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.