The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

THE PROBLEM OF THE CROWDED CEMETERY by Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch (b.1930) is a literary phenomenon. He has written over 800 short stories since his debut with “Village of the Dead” in Famous Detective Stories for December 1955. This, in an age when the all-fiction magazine has all but curled up and died. He has had a story (sometimes more) in every issue of the prestigious Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (or EQMM for ease) since May 1973, a record which surely can never be equalled by anyone in any magazine. What is even more amazing about Ed Hoch is his versatility. Despite this awesome level of production his stories still manage to be original and enjoyable. He is able to ring the changes on every idea in the book. Quite a number of his stories have been impossible crimes – more than any other writer’s. I mention many of these in my afterword. His best known series of impossible crimes are those narrated by New England doctor Sam Hawthorne, who looks back over his long life and tells the stories of the many strange crimes with which he was involved. The series began with “The Problem of the Covered Bridge” EQMM, December 1974) which is set in March 1922. The early stories have been collected as Diagnosis: Impossible (1996). I’ve selected a later story that has not been reprinted since its first outing, and which deals with the most remarkable mystery of how a freshly dead body ends up in a long-buried coffin!

I used to picnic in Spring Glen Cemetery in my younger days (Dr Sam Hawthorne told his visitor over a suitable libation). That was when the place was more like a park than a cemetery, bisected by a creek that flowed gently through it most of the year. It was only in the spring, with the snow melting on Cobble Mountain, that the creek sometimes overflowed and flooded part of the graveyard.

That was what happened following the especially harsh winter of ’36. The flooded creek had so eroded the soil on its banks that several acres of cemetery land had been lost. I was a member of the cemetery’s board of trustees at that time and when we met in the spring of 1939 it was obvious something had to be done.

“It’s just been getting worse for the past three years,” Dalton Swan was saying as he showed us photographs of the damage done by the flooded stream. He was the tall, balding president of the board, a rotating responsibility each of the five members had assumed at one time or another. Swan, a fiftyish bank president, was in the second year of his two-year term.

I shuffled the pictures in my hands before passing them to Virginia Taylor on my right. Aware of the cemetery’s shaky financial underpinnings, I asked, “Couldn’t this go another year?”

“Look at these pictures, Sam,” Dalton Swan argued. “The Brewster family gravesite is almost washed away! Here, you can actually see the corner of a coffin among these tree roots.”

“Those coffins need to be dug up and moved,” Virginia Taylor agreed. She was a tall, athletic woman in her thirties whom I often glimpsed on the tennis courts around town. The Taylor family had made their money growing tobacco all over the state of Connecticut but all it had earned them was the largest family plot in Spring Glen Cemetery.

We discussed it awhile longer, with Randy Freed, a trustee and the cemetery’s legal counsel, suggesting we give it another month. “We simply can’t justify this expense if there’s another way out.”

Dalton Swan scoffed at that. “The only other way is to let the Brewster coffins float down Spring Glen Creek. That what you want?”

Freed bristled, more at Swan’s tone of voice than at the words. “Do what you want,” he grumbled.

Swan called for a vote on the motion to move the endangered coffins. “I’ve already spoken with the Brewster family. They’ll sign the necessary papers.”

Miss Taylor, Swan, and I voted yes, along with Hiram Mullins, a retired real-estate developer who rarely spoke at our meetings. He sat there now with a sad smile on his face, perhaps remembering better days when creeks did not overflow their banks. The only negative vote came from Randy Freed.

“We’ll proceed, then, as quickly as possible,” Dalton Swan said. “Gunther can have the workmen and equipment here in the morning.” Earl Gunther was the cemetery’s superintendent, in charge of its day-to-day operation.

“You’re making a mistake rushing into it like this,” Freed told us. “A truckload of dirt tamped down along the bank of the creek would be a lot easier than relocating those coffins.”

“Until it washed away with the next heavy rain,” Swan argued. “Be practical, for God’s sake!”

