Scraps of Paper (11 page)

Sliding down against the trunk of the tree, Abigail switched off the flashlight. No choice but to wait. The clouds were moving and her eyes slowly adjusted to the pale light when the moon peeked through. It was peaceful sitting there, a light breeze stroking her skin. The moon a thoughtful face above her. The twins had skipped across this ground; climbed this tree and dreamed their dreams so long ago beneath a moon like the one above. Decades ago. Just yesterday.

Closing her eyes, a moment later she was opening them to morning. After stretching to get the kinks out of her stiff body, she climbed up into the tree. It’d been a long time since she’d done that. She was out of practice and her muscles let her know it. The platform, as Myrtle had said, was there, though the planks were worn and splintered with gaps missing. She hunted everywhere. No diary. No secret stash of notes or left behind bag of cat’s eye marbles. Nothing. But the police would have searched all this, she reasoned, squatting in the middle of the tree house ready to give up. Or would they? If they’d even known about it. If they’d even cared.

Where would a child have hid a diary? One of the boards seemed higher than the others and she got a stick and pried at it until it lifted.

There, squeezed into the narrow space, wrapped in a plastic bag, bound by rubber bands, was a tiny pink flowered book. She couldn’t believe she’d found the diary. Too easy. Climbing down, she retrieved the flashlight; looked around and headed in the direction she thought home would be. But a few feet later her face was in the grass.

A wooden grave marker had tripped her. Sticking straight out of the dirt, it was small, a sliver of wood with a name scratched on it.
Emily.

“Oh, no,” she moaned, staring at the name. The E looked like it had antlers on it and the y had a shelf on the bottom. Besides the first grave marker, covered in weeds and bramble, were others. The name Jenny carved on one and Christopher on the other.

She’d found Emily and her two children. No more speculating over what had happened to them. No more hoping they were safe living somewhere else. They’d been here all along for over thirty years beneath the dirt. That is, if there were bodies in those graves beneath her feet. She was filled with a dull sorrow. Poor Emily. She’d never gotten to go to college or to be an artist. Never seen her children age and have children of their own. Jenny and Christopher had never grown up, fallen in love; had lives of their own. None of them had had lives. They’d been here all the time. Dead and gone.

Abigail found her way home. It wasn’t far. She got lost only once. She called Frank and he notified the sheriff.

And within a half-hour she had a house full of people.

Chapter 9

Abigail had a kitchen full of noisy people drinking coffee and a yard full of the curious tracking back and forth from the tree house, debating over the graves she’d discovered.

The newspaper story on the Summers family had opened her life, and everything in it, to the townspeople. Whatever new developments she discovered in their disappearance were their business now, too. She didn’t know how the news had spread so quickly, but it had. She’d called Frank and then Samantha so she could get photos of the graves. She’d called the police, but had no idea how the other people who’d showed up had learned of them.

The Sheriff was at the gravesite doing what he was good at, scratching his head, looking for clues, taking notes and trying to figure out how he could get out of doing anything that smelled like work.

Abigail had snuck off to take a quick shower and put on clean clothes before she’d led Frank to the gravesite.

“This feels like a wake,” she said, staring at the people milling around and feeling a heavy sense of loss. She hadn’t actually known the people buried beneath the ground, but she’d come to feel a strange sort of bond with them and mourned their senseless deaths.

“It is,” he replied, his expression sad. “I can’t believe they’ve been dead all these years. I didn’t even know. I was too busy getting on with my new life in Chicago to bother. I didn’t try hard enough, didn’t look hard enough. What happened to them?” He seemed angry with himself. “And why didn’t I
know
?”

“How would you? Frank, it’s not your fault. You didn’t look hard enough because you weren’t absolutely sure a crime had been committed. Thirty years ago
no one
looked hard enough for them. The Sheriff at the time had a vendetta against Emily because she wouldn’t date him. So he pretended to look for them, but sabotaged the effort. It might explain why the graves weren’t discovered, or the tree house, hidden so deep in the woods.”

Frank stood above the graves for a long time. “All these years no one knew they were here.” She wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw tears in his eyes. Hard to tell because a misty drizzle had begun falling. Rain that had come in suddenly with the people.

“Edna knew,” Abigail mumbled. “She put those names on those grave markers, I’m sure of it. But how could she have buried her own sister, niece and nephew…hid it all those years…and not known who’d killed them? Unless she’d killed them or been part of someone else killing them. How can a sister, an aunt, do that and live with herself?”

“People do awful things for money. Land. Security. Perhaps Edna wanted the inheritance and the house more than she feared carrying the guilt–or maybe she was mentally unstable as some people believed. Murderers don’t follow our rules. And are you so sure she was a willing participant in their deaths? She might have been scared into it or found them dead and buried them after the fact. Someone else may have done it and Edna never knew who or why.”

“Then why didn’t she report it to the police?” Abigail wanted to know.

 “Good point. She must have had her reasons. Maybe she was afraid of Cal Brewster or something else to do with that red ledger book. The blackmail might figure into it somehow. I just don’t know.”

She’d told Frank about Myrtle’s theory that Edna might have poisoned her parents and he’d told Sheriff Mearl.  “He should have the parents’ bodies as well as the three out there exhumed. Don’t know if he will though. The crime, the remains are decades old. DNA testing might be able to yet detect poison if it’d been administered long term. If there are truly bodies in those graves, there could have been three murders…even five. Someone had to kill them. Edna’s now a suspect.”

