“Perfectly,” de Grandin agreed with a quick nod. “You have refrigerated her—she will remain in her present condition indefinitely!”
“Well,” Coroner Martin smiled deprecatingly, “I’m sure there’ll be no immediate change in her condition, or—” he broke off abruptly, for we had arrived at the cemetery, and he was once more the busy official, directing an undrilled personnel in the performance of unfamiliar duties with the precision of a detachment of trained soldiers.
I kept my gaze fixed demurely on the ground, as befitted a physician whose patient was being buried, but Jules de Grandin permitted no conventions to hamper him. About the grave he strolled, taking eye-measurements of the location, noting the character of the upturned soil, examining the approaches with the practiced eye of one who had seen much military service.
“There is a new moon tonight, Friend Trowbridge,” he whispered as we re-entered Martin’s car for the return trip; “be so good as to make no engagements, if you please.”
“A new moon?” I echoed in amazement. “What the dickens are you drooling about? What has the new moon to do with us?”
“Nothing, I hope; much, I fear,” he returned seriously.
His air of suppressed excitement told me he had some enterprise afoot, but his irritating habit of keeping his plans to himself was strong as ever. To all my questions he returned no more informative answer than a shrug or a lifted eyebrow. At length he turned his shoulder squarely on me, gazed out the window and fell to humming:
“Ma fille, pour pénitence,
Ron et ron, petit patapon,
Ma fille, pour pénitence,
Nous nous embrasserons!”
The night air was heavy with dew and drenched with the perfume of honeysuckle as de Grandin and I let ourselves through the narrow door flanking the main entrance of the great Canterbury gate leading to Shadow Lawns Cemetery. Michaelson, the superintendent, was awaiting us in the office adjoining the graveyard’s imposing Gothic chapel, and that he expected trouble of some sort was clearly evidenced by the heavy revolver swinging in a shoulder-holster beneath his left armpit. “Down Hindenburg—charge!” he ordered gruffly as a monstrous police dog with baleful, green eyes half rose from its station before the lifeless hearth and bared a set of awe-inspiring teeth.
“I’ve been on the lookout all evening,” he told us as we shook hands, “but nothing’s happened yet. Sure you got a straight up, Doctor de Grandin?”
The Frenchman tweaked the carefully waxed ends of his tiny blond mustache. “My informant is one I have every reason to trust,” he replied. “I am not surprised you have seen nothing thus far; but it might be well if we took our stations now; we know not when something may transpire.”
“All right” Michaelson agreed, slipping on a dark jacket and snapping a woven-leather leash through the dog’s collar. “Let’s go.”
As we walked along the winding, well kept roads beneath the arching trees toward the FitzPatrick family plot, “Mighty glad you got this information in time,” the superintendent said. “Shadow Lawns has been operating more than fifty years, and we’ve never had a grave robbery, not even in the days when medical schools had to buy stolen bodies for their work. I’d hate to have our record broken now. Wonder if there’ll be a gang of ’em?”
“I doubt it,” de Grandin answered. “Indeed, I think this will be scarcely what could be called a grave robbery; it is more apt to be a violation.”
“H’m, I don’t think I quite follow you,” Michaelson confessed as we took up our position in the shadow of an imposing bronze-and-granite monument. “What makes you so sure it will be tonight?”
“The moon—the new moon,” the Frenchman replied.
“The mo—well, I’ll he damned!” rejoined the other.
OUR WAIT SEEMED INTERMINABLE. The low, monotonous crooning of nocturnal insects in the grass, the occasional mournful cry of a night bird, the subdued echo of the traffic of the distant city—all blended into a continuous lullaby which more than once threatened to steal my consciousness. Michaelson yawned and stretched full length on the grass, Hindenburg lay with pointed nose between his outstretched paws in canine slumber; only Jules de Grandin remained watchful and alert.
I was on the point of pillowing my head upon my arm and snatching a nap when the sudden pressure of the Frenchman’s fingers on my elbow roused me. “See, my friends,” he whispered. “He comes!”
