Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

I shuffled the pictures in my hands before passing them to Virginia Taylor on my right. Aware of the cemetery’s shaky financial underpinnings, I asked, “Couldn’t this go another year?”

“Look at these pictures, Sam,” Dalton Swan argued. “The Brewster family gravesite is almost washed away! Here, you can actually see the corner of a coffin among these tree roots.”

“Those coffins need to be dug up and moved,” Virginia Taylor agreed. She was a tall, athletic woman in her thirties whom I often glimpsed on the tennis courts around town. The Taylor family had made their money growing tobacco all over the state of Connecticut but all it had earned them was the largest family plot in Spring Glen Cemetery.

We discussed it awhile longer, with Randy Freed, a trustee and the cemetery’s legal counsel, suggesting we give it another month. “We simply can’t justify this expense if there’s another way out.”

Dalton Swan scoffed at that. “The only other way is to let the Brewster coffins float down Spring Glen Creek. That what you want?”

Freed bristled, more at Swan’s tone of voice than at the words. “Do what you want,” he grumbled.

Swan called for a vote on the motion to move the endangered coffins. “I’ve already spoken with the Brewster family. They’ll sign the necessary papers.”

Miss Taylor, Swan, and I voted yes, along with Hiram Mullins, a retired real-estate developer who rarely spoke at our meetings. He sat there now with a sad smile on his face, perhaps remembering better days when creeks did not overflow their banks. The only negative vote came from Randy Freed.

“We’ll proceed, then, as quickly as possible,” Dalton Swan said. “Gunther can have the workmen and equipment here in the morning.” Earl Gunther was the cemetery’s superintendent, in charge of its day-to-day operation.

“You’re making a mistake rushing into it like this,” Freed told us. “A truckload of dirt tamped down along the bank of the creek would be a lot easier than relocating those coffins.”

“Until it washed away with the next heavy rain,” Swan argued. “Be practical, for God’s sake!”

It did seem to me that the lawyer was being a bit unreasonable and I wondered why. “If it’ll help matters any,” I volunteered, “I can be out here in the morning when the workmen arrive, just to make certain nothing is touched but the Brewster plot.”

“That would help a great deal, Dr Hawthorne,” Virginia Taylor agreed. “We’d all feel better if there was some supervision on this besides Earl Gunther.”

The superintendent had not been a special favourite of the trustees since a pair of his day labourers had been found drunk one morning, finishing off a quart of rye whiskey on the back of a toppled tombstone. Sheriff Lens had been called by some horrified mourners and he’d given the two a choice of thirty days in jail or a quick trip out of town. They’d chosen the latter, but the matter had come to the board’s attention. Earl Gunther had been warned to stay on top of things if he wanted to keep his job.

After the meeting we sought him out in the house near the cemetery gate. It went with the job, though his office was in the building where we met. Earl’s wife Linda ushered us in. “Dear, Dr Hawthorne and Mr Swan are here to see you.”

Earl Gunther was a burly man with a black moustache and thinning hair. He’d been a gravedigger at Spring Glen for years before taking on the job of superintendent. None of the board had been too excited at the prospect, but he seemed to be the best man available. He was newly married to Linda at the time and somehow we felt she might help straighten him out. She had, but not quite enough.

The Spring Glen board of trustees only met quarterly. This April meeting would be our last till the traditional July outing at Dalton Swan’s farm. It wasn’t something that took a great deal of my time, and until now it had never involved anything other than the perfunctory board meetings. All that was about to change. “Dr Hawthorne will be out in the morning to oversee the disinterment and reburial,” Swan told the superintendent. “We don’t foresee any problem.”

Earl Gunther rubbed his chin. “T’ll get a crew lined up, with shovels and a block and tackle. There are six coffins in the Brewster plot. That’s gonna be an all-day job.”

“It can’t be helped. Someone from the family will be here for the reburial, probably with the minister.”

“We’ll do the best we can,” the superintendent informed us.

Dalton Swan nodded. “I’m sure you will.”

I drove back to the office where I had a couple of early afternoon appointments. “Any excitement at the meeting?” Mary Best asked, knowing there never was.

“Nothing much. I have to go out there in the morning while they move the Brewster plot. The creek’s just eating away at the banks.”

She glanced at my appointment book. “Shall I reschedule Mrs Winston for the afternoon?”

“Better make it Friday morning if you can. There’s no telling how long I’ll be out there.”

While I waited for my first patient I glanced at the newspaper headlines. Hitler was insisting on the return of Danzig and a war between Germany and Poland seemed a distinct possibility. Up here in Northmont such concerns were still far away.

Late that afternoon, as I was leaving my office, I saw Virginia Taylor coming out of the adjoining Pilgrim Memorial Hospital. She paused by her car, waiting till I reached her. “Will you be at Spring Glen in the morning?”

“I’m planning on it.”

“That’s good. The Brewster family is very concerned that the remains be moved in a dignified manner.”

“I’m sure there’ll be no problems. Whatever his other faults, Gunther is a good worker.”

She nodded and motioned back toward the hospital building. “I do some volunteer work here on Tuesdays. It makes for a full day when there’s also a board meeting.” She belonged to one of Northmont’s older families and spent much of her time with charitable causes. A few years back she’d been engaged to a young lawyer from Providence but they’d broken up, leaving her still unmarried. As often happened with unmarried women, her tennis and travel and volunteer work had managed to fill her life. The family tobacco business had long since been sold to others.

We chatted a while longer and then she went off in the sporty little convertible she drove around town. I’d had a car something like it in my younger days.

In the morning I drove out to the cemetery, arriving before nine. Earl Gunther had a flatbed truck parked by the Brewster plot, its back loaded with shovels and picks, a block and tackle, and a bulky tarpaulin folded into a heap. A half-dozen workmen were just arriving on the scene, walking over from the main gate.

“Good to see you, Doc,” Gunther greeted me with a handshake. “I’m using two crews of three men each. One will work on the creek side, digging into the bank. The other will dig in from the top to reach the other coffins. It’ll probably take all morning and maybe longer.”

I watched the crew by the creek as they shovelled away the soft dirt and cut through some of the tree roots with axes. The tombstones up above told me that the most recent of these graves was over fifteen years old, and a couple dated back to before the turn of the century. As one coffin finally came free an hour later the workmen hoisted it out with the block and tackle, guiding it onto the flatbed truck. After that the pace seemed to pick up. Before I knew it a second and third coffin had appeared on the flatbed, with a fourth being lifted from its resting place.

I’d wandered around the cemetery while the work was in progress, reading the names off the tombstones, remembering a few old patients whose lives I’d briefly prolonged. Finally, around noon, the last of the six coffins was pulled free of the tough oak roots that encircled it. I walked over to the truck as it was slid into place.