It did seem to me that the lawyer was being a bit unreasonable and I wondered why. “If it’ll help matters any,” I volunteered, “I can be out here in the morning when the workmen arrive, just to make certain nothing is touched but the Brewster plot.”

“That would help a great deal, Dr Hawthorne,” Virginia Taylor agreed. “We’d all feel better if there was some supervision on this besides Earl Gunther.”

The superintendent had not been a special favourite of the trustees since a pair of his day labourers had been found drunk one morning, finishing off a quart of rye whiskey on the back of a toppled tombstone. Sheriff Lens had been called by some horrified mourners and he’d given the two a choice of thirty days in jail or a quick trip out of town. They’d chosen the latter, but the matter had come to the board’s attention. Earl Gunther had been warned to stay on top of things if he wanted to keep his job.

After the meeting we sought him out in the house near the cemetery gate. It went with the job, though his office was in the building where we met. Earl’s wife Linda ushered us in. “Dear, Dr Hawthorne and Mr Swan are here to see you.”

Earl Gunther was a burly man with a black moustache and thinning hair. He’d been a gravedigger at Spring Glen for years before taking on the job of superintendent. None of the board had been too excited at the prospect, but he seemed to be the best man available. He was newly married to Linda at the time and somehow we felt she might help straighten him out. She had, but not quite enough.

The Spring Glen board of trustees only met quarterly. This April meeting would be our last till the traditional July outing at Dalton Swan’s farm. It wasn’t something that took a great deal of my time, and until now it had never involved anything other than the perfunctory board meetings. All that was about to change. “Dr Hawthorne will be out in the morning to oversee the disinterment and reburial,” Swan told the superintendent. “We don’t foresee any problem.”

Earl Gunther rubbed his chin. “T’ll get a crew lined up, with shovels and a block and tackle. There are six coffins in the Brewster plot. That’s gonna be an all-day job.”

“It can’t be helped. Someone from the family will be here for the reburial, probably with the minister.”

“We’ll do the best we can,” the superintendent informed us.

Dalton Swan nodded. “I’m sure you will.”

I drove back to the office where I had a couple of early afternoon appointments. “Any excitement at the meeting?” Mary Best asked, knowing there never was.

“Nothing much. I have to go out there in the morning while they move the Brewster plot. The creek’s just eating away at the banks.”

She glanced at my appointment book. “Shall I reschedule Mrs Winston for the afternoon?”

“Better make it Friday morning if you can. There’s no telling how long I’ll be out there.”

While I waited for my first patient I glanced at the newspaper headlines. Hitler was insisting on the return of Danzig and a war between Germany and Poland seemed a distinct possibility. Up here in Northmont such concerns were still far away.

Late that afternoon, as I was leaving my office, I saw Virginia Taylor coming out of the adjoining Pilgrim Memorial Hospital. She paused by her car, waiting till I reached her. “Will you be at Spring Glen in the morning?”

“I’m planning on it.”

“That’s good. The Brewster family is very concerned that the remains be moved in a dignified manner.”

“I’m sure there’ll be no problems. Whatever his other faults, Gunther is a good worker.”

She nodded and motioned back toward the hospital building. “I do some volunteer work here on Tuesdays. It makes for a full day when there’s also a board meeting.” She belonged to one of Northmont’s older families and spent much of her time with charitable causes. A few years back she’d been engaged to a young lawyer from Providence but they’d broken up, leaving her still unmarried. As often happened with unmarried women, her tennis and travel and volunteer work had managed to fill her life. The family tobacco business had long since been sold to others.

We chatted a while longer and then she went off in the sporty little convertible she drove around town. I’d had a car something like it in my younger days.

In the morning I drove out to the cemetery, arriving before nine. Earl Gunther had a flatbed truck parked by the Brewster plot, its back loaded with shovels and picks, a block and tackle, and a bulky tarpaulin folded into a heap. A half-dozen workmen were just arriving on the scene, walking over from the main gate.

