Cat's Eyewitness (19 page)

26

K
nowing that a woman in a position of authority might be disquieting to the Greyfriars, Rick briefly interviewed each brother.

Brother Handle agreed to this because Brothers Frank and Prescott impressed on him how bad it would look if he didn’t cooperate. It would appear that the Greyfriars had something to hide.

Rick made the questions brief. He knew from many years of experience that he had to piece together this case, each bit of evidence, each person questioned, a tiny square of information in what would become an intelligible mosaic. He had queried Brother Mark about the last time he saw Thomas’s body then switched gears, asking him about Nordy.

Brother Mark, head down, sat opposite him. “I loathed him. I tried to like him. I prayed. Still hated him.”

“Even at Michigan State?”

“Especially. He swaggered, humiliated me in front of my dates. We were in the same fraternity but he was a year ahead of me.”

“I see. What about printing and selling fake I.D.s?” Rick surprised him with this information.

Mark raised his head. “His idea. I was weak and went along with it.”

“Made a lot of money?”

“Yes.” He brightened, although wary of the Sheriff. He wondered just why Rick had dug so deep into his own past. “We made over fifteen thousand dollars in one semester. One semester!”

“And you got busted. He didn’t.”

“Nordy’s father could pull strings. Mine could only pull on the bottle,” he said with rancor.

“That’s when you, uh, took a nosedive.”

“Puree.” Mark used an expression for a total loss.

“That’s a good one. Puree is worse than toast?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me what happened next.”

“Drugs. Couldn’t hold a job. If I hadn’t found God I’d be in jail or dead. I was this far”—he held up his thumb and forefinger close together—“from becoming a career criminal.”

“What happened?”

“I woke up in the middle of Beverly Street in Staunton on a cold night. A doctor was dragging me out of the road and she said, ‘Son, you can go into rehab or you can find God. I’ll help you either way.’ ”

“And she did?”

“I went to a clinic in North Carolina, not expensive or anything. I detoxed. I found God and I found the Greyfriars. But every day I have to work on myself.”

“Could you have killed Nordy?”

Mark half-smiled. “The thought occurred to me. I suppose I could have, but even though I couldn’t stand him, nah.” He shrugged. “I pray harder.”

Rick checked his watch. “You’ve been helpful. One last question. Do you fit in here? Is this the place for you?”

“Yeah. I’m surrounded by dinosaurs. I know they make fun of me behind my back, but,” he shrugged again, “I ignore them. I miss Brother Thomas. He taught me stuff. I could talk to him, and even though he was eighty-two he could use the computer as easily as I can. He said if he made it to eighty-three he was going to build his own computer. He even knew he could specify what he wanted from ASUS, the company in California.”

“You lost me.” Rick closed his notebook.

“ASUS. They build motherboards. Brother Thomas really was going to build his own computer with a motherboard he helped design.”

“I can see why you miss him.”

“No one here even knows what a motherboard is.”

“Bet Nordy did.”

“Yeah, but he’d kind of have to know. Every now and then I’d use one of the computers here and fire him an e-mail.” He cupped his chin in his hand. “Funny, he really pissed me off, but I’m going to miss him. I never thought someone my age would die, you know?”

“Well, Brother Mark, you’ve had the great good fortune not to be in a war. Your generation has been spared. If it were 1943 or 1970, a lot of your running buddies would be dead. You might be dead. When you say your prayers, pray for them, for those that went before.”

Mark blinked. “I will. And I know the Blessed Virgin Mother weeps for them.”

27

H
arry remarked to Susan as they drove the rig back from a foxhunt, “I am in the best mood. The best mood.”

“Good, because when you get home you know those two cats will have shredded something.” Susan smiled. The bracing day had improved her spirits, too.

She was right. When Susan dropped her off she walked inside to behold two silk lamp shades slit open, shredded. Then Harry went down to the basement to fetch a jar of orange marmalade and found the birdseed bags that Mrs. Murphy and Pewter had ripped open when she last left them alone in the house.

Tucker, quick to defend herself, told Harry in no uncertain terms that she would never shred silk lamp shades, nor would she spill seed upon the ground like the Biblical Onan although Onan wasn’t spilling birdseed.

“Brownnoser,”
Mrs. Murphy growled at the dog.

“No impulse control.”
Tucker walked away from the cat, her claws clicking on the kitchen heart-pine boards.

“Why are you so happy? You got left behind today, too,”
Pewter complained.

“We are not supposed to go to foxhunts. Sometimes Mom will let me sleep in the cab of the truck but we really aren’t supposed to go. You know that.”

“Tucker, I might know it but I don’t agree with it.”
The tiger cat swatted at the corgi.

The phone rang. Miranda informed Harry that Big Mim had just been told by her daughter that Blair Bainbridge proposed to her on Thanksgiving Day. Big Mim had mixed emotions but put a good face on it. Mim called Miranda to talk it out.

