Casket Case (27 page)

I’ll never forget that book. The scene where the daddy gets into a fight with his father-in-law and they knock the casket down at the funeral home was horrifying to me. I’ve always been very conscientious that the coffin is stabilized on the bier at Middleton’s because I used to have nightmares about that scene from the movie.

“Callie?” Jane called when I entered my office.

“Yes.”

“I called Frank on my cell phone. He’s coming to get me. We need to talk. Is that okay with you? He said you’ve got keys and your car’s in the lot.”

“That’s fine. Will you be at the apartment tonight?”

“Not only will I be at the apartment, Roxanne will be working tonight.”

“What are you going to tell Frank?”

“I’m telling him that my job really is acting and it’s only talk, but I need to work to survive. If we get truly serious, I’ll consider changing, but Roxanne isn’t stopping until I’m into something committed that means sharing expenses, and we’re not there right now.”

“Makes sense to me. I thought you were just sitting here. You must have been thinking.”

“That’s right, and I’ll have supper cooked for you when you get home.” She leaned over and cocked her head toward the window. “I hear the Jeep. Please walk me to the door, so he doesn’t come in. This needs to be private.”

I guided Jane to the door with my fingers gently touching her arm. We reached the loading dock the same time Frank parked. He jumped out and climbed the steps, took Jane by the hand, and in just a few minutes, they were gone.

Just as Frank’s Jeep drove away, Odell pulled his Buick in.

“Was Jane in there with Frank?” he asked.

“Yes, they’ve gone to talk things over.”

“Well, I brought her a sandwich along with some for you and Otis. Come on in, and we’ll eat.”

“You didn’t eat at the restaurant?”

“I did, but there’s no point in letting Jane’s lunch go to waste.”

Otis joined us and we pigged out on great big barbecue sandwiches and potato salad, with sodas, not bottled water.

“Do you want to go with us?” Odell asked.

“To the old graveyard to get Mrs. Bristow?” I said.

“Yes, we’ve got authorities and workers meeting us there. I can call Jake in to catch the telephone or we can just lock up and forward all calls to my cell phone,” Odell continued.

“I don’t know. I don’t think I want to see it.”

“It’s up to you, but in all the years Doofus and I’ve run the mortuary, this is the first time we’ve done a reinterment. Our father handled one years ago when a body had to be disinterred for an autopsy after evidence changed the manner of death from natural to homicide, but I don’t remember it too well. I was just a chap back then.”

I closed my eyes and thought of Gage in
Pet Sematary
. I could hear Jane’s frequent advice: “Live for the day.” Sometimes Jane took her own advice too literally, but I needed to take it myself sometimes.

“Will I have to dig?” I asked.

“No, not at all,” Otis said.

Against my better judgment, I agreed to go. A note went on the front door advising anyone who needed us to call on the telephone. The business lines were forwarded to Odell’s cell phone. Odell took his car; Otis and I rode in the “oldest” funeral coach, which is only three years old and just as shiny and bright as the new one.

Taylors
Cemetery was less than an hour’s drive from the funeral home. I was surprised at how many people were standing around when we drove into the fenced yard. A Middleton’s Mortuary canvas awning stood over the grave site. Two bright yellow backhoes sat on the edge of the road, and several of our part-timers were there, each holding a pick or shovel.

A middle-aged lady wearing a navy blue dress, white shoes, and a white hat stood beside a Beaufort County sheriff’s deputy. We’d crossed out of Jade County about five miles ago. The lady in blue smiled at me. I realized that until we arrived, she’d been the only female there. I walked over to her and said, “Hello, I’m Callie Parrish. I work with Middleton’s.”

“Yes, I’m so glad you came. I’m Kitty Whitaker. I was afraid I’d be the only woman.”

“I’m glad to be here for you, but I can assure you that my employers would take excellent care of you anytime, anywhere.”

Otis spoke with the deputy and gave him a handful of legal-looking papers. The officer nodded.

Odell approached the digging equipment and spoke with one of the drivers, who started the smaller backhoe and slowly drove it to a grave with a very small gray granite marker bearing the name “Catherine Margaret Bristow” and dates showing she was eighty when she died ten years ago.

“I understand Mrs. Bristow was your grandmother,” I said.

“Yes, but when she died, there was no insurance, and we didn’t have much money. Grandmama had the cheapest funeral we could get.”

“Is your grandfather here, too?”

“No, he was MIA during the war.”

I didn’t ask which war. He would probably have been in his nineties now, so I assumed she was talking about World War II.

“The first thing I thought when I found out I’d won the lottery was that now Grandmama can have a nicer funeral.” She watched silently for a few minutes. “I’m her only survivor. I want her where someone will keep her grave clean when I’m gone, and I want to be buried beside her.”

We watched as men swung picks to chip an outline of the grave in front of the tiny marker. After the picks, they used shovels to dig around the edges. Then the backhoe dug into the earth, throwing each load of dirt on a pile.

Odell stood by the deepening hole. He threw up his hand and yelled, “Stop!” A lot of people think that six feet under means that the top of the casket or vault is six feet beneath the surface of the ground. Actually, the bottom of the burial container is six feet below the surface, with the top sometimes barely two feet down. In front of the backhoe, in the same area that the workers had outlined with picks and shovels, parts of two caskets were visible. There was no vault around either of them, not even the concrete blocks some cemeteries use. The coffins lay side by side at about a sixty-degree angle across the grave.

“What’s happened?” I asked Odell.

“They’ve shifted. Sometimes it happens, especially in these older graveyards. If there are no name plates on the caskets, and I doubt that there are, we’re going to have to open them to find Mrs. Bristow. Then we rebury the other one and take Mrs. Bristow back to St. Mary with us.”