“Good to see you, Doc,” Gunther greeted me with a handshake. “I’m using two crews of three men each. One will work on the creek side, digging into the bank. The other will dig in from the top to reach the other coffins. It’ll probably take all morning and maybe longer.”

I watched the crew by the creek as they shovelled away the soft dirt and cut through some of the tree roots with axes. The tombstones up above told me that the most recent of these graves was over fifteen years old, and a couple dated back to before the turn of the century. As one coffin finally came free an hour later the workmen hoisted it out with the block and tackle, guiding it onto the flatbed truck. After that the pace seemed to pick up. Before I knew it a second and third coffin had appeared on the flatbed, with a fourth being lifted from its resting place.

I’d wandered around the cemetery while the work was in progress, reading the names off the tombstones, remembering a few old patients whose lives I’d briefly prolonged. Finally, around noon, the last of the six coffins was pulled free of the tough oak roots that encircled it. I walked over to the truck as it was slid into place.

“Good work, Earl,” I told him. “It looks like just one or two of the corners were damaged.” These burials had been in the days before coffins were enclosed in metal vaults, and the older ones were showing evidence of their decades in the earth, even before the recent ravages of the flooded creek. Still, all six seemed to be reasonably sound. Or at least I thought so before my probing fingers encountered something wet and sticky at the damaged corner of one coffin.

“What’s this?” I asked Gunther. My hand had come away moistened by blood and for a moment I thought I’d cut myself.

“You bleeding?”

“I’m not, but this coffin is.”

“Coffins don’t bleed, Doc, especially after twenty or thirty years.”

“I think we better open this one up.” The lid was still firmly screwed down and my fingers were useless. “Do you have a tool of some sort?”

“It’s just bones,” the superintendent argued.

“We’d better have a look.”

He sighed and went to get some tools. The lid was unscrewed and easily pried open. I lifted it myself, prepared for the sight of decay. I wasn’t prepared for the bloody corpse that confronted me, jammed in on top of the stark white bones.

Impossibly, irrationally, it was the body of Hiram Mullins, who’d sat next to me at the board meeting not twenty-four hours earlier.

It was Sheriff Lens who offered the best commentary when he arrived to view the body less than an hour later. “You’ve really outdone yourself this time, Doc. How could a man who was alive yesterday end up murdered inside a coffin that’s been buried for twenty years?”

“I don’t know, Sheriff, but I damn well intend to find out.” I’d been questioning Earl Gunther and the workmen while we waited for the sheriffs arrival, but they professed to know nothing. Earl seemed especially upset, nervously wiping the sweat from his brow though the temperature was barely sixty.

“How’s the board goin’ to react to this, Doc? Will I lose my job?”

“Not if we can show you weren’t responsible. But you have to be completely honest with me, Earl. Had any of those graves been dug up during the night?”

“You saw the ground yourself, Doc, before they started digging. It hadn’t been touched in years. There’s no way a coffin could have been dug up and reburied without leaving traces.”

“Did you know Hiram Mullins well?”

“Hardly at all. I saw him when he came to your board meetings, that was it. He seemed like a nice man. Never said much.”

That was certainly true, and I used virtually the same words to describe Mullins to the sheriff when he arrived. Sheriff Lens peered distastefully at the body in the coffin and asked, “What do you think caused the wound?”

“Some sharp instrument like a knife, only the blade seems to have been longer and thicker. There’s a great deal of chest damage and so much blood that it actually leaked out of this rotted corner of the coffin.”

“Good thing it did, or the Brewsters would have been reburied and Mullins along with them.” The sheriff had brought a camera with him and was taking some photographs of the crime scene. He’d been doing this recently, following techniques outlined in crime investigation handbooks. He might have been a small-town sheriff but he was willing to learn new things. “What do you know about Mullins?”

