The Family Plot (18 page)

“
There
you are,” Bobby groused, when she finally reached the barn.

“Here I am. Did you guys make this mess, or was it like this when you got here?”

They'd pried open the barn doors without her, a process that involved pulling one of them right off its hinges—and breaking the other one into pieces. Now both doors lay flat on the grass, their rusted metal fixings jutting up from frayed, twisted beams spiked with bent nails.

Gabe confessed, “We did most of it. We couldn't get the doors open, not to save our lives. Brad said we should just pull out the hinges, that'd be the easy way. We're going to take the wood, anyhow, and it doesn't matter if we leave it open.”

Brad nodded. “But everything was rusted to everything else. Honestly, we could've opened the thing faster with a chainsaw.”

Dahlia shrugged. “Oh well. We'll have to drag the power tools out eventually, because we'll never get these bigger beams free with just crowbars and sledges. Gabe, you want to bring my truck around?” She fished keys out of her pocket and tossed them to him. “The generator's in the back, along with some gas to run it. We'll fire it up and go to town. The wood…” She poked the toe of her work boot against the nearest door. “Yeah, it's chestnut.”

“As advertised,” Gabe called cheerfully, as he strolled toward the truck. “Uncle Chuck is gonna be so psyched!”

“Damn right, he will.” Dahlia stepped past the fallen doors and let herself inside the barn. “Is there anything but the wood worth saving in here? Or have you had time to look?”

“We've had plenty of time, what with you chatting up the old lady.” Bobby adjusted his cap, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “What was that about, anyway? What did she want?”

She told the truth. “She didn't want anything. She didn't even want to see the place. Good God, look at this hulk.” She turned sideways to sidle past the enormous pile of wood and wheels, which was surely what the guys had been arguing about when she'd heard them from inside the house … before there was a soldier who fidgeted in the cemetery, back and forth, foot to foot.

Brad crouched beside the hulk in question. He used a scrap of lumber to poke at the side of the pile. “Mostly there's just a bunch of rotten crap in here, but this is pretty cool. It was some kind of wagon, or cart. It looks old, but I don't think we can save it.”

“No, this is beyond hope,” she said. She picked up a long piece of splintered wood, and used it to push the debris around. She spotted what looked like curtain fringe, and bits of broken glass. “But I bet I know what it was.”

“Really?” Bobby raised an eyebrow.

Gabe returned with Dahlia's truck. The driver's door slammed, and the big kid hopped down off the running board, into the grass. “Hey, Dad. I'll need a hand dragging this thing out. It's hella heavy.”

“In a minute. Your cousin thinks she knows what this thing used to be.”

The boy trotted into the barn to join everyone else. “Cool. What was it?”

“I bet it was a hearse. The horse-drawn kind, from way back in the day.” Dahlia lifted the edge of fringe, and let it fall. She jabbed a padded seat that had long ago been pillaged by rats in search of nesting material, and knocked on something hard and heavy. She paused to put her work gloves back on, then stepped into the collapsed pile carefully, to feel around. She withdrew a metal handle. “See?”

“See
what
?” Bobby demanded.

“It's a casket handle.” She turned it over, and used her gloves to rub off some of the tarnish. “And it's silver. See, funeral companies used to make these kits for people who couldn't afford a nice casket. They'd stick the nice hardware on for the service, just for show. When all the prayers were said, someone would yank everything off before the box went into the ground—then use it again later.”

“That's…” Brad looked like he wanted to say “gross,” but he settled for “strange.”

“Nope. It was logical. If you weren't rich, why would you pay a fortune for silver or gold casket trimmings, just to bury them? The dead didn't care, and the living needed the money.” Dahlia thought she'd found another one, but it turned out to be the corner of an empty box, rusted and crushed into a lump of scrap. “So bring out the lights and get yourselves some shovels or something. Dad will go apeshit for Victorian casket bling, even if it's not solid sterling.”

Brad used a pry bar, Dahlia took a shovel, and Bobby dove in with his hands and feet, lifting and shoving the bigger pieces with Gabe's help.

