28

  “Tell me one more time what you saw,” Coleman said as he sipped a cup of coffee. The five of us—me, Tinkie, Coleman, DeWayne, and Budgie—were parked at a small table in the bar of the Prince Albert hotel. “I want to be sure I’ve got a clear picture.”

  I looked at Tinkie and rolled my eyes. We’d told him and the deputies twice. Cece had confirmed, over the phone, what she’d seen on that fateful night with Peter Deerstalker. At first the lawmen had guffawed. The second go-round they’d laughed and frowned. Now they looked serious, but it was clear they didn’t believe us. We went through the story one more time, taking care to give each detail. “We’re not making this up,” I told him. My tone should have been enough for them to knock off the teasing.

  “If you’d had Sweetie Pie, Chablis, and Pluto with you, they would have rounded up that zombie and kept her at bay until you could get help.” Coleman was straight-faced when he talked but he wasn’t taking us seriously.

  “Hey,” DeWayne said, “what about we catch that zombie and use it for a tourist attraction. I know Sarah Booth and Tinkie hate zoos because the animals are in prison. But the thing with a zombie—it’s already dead! Perfect.”

  “You are cruising for a bruising,” Tinkie said to DeWayne. “I mean it.”

  “Just think of the crowds we could draw.” Budgie picked up the thread of torment. “Maybe we could get Zombie Watch added to the blues trail that runs through the Delta. What if there are more zombies out there just waiting to be captured? Or capitalized on?”

  “Do they really eat brains?” DeWayne asked.

  “Maybe Millie could add something to the menu like roasted brains or maybe Zombie Pot Pie—a light crust filled with vegetables and fresh brains. It would be a big hit with the zombie population.”

  “There. Is. No. Zombie. Population.” I said each word clearly.

  “There is only one zombie and she’s haunting both burial mounds. Let Budgie and DeWayne retrieve those cameras,” Tinkie said. “You’ll see, and then you’ll be sorry you doubted us.”

  “Budgie, why don’t you fetch those cameras,” Coleman suggested. He was working hard to hide a grin.

  Budgie sat up taller. “DeWayne and I will go get ’em.”

  Coleman arched one eyebrow. Now he was truly amused. “You don’t need DeWayne. You’re not scared to go alone, are you? DeWayne’s going to find Cooley Marsh for me. He knows something and it’s time for him to talk.”

  “I want to look for Cooley Marsh, too,” Budgie said. “DeWayne and I can pick up the cameras and then jump on Cooley’s trail. We’ll be more efficient as a team.” Budgie looked at the tabletop as he spoke. Two little red spots of embarrassment touched his cheeks. He was creeped out by the zombies and didn’t want to go alone. And I didn’t blame him.

  I grinned. “They would work faster as a team,” I said to Coleman. I gave Budgie a long look so he would know I knew I was saving his butt. “While they’re gone, we can talk to the hotel staff. Rain check on dinner at Millie’s?”

  Coleman relented. “You two take off,” he said to the deputies. “Report back when you have Cooley. I did a little background check on him and found some interesting history. He’s a
bit old to be a college student, though he doesn’t look it. Turns out he’s in his late twenties.”

  “He couldn’t be.” He looked like he was in his early twenties, at most.

  “Since Cooley didn’t check out as a student, I did some digging.” Coleman was no longer teasing. “Cooley Marsh doesn’t exist. It’s an alias, and we need to discover why he’s using an alias.”

  “Why indeed.” I pulled up my conversations with him. “He said he wants to make computer games. He wanted to connect with Elton Cade, maybe have a shot at creating games for Elton’s empire.”

  “Elton’s pretty accessible,” Tinkie said.

  “I need to speak with Elton, Frank Hafner, and Peter Deerstalker,” Coleman said.

  “Is Hafner back from giving the eulogy?” Tinkie asked.

  “No body, no eulogy,” DeWayne noted. “He’s arriving back here this evening. He knows to come by the sheriff’s office.”

  “We still have a lot to do.” Coleman stood and we all rose to our feet. It was time to get about our work. It was six o’clock, and everything in Zinnia except the hotel, Millie’s Café, and the Sweetheart café, which was more of a teen hangout, had closed.

  “Where’s Cece?” Tinkie asked. “She was supposed to be here by now.”

  “I’m here, dah-link!” She came out of a hallway, pushing Kawania Laveau ahead of her. “Or should I say we’re here. You should know all of the students are leaving town as quickly as they can make travel arrangements. Kawania was walking out the door when I apprehended her. And she has something to tell y’all.”

  I looked at the young woman who seemed to be perfectly miserable. “I didn’t tell the truth about Bella Devareaux.”

  * * *

  An interrogation in the lobby of the Prince Albert was out of the question. I whispered to Coleman that I thought he’d get more out of Kawania if he kept the questioning informal. With some reluctance he agreed to walk down to Millie’s Café. He’d been nibbling on ham and potato salad, but I was starving. Tinkie, too. We’d gone all day without sustenance and, besides, I could not go home without something for the critters. They were already miffed by my neglect. Sweetie Pie, for all of her good nature, and Pluto, who was a black cat after all, could be quite vengeful.