Stealthily as a shadow, a figure stole between the mounded graves toward the flower-decked hummock beneath which lay the body of Dolores FitzPatrick. The man was dressed in some sort of dark clothing, without a single highlight of white linen in his costume; consequently his visibility was low against the background of the night, but from the suppleness of his movements I realized he was young, and from the furtiveness of his manner I knew he was afraid.
“How the hell did that happen?” Michaelson demanded. “The main gate’s the only one open, and Johnson’s on guard there with a shotgun and orders not to let even the President of the United States by without a written pass from me.”
“Ah bah,” de Grandin whispered, “there never yet was fence so high that desperate men could not swarm over it, my friend, and this one is most desperate; make no mistake concerning that.”
Michaelson’s hand stole toward his gun. “Shall I wing him?” he asked.
“Mon Dieu, no!” de Grandin forbade. “Wait till I give the word.”
The great dog roused to his haunches, and opened his mouth in an almost noiseless snarl, but the Frenchman’s small hand stroked his smooth head and patted his bristling neck soothingly. “Down, mon brave,” he whispered. “Our time is not yet.” Children, dogs and women loved and trusted Jules de Grandin at sight. The savage brute rested its great head against his knee and seemed actually to nod understandingly in assent.
Meantime the figure at the grave had unslung a spade and pick-ax from the pack upon its back and commenced a furious attack on the soft, untrampled earth. We watched in silence from our vantage-point, saw the parapet of defiled earth grow high and higher beside the grave, saw the digger descend lower and lower into the trench he made. From time to time the ghoul would pause, as though to measure the task yet incomplete, then renew his attack on the yielding loam with redoubled vigor.
It must have been an hour before he reached his grisly goal. We saw him cast aside his spade, bend forward in the excavation and fumble at the fastenings of the outer box which shielded the casket from the earth. Some fifteen minutes later he rose, took something from the sack which lay beside the opened grave and twisted it between his hands.
“What the hell?” Michaelson, murmured wonderingly.
“A sheet, if I mistake not,” de Grandin answered. “Watch carefully; his technique, it is good.”
He was correct in his surmise. It was a sheet the resurrectionist twisted into a rope, then knotted into a sort of running noose and dropped into the grave.
Straddling the desecrated sepulcher, one foot on each lip, the despoiler seized the loose ends of the sheet, twisted them together and hauled upward, like a man dragging a bucket from a curbless well.
Hand over hand he drew the twisted linen in; at length his task was done, and the ravished body of Dolores FitzPatrick came once more into the outer world, the linen band knotted behind her shoulders and crossing her breast transversely from underneath the arms. Her little head, crowned with its diadem of ruddy hair, hung backward limply, and her long white arms trailed listlessly behind her as the robber drew her from the rifled grave and laid her on the grass.
A sharp, metallic click sounded at my elbow. Michaelson had cocked his pistol and trained it on the ghoul, but de Grandin’s quick wrestler’s-grip upon his wrist arrested the shot. “Non, stupid one!” he bade. “Have I not said I will say when to shoot?”
From the corner of my eye I saw this by-play, but my horrified attention was riveted on the tableau at the grave. The robber had laid Dolores’s body on the warm, dew-soaked turf, compose
d her limbs and folded her hands across her quiet bosom, then bent and rained a perfect torrent of kisses on the calm, dead face. “I’m here, dear love; I kept our compact!” he choked between ecstatic sobs. “I’ll keep the promise to the end, and then you shall be mine, mine, all mine!” His voice rose almost to an hysterical shriek at the end, and before I realized what he did, he folded the dead form in his arms and pressed it to his breast as though it would respond to his mad caresses.
“Good heavens, a lunatic!” I whispered. “A necrophiliac; I’ve heard of such perverts, but—”
“Be still!” de Grandin’s sharply whispered admonition cut me off. “Be quiet, great stupid-head, and watch what is to come!”
The madman raised the corpse in his arms as once I had borne her living body through the woods, gazed hurriedly about, then set off at a rapid pace toward the rising ground which marked the center of the cemetery.
