Deb Baker - Ding Dong Dead

“Thanks,” Julie said. “I think.”

Nina walked over, stopped beside Gretchen, and studied the graves from Gretchen’s point of view. “Look at that!” she said after only a moment, leaving Gretchen to wonder again about her aunt’s ability to tune into her own thoughts.

Aunt and niece looked at each other.

“A family plot,” they said simultaneously.

“The cops have already been through all this,” Bonnie’s friend Anne said. Her arms were wedged into the top drawer of a filing cabinet. She pulled out a manila folder, shut the drawer, and sat down at her desk.

“Did my Matty check into this particular file specifically? You know, this one for Swilling?” Bonnie’s pet name for her son had seemed endearing at first but was quickly starting to annoy Gretchen almost as much as it did Matt.

“There isn’t a Swilling file, and I told them the same thing,” Anne said. “Several officers went through all the files, the cabinet, and the computer records, like they didn’t believe me.” She withdrew a single sheet of paper from the file and leaned forward. “This is the extent of the records from the old cemetery. The rest burned up in a fire in the fifties.”

“What is it?” Julie asked. Some of her color had returned since they’d left the graveyard and entered the office.

“It’s a document from the Arizona Historical Preservation Office,” Anne said. “The old cemetery has a historic designation. We can’t remove any of the bodies.”

“Would you want to?” Julie asked, losing her color again.

“No, no, it’s only a formality.”

“The victim died right on top of the Swilling graves,” Gretchen said. “We were hoping to learn who else was going to be buried in that plot.”

“Didn’t she crawl for a ways and collapse there? If that’s the case, then those people buried beneath her wouldn’t have anything to do with her murder anyway,” Anne said. “We don’t even know why she was in the cemetery after dark. Was she meeting someone? Was she with somebody? What if she had a partner, and they were robbing a grave?”

“Robbing a grave?” Gretchen stopped reading the historical document over Anne’s shoulder. “Does that happen often?”

“You never know what a coffin might contain,” Anne said. “Gold, jewelry. Thieves even sell body parts.”

Gretchen thought Anne’s theory a bit far-fetched. Gretchen hadn’t seen a shovel or other tools the night the body was found. If Allison Thomasia had been trying to exhume a corpse, she would’ve had to have been digging with her bare hands, certainly no match for the desert rock under which the coffin lay.

Bonnie, however, was buying into her friend’s grave-robbing idea. “Really? I never thought of that. Wow. I’ll have to pass that one on to Matty.”

Matty. Okay, now it was sounding like chalk on a blackboard or like a dentist’s drill in action.

“So there’s no way of learning anything about the Swilling graves?” Gretchen reached for the folder. Sure enough, no other documents were inside.

“Those grave sites have been around for a long time,” Anne said. “Clients these days might talk to us about their plans for interment. You know, they might say, sure let’s get a plot with enough room in case the kids want to be buried with us. You know, they like to plan into the future, just in case.”

Everyone nodded.

“But they don’t put that part of their plan in writing. John Swilling apparently purchased space for four coffins. That’s the extent of what we’ll ever know.”

They were driving back to the street when Gretchen returned to wondering if the grave had any possible significance. “What if Allison crawled over to that particular grave for a reason? What if that was a clue?”

“She was trying to escape,” April said. “It was random that she happened to die on that particular grave. Where she died doesn’t mean anything.”

“I’m with Gretchen on this one,” Nina said.

Gretchen stopped the car beside Nina’s car. Tutu glared at her from the backseat.

“Allison Thomasia left a clue that will lead to her killer,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”

Gretchen arrived home physically and mentally drained of energy. Nimrod had fallen asleep inside her purse on the way, exhausted from his fun time at doggy day care. The almost full-grown black fur ball was only the size of a stuffed animal and weighed about the same amount, next to nothing. She gently laid the pup on the sofa, poured a glass of red wine, and made a beeline for a lounge chair near the pool, where she wasted no time kicking off her shoes.

The sun was setting behind Camelback Mountain in a giant blaze of orange when Caroline joined her, favorite scotch cocktail in hand.

The moment should have been perfect, with Wobbles purring away under Gretchen’s massaging hand. But the sky wasn’t dark enough yet to mask the way her mother sat down gingerly next to her. Caroline turned her entire body stiffly to set down the cocktail. Gretchen smelled the minty odor of a muscle ointment.

“What happened to you?” she said. “What’s wrong with your neck?”

“I had a car accident today, but I’m fine now. I took two pain pills and the Bengay is working.”

“You look like you’re in pain. Did you see a doctor?”

“Not yet. Maybe tomorrow, if it gets worse.” Caroline rubbed the back of her neck. “If that’s the extent of my injuries, I consider myself very lucky.”

“Let’s hear it. The whole story.”

Gretchen felt her stomach churning as Caroline gave her the details of the accident.

“I assumed you had a fender bender,” Gretchen said, horrified. “This is terrible. You crawled out of your car after rolling over and then attempted to assist a dying woman?”

“I couldn’t believe I was alive.”

“You might have been killed.” Gretchen felt tears welling up. She felt scared, relieved, and angry at the same time. “Injured bodies everywhere, including yours, one person dead? And you didn’t think about calling your own daughter?”

“Everything happened so quickly and others needed my help. I simply reacted. Afterward, I realized that I wanted you to hear the details from me and not before you could see with your own eyes that I was perfectly fine.”

“You aren’t fine.”

“Please.”

“You should have called.”

“Really, Gretchen, I don’t know what you want from me.”

“You know what I want? I want my mother to stop thinking she’s invincible.” Gretchen found herself on her feet, tears flowing freely. “I want her, just once, to reach out to me for help. I want my mother to say she needs me as much as I need her.”

“I’ve had to depend on myself for so long. This is all new, having you living with me.”

The two women came together, hugging, crying, apologizing. “If you’d known about it you would have come there, seen the destruction, and it would have started all over again. I was only trying to protect you from more nightmares,” Caroline said. “I didn’t want that to happen again.”

What her mother said was true. Still, they’d been through these same arguments before. “You hurt me the most when you keep things from me,” Gretchen said. “When you don’t include me in your life. This is the same issue we had during your chemo.”

Caroline took Gretchen’s hands in her own and squeezed. “We still have a lot to learn about each other.”

Gretchen sniffed. “We have some catching up to do,” she agreed. “We spent too many precious years disagreeing.”

She was grateful that they had worked out their differences. She’d witnessed too much hostility between other mothers and daughters instead of love and friendship.