Ding Dong Dead

17

April’s white Lincoln was parked on the street outside of the cemetery entrance. Gretchen pulled up behind her, got out, and walked up to the car.

Bonnie was in the passenger seat. Julie sat alone in the back.

“Nina will be here in a few minutes,” Gretchen said.

“Smart thinking,” April said. “You would have been in big trouble if you left her out. Again.”

Exactly! Gretchen wasn’t going to subject herself to Nina’s wrath unless she absolutely had to.

“Here she comes,” Julie said.

Nina parked in the shade of an orange tree.

“Tutu can wait in the car with Enrico,” Gretchen said to her aunt. “It’s a nice day. She isn’t going to roast.”

“Why can’t she come?”

April snorted. “She might wee-wee on the graves, that’s why.”

They piled into Gretchen’s car, and she drove inside the cemetery gates.

“I love visiting cemeteries,” April said from the backseat. “Especially old cemeteries. It’s one of my hobbies. I can hardly wait.”

“That’s creepy,” Nina said, turning her lithe body to glance into the back.

“And ghost chasing isn’t?” April replied.

“I can’t help it if I attract otherworldly beings,” Nina said. “They gravitate to me because of my ability to communicate with them. It’s not like I have a choice. They pick me. Flora’s situation is a perfect example. She didn’t show herself to anyone until I arrived, did she?”

“That’s true,” Bonnie said.

“Cemeteries are steeped in history,” April said. “You get a flavor of the different eras and cultures when you take the time to read the headstones.”

“My hunt to help a ghost is steeped in history, too,” Nina reminded her.

Gretchen’s hands were sweaty on the steering wheel. She stopped the car next to the same palm tree that she’d leaned against after running away from the dead woman’s frozen stare.

The cemetery didn’t look as forbidding in the light of day. Mountains framed the skyscape, and ancient red earth spread underfoot. To Gretchen, the lack of greenery looked exotic, and the desert hues warmed her. Living in Arizona was like living on another planet, the smells and visuals so different from Boston where she had grown up.

Gretchen looked around-palm trees, several native shade trees, white crosses rising from tall grave markers, the sun glistening from metal grave sculptures and ornaments.

“Ever been to Tombstone?” April asked, hefting her body out of the back of Gretchen’s car. “Boot Hill Cemetery is where many of the old-time western gunslingers are buried. One of my favorite tombstones says, ‘Here lies Lester Moore/Four slugs from a 44/No les, no more.’ ”

The women stood outside the car. Julie hadn’t said a word since getting out of April’s car. Her dyed black hair looked harsh in the daylight. Both her and Bonnie’s faces were pale.

“Are you feeling all right?” Gretchen asked them.

“I’m a little jittery,” Julie said.

“Me, too,” Bonnie agreed.

“If you ever get to Key West,” April went on, “go to the old cemetery in the ‘dead’ of town.” She elbowed Bonnie. “Pun intended. That’s the spookiest cemetery and the most interesting. The graves are aboveground. The coffins are stacked on top of each other because the bedrock is too hard to dig into. One of the graves reads, “I told you I was sick.’ ”

“Shush,” Nina said. “We have to show proper respect for the dead. And you’re scaring Julie. Gretchen, lead the way.”

“Over here.” Gretchen retraced her steps as she remembered them. First to the tree, then at an angle to Matt.

An eerie silence permeated the spring air. A light breeze ruffled Gretchen’s hair.

“Where is the first headstone?” Nina asked her. “You have a lost expression on your face, like you don’t know where you are.”

“It was dark. Let me see.” Gretchen stopped and studied her car, parked where Matt’s had been two nights ago. She visualized an imaginary line from the car to the palm tree, then to the lipstick-marked grave. “There.” She had been off by only a few graves. The women followed her as she realigned.

There weren’t any signs of lipstick markings anywhere. She still hadn’t told her friends about the handwriting on the headstone. If Matt’s intention was to keep that information from the public, she’d support him. But she wanted to ask him about it. She’d have to tell him about the note also.

April squinted over the top of her reading glasses. “William Hayden,” she read. “Anybody know that name?”

They all agreed that they didn’t.

“Sure are a lot of Haydens buried together,” Bonnie observed.

April read off the names of others buried close by in case Gretchen was mistaken about the specific grave marker. None of the names sounded familiar to any of them.

“Show us where the body was found,” April said.

Gretchen had been avoiding the spot, focusing her attention instead on the mountains in the distance or the gravel at her feet. Any place other than where Allison Thomasia’s body had been discovered. When she forced herself to glance in that direction, she half expected to see a body, the blood, the stare. Instead she gazed at more of the same: red earth, white crosses, heavy marble headstones. Nothing to remind her of the other night except for the images seared in her memory.

“Right here,” she said. The women formed a circle around the plot she was staring down at.

Cemetery protocol eluded her. Were they supposed to stay off of the graves? She thought the answer was yes. But how? Hard to do considering there weren’t any obvious walkways between them.

April was standing right on top of the one she had indicated, scanning the ground over her glasses, looking for clues.

“The ground’s soaked in blood,” Bonnie announced, confirming Gretchen’s silent opinion.

