CHAPTER 33

It appears female.” Collin’s voice through the phone brought an odd thrill to Aggie. She really needed to get past this flip-of-the-stomach thing whenever he was around.

“The body?” Aggie adjusted her grip on her phone as she made her way across the hospital parking lot.

“Skeleton, actually.”

“Ah, wonderful.” She tried to sound flippantly interested, but Aggie was more than happy now to not be at the mystery grave’s exhumation.

“It’s going to be a beast to determine the individual’s age. For that matter, how long she’s been dead. Although, on my initial assessment, she appears to have wisdom teeth, so that would put her age to be eighteen or more at time of death. And the fact it’s strictly skeletal remains tells me it’s more than likely been many years. Still, decomp and time deceased are wonky things to try to calculate.”

Aggie opened her car door, tossing her bag onto the passenger seat. “How will you find out?”

“I’ll complete my initial assessment here in a bit, but they’ll take the remains to a lab for an assortment of lovely tests in order to make more accurate determinations. Will you hop down to see her before she goes?”

Aggie choked, coughed, then slipped into the driver’s seat, shutting the car door. “I wasn’t planning on it.”

“You really should! It’s quite remarkable. I assure you, she’s not gruesome in the slightest.”

“I almost passed out at the fake skeleton in Mumsie’s yard the first day I arrived in Mill Creek. How do you expect me to stay standing when I know I’m staring at a real one?”

Collin’s chuckle seemed far too relaxed considering the topic of conversation. It just went to show how familiar he was with his field of work. “Very well then. I shall do my work here on my own and text you my theories.”

She didn’t miss the inflection on the word text. At least he was a fast learner and knew her preferred form of communication. Aggie didn’t want to be guilty of abusing too much time off from the cemetery, but today seemed like a marvelous day to avoid work.

“If Mr. Richardson is there, will you tell him that I plan to return tomorrow? I have a few errands I need to run today for—um—Mumsie.” She faltered. It was a tiny white lie. Mumsie hadn’t exactly asked her to visit the old cemetery and check out the graves there. But if Hazel was somehow the black sheep of the family, Mumsie’s devotion to her memory told Aggie that Mumsie didn’t believe the accusations against Hazel were real. It was as though, by having a stroke, Mumsie had dropped her mantle of dedication to finding proof, and Aggie had inadvertently picked it up and could now not set it down.

“Certainly, I can do that.” Collin paused. “Are you all right, Love?”

His question was straightforward and really shouldn’t have mattered much to Aggie, but somehow it did. She blinked furiously as her eyes filled. “I-I’m fine.”

“You’re such a horrific liar, Agnes.”

“No, really, I’m fine.”

“And I’m the king of England. Very well, do what you will. If you need, drop me a line, eh?”

Drop him a line? Aggie had the sudden desire to race over to the cemetery—skeletal remains or not—and hide her face in his chest, breathe in that old spicy aroma, and feel the crisp cotton of his perfectly ironed shirt.

“Okay.” It was all she had to offer in response.

“And, Love?”

He really needed to stop calling her that! “Yes?”

“A wise man once said, ‘When you walk a lonely road, take hold of the hand of a friend when it is offered to you.’”

That belonged on a calendar. Aggie smiled a resigned smile into the phone. “And who was the wise man?”

Collin’s voice held a bit of humor laced with a large measure of intent. “Me.”

Aggie wasn’t sure what to say to that. Friendship was a great thing and all, but sometimes it was offered and then withdrawn when the going got tough. And something deep inside told Aggie that she had yet to experience the tough. If Collin was anything like the typical male of her experience, he wouldn’t have enough stamina to stick with her.

“Sometimes walking alone is safer,” Aggie responded at last, turning the key to fire up her car’s engine.

“Self-preserving, yes. But satisfying? Hardly.” Collin’s words pierced her. Made her wish for a moment that she could really believe him. Truly believe that, somehow, God reached down from heaven and plopped someone next to you to be His hands and feet in your life, and that they would carry you when you couldn’t walk on your own.

Aggie rested her hand on the steering wheel, even though she had yet to put the car into reverse and back out of the parking spot. “How do you know that God is truly real, and if He is real, that He cares?” The question came out of nowhere, surprising even her. “It doesn’t seem evident He’s all that concerned with sparing us from pain.”

Collin was quiet. Aggie pulled the phone away from her ear and glanced at the screen to check whether the connection had been cut. She heard his voice and raised the phone again so she could listen.

