“She can survive in the woods better than most,” I said slowly. “She's out there because she's afraid someone will blame her for Harding's death, something she didn't do.”
“That college education don't get in the way of your good sense. Much.” She was proud of me. “Right to this day you see that black dog up in the cemetery sometimes.”
“But that's exactly what I think Able's afraid of. Not the dog. I mean they're both hiding because someone will blame them for Harding's murder. I think they're in the graveyard.”
“I wondered how long it would take you to get to that.” She stirred serenely. “Hek laid down enough hints.”
“Why didn't you let me know that the last time I was here?” No point in telling her I'd already thought it.
“Not my business.” She exhibited the whisper of a smile. “You know your Great-grandfather Devilin from the old country, he was one of them to start that graveyard. Along with the Newcombs.”
I was well aware of June's propensity for bending the truth if it made for a better story, for further crafting facts to fit ancient songs and tales. Her story about her husband's adventures traveling from town to town looking for her after he was wounded in Vietnam was a nearly word-for-word parallel of the song “Dark-eyed Sailor”âand about a hundred other variants of the same plot. I knew it, she knew it, and still she insisted on embellishing reality. Truth, lies, and a human propensity for hyperbole weave the fabric of folkloreâand life, I suppose.
“No. My great-grandfather is buried up there, but he had nothing to do with the graveyard.”
“Built part of it himself. Out of guilt for marrying a woman he didn't love,” she went right on, as if the story of old Conner Devilin were recent news. June had heard my great-grandfather's history a hundred times.
“What do you think you're doing, Junie, bringing up that old trouble now?”
“Not my business,” she said, holding up one hand. “Get you a plate and I'll let you have a taste of these peas.”
“I'm not hungry.” I stood. Changing the subject to food meant she was done talking about Truevine and nothing I could do would change that. “I might want to come back and talk to Hek about all this.”
“He don't know a thing.”
“Still.”
“You miss Lucinda?”
“I do,” I said quietly, unsettled by her sudden change of subject.
“Tell her that when she gets back.” June stared out the window. “You don't have much of woman's ways in your life; you could use a little more. You know you ought to marry that girl.”
“I don't know, June.” I pushed the chair in. “You're aware of my
feelings about being married in general, my parents' disaster. I'm not sure I'm cut out for the institution.”
“That's a laugh,” she responded without the hint of a smile. “You need marrying more than any man I ever knew.”
“I'll be back later,” I sighed, exasperated.
She nodded. I left. No point in dredging up all the doubts I'd buried deep. They needed their rest.
The air had refused to warm, even though the sun was doing its best. A wind down the rocks of the mountain was ice water, the crack of cold apples. I was glad to climb into the truck.
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Harding Pinhurst the Third was killed,
I thought driving downward,
because he wasn't doing his job at the mortuary. His work was shoddy, and someone found out. Families take death seriously here. That's what Donny was telling me. I have to find out. How am I going to get into the building?
Pinhurst Funeral Parlor and Crematorium was an imposing pre-Victorian mansion on the edge of three hundred acres of protected land. The large acreage had been bought by the state during World War II and set aside to extend the Appalachian Trail park system, but work had never been completed. Ancient oaks and odd blue conifers surrounded the place, except for spots in front. Ivy did its duty over most of the front yard, decorating what it obscured.
The house itself, redesigned when Harding took over as director not five years earlier, sat off our town's main road about a hundred yards. It stood three stories, white with ornate ginger trim, a wraparound front porch guarding it, tall slanting clay-tiled roof, a dozen gables covered. Oversize rockers sat empty on the porch. No driveway, the yard was always a wreck, cars parked everywhere with no pattern; grass didn't stand a chance. The windows of the house were all beveled lead glass, wavy and clouded, like cataracts. Paint curled away from the wooden exterior like dry skin; the eaves sagged; the columns on the porch were canes supporting a hazardous overhang. Still, it was a grand old structure and in the right light was a set piece straight from
Arsenic and Old Lace.
No cars. Good. No sign of anyone around. I pulled the truck to the side of the house. Behind the shelter of low branches it wouldn't be seen by anyone driving by.
I hadn't been there since Ida Shumps's funeral six months before. The place was deserted. Steps creaked when I peered into the small window in the back door. I checked the lock. Solid. I tried the window next to it. No luck. I was cold in the shade; wind found the bare skin of my face and slapped it. I worked my way around the back of the house checking windows with no success. On the far side of the house I came across the root cellar. It had no lock.
Gray-wood doors revealed stone steps that led down into darkness. I thought for a second that I ought to go back to the truck for my flashlight, but it seemed ridiculous in the middle of the day.
The steps were hard, a little damp. The cellar was pitch-black. I moved very slowly out of the daylight and into the dungeon, waited at the bottom of the stairs for my eyes to adjust. The ceiling was too low for me; the smell was already nauseating: mildew, stagnant water, formaldehydeâthe waiting room for hell's doctor.
As my vision adjusted, I half-expected to see evidence of Donny's suspicions there under the house. All I could make out were buckets and shovels, tarps, bottles, a few long-unused tools, typical cellar inhabitants. To my right were the old root bins for cold storage. To the left an ancient coal furnace sat silent. A black overturned coal bucket stood to one side, a silent sentinel. Behind it were other bins of some sort and stacks of large burlap bags for feed or seed. Just beyond there was a flight of wooden stairs that led up, I guessed, to the kitchen.
The dirt floor of the cellar was not entirely dry, silty, and I slipped a little on my way to the steps, but the handrail steadied me. I made it up; the door opened into the kitchen.