Taking cover behind the intervening monuments, we followed, but our precautions were unnecessary, for so absorbed in his horrid task was the grave-robber that we might have walked at his heels, yet never been discovered.
A circular row of weeping willows crowned the hill toward which we moved, and in the center of the ring thus marked there stood a tall stone cross engraved with a five-word legend:
HE GIVETH HIS BELOVED SLEEP
To this monolith the grave-despoiler bore his prey and laid her on the close-cropped grass before the cross, then knelt beside the body and clasped the slim, cold hands in both of his; while leaning forward, he gazed into the quiet face as though he would melt death’s chill by the very ardor of his glance.
“And now, my friends, I damn think we shall see what we shall see!” de Grandin whispered. “Observe, if you please; the new moon rises.”
He pointed upward as he spoke. There, beyond the line of willow trees soared the crescent moon, slim as a shaving from a silversmith’s lathe, sharp as a sickle from the fields of Demeter.
And even as I spied the moon I saw another thing. Clear-cut as an image in a shadowgraph against the moon’s faint luminance came a great black-winged owl, another and still a third, flying straight for the morbid group beneath the cross.
“Good Lord, de Grandin, look!” I whispered, but he shook my admonition off with an impatient shrug.
“Do you look there, my friend, and tell me what it is you see!” he ordered.
I glanced in the direction he indicated, then shook my head as though to clear a film from before my eyes. Surely, I did but fancy it!
No, there was no mistaking. As the silver shafts of moonlight fell upon it, the body of Dolores FitzPatrick seemed to gather itself together, the long-limbed looseness of post-mortem flaccidity passed, and the body was imbued with life. Distinctly as I ever saw a living person rise, I saw the body of the girl which had been buried that very afternoon uprear its head, its shoulders, and rouse to a half-sitting posture. More, it turned a living, conscious face upon the man beside it, and smiled into his eyes!
A low, trembling whine, no louder than a cricket’s squeak, sounded at my feet. Hindenburg, the great, fierce dog crouched and groveled on the grass, the hair upon his back raised in a bristling ruff, his bushy, wolf-like tail held closely to his hocks, every nerve in his powerful body trembling with abject fright.
“Now you may fire, my friend,” de Grandin ordered Michaelson, and at the same time drew an automatic pistol from his pocket and sent a bullet winging on its way. But as he fired he contrived to stumble against Michaelson so that the latter’s aim was deflected.
Both weapons spoke together, and there was a startled cry of pain as the echo of the shots reverberated through the graveyard.
“Quick, my friends, on him—chargez!” the Frenchman cried, leaping toward the man and girl who huddled in the shadow of the cross. He was a step or two before us, and I observed what Michaelson did not. As he reached his goal, he brought the barrel of his pistol crashing down, upon the robber’s head, striking him unconscious.
“Did we get him?” the superintendent asked, pausing beside the prostrate man.
“I think so,” de Grandin flung over his shoulder as he bent above the girl. “Examine him, if you please.”
As Michaelson bent above the man, de Grandin took the woman’s body in his arms.
“Great heavens—” I began, but a sharp kick from the Frenchman’s boot against my shin silenced my ejaculation half uttered. Yet it was hard to restrain myself, for in the fraction of a second while he lifted her I had seen the tiny, blue-black hole drilled through the girl’s left temple by the small-calibered automatic the Frenchman carried, and saw the warm, fresh blood gush from the wound! Dead she undoubtedly was, but newly dead. That bullet had crashed through living flesh and bone into a living brain!
“Say, this feller’s alive!” the superintendent cried. “He’s unconscious, but I can’t find a wound on him, and—”
“He was most likely stunned by a glancing bullet,” de Grandin cut in. “Our aim is often erratic in the dark. Tie him securely and take him to the office; Dr. Trowbridge and I will join you as soon as we have returned this poor one to her grave.”
“You’re—you’re sure she’s dead?” Michaelson asked diffidently. “I know it sounds crazy as hell, but I’d have sworn I saw her move a moment ago, and—”
“Tiens, my friend, our eyes play strange tricks on us in the moonlight,” the Frenchman interrupted hastily. “Come, Friend Trowbridge, let us go.”
