Dead and Buried

by Karin Kaufman

  “Yup. And we take that threatening note to Rancourt at the station.”

  “It’s in my car.”

  “But before the police station, I’d like to go to Olivia’s house. She’s there most mornings, but she’ll be gone by noon, off to the mansion or the cemetery.”

  “Why do you want to go there?”

  “To see her headstone rubbings.” Emily tore one end of her croissant off, popped it in her mouth, and looked at me as if to say, Clever, huh?

  “Brilliant! Yes!” I took a large bite of my own croissant and then wrapped my hands around my coffee cup. Emily’s kitchen was as chilly as mine.

  “I can’t remember what they look like, but I do remember two smaller rubbings in square frames. It’s much easier to create a rubbing when the headstone is flat, so I wouldn’t put it past her to have worked on those children’s stones after they were taken to the mansion.”

  “Olivia was too worried about us being in that spare room,” I said. “She wasn’t just being her officious self, she was scared we’d stumble onto those headstones. That means Olivia and Charlotte—and maybe some of the others—are working together to steal and sell headstones from Mount Hope.”

  “Do you think Olivia knows we found them?”

  As I sipped my coffee, I considered the question, and I recalled the expression on Olivia’s face when she saw us at the bedroom door. “I don’t think so. We didn’t act like we’d just discovered two headstones, and she would’ve expected us to. She was worried, but she didn’t press us on whether we’d snooped through the wardrobe or drawers. She assumed we didn’t find them, but she was worried we would if we stayed longer. Of course, if she talks to Charlotte, she may put two and two together.”

  Emily ate the last of her croissant and rose to pour herself another coffee. “Check out the front page of this morning’s paper.” She turned to me, a sullen look on her face. “My name’s in it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I moaned. I pulled the paper across the table, flipped it open, and read the headline aloud. “‘Resident finds victim’s body in her yard.’”

  Leaving her honey spoon, Minette flew the short distance from the table to my shoulder, seized my coat collar for balance, and stared down at the paper.

  “Do you read, Minette?” Emily said as she retook her seat.

  “Not as well as I should.”

  “Wow.”

  Smiling at Emily, I shrugged in perplexed sympathy. “Go figure. I’ve known Minette since October, and I’m still learning things about her.”

  “But how can she read?”

  “Don’t bother asking her. She won’t tell you.”

  “One day I will, Kate. But not now.”

  I drank up, and while Emily finished her second coffee, I leafed through our town’s small newspaper, searching for more news related to Patti’s death or stories about the mansion and its tours. On the second-to-last page, above a large ad for next month’s Christmas fair, I found an article on Smithwell’s battle against drunk driving. Quoting Officer David Bouchard, the article said the police had planned a number of pre-announced and well-signaled DUI checkpoints and, in fact, had run their first two checkpoints the night before last and arrested one person for drunk driving. Signs warned citizens several blocks before the checkpoints that their progress would be delayed. “Elm Street and the Bog Road,” I said.

  “What are you reading?” Emily asked.

  I reread the paragraph to make certain I was seeing the street names right then slid the paper her way. “The night before last, the night Patti was killed, the police set up a DUI checkpoint on Elm Street between seven o’clock and three o’clock in the morning. On Elm between Fowler and Dunlap.”

  “Fowler’s just a few blocks . . .” She pointed vaguely toward the east. “Just east of here.”

  “I think we know why the killer stopped on Elm. He had to dump a body—and fast.”

  CHAPTER 14

  I called Rancourt and told him about the drag marks I’d found, then Emily and I, and Minette, drove off for the cemetery. If the killer had stopped his car on Elm, taken Patti out of it, and dragged her through the woods to Emily’s house—but all that was supposition—we now thought we knew why. Still, several puzzling questions remained. First, why didn’t the killer leave Patti in the woods? Why risk taking her into Emily’s yard? And why leave a fake murder weapon in the form of the historical society’s hammer?

  Most of all, why move Patti from the cemetery?

