“Let's go to the mortuary.”
“Great.” Andrews slumped. “I suppose it's too late for breakfast at Etta's.”
“She stops serving at eight.”
“And luncheon is not served ⦔ he began.
“ ⦠until eleven,” I finished.
“Fine.” He gazed longingly at the dark diner's window.
The open sky seemed reflected everywhere, in the glass behind the word
Etta's,
on the hood of the Ford; even the road glistened glass beads of sunlight.
“The world looks different this morning.” I couldn't keep the notion from lifting the corners of my mouth. “Town looks nice.”
“What's different,” Andrews mumbled, “is that we haven't seen a living soul. Diner's closed; police station's closed; no one's on the street. Body snatchers, that's my guess.”
I eased off the accelerator. He was right; there was no one around. Gil's was vacant; the few cars parked around were empty and still. No one was walking. It would have been just as odd, of course, to see a flurry of activity in our quiet hamlet, but everything suddenly seemed as abandoned as the Newcomb mansion.
“No one at Gil's,” I told Andrews, nodding in its direction.
He stared silently, eyes widening. He knew what it meant for that place to be empty: it was possible the world had come to an end and Andrews and I were the last to know.
Â
The mortuary was surrounded. A hundred cars, police sedans, state trooper vehicles, news vans, old Chevy station wagons, new Mercedes coups. We had to park off the road.
“Mystery solved,” Andrews told me climbing out of the cab. “Everyone in the county is
here
.”
“Looks like it.” I followed close behind him. “Must be some news story about the bodies, finally.”
“But would everyone in town be here for that?” He tried to see around the house. Still no sight of anyone.
“Absolutely,” I confirmed. “If there's a big wreck on the highway, we all come out to look.”
Without warning, the front door of the mortuary burst open and a crowd of reporters erupted onto the porch. The first people out were running to their cars and vans, some shouting into cell phones. The next wave included familiar faces, merchants and town people, moving slower, wagging heads.
Behind them all Skid stood in the doorway.
He watched the chaos, caught sight of us, beckoned.
We moved through the throng, denying eye contact to anyone, onto the steps.
“I guess your story broke,” I said, gazing out over the frenzy.
“Just finished my news conference,” Skid affirmed. “Look at 'em go.”
“This won't do your election any harm,” Andrews said sagely.
“Any publicity is good publicity,” Skid sighed, “is what Mr. Tineeta says. Come on in.”
He turned and stepped over the threshold, into the relative darkness of the front room of the mortuary.
Door closed, silence was cotton to the ear.
“Body count,” Skid began with no ceremony, leading us toward the back rooms, “is up in the three hundreds now.”
“Jesus,” Andrews said softly.
“How could it be that no one knew about this?” I said as we came to the door I'd found locked from within.
“That was one of the questions at my news conference,” Skid said, enjoying the phrase a little too much for my taste. “The fact is, people did know about it. Just not the right people.”
“Deveroes,” Andrews stated flatly.
“The people who live up at the cemetery,” I whispered, afraid someone might overhear.
“They don't live there,” Skid corrected at a normal volume.
“They're only passing through. That's why we call them transients.”
“Is that what we call them?” I gave him a sidelong glance, returned my attention to the locked door before us. “I probably should have told you this before. I didn't just discover the trapdoor to that room; I broke into it. The one that's ⦔
“ ⦠locked from the inside?” Skid finished calmly.
“It wasn't hard to get in,” I told him. “Got a knife from the kitchen, lifted the hook.”
“So you know it don't look a thing like the other lab.” He pointed to the cleanest room any of us had ever seen.
“Right. So you've gotten in.”
“Through the trapdoor in the cellar you told me about.” Skid leaned against the wall.
“Would someone
please
tell me ⦔ Andrews fumed.
“Near as I can piece together,” Skid told us, his voice veering dangerously close to the official, “Harding Pinhurst was never a mortician.”
Andrews and I exchanged a questioning look.
“Didn't have a license, never filed a death certificate, a single burial record, nothing.”
“How is that possible?” Andrews folded his arms.
“Harding's Uncle Jackson made him take this job,” I guessed. “Set it all up.”
Skid grinned. “Damn, you're pretty good.”
“Why do I know that name?” Andrews said to himself.
“Rud said it,” I answered.
“The man who made Rud take the caretaker's job.” Andrews's eyes lit. “He's the godfather of Blue Mountain.”
“Harding had him a few boys he'd hire to take the bodies out to the state woods,” Skidmore went on. “Guess who?”
“Deveroes,” Andrews shot back.
“They don't do
everything,
” Skid chastised.
“They shot our boy, here,” Andrews said, tilting his head my way. “That's enough for me.”
“Didn't mean to,” Skid said.
“The boys who found Harding's body Saturday morning,” I interrupted, “are the ones he hired to dispose of his customers.”
“Batting a thousand today,” Skid said, impressed.
“Those drunken teenagers?” Andrews asked, trying to understand it.
“So they could have known about the enmity between Harding and Able,” I went on.
“Which is why they were so eager to accuse Able that day,” Andrews concluded. “Or did they even have something to do with the murder?”
