The Cemetery Man and Other Darkside Tales

The Cemetery Man

The first time I saw the Cemetery Man, I knew he wasn’t the usual kind of visitor we have at Shady Oaks. Most folks who come to visit the resting places of loved ones and friends follow one or more of the grid of interior roads so as to get as close to the gravesites as they can. This fellow parked his black sedan — a rental, I found out later — just inside the main entrance gates, opposite the administration building, and walked from there. He wasn’t dressed right for the warm Indian summer weather, either, in a long black overcoat. And he didn’t seem to know where he wanted to go.

Shady Oaks stretches over more than fifteen hillside acres just outside the Los Alegres city limits. The Catholic and Jewish cemeteries are east of the administration building, the larger, wider nondenominational and historic sections west of it. There are a couple of dozen blacktop roads that crisscross the grounds; the ten that lead uphill vertically are known to employees as Up Roads, the seven that run horizontally as Crossroads, and each one is numbered. On the west side the gravesite and outdoor crypt sections between the roads are lettered from A through Z, with A being the lowest near the entrance gates and Z far up on the brow of the hill. I’m explaining all this to give you an idea of what Shady Oaks is like and so you’ll know what I mean when I say I was working on #1 Crossroad above A Section the first time I saw the Cemetery Man.

What I was doing there was cleaning up leaves and twigs and branches that had blown down in a recent windstorm. It was a weekday afternoon in October and the grounds were mostly deserted. The work was easy enough and I was taking my time, so I noticed him as soon as he drove in and parked. He stood for a minute or so to look around, then headed on foot into A Section.

He was nobody I’d ever seen before. Close to seventy, somewhat frail-looking even at a distance, yet his back was straight and there was purpose in the way he moved. When he reached the first row of the A Section gravesites, he paused long enough at each to peer at the markers before moving on to the next. Looking for a particular plot, I thought, but not the way somebody does when he’s forgotten the exact location of one he’s visited before. As if he had no idea where the one he wanted was located.

He didn’t find it in A Section. While I raked and piled and bagged, I watched him cross #2 Up Road farther west and search through the B Section rows. The one he was looking for wasn’t there, either. He went uphill next, into F Section above where I was on #1 Crossroad.

Well, I’m what they call a people person. I know a good many of the visitors who come to Shady Oaks, on account of I’ve lived in the Los Alegres area all my life, and I enjoy passing the time of day with folks and offering a helping hand whenever I can. I admit to being a curious fellow, too — some might say nosy, not that that bothers me. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it never did me any harm.

So I tossed the last bag of debris into the back of my pickup and walked up to where the Cemetery Man was moving among the F Section plots. When he reached the near end of a row, I went up to him and smiled and said, “Afternoon. Having trouble finding a plot?”

He turned toward me, and I have to say I felt a little shock when I saw him up close. His cheeks and forehead were crosshatched with deep-cut lines; two that curved down around his mouth looked as if they might have been framed and dug out with a pair of calipers. His eyes were deep-sunk, the pupils shiny-dark with what I’d seen too many times not to recognize as grief and sorrow. The word that came to me when I looked into that face for the first time was “ravaged.”

He said in a thin, raspy voice, “I’ll find it eventually.”

“Maybe I can help. Jim Foley’s my name. Head groundskeeper at Shady Oaks for twenty-two years and counting. I don’t claim to know the names and locations of everyone at rest here, but I do know quite a few. Who is it you’re searching for?”

He hesitated so long I thought he was going to turn away without answering.

Then he said, “Peter J. Anderson,” but I had the feeling he gave the name reluctantly.

“Anderson, Peter Anderson.” The name didn’t ring any bells, not then. “Quite a few Andersons here, as you’d imagine. When did he pass on?”

“Twelve years ago. August eleventh, Two Thousand Two.”

“Member of a large family?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh? You’re not a relative, then?”

“No.”

“Friend of the deceased, or of a family member?”

“No.”

I thought it was funny that he’d be hunting for a stranger’s grave, but I didn’t say so. I said, “Are you sure he’s interred at Shady Oaks?”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

“Well, you know, the quickest way to find out his resting place is to check with Mrs. O’Brien in the administration office. Each plot has a number that can be cross-referenced by name and date—”

“That won’t be necessary. I’ll find it on my own. I have time.”

“This is a pretty big cemetery,” I said, “more than two thousand plots and crypts in this part alone—”

“I have time,” he said again.

I thought that was queer, too. But I said, “Yes, sir. Suit yourself. One thing you might want to know: No need to go looking in the sections up on the brow of the hill. That’s the oldest part of Shady Oaks, where most of our founding families are buried; some of the graves date all the way back to Gold Rush days. No new burials up there in more than fifty years.”

“Thank you,” he said, and then he did turn away. And went right on with his search.