  Pondering these questions as I headed for Mount Hope, I was starting to think Emily might be in danger after all. Between the body in her yard and the pasted-together note on my windshield, someone didn’t like her.

  We were silent as we drove to the cemetery. I was operating on autopilot, anxious thoughts tumbling in my mind. It was another wet November morning, the air fresh, the sky gunmetal gray save for an occasional white cloud scudding by. I turned onto the main cemetery road and drove in the direction of a small brick building, which I presumed to be the office. I’d never been to that end of Mount Hope. Not wanting to be dissuaded from our task, we hadn’t called ahead of time. It was better to show up in person.

  Emily was the first to break our silence. “Did the murderer even know he put Patti behind my house?”

  It seemed she had been mulling over the same problematic questions I had. “I’ve been wondering that myself. Maybe it was pure bad luck Patti ended up in your yard. We should find out where those checkpoint warning signs were placed last night. Where on Elm did the killer have to get rid of Patti? If he—”

  “Or she.”

  “Or she stopped immediately after a sign, the chances are greater it was coincidence.”

  “That doesn’t explain the hammer.”

  “No.”

  I parked in front of the brick building, which I now saw was marked by a sign reading Sexton’s Office, and we headed inside, but not before I cautioned Minette for the umpteenth time to keep quiet and well hidden.

  The sexton’s office—the entire building—was one large room, rather old and dank but brightened by large windows and white walls. Two desks topped with computers were front and center, and rows of bookshelves and tall file cabinets ran the perimeter of the room.

  The man at one desk smiled and asked what he could do for us, a promising beginning, and I asked if it was possible to find out if two children who died in the 1860s were buried at Mount Hope. “I have their names, birth dates, and death dates,” I said.

  The man pushed his chair back from his desk and swiveled to face us. He was in his late forties, a little chubby, with salt-and-pepper bushy hair and rosy apple cheeks. “That’s easy. Are you related?”

  “No.” Out with it. “We’re thinking their headstones were stolen from Mount Hope.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said, his eyebrows on the rise. He stood and greeted us with a handshake. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time. I’m Jeremy Miller, by the way. Sexton at Mount Hope.”

  I introduced myself and Emily, and then, keeping details to a minimum so we didn’t smear everyone who worked at the Fairfield Mansion, told him we’d found two children’s headstones and wanted to know where they rightfully belonged.

  “I’d be happy to look,” he said. “Everything is computerized now, so it’s as easy as typing in a name. You got them?”

  “I have photos,” I said, pulling out my phone and navigating to the shots I’d taken in the mansion.

  Miller took my phone back to his desk and started clicking away on his keyboard. He jotted a few notes with a pen, clicked away again, then jotted some more. Soon after, a frown creasing his face, he handed me my phone and showed me what he’d written.

  “Both of those headstones belong in Mount Hope,” he said. “But let’s go take a look in my car, shall we?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Emily agreed to go too, but judging by her stony expression, Miller’s discovery pained her. Now that we knew the headstones were taken from Mount Hop
e, we’d have to tell him where we had found them. The police would become involved, and everyone at the mansion would know she had reported the thefts.

  I got into the front seat of Miller’s sedan and Emily climbed in back. As we drove down one of the cemetery’s narrow asphalt roads, Miller showed me our destination on his Mount Hope map. “Those headstones were in one of the older parts of the cemetery, but not the oldest by far,” he said. “We’re one of the older cemeteries in central Maine.”

  “Emily knows a lot about this cemetery,” I said, glancing toward the back seat. “She was giving tours for the Smithwell Historical Society.”

  “Oh, you’re one of those?” Miller said.

  “Afraid so,” she answered meekly.

  “Nah, no judgment there. Interest in Mount Hope is a good thing, however it comes. I’ve dealt with your Olivia Atkinson before. She’s a fan of this cemetery.”

  I didn’t relish telling him that employees of the historical society had taken the headstones. My guess was that Olivia and Charlotte were involved, but not being certain of that, I would keep their names to myself.