Then the phone rang again.

“Susan, you must have just gotten to the house. What’s up?”

“Harry, you and I are both country girls. Today’s hunt pulled me out of my torpor. My mind’s working again and I’m ready to fight the world.”

“I’m ready, too.” Harry liked hearing the energy in Susan’s voice.

“Here’s what I think. G-Uncle Thomas is laid in the coffin, three brothers see him. According to Brother Mark, the lid was nailed down, he’s buried. Right?”

“Right.”

“All the brothers attend the brief entombment, as do I.”

“Right.”

“The coffin is heavy. No suspicions. Still with me?”

“Always and ever.”

“All right, then. Either Brother Andrew and Mark are lying through their teeth, which I don’t discount, or someone removes the body before everyone gets to the cemetery, putting in three bags of potting soil. Something was in his coffin.”

“You’re right.” Harry had already considered this.

“So what do they do with him? None of the brothers left the grounds that night. At least not that anyone knows. No car was taken, and only a few brothers have access to the keys. G-Uncle Thomas was taken somewhere and dumped or reburied. It would be a hard job to rebury him. I figure all this happened within one night, in darkness. He can’t be far. How far can you drag a body in bitter cold and snow? I’m willing to bet my great-uncle is within a mile’s radius of his grave, or should I say his intended grave.”

“Susan, you’re on to something.” Harry encouraged her, glad that her friend didn’t sound as anxious or troubled as she had been in the last few weeks.

“If we find him, maybe we can find out what happened to him.”

“We’re country girls. If anyone can find him, we can. The cats and dogs can help. We have to be careful. We can’t blow through the joint, know what I mean? We’ll have to work up from the ravines.”

“Thought of that, too. I say we go in from behind the Inn at Afton Mountain just before dawn. Work up to within sight of the Virgin Mary, then work around in a southwest arc. Since it’s Sunday the brothers will be in service and prayer, at least early in the morning. We have a shot at it, and we can be out of there before attracting notice. We’ll have to work in sections. We can’t do it all in one day.”

“Great idea.” Harry paused a moment. “But, Susan, if we do find him, do you really want to see old Uncle Thomas like, well, like however we find him?”

“I tell myself the soul has left the body. Whatever we find is a husk. And I tell myself that he deserves better. He deserves a decent Christian burial after a lifetime of service to the best of Jesus’ teachings.”

“You’re right,” Harry agreed.

“I feel this foreboding. Harry, I feel like he’s calling to me. I have a debt to clear, but I don’t know what it is.”

28

L
ooking east from the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a thin gray line separated the horizon from the frozen earth. The band expanded until the faintest touch of rose diffused the bottom to cast a pinkish glow on the dark earth.

Harry, Susan, Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, Tucker, and Owen, Susan’s corgi, paused to watch the blush of dawn before they plunged into the ravine behind the monastery.

The early morning, still as the tomb and clear, promised a cold day but a bright one. The winter solstice, ten days ahead, brought soft light.

Harry marveled at how the light changed with each season. Winter’s light, soft and alluring, offered a contrast to the cold.

The two dogs scrambled down the ravine. The cats picked their way over the fallen branches and the jutting rocks. Pewter, never one for vigorous exercise, grumbled with each obstacle.

“You could have stayed in the car up at Afton Inn.”
Mrs. Murphy tired of the stream of complaints.

“And miss everything! If we find Brother Thomas you’ll need my powers of observation.”

“If we find Brother Thomas, you’ll throw up. It will be like one big hairball,”
Mrs. Murphy said as she leapt over a large oak branch, the place where it had torn from the tree a different color.

“I will not.”
Pewter elected to go around the tree branch.
“I don’t rejoice in these things. Not like the dogs. Carrion eaters. They love it.”

“Dogs can be gross.”
Mrs. Murphy couldn’t imagine eating anything decayed or rolling in it.

“And Tucker brags about her nose.”
Pewter wrinkled hers.

“She has a good nose. Rot smells like an enticing dinner to her. I don’t get it, either. I mean, you and I have good noses, but that’s one scent we don’t like. Humans, either. I guess buzzards like it, though.”

“Ever notice how birds who tear flesh have upper beaks that curve down—sort of? Think of Flatface, not just buzzards.”
Pewter mentioned the large horned owl living in the barn at home.

“Yes. Ever notice how buzzards don’t have feathers on their necks?”
Mrs. Murphy answered her own question.
“They can stick their entire head inside some really dead animal, but their necks won’t get sticky, weighted down. They can keep clean that way, I suppose, and they can fly, too. If a buzzard was pasted over with goo, it’d be harder to fly.”