Gabe took a door panel that was partly intact, and turned it around. There was artwork on it, something painted but terribly faded. She could almost make out the words “funerary services.” He pointed at the letters and asked, “How did you know, Dahl?”

“Know what?”

“How'd you know this was a hearse?”

She tagged something heavy with the shovel's edge, and squatted down to dig it out by hand. “You know those tombstones we found in the carriage house?”

“Yeah?”

“The Withrow family used to make them. They had their own business: the Withrow Monument Company.” She extracted another handle from the rubble. “Got another one. Y'all need to catch up.”

“What if there
aren't
any more?” Bobby fussed.

“There should be four, at least, more likely six. Assuming the set's intact. So keep looking.” She dropped the handle with a clank beside the other one. “Anyway, I figured if the Withrows were making tombstones, they might have branched out in the death business. I saw the curtains, and the glass … it was an educated hunch.”

Bobby grunted, signaling that he was about to argue, or accuse her of making a lucky guess—but the grunt turned into an exclamation. “Hey, I got one over here.” He picked it up and rubbed it on his jeans. “This fucker's heavy. I bet it's solid.” He tossed it to her.

She added it to the pile. “Solid
something.
We'll let Dad decide what it's made of.”

Gabe stumbled forward, catching himself on his hands and turning one of the hearse's back panels into sawdust. It crumbled beneath his weight, and beneath years of termites and rodents and rot, all doing their worst. “One more,” he chirped. “Bruised the shit out of my hand, but if it's silver, I'm not complaining!” He passed this one Dahlia's way. “So did Mrs. Withrow tell you about the family business?”

“Yep, just now. I showed her that photo album we found, and she told me about some of the people in it.”

Brad paused, and rolled up his sleeves a little higher. He pushed them past his elbows. “Is that why she was here? You called her about a photo album?”

“I called her about the cemetery. She said we shouldn't worry about it. I showed her the album as an afterthought.”

Brad's eyes were full of dubious concern. “She said … not to worry about the cemetery?”

Dahlia wondered if he'd told anyone else about the spectral soldier. “According to her, it's not a real cemetery, and nobody's buried there. It's an old Halloween prank, using unclaimed tombstones from the shop.”

“So you're saying there aren't any bodies,” Brad stated flatly.

“No bodies, no coffins. That's what she told me.”

He shook his head and paid an awful lot of attention to the task of digging in the remains of the collapsed hearse. “Bullshit. I call bullshit.”

Gabe had his back. “I don't buy it, either.”

Bobby stopped what he was doing and watched Dahlia with interest.

She stood up straight, and leaned on the handle of the shovel. “Why not? Because all of y'all think the place is haunted?”

The barn went quiet. Everyone stopped scrabbling around in the dirt, the crumbled timbers or wheels, and the ashy dust left behind by the hearse as it'd rotted through the decades. Nobody said anything in reply.

She sniffed. “At least nobody's arguing with me.”

Brad put his hands up in that half-shrug, half-surrender he did so well. “You said it yesterday—we were talking about ghosts and old houses. Why shouldn't the Withrow house have a haint or two hiding in the woodwork?”

She adjusted her grip on the shovel. Its metal head scraped on the unfinished floor. “I never said it wasn't haunted,” she said carefully. “This is an old house, an old estate. Lots of people came and went. Some of them probably died, and if you believe in ghosts, there's no good reason to think there aren't any here.”

“You saw something?” Bobby asked. It was barely a question.

She wanted to pitch it right back at him, and ask if he'd seen anything himself. She didn't. “It's … not exactly like that.”

But Gabe pushed the matter. “Well,
did
you, or not?” And in his eyes she saw something very close to desperation.

“I've felt things,” she said, still playing it cool. It wouldn't do any good to scare the whole crew half to death. They were jumpy enough as it was. “Like someone's watching me, or like maybe I saw something out of the corner of my eye. None of it was worth getting too excited about, and there's nothing to worry about, that's for damn sure. Let me make myself clear: I
never said
there aren't any ghosts on the grounds. I only said there wasn't anyone buried in the cemetery—because it's not a cemetery. That's what Augusta Withrow said.”