I shrugged. “No more than you, I imagine. He was around seventy, I suppose, retired from his own real-estate business. I never saw him except at the cemetery board meetings, every three months.”

“His wife is dead and they had no children,” the sheriff said. “But how do you think he got into that coffin, Doc?”

“I have no idea.”

When I got back to my office I looked through my bookshelves until I found an Ellery Queen mystery I remembered from seven years earlier. It was called The Greek Coffin Mystery and it dealt with two bodies discovered in a single coffin. But the second body had been added before the original burial. It didn’t help a bit with Hiram Mullins’s killing. His body had been added to a coffin already buried for two decades.

Before long my telephone started ringing. The word was getting around. First to call was Randy Freed, the lawyer who served as legal counsel for Spring Glen. “Sam, what’s this I hear about old Mullins?”

“It’s true. We found his body in one of the coffins Gunther’s crew dug up.”

“How is that possible?”

“It’s not.”

“Look here, Sam – you’re the last one I’d expect to believe in any sort of supernatural business. Maybe Earl Gunther’s crew added the body after they dug up the coffin.”

“I was there all the time, Randy, never more than a hundred feet away.”

“Do you think Spring Glen could face any sort of liability from the Mullins family?”

“I don’t know how much of a family there is, and he was clearly murdered. We just have to figure out how.”

“I’ll be in touch,” Freed told me as he hung up.

The next call came from Dalton Swan, advising me that he was calling an emergency meeting of the cemetery board for the following day. “We have to get to the bottom of this. The board has to issue a statement of some sort and we have to pick someone to fill his place.”

The latter didn’t seem that urgent to me, since we only met quarterly. “Whatever you say, Dalton. I have some hospital visits in the morning but after that I’m free till afternoon.”

“Let’s say eleven o’clock, then. I’ve spoken with Virginia and that time is good for her.”

“Fine.”

Mary Best came in as I hung up, returning from a late lunch. “What’s this business of two bodies in one coffin?” she asked immediately. “Is Spring Glen getting that crowded?”

“I suppose the news is all over town.”

She sat down at her reception desk. “All I know is, it’s another impossible murder with you right in the centre of things again.”

“Believe me, I didn’t plan it that way. Until now, being a cemetery trustee was about the easiest position I ever held.”

“The creek’s the problem there. Maybe they should have gone in with Shinn Corners after all.” The nearby town had wanted to develop a new regional cemetery serving both communities, but before anything could be decided the land was sold to a private college now under construction for a September opening.

“I never knew a thing about that till it was over,” I admitted. “I don’t know that anyone on the board did.”

Mary had a way of thinking things through to their basics. “Would Earl Gunther have any reason for killing Mullins?” she asked.

“I can’t imagine what it would be. The old man just sat there at the meetings, never said a word about Gunther or anyone else.”

“Still, you don’t think Gunther could be involved?”

“Maybe. But I don’t picture Mullins going out to the cemetery to meet him at the crack of dawn. And even if he did, how would Gunther have gotten the body into a coffin buried six feet deep in firm, undisturbed earth?”

“Let me think about that while I type up the bills,” she said. Marry was never one to admit defeat.

I waited around the hospital that afternoon until Doc Prouty completed the autopsy on old Hiram. There were no surprises. “Fully dressed except for collar and tie,” he said as he washed up in the autopsy room. “It was a large, deep wound that encompassed the chest and heart. Went in under the rib cage, slanting up.”

“What could make a wound like that? A broadsword?.

He chuckled. “Northmont isn’t quite that far behind the times. There must be a lot of gardening tools around at the cemetery. I suppose a hedge trimmer could have done it.”

“Can you estimate the time of death?”

“He’d eaten breakfast maybe an hour before he died.”

“Breakfast?”

“Looks like toast and scrambled eggs.”

“I was out there before nine.”

A shrug. “People the age of Mullins, living alone, sometimes eat breakfast at four in the morning. I’d say he could have been killed anywhere between five and nine a.m., judging by the body temperature and such.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

I was halfway out the door when he said, “One more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“With a wound like this, there’s no way the killer could have moved the body without getting blood on his clothes.”