We walked a little way in silence; then, as though he were replying to my unspoken thoughts, de Grandin said: “Do not press me for an explanation now, my friend. At present let us say my aim was poor and my bullet found the wrong mark. Scandal will be avoided if we let the dead bury the dead. Anon I shall surely tell you all.”
“I THINK THERE IS LITTLE to be gained by questioning him further,” de Grandin counseled some two hours later when Michaelson had at last decided it was useless to press our prisoner for an explanation and was on the point of calling the police. “The families of all involved are prominent, and only ugly scandal can result from an exposé, and that would do your cemetery little good, my friend. This young man’s actions are undoubtlessly caused by mental derangement; Doctor Trowbridge and I will take charge of him, and see he is looked after. Meantime, Mademoiselle FitzPatrick’s body is interred and none need be the wiser. It is best so, n’est-ce-pas?”
“H’m, guess you’re right, sir,” the superintendent agreed. “We’ll just hush the whole rotten business up, eh?”
The little Frenchman nodded. “Come, Friend Trowbridge,” he said, “let us be gone. Monsieur,” he bowed politely to the prisoner, “we wait on your convenience.”
AT HIS SUGGESTION I drove directly to the house and helped him escort the captive to the study. Once inside, de Grandin dropped his air of captor and motioned our charge to a comfortable chair. “You will smoke, perhaps?” he asked, proffering his case, then holding a match while the other set his cigarette aglow.
“And now, petit imbécile, it may be you will be good enough to explain the reason for this evening’s lunacy to us?” he continued, seating himself across the desk from the prisoner and fixing him with a level unwinking stare.
No answer.
“Tiens, this is no coin in which to repay our kindness, Monsieur,” he expostulated. “Consider how inconvenient we might have made things—may still make them, unless you choose to talk. Besides, we know so much already, you would be advised to tell us the rest.”
“You don’t know anything,” the other answered sullenly.
“Ah, there is where you are most outrageously mistaken,” de Grandin corrected. “We know, by example, that you are Robert Millington, son of Ralph Millington, cotton broker of New York and eminent church-member of Harrisonville, New Jersey. We know you were deeply—passionately to the point of insanity—in love with Mademoiselle Dolores; we know—”
“Leave her out of this!” the young man blazed. “I won’t have—”
“Mille pardons, Monsieur,” the Frenchman corrected in a cold voice, “you will have whatever we choose to give; no more, no less. Your escapade tonight has brought you to the very gate of prison, perhaps of the asylum for the insane, and you can best serve yourself by telling what we wish to know. You will speak?”
“You wouldn’t believe me,” the boy responded sullenly.
“You greatly underestimate our credulity, Monsieur. We are most trusting. We shall believe whatever you may say—provided it be the truth.”
Young Millington took a deep breath, like one about to dive in icy waters. “She made me promise,” he replied.
“Ah? We do make progress. What was it you promised her?”
A flush suffused the lad’s cheeks, then receded, leaving them pale as death. “I loved her,” he murmured, almost breathlessly. “I loved her more than anything in the world—more than family or friends, or”—he paused a moment, then, in a sort of awestruck whisper—“more than the salvation of my soul!”
“Eh bien, love is like that in the springtime of life,” the little Frenchman nodded understandingly. He tweaked the ends of his tightly waxed mustache and nodded once again. “Have not I felt the same in the years so long buried beneath the sod of time? But certainly. Ah, la passion délicieuse!” He put his joined thumb and forefinger to his lips and wafted a kiss toward the ceiling. “Those moonlit evenings beside the river when we kissed and clung and shuddered in an ecstasy of exquisite torment! That matchless combination of humility and pride—that lunacy of adoration which made the adored one’s heel-print in the dust more kissable than the lips of any other woman—”
“That’s it—you understand!” the boy broke in hoarsely. “That’s how I felt; so when she told me—”
The little Frenchman’s sentimental mood vanished like the flame of a blown-out candle. “Précisément, when she told you—” he prompted sharply, his little round blue eyes holding the youth’s gaze with an implacable, unwinking stare.
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