Brad didn't buy it. “She might be lying.”

“She might be, yeah. But I went looking through that photo album, and I didn't see any of those family names on any of the tombstones over there. There's not a single Withrow stone, and that doesn't make any sense if it was a private cemetery on their land. The names are just … they're all random. So can we let it go?” Dahlia lifted the shovel, jabbed it into the rubble, and resumed her search for the silver casket handles. “Ghosts or no ghosts, we're burning daylight. We can't salvage ghosts. They don't sell for shit.”

One by one, the guys resumed digging, but they did it in silence—until Brad scored the final two handles, hiding side by side under one of the back wheels.

“That makes six,” he declared. “I'll go lock them in the truck.”

“Why?” Dahlia asked.

“Because … they're valuable? Maybe?”

Bobby grunted. “Everything's maybe valuable. Nobody's here to take it. Don't be paranoid.”

Gabe shot Dahlia a dark look, but he didn't say anything.

She didn't sigh, but she wanted to. “I don't know, Brad's probably right. They're shiny and easily portable. If anybody comes up around here, scrapping or scavenging, these would look like an easy score. It's no more effort to lock them in the cab than to stack them in the rear. Gabe, you still got my keys?”

“Yes ma'am.” He tossed them back to her.

“I'll go ahead and put them away. You and Bobby, get the generator out and running. Brad, get the Sawzalls ready to go. Check the blades and unroll the extension cords.”

“Why don't we use the cordless models? This generator business is a pain in the ass,” he complained.

“You need electricity to charge batteries—so on a long job with no power, you'll need the generator anyway. Just … go get everything. We'll need it all, before the day's out.”

The crew spent the rest of the morning disassembling the biggest pieces of the barn; and when lunch rolled around they were nearly finished—so they worked through until two o'clock, then called it. Several large piles of lumber were loosely organized by size, shape, and condition, to be loaded into the truck after a meal break.

“Then what?” Gabe asked. He was wrapping up an orange extension cord, folding it in loops between his elbow and thumb. It coiled tighter and tighter, thicker and thicker.

Dahlia didn't have anything hard and fast in mind, so she guessed. “By the time we get all that lumber loaded, and all the nonscrap items into the other truck, it ought to be getting dark.”

“Then we could always get started on the house's interior,” Brad suggested.

Bobby disagreed. “
Or
we could have a drink and take a fucking rest. I could use a beer. Or two, or three. Hell, we're ahead of schedule, so we might as well relax. You think it'll take us all day tomorrow and Thursday to break the house down? You're crazy.”

“Like you'd know anything about how long it takes,” Dahlia grumbled.

“Hey, I might not have done a million of these, but I'm no idiot. The house is mostly empty, except for the stuff we plan to pry loose and make off with. It shouldn't take a whole day.”

“I
have
done a million of these, and I can tell you those mantels will take for-fucking-ever to get out.” Dahlia took another long snake of extension cord and started winding it, somewhat more fiercely than Gabe. “You have to reinforce the marble where it's cracked, or else the whole thing will crumble, and then what? Then the mantels and surrounds aren't worth shit, that's what.”

“Only two of them are marble.”

“Either one could wind up taking us all afternoon to secure—and they're valuable enough to spend the time doing it right. Who's the boss, Bobby?”

“Go to hell.”

“
Who's the boss?
Tell me now, or pack your shit and go back to Nashville.” She flung the rolled cord onto the ground, and started picking up the power saws. “You've been getting too comfortable here, Bobby—thinking you can jerk off like usual, and all you have to do is be a little nice once in a while. Well that ain't the case, and you can't just squeak by on the bare minimum. So I'll ask you again: Who's in charge?”

He spit on the floor and turned on his heel. “You are, bitch.”

She told him, “Go get some lunch, asshole.” But he was already out of the barn and halfway back to the truck he called his own. She kept twisting the cords, squeezing them like she'd prefer to squeeze somebody's neck.