I phoned Sheriff Lens with the advance word on the autopsy results. I also told him about the blood. “Didn’t notice blood on Gunther or any of his workmen,” was his comment.

“Of course not. The killing couldn’t have happened while I was there.”

“Hiram Mullins drove a fancy Lincoln. Had one long as I can remember. We found it parked in his driveway.”

“Well?”

“How’d he get out to the cemetery, Doc? He sure didn’t walk at his age. Not in the dark.”

It was only a couple of miles, and certainly walkable, but I admitted it was unlikely for someone like Mullins. That meant he’d probably been driven to the spot by his killer. It had been someone he knew and trusted to get him out that early in the morning. Would Earl Gunther have called him? One of the board members?

I finished talking to the sheriff and told Mary she could go home. I stayed awhile longer, puzzling over the life and death of a man I’d barely known, a silent man I’d seen four times a year and barely nodded to. I wondered if that ignorance was his fault or mine.

“Dr Hawthorne?”

I looked up at the sound of my name and saw a young woman standing in the doorway. The light from the hall was at her back and it took me an instant to recognize Linda Gunther, Earl’s wife. “Can I help you?” I asked, certain the reason for her visit must be medical.

“I just wanted to speak with you about Earl, and about what happened this morning. I hear there’s a meeting-”

“Sit down. I was just closing for the day.”

“I know my husband has been in trouble with the cemetery board before. He was worried about losing his job. Now, with what happened this morning, he’s afraid of being arrested.”

“We have no reason to believe Earl is implicated in the killing. I was there the whole time the coffins were being disinterred. If he’d done anything unusual, I’d have noticed.”

“But some of the others have never liked him.”

“I don’t know that that’s true. He’s always done his job.”

“Is there anything I can do to help him?”

“Just tell the truth if Sheriff Lens has any questions. Did anything unusual happen this morning, for instance?”

“Nothing. Earl got up around seven and I fixed him breakfast. Then he walked over to the Brewster gravesite.”

“What did you two have for breakfast?”

“Juice, cereal, toast, coffee. He has the same thing every morning.”

“No eggs?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondered. You didn’t hear any unusual noises during the night or early morning?”

“No. Should I have?”

“If Hiram Mullins was murdered in the cemetery he might have screamed or cried out.”

“We didn’t hear anything.”

I remembered what Doc Prouty had said about the blood. “What was your husband wearing when he went out?”

“His work overalls, like always.”

“Did he have more than one pair?”

“He keeps an extra down at the tool shed.”

I tried to reassure her. “Don’t worry, Mrs Gunther. We’re having a special meeting of the cemetery board in the morning, but it’s not to take any action against your husband. We’ll be talking about a replacement for Mullins.”

“And Earl-?”

“-has nothing to worry about if he isn’t involved in the killing. He won’t be blamed just because it happened in the cemetery.”

Linda Gunther allowed herself a cautious smile. “Thank you, Dr Hawthorne. I appreciate that.”

After she’d gone I decided for the first time that she was a fairly attractive woman. Surely she could have done better than Earl Gunther for a husband, but then the ways of love and marriage are sometimes strange.

I had two hospital patients to visit in the morning, both recovering nicely from mild heart attacks. Then I checked in with Mary at the office and told her I’d be driving out to the cemetery for the board meeting. “I thought that wasn’t till eleven o’clock,” she said.

“I want to get there early and nose around, especially in the tool shed.”

“Do you know how it was done?”

“Pure magic,” I told her with a grin.

When I arrived at Spring Glen the morning sun was filtering through the spring leaves, bathing the place in a soft, inviting glow. I was an hour early for the meeting and I was surprised to find I wasn’t the first to arrive. Virginia Taylor’s sporty convertible occupied one of the parking spaces, though she was nowhere in sight.