“Practical. Crabs are carrion eaters, too. So why do they have eyes on stalks?”
Pewter liked crabmeat, so long as she didn’t think about what the crab had eaten.

“To look goofy.”
The tiger laughed.

Harry’s eyes followed the dogs. On the one hand, she hoped they did find Brother Thomas. On the other, she didn’t. She had a strong stomach, but still.

Susan, silent, trudged along. The snow shone deep blue in the boulder cracks and fissures. The rim of the sun crested the horizon, but down in the deepest part of the ravine neither she nor Harry could see it.

“How upset is she?”
Tucker asked her brother.

“Pretty upset, but once she made up her mind to do something about it, she settled down,”
Owen replied.
“She can’t understand why he would disappear. She fears the worst, too.”

“Murder,”
Tucker flatly said, as she slid down an icy bank, then nimbly jumped over a narrow rivulet feeding into a strong running creek.

“Ever notice how humans have to find reasons for things? They can’t relax unless they invent a reason. Susan couldn’t accept that one human kills another just to kill. Has to be a reason.”

“Usually is. In civilian life. War’s different. A human gets used to killing then, I guess.”
Tucker hoped she’d never face a war.
“They get used to killing and it doesn’t matter. If it’s a religious war, then they really want to kill one another.”
She sighed.
“If this thinned the herd it might be good, but all they do is turn around and breed in more and more numbers. They don’t learn much.”

“Don’t learn much from their own history and don’t learn doodley-squat from us.”

“I don’t care. I care about Harry, but since there’s nothing I can do for the rest of them, they’ll hang on their own hook.”

“It’s strange to love an animal that’s so stupid, isn’t it?”
Owen stopped, lifting his nose.
“Mmm.”

“Could be deer. Far away.”
Tucker, too, inhaled the faint, very faint, sweet odor of decay.

The cats joined them as Mrs. Murphy, feeling full of herself, dashed along, zigzagging, leaning over anything in her path, sending ground-nester birds and little finches in bushes skyward.

Pewter, not to be outdone, also hurried down the slopes. She jumped over the rivulet and bounded up the steep side of the ravine.

Within minutes the four animals reached the top.

Tucker lifted her head, her nose skyward, then dropped it, facing southeast.
“Down there.”

Owen repeated his sister’s motions.
“Stronger now.”

Pewter hesitated a moment, looked at Mrs. Murphy, who giggled at her. Without one peep, she followed the dogs. Damned if she was going to be called a wimp.

The two humans lagged a quarter of a mile behind, the rough terrain more difficult for them to negotiate. Both women sweated although the mercury clung to twenty-eight degrees in the ravines, nudging upward on the ridges as the sun was climbing. The eastern horizon was a flare of pink, peach, and scarlet, quickly fanning out westward. The colors of sunrise never seemed to linger as did those of sunset, or so Harry thought.

As Harry and Susan reached the top of the ridge, they heard the two dogs barking. Startled buzzards flew overhead.

“Hope no one hears that,” Susan fretted.

“We’re far enough away from the monastery,” Harry reassured her. “And they’re in services, so hopefully they’ll be chanting or singing or doing whatever monks do.” Harry swept her eyes along the line of the ridge, then down. The sight of Tucker and Owen gleefully pulling on a dismembered arm stopped her cold. “Susan, you might want to stay up here.”

Susan, reaching her, saw the same spectacle. “No.”

“Mine!”
Tucker raced with Brother Thomas’s arm, which she’d found behind a large boulder.

“You didn’t find it, I did.”
Owen raced after her, both dogs enjoying the game, oblivious to how awful this appeared to the humans. The cats didn’t much like it, either.

“One arm. Where’s the rest of him?”
Pewter asked.

“Mmm.”
Mrs. Murphy sat, watching the dogs carry on, one at each end of the arm now. Tucker had the hand; Owen, growling, pulled on the bone sticking out from the other end where the forearm once connected to the elbow.

“Coyote?”
Pewter noticed that what remained of the flesh was gray.

“Or dogs. Wild or domestic. Chances are they’ve torn poor old Brother Thomas all to hell. Buzzards got at him, too. We’ll be picking up pieces until the cows come home.”

“Be funny if someone’s beloved golden retriever brought home a foot, wouldn’t it? That’s one human who would pass out.”
Pewter couldn’t resist thinking of the shocked person.

“Best foot forward.”
Mrs. Murphy trotted past the dogs, who continued to tug at the arm.
“Come on, Pewter. Let’s keep moving. We’ll find more of him.”

As Harry reached the dogs she sharply said, “Leave it!”

Obediently, Tucker dropped her end.
“Spoilsport.”

Hearing Susan shout at him, Owen also dropped the arm.
“I was only playing.”

“Don’t touch it, Susan. No prints.” Harry was glad the morning had proved so cold. The arm, thawed and frozen a few times during the last days, would become more pungent once the temperature climbed.

