CHAPTER 21

Heard tell they were pig bone.” Mr. Richardson’s sudden declaration behind Aggie caused her to jump in her chair and choke on a scream. It was unnerving working in a cemetery to begin with, let alone in the cramped little office where someone had not so long ago taken a shovel to Collin’s head.

“Excuse me?” Aggie couldn’t hide her annoyance at being surprised.

The older man peered at her through his thick plastic lenses. He tugged on his sweater, the hem of it frayed and a string of wool dangling against his navy-blue trousers. “Them bones someone sent to your grandmother.”

Aggie drew back in shock. It’d been several days. Several days with very little answers. Mumsie had been remarkably quiet, napping a lot lately. Before leaving for work, Aggie would call and ask a local volunteer from the Center for the Community on Aging to come sit with Mumsie and make sure she didn’t—God forbid—pass away alone in her sleep. Aggie wasn’t certain Mumsie was ailing so much as the undetermined letter and bones had made her turn inward.

“I’m sorry . . .” Aggie shook her head and eyed Mr. Richardson. “Pig bone, you say?”

“Yep. I saw Harold Pittman downtown, and he said that his wife heard that them bones were pig. Not human.”

Lovely. The entire town was playing a verbal game of telephone surrounding the facts of Mumsie’s sordid and freakish events.

“Mr. Richardson,” Aggie began, “the police haven’t even confirmed that with us.”

“Oh, they will. Eventually.” Mr. Richardson shuffled to the desk where Aggie sat and scooped up a pile of index cards—some of them typewritten, some written in faded handwriting. “Police here in Mill Creek have always been slow as molasses.”

“So I’ve heard.” Aggie grimaced. She paused, then proceeded as an idea struck her. “Mr. Richardson, what do you know of Hazel Grayson’s gravesite?”

His head popped up from his perusal of the cards. “What don’t I know? I know everything about this here cemetery.”

Not really. Aggie wanted to point out the two unmarked graves Collin had discovered. He was still waiting on the legalities involved before he could exhume the graves and have samples sent to a lab to determine exact ages, dates, and logistics of the remains. Until he received the go-ahead, the bodies would stay where they were, encased in the earth.

“Then enlighten me.” Aggie prodded the older man’s ego. He grinned, revealing crooked front teeth, stained from coffee and maybe tobacco use years before.

Mr. Richardson scratched his chin. “Well now, I was a lad when it happened, so I don’t recall all the details, mind you.”

“How old were you?” An age would help Aggie to know how firmly she’d choose to believe the cemetery curator’s story.

“Five? Yes, ma’am. Five years old.” Mr. Richardson smiled again, this time with pride. His eyes were alert, his expression rife with eagerness to tell the tale of Hazel Grayson. “She was murdered, Hazel was.” His voice dropped an octave, as though bringing Aggie into some circle of need-to-know information.

Aggie tried to ignore the pang of regret that snagged her when Mr. Richardson confirmed her suspicions. She managed her facial reaction so as not to show the man how much his blunt acknowledgment had affected her. “Oh?”

“Yes, ma’am!” He shifted his feet and reached for a metal folding chair. Plopping onto it, he slapped his knees with his hands. “My daddy told me that Hazel was found in her attic bedroom. Facedown. Blood everywhere. Like someone had taken a hatchet to her.”

Aggie leaned back against the desk, gripping the edge of it. “That’s, um, interesting.” And morbid. And tragic. Her chest constricted with the sensation of empathy filling her. The kind that predicted tears would soon follow. She took a deep breath to quell the instinctive response.

Mr. Richardson nodded. “For sure it was. Wall was covered in blood and—”

“Okay.” Aggie waved him along.

Mr. Richardson halted and assessed her briefly. “Anyways, my daddy told me it was your grandmother that found her. Came home and went lookin’ for her sister, and there she was. Dead as a doornail and still a bit warm.”

Aggie blanched. “And then what? Who killed Hazel?”

