Рита Браун - The Big Cat Nap

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.