“People make the mistake of thinking if God were real, we’d live in some sort of Utopia. But we won’t, not when we’re human and have the nasty habit of making awful errors. Not to mention, God did sort of create a Utopia—the Garden of Eden—but that’s another topic for another day. All I can say right now is that we sell God short when we look at the pain. Instead, we should focus on what He’s provided us to help us heal.”

“Magic juice?” Aggie quipped.

Collin chuckled. “No, Love. His medicine comes in various forms, although I’ve found the best is simply being in the company of those willing to fight for you. One person can easily be overpowered, but two? They can defend themselves. Add a third, and it’s a very difficult combination to break.”

“I’m not sure what you want me to do with that explanation.” Aggie had to be honest. Religion, faith, God—none of these were new concepts to her. They just weren’t practiced.

Collin answered with a softness that wrapped around her soul. “Just call me if you need to. It’s really quite simple.”

Aggie ended the call, setting her phone on the seat beside her. She gripped the wheel and stared through the windshield at the hospital that rose in front of her. Mumsie’s room window was on the fourth floor, sixth window in. She fixated on it.

Just that simple.

One of these days, she knew she was going to break. That the dam that held back the tears since the day she’d heard the last breath slip from her mom’s lips would collapse. The very idea that she could move beyond Mom’s death—experience life without Mom—that was what kept her from healing, from taking comfort and strength from others. It was a betrayal. A betrayal to Mom and everything they’d experienced together. Their closeness, the intimacy of mother and daughter, the way Mom could read her soul by just looking into her eyes—how could Aggie move on and close that chapter of her life? It was better to leave it a raw, gaping wound. At least then, Mom was still with her, even if Aggie’s spirit was slowly dying its own death at the hand of a tenacious grief. At least then, Aggie didn’t close the door and walk away, leaving Mom behind.

Mumsie’s window reflected a beam from the afternoon sunlight. For a moment, it blinded Aggie, then blinked away as a cloud dimmed the reflection. Aggie chewed the inside of her bottom lip and nodded. It was the same for Mumsie—it must be the same. All these years, she’d kept Hazel alive, kept her breathing and vibrant by not closing the door.

Aggie wondered if part of why it’d been seventy-plus years since Hazel’s death remained unsolved was not only because it was a murder case gone cold, but because if Mumsie did find the answers, then Hazel would really be dead. Her story would truly be over. Her grave would be final.

“We’re too much alike, you and I,” Aggie whispered up at Mumsie’s window. She could see it now. Two peas in a pod. One old, one young. Both festering in the raw agony of grief. And it terrified Aggie. It terrified her to know that bloody rawness would still be as painful seventy years from now.

Unless she somehow found a way to say goodbye.

Aggie stopped for a bottle of water at a gas station and filled up her car’s tank. Her drive to the old cemetery didn’t take long, and as she came over the top of a steep hill bordered by woods, she was impressed by the broad expanse of fields in the valley beyond. Cornfields made up part of it, but there were also large sections of acreage of yellow grass, along with spacious patches of gravel and dirt where buildings had once stood. Her car curved down the road, entering the pass, and she noted one white, two-story rectangular building on the left side of the road. Slowing, she read the sign posted to a chain-link fence that bordered approximately three acres.

Mill Creek Ammunition Plant

Museum and Records Office

Good place as any to start. Aggie pulled in and parked. She made quick work of exiting her car and walking the few steps to the front door. A bronze plaque was mounted to the right of the door.

Power Plant Main Office, 1942–1999

Aggie pulled open the door and stepped inside. Displays were scattered about the room. Black-and-white pictures, memorabilia behind glass cases, and bookshelves with binders and books.

“Can I help you?” The voice came from a small office just off the back. A young woman wove her way through the displays. Her blue jeans were torn at the knee, and she wore a pink T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the Ammunition Plant Museum. Aggie guessed she was maybe in her mid-twenties.

“Yes, I was looking to speak to someone about accessing the old cemetery on the ammunition plant’s property.” Aggie hoped she didn’t have to go through some strange political red tape to gain access to the private property.

“Oh!” The woman smiled and extended her hand. Her red hair curled in a frizzy ponytail, and her blue eyes sparkled. “Hey, that’s awesome! We don’t get very many people interested in this place anymore. It’s sorta dying a slow death.”

Bad choice of words. Aggie hid her wince.

“I’m Terra, by the way. I work here part-time. We have private supporters who fund the museum.”

“Cool,” Aggie nodded, but she really wasn’t concerned with how Terra was paid.