Mr. Richardson shrugged his sweater-clad shoulders. “There’s the mystery of it!”

“No one was ever convicted?” Aggie stiffened, frowning.

“Nope.”

“What about DNA?” Aggie asked before thinking it through.

“DNA?” Mr. Richardson’s laugh sounded congested. He coughed and cleared his throat. “Ain’t no one know nothin’ about DNA. Fact is, what you young’uns are so used to seein’ on all those crime shows on TV? We didn’t have much of that back then. Photographs. Fingerprints. Common sense. That was what they used to solve crimes.”

Aggie’s arms suddenly had goose bumps on them. The very idea of a young Mumsie calling for her sister, walking up the stairs, opening that attic bedroom door . . .

She blinked. “So the police found nothing? No one?”

Mr. Richardson shrugged again. “All I know is, they buried Hazel Grayson in Fifteen Puzzle Row, right between two graves from 1901 and 1889. There she is, all these years later, a dead woman from 1946 smack-dab between a three-year-old and an old lady. Know why she’s buried there?”

Aggie leaned forward, her breath catching in anticipatory eagerness for something to be answered. “No. Why?”

Mr. Richardson drew back, tucking his chin in and creating an extra roll of flesh around his neck. “Well, I don’t know why! I was asking you!”

Aggie bristled. “How would I know?”

He gestured to the desk and the computer. “That’s what you were hired for! Put the records together. Make sense of it all. Build up a well-plotted map of this place so we can answer those questions. Who wants to buy a plot of dirt to lie in someday if the only empty ones are in old sections of the graveyard, or in the brand-new sections where the trees have hardly grown taller than a few yards?”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.” Aggie tempered her voice so she didn’t allow her irritation to show. She’d learned this skill after years of selling real estate. Picky, presumptuous buyers, entitled spouses, and the like.

“People like to have trees over them when they’re dead! No one likes those baby ones the cemetery board had us plant two years ago. Buyin’ those four acres was stupid is as stupid does. Especially when we got open plots here already. Sell what we got, I voted for, and fill ’er up first. Then spend money on more land.”

If Mr. Richardson didn’t stop spinning circles around her, she was afraid she was going to reach out and slap the old man silly. Aggie folded her hands in front of her to avoid any such extreme and overdramatic reactions. “But you just said that no one would want to be buried in an old section of the cemetery.”

“Sure! Of course I did!” He gave her a wide-eyed nod as if she should understand.

Aggie didn’t. Not in the slightest. She mustered a smile, laced with a simpering sarcasm she was all too familiar with. Summoning Mumsie’s spit and vinegar, Aggie patted the old man’s hand. “No one likes to fill up a graveyard like one would fill up their gas tank.”

Mr. Richardson narrowed his eyes as if trying to follow her. Ha! Now he knew what it felt like! Riddles and circles and spinning woven tales with no endings.

“But, Miss Dunkirk,” Mr. Richardson said, seeming to want the last word on the subject, “graveyards do fill up. Point is, people want to be buried in a pretty place. No one wants to be laid to rest in a hole in the bright sunlight with no big trees around and no real landscapin’. And no one wants to be dropped into a hole in the middle of a bunch of old graves. People’ll forget to look for ya if you’re stuck in some old section. But I say a grave’s a grave. You get what you can pay for, and the fact is we sell those cheaper.”

A thought struck Aggie, and she pushed herself off the desk. “You say the graves are cheaper in the old section?”

“Sure. Who can say why some plots never sold and others did. Although now we got random one-offs stuck there among established dead families. People want their kin together. They’re not gonna be having no party where they’re laying, but I suppose the idea of being dead next to relatives is comforting, I mean if you’re still alive to think about it.”

Aggie nodded. “So, it’s difficult to sell gravesites that allow no space for family to be buried nearby.”

Mr. Richardson nodded. “That’s a fact, ma’am.”

