Dead Voices (6 page)

“For Christ’s sake,” Norton sputtered, once the initial wave of sickness had receded. He stood up shakily, unconsciously wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “Who in the fuck could
do
something like this?” He was unsteady on his feet and had to lean against one of the other tombstones for support while he took several deep breaths. The moist spring air was sour, almost fetid as it filled his lungs.

Meanwhile, the putrid smell that wafted up from the hole in the ground, mixing with the fresh aroma of Norton’s vomit, made Frank choke.

The top part of the coffin lid had been ripped open, and the body inside had been dragged up into a sitting position. The corpse — an elderly looking man — was propped against the dirt wall of his grave. His waxy, pale face was splotched with decaying skin, and the thin, gray hair was caked with dirt and hung in clumps of rotting scalp. His lips were peeled back and his mouth gaped open, as if he were railing against this desecration in speechless protest. The corpse’s tongue hung out to one side, looking like a huge white slug that had died while crawling from his mouth, and the rotting funeral clothes had been shredded by the vandal’s efforts; Frank wondered if this was all normal deterioration of a corpse, or if the person who had opened up the grave had purposely mutilated the body. Fighting waves of nausea, which hadn’t been helped by hearing Norton vomit, Frank stared in disbelief at the disturbed corpse.

“For Christ’s sake,” he muttered. “Will you look at that!”

Still unable to speak, Norton did no more than grunt as he edged his way cautiously to the side of the grave and looked down.

“Look at his left arm,” Frank said, his voice wound up tightly. “Whatever sicko did this must have used their shovel or something to cut off its left hand!”

2.

While Frank secured the area, making sure not to disturb the freshly dug earth or mess up any of the footprints around the site, Norton pulled himself together enough to go back to the cruiser and radio in the incident. He asked the dispatcher to call Barney Fraser, the Oak Grove caretaker, and tell him to come right out to the cemetery with a plot plan, if one was readily available. He also requested two detectives from the Criminal Investigation Division and an evidence technician to come out to the scene as soon as possible.

Half an hour later, the investigation was in full swing. The detectives and the evidence technician were busy collecting soil samples, making plaster of Paris casts of the tire and boot prints, and taking photographs of the area from every conceivable angle. The sudden blue flash of the camera constantly lit up the night in harsh relief. One of the detectives kept complaining how he wished the culprit had been kind enough to leave the shovel behind so they could lift some prints. No such luck.

Frank and Norton stood beside the cruiser, which was still parked outside the cemetery gate, and watched the activity at the top of the hill. They had strung the entire perimeter of the cemetery with wide fluorescent-yellow plastic tape that read in black letters: CAUTION — DO NOT ENTER — POLICE ZONE.” The flashing police lights had brought out a few curious neighbors, but, at least upon first being questioned, no one recalled seeing anything suspicious earlier that evening. Frank wished there was something more he could do, other than just making sure some curious onlooker didn’t inadvertently ruin some evidence.

“Did Fraser tell you whose grave this was?” Norton asked, as he and Frank sipped at the coffee one of the men from C.I.D. had brought them.

“Burial plot 317,” Frank said evenly. His stomach still felt queasy, and the coffee wasn’t helping.

“No, no,” Norton said, “I mean who was buried there. Who’s the guy they ... dug up and took the hand from?”

Frank shook his head and, fighting to keep his voice steady, said, “He didn’t have to. I read the turned-over headstone. It was Jonathan Payne. “

Norton nodded, still wide-eyed with fear.

“Elizabeth Myers’s uncle,” Frank added, speaking softly, as though to himself.

Norton shook his head with total bewilderment. “So that means the grave I was leaning on ... after I got sick ... that must’ve been the grave of Caroline, her daughter.”

Frank nodded but said nothing as he bit down hard on his lower lip. His stomach did another sour flip-flop.

“Coincidence — or what?” Norton said, after a shuddering sigh.

In the flashing blue light of the cruiser, Norton’s face still looked pale and drawn. In over ten years of working together on the Bristol Mills police force, this was the worst Frank had ever seen Norton shaken up. It made the backs of his own legs feel unstrung, especially when he considered the “coincidence,” as Norton put it, of them finding this right after they had been talking about Elizabeth. Maybe it was just a coincidence, Frank thought. wishing the acid taste would leave the back of his throat ... then again, maybe it wasn’t.