I avoided the red-brick superintendent’s house where Gunther and his wife lived and headed down the gently curving road toward the tool shed. Off in the distance I could see a couple of workmen removing some limbs from a tree ravaged by winter storms. The shed was unlocked, as it usually was when there were workmen about. I searched around among the tools for Earl’s extra pair of overalls but found nothing.

Just as I was about to give up my search I spotted a large pair of hedge trimmers that seemed to be hiding behind a piece of canvas. I pulled them out, not thinking about fingerprints, and examined the blades for bloodstains. They appeared to have been wiped clean, but near the juncture of the blades were rust-colored spots that would be worth examining. I wrapped them in an oily cloth, trying not to damage fingerprints any more than I already had.

I was leaving the shed with my find when I saw Virginia Taylor walking toward me. “What have you got there?”

“Hedge trimmers. Could be the murder weapon.”

“I always forget that you’re something of a detective.”

“Just an amateur.”

“I wanted to see the spot where Hiram’s body was found,” she explained. “They seem to have removed all the Brewster coffins now.”

“Did you know Hiram well? I only saw him at the meetings.”

“He handled some real-estate transactions for my family years ago. He was good at making deals.”

“A man of few words.”

She smiled. “He could keep his mouth shut. Sometimes that’s a valuable asset.”

“Did he still work?”

She shook her head. “He’s been retired for a year or so, ever since he put together the parcels of land for the new college in Shinn Corners.”

“He was probably an interesting man. I’m sorry I never got to know him better. I remember last summer’s party at Swan’s place. Even out there I never saw him without a stiff collar and tie.” It was still the era of highly starched detachable collars and men like Mullins and Swan wore them regularly. I preferred a shirt with an attached collar, as did younger men like Randy Freed.

We strolled back toward the small office building where the board held its meetings. A part-time secretary helped Gunther with the bookwork when she was needed, but most days he was there alone unless he was supervising a work crew. Today, as always, he gathered up his papers to leave us in privacy.

“Stay a few minutes, Earl,” I suggested. “We’ll want to talk with you about what happened.”

“Sure, whatever you say.” He stayed at his desk rather than join us at the board table. Almost at once two more cars pulled up outside and I saw that Swan and Freed were arriving.

The lawyer was first through the door, all business. “We’ve got a serious problem here, Gunther. I’m worried about the cemetery’s liability.”

Dalton Swan took his seat at the head of the table, running a hand through his thinning hair. “We’ll get to that later, Randy. Let’s everyone sit down and go over what we know. Have you been able to learn anything, Sam?”

“Not much,” I admitted. I ran through the autopsy report for them and then turned to Gunther. “Earl, you usually keep a clean set of overalls in the tool shed, don’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“I was just looking for them. They’re not to be found. I did find this hedge trimmer, though, with what looks like traces of blood.”

Virginia Taylor made a face. “Sam thinks it could be the murder weapon.”

“It’s possible.”

Dalton Swan now shifted his gaze to the cemetery superintendent. “Isn’t that tool shed kept locked, Earl?”

“Sure, most of the time.”

“Was it locked night before last?”

“Well-” Gunther looked uneasy. “See, we had all this work to do in the morning, digging up those coffins for reburial. I thought some of the workmen might arrive early so I left the shed unlocked for them. Nobody dug up the graves before we got there, though. Doc saw that for himself.”

“That’s right,” I agreed reluctantly. “The coffins were still underground when I got there.”

“Do you have any idea how Mullins’s body could have gotten in there?” Swan asked.

“None. It’s like a miracle.”

“All right.” Swan waved him away. “Leave us alone for a few minutes.”

Earl left the office and walked across the driveway to his house.

“Who do you have in mind as Hiram’s replacement?” Virginia asked.

It was Randy Freed who answered. “I spoke to Dalton on the phone and made a suggestion. Milton Doyle is-”

“Not another lawyer!” Virginia exploded. “Cemeteries are about families, not lawsuits, for God’s sake! How about another woman?”

