On the second Thursday following the judge’s order, after Jimmy Bales again smiled and shrugged when Mac stopped in to find out what progress had been made, Mac took a copy of the court’s exhumation order down to the cemetery.
Mac had never had occasion to go to Maryton. He knew the town had prospered in the late 1800s as a crossroads trading center, but had withered after the railroad was put through Grand Point, five miles to the north. Houses and stores were abandoned; its few streets crumbled. Folks could not make a living. They’d left.
The dead began coming, then, in abundance. County-owned Maryton Cemetery, surrounded by acres of suddenly worthless land, became the cheapest place to bury the departed of Peering County. Among them were interred the members of the Dean family, going back three generations. Including Betty Jo, in the summer of 1982.
The gray-faced custodian’s name was Gerald. He sat in a clammy stone storage building, surrounded by muddy water hoses, rusted lawn rakes and a not-quite-closed desk drawer full of skin magazines.
Mac handed him the exhumation order, which Gerald pointedly set down without reading.
‘Never mind these papers, Mayor Bassett,’ he said. ‘Sheriff’s got to set it up. He’s paying for the exhumation.’
‘Almost two weeks have passed. I’m trying to speed things along. Who will you use for the digging?’
‘Ralph, but the sheriff’s got to approve.’
‘Give me Ralph’s number. I’ll call him.’
‘You need a soil test before anything,’ Gerald said.
‘Who does that?’
‘Ralph. He’s got to make sure he don’t sink into the beloveds.’
‘Let’s call him now.’
‘I’ll have to hunt up his number.’
A large, smiling man in faded overalls appeared in the doorway.
‘Wait outside,’ Gerald snapped.
The large man extended his hand to Mac. ‘Name’s Ralph,’ he said.
‘Damn it,’ Gerald muttered. Then: ‘Ralph, this here’s Mayor Bassett of Grand Point. He’s here about the Dean exhumation.’
‘Heard about the court order,’ Ralph said.
‘Nothing’s happening,’ Mac said.
Ralph looked at the custodian. ‘We’re waiting for the sheriff, right, Gerald?’
‘How’s the soil?’ Mac asked.
‘Shit,’ Gerald said.
‘Worse than that, maybe,’ Ralph said. ‘Like to step outside?’
Mac followed him around to a second door. Ralph went in and came out with an eight-foot steel rod. They walked several hundred feet to a small headstone cut with Betty Jo Dean’s name. It was small and modest, and hinted nothing at how she must have screamed on Poor Farm Road and, if Ridl was right, in the two days that followed.
Ralph set the steel rod perpendicular to the ground.
‘Gerald in there,’ he said, cocking a thumb back at the stone building, ‘he’s been running this cemetery for nigh on forty years. He ain’t going to push the sheriff for papers because he don’t want no part of any exhumation. Worried hell will pay.’
‘Why?’
Ralph wrapped both of his ham-like fists around the rod and pushed down. It quickly slid three feet into the earth.
‘Mush,’ Mac said.
‘That ain’t the only problem,’ Ralph said. ‘Gerald’s records are incomplete.’
‘About the soil?’ Mac asked, confused.
‘About how your Miss Dean was buried.’
‘I’ve got a court order. Nothing more is needed.’
Ralph gave him a pitying look. ‘Soon as I heard I’d be doing an exhumation, I came out with this here steel rod to get a little heads-up on conditions. I’ve never done an exhumation, see, but I’ve dug plenty of holes for burials. Lots of spots around here are as wet and soft as this one, and plenty fill up with ground water before I finish digging. That’s a bastard; it’s never good dropping beloveds into water.’
He pushed on the rod again. It went down another foot. ‘And as you can see,’ he said, ‘this here is one of the spongy places.’
‘You can still do it, right?’
‘Diggin’s diggin’; I can dig anywhere.’ Ralph scratched his chin. ‘Look, can we speak confidentially? It might save everybody a ton of grief.’
‘Of course.’ Mac would have said anything to speed up the man.
‘What I’m asking is whether you checked to be sure she’s in a vault. You’d want no part of digging up an unprotected casket, right?’
Mac swallowed, trying to force down the queasiness rising in his throat. ‘I thought every casket had to be put in a cement vault.’
‘You being mayor, you know lots of people around here are poor. Sometimes corners get cut to accommodate their circumstances.’
They’d been putting caskets, unprotected, directly into the ground.
‘How do we find out if corners got cut for Betty Jo?’
Ralph turned to unmarked ground to spit. ‘Right after we heard we’d be doing the dig-up, we checked our records. They didn’t show squat, so we called Wiley’s. Luther said all his Betty Jo Dean records are lost. Then he said there’d be lots of press at the exhuming. If things don’t go right – meaning no vault – not only would we be disturbing that poor girl for nothing, but we’d be exposing charitable practices right in front of news people with cameras. Burial business workers can do jail time, Luther Wiley said, for not making poor folks come up with money they don’t have for vaults.’
