Grave Surprise (2 page)

“It's a girl,” I said.

“Ha!” Nunley chose to regard himself as vindicated. He kind of overdid his glee, he was so happy to be proved right. “Wrong!” he said. Mr. Open Mind.

“I'm not wrong,” I said, though I really wasn't thinking about him, or the students, or even Tolliver. I was thinking about the puzzle under the ground. I was thinking about solving it.

I took off my socks. My feet felt fragile in the chilly air. I stepped back onto the dead grass in line with the headstone to get a fresh outlook. For the first time, I noticed that though an attempt had been made to level this grave—it bore the flattened spots that blows with a shovel on soft dirt would have produced—the earth had been recently turned.

Well, well, well. I stood still for a moment, the implications working their way through my brain. I had the ominous creeping feeling you get when you just know something's right outside your realm of knowledge—a bad piece of future poised to jump out from behind a door and scream in your face.

Though the kids were muttering to each other and the two older students were having a low-voiced conversation, I squatted down to decipher the headstone. It read,
JOSIAH POUNDSTONE,
1839–1858,
REST IN PEACE BELOVED BROTHER
. No mention of a wife, or a twin, or…

Okay, maybe the ground had shifted a bit and the body buried next to Josiah's had sort of wandered over.

I stepped back onto the grave, and I squatted. Distantly, I heard the click of the camera, but it was not relevant. I laid my hand on the turned earth. I was as connected as I could be without lying full length on the ground.

I glanced over at Tolliver. “Something's wrong here,” I said, loudly enough for him to hear. He started over.

“A problem, Miss Connelly?” Dr. Nunley asked, scorn lending his voice fiery edges. This was a man who loved to be right.

“Yes.” I stepped off the grave, shook myself, and tried again. Standing right above Josiah Poundstone, I reached down again.

Same result.

“There are two bodies here, not one,” I said.

Nunley made the predictable attempts to find an explanation. “A coffin gave way in the next grave,” he said impatiently. “Or something like that.”

“No, the body that's lower is in an intact coffin.” I took a deep breath. “And the upper body isn't. It's much newer. This ground has been turned over recently.”

Finally interested, the students quieted down. Dr. Nunley consulted his papers. “Who do you…see…in there?”

“The lower body, the older one…” I closed my eyes, trying to peer through one body to another. I'd never done this before. “Is a young man named Josiah, like the headstone says. By the way, he died of blood poisoning from a cut.” I could tell from Nunley's face that I was right. However the priest had described Josiah's death, modern knowledge could recognize the symptoms. What the priest may not have known, however, is that the cut had come from a stab wound, inflicted in a fight. I could see the knife sliding into the young man's flesh, feel him staunch the blood. But the infection had carried him off.

“The upper body, the newer one, is a young girl.”

There was sudden and absolute silence. I could hear the traffic rushing by on busy roads just yards away from the old graveyard.

“How recent is the second body?” Tolliver asked.

“Two years at the most,” I said. I tilted my head from side to side, to get the most accurate “reading” I could. On the age of the bones, I mostly go by the intensity of the vibration and the feel of it. I never said I was a scientist. But I'm right.

“Oh, my God,” whispered one of the female students, finally understanding the implication.

“She's a murder victim,” I said. “Her name was…Tabitha.” As I heard what my voice was saying, an awful sense of doom flowed over me. The boogeyman jumped out from behind the door and screamed in my face.

My brother moved across the intervening ground like a quarterback who could see the end zone. He stopped just
short of the grave, but he was close enough to take my hand. Our eyes met. His echoed the dismay in mine.

“Tell me it's not,” Tolliver said. His dark brown eyes were steady on mine.

“It is,” I said. “We finally found Tabitha Morgenstern.”

After a moment, in which the younger people in the group turned to look at each other with inquiring faces, Clyde Nunley said, “You mean…the girl who was abducted from Nashville?”

“Yes,” I said. “That's who I mean.”

I'D
been standing on two murder victims, one ancient (at least to me), and one modern. There were differences in the reading I got from the older one, in addition to the shock of finding Tabitha. I stowed Josiah Poundstone away to ponder later. No one here in St. Margaret's cemetery was concerned with him today.

“You got some explaining to do,” the detective said. He was putting it mildly. We were at Homicide, and the carpeted partitions and the ringing phones and the flag tacked to the wall made the floor seem more like a modest company with a burgeoning business than a cop facility.

Sometimes I faint when I find a body that has passed in a violent way. It would have been good if I'd fainted this time. But I hadn't. I'd been all too conscious of the disbelief and outrage on the faces of the police, uniformed and plainclothes.
The initial skepticism and anger on the part of the two uniforms who'd rolled up on the scene had been understandable and predictable. They didn't imagine anyone would dig up a centuries-old grave on the say-so of a lunatic woman who made her living as a con artist.

But the more Clyde Nunley explained, the more they began to look uneasy. After a lot of comparison of the grave's surface with the others around it, the larger black cop finally radioed in, calling a detective to the scene.