It was about time for me to take my afternoon break, but the Cemetery Man was such an odd old duck I didn’t want to leave off keeping an eye on him. I went down and got into my pickup and drove on up to #2 Crossroad, where I had a clear view of him while I did some more raking and bagging.

He must have covered about a third of F Section before I saw him stop and stay stopped in front of a gravesite in the shadow of a big live oak. His body stiffened — I could tell that even from a distance — and he stood there staring at the plot for a minute or so without moving. Then he bowed his head, as if he might be praying, and stood like that for a longer time, must’ve been at least five minutes.

Afterward I watched him walk along #1 Crossroad to where his rental car was parked, and I thought, Well, that’s that. But it wasn’t. He didn’t get in and drive off as I expected him to. Instead he opened the trunk, took out what looked to be a large bouquet of flowers, and headed straight back to F Section.

When he came uphill toward the grave he’d found, I could make out that the flowers were carnations and two or three kinds of lilies — all of them white and all artificial. Each gravesite has metal cups sunk into the ground for flowers and such; the Cemetery Man arranged his bouquet in the one there, stood again for a little time with his head bowed. Then he returned to his car again and this time he did drive on out.

Well, that curiosity of mine got the best of me. Once I was sure he wasn’t coming back, I went to the plot under the big live oak. And when I looked at the headstone above the bunch of artificial flowers, I got my second little surprise of the day.

Why had the old fellow asked for the grave of a man named Peter J. Anderson and then put flowers on a woman’s named Evelyn Brown? The Anderson name might have been a falsehood, I supposed, and he’d been looking for Brown all along, but that didn’t make sense, either. The only possibility I could think of that did make sense was that there was some sort of family connection between the Andersons and the Browns.

It was puzzling, all right, but in a minor sort of way. I had too much work to do to fuss about it. And I figured I’d never know one way or another because I’d never see him again.

Wrong. He was back again next day.

He must’ve come in sometime in the morning, but it wasn’t until around one o’clock that I saw his car parked in the same spot inside the gates, then him a little while later. My assistants and I had a burial to prepare for in the Catholic Cemetery, and some other work to attend to in the northeast quadrant after that, and I took time to eat my brown-bag lunch before I headed over onto the west side. I was on #3 Crossroad, on my way to fix a leaking hose bib on #4 Up Road, when I spotted him.

There’s a long curving row of crypts in a grove of pepper trees on that part of #3 Crossroad, where folks who don’t believe in ground burial inter the ashes of loved ones who have been cremated. That was where the Cemetery Man was, peering at the nameplates on the crypts. He didn’t pay any attention to me as I rolled slowly by. I almost stopped, but my sense of what’s right and proper in dealing with visitors trumped my curiosity and kept me from doing it.

I put new washers in the leaking hose bib, moved a fallen tree limb that was partially blocking #4 Up Road. The Cemetery Man had finished examining the crypts, I saw when I drove back past, and was now up in J Section. Standing before one of the plots just off #3 Up Road — standing the way he had in front of Evelyn Brown’s grave, stiff and still with his head bowed. Evidently he’d found what he was looking for today. After the switch yesterday, I couldn’t help wondering if it was Peter J. Anderson’s resting place or somebody else’s.

I drove up to #4 Crossroad, turned in there, and stopped. By then the Cemetery Man was moving again, down to #2 Crossroad — heading for his car. Same thing as yesterday, then: he took another bunch of artificial flowers from the trunk, brought them back to the new grave he’d found in J Section, arranged them in front of the headstone there, and stood for another minute or so with his head bowed. The bouquet looked to be identical to the one he’d put on Evelyn Brown’s grave — white carnations, white lilies.

Ten minutes later, he was back in his black sedan and gone.

Didn’t take me long after he passed through the gates to go have a look at the marker on the J Section plot. Peter J. Anderson. 1977–2002.

Well, that should have satisfied me. The Cemetery Man had come hunting for two graves, not just one, found them both, paid his respects and left flowers — end of story. Except that I had a feeling it wasn’t. And it still didn’t explain why he’d given me Peter J. Anderson’s name and not Evelyn Brown’s, or why he’d been so bent on locating their graves without help.

I drove to the administration building and asked Kay O’Brien, who has worked at Shady Oaks almost as long as I have, to look up the records on both plots. She didn’t ask me why I wanted the information. If I have too much curiosity, she doesn’t have any at all.

There was no connection between the Brown and Anderson plots, or at least none in the records. I’d been thinking that maybe the same person might be paying annual maintenance fees for both, but that wasn’t the case. One of the surviving members of the Brown family paid for upkeep on their plot; nobody paid for upkeep on the Anderson grave. That’s often the case with deceased individuals who come from poor families or have no families at all. We try to do a minimal amount of upkeep on those anyway, gratis, but there’s too much other work and barely enough public funding to maintain the roads and pay my and my crew’s salaries.

