Authors: Sharyn McCrumb
“Trust you to admire the Scottish royal,” muttered Geoffrey.
Elizabeth ignored him. “She was very charming and not just a social butterfly, either! During the First World War, her family used their castle as a convalescent home for soldiers. And Elizabeth worked as a nurse, even though she was only fifteen at the time.”
“She does not sound like you in the least,” Geoffrey remarked.
“Anyway, she got to know the King’s younger son, Bertie, and when he asked her to marry him, she turned him down.”
“She seems to have had a clearer view of royal life than you do, dear.”
Elizabeth ignored him. “He kept proposing to her, though, and—get this! His parents—the King and Queen, mind you!—said to him, ‘You’ll be a lucky fellow if
she
accepts you.’ Imagine being
that
approved of.”
“And were they right?”
“They were. She was marvelous. They got married in 1923, and when she entered Westminster Abbey for the wedding, she laid her bouquet on the grave of the unknown warrior and walked to the altar without it. And during World War II, she actually practiced with a pistol at Windsor, because, she said, if the Nazis invaded England, she wanted to go down fighting. I would like very much to meet
her.”
“And her wedding song was …?”
“‘Lead Us Heavenly Father.’”
“I think you ought to go for that one,” said Geoffrey. “It will have sentimental associations for you. Assuming, of course, that you can find anyone around here who can sing it.”
“Yes, I hope I have better luck with musicians than I did with caterers. Did you hear about Charles’s recommendation?”
“Yes,” murmured Geoffrey, looking troubled. “Charles is behaving oddly these days. And don’t say ‘How perfectly normal,’ because I know that he’s always peculiar, but he’s being strange in a different way.”
“Do you think he’s up to something?”
Geoffrey hesitated. “I think he bears watching.”
The sheriff’s reading glasses were perched on the end of his nose as he examined the blue cloisonné urn on his desk. Cautiously he picked it up and checked to make sure that the lid was on tight before examining the bottom. “Made in China,” he announced with a sigh of disgust. “That’s no help.”
“Yeah, I noticed that. It’s heavy, though, isn’t it?” asked Clay, who had just finished photographing the urn and dusting it for prints.
“There’s something in there, all right. I was hoping for a serial number, or—if we were really lucky—the name of a funeral home inscribed on the bottom.”
The deputy shook his head. “It’s never that easy.”
“It is in real life.” Wesley grinned. “Remember the fool who tried to hold up the bank in Decatur, and wrote his holdup note on his own deposit slip?”
“Well, in this case you’re out of luck. You’ve got no clues as to the origin of the vase; no fingerprints, thanks to five years of Clarine’s diligent housekeeping;
and no trace of the packaging that the vase was sent in, also thanks to the widow’s cleaning mania.” He took a long swallow of coffee and made a face. Wesley Rountree could not make coffee worth a damn. “I think you’re going to have to open it.”
“You’re right,” sighed Wesley. “I reckon it could just be filled with sand. Before we go any farther in looking into this matter, we have to know.”
He wiped his hands against his trouser legs and took a flat-footed stance facing the desk. Cradling the urn in the crook of his arm, Wesley gripped the lid and turned. After a moment’s hesitation, it turned easily, and within seconds he had set it back on the desktop and lifted the lid.
“It isn’t sand,” he said, peering at the contents of the urn. “It isn’t fine ash, either.”
The deputy ambled over to Wesley’s desk to take a look. “There’s chunks of stuff in there,” he said. “What is that? Bone?”
“Looks like it,” the sheriff agreed. “So we have
somebody
in this urn, even if it isn’t Emmet Mason.”
“Yeah, but who?”
“Let me think about this,” said Wesley, running a hand across his bristly hair. “I need to talk it out and see what occurs to me. Five years ago Emmet leaves for California on a business trip….”
“Did he?”
“Good question. We know he’s dead there now, but we don’t know that he went there then. What we do know is that five years ago Clarine Mason got a phone call, purporting to come from California, telling her that her husband was dead.”
“But you can make a phone call from anywhere,” Clay pointed out.
“True. And then she got a package, containing
this blue urn, supposedly filled with the ashes of her cremated husband.”