Aggie bit her bottom lip and pondered for a moment, squinting as she tried to picture the gravestone of Hazel Grayson. “If Hazel’s family couldn’t afford a nice plot in their family’s section, then they would have perhaps just bought one that was available, right?”

“Sure seems like that’s what happened.” Mr. Richardson nodded as though their entire conversation had been heading in that direction to begin with.

Aggie frowned. “And where is the Grayson family section?”

Mr. Richardson snorted, shaking his head as though Aggie’s question was the most ridiculous thing he’d heard all day. “Ain’t no Grayson family section. Never was. Prob’ly never will be.”

“Where’s my grandfather buried then?” Granted, Mumsie’s husband obviously hadn’t been a Grayson, seeing as that must have been Mumsie’s maiden name, but for certain family burials had to be somewhere in the Mill Creek Cemetery.

Mr. Richardson appeared confused. He pursed his lips and gave his head a little shake. “Your grandfather isn’t buried here.”

“Then—where is he buried?”

“Don’t know. Never even heard much about him.”

“John. John Hayward,” Aggie supplied. His name was the only thing she knew for sure about him.

Mr. Richardson gave her a blank stare, wagging his head back and forth. “Nope. Sorry. Never heard of him.”

Aggie thumbed a stack of index cards. Cards that would never lead her to any more family graves. Mumsie’s family was missing, and not even their graves existed by which to name them.

“I’m not even sure where to begin.” Her admission pained her as Aggie spoke it aloud. She ran her finger around the rim of her coffee mug and lifted her eyes to meet Collin’s.

He off-loaded a duffel bag of equipment onto the floor of the office. His normally combed hair flopped onto his forehead in a damp mop of copper waves. The autumn weather was gifting them with mist and a cloudy, dismal day. Moisture glistened on Collin’s shoulders, clad in a brown fisherman’s sweater that hung to his waist over a pair of olive-green pants, which had a pressed seam down the front of each leg.

Classy, even when playing with dead people in the mud.

“Begin what, Love?” His back was to her as he hoisted the duffel onto a table.

“Figuring out what happened to Hazel Grayson and why Mumsie has a crime scene reconstruction in a dollhouse. And that stained bedspread? I’d place bets that it’s the actual spread from Hazel’s attic room where they found her murdered, and that creeps me out.”

“And how do you come about that?” Collin jotted down some notes in a small notebook. His glasses had slid down his nose.

Aggie was distracted for a moment, then shook her head to clear her mind from vacant admiration of the man who had somehow won her trust and without telling her anything personal about himself.

“Mr. Richardson was here earlier today. I asked him what he knew. It’s all hearsay, of course, but it sounds like Mumsie’s sister was murdered in 1946 and no one knows for sure who did it. He thinks it’s likely the Graysons buried Hazel in the most affordable plot available at the time. In Fifteen Puzzle Row. Can you imagine? Not being buried next to family?”

“I can’t fathom it.” Collin’s response was vague as his face scrunched in concentration. His pencil squiggled more in the notebook.

“So where’s my family buried then, if not here in a family section of the cemetery?”

“Somewhere else, obviously,” Collin said. His reply was hardly helpful.

“Yes, but where? And why not here? I mean, where exactly is my grandfather buried? Why would someone kill Mumsie’s sister? Was there a supposed motive? Was she assaulted first—like a random attack on a female? I can’t imagine that was all that prevalent in 1946.”

“What wasn’t prevalent?” Collin looked up from his note-taking.

Aggie set her coffee mug on her desk with a clunk. She widened her eyes, hoping the green of them would shoot daggers of no-duh into his senses. “Abuse against women.”

“I’m sure it was prevalent,” Collin muttered.

“Abuse, yes, but I meant . . . rape.” Her voice waned. Saying the word was so—violent. She prayed that wasn’t Hazel’s story.

Collin shut his notebook and stuck the pencil behind his ear. He contemplated her for a moment, rolling his lips in thought, which caused his dimples to deepen. “Seems to me whoever killed Hazel Grayson pulled a blinder.”

