The Big Cat Nap (21 page)

“You’re a medical person. You stay. I’ll go.” She hurried back through the graveyard, looking over her shoulder. “Tucker, come on.”

Harry filled in the reverend with the news as the blue team came within a whisker of winning.

Reverend Jones said to Harry, “Let them finish the game. It will be much easier to move everyone in. I have to present the trophy anyway.” He paused. “This is just terrible. What in the world is going on?”

Harry then ran along the sidelines to go and ask BoomBoom to help after the game.

As Reverend Jones had anticipated, herding people into the stunning inner quad after the game proved easy. Tucker was a big help, snapping at people’s heels. The corgi did this respectfully. Harry was too distracted to call her off.

Once in the inner quad, Herb presented the trophy to the triumphant blues, then said, voice commanding, “We’ve had a bit of an accident. I ask that you all go home, and, Craig, as people leave, please have them sign a—Susan, get a notebook from the supply room. Have them sign the notebook with their name and the names of their family members. I’m sorry to do this, folks, but all of this will be clear later. We need a record of who was here today, as best as we can get one.”

The crowd grumbled in confusion, and then sirens split the air.

Cooper had intended to come to the celebration but was delayed, thanks to an accident on the old bypass. Fortunately it wasn’t serious. She’d picked up Fair’s call and informed Marcie, the dispatcher. Rick would arrive shortly after her, she hoped.

As people left, the murmur became a roar, especially when they saw Coop’s vehicle fly down to the reverend’s garage. She hit the brakes and jumped out.

Cool in a crisis, BoomBoom continued to move people along. She glanced back at Harry. “Whatever happened must be big.”

Harry simply nodded.

Susan stood at one end of the quad with the notebook. She, too, quizzically looked at Harry, who made the wrap sign with her forefinger.

Thanks to the vestry-board members’ expert people-management skills, the place was cleared out in twenty minutes. By that time, Harry had run back to the graveyard.

Standing on the big quad looking down, BoomBoom asked Alicia,
Susan, Craig, and Reverend Jones, “What’s going on? Should we go down there?”

Herb grimaced slightly. “No. Let’s wait up here for the sheriff. There’s always the danger of evidence being trampled.”

“What do you mean? Evidence of what?” Alicia inquired in an even voice.

“There’s a dead man propped up at the Trumbull tombstone. Let’s wait here. If Rick needs us or wants us, he’ll let us know.”

“Of all times and all places,” BoomBoom blurted out. “No wonder Harry’s face looked so white.”

Staring into the dead man’s eyes, Cooper wasn’t saying anything. She was puzzled by the disposition of the body.

“I can’t disturb him. We’ve got to wait for the team.” She checked her watch. “Dammit to hell.”

“Neat work. No marks,” Fair observed.

“No marks that we can see. It is remotely possible that he sat there and had a heart attack.”

“He looks awfully young for that,” Fair rejoined.

“Well, we can’t dismiss anything until the report comes back from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.”

Rick arrived within ten minutes. Slamming the door of his squad car shut, he hurried over to the small group at the grave.

“Not happy,”
Elocution observed.

“Finding bodies affects their equilibrium,”
Lucy Fur sagely opined.

Pewter sat up straight.
“A dead human always means trouble. It’s not like a squashed squirrel on the road. The fellow seemed familiar, but I can’t quite place him.”

The forensics team arrived right after Rick. Weekends were slow, but the department maintained a skeleton crew. Rick had learned long ago that the damnedest things could and would happen on weekends.

The forensics team’s Nina Jacobson carefully observed the body. She donned thin rubber gloves while asking her two assistants to move the body slightly away from the tombstone. She then carefully examined his back.

“No obvious wounds. No gunshot, knife, blunt trauma.”

Tucker lifted her nose in the air. “Skull.”

“Ah.”
Mrs. Murphy agreed, for she, too, could smell the very faint signature of fresh bone.

Nina, no slouch, peered at the back of the fellow’s neck, ever so slightly brushed back his hair at the nape of his neck, then moved higher. “There it is.”

Rick and Cooper moved closer to eyeball where she pointed.

“So it is.” Fair whistled.

Rick, voice crisp, said, “Someone drove a thin needle or ice pick from the base of his skull into his brain. One hard, hard blow. Instant.”

Fair knew how fast death could be when the brain was invaded. “But surely not here. It wasn’t done in this graveyard.”

Rick grimaced. “No. I think not. Who would sit still while someone pierced his brain? Dammit, this last month has been just, just …” His voice trailed off.

“A bitch.” Cooper finished his sentence for him.

“Whoever killed him wanted to show off,” Rick said. “Someone is playing games with us. Sooner or later someone from the celebration would have wandered into the graveyard.”

“Let’s be thankful no children found him,” Harry breathed out.

“I found him.”
Pewter walked over, brushing Cooper’s leg.

“I guess this killer likes drama.” Cooper looked at Rick, who shot a look at Nina.

The team placed the body on a stretcher.

Hoping for more attention, Pewter piped up,
“Why do these things happen to me?”

“Karma,”
Mrs. Murphy fired back.

Y
ou never know.” His tools as neatly laid out as a surgeon organizes scalpels, tweezers, and probes on a tray, Dabney Farnese was talking about death.

“No, you don’t.” Harry sat on an upturned Winchester ammunition wooden crate in the equipment shed while Dabney stood on a small stepladder next to the John Deere.

In his mid-seventies, Dabney Farnese couldn’t keep up with the volume of his work. Making it to Harry’s within two and a half weeks was fast for him. So few people repaired older-model tractors that Dabney could have worked twenty-four hours a day if humanly possible.

