Grave Surprise

Page 13

He hung up and made a face. "The Morgensterns want us to come to their house tomorrow for lunch," he said. "They've had a lot of people bringing food by, they can't eat it all, and they're feeling guilty that we're stuck in Memphis because of them. There'll be other people there," he assured me when he saw my face. "The focus won't be on us."
"Okay, good. That would have crossed a line, after the flowers. There's such a thing as overdoing the gratitude. After all, it was an accident. And we're getting the reward. Joel said so. You should have asked me before you said yes. I really don't want to do that."
"But you see that we pretty much have to."
"Yes, I see that," I said, trying not to sound resentful. I thought that my brother wanted to see Felicia Hart again.
Tolliver nodded, a sharp gesture to close the subject. I wasn't quite sure I was through whining, but he was right. No point in discussing it any longer. "You ready to go back to the cemetery?" he asked.
"Yes. How cold is it?" I stood up, experimentally stretched the leg. Better.
"The temperature's dropping."
When we were all bundled up, I called downstairs to have our car brought around. A few minutes later, we were making our way back to St. Margaret's. The weekday nighttime traffic in downtown Memphis was not heavy. Nothing was going on at the Pyramid, and Ellis Auditorium looked dark, too. We drove east through depressed areas, shopping areas, and old residential areas until we got to the streets around Bingham College. The few people on foot were bundled up like urban mummies.
I began to recognize a few landmarks from the morning before. This time we didn't take the main drive through the college, as we had previously. Tolliver drove around the campus to reach a small road at the back of the college property. It had those white barriers that you pull back across the entrance, and yesterday they'd been pulled shut but unlocked, he'd noticed.
The same was true tonight. Rick Goldman, private eye, should tell Bingham their security had a few holes in it.
We passed between the open barriers. The crunch of gravel under our tires sounded especially loud. After a short stretch of landscaped lawn all around us, we entered the wooded corner of the campus.
Though the city lay all around us, it felt like we were miles from nowhere. We drove slowly through the trees surrounding the old site, our headlights catching on the branches and trunks as we passed. Nothing moved in the cold stillness. We reached the clearing of the church and its yard. In the small graveled parking lot, we drove up to the low posts connected with wire that kept cars from pulling onto the grass. There was a security light on a high pole at the rear of the church, and one on the far side. They provided just enough light to make the shadow of the dilapidated iron-railing fence obscure the graveyard.
"If this was a horror movie, one of us would be a goner," I commented.
Tolliver didn't respond, but he wasn't looking any too happy. "I thought the lighting would be better than this," he said. We made sure our coats were buttoned and zipped, gloves on, flashlights ready. Tolliver loaded some extra batteries into his pockets, and I did, too.
There was not even a night-light on in the old church.
When we shut the car doors behind us, the slams sounded loud as gunshots. Tolliver shone his flashlight on the wire so I could step over it, and I returned the favor. Then we opened the gate, which creaked loudly in approved horror-movie fashion.
"Just great," Tolliver muttered. I found myself smiling.
The ground, which had seemed fairly level in the daylight, was rough walking at night. At least, it was for me. I negotiated it slowly, worried about my faltering right leg. But I didn't ask Tolliver for help. I could manage.
From the entrance gate, we needed to work our way southeast to reach the secluded corner where I'd found Tabitha in Josiah Poundstone's grave. Of course, that was the darkest place in the whole cemetery.
"It feels bigger tonight," Tolliver said. His voice was just one step up from whispering. I almost asked him why. Then I realized I didn't want to talk out loud, either. As we neared the open grave, I wondered if they'd dug up poor Josiah, too--and if so, what they'd done with him. The familiar vibrations of the dead began to sound louder and louder in my head.
"Have we ever been to a cemetery at night?" I asked, trying to shake off the uneasy, prickling feeling that was riding my shoulders. There was no definite reason for me to feel anxious. In fact, I usually felt alive, alert, and happy in graveyards.