“So what interests you about the cemetery?” Terra leaned against a display of old bullets and grenades.

Aggie figured there was no reason to hide her purpose. “I’m Imogene Hayward’s granddaughter. She was a Grayson during the war, and I guess they owned some of the property the plant was built on. I was going to venture a guess that it has a cemetery on it?”

“Sure!” Terra nodded, her ponytail bobbing. “Yep. So, the acreage the cemetery is on was purchased quite a while ago by a private company that granted burial rights back to the Grayson family. Super generous of them, I’d say, to let the family have their cemetery. There was quite an uproar when the government moved in and bought the property from the farmers.”

“But they bought it,” Aggie countered. “That has to count for something.”

Terra gave her a look that indicated she was understanding but not sympathetic toward the government. “Sure. Underpriced value, and the farmers didn’t have a choice. So really it was shut-up money.”

“Oh.” Aggie didn’t know if Terra was a natural-born activist or just an accurate historian. She’d no desire to start debating the implications of government need versus personal need. War was messy. Period.

“Anyway! Yeah. You can see the cemetery. It’s not too far from here. There’s a road back in, and the owners have made it public access. Really, no one cares to go back there anymore. The last burial there was . . . oh, maybe twenty or so years ago?”

Aggie was anxious to visit it. To see if Mumsie’s husband—her grandfather—was there. To see the other names too. To miraculously find something that would trigger more clues, more information to piece together to make Hazel’s death finally make sense.

“Want me to go with you?” Terra offered.

Why not? Aggie shrugged and nodded. The chatty tour guide might be helpful.

After a short few minutes of driving down a gravel road, the old cemetery opened in front of them. There was nothing marvelous about it at all. An iron fence bordered it, with fifteen or twenty stones inside.

“The government agreed to care for it when they bought the land from the Graysons back in the forties,” Terra explained as she hopped out of Aggie’s car. She slammed the door and starting hiking for the entrance. “And to their credit, they did. Around the time of the Vietnam War, they hired a blacksmith to forge the fence you see here now, funded by the maintenance budget and some private donations.”

Aggie studied the fence. It was simple in its design, the ironwork evidently hand-forged, textured from the hammer as it had tapered the ends into gentle scrolls. Her eyes skimmed the stones, reading what she could of the etchings and noticing a lot of them were weatherworn. All in all, it was a peaceful cemetery, unassuming in its elegance, understated in its years.

“Now,” Terra said as she reached for the latch, flipped it, and swung open the waist-high gate, “the current owners pay homage to the dead and have someone come by every week or two as needed to mow and weed-whack the place.”

Immediately, Aggie’s eyes landed on a pair of headstones, the names inscribed on them grabbing her attention.

Billy Grayson

Tom Grayson

So they had been children, as was evident by the dates showing they’d both died as babies.

Ivan Grayson

Chet Grayson

Mumsie’s brothers, if she recalled correctly. There were a few other graves too, older ones, in the same area. Then Mumsie’s parents. Some cousins perhaps? Ivan’s and Chet’s children?

“There’s no headstone for John Hayward.” Aggie frowned, noting the absence of her grandfather’s grave.

“Who’s he?” Terra asked with a curious cock of her head.

“My grandfather. He was married to Imogene Grayson, who is the sister to Ivan there”—Aggie pointed to his headstone—“and Chet, and also their sister Hazel, who’s buried in Mill Creek Cemetery.”

“Ohhhhh!” Terra’s brows rose. “Interesting! Yeah, I don’t know anything about a John Hayward. That’s weird. Was he living in Mill Creek when he died?”

Aggie strained to remember the details of family history Mom had shared with her over the years. Her grandfather had died when Mom was a toddler. According to the Three Stooges back at the hospital, Mumsie wasn’t living in Mill Creek when her parents passed. Aggie glanced at their stones again, computing dates and circumstances in her mind. So that meant . . .

“No. I guess they didn’t live here when my grandfather passed.”

Terra smiled. “Got it. So, most likely he’s buried wherever they lived at the time.”

California. The answer supplied itself in Aggie’s head. She recalled Mom telling her that she was born in California, and Mumsie had stayed there with her until her early teens. They’d moved back to Mill Creek when Mumsie’s brother Ivan took sick, and never left after that.

Aggie wished there was more here. She wasn’t sure what. Her grandfather’s grave would be nice, but now that she was level-headed enough to put two and two together, it made sense it wasn’t here.

