Jeff shot his partner an incredulous look. “What are you talking about?”
Emory again pressed his finger into Jeff’s chest. “I saw the dried mud on the driver-side floor of your car.”
Jeff lifted his open hands at his side. “You mean dirt?”
“You’re fanatical about the cleanliness of your car, and I saw it before we came here to work on this case, when we were walking to my car. It was spotless inside and out. If you had truly gone from your home to the apartment where Bobbie is staying, back to your apartment to sleep and then down here, at no point would you have come into contact with muddy ground.”
“I parked across the street from the cat-sitter’s apartment, and there was mud in the median when I ran across the street.”
“What street does she live on?”
“Morg…”
“Morgan Street? There aren’t any medians on Morgan Street.”
“I wasn’t going to say Morgan Street. I was going to say Morgue Street.”
“Morgue Street? There’s no such place.”
“Yes, there is. It’s right by… the hospital.”
“I don’t believe you. And you were exhausted yesterday – not because you couldn’t sleep the night before but because you were up all night, renting a truck for some reason, driving down here, doing whatever you did… What were you doing here?”
Jeff threw up his hands. “Nothing because I wasn’t here. You’re being ridiculous.”
“Stop lying to me! You have the nerve to guilt me for not trusting you? Give me a reason I should trust you.”
Jeff turned away from his partner. His shoulders dropped, and he faced him again. “All right. It was me.”
“Explain yourself.”
“Okay. I’ll… I’ll tell you.” Jeff’s eyes scrolled from the landscape on Emory’s left to his right and back again.
“Stop stalling! You think I don’t know you’re concocting a lie?”
“I was not.”
“Yes, you were. The truth doesn’t need time to think. You just tell it.”
Jeff raised a hand to his lips and sighed. “In my defense, you weren’t supposed to find out.”
“That’s not a defense! What were you doing here in the middle of the night with a shovel?
“I was trying to surprise you. I was following a hunch, digging for the Pangram Box, but it was a dead end.”
“Then why leave? Why not just say… You’re lying.”
“What? I’m not lying.”
A thought popped into Emory’s head. “Were you burying something?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Then you should have no problem with my borrowing a shovel from the gardener.” Emory turned from him to walk away.
Jeff grabbed Emory’s arm. “Why?”
“I’m going to dig around that cedar tree until I find whatever you buried.”
With a wry expression, Jeff called his bluff. “You wouldn’t do that. That tree is protected by the state. There’s no way you’ll risk hurting it.”
“It shouldn’t be that difficult to find freshly disturbed dirt. That’s all I’ll touch.”
“All right!” Jeff clenched his fists. “All right. I’ll tell you the truth. But you can’t repeat what I say to anyone. Not even Virginia.”
Emory tried to imagine what Jeff wouldn’t even tell his best friend. “Okay.”
Jeff took him by the arm. “Let’s walk.”
“Why?”
“I need some air, and I don’t want to risk anyone else hearing what I’m going to tell you.”
“Fine.” Emory followed Jeff around the house and toward the river.
Jeff stayed silent, waiting until they stepped onto the pier to the boathouse before speaking again. “We should skinny-dip later.”
“I told you I can’t swim.”
“I could teach you.” Jeff glanced at Emory, who didn’t respond. He opened the door to the boathouse. “Let’s talk in here.”
Walled on all four sides, the wooden structure had two arched cutouts on both sides for docking boats, only two of which held a vessel. At the far end hummed a generator, powered by the waterwheel on the other side of the wall. A pipe carrying electricity to the house, Emory presumed, ran from the generator and disappeared beneath the floor.
As they walked across the wooden planks, the walls moaned. Jeff stopped in the middle of the boathouse and let out a tiny laugh. “I guess the boathouse is haunted too. Hey, we still haven’t figured out what the light in the water was.”
“You’re stalling again.”
Jeff looked everywhere but Emory’s face as he blurted out, “I buried someone.”
Emory gasped and froze. “What do you mean you buried someone? Who?”
“My old boyfriend.”
Emory gasped again.
Jeff faced him to ask, “Would you stop doing that?”
Emory threw his arms up. “Then stop giving me things to gasp about!”
“Just hold your freak-out until I’ve had a chance to explain.”
Emory gritted his teeth and growled, “Fine. Explain why I shouldn’t be freaking out right now.”