Mrs. Whitaker approached us. Otis walked by her side.

“Is there a problem?” she asked, then looked down into the grave. “Oh, no, how could this happen?”

“Very minor underground shifts of earth,” Otis said.

“Like an earthquake?”

“Not anything big enough to be felt on the earth’s surface, but kind of like small earthquakes. Heavy rains cause underground shifting, too,” Odell responded.

“What do we do now?” Mrs. Whitaker’s voice quivered. Like me, she probably dreaded watching them open two caskets. One with her grandmother buried ten years previously; the other, perhaps dead and buried long before.

“I’ve read about this, but I haven’t actually encountered it before,” Otis said. “I think perhaps you and Callie should go sit in Odell’s car while we sort this out.”

“You don’t happen to remember what your grandmother was buried in?” Odell asked Mrs. Whitaker as he handed me his car keys.

“Yes, I do. We buried her in her favorite church dress. It was burgundy with a white lace collar.”

“What about the casket? Do you remember what kind she had?”

“It was metal, not expensive, but metal. We couldn’t afford a vault for the grave, so we didn’t want wood. Besides, the metal one we chose was cheaper than the available wooden ones.”

That wasn’t surprising. Some of the most expensive coffins are highly polished woods like mahogany, oak, or teak. A few years back, Middleton’s buried a lady in a cherrywood casket that was more beautiful than any piece of furniture I’ve ever seen.

“I’d really like to see Grandmama,” Mrs. Whitaker added.

“We agreed that you’d let us do what’s necessary first,” Otis said.

“Okay, but I want you to be sure that the right body is moved.”

“I assure you we shall treat this as though Mrs. Bristow were our own grandmother.”

Personally, I hadn’t wanted to be here anyway, but now that I was, I breathed a sigh of relief that I wouldn’t have to watch openings of the two old coffins. I led Mrs. Whitaker to Odell’s car. I held the passenger door open for her and then slid in the other side under the steering wheel, cranked the car, and turned on the air-conditioning.

The Buick faced away from the grave, and I didn’t want to see, but I glanced in the rearview mirror to see what was going on anyway. The men were excavating around both caskets with picks and shovels. The backhoe had been driven over to the road. I realized I should be talking to Mrs. Whitaker, distracting her, but I couldn’t stop watching the scene behind us.

“What do you do at the funeral home?” the lady beside me asked.

“My title is cosmetitian, which is the name for a mortuary cosmetologist, but I’m kind of like a girl Friday. I do the obituaries and a lot of paperwork, too.”

“Well, I hope you’ll be able to make Grandmama look good. If so, I’m going to invite some of her old neighbors to her new service.”

My mouth flies open too quickly and when it does, I often insert my foot into it. For once, I was speechless. Did this woman think I could make a ten-year-old corpse pretty enough for an open-casket service? I wondered if Otis and Odell knew about her expectations.

Trying to make small talk with Mrs. Whitaker was almost impossible because I couldn’t keep my eyes off the rearview mirror. After more digging and manhandling, the two coffins lay side by side on the ground beside the expanded hole.

From where we were parked, they both looked reddish brown, not a common color for a metal casket, especially one of the thinner, basic models. Odell began wiping the sides of one of the coffins with a cloth. The color changed from brown to a light gray. He must have been removing mud. After that, he opened a small case and took out several tools. He attempted to release the lid with various implements, then pried it open with a crowbar.

Otis moved to bend over beside his brother. I could see they were talking, but of course, I couldn’t hear a thing.

As it often does, my mind traveled back to a book I’d read.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain is one of my favorite books. I’ve read it numerous times and just skip over the
n
word—verbally, visually, and mentally. I also think of Jim as Huck’s “friend” instead of using the word “slave.”

Having read the book the first time over twenty years before, I could still remember my reaction when the towns-people dug up the casket and found the bag of gold on the chest of the corpse. Mark Twain milked the scene for all it was worth. They were out in a graveyard after dark with only the light of a lantern because the clouds and thunder blocked off the moon’s illumination. The first time I read that scene, it had several results. I felt scared, excited, and horrified all at the same time.

The scene here in Taylors Cemetery should not have made me think of that wind-torn night with lightning and thunder in Mark Twain’s book. This was a bright, sunny June afternoon.

Mrs. Whitaker turned around and looked over her shoulder. “They’ve opened one of the caskets. Do you think it’s Grandmama? I’m going over there and find out.”

“No, no,” I quickly said. “I’ll go check. Sit tight until I’m back.”

I slipped out of the car and walked to the open coffin. I didn’t walk quickly, more at a snail’s pace. The thought actually crossed my mind that perhaps there was a bag of gold in the coffin.

“Mrs. Whitaker wants to know what you see,” I said when I reached Otis and Odell.

“Look for yourself,” Odell said and stepped back.

No doubt in my mind that the open casket held Grandmama Bristow’s remains. There were some worn spots on the thin metal casket, but none were corroded completely through. The satin-type fabric interior had probably been cream or a light pink ten years earlier. Now it was a muddy rusty color. Even waterproof caskets leak, and this one had never claimed to be sealed against seepage.

Mud or rust had changed Mrs. Bristow’s burgundy dress beyond recognition, and the lace collar Mrs. Whitaker had described was now almost brown. Mrs. Bristow’s face and hands looked dried to the bones, with a fairly heavy growth of yellowish mold, but I thought the features remained natural enough for recognition if I’d known her in life. Otis leaned over the body and gently wiped the mold away with a soft cloth. A few patches of brownish gray hair were detached from the head, and the lady’s plastic pearl earrings had dropped from her ears and lay on the shoulders of her dress. I couldn’t call it a pretty picture, but it definitely wasn’t half as horrible as I’d expected.