Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 68.

“Shit,” I said.

“Ho Ho,” Leo, the jokester, said.

“Ellie Ball,” Ellie Ball said.

I turned around, raised my hand to shield my eyes from the glare of the light.

“You guys stay back a bit,” she said to whoever was with her. She started moving forward, increasing the glare on my face.

I turned my back to her.

“Damn,” she said, when she got up to the hole. “You slicks from Chicago are clever. That wreath business was a real special piece of work. Guy at the florist’s told me it set someone back one and a half large. And that bow-blue and orange? Was that you, Elstrom? Clever again. No way your hundred-and-fifty-dollar floral wreath was going to get lost in the sea of the other hundred-and-fifty-dollar wreaths this place is always littered with. No sir; yours was going to stand out, because of that big bow. Clever again by half, though I’ve got to ask: Have you noticed any other wreaths here?”

She had people with her, I reminded myself. She had a gun, and they must have had guns. Behaving agreeably seemed prudent.

“No,” I said.

“That could be because folks around here don’t have that kind of money for floral wreaths, especially not when they’ll wilt in the heat we get this time of year. Wouldn’t you agree, Elstrom?”

“I know I would, Sheriff,” Leo said, reaching to pull himself out of the hole.

“Stay the hell down in that hole.”

“Damn it,” I said. “Your problem is with me, not him.”

“That’s for sure.”

She switched off the light, and the world blessedly went red. Until my eyes adjusted, and it changed again, to a deep blue, milky from the moonlight.

Belowground, Leo sighed with relief. Several times.

“How did you know to expect us here, this particular night?” I asked.

“First, your Lieutenant Plinnit sent some photos up here, asking me to verify it was Darlene Taylor they found dead at your castle.”

Leo cut in, “Actually, it’s only a tur-”

“Shut up,” she said. Then, to me, “He called again, yesterday. He had a number of topics he wanted to discuss. Primarily, he’s feeling substantial pressure to find Rosemary Taylor. He told me he’s got partial DNA evidence that shows she’s still in Chicago, and has been beating up on you, Elstrom. He asked me to keep an eye out for her, if for some reason she came back up this way. I told him I didn’t expect she’d ever come back here. He also mentioned that you might be damned-fool enough to pop back up in Hadlow, for reasons comprehensible only to yourself. I laughed at that, saying I believed we’d seen the last of you, as well. That’s what I believed, too, until the florist called, not one hour later, to tell me some woman in Chicago had bought expensive flowers for Alta’s grave, and that it was a hurry-up order that had to be delivered A-SAP. It was then that I began to believe we’d be seeing you after all, and immediately at that.”

“No way you would have gone along with a request to open the grave,” I said.

“I’ve never had cause to warrant an exhumation order, nor any reason to approach Darlene about such a thing.”

“You never wanted this grave opened anyway, Sheriff.”

“That’s not entirely true. Ever since I started with the department, I’d see Darlene driving with someone, always in her car, always in the middle of the night. One time or another, everyone in the department has seen him with her, believing he was her special mystery man. Well, after a time, I quit believing that. Thirty, forty years is a long time to be keeping nightly company with a man and not have him be noticed coming or going out at her place, at least once. So I started imagining what else might be going on, for Darlene to be out in her car in the middle of so many nights, and I got to speculating it might be so she could accompany someone who needed to get out, drive around a bit, before going back to hiding during the daytime. That’s when I became convinced there was no little fancy man at all, but rather, Alta Taylor, alive and well for all these years.”

“Did your grandfather wonder?”

“I think he regarded her death, real or not, as a chance to close the book on an ugly incident.”

“An ugly incident caused by his biological daughter.”

“That part’s only rumor,” she said, in an even tone.

“Rumor or not, it was enough to keep you from investigating anything that might reflect poorly on your grandfather.”

“Why didn’t I stop you two grave raiders after you turned the first shovelful of dirt? That’s all I needed for an arrest.”

She had a point. She could have stopped us then.

“Because of what didn’t come up in my conversation with Lieutenant Plinnit,” she went on. “You didn’t mention your suspicions about my grandfather. For that, you were allowed to dig into Alta’s grave.”

“And because finally, you want to know what’s not in this ground?”

“Fair enough,” she said. “We haven’t been able to find Alta’s death certificate. The undertakers that would have done the burial are long out of business, so there’s no way to check their records.” She pointed to the video camera I’d set on the ground. “However, there will be no video, Mr. Elstrom. Nor is there to ever be any mention of what you’ve done here. You open the box, everyone gets satisfied it’s empty, you close the box and fill the hole. You leave Hadlow, for good.”

“Sounds good to me, especially that last part,” Leo said, subterraneanly.

“Agreed,” I said.

She turned on her bright beam and shined it into in the hole. “I was expecting more of a child’s coffin.”

“Alta was what, fourteen, when she supposedly died?” I asked.

“Fifteen, but quite small for her age, I’ve heard. Stunted, actually.”

Not so stunted as to not be lethal, I thought, remembering the feral creature who’d taken me down behind the Taylor cottage and again in Sweetie’s penthouse.

Ellie Ball told Leo to open the coffin.

The corroded metal box wasn’t secured. Leo lifted the lid.

It contained no feed sack, filled with rocks or dirt.

There was a flannel shirt and denim jeans, covering what was left of a corpse, lying facedown.