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

The lawyer was first through the door, all business. “We’ve got a serious problem here, Gunther. I’m worried about the cemetery’s liability.”

Dalton Swan took his seat at the head of the table, running a hand through his thinning hair. “We’ll get to that later, Randy. Let’s everyone sit down and go over what we know. Have you been able to learn anything, Sam?”

“Not much,” I admitted. I ran through the autopsy report for them and then turned to Gunther. “Earl, you usually keep a clean set of overalls in the tool shed, don’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“I was just looking for them. They’re not to be found. I did find this hedge trimmer, though, with what looks like traces of blood.”

Virginia Taylor made a face. “Sam thinks it could be the murder weapon.”

“It’s possible.”

Dalton Swan now shifted his gaze to the cemetery superintendent. “Isn’t that tool shed kept locked, Earl?”

“Sure, most of the time.”

“Was it locked night before last?”

“Well-” Gunther looked uneasy. “See, we had all this work to do in the morning, digging up those coffins for reburial. I thought some of the workmen might arrive early so I left the shed unlocked for them. Nobody dug up the graves before we got there, though. Doc saw that for himself.”

“That’s right,” I agreed reluctantly. “The coffins were still underground when I got there.”

“Do you have any idea how Mullins’s body could have gotten in there?” Swan asked.

“None. It’s like a miracle.”

“All right.” Swan waved him away. “Leave us alone for a few minutes.”

Earl left the office and walked across the driveway to his house.

“Who do you have in mind as Hiram’s replacement?” Virginia asked.

It was Randy Freed who answered. “I spoke to Dalton on the phone and made a suggestion. Milton Doyle is-”

“Not another lawyer!” Virginia exploded. “Cemeteries are about families, not lawsuits, for God’s sake! How about another woman?”

“We have a woman,” Swan answered quietly.

“Then how about two women? You men could still outvote us.”

“It’s worth considering,” I agreed. “I suggest we adjourn until after the funeral. In the meantime maybe we can come up with some good women nominees.”

Virginia Taylor gave me a smile of thanks and Swan agreed to adjourn until the following Monday. As we were leaving, Freed said, “It doesn’t seem the same without old Mullins.”

“He never said anything.”

“But he was there, right in that chair! With those popping eyes and that bull neck he always looked as if his collar was strangling him.”

Something occurred to me. “Randy, where would the records of real-estate transactions for the new college be kept?”

“Shinn Corners. At the courthouse.”

It was just a hunch, but it was worth a drive to Shinn Corners. On the way over I started putting the pieces together in my mind. There was a way it could have been done. I saw it clearly now. Sometimes killers set out to create impossible situations but that hadn’t been the case here. The killer had only wanted a safe way to dispose of the body, a way that would keep it hidden for another twenty years.

The courthouse was a big old building dating from the turn of the century with a stone fence already grown dark and weathered. In a big room I found maps and deeds, records stretching back a hundred years and longer. A girl in her late teens, a part-time clerk, came to my assistance at once. “The new college? We’re very excited about it. I’m already enrolled for September.”

“That’s great,” I said, meaning it. “I need to see the deeds on the various pieces of property that make up the college land. Would that be difficult?”

“No, not at all. It’s a matter of public record.”

There were so many individual parcels of land involved that the task seemed hopeless at first. Then I spotted Hiram Mullins’s name and started concentrating on the deals he’d handled. I turned over the page of one deed and found the name I’d been seeking. After that it was easy.

I phoned Mary at the office and told her to postpone my afternoon appointments till the following day. “That’s easy,” she said. “There’s only the Kane boy, and his mother says he’s feeling fine now. The spots are all gone.”

“Tell her to keep him out of school the rest of the week. He can go back on Monday.”

“Sheriff Lens has been looking for you.”

“I’ll call him.”

A moment later I had the sheriff’s familiar voice on the other end of the line. “Where are you, Doc?”

“Over in Shinn Corners, checking the real-estate transactions regarding the new college.”

“Why the college?” he wondered.

“It was the last deal Hiram Mullins worked on before his full retirement.”

“Find anything?”

“A motive, I think.”

“We’ve got something too. My deputies came up with a pair of bloodstained overalls. Earl Gunther admits they’re his. Had his initials inside.”

“Where were they found?”

“On the bank of the creek. Looks like Earl rolled them up and tossed them into the water, only they fell about a foot short. There’s a collar and tie with bloodstains, too. Remember, they were missing from Hiram’s body.”

“I remember. What are you going to do now?”

“Arrest Earl Gunther for the murder, of course. Those overalls are the proof we need.”

“Look, Sheriff, you can bring him in for questioning but don’t charge him yet. I’ll be at your office in an hour.”

I covered the back country roads in record time and arrived at the sheriffs office just as he was starting to question the cemetery superintendent. Linda Gunther was outside in the waiting room, looking nervous, and I tried to comfort her.

“Earl’s in trouble, isn’t he?”

“Yes, but he could be in lots worse trouble. Try to relax until we finish talking to him.”

Inside the office Sheriff Lens was talking with Gunther while a deputy made notes. “I never wore those overalls to kill Mullins,” the superintendent was saying. “Someone found them in the tool shed.”

“Come on, Earl – you expect us to believe that?”

“I’m innocent!” He turned to me for help. “You believe me, don’t you, Dr Hawthorne?”

I sat down across the table and chose my words carefully. “You didn’t kill Mullins, but you’re hardly innocent, Earl. You’d better tell us the whole truth if you expect to get out of this with your hide.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know how the body got into the Brewster coffin.”

“I-”

“What you gettin’ at, Doc?” the sheriff asked.

“We’ve been saying all along that the ground over those coffins was solid and undisturbed, and that’s perfectly true. But the ground on the creek side was a different story. The coffins were being moved, remember, because the waters of the flooded creek had so eroded the banks of the creek that some coffins were actually visible, held only by the tree roots that enveloped them. The morning of the murder I watched your crews shovel away the soft dirt and chop out those roots.”

“Then you saw that I didn’t-”

“I saw what you wanted me to see, Earl. That dirt was soft because it had been removed and replaced the night before. You went down there and saw one coffin virtually free of the earth, its corner badly damaged. You were afraid I, or one of the other trustees, would raise a fuss if we saw that, so you removed it yourself, using the block and tackle on your flatbed truck. You placed the coffin on the truck, carefully hiding it beneath a bulky folded tarpaulin and some tools. You had two crews digging, concentrating on their own efforts, not paying much attention to each other. At some point when I’d strolled off examining tombstones it was easy enough for you to yank off the tarp and reveal one more coffin. I remember thinking that the second and third coffins appeared on the truck before I knew it.”