He tugged the steel rod out of the ground. Its bottom half was shiny with muck.
‘So there you have it,’ he said. ‘If she’s got no vault, there’s nothing down there but specks of bone and rotted pine and unnecessary legal trouble for God-fearing people.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘And from what I hear, you understand about unnecessary legal trouble?’
‘Luther Wiley said it was best if Betty Jo doesn’t get disturbed?’
Ralph nodded. ‘He’d be liable too, just like Gerald and me, if he can’t lay it off on his dead uncle.’
‘I’ll talk to the family,’ Mac said.
He called Reed on his way back to Grand Point. ‘You were too young, but do you think Bella remembers whether Betty Jo was buried in a vault?’
‘Everybody’s got to be buried in a vault.’
‘They’re telling me at Maryton that isn’t always so. Sometimes people can’t afford—’
‘Sweet shit; you’re suggesting Betty Jo was put into the ground without a vault?’
‘I’m trying not to think that.’
‘I’ll call Bella.’
Reed called back in five minutes. ‘She doesn’t remember.’
Mac called Rogenet. ‘If there’s no vault, the state will shut down the whole cemetery,’ the lawyer said. He was out of breath, like he’d just climbed steep stairs. ‘They’ll begin digging everywhere. If there are corpses, or what little is left of them, staring back from the holes, things will get crazy. Since the cemetery is county-owned, your sheriff is going to be in the middle of it, along with that funeral director since, from what you’ve just told me, they both know about this little problem.’ The lawyer inhaled deeply. ‘For now, Bales has got no choice but to comply with the judge’s exhumation order. I’ll call him and say I just heard the most fascinating little tidbit about what lies beneath the ground at Maryton. Or not. I’ll infer that the best way to keep my mouth shut is for him to proceed pronto, hoping Betty Jo is in a vault.’
Reed phoned late that afternoon. ‘Someone named Brown from the State of Illinois just called. Said he was a forensics examiner and wanted to confirm that the exhumation was set for Monday, at eight in the morning.’
‘Rogenet worked at warp speed.’
‘Not at all,’ Reed said. ‘I asked Brown how long he’d known. He said he’d arranged things with Jimmy Bales a week ago.’
Mac whistled softly at the sheriff’s audacity. ‘Bales was going to use his own diggers and exhume without telling us or the press. That would solve the problem of anyone being around to notice whether folks were buried without vaults, and it would give him the chance to use his own fast, friendly doctor. No doubt he planned on re-interring her without the kind of thorough examination we want, hoping the State would then back off, since the work had already been done.’
‘Clever bastards,’ Reed said. ‘Brown said Betty Jo will first be taken to the municipal garage, where she’ll be transferred to an ambulance and driven to Rochelle for X-raying at the hospital. Afterward, she’ll be returned to the sheriff’s examining room in Grand Point, where Brown will collect samples from her fingernails and mouth, whatever.’
‘We’re almost there, Reed.’
‘You think we’ll learn anything?’
‘We already have.’
‘You mean about the sheriff?’
‘And Luther Wiley, Horace Wiggins, Doc Farmont and others we don’t know about yet. People don’t want us anywhere near that forensic examination.’
‘We’ll know more come Monday morning,’ Reed said, and hung up.
It didn’t take as long as that.
That night, Randall White, sweat-faced, charged into the Bird’s Nest. ‘We need to talk, outside,’ he said.
Mac led him through the kitchen and out to the Dumpster.
White grabbed Mac’s arm. ‘You need to stop this foolishness.’
‘You mean about me killing Farris Hobbs, as you suggested to the cops?’
‘She’s coming up, Monday?’
‘Eight a.m., but I imagine you knew that before I did.’
‘You don’t know what you’re doing,’ White said. ‘Folks are going to suffer.’
‘They want to know the truth.’
‘Leave the truth alone.’
‘What the hell …?’
‘There was a mad panic to get that bullet out of Betty Jo. She was in such bad shape, lying so long out in that field, everybody was hurrying.’ Spittle had formed on White’s lips.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The damned bullet everybody was so anxious to get at.’
‘They got it, right?’ Mac asked. ‘They got the bullet?’
‘Doc Farmont slipped away this afternoon,’ White said. ‘He was painting his boat just this morning. Next thing, someone saw him passing beneath the highway bridge, heading south.’
‘He told me he was planning on sailing that boat to the Mississippi, then down to the Gulf of Mexico, but that wasn’t going to be for another week or so.’
‘You’re not listening,’ White said. ‘I saw Doc just this morning, painting his boat.’
‘Doc put the boat in the water while the paint was still wet? That sounds like he’s as afraid of the exhumation as much as you are.’
‘No good will come from it.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ Mac called out to the man’s back. Because by then, White was hurrying away like a man fleeing an avalanche.