“We have a woman,” Swan answered quietly.

“Then how about two women? You men could still outvote us.”

“It’s worth considering,” I agreed. “I suggest we adjourn until after the funeral. In the meantime maybe we can come up with some good women nominees.”

Virginia Taylor gave me a smile of thanks and Swan agreed to adjourn until the following Monday. As we were leaving, Freed said, “It doesn’t seem the same without old Mullins.”

“He never said anything.”

“But he was there, right in that chair! With those popping eyes and that bull neck he always looked as if his collar was strangling him.”

Something occurred to me. “Randy, where would the records of real-estate transactions for the new college be kept?”

“Shinn Corners. At the courthouse.”

It was just a hunch, but it was worth a drive to Shinn Corners. On the way over I started putting the pieces together in my mind. There was a way it could have been done. I saw it clearly now. Sometimes killers set out to create impossible situations but that hadn’t been the case here. The killer had only wanted a safe way to dispose of the body, a way that would keep it hidden for another twenty years.

The courthouse was a big old building dating from the turn of the century with a stone fence already grown dark and weathered. In a big room I found maps and deeds, records stretching back a hundred years and longer. A girl in her late teens, a part-time clerk, came to my assistance at once. “The new college? We’re very excited about it. I’m already enrolled for September.”

“That’s great,” I said, meaning it. “I need to see the deeds on the various pieces of property that make up the college land. Would that be difficult?”

“No, not at all. It’s a matter of public record.”

There were so many individual parcels of land involved that the task seemed hopeless at first. Then I spotted Hiram Mullins’s name and started concentrating on the deals he’d handled. I turned over the page of one deed and found the name I’d been seeking. After that it was easy.

I phoned Mary at the office and told her to postpone my afternoon appointments till the following day. “That’s easy,” she said. “There’s only the Kane boy, and his mother says he’s feeling fine now. The spots are all gone.”

“Tell her to keep him out of school the rest of the week. He can go back on Monday.”

“Sheriff Lens has been looking for you.”

“I’ll call him.”

A moment later I had the sheriff’s familiar voice on the other end of the line. “Where are you, Doc?”

“Over in Shinn Corners, checking the real-estate transactions regarding the new college.”

“Why the college?” he wondered.

“It was the last deal Hiram Mullins worked on before his full retirement.”

“Find anything?”

“A motive, I think.”

“We’ve got something too. My deputies came up with a pair of bloodstained overalls. Earl Gunther admits they’re his. Had his initials inside.”

“Where were they found?”

“On the bank of the creek. Looks like Earl rolled them up and tossed them into the water, only they fell about a foot short. There’s a collar and tie with bloodstains, too. Remember, they were missing from Hiram’s body.”

“I remember. What are you going to do now?”

“Arrest Earl Gunther for the murder, of course. Those overalls are the proof we need.”

“Look, Sheriff, you can bring him in for questioning but don’t charge him yet. I’ll be at your office in an hour.”

I covered the back country roads in record time and arrived at the sheriffs office just as he was starting to question the cemetery superintendent. Linda Gunther was outside in the waiting room, looking nervous, and I tried to comfort her.

“Earl’s in trouble, isn’t he?”

“Yes, but he could be in lots worse trouble. Try to relax until we finish talking to him.”

Inside the office Sheriff Lens was talking with Gunther while a deputy made notes. “I never wore those overalls to kill Mullins,” the superintendent was saying. “Someone found them in the tool shed.”

“Come on, Earl – you expect us to believe that?”

“I’m innocent!” He turned to me for help. “You believe me, don’t you, Dr Hawthorne?”

I sat down across the table and chose my words carefully. “You didn’t kill Mullins, but you’re hardly innocent, Earl. You’d better tell us the whole truth if you expect to get out of this with your hide.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know how the body got into the Brewster coffin.”