“I think I’ll take a stroll around the perimeter again, just in case we missed anything the first time,” Frank said. “You wanna come along or wait here?”

Norton didn’t move, seemingly content to stay where he was. He sent Frank off with a wave of his hand. Frank was actually glad Norton had decided not to come along, because what he really wanted to do was just be off by himself, to try to absorb some of the thoughts he had to deal with.

He walked off to the left of the cemetery, staying on the outside of the iron fence as he let his flashlight beam swing listlessly back and forth. He didn’t really expect to find anything; he was fairly certain that the grave robber, if that’s what he was, had driven his car or truck in through the main gate,-at least, that’s what the tire tracks made it look like.

But why dig up a grave just to cut off the corpse’s hand? Frank wondered, as he started into the woods along the side of the cemetery. The sound of the spring peepers was louder in the woods heading toward the wetland. The noise filled Frank’s ears, almost crowding out the confusion of thoughts. Had the corpse been wearing a gold ring on its left hand that hadn’t come off easily? Or had something else of value been taken, something they hadn’t found out about yet? And if not, then what in the hell was the point of disinterring someone just to amputate their dead hand?

Once he arrived at the far corner of the cemetery, some distance from the scene of the crime, Frank stopped and, pressing his face against the cold iron rails like a boy staring longingly at the circus, watched as the detectives went about their work. They had the area illuminated with high-intensity, portable floodlights that cast long, wavering shadows over the ground as the C.I.D. people walked back and forth. With the sounds they made muffled by the distance, they looked eerily unearthly, almost like astronauts exploring the silent wasteland of the moon, as they combed the area for clues. Frank was sifting through his own list of possibilities for what had happened up there when, from behind, he heard a branch snap. Because his nerves were still wound up tight, it sounded as loud as gunfire. Turning quickly, he swung his flashlight in the direction of the sound.

“Stop where you are! This is the police!” he called out, not even sure anyone was there. Not willing to take any chances, though, he drew his revolver and let it track along with the beam of his flashlight.

The thick growth of brush and the close night muffled his voice, pushing it back at him as he started cautiously forward, flashlight in one hand, drawn revolver in the other. Dead leaves and branches crunched underfoot as he made his way slowly through the underbrush, constantly scanning left and right, tensed and waiting for the sound to be repeated. He was fairly certain the sound had been made by either the wind or an animal, but then he sensed a flurry of activity off to his right. Intervening brush blocked his view, so he got only a fleeting impression of someone running away into the darkness.

“All right!” Frank shouted. “Hold it right there!”

He raised his revolver and took a steady aim at the darker-than-night silhouette he glimpsed moving among the trees. Giving a slow count of three to see if the person would stop, Frank fired once into the air. As the booming echo of the gunshot died, he ran ahead, sweeping the area with his flashlight. The person was gone! Disappeared!

“Goddamn it!” Frank hissed, plowing through the underbrush, straining to hear the sounds of the person’s hasty retreat. Had it been some curious bystander, maybe a kid drawn by the activity? Or had this been the person who had dug up the grave, returning to watch the investigation like a pyromaniac who returns to watch the house burn.

“What the hell’s going on?” Norton shouted as he came running along the line of the cemetery fence toward where Frank stood in the woods, staring hopelessly at the impenetrable darkness. When Frank shined the light onto his partner, he saw that Norton’s eyes were wide open, reflecting the light back like a frightened animal’s.

“I saw someone over there. Get back to the cruiser and radio for some backup,” Frank snapped. “Whoever it was didn’t want to stick around and talk to me. It must have been the freak who dug up the grave. “

“Where do you think he went?” Norton asked, peering into the dark and silent woods. If Frank hadn’t known better, he would have thought Norton was stalling.

“I’d guess he’s headed out toward Old County Road. Maybe he parked somewhere out there on the side of the road. If we can get a cruiser over to Deering Road and another at the end of Brook Road, we might be able to nab him. Probably ought to get K-9 out here, too.”

