Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (37 page)

The Internet driving directions I'd printed that morning said to turn right. We did, and went through more woods for another one-point-four miles.

We came to an iron arch, and he parked the truck next to a copse of trees. He shut off the lights, and we got out.

There was a full moon. We wouldn't have to risk the flashlights until we started working.

He shrugged on the backpack and took the shovel and the pick out of the truck bed. I carried the video camera.

The sign on the iron arch was readable in the moonlight. It said the cemetery grounds had been consecrated over two hundred years before. I didn't doubt it. Many of the granite markers looked to have been shifting in the ground for a long time, and now resembled loose teeth gone crooked in a shriveling old mouth.

“We don't belong here,” Leo whispered.

“Piece of cake,” I said.

“Piece of Ho Ho,” he said, with more derision than I thought necessary.

Our feet rustled through the carpet of rotting leaves as we moved between the markers.

“There's not one wreath here, floral or otherwise,” he said, when we got to the center of the cemetery.

“Got to be.”

“Maybe they're going to deliver it tomorrow.”

“Endora said it was delivered today.”

“Wait; look there.” He pointed to the far side of the cemetery. At the edge of the woods, an enormous wreath had been set up on a wire stand, though we were too far away to tell if it had a blue and orange bow.

I allowed, silently, as to how that last detail might not have been such genius anyway. The wreath looked to be the only one in the cemetery.

“No problem picking ours out,” I said, before he could say anything.

“Genius, for sure,” he said, as we walked to the wreath.

He set down the shovel and the pick, then took off the backpack.

I brushed away the cover of wet leaves with my foot. The flat marble marker was tiny, barely eight inches wide, twelve inches long. I eased down to read it.

Only the name was engraved, faint in the moonlight:
ALTA TAYLOR.

“We'll sweep the leaves back when we're done, the ground will settle back beneath them next winter, and no one will ever know,” I said.

“More genius,” he muttered.

He started digging. The ground had hardened over the forty years, making it slow work. At least a dozen times he ran into tree roots encroaching from the edge of the woods, and had to flail at them with the pick until they broke away. Finally, after three hours, he got down to where his shoulders were at ground level.

“Grave invasion is hard work,” he said, taking a break.

“Technically, no,” I said. “There's got to be someone buried here for it to be a grave.”

“You're sure there's nobody home?”

“Just an empty coffin, filled with rocks to approximate her weight. Plinnit's DNA test proved she's alive.”

“You said he sounded a little unsure.”

“Sisters with the same mother but different fathers wouldn't have an exact match, but there would be some similarities. It's why the DNA from beneath my fingernails can't exactly match what they got from Sweetie's hairbrush.”

“You're absolutely sure there's nobody down here?”

“Alta's alive and scratching.”

He resumed digging. Twenty minutes later, at just past one thirty, his shovel rang against something metallic. He jumped back as far as he could in the small hole.

“Oh, man,” he said, letting the shovel drop.

I repeated what I'd told him, driving up. A dozen times.

“Sheriff Lishkin had been pressing all summer for the truth about what happened out at that gas station. Darlene had to pass Alta off as dead, to shut down the investigation.”

“I thought you said Alta was his daughter.”

“He was still sheriff. He needed to know what happened.”

I shined the flashlight into the hole.

He'd uncovered a small section of mottled gray metal.

“A tin coffin?” he asked.

“Cheap. The right thing to put in the ground if all you're burying is rocks. Brush the dirt away, We'll pop the lid, make a video showing it's empty, fill the hole, and be gone.”

The lid was dished inward, and corroded everywhere with splotches of rust.

“We got here just in time,” Leo said, from the hole. “The lid's about to collapse.”

I handed him the hammer and the pry bar, then shouldered the video camera and aimed the flashlight into the hole.

“They could say we staged this,” he said.

“It's the only proof I can think of.”

“Jeez, I wish I could see better,” he said.

A huge burst of light hit us.

“How's this?” she asked.

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.

CHAPTER 69.

We stared, stunned by a corpse that was not supposed to be there. Leo scrambled out of the hole as if his feet were on fire.

“I want you gone,” Ellie Ball said to us.

“I have to know if that's Alta Taylor,” I said.

“You will leave. You will never say anything about this, you will never come back, you will never call me.”

“I'm going to hang around until your coroner verifies that's Alta.”

“You'd rather be arrested for desecrating a grave?”

She whistled with her teeth and lower lip. The people who'd come with her to the cemetery began rustling the leaves behind us. They'd be big men, I imagined, and armed—and loyal enough to do, and say, precisely what she wanted.

“I will call you, Mr. Elstrom,” she said.

Leo threw the small tools in the backpack and picked up the shovel and the pick. He'd not made a sound since he opened the casket. He took off toward the gate, shuffling stiff-legged, as if his brain had lost its ability to fully command his feet. I picked up the video camera and hurried after him.

At the truck, he dumped everything into the bed and moved to the passenger's side. His hands were shaking too badly to open the door.

“You all right?” I asked.

He made no sound.

I opened his door, went around, and levered myself carefully in behind the wheel.

“Jeez, Dek, did you see her?” His words came out too high and too fast. “That coffin leaked. Her skin was oatmeal, damp and wet and probably full of bugs. Jeez, Dek, did you see her? I'm never going to sleep again.”

He slumped against the door, out cold. He'd had too many hours of driving and too many hours of digging, and too many seconds of looking at a corpse gone to oatmeal in the ground. I drove us the hell out of Hadlow, Minnesota.

Four hours passed. I had no trouble keeping the truck straight on the road, but I couldn't steer my mind in any direction that made sense. I'd come to Minnesota certain that Alta Taylor had done the Chicago killings—right down to eradicating her sister Darlene and George Koros—and the proof of that would be an empty grave. To have found a body made no sense. No matter how I thought, and rethought, the only thing I was sure of was that Ellie Ball was spending the hours since we left racing to dig a new hole for the corpse, and filling the old one, so that no one would ever find out anything again.

She called just after I'd passed Madison, Wisconsin. She didn't say my name, nor did she identify herself. She spoke slowly, and deliberately, and said, “A man. Absolutely, not her.” She hung up. It was relief.

Leo woke up an hour later. “I nodded off,” he said in a normal voice.

“You nodded off for almost five hours.” I rustled the bag I'd brought from Rivertown. “Ho Ho?”

“I need coffee, and something adult to eat.”

That, too, was relief. I took the next exit, and we stopped at a McDonald's at a big truck stop. I was no longer concerned about security cameras. Ellie Ball would deny we'd ever come back to Hadlow.