“But since we don’t have the wrapping and since she never looked at it, we don’t know that the package actually came from California.” The deputy shook his head. “I don’t think that narrows it down a whole lot, Wesley.”
The sheriff leaned back in his swivel chair and closed his eyes. “I am trying to remember Emmet Mason,” he said. “Friendly fellow, kind of beefy. Ran the hardware store, but wasn’t too interested in tools himself, as far as I could tell. He was big in little theatre, though. He’d lived here all his life. The Masons have been here for a good hundred years. They built that homestead where Clarine lives now before the Civil War.”
“So?”
“I’ve got to call Clarine. Why don’t you get on the other line and call around to all the funeral homes in the area.”
“What for?”
“Ask if any of them do cremations.”
Charles Chandler figured that it was a long shot, at best, considering the amount of time he had at his disposal—ten days, at the most—but he felt that he owed it to himself and his potential as a scientist to make an effort.
With that in mind, he had dressed in his most conventional outfit: khaki slacks, a navy blue blazer, and an ugly yellow tie borrowed from Geoffrey, who evidently prized it. Now, clean-shaven and smelling like Old Spice, he was ready to make a Serious Effort in the matrimonial sweepstakes. He needed the million dollars.
The problem was that he had no idea how to go about locating a suitable young woman. Like Geoffrey,
Charles had gone to prep school away from Chandler Grove. After that had come college and the colony of scientists, as Charles liked to call them. He hardly knew anyone in Chandler Grove anymore, a fact that until recently was a source of comfort to him, since he found idle socializing both frightening and time-consuming.
The sudden need of a marriage partner had shed rather a different light on his freedom from social obligation. Now he felt like an outcast, marooned in a strange land whose language he did not speak. Even the most casual encounter made him feel like an alien. What
did
one reply to the man in a camouflage hunting outfit and a University of Georgia cap who ambled up to him at the gas station and said, “How ’bout them Dawgs?” Charles said that he didn’t own one, which, judging from the man’s reaction, was not the correct response.
Charles was afraid that he might find the female residents of Chandler Grove equally impossible to communicate with. He tried to think of places that he could locate someone who was more of a kindred spirit. He had still received no reply to the letter he had sent to the
Georgian Highlander
box number. Surely the responses to such a local magazine couldn’t be
that
numerous; perhaps his literary skills were even worse than he feared. Should he try again? There were Atlanta newspapers and magazines with personals columns for lonely yuppies, but they also required a written reply to a post office box, and there wasn’t time for that. He needed somebody around here that he could relate to. Some other group of outsiders, perhaps, who were in Chandler Grove but not
of it
.
Earthling!
Charles remembered the group of Earth Shoe people described by Tommy Simmons. Charles had
recommended them as caterers for Elizabeth’s wedding partly out of mischief and partly because as a vegetarian himself, he hoped that his cousin would hire them to cater the wedding so that he could enjoy the food. Now he thought of an even better use for Earthling: as a source of suitable women.
Having forgotten exactly where the lawyer had said they were, Charles had to drive about in search of their health-food store. Fortunately, in Chandler Grove, such a quest was not difficult. After ten minutes of driving, he crossed the steel span bridge over the river, having covered the one-block business district of downtown Chandler Grove without finding any new establishments. Once over the river he discovered what he was looking for. The old gristmill, set in a grove of ancient oaks, had been repainted barn red and displayed a sign over its porch—
EARTHLING
—with a logo: a rainbow over an oak tree.
He parked the family station wagon in the gravel lot next to the riverbank and went in, hoping that a maiden with the soul of Madame Curie and the looks of Joan Baez was waiting for her prince to come. He straightened his borrowed tie.
Perhaps he had overdressed for the part, he thought, looking over the Earthling premises. A sawdust-covered floor was littered with packing crates and barrels of grain, each labeled with a sign hand-lettered in Magic Marker. A homemade cloth banner on one wall proclaimed the back room as the national headquarters for the Central American Prayer and Protest Group. Charles edged his way past plastic tubs of spices to examine the notices on the bulletin board. He had worked his way through
Goat’s Milk for Sale; Custom-made Crystal Jewelry;
and
Advanced Yoga Classes
when a gaunt,
bearded man emerged from the back room and hailed him with “Yo! How can I help?”