“Or Cal Brewster…or the ex-husband or the mysterious boyfriend or…a couple of others.” She hadn’t told Frank or anyone she’d found Jenny’s diary. She said Myrtle and she had been searching for the tree house and had found the graves by accident. Abigail had stashed the diary away, determined to read it first. Only then would she reveal she had it and hand it over to the sheriff.

Samantha had left with her grave and tree house photos. She was going to use them in the next installment. Abigail had been surprised she was continuing the stories.

“Of course. It’s an even bigger story now. We have three graves. If there’s really bodies under them–who killed them? I can’t stop the articles now. The publisher wants more. People want more.”

“Don’t they always.” Frank hadn’t been happy. He still believed Abigail was in danger.

After the crowds had thinned out the sheriff remained behind with Martha and Frank to ask more questions. Abigail wondered if he knew that his father had also had a thing for Emily.

“Sheriff,” Frank demanded, “are you going to exhume the bodies and have the state forensic guys run some tests on them? Edna’s parents too?”

“Guess I’m going to have to. With all this publicity. Wouldn’t look like I was doing my job if I didn’t, now would it? We’ll dig ’em up and let the forensics crew have a go at them–not that I can see much sense in it. Bodies been in the ground thirty years and no one’s missed them. If Edna killed them, she’s not around to stand trial, is she? What’s the sense?” The sheriff’s eyes barely concealed their scorn. If he’d had his way, the graves would have been left untouched. Finding them all these years later made the department look bad. A crime had been committed and the police hadn’t had a clue it had. Now it would be all over the newspapers.

“Justice,” Frank snapped, “that’s what.”

“I can’t promise how quickly we can get the results. A couple of weeks. Won’t be top priority. Not a crime this old.” Then the sheriff turned to Abigail. “Myrtle said she’d be gone how long?”

“A week or two.” She’d given him the other details earlier.

“I’ll make a couple of calls and see if I can track her down. I have some questions for her.”

Abigail expected he did.

When the sheriff departed, Martha, Frank and Abigail wandered out on the front porch. The rain was heavier and the day had become a gray shroud for the morning. They watched the rain fall.

“Girl, ever since you came to town, you’ve sure stirred things up.” Martha was gently pushing the swing with her feet, a piece of toast Abigail had fixed her going into her mouth, a mug of coffee balanced in her other hand. “Just can’t let sleeping ghosts sleep, or lost graves stay lost, can you?”

“No one could if those ghosts kept slipping you notes.”

Frank was sitting on the step below them; getting wet but he didn’t seem to care. Since they’d come out on the porch he’d been unusually quiet.

Martha sipped her coffee. “So, do you two think that Edna killed those three back there in the woods? I mean I knew the old woman and she was…weird. Like half the people in this town. But I never would have guessed she was a murderess. Didn’t look like one.”

“Not many murderers do.” Frank broke his silence, his arms crossed and resting on his knees.  “About ten years ago in Chicago there was this man, couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, bald with glasses, and as ancient as a rock. He lived by himself in a mausoleum of a house with a baby grand piano he could play like nobody’s business. Dead plants everywhere. Creepy. You couldn’t walk through the house there were so many dried up ivies and potted trees. I asked him why they were dead and he simply replied he liked them like that. To him they were beautiful. That should have been a big tip off.” Frank chuckled softly.

“A neighbor turned the man in because he’d seen him killing dogs and cats and burying them in his garden in the middle of the day. Anyway, my partner and I called on him and had a chat about it. At first he appeared sweet and harmless. Sprouted poetry from memory and played us Mozart on the piano. He mentioned a son and a couple of grandkids. Served us tea and cupcakes.

“But the old guy reacted so violently to our animal inquiries I knew there was more to it. We got permission to dig up his garden and, low and behold, turned out he hadn’t only butchered and buried animals in his garden, but people, too. Seven of them.”

“You’re kidding!” Martha was glued to the conversation. “Who were the victims?”

“Salesmen. I should say salespeople. Men and women. Anyone who’d knocked on his front door over the years trying to sell him something or anyone whose looks or attitude he didn’t care for. He’d invite them in and–boom–hit them over the head with a baseball bat from behind. As many times as it took to kill them. Then, because he was a frail slip of a man, he’d cut them up into moveable pieces with his chainsaw and bury them out in the garden.”

“Why did he do such a horrible thing?” Abigail shuddered, eyes on the rain a few feet away.

“We never got the answer. First night after he was arrested he died in his cell of a heart attack. We never found out anything other than what he’d said when we’d taken him into custody.”

“Which was?”

“He didn’t appreciate pesky people banging at his door trying to sell him crap he didn’t need. He was on a fixed income.” Those were his words. So he killed them. It’d been going on for ten years or more.”

“Good thing you and your partner were cops or you might have also ended up in that garden,” Abigail threw in. “And how was it no one ever caught on all those years…until the dead animals?”

“Because he was smart enough to bury the people he killed at night. He only buried the animals during the day. People don’t see what’s in front of their eyes sometimes. That’s how criminals get away with what they do.”