“A what?” Aggie drew back.

Collin blinked as if confused, then realization entered his eyes. “Oh, uh, ‘pulled a fast one,’ you might say.”

Aggie nodded. “No doubt. If what Mr. Richardson said is true. Still, I can’t imagine Mumsie living with her sister’s unsolved murder for over seventy years.”

“What are you going to do about it?” Collin cocked an eyebrow and pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

“And we circle back.” Aggie rolled her eyes. Not so much at Collin, but at the situation. “I don’t know where to begin.” The nagging questions were only growing stronger, and it was becoming more unsettling as she pondered the fact that there were no family pictures in Mumsie’s home. Not even the eighth-grade picture Aggie specifically recalled sending Mumsie of herself, so excited she was that her freckles had faded, and her bobbed black hair made her cheekbones stand out much like Mumsie’s. She was an eighth-grader proud of looking like her grandmother’s younger version. Apparently it hadn’t moved Mumsie enough to keep the picture on display.

“Ah, well, that’s a pity.”

“Is everything okay?” Aggie frowned. She could tell Collin was trying to be invested in their conversation, yet he kept glancing at the notebook he’d set on top of his duffel bag.

“Mmm?” His brows raised in question, as if she’d startled him. He gave his head a quick shake. “Oh. Yes. Quite well, thank you.”

Aggie tilted her head. “I don’t believe you.” And he should at least share something with her since she’d word-vomited her entire considerations regarding Mumsie and Hazel.

“It’s just, I thought this job was going to be especially simple. What with the flooding, the graves mark themselves, or so it would seem. Outlined by sinking and that. It should be as easy as mixing milk in my tea. But I’m a bit gobsmacked now.”

“By what?” Aggie watched the confusion furrow his brow again, and when he met her eyes, there was concern in his that had completely erased the typical twinkle that resided there. “What is it?” She leaned forward.

Collin raked his hand through his hair and shrugged his shoulders. “I found another grave. Another unmarked grave. That makes three now.”

“You’re in Fifteen Puzzle Row. It stands to reason some old, ancient graves might have lost their markings, doesn’t it? That was the whole reason the cemetery hired you.” Aggie reached for her coffee mug, more out of something to do with her hands than the need for a warm drink.

Collin nodded. “One would think. But this one . . . it’s not where I’d expect one on the grid survey. The other two graves I found, I was able to calculate depth and position of the grave based off the imagery on my GPR. This grave is not only horizontal to the other two graves, it’s also not the average depth. Quite close to the surface actually.”

“You mean your radar? That thing I can’t make sense of with all the ripples and lines and shadows on the screen?”

“Yes.”

“So, this supposed grave didn’t wash away in the flood?” Aggie took a sip of coffee.

Collin shook his head. “From what I can tell, there’s nothing for the earth to sink around or wash away from.”

“I don’t understand.”

Collin gave a long sigh, his frown deepening. “Meaning, there is no grave. More specifically, no cement vault, no casket or coffin. At least from what I’m able to detect with the equipment I have at my disposal.”

“But you said it’s a grave.”

“Yes. Yes, I did. There’s something inside of it, but the measurements don’t fit a coffin. They’re not typical. It’s more compact. As if . . .”

“As if what?” Aggie was going to throttle the man if he didn’t just spit it out.

“As if a body was buried there. Just a body. Nothing else.”

Aggie winced. “So, not only did people buy grave plots cheap because they were in random spaces, but they skipped buying coffins too?”

“And were buried sideways,” Collin concluded.

“That sounds . . . unbelievable.” Aggie shook her head.

“Unbelievable? No.” Collin met her gaze. “Atypical, most definitely. It raises many questions. Many, many questions.”

“Such as?” Aggie led.

“Well, pardon my bluntness, but it begs the question as to whether Hazel Grayson was the only murder victim laid to rest in Fifteen Puzzle Row.”