Certainly, no one else was around. The cemetery was surrounded on two sides by thick stands of trees, on the third side by the parking area (beyond which were more trees), and on the fourth by the old church. It wasn't too far off a busy, modern street, but I'd noticed on our previous visit how isolated the graveyard felt. Bugs and birds had sense enough to keep silent and lay low.
"There was that time the couple in Wisconsin wanted you to do a reading at midnight on their son's grave," Tolliver said in my ear. It had been so long since I'd spoken, I had to recall the question I'd asked.
I was immediately sorry to be reminded about Wisconsin. I'd been trying to forget, to stuff that night into the closet where I kept horrors. Just to add to the weirdness of the couple and their request, they'd requested Halloween night. Plus, they'd invited about thirty best friends. I guess they'd figured if they were going to pay us that much money, they were going to get some mileage out of the event. They'd been mistaken about what I could do, though I'd never tried to mislead them. Right out there, in front of all their friends, I'd blurted out what had really happened to the child. I shuddered, remembering. Then I made myself shake off the memory. Focus on this night, this dead girl, this grave, I told myself. I took a deep breath, let it out. Then another.
"I know the body is gone," I said, almost in a whisper. "The body's always been my connection, but I'm going to try to recreate what I got from her yesterday."
"We're in an isolated graveyard in the dark," Tolliver muttered. "At least you're not wearing a long white nightgown, and at least we're together. And believe me, my cell phone battery is fully charged."
I almost smiled. Usually, I felt most comfortable in a cemetery; but not this one, not this night. I stumbled again. Cemeteries are tricky going, especially the older ones. So many of the new ones have the flat headstones. But in the older ones, there are broken headstones in the grass, which is often uneven and tufted with weeds. In more secluded cemeteries, the living often leave trash on top of the dead--broken liquor bottles and crushed beer cans, condoms, food wrappers, all kinds of stuff. I can't count the times I've found underpants suitable to both sexes, and once I found a top hat set jauntily upright on a stone.
St. Margaret's graveyard was free from debris of that sort. It had been mowed and trimmed at the end of the summer, so the grass was fairly low. Our flashlights bobbed through the darkness like playful fireflies, sometimes crossing their beams and then floating away.
The still air was cold, a cold that bit through my gloves and made me shiver. I had on a knit cap and scarf, but my nose felt especially chilled. Tolliver, some steps ahead of me and to my left, made the beam of his flashlight dance as he rubbed his hands together.
The night had a thick, waiting quality that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle. I tried to identify the swoosh of the traffic on the road off through the trees, but there was an absolute silence. I felt a stab of alarm. Surely, at night, I should be able to see the lights of those cars, even through the trees? I slowed down, feeling suddenly disoriented. The flashlight beams seemed dimmer. I was very close to the right spot, but somehow I couldn't pick it out. The buzzing of the bodies around me seemed extraordinarily clear and strong for such old corpses. I started to say my brother's name, but I couldn't speak. Suddenly, Tolliver gripped my lower arm with both hands, very tightly, bringing me to a complete standstill. "Look at your feet," he said in a very strange voice. I shone the light directly downward.
In one more step I would have fallen into the open grave.
"Ohmygod. That was close. Thank you. Do you hear anything?" I whispered. One hand slid down to mine, squeezed it, and released it. There was something odd about the feel of that bony hand.
And then I realized Tolliver's flashlight was shining at me from the other side of the grave, with Tolliver holding it.
My heart pounded so fast I thought the vibrations might tear my chest apart. I sank down to my knees on the soft, freshly turned earth.
"See?" said the voice, though I couldn't have said where it had come from. With an increasing sense of dread, I directed my flashlight down into the grave.
There was another body in it.
Chapter eight
TOLLIVER didn't seem to be able to move from his side of the open grave, and we both shone our flashlights down at the body.
"At least I didn't fall in," I managed to say, and my voice sounded hoarse and strange to my own ears.
"He stopped you," Tolliver said.
"You saw him? Clearly?"