The boathouse wailed and swayed a bit with the river’s current, prompting both men to adjust their footing. The two boats tapped the posts to which they were moored.
“That moaning.” Jeff looked up at the ceiling beams.
“It does sound like a ghost. Is this place safe?”
“It should be. It’s not that old.”
Emory shook his head and aimed forward with his hand as if to recalibrate the conversation. “Okay. Stop stalling.”
Jeff sighed. “I’ll start from the beginning. I met him at a fraternity party when I was a freshman at UT. I don’t remember which fraternity. I know it wasn’t the one I eventually pledged. I guess that doesn’t matter, but it was the first time I saw Trevor Park. He was this handsome, sexy nerd who looked so out of place – kind of like you anywhere outside a crime scene. I got him a beer and made a joke. I don’t remember what the joke was either, but I’ve never in my life made someone laugh so hard. Of course, that endeared him to me right away. It ended up being one of the best nights of my life. I swear, for a bacteriology major, he was surprisingly good at beer bonging.
“Anyway, we became an item. He came home with me over the winter break, and my parents loved him. The next semester, we got an apartment together, and all was good. Wonderful really. He used to write me little poems and leave them on my pillow. Not sappy love poems. More serious, even sad. One of my favorites later inspired the name for the agency.” Jeff recited the poem from memory:
The mourning dove flies
On the broken heart’s wings.
The mourning dove cries
While the thoughtless bird sings.
And the mourning dove dies
In the fervor hate brings.
“Then summer came. He headed back home to Idaho, determined to come out to his ultra-conservative parents and tell them about me. I tried my damnedest to talk him out of it. From everything he had told me about his parents, I knew they wouldn’t take it well, but my thoughts undersold the fervor of their hate. He showed up at our apartment two days after he left, completely distraught. He had come out to his parents, and they were brutal in their response. They completely disowned him, gave him five minutes to pack his stuff and get out of their house. They cut him off financially, which wasn’t as big a deal because he had scholarships and grants to get through school. He found out through a cousin that they gave all the belongings he left behind to Goodwill.
“Then he got sick. Who gets the flu in summer? Honestly, I thought at the time he was heartsick about his parents, and his body just shut down on him. He came down with pneumonia, and the next day, he was… gone.” Jeff turned away to wipe his eyes.
Emory’s demeanor evolved from mistrust to empathy. “I’m sorry. Did his parents regret their actions after he died?”
“They never came to Knoxville and never even claimed his body. I wanted to claim it and give him a proper funeral, but his parents refused. To make sure I didn’t get him, they donated his body to your alma mater for med students to dissect.”
“Damn.”
“What kind of parents would do that to their kid? I couldn’t stand the thought of it. I drove overnight to Nashville, broke into the Vanderbilt morgue and stole his body. I made a coffin for him and buried him.”
“Where?”
“My parents own thirty acres outside Bristol that they’ve been planning to develop for their retirement, but they hadn’t done anything with it. It’s mainly used by hunters who completely disregard the No Hunting signs I posted all around the perimeter. Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. I held a funeral for Trevor with just me, and I buried him there. After I opened the agency, my parents started talking again about building a house on the property, and that’s when I moved his body to the basement at Mourning Dove.”
Emory surmised the rest. “Once construction started on the office, you were afraid his body would be found.”
“My parents still haven’t done anything with the property, despite all their talk of retiring, so I temporarily put him back there. But I knew I needed to find a permanent place for him.”
“You buried him in the protected zone around the red cedar?”
“What better place than a landmark that will remain untouched. And I figured I could come visit him every month or so, since this place is being converted to a museum.”
Emory gave Jeff a lingering hug. “You did a good thing. Thank you for telling me.”
The pier creaked and swayed again.
Emory stepped back to reclaim his footing. “I didn’t realize these things moved this much.”
“They don’t usually. I hope Blair Geister’s buildings are better constructed than her boathouses.”
Emory laughed. “Now, I need to tell you something.”
“What is it?”
Emory started to answer, but the boathouse moved again. The powerful lunge to the side sent both men to the floor planks. They looked at each other, and both said, “Run!”
They sprang up and hurried toward the door, through which they could see the pier collapsing. The boathouse lurched to the side, separating from the pier. The walls twisted, planks flying loose.
The building screeched, and Emory’s eyes shot up to the falling ceiling.