“I-”

“What you gettin’ at, Doc?” the sheriff asked.

“We’ve been saying all along that the ground over those coffins was solid and undisturbed, and that’s perfectly true. But the ground on the creek side was a different story. The coffins were being moved, remember, because the waters of the flooded creek had so eroded the banks of the creek that some coffins were actually visible, held only by the tree roots that enveloped them. The morning of the murder I watched your crews shovel away the soft dirt and chop out those roots.”

“Then you saw that I didn’t-”

“I saw what you wanted me to see, Earl. That dirt was soft because it had been removed and replaced the night before. You went down there and saw one coffin virtually free of the earth, its corner badly damaged. You were afraid I, or one of the other trustees, would raise a fuss if we saw that, so you removed it yourself, using the block and tackle on your flatbed truck. You placed the coffin on the truck, carefully hiding it beneath a bulky folded tarpaulin and some tools. You had two crews digging, concentrating on their own efforts, not paying much attention to each other. At some point when I’d strolled off examining tombstones it was easy enough for you to yank off the tarp and reveal one more coffin. I remember thinking that the second and third coffins appeared on the truck before I knew it.”

“If he pulled that trick he must have killed Mullins,” the sheriff argued.

“Not at all. Earl had been in trouble with the trustees before and he was afraid we’d fire him for sure if we saw how bad he’d allowed that Brewster plot to get. He was only worried about his job. He had no way of knowing a murderer would find the coffin in the early morning hours and decide it was the perfect place to hide a body.”

Sheriff Lens was still sceptical. “Who’d have a motive for killing the old guy?”

“Someone who’d used him to assemble parcels of land for the new college. Someone in a position to hear the talk about a possible new community cemetery with Shinn Corners and use that information to buy up property, then derail that project and sell the land to the private college for a huge profit.”

“You talkin’ about one of the trustees, Doc?”

“Exactly. No one else would have had the knowledge and the position to bring it off. No one else could have enlisted Mullins’s help when he was in virtual retirement. I found the name I expected on those deeds over in Shinn Corners this afternoon. Mullins must have threatened to talk, or maybe tried a little blackmail. It’s doubtful that anyone but another board member could have lured him to the cemetery early that morning, probably on the pretext of checking the erosion, and then killed him. The killer had to know about the tool shed, and the extra overalls, to protect his clothing from bloodstains. The killer might even have had a key, in case the shed was locked. The trustee put on the overalls, picked up the hedge trimmers, and went out to meet Mullins when he arrived. A quick thrust beneath the rib cage and it was over. The coffin lid was unscrewed and Mullins was added to those long-dead bones. Only there was too much blood, and a damaged coffin that allowed it to seep through and be seen.”

“Which one, Doc?”

“Even without the name on those courthouse records I would have known. The overalls covered everything except the killer’s collar and the top of the tie. Why were the dead man’s collar and tie missing? Certainly he’d worn them. Mullins even wore them to summer picnics. No, the blood didn’t get on the victim’s collar and tie but on the killer’s! A few drops splattered above the protective overalls. So the killer discarded his and replaced them with the victim’s. The bull-necked Mullins would have had a collar big enough to fit any of the other trustees.”

“Which one, Doc?” Sheriff Lens asked again.

“There was only one possibility. Miss Taylor is a woman, after all, with no need for male attire. Randy Freed and I wear shirts with attached collars. Only the dead man and Dalton Swan still wore the detachable collars. Dalton Swan, president of the board of trustees, whose term began before the land deal was closed, who was in the best position to hush up any proposal for a community cemetery and buy the land for himself, who could have gotten Mullins to front for him with the college people, who knew about the tool shed and could have killed Mullins and hidden the body without difficulty, who would have needed to replace his own bloodstained collar and tie before appearing that morning at his bank. The collar and tie you found can be traced to Swan. That and the land deal should be all the evidence you need.”

“Dalton Swan…”

“That’s your killer. Go get him, Sheriff.”