We'd gone over the whole sequence of events again. This took a lot of time. Tolliver and I were leaning against our car, getting progressively colder and wearier, while the slow and repetitive questioning went on and on. Everyone was angry with us. Everyone thought we were frauds. Clyde Nunley grew more defensive and loud with each amazed reaction he got from the cops. Yes, he conducted a course during which students “experienced” people who claimed they could communicate with the dead: ghost hunters, mediums, psychics, tarot readers, and other paranormal practitioners. Yes, people actually sent their kids to college to learn stuff like that, and yes, they paid a rather high tuition for it. Yes, the papers about the old cemetery had been kept quite secure, and Harper Connelly had had no chance to examine them. Yes, the box containing the papers had been sealed when the library staff had discovered it. No, neither Tolliver nor I had ever been a student at the college. (We had to smile when we heard that one.)

To no one's surprise, we were “asked” to come to the police station. And there we sat, answering all the same ques
tions over and over again, until we were left to vegetate in an interview room. The garbage can was full of snack wrappers and stained Styrofoam coffee cups, and the walls needed a new coat of paint. In the past, someone had thrown the chair I was sitting on. I could tell, because one of the metal legs was slightly bowed. At least the room was warm enough. I'd gotten chilled down to my bones in the cemetery.

“You think it would look bad if I read?” Tolliver asked. Tolliver is twenty-eight now, and he likes to grow his black hair out, wear it long for a while, and then cut it drastically. At the moment, it was long enough to pull back into a short ponytail. He has a mustache and acne-scarred cheeks. He's a runner, like me. We spend a lot of hours in cars, and running is a good way to counteract that.

“Yes, I think it would look callous,” I said. He glowered at me. “Well, you asked me,” I said. We sat in dreary silence for a minute or two.

“I wonder if we'll have to see the Morgensterns again?” I said.

“You know we will,” he said. “I bet they've already called them, and they're driving over from Nashville right now.”

His cell phone rang.

He checked who was calling, looked as blank as a man can look, and answered it. “Hey,” he said. “Yeah, it's true. Yes, we're here in Memphis. I was going to call you tonight. I'm sure we'll see each other. Yes. Yes. All right, goodbye.”

He didn't look happy as he snapped the phone shut. Of course I wanted to know who his caller had been, but I didn't say anything. If anything could have made me
gloomier, it was the idea that sooner or later we'd have to see Joel and Diane Morgenstern again.

When I'd realized whom the bones belonged to, my dismay was more overwhelming than my feeling of triumph. I'd failed the Morgensterns eighteen months ago, though I'd tried as hard as I could to find their daughter. Now I'd finally come through for them, but the success was bitter.

“How'd she die?” Tolliver asked very quietly. You never knew who was listening, in a police station. I guess we're the suspicious sort.

“Suffocated,” I said. Another silence. “With a blue pillow.” We'd seen so many pictures of Tabitha alive: on the news broadcasts, pinned to the walls of her room, in her parents' hands, blown up to illustrate the fliers they'd given us. She'd been a very average girl of eleven, to everyone but her parents. Tabitha had had bushy reddish-brown hair she hadn't yet learned to deal with. She'd had big brown eyes, and braces, and she hadn't begun to mature physically. She'd liked gymnastics, and art lessons, and she'd hated making her bed and taking out the trash. I remembered all this from talking to her parents; or more accurately, listening to their monologues. Joel and Diane had seemed to believe that if they made Tabitha real to me, I would work harder at finding her.

“You think she's been down there since she was missing?” Tolliver asked, finally.

It had been the spring of the preceding year when we'd been summoned to Nashville by the Morgenstern family. By then, Tabitha had been gone a month. The police had just
cut back on their search, since they'd looked everywhere they could. The FBI had scaled back its presence, also. The extra equipment that had been installed to trace phone calls had been removed, because there hadn't been any ransom demands. By then, no one was expecting such a demand.

“No,” I said. “The ground was too freshly disturbed. But I think she's been dead the whole time. I really hope so.” The only thing more awful than a murdered child was a murdered child who'd been subjected to prolonged torture or sexual abuse.

“There was no way you could have found her,” Tolliver said. “Back then.”

“No,” I agreed. “There wasn't.”

But it hadn't been for lack of trying. The Morgensterns had called me when they'd exhausted all the traditional methods of finding their lost child.

Yes, I had failed; but I had given it my all. I'd been over the house, the yard, the neighborhood, into the yards of anyone with a police record who lived in the surrounding area. Some I'd done at night because the homeowner wouldn't consent. Not only was I risking arrest, but injury. A dog had almost gotten me the second night.

I'd toured nearby junkyards, ponds, parks, landfills, and cemeteries, in the process finding one other murder victim in the trunk of a junked car (a freebie for the Nashville police—they'd been so pleased to have another murder victim on the books), and one natural death, a homeless man in a park. But I hadn't found any eleven-year-old girls. For
nine days I'd searched, until the time came when I'd had to tell Diane and Joel Morgenstern that I could not find their child.

Tabitha had been snatched from her yard in an upscale Nashville suburb while she was watering the flowers in the beds around the front door of the house on a warm morning during spring break. When Diane had come out to go to the grocery, she'd discovered Tabitha was nowhere to be found. The hose was still running.