“What do you know about Hazel Grayson?” Aggie asked the young historian. “I’ve been told she didn’t have the greatest reputation.”

Terra pursed her lips, and her gaze swept over the small cemetery. “I know more about the plant than I do any of that. But I did learn about the post-office explosion and town-hall fire back in the forties, ’cause the authorities thought someone had probably smuggled supplies from the plant to make the homemade bomb and start the fire.”

“Did they ever prove that?”

Terra nodded. “Oh, sure. I mean, they locked someone away for it.”

“Who?” Aggie asked.

Terra shrugged. “Like I said, I’m not as familiar with that story. Just how it related to the plant here. But . . .” Her words dwindled as she caught sight of something. “Well, that’s weird.” She took a few steps forward, craning her neck, her eyes fixed on something.

“What is it?” Aggie looked in the direction of the cemetery that Terra was walking toward, but from her angle she didn’t see anything other than a row of basic gravestones.

“This.” Terra squatted in front of a gravestone a few rows away, toward the far east side of the small piece of property. She lifted something from the base of the stone.

A wilted rose.

Something shifted in Aggie. She skipped around the headstones and hurried to Terra’s side. She snatched the rose from her, and Terra gave her a startled look. Thumbing through the petals of the pink flower, Aggie looked for black ink. For the words It’s not over.

“Nothing’s written on it,” she mumbled. A wilted rose petal broke off and fell to the yellow grass at their feet.

“Written on it?” Terra drew back. “On a flower?”

Aggie shook her head in dismissal. She didn’t want to answer Terra’s question. It wouldn’t make sense. But the fact a pink rose had found its way to the old family cemetery could not be happenstance. Someone—someone—was as intent on Hazel’s seventy-year-old murder as she was. As Mumsie had been.

“There is some writing,” Terra offered.

Aggie’s head snapped up. She leveled Terra with one of Mumsie’s infamous green-eyed stares. “Where? What?”

Terra motioned to her. “On the back of this gravestone. I’ve seen it before. It’s curious because most people put epitaphs on the front, but this one was chiseled on the back.”

Aggie moved around the stone to stand beside Terra, who pushed her hands into the pockets of her jeans. Terra gave a redheaded nod toward the stone. “See? A strange epitaph too.”

She didn’t deserve death. He didn’t deserve life.

It matched the note left at Mumsie’s. The note with the fragments of pig bone. Meant to terrify them, or creep them out, or what? Stop them from trying to figure out Hazel’s murder?

“Whose grave is this?” In her rush to the rose and then to see the epitaph Terra pointed out, Aggie hadn’t paused to read the name of the soul laid to rest there.

Terra spoke it as Aggie rounded the stone again to read the name. “Samuel E. Pickett.”

“Pickett? I’m not familiar with that family name at all.” Aggie couldn’t figure it. Nothing fit. What was someone with a non-family name doing buried in the Grayson cemetery? She eyed the date of death. “He died in 2014.”

“Not too terribly long ago.” Terra’s words acknowledged Aggie’s observation.

Aggie studied her. “Do you know how or why he was buried here, if he wasn’t a Grayson?”

Terra shrugged and sucked in a thoughtful breath, narrowing her eyes in thought. “The only thing I can think of is a Grayson would have given permission. They were probably approached by the corporation that owns the property after someone put in a request to bury the body here.”

“That’s the process then—to be buried in this cemetery?” Aggie still held the rose, though several of its petals had fallen off now and rested in a pattern on the ground, not unlike the pattern a flower girl might have left for a bride.

Terra nodded. “It’s not complicated. The owners don’t have any interest in the cemetery, but they also have no intentions of having more plots provided than what the allotted acreage allows. So, they look for proof of relation to the Grayson family.”

“But my grandmother is the only living Grayson.” Besides herself, of course.

“Then she would’ve been the one the owners contacted,” Terra replied.

“I need to talk to the owners.” Aggie waited, expecting Terra to provide the name.

Terra gave her an apologetic wince. “Yeahhhh, well. Good luck. They moved their main offices to New York, and now it’s a heck of a job to get ahold of anyone.”

“New York?” Aggie wanted to bang her head against a wall. “Well then, how do I get their attention? I need to find out who requested to bury Samuel Pickett in the Grayson cemetery. What do I need to do?”

Terra blinked, and her response was innocently frank, but ran a chill down Aggie’s spine. “They might respond faster if you needed to bury someone here.” She gave a little laugh, not realizing the impact of her words. “I guess the quickest way to get their attention is to die.”