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

“Good work, Earl,” I told him. “It looks like just one or two of the corners were damaged.” These burials had been in the days before coffins were enclosed in metal vaults, and the older ones were showing evidence of their decades in the earth, even before the recent ravages of the flooded creek. Still, all six seemed to be reasonably sound. Or at least I thought so before my probing fingers encountered something wet and sticky at the damaged corner of one coffin.

“What’s this?” I asked Gunther. My hand had come away moistened by blood and for a moment I thought I’d cut myself.

“You bleeding?”

“I’m not, but this coffin is.”

“Coffins don’t bleed, Doc, especially after twenty or thirty years.”

“I think we better open this one up.” The lid was still firmly screwed down and my fingers were useless. “Do you have a tool of some sort?”

“It’s just bones,” the superintendent argued.

“We’d better have a look.”

He sighed and went to get some tools. The lid was unscrewed and easily pried open. I lifted it myself, prepared for the sight of decay. I wasn’t prepared for the bloody corpse that confronted me, jammed in on top of the stark white bones.

Impossibly, irrationally, it was the body of Hiram Mullins, who’d sat next to me at the board meeting not twenty-four hours earlier.

It was Sheriff Lens who offered the best commentary when he arrived to view the body less than an hour later. “You’ve really outdone yourself this time, Doc. How could a man who was alive yesterday end up murdered inside a coffin that’s been buried for twenty years?”

“I don’t know, Sheriff, but I damn well intend to find out.” I’d been questioning Earl Gunther and the workmen while we waited for the sheriffs arrival, but they professed to know nothing. Earl seemed especially upset, nervously wiping the sweat from his brow though the temperature was barely sixty.

“How’s the board goin’ to react to this, Doc? Will I lose my job?”

“Not if we can show you weren’t responsible. But you have to be completely honest with me, Earl. Had any of those graves been dug up during the night?”

“You saw the ground yourself, Doc, before they started digging. It hadn’t been touched in years. There’s no way a coffin could have been dug up and reburied without leaving traces.”

“Did you know Hiram Mullins well?”

“Hardly at all. I saw him when he came to your board meetings, that was it. He seemed like a nice man. Never said much.”

That was certainly true, and I used virtually the same words to describe Mullins to the sheriff when he arrived. Sheriff Lens peered distastefully at the body in the coffin and asked, “What do you think caused the wound?”

“Some sharp instrument like a knife, only the blade seems to have been longer and thicker. There’s a great deal of chest damage and so much blood that it actually leaked out of this rotted corner of the coffin.”

“Good thing it did, or the Brewsters would have been reburied and Mullins along with them.” The sheriff had brought a camera with him and was taking some photographs of the crime scene. He’d been doing this recently, following techniques outlined in crime investigation handbooks. He might have been a small-town sheriff but he was willing to learn new things. “What do you know about Mullins?”

I shrugged. “No more than you, I imagine. He was around seventy, I suppose, retired from his own real-estate business. I never saw him except at the cemetery board meetings, every three months.”

“His wife is dead and they had no children,” the sheriff said. “But how do you think he got into that coffin, Doc?”

“I have no idea.”

When I got back to my office I looked through my bookshelves until I found an Ellery Queen mystery I remembered from seven years earlier. It was called The Greek Coffin Mystery and it dealt with two bodies discovered in a single coffin. But the second body had been added before the original burial. It didn’t help a bit with Hiram Mullins’s killing. His body had been added to a coffin already buried for two decades.

Before long my telephone started ringing. The word was getting around. First to call was Randy Freed, the lawyer who served as legal counsel for Spring Glen. “Sam, what’s this I hear about old Mullins?”

“It’s true. We found his body in one of the coffins Gunther’s crew dug up.”

“How is that possible?”

“It’s not.”

“Look here, Sam – you’re the last one I’d expect to believe in any sort of supernatural business. Maybe Earl Gunther’s crew added the body after they dug up the coffin.”

“I was there all the time, Randy, never more than a hundred feet away.”

“Do you think Spring Glen could face any sort of liability from the Mullins family?”

“I don’t know how much of a family there is, and he was clearly murdered. We just have to figure out how.”

“I’ll be in touch,” Freed told me as he hung up.

The next call came from Dalton Swan, advising me that he was calling an emergency meeting of the cemetery board for the following day. “We have to get to the bottom of this. The board has to issue a statement of some sort and we have to pick someone to fill his place.”

The latter didn’t seem that urgent to me, since we only met quarterly. “Whatever you say, Dalton. I have some hospital visits in the morning but after that I’m free till afternoon.”

“Let’s say eleven o’clock, then. I’ve spoken with Virginia and that time is good for her.”

“Fine.”

Mary Best came in as I hung up, returning from a late lunch. “What’s this business of two bodies in one coffin?” she asked immediately. “Is Spring Glen getting that crowded?”

“I suppose the news is all over town.”

She sat down at her reception desk. “All I know is, it’s another impossible murder with you right in the centre of things again.”

“Believe me, I didn’t plan it that way. Until now, being a cemetery trustee was about the easiest position I ever held.”

“The creek’s the problem there. Maybe they should have gone in with Shinn Corners after all.” The nearby town had wanted to develop a new regional cemetery serving both communities, but before anything could be decided the land was sold to a private college now under construction for a September opening.

“I never knew a thing about that till it was over,” I admitted. “I don’t know that anyone on the board did.”

Mary had a way of thinking things through to their basics. “Would Earl Gunther have any reason for killing Mullins?” she asked.

“I can’t imagine what it would be. The old man just sat there at the meetings, never said a word about Gunther or anyone else.”

“Still, you don’t think Gunther could be involved?”

“Maybe. But I don’t picture Mullins going out to the cemetery to meet him at the crack of dawn. And even if he did, how would Gunther have gotten the body into a coffin buried six feet deep in firm, undisturbed earth?”

“Let me think about that while I type up the bills,” she said. Marry was never one to admit defeat.

I waited around the hospital that afternoon until Doc Prouty completed the autopsy on old Hiram. There were no surprises. “Fully dressed except for collar and tie,” he said as he washed up in the autopsy room. “It was a large, deep wound that encompassed the chest and heart. Went in under the rib cage, slanting up.”

“What could make a wound like that? A broadsword?.

He chuckled. “Northmont isn’t quite that far behind the times. There must be a lot of gardening tools around at the cemetery. I suppose a hedge trimmer could have done it.”