It complained loudly and I stopped in my tracks, certain the noise had alerted inhabitants. I thought it best then to confess my trespass.
“Hello?” My voice offended the silence.
I pushed into the room. Dirty dishes were in the sink; the faucet dripped. The floor was filthy. The kitchen table was a mess, cluttered with paper plates, plastic ware, tissue napkins.
“Harding?” That was stupid. I knew he wouldn't be there. But I somehow thought it was the right thing to yell in case anyone else heard me.
I made my way slowly through the kitchen to the other back rooms, the mortuarial lab, embalming chambers, whatever they were called. I followed my nose.
The first room was locked with a hook and eye from the inside. The one beside it was open and sterling. Spotless. It looked as if it had never been used. Chrome was polished; surfaces dazzled; everything gleamed, far from being the butcher Donny had suggested, the room seemed to prove Harding the cleanest mortician in the state.
I turned back to the other room, knew I had to get in. A combination of fear and determination supplied the adrenaline; a kitchen knife did the rest. I slipped the knife into the door frame and managed, after a few attempts, to simply push the hook up. The door swung open.
Chaos. What struck my eye like a fist was the utter disarray of the room, darker than the other. Tables were shoved against the far wall; stacks and stacks of papers were everywhere, empty medicine bottles, industrial-sized drums of cleaning fluid, and more large seed sacks. The room was a janitorial closet. I realized after a moment that there were several opened bottles of formaldehyde on the counter, completely full, perfuming the room.
It didn't make sense. One room was a showplace, the other a storage room.
And,
it suddenly occurred to me,
how did this one come to be locked from the inside?
I checked the single window: locked as well. That made the room more important. Someone had bothered to secure it from the inside.
Why? To make it look as if someone were in the room? Working?
I would find the secret exit.
I started at the door and took in every inch of the room, slowly, letting the details sink in. Took nearly ten minutes. Then I started a more physical examination, checking for disguised doors in the wall, trapdoors in the floor, something in the ceiling. Another twenty
meticulous minutes later, I found it. Surrounded by the heavy stacks of seed there was a blank space of floor where the boards gapped a quarter of an inch more than in any other place in the room. I moved a few of the sacks aside, finding they weighed more than expected, gazed down at the floor. On my knees, really looking at the floorboards in that corner, it was clearly different from the rest of the wood. I used the knife, worked it into the extra quarter-inch gap, and, sure enough, found I could pry up a section of the floor about three feet square.
I looked down onto the cellar floor where the rest of the sacks were laid. For a man of my size it was a little tight, easing myself down into the darkness. The black coal pail was directly under my feet, a convenient step stool.
Back in the cellar I was at a loss.
Why would there be a trapdoor?
Clearly Donny had been wrong about Harding; there was no evidence of botched embalming. But the trapdoor phenomenon was eerie, no denying.
After a few moments' pondering, remaining confused, I thought it best to put everything back the way it had been. I stood on the pail, hoisted myself into the workroom to lock the hook from the inside, then crawled back down the hole, moved the sacks as best I could to hide the trapdoor, replaced the false piece of flooring. I smoothed the cellar dirt where my feet had left impressions and was out, the old wooden doors creaking shut.
I don't know what caught my eye first, a glint of something in the woods behind the house, a black blur. Maybe a squirrel moved, but this time I saw dozens more seed sacks laid against a red wheelbarrow about sixty yards from where I was standing.
Harding was never a farmer, and there's not usable land anywhere near this place; what's he doing with all these seeds?
I peered around the side of the house, still no cars anywhere; my truck was fine. I headed for the woods to check things out.
Past the shadow of the house, the sun flickered patterns against the bare limbs in the wind. The woods were in constant motion, and I thought how van Gogh's sense of movement must have been inspired by this sort of autumn afternoon.
The sacks were jumbled everywhere, sixty, maybe a hundred of them. Some had been partly rotted by exposure, and it took me a second look to realize what was odd about them: they were filled with dirt, not seeds.
I stooped down, wind flinging leaves up from the ground all around me; ruby, chestnut, hazel colors floated for a moment like slow birds in the air. The bags were filled with red Georgia clay, heavy good-for-nothing soil. A wet bag that size might weigh a hundred pounds; dry it would turn to concrete, hard as brick. Bag after bag was packed with the stuff and tied loosely at the top.
What the hell is this?
I stood.
I could see more stacks farther into the woods, down the slope where the area was guarded with barbed wire, decorated with NO TRESPASSING signs. Everyone talked about the wild dogs and feral swine in that part of the government's property. No one ever went near it. Harding himself had a history of taking shots at high school kids trying to get into the area on a dare or hunters looking for protected game. Though it was unlikely that he'd fire at me that day.
I made my way down the slope, skidding on wet leaves, grabbing what handholds I could. The fence was easy enough to crawl under. The sun still found its way past the trees. The leaves were cathedral windows. I found the wind wasn't so stern down in the hollow; if I'd been set for a hike in the woods, the place would have made for a good starting point, I thought.
Until I saw the rotted human hand.
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I didn't respond the way I'd seen people in films react. Disbelief allowed me to be more curious than horrified. I thought my eyes deceived me. I took a step closer to where it lay on top of a pile of leaves beside a tall pine. By the time I realized that my perception was accurate, I confess to being fascinated.
Bone from the ring finger showed through gray flesh; long milky nails clung precariously to the tips. The thumb stuck up stiffly. It was not, as I had first thought, a dismembered body part, simply a
portion of a larger body that had been mostly covered by leaves.