With that, Norton turned and started back toward the cemetery gate to radio in, and Frank took off through the woods, vainly hoping he could run down whoever it was. He tried not to be discouraged by the person’s sizable headstart; it was less than a mile to the main road by the most direct path, and something told him that whoever he was pursuing seemed to know where he was going.

As Frank ran, he kept glancing at the ground, looking for footprints, but the thick mat of dead leaves covering the forest floor looked undisturbed. Ducking under branches and running around trees, before long he wasn’t even sure he was heading in the direction the person had run. For all Frank knew, the man he was after was already in his car and halfway to the state line.

Breathing heavily, the air stinging his lungs, Frank slowed his pace and started looking more carefully for tracks. As much as he strained his eyes and ears, though, he couldn’t detect a thing, and started to suspect the whole thing was a figment of his overworked imagination, but he pushed onward, knowing that before long he’d come out somewhere on Old County Road.

And won’t this look just great, he thought bitterly — having to walk back to town. So much for the concept of “hot pursuit.”

The land sloped down through a soggy stream bed and then gradually rose. Ahead in the distance, Frank heard the sound of a vehicle passing by on the road. The engine whined loudly, filling the night before fading rapidly. He wondered if that was the person he was after, making good his getaway, or if it was a cruiser responding to Norton’s call for backup. Either way, Frank had pretty much given up on the idea of catching whoever it was. He satisfied himself by thinking that it was going to be up to the C.I.D. unit to figure out the rest of this. As far as he was concerned, he would go back to the station, fill out the incident report, and that would be the end of it for him.

The end of it, he thought, unless, because he knew Elizabeth’s family pretty well, the detectives asked him to stop by Junia and Elspeth Payne’s house in the morning to notify them about what had happened.

“Won’t
that
be a whole barrel full of fun,” he muttered, just as he broke out of the woods onto Route 22. Fortunately, the first car that approached was a cruiser, so he flagged it down. Ernie LaChance was the patrolman driving it, and after Frank explained what had happened, they drove back out to Oak Grove Cemetery and rejoined Norton. They finished out their shift drinking coffee and leaning against the cruiser as they watched the C.I.D. men do their work.

3.

Elizabeth was the kind of person who put a lot of faith in her first impressions of people; but for the first time since she could remember, she ,felt genuinely stymied by someone. Dr. Roland Graydon greeted her on the landing outside his office. Below her was the windowed breezeway that connected the garage to the large, very expensive looking house on Shore Drive in South Portland.

Graydon was probably in his mid-fifties, tall and rather slender, with sandy brown hair. One of the first things she noticed about him was his penetrating, blue-eyed gaze, and, although not overtly handsome, his face was pleasantly attractive and masculine. He appeared to have a youthful energy about him, yet at the same time there was an aura of age and deep worry surrounding him.

“Elizabeth Myers,” Dr Graydon said, as he extended his hand and gently shook hands with her. ‘‘I’m so glad to meet you at last.”

His voice and handshake, his entire manner, were warm and comforting, but there was something about him, an undercurrent that made her feel — well, off balance. Perhaps, she thought, it was simply the confusion she felt from his initial greeting.

The wind off the ocean was warm and moist, and tangy with salt. The morning sun was warm on her shoulders, but the man’s handshake felt even warmer — hot, almost, and too tight. She broke it off a bit abruptly.

“At last?” Elizabeth said, arching her brows. “We spoke for the first time last night, when you returned my call.”

“Oh, yes — yes, of course,” Graydon said, stepping back and holding the door open so Elizabeth could enter the office. He swung the door shut behind her, pushing back against it finnly. “For a second there you reminded me of someone else. I have another appointment in” — he stretched out his arm and glanced at his wristwatch —”an hour and fifteen minutes. I’m sorry. Please, make yourself comfortable.” He helped her off with her light spring jacket and carefully hung it on the brass coat tree by the front door.

Smiling, but secretly wondering if she really needed a therapist who seemed as distracted as this man appeared to be, Elizabeth walked the length of the room, taking a few seconds to size up the office.