  “She asked if she could put bats in the trees,” Miller continued. “I said yes, if you take them down after the tour and don’t touch anything else. But I found a bat on a headstone. It’s not right. I shouldn’t have allowed them in the trees. Once you think it over, it’s disrespectful.”

  I shifted to face him. “Do you mean you found a bat on the Dawson headstone? The one you reported for vandalism?”

  “Yup. Took it right off.” Miller slowed and waved a hand at the windshield. “Here’s the area. The people who knew these people are dead, you see. Great-great-grandchildren might visit now and then, or people walking their dogs, that sort of thing, but really, no one comes, so there’s a certain kind of person who doesn’t think twice about stealing. They figure it’s a victimless crime.”

  Miller slowed again, inched forward several feet, and then parked his car beneath a large fir. “We’ll stop here,” he said, taking hold of the map. He studied it and then tapped it with a calloused finger. “The first one should be about sixty feet east of here, near that obelisk ahead.”

  Emily and I followed Miller, who strode briskly across the cemetery lawn until he came to the granite obelisk. There, he slowed his steps, studied his map, then took several more steps to the east.

  When I came up alongside him, he pointed to a rectangular hole in the ground. We were standing exactly where one of the little headstones should have been.

  “Well, well.” He bent down and lightly touched the spot. “Right here. Someone dug it up. That’s a first. They usually try to snap them off at the base. Maybe there wasn’t one.”

  I didn’t hide my disgust. “For money? Do they sell them to collectors?”

  “Sometimes,” he said, getting to his feet. “And sometimes the thief is the collector. There’s a black market for old headstones and plaques, but they’d be hard to sell in Maine. Maybe they could sell in New Hampshire or Canada. It’s not like family members are tracing missing headstones, right? So the risk is low outside the state. Let’s find the other location.”

  I’d thought I’d have to pry information out of the sexton, that he might be the reticent old-Maine type, especially after being dragged out into the rain. But Miller seemed eager to talk. Maybe his lonely profession had taught him to grab snippets of conversation where he could.

  Miller trudged off, mumbling about the theft and how people were worse than ever these days. I couldn’t argue with him.

  About twenty feet on, there was a knot of old lilac bushes, and ten feet beyond the lilacs, another rectangular hole in the ground. Hands on his hips, Miller looked at the down at the hole. “Gone,” he said. He nearly spat the word.

  “Then they did belong here,” I said.

  “Can I ask you where you found them?” Miller said.

  I wasn’t about to protect the historical society. Not over stolen headstones, I wasn’t. This was low. “We went off the beaten path during a tour at the Fairfield Mansion and found them in an unused room.”

  “Well, shoot,” Miller said. “And I trusted those people. You have proof on your phone, right?”

  “Yes, four photos.”

  “And we’re both witnesses to their discovery,” Emily said.

  Still trying to take it in, and no doubt feeling betrayed, Miller shook and scratched his head. “Was it all of them? They were all stealing?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m just hoping the headstones are still in the mansion. I took those photos last night, and Emily and I were discovered coming out of the room.”

  Miller declared that he was off to call the cops, waved for us to follow, and hurried for his car. Once we were all inside—just barely—he shot for the office.

  “Can you email me those photos?” he said. “I’m fighting mad.”

  I told him I would, and when he parked, I followed him inside and waited for him to finish talking to the police. There was one more question I needed to ask him.

  He hung up the phone and looked back to me, breathing a little easier, I thought, for having made the call and gotten the matter off his chest.

  “Can I ask you one more thing?” I said.

  “Of course you can.”

  “Why was dirt mounded in front of the Dawson headstone? It wasn’t a brand-new grave, and it wasn’t mounded to the side as if a family member was going to be buried there.”

  “The family is moving the grave to Ellsworth, so we dug the coffin up a week back. The headstone follows today.”

  So that explained it. “The grass was shredded at one side of the grave.”