Daughter of a senior accountant with a firm that handled lots of Nashville singers and record people, Tabitha had had a blessed childhood. Though she had a stepbrother because Joel had been married and widowed previously, Tabitha had obviously enjoyed a well-regulated home life centered on maintaining her health and happiness, and incidentally that of Victor, her half sib.

My childhood, and Tolliver's, had not been like that—at least, after a certain point. That was the point where our lawyer parents began using drugs and drinking with their clients. After a while, the clients had ceased to be clients, and had become peers. That downward slide had brought me to the moment in time when I'd been standing in the bathroom in that trailer in Texarkana and the lightning had come through the window.

Trips down memory lane aren't happy jaunts for me.

I was almost glad when the detective—Corbett Lacey was his name—came back with cups of coffee for both of us. He was trying the soft approach. Sooner or later (probably later) someone else would try the hard approach.

“Tell me how you came to be here this morning,” suggested Corbett Lacey. He was a burly man with receding blond hair, a large belly, and quick blue eyes like restless marbles.

“We were invited by Dr. Nunley to come to the old cemetery. I was supposed to show the students what I do.”

“What exactly do you do?” He looked so sincere, as if he would believe any answer I gave him.

“I find the dead.”

“You track people?”

“No, I find corpses. People call me in, and I find the bodies of those who've passed on.” That was my favorite euphemism. I have quite a repertoire. “If the location of the corpse is already known, I can tell you the cause of death. That was what I was doing at the cemetery today.”

“What's your success rate?”

Okay, that was unexpected. I'd assumed he'd sneer, at this point. “If the relatives or the police can give me a bead on the location, I can find the body,” I said matter-of-factly. “When I find the body, I know the cause of death. In the case of Tabitha Morgenstern, when the family called me in, I could never find her. She'd been taken from her yard and put in a car pretty quick, I guess, and her corpse just wasn't there for me to sense.”

“How does this work?”

Another unexpected question. “I feel them, like a buzz in my head,” I said. “The closer I get, the more intense the buzz, the vibration, is. When I'm on top of them, I can reach down and tell how they died. I'm not a psychic. I'm not a
precognate, or a telepath. I don't see who killed them. I only see the death when I'm near the bones.”

He hadn't expected such a matter-of-fact reply. He looked at me, leaning forward on the other side of the table. His own cup of coffee was forgotten in front of him. “Why would anyone believe that?” Lacey asked wonderingly.

“Because I produce results,” I said.

“Don't you think it's quite a coincidence? That you were called in by the Morgensterns when they were looking for their little girl, and now, months later, in a different city, you say you've found her? How do you think those poor folks are going to feel when the area's dug and there's nothing there? You should be ashamed of yourself.” The detective regarded me with profound disgust.

“That's not going to happen.” I shrugged. “I'm not ashamed of anything. She's there.” I glanced at my watch. “They should have reached her by now.”

Detective Lacey's cell phone rang. He answered, “Yeah?” As he listened, his face changed. He looked harder and older. His eyes fell on me with a look I've seen often—a stare compounded of distaste, fear, and a dawning belief.

“They've reached some bones in a garbage bag,” he said heavily. “Too small to be an adult's.”

I tried very hard to look neutral.

“A foot below the garbage bag bones, there are wood remnants. Probably a coffin. So there may be another set of bones.” He breathed heavily. “There's no trace of a coffin around the upper bones.”

I nodded. Tolliver squeezed my hand.

“We'll get a very preliminary identification in a couple hours, if it's the Morgenstern girl. The dental records have been faxed from Nashville. Of course, a solid ID will have to wait on a full exam of the body. Well, what's left of the body.” Detective Lacey set his own personal coffee mug on the battered table with unnecessary force. “Nashville police are sending the X-rays by car, and the car should be here in a couple of hours. The local FBI office is sending someone to witness the full autopsy. The Fibbies are offering their lab for the trace stuff. You are not to say anything about this to anyone until we've talked to the family.”

I nodded again.

“Good,” Tolliver said, just to goose the silence.

Corbett Lacey gave us a steady glare. “We've had to call her parents, and if this isn't her, I don't even like to think about what they'll feel. If you hadn't broadcast her name to the whole group standing there, we could have kept this quiet until we had something solid to tell them. Now, we've had to talk to them because it looks like the damn television will have it on the air soon.”

“I'm sorry about that. I just wasn't thinking.” I should have kept my mouth shut. He had a good point.

“Why do you even do this, anyway?” He gave me a puzzled face, as if he really couldn't figure me out. I didn't think he was completely sincere, but I was.

“It's always better to know. That's why I do it.”

“You seem to make quite a bit of money, too,” Corbett Lacey observed.

“I have to make a living, same as anybody else.” I wasn't
going to act ashamed of that. But, truly, I sometimes wished I worked at Wal-Mart, or Starbucks, and let the dead lie unfound.

“So, I guess Joel and Diane started out right away,” Tolliver said. He was right; a change of subject was in order. “It'll take them how long to get here?”