The sandstone earth did seem slightly redder over the grave. It wasn’t Gretchen’s imagination.

“Oh my Gawd,” Nina said. “Get a load of this.”

Gretchen turned to find Nina standing in front of one of the headstones.

“This is the same man who built the house,” Nina said when April and Bonnie didn’t make the connection.

But Gretchen had. “We’ve located John Swilling’s grave.”

“And his wife Emma is buried beside him,” Nina said, reading the inscription aloud. “Wait.” She pulled a small notepad from her purse and flipped through it. “I should have made a copy of the historical records instead of jotting notes, but how was I to know at the time?”

While her aunt went through her notes, Gretchen read the scant information on the gravestone. John Swilling had been forty-eight when he died in 1946, his wife even younger when she’d been placed in the cold hard earth. She’d been only twenty-four years old at the time and had died the same year the house was constructed. Births, names, deaths were the only part of their story that the gravestone gave away. Side by side for the rest of eternity.

“I thought so,” Nina said. “Flora’s birth record was in the files at the historical society. According to these dates”-she waved at the headstone-“Flora Swilling was born on the same day that Emma passed away. Emma must have died giving birth to Flora.”

“How sad,” Bonnie said. “She never knew her mother.”

While her friends made sympathetic noises over a little girl who never had a chance to experience the comfort of her mother’s arms, Gretchen walked away from the stone and stood at the foot of the graves.

There was space for at least one more family member, maybe two.

“Is your friend working in the office today?” Gretchen asked Bonnie.

“I think so,” Bonnie answered. “Let’s go see.”

“Let’s leave,” Julie said. “I’ve seen enough.”

“I told you not to come,” April said. “You’re too nice.”

“Thanks,” Julie said. “I think.”

Nina walked over, stopped beside Gretchen, and studied the graves from Gretchen’s point of view. “Look at that!” she said after only a moment, leaving Gretchen to wonder again about her aunt’s ability to tune into her own thoughts.

Aunt and niece looked at each other.

“A family plot,” they said simultaneously.

“The cops have already been through all this,” Bonnie’s friend Anne said. Her arms were wedged into the top drawer of a filing cabinet. She pulled out a manila folder, shut the drawer, and sat down at her desk.

“Did my Matty check into this particular file specifically? You know, this one for Swilling?” Bonnie’s pet name for her son had seemed endearing at first but was quickly starting to annoy Gretchen almost as much as it did Matt.

“There isn’t a Swilling file, and I told them the same thing,” Anne said. “Several officers went through all the files, the cabinet, and the computer records, like they didn’t believe me.” She withdrew a single sheet of paper from the file and leaned forward. “This is the extent of the records from the old cemetery. The rest burned up in a fire in the fifties.”

“What is it?” Julie asked. Some of her color had returned since they’d left the graveyard and entered the office.

“It’s a document from the Arizona Historical Preservation Office,” Anne said. “The old cemetery has a historic designation. We can’t remove any of the bodies.”

“Would you want to?” Julie asked, losing her color again.

“No, no, it’s only a formality.”

“The victim died right on top of the Swilling graves,” Gretchen said. “We were hoping to learn who else was going to be buried in that plot.”

“Didn’t she crawl for a ways and collapse there? If that’s the case, then those people buried beneath her wouldn’t have anything to do with her murder anyway,” Anne said. “We don’t even know why she was in the cemetery after dark. Was she meeting someone? Was she with somebody? What if she had a partner, and they were robbing a grave?”

“Robbing a grave?” Gretchen stopped reading the historical document over Anne’s shoulder. “Does that happen often?”

“You never know what a coffin might contain,” Anne said. “Gold, jewelry. Thieves even sell body parts.”

Gretchen thought Anne’s theory a bit far-fetched. Gretchen hadn’t seen a shovel or other tools the night the body was found. If Allison Thomasia had been trying to exhume a corpse, she would’ve had to have been digging with her bare hands, certainly no match for the desert rock under which the coffin lay.

Bonnie, however, was buying into her friend’s grave-robbing idea. “Really? I never thought of that. Wow. I’ll have to pass that one on to Matty.”

Matty. Okay, now it was sounding like chalk on a blackboard or like a dentist’s drill in action.

“So there’s no way of learning anything about the Swilling graves?” Gretchen reached for the folder. Sure enough, no other documents were inside.

“Those grave sites have been around for a long time,” Anne said. “Clients these days might talk to us about their plans for interment. You know, they might say, sure let’s get a plot with enough room in case the kids want to be buried with us. You know, they like to plan into the future, just in case.”

Everyone nodded.

“But they don’t put that part of their plan in writing. John Swilling apparently purchased space for four coffins. That’s the extent of what we’ll ever know.”

They were driving back to the street when Gretchen returned to wondering if the grave had any possible significance. “What if Allison crawled over to that particular grave for a reason? What if that was a clue?”

“She was trying to escape,” April said. “It was random that she happened to die on that particular grave. Where she died doesn’t mean anything.”

“I’m with Gretchen on this one,” Nina said.

Gretchen stopped the car beside Nina’s car. Tutu glared at her from the backseat.

“Allison Thomasia left a clue that will lead to her killer,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”