  “That was our heavy equipment,” Miller said. “We don’t do things by hand anymore. The morning I found that bat, though? There were tire tracks too. Kinda faint, and the rain washed them out afterward. But someone drove right onto the grass.”

  CHAPTER 15

  “We solved some small mysteries,” I said to Emily. “Like what happened to the bat on the Dawson headstone. We still don’t know who put it there, but I’m not sure it matters. And now we know why the turf was torn up at the grave site.”

  “Hang a right at the light, then a left at Knox,” Emily said. “The most important mysteries are still mysteries. Like who planted that hammer at my house—and who planted Patti in my yard. Do you really think it had anything to do with the DUI checkpoint?”

  Admittedly, that theory was rapidly losing favor in my eyes. It was difficult to believe that the checkpoint had nothing to do with the killer stopping on Elm Street, but it was even more difficult to believe that the killer just happened to stop directly behind Emily’s house. Why not mine or another close neighbor’s? “I’m beginning to doubt it. I thought we’d uncover the killer if we found a motive. Now I think we need to find the motive first. Until we find that, nothing will make sense.”

  “The Tudor house on the right,” Emily said.

  I pulled to the curb in front of a large Tudor Revival house of stone and brick. Its steep roof line and ornamental half-timbering made it stick out like a sore thumb amid the other houses on Knox Street, all of them traditional white and gray clapboards.

  “That’s her car in the drive,” Emily said.

  “An Audi. Nice. Is she married? Does she have kids?”

  “A husband, no kids.”

  “What’s our excuse for coming here?”

  Minette piped up from the back. “Ask her when they will do the cemetery tours again.”

  I turned and saw her tiptoeing across the floor mat toward the center console.

  “That’s not reason enough to drive out here,” Emily said. “What if we say we were driving by and stopped in to ask her if we could bring lunch for everyone at the mansion?”

  “What if she says yes? Then we’d have to buy five extra lunches.”

  “Okay, let’s say we were driving by and you happened to mention you wanted to join the historical society.”

&n
bsp; “I can’t do that. That’s not a white lie, it’s a big black one.”

  “Apologize,” Minette said. She hopped to the console with one flap of her wings. “Apologize one more time for going in the room you shouldn’t have gone in, and say you’re very sorry to disturb her at her house. Which is mostly true, Kate and Emily. It’s not big and black.”

  We could have sat in my car for an hour and not come up with a better excuse than that. “Emily?”

  “Sounds good to me. She got on my nerves last night, and I’m sure I made that clear, so a tiny apology wouldn’t hurt. You snoop while I do the talking.”

  Minette flew into my pocket again, and I trailed Emily up the brick walk to the front door, silently practicing an apology and hoping that Olivia didn’t think our arrival so intrusive that she refused to talk to us. Emily rapped on the green door and waited. A shadow passed over the peephole and Olivia flung wide the door.

  “Emily? Kate?” she said, glowering at us.

  “Sorry to barge in, Olivia,” Emily said, “but we were driving by, and I wanted to apologize for last night. May we come in?”

  Olivia began to thaw. “Yeah, I guess. I’ve got time.” She waved us in, shut the door, then pivoted back to give Emily a good look. “Last night was unfortunate.”

  Despite the thaw, she wasn’t going ease up on Emily. The funny thing was, Olivia should have been the one to apologize, not Emily.

  “Well, it was my fault,” I said. “I pressured Emily to show me around, and honestly, I couldn’t see how it would do any harm.”

  For one icy moment, Olivia glared at me. “Let’s start with a clean slate, shall we? I was working in the living room.”

  She swung around us and strode off. Emily rolled her eyes at me, but we both followed her into a rather grand and spacious living room. Tasteful was the word for it. Ten-foot ceilings, taupe-colored walls and white trim, huge windows with damask Roman shades, gray leather sofas. No, lavish was the right word. What did her husband do for a living? Olivia didn’t make this kind of money working for the historical society.