Charles took a deep breath. “I—uh—” Inspiration! “I notice you have a sign up about Central America and I wondered if I could help.”
The man stared at Charles in his suit jacket and tie. “Well, we have a beans-and-rice dinner coming up on Friday night.”
“No. That wasn’t what I had in mind. Look, are you part of the underground?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You know, the
underground!
That group that smuggles political refugees out of Costa Rica!”
A woman with braids and rimless glasses stuck her head out from behind the curtained doorway. “There aren’t any refugees from Costa Rica.”
“Puerto Rico, then,” said Charles impatiently. He wished he had taken a look at
Newsweek
before he left home. “You know, Central American illegal aliens.”
The Earthlings looked at each other and shrugged. This guy was too dumb to work for immigration, they figured, and it didn’t seem worth the trouble to enlighten him in regard to Puerto Rico.
“I thought I might marry one,” Charles said wildly. “Keep her from being deported.”
The woman’s lips twitched in amusement, but she said nothing.
Finally the man said gently, “We don’t do aliens. Look, can I help you?”
Charles looked at them, trying to decide whether or not to tell the truth. Better not, he decided. They didn’t appear to be people who would do desperate things for a large sum of money. They would for a cause, of course, but he couldn’t come up with one on short notice.
The woman came out from behind the curtain now, looking concerned. Her lips were pale and her eyelids red with a well-scrubbed look. Charles thought that she looked sympathetic and her figure was all right.
“Look,” he said, “I’m a physicist, and I don’t know anybody in town. Would you go out to dinner with me and tell me all about your work here?”
The woman regarded him as if he were a weevil in the whole-wheat flour. “No way,” she said.
While he waited for his deputy to get off the phone, Wesley stared up at the picture of the cowgirl on the palomino. The girl and the horse graced the calendar above his desk. Every year Wesley would sift through the collection of complimentary calendars sent out by local businesses—in search of a new palomino and cowgirl to adorn his workspace. Usually it was the feed store or the local hardware that issued such an offering, but this year they had opted for collie puppies and waterfalls, respectively, so Wesley had had to go as far as the Milton’s Forge Tack and Saddle Store. This year’s cowgirl, a skinny blonde in a white buckskin jacket, looked as if the palomino she was holding by the reins was the first of its species she had encountered. Wesley would be glad when the year was over. There weren’t any trees in the background, either. Any place without trees made him nervous.
His conversation with Clarine Mason had been brief. He had told her as gently as possible that the photograph from California did resemble Emmet, as far as he could tell, and that being the case, he had a few more questions to ask. He wanted to know if Emmet had ever been to college or if he had lived anywhere but Chandler Grove. Clarine said that apparently he had, if he was presently residing on
a slab in a Los Angeles morgue, but Wesley assured her that he meant
before
that, to the best of her knowledge.
“No,” said Clarine Mason, without a moment’s hesitation. “He went to the community college for a business course, but he’d lived at home then. Of course, there’s the army. He was stationed in Germany about 1960. Does that count?”
“It may count,” said Wesley. “But I doubt if it matters.” He told her that he would be in touch when he learned anything and hung up.
Clay, on the other hand, seemed to get trapped by every person he talked to. He always wound up saying very little during these phone conversations, except for an occasional “I understand” and “That’s not really why I called” or “How interesting.” The calls always started out the same way. Clay would inquire whether the funeral homes supervised cremations, and then he wouldn’t get a word in edgewise for a good three minutes. Wesley was afraid that if this kept up, his deputy would become a real-estate baron in cemetery plots.
Finally, on the last call, he managed to avoid having one of the firm’s representatives sent around to discuss their special prepayment burial plan
(Because in your line of work, sir, you never know)
and he hung up the phone with the air of one who has had to wrest himself from its clutches.
“Okay,” he said, turning to Wesley. “I have some information for you. And, listen, if anybody with a voice like Vincent Price calls up and asks for me, tell ’em I’m out, all right?”