The only thing Evelyn Brown and Peter J. Anderson seemed to have in common was that they’d both died young, in their twenties, about fifteen months apart. Something about that stirred in the back of my mind, but it was vague and my memory’s not as sharp it used to be. I couldn’t quite dredge it out.

I told myself to forget it, it was really none of my business, and in any event the Cemetery Man was now gone for good. But I wasn’t a bit surprised when he showed up again the following day.

I was just pulling out of the maintenance yard above the administration building, heading out on my morning rounds, when his black sedan rolled in through the gates and stopped in the same place as before. He was still wearing that black overcoat even though it was even warmer today. He walked up to #4 Crossroad, then over into M Section.

Picking up where he’d left off the day before. Still looking.

Well, now I really had the wind up, as the British say. I had to fight down a couple of impulses, one to go poking around inside his car — he hadn’t locked it — to see if I could find out who he was, the other to chase after him and ask him point blank what he was up to. I had my job to consider, after all, and one sure way to lose it would be to hassle a visitor without good cause.

But I couldn’t just ignore him, either, and go on about my work as if he wasn’t there. So I hung around the general area, doing little make-work projects while I watched him conduct the same sort of methodical search as on the previous two days.

He went from M Section up to Q and down to N. The noon hour came and went; I didn’t bother to eat my lunch, which shows you how intent I was on the Cemetery Man. At one-thirty he was in R Section, which is mostly lawn on a gently rolling plateau, the grave markers nearly all plaques and small slabs that he had to stoop to read. And that was where he found the third grave.

I was standing alongside the pickup, fiddling with the tools inside the open side compartment, when he stopped and stared, then straightened and stood stiff-backed and bowed his head — exactly as he had at the Brown and Anderson sites. He stayed at this grave even longer than the others before he went off to his car. The ritual with the bouquet of flowers would be the same as before, I thought. And it was.

When he finished and walked away again, I hurried down to that third grave in R Section and leaned over to read what was etched on the already-tarnished bronze plaque.

All sorts of bells went off in my head then. Even with a bad memory you don’t forget a name like Sarah Jane Nowitzky. Or what happened to her. And once you remember that, you can’t help but remember the connection between her and Evelyn Brown and Peter J. Anderson.

The Cemetery Man had almost reached the main drive. I ran for my pickup, got it turned around, and went barreling down that way. He had the door to the black sedan open when I got there. I braked nose up to the car’s front bumper and jumped out and faced him square.

“Mister,” I said, “I saw you put those flowers on Sarah Jane Nowitzky’s grave.”

All he said was, “Yes, I was aware of you watching me.”

“Evelyn Brown’s and Peter Anderson’s, too. You know what those three people have in common besides being young when they died? I sure do.”

He knew, all right. “They were all murdered,” he said, “between Two Thousand Two and Two Thousand Four. Each in a terrible way.”

“That’s right, and the murders were never solved. And now here you come ten years after the last one, looking for their graves and putting flowers on ’em. I think you better tell me why.”

“Or else you’ll go to the police.”

“Straight to the police.”

“That’s the right thing to do, Mr. Foley. I’ll even go with you if you like.”

It wasn’t what I’d expected him to say, and it took some of the wind out of me.

“You will?”

He nodded and then looked past me into the middle distance. “Evelyn Brown, Peter Anderson, Sarah Jane Nowitzky,” he said after a few seconds, in a voice not much louder than a whisper. “The only three in this area, thank God.”

“What do you mean, the only three in this area?”

“I don’t suppose it matters if I tell you. It won’t be long until it all comes out.” The Cemetery Man pulled his coat collar up to his chin, as if he were feeling a sudden chill. “There were thirty-four others over nearly thirty years. Not only in California — in eleven other states across the country.”

I guess I gawked at him. “Thirty-seven murders?”

“Twenty-six women and eleven men, most under the age of thirty. All killed by the same man, an itinerant carpenter named George Lampton who died of lung cancer three weeks ago. During his lifetime he was never identified, never punished for his crimes.”

“But then... how do you know he’s the one?”

“There was a diary among his effects. Names, dates, places. Methods. Each of his crimes recorded in explicit detail. A scrapbook, too — newspaper clippings, burial notices.”

“My God!”

“The FBI has them now,” the Cemetery Man said. “They’ll release the story to the media only after they’ve completed a thorough investigation. I should have enough time.”

“Enough time for what?”

“To locate most if not all of the graves of his thirty-seven victims, pray for each of them, tell them how sorry I am.

“But why? Why would you want to do that?”

“I have to,” he said, and tears glistened now on his ravaged face. “George Lampton was my son.”