(20)

At the police station, in the chief’s office with him and Ronnie, I told them about my dream and what it had led me to do.

“Dreamed that, did you?” Chief Dudley said.

“No. I had a dream that led me to the cemetery and the junkyard, the old sawmill. Look, I know how it sounds, but it isn’t like that. It wasn’t some prophetic dream. It was me making sense of a lot of ideas in a dream.”

We went back and forth with it for a while, and I could see that Chief Dudley was beginning to suspect I might be two turds short of a pile.

When I finished up the telling, Ronnie sat politely silent. Chief Dudley said, “I think we should go over and see the coroner.”

When we came in, Shirley was sawing on her nails with a file. A bottle of pink nail polish was sitting on the desk along with other instruments that I didn’t recognize but assumed were feminine cosmetic tools of some sort. It could have been a lock-picking set for all I knew.

Jay, it turned out, was outside, around back. We went out there and found him standing by a trailer truck and we could hear a large metal box by it humming. I realized it was a refrigeration unit.

Jay turned when he heard us.

“Ah, the law plus one,” he said.

Chief Dudley said, “I assume that’s been set up for the extra bodies?”

“Yep. Controlled temperature keeps the bones from falling apart. They’re fragile. Had hell getting it approved by the city council.”

“Why are you standing out here?” Ronnie said.

“Thought I needed some sunlight, but that’s proving to be uncomfortable. Too much air-conditioning makes me feel uneasy and then too much of this heat makes me feel faint.”

“Danny here has something that might be of interest, but we want you to hear it,” Ronnie said.

“He had a prophetic dream,” Chief Dudley said. “Or some such shit. A dream about all those bones.”

“A vision,” Jay said. “Really, Danny? A fucking spirit guide came to you?”

“Nothing like that,” I said.

“Let’s go back to the office,” Jay said. “This heat is choking me and I want to be sitting down when I hear this.”

In the office, we sat in the chairs near the coffeepot. None of us had coffee, and this time Shirley didn’t offer to fix us any. She seemed to be at a critical point in her nail work.

“Long ago,” I said, “when the flood that formed Moon Lake happened and the bodies were recovered from it, the only funeral home that would handle black bodies were black-owned and -operated. Ronnie’s dad told us that when the bodies were recovered and taken to the funeral home in New Long Lincoln, there weren’t enough clothes to be had to dress all the corpses. Most of what the families had owned—possessions, money—had washed away. This wasn’t true of everyone. There were those who could afford suits and dresses for their dead, but for those who couldn’t the funeral home provided the dead with blue burial gowns. This was done for several bodies that were buried in the cemetery on the hill above the lake.”

“There’s a graveyard up there?” Jay said.

“The dream reminded me. I realized my subconscious was trying to tell me something that was stuck in the back of my mind like an upholstery tack. Memories about the flood, about a junkyard near a sawmill where Mr. Candles worked. Remember all that, Ronnie?”

“Of course,” Ronnie said. “The blue gowns being the shreds mixed in with the bones.”

“Those pieces might be blue,” Jay said. “Hard to tell at this point.”

“I think over the years, maybe even recently, those bones were dug up and put in cars from the old junkyard up there, and then they were pushed off in the lake. The graveyard has holes where there used to be graves. Could have been like that a long time. The junkyard is locked down, but there’s a new padlock on the gate, and I thought it might be the place where the cars came from. I don’t know. Someone had been going in and out of there at will, perhaps for some time. Could be someone wanted that to stop. The owner of the property got a new lock.”

“But why?” Chief Dudley said. “I mean, what’s the point in digging up bones and putting them in car trunks and pushing the cars off into the water?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I could be wrong, but it makes a kind of sense. Otherwise, too many coincidences. The dug-up cemetery. Bones, and what I think are parts of those shrouds in car trunks. Jay, can you check the bones, the scraps of cloth, determine if the bodies had been embalmed and if that cloth is from shrouds?”

“Bones aren’t exactly fresh. Maybe I can figure something from the cloth. I don’t know.”

“But your father’s car was already in the lake,” Ronnie said. “A body would have to have been brought to the lake and put in the trunk of the car, and until recently the lake was filled with water.”

“Yeah,” Chief Dudley said. “Makes more sense the body was already in the car. Who’d go to all the trouble to move cars out of a junkyard, dig up bones, put them in the trunks of cars, and push them off into the lake, then when it’s dry, put a body in the trunk of your father’s car? What would be the purpose?”

“It sounds somewhat ritualistic,” Shirley said.

At the sound of her little voice we all turned to look at her. She was holding one hand up and filing a fingernail on it with the other.

“Reading in anthropology, I remember a chapter on rituals. People can do some odd and difficult things to fulfill rituals. And then there are sequence killers. Ones who kill as an obsession and can’t stop. They have rituals they perform. I believe they call them signatures.”

“Read that in a book, did you?” Chief Dudley said.

“Did,” she said. “People like that, messed up that way, they frequently feel the need to perform murders in a certain manner, leave behind, maybe without knowing it, perhaps on purpose, signatures, little rituals, identifying it as their work.”

“I don’t think we’re talking about murders,” I said. “I still think the bones were from burials.”

“Then we’re still talking about rituals,” Shirley said. “There’s a group called Skull and Bones, they’re just a bunch of Yankee college students, and way back they stole the bones of Geronimo. The skull is in their clubhouse, and they have ceremonies and rituals there using the bones. At least, that’s how the story goes.”

“We do have the junior college here,” Jay said. “Could have been some college students, I guess. Part of an elaborate joke, maybe?”

“I don’t find it very funny,” Ronnie said. “My grandmother was one of those buried in that graveyard, along with my grandfather. My dad’s mentor, the one who taught him boxing, he’s there too. I never really knew my grandparents, and I hate to admit it, but I don’t visit their graves. I remember Daddy saying he did from time to time but finally decided they weren’t there. I guess a lot of people must have felt that way, or their descendants died off, and that’s why the place had gone to ruin. Kind of feel guilty about it, now that I’m thinking on it.”

“The dead do better in our hearts than in the ground,” Chief Dudley said.

“What I’m thinking,” Ronnie said, “is we find out about the land where the graveyard is, see who owns it, and get a list of who was buried there. We can see who owns the junkyard too.”

“If it’s all right, Jay, and you can do without me for a while, I can do that,” Shirley said. She had put her file aside. “I can go to the Hall of Records at the courthouse. Beats sitting here and filing my nails, though I’ve done an excellent job on them.”

“They look very nice,” Ronnie said.

Jay said, “I was about to check the remains anyway. I’ll do that, look at the cloth and bones, see if I can determine anything.”

“Waste of time,” Chief Dudley said. “Who can figure what some freak thinks? And, Danny, no offense, but your father still strikes me as more likely than someone digging up graves and sticking bones in car trunks and running them off into the lake. Some things can’t, or aren’t meant to, be solved.”

“Might be some records about the flood that go beyond the stories I’ve grown up with,” Ronnie said. “The library might have something on that if the Hall of Records doesn’t.”

“Why don’t you do the library?” Chief Dudley said to me. “I got other work for Ronnie.”