“Don't know,” Skid said slowly. “But I do believe they were looking for a place to dump more bodies when they found Harding.”
“Christ!” Andrews said. “That close to Dev's
house?
”
“How long has this been going on?” I asked Skid. “How many years has it been since Harding took over the mortuary?”
“What's that, five years?”
“For that long he's been throwing corpses into the woods,” Andrews said, “and no one's known?”
“I was saying that the transients up at the cemetery knew,” Skid allowed. “And, of course, the Deveroes, all of them.”
“Truevine knew.” I stared at the wall beside me.
“The bodies were all covered up with red clay,” Skid went on, “and pine straw, impossible to seeâor smell. Until recently.”
“Red clay has the additional benefit,” I declared, “of being acidic, increasing the decay rate of the bodies.”
“This doesn't make any sense,” Andrews said.
I assumed from the falter in his voice he was trying to get his mind around the facts as much as I was.
“It seems like as much trouble to do ⦠what he did,” Andrews continued, “as it would have been just to bury the bodies the right way.”
“It's hard to figure,” Skid admitted.
“You said âuntil recently.'” My eyes narrowed. “What changed?”
“It appears,” Skid told me, “that Harding was planning to do something new with the bodies. He uncovered a bunch of them, rented some earthmoving equipment, and had it brought here.”
“To the mortuary?” Andrews shook his head.
“No, to the state land,” Skid said, casting his eyes in that direction. “Turns out Jackson Pinhurst has been working on a deal with the state of Georgia for a good many years. It finally went through. That government property over yonder? It ain't set to be a park like everybody thought. It's going to be Georgia's biggest landfill operation, all three hundred acres.”
“No.” I looked up.
“Disgusting, I call it.” Skid seemed very calm under the circumstances. “Trash from all over the state shipped up here to my town.”
“You're not so upset about it,” Andrews said accusingly. “You've got something up your sleeve.”
“I doâ”
“One thing at a time,” I interrupted. “For God's sake tell me what's been going on here at the mortuary.”
“Far as we can tell,” Skid responded, “Harding spent all his time drinking, messing around in Atlanta, that sort of thing. He's definitely not a mortician. He had no education of any sort after his prep school days. Apparently the family wanted him to go to college, but he didn't get inâon the recommendation of the headmaster of his prep school.”
“The headmaster recommended that he
not
be admitted?” Andrews asked.
“The mortuary, please, is our topic,” I said impatiently.
“Shoot,” Skid laughed, looking around the place. “This ain't a mortuary. It's a big old houseâwhere over three hundred counts of fraud were perpetrated on the public.”
“But
why?
” I said. “That's what I want to know. Why did Harding do it?”
“He was insane,” Andrews offered. “All that family inbreeding and bad blood.”
“Harding Pinhurst didn't give a damn about anything in this world,” Skid said, cold as the grave. “Dev, you probably don't even remember an incident when we were in grammar school about some little bird eggs ⦔
“ ⦠where Harding broke one open in front of a bunch of other boys,” Andrews finished, a little amazed that he was remembering the story.
“I always thought, after that incident,” Skid went on, “Harding would come to no good. Which is apparently what happened.”
“Do you remember the nickname our friend acquired after that?” Andrews asked Skidmore.
“Nickname?” Skid's brow furled. “
Fever
isn't bad enough all by itself?”
“There you have it.” Andrews turned to me. “You're the only one who remembers the nickname. But everyone remembers Harding's bad behavior.”
“They'll remember it a lot better after today,” Skidmore said, taking another look around the empty mortuary.
“Amen,” Andrews said. “So who killed him?”
“Dev?” Skid looked at me.
“Andrews thinks it was one of the nameless homeless,” I began, “the one who calls the dog sometimes.”
“Scarecrow,” Andrews chimed in, “we call him.”
“I know who you mean,” Skid sighed. “He does look like that. What makes you think he did it?”
“He's creepy,” Andrews said without thinking.
“He's harmless enough,” Skidmore said, but his voice was very dry, his eyes boring a hole in my head.
“I'm more interested in finding Ms. Deveroe,” I said, avoiding Skidmore's burning glare. “Andrews also has the idea that she's in danger. I agree.”
“She saw the murder,” Skid agreed, “and whoever did it is still out there.”
“Good,” I sighed. “So you don't think Able's guilty.”
“Not really.”
“And now we don't think Truevine did it either?” Andrews asked, checking.
“I keep asking myself how the body got naked,” Skid mused.
“I have an idea about that,” I said, nearly to myself.
“I don't like to think about it,” Skid went on. “It's clear that Able was about to have Harding brought up on charges for all this mess here. Although Able didn't know the extent of the problem.”
“Harding knew how close he was to getting arrested,” Andrews said, his hand raking the part in his hair. “Able and Truevine argued; Harding overheard, knew it was all coming down ⦔ Andrews stopped.
“What?” I asked him, wondering why he hadn't finished his thought.
“Now,” he answered slowly, “I'm back to thinking Able did it. Or Truevine, accidentallyâwhat we were thinking earlier.”
“Something happened that night,” Skid said, “that was sufficiently traumatic as to scare Able and Truevine fairly bad. Make them act stranger than they normally do.”