Before her, Harry’s parents had used Dabney’s business and were good customers. He always enjoyed seeing Harry, remembering the little girl from long ago who wanted to repair tractors with him, grease smeared on her nose, hands, and clothing.

Farnese, an Italian name, was easy for people to recall, plus Farneses had lived in Virginia since the Revolutionary War. Dabney, no interest in history or genealogy, never brought up how long his people had lived in the Old Dominion, but others found it fascinating. His children dabbled in their family history, finding what everyone finds: brave people, some bright, some dumb as a sack of hammers, most honest, a few not.

“You just make sure, Missy,” he told Harry, “that you aren’t found. Let the Sheriff do his job and you steer clear of the business.” He carefully lifted out the entire hydraulic pump. “Would you like to provide a funeral for this hard-used hydraulic pump?”

She laughed. “I could hang a wreath on it.”

“Very respectful. Do you remember when your father fried eggs on Johnny Pop?” Dabney recalled the old tractor from the fifties, which had an exhaust pipe on the left side of the engine, with a lid on top of it. When you drove the tractor, the lid would
pop, pop
as the exhaust escaped. That particular tractor would have run into the twenty-first century, except that Harry’s dad started it up one spring day without noticing a bird’s nest filled with eggs scrunched in the exhaust pipe, the lid slightly ajar. By the time he figured it out, not only was there a mess, he’d driven into a ditch, making yet another mess. He finally traded the tractor in for a newer model less inviting to birds.

“Never heard my father cuss so much.” Harry laughed. “Actually, Mom fired off a few choice words herself when he drove into that ditch. At first we didn’t know what had happened. All we heard was our collie barking, barking, and more barking. By the time we got outside, Dad had crawled out from under the overturned tractor. Lucky he wasn’t hurt. It was pretty funny—those things are, after enough time passes. I suppose, in a way, it will be funny someday that we found that young man Bobby Foltz in the cemetery. Convenient. All they’d have to do would be to dig a grave right there.”

“Know him?”

Harry shook her head. “Not really. I saw him race at the drag strip. Passed him at ReNu.”

Dabney removed the hoses. “Did you like him?”

“He seemed nice enough. Now that’s three men dead who worked at ReNu.”

“Read in the papers where the guy who owns the shop has offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to a conviction.” Dabney wiped his hands on a red cloth, unpacked new hoses, set them on his big tray.

“A lot of money.” Harry whistled.

“Also said this fellow is establishing scholarships in honor of the dead men, for kids who want to be mechanics.”

“What a good thing to do.” Harry listened to the bluebirds who’d made a nest outside the shed in the back.

“Wish somebody would create scholarships for tractor repair,” Dabney said.

“John Deere should be naming scholarships after you. You can repair anything.” She thought a moment. “But I suppose you’re taking business away from the dealers. They charge an arm and a leg for repairs.”

“I don’t have their overhead,” the shrewd Dabney announced. “Don’t want it, either.”

“Thank you for driving out on a Sunday. You’re saving my bacon, ’cause I’ve got to cut my hay.”

“You’re lucky it hasn’t gone to seed—nor have you.” He winked.

“Elevation. I’m sometimes two weeks behind farms at lower elevations, and I’m almost three weeks behind the farms near Richmond. Most times that’s a help. In the dead of winter, maybe not.”

“You mentioned over the phone that Fair was going to take out a loan.”

“I talked him out of it. He was worried we’d lose our hay crop. It’s such a good one this year, but I said, hang on, honey. He leaves the farming to me. We each have our spheres, as he calls them. But I raised the money by selling my sunflower crop—futures, sort of—to Yancy Hampton.”

“I don’t believe that organic-farming crap.” Dabney carefully inspected the new hoses on his tray, then removed the new pump, meticulously checking it.

“I do and I don’t. Farming without some form of pesticide is hideously expensive. Birds, bugs, little viruses, can ruin a high percentage of your crop. Plus, Dabney, the produce doesn’t look as pretty as the agribusiness produce.”

“That’s true. Real apples are a lot smaller, might have a little blemish on them. Might have a worm, too.” He lifted his shoulders slightly. “How does anyone expect the world’s bursting population to be fed without genetic engineering?”

“Don’t know.” Harry kept to the old ways, so she truly didn’t.

“I bet I’ve been to half the farms in Virginia in my long life, repairing John Deere tractors. The changes I’ve seen.” He shook his head. “The worst was in the eighties, when the government pretty much turned on the small farmer. God bless anyone who managed to hang on. Your family did.”

“Sometimes I think it killed Mom and Dad. They worked so hard to save this place. It took its toll. I have a husband whose income doesn’t derive from farming, so I can keep the old home place going. Still, sometimes I get overwhelmed. Maybe that’s why I get caught up with mysteries, wanting answers. Takes my mind off these huge economic forces. Nature, the government, a crop across the ocean, can affect my crop prices. I mean, there’s just little me.”

“Yep.” He breathed in the fresh morning air, for a cold front had swept through during the night. “Mystery is one thing. Murder is another. You read too many books when you were a kid.”

“Nancy Drew.” She smiled. “Mother would get after me to read serious fiction. Bored me stiff, which set her right off. Can’t help it.” She held up her hands in supplication.

“Here. This isn’t a mystery, but let me show you something.” He held out the hydraulic pump. “This is a genuine John Deere pump for your 2750. It hasn’t been cheaply produced in India or somewhere else in Asia.” He lifted an eyebrow. “For one thing, your tractor is twenty-four years old, which means it’s too old to get fake aftermarket parts for it. Don’t part with this tractor. Those countries have a real incentive to produce cheap aftermarket parts.”