“I won’t. I suppose it’s my great-uncle’s arm, but I can’t say for sure.” She wasn’t as disgusted by the sight as she thought she would be. At least not yet.

“Over here,”
Mrs. Murphy yowled as she pushed down into a large boulder crevice where Brother Thomas’s head and most of his torso had been stuffed. Coyotes or dogs had pulled off the limbs, but whoever wedged the old man in the crevice jammed him in there, placing large stones on the torso.

Harry reached the body first. “Goddammit!” she exploded.

Birds had plucked out Brother Thomas’s eyes. They’d also been pulling at his hair, for birds like long hair—human, horsehair, the hair from the end of a cow’s tail—to weave into their nests.

Susan stopped. She could take seeing her great-uncle’s arm, but this was pretty bad. “Oh, Harry.”

“Don’t look. It’s him, all right.”

“We found him.”
Pewter puffed out her gray chest, although she was disgusted at the sight.

“Why not leave him in his pine box?”
Tucker joined the cats.

“Because someone was smart enough not to take the chance he’d be exhumed. Obviously, Tucker, there’s something to find in the body,”
Mrs. Murphy replied.

Owen, leaving the treasure, walked over to the cats.
“So tasty.”

“Whoever is behind this knows something about bodies. If the corpse is exposed, maybe the method of murder will evaporate. I don’t know. The coroner has his work cut out for him, but there has to be a reason why Brother Thomas wasn’t left in his box. Think about it.”
Mrs. Murphy ignored the “so tasty” remark.

“I am. I don’t like any of this, and I really don’t like that Harry’s smack in the middle of it.”
Pewter wanted to go home now.

“She’s not patient. She acts on impulse,”
Tucker observed, wanting to tug at Brother Thomas’s remains.
“She thinks about these things. She gets part of the answer, but she rushes in, you know?”

“They’re both in it.”
Owen’s big brown eyes looked at Susan, who was white as a sheet.

“You going to puke?” Harry also noticed Susan’s pallor.

“No,” Susan snapped. “It’s horrible. For God’s sake, Harry, how can you be so cold-blooded?”

Harry backed away from the body, going to her friend and putting her arm around Susan’s shoulders. “The soul is with his Maker. This isn’t really your great-uncle. It’s like an old corn husk, Susan. We attach importance to it, but Thomas is gone.”

A light lingering scent lured Tucker and Owen to the back of the large boulders. They sniffed around where coyotes had marked.

“They’ll be back.”
Owen hated coyotes.

“Yes, but we’ll be out of here and so will what’s left of the human.”
Tucker, like Mrs. Murphy, was trying to think things through.
“And when whoever is behind this learns that we’ve found the body, it will be dangerous.”
The strong, small dog sat down.
“I’m trying to put the pieces together, no pun intended.”

Owen chuckled.
“Some of these pieces aren’t going to be found. They’re in coyote and buzzard bellies.”

“Can’t talk to the coyotes, even if we found the ones that did this.”
Tucker watched as Harry punched numbers on her cell phone.

“If all four of us were together we might could.”
Mrs. Murphy used the old Southern expression.

“Only way I’m talking to a coyote is if I’m high up in a tree.”
Pewter spit out the word “coyote.”

“You’ve got a point there, Pewter. They’d kill us the minute we turned our backs.”
Mrs. Murphy hated the marauders as much as her gray feline companion did.

“Can’t get a signal. Susan, I’ll try from the top of the ridge. Come on with me. We aren’t going to forget this site.”

Once on the ridge, Harry reached Cynthia Cooper, who told Harry to mark a trail but to get out of there.

“Why?”

“Because neither you nor Susan is armed. Because you’re probably safe, but what if whoever dumped Brother Thomas were to come back? It’s a long shot, but I want you and Susan out of there. You’ve got your pocketknife on you, don’t you?”

“Always do,” Harry answered.

“Make slash marks where you can, bend twigs. We’ll meet you at the parking lot. I mean it, Harry.”

“All right, Coop. All right.”

Back at the parking lot, the humans and animals waited.

“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” Susan burst into tears as she quoted First Thessalonians, Chapter 5, Verse 21.

“What makes you think of that? It’s usually Miranda who quotes the Bible.”

“When I spoke to Thomas about my fears—you know, about Ned—that’s what he said to me. I don’t even know why I blabbed it. Not his business.”

“He was wise and loving. You probably made him feel good by confiding in him.”

Later, when Harry called Miranda, Miranda did, in fact, quote scripture. “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil and canst not look on iniquity.”

Gave Harry a shiver to hear the quote from Habakkuk, Chapter 1, Verse 13.

Gave Cooper and Rick a shiver when the law called back on the sample Coop had dropped off from the statue. Type O human blood.