"Just his silhouette," he said, and even Tolliver's voice was strained and breathless. "A small man. With a beard."
This was the first time such a thing had happened to us. It was like being an accountant for five years, and then suddenly being presented with a set of alien numerals that had to be balanced in five minutes.
Tolliver stumbled around the grave to kneel beside me, put both his arms around me, and we held each other fiercely. We were shivering, shivering intensely--not from the cold, but from the nearness of the unknown. I made a little noise that was horribly like a whimper. Tolliver said, "Don't be scared," and I turned my head a little to tell him I wasn't any more scared than he was; which was to say, quite a lot. He kissed me, and I was glad for his warmth.
I said, "This is a thin place."
"What's that?"
"A place where the other world is very close to this world, separated only by a thin membrane."
"You've been reading Stephen King again."
"It felt strange from the moment we got here tonight."
"Did you feel anything different when we were here the first time? Yesterday?"
"The old ones always feel a little different from the new ones. Maybe I saw the dead more clearly, with more detail." I held him tighter. Now that I'd gotten over my startled reaction to the ghost, I had plenty of other fears to cope with. We had a situation on our hands. "What will we do about the body, Tolliver? We shouldn't call the police, right? We're already under enough suspicion."
My feelings about the law were, at best, ambiguous. I couldn't blame the Texarkana PD for not knowing what was going on in our household when I was a teenager. After all, we'd struggled so hard to conceal it. I hardly blamed them for not finding Cameron; I, of all people, knew how hard it could be to find a dead person. But now that I was grown, the thing I valued most was the ability to shape my life as I wanted. The law could take that away from me in a New York minute.
"No one knows we came here," Tolliver said, as if thinking out loud. "No one's come out here since we got here. I bet we could leave and not get caught. But someone's got to get this body out of the grave. We can't just leave him."
I was beginning to feel calmer. "Who is it?" I asked, and my voice was steadier. After all, bodies were my area of expertise. I was not at all worried about being this close to a corpse. I was worried about the police suspecting I'd made him a corpse.
"I'm not sure." Tolliver sounded a little surprised, as if he should have known who was in the hole from the brief glimpse we'd had.
"Let's look again," I said practically. I was feeling a little more like myself.
We pulled apart then, and deployed our flashlights.
If my heart could sink any lower, it did. Since the body was on its stomach, I couldn't identify its face, but the clothes were familiar.
"Crap. It's Dr. Nunley," I said. "He's still wearing the clothes he had on when he grabbed me at the hotel." I pressed the button on my watch, and the dial illuminated. It looked as though I had a fairy perched on my wrist. "It's been three hours since that happened. Just three hours. The lobby staff had to talk to Dr. Nunley to get him to leave, and they'll remember it. This couldn't be worse."
"Not for him, anyway," my brother said, his voice dry. But he had a slight smile on his face. I could just see the edge of his mouth in the cast-back light. I felt like punching him in the arm, but I wasn't sure I had enough muscle control to manage it. "And it's not so good for us, you're right," Tolliver admitted.
"Have we left footprints? Has it rained since we got here yesterday?"
"No, but the dirt here around the grave has been turned over, and I'm sure we've left traces somewhere. On the other hand, so many people have come through the cemetery since you found Tabitha... and we're both wearing the same shoes we wore out here yesterday."
"But there wasn't this loose dirt then. I don't know how we would explain coming out here tonight. Oh, I'm so sorry I got you into this."
"Bullshit," he said briskly. "We were doing what we do. You wanted to see if you could get some other bit of information from the grave. Well, we found out more than we wanted to know, huh? But it's not your fault." He hesitated. "Do you want to try to talk to him, the--the ghost? And what about getting a reading from the body?"
Tolliver's suggestion was as bracing as that brisk slap detectives give hysterical women in old movies. "Yes," I said. "Sure." Of course, I should have thought of that. I had to calm myself first, and center myself. Not too easy, since I was already buzzing like crazy just from being so close to a fresh body.