D. Gilles - Colder Than Death

I reached for the pen in my shirt pocket, held it up to the lined yellow notepad hooked onto the wall next to the phone and prepared to write down the name and address I assumed Perry would be giving me.

“What do you need, Perry?” I asked, my tone businesslike. I ignored the ‘ghoul’ remark, just as I always disregarded his jibes. He’d been ragging on me ever since my mother and I moved to Dankworth after my father died when I was in high school. As my mother would say about someone’s poor behavior, ‘It was his way,’ and I’d accepted it. I had to. When Perry Cobb called it usually put money in my pocket.

Because Dankworth is only a township we don’t have our own Coroner. We fall under the umbrella of the County, so when a body needs to be transported to the Coroner’s office for autopsy, Perry calls us or DiGregorio’s. We get a small fee for this: fifty dollars plus gas mileage.

“I’m at Elm Grove cemetery,” he said. “How soon can you get a hearse up here?”

“Twenty minutes. What’s going on?”

“Seems the grave robbers have struck again,” he said, the last word slightly slurred, no doubt because of the chewing tobacco in his mouth.

Over the last six months somebody had been breaking into turn of the nineteenth century mausoleums and above-ground crypts at Elm Grove cemetery looking for jewelry and valuables on corpses. Cemetery management considered themselves lucky that whoever was doing it wasn’t interested in body parts for satanic rituals or potions.

“What’s that got to do with you needing a hearse?”

“We got a body. A female.”

“You have an exhumation, Perry?”

“Not quite. There’s been a murder.”

I leaned back against one of the four portable embalming tables. The icy chill from the stainless steel ran through my slacks and reached the backs of my thighs, instantly sending a mild tingle up my spine.

“Where’d you find her?” I asked.

“ I didn’t. Vaughn did.” Vaughn Larkin was night watchman of the cemetery and a good friend of mine.

“When Vaughn was making his midnight rounds he heard a noise. Checked it out and found that the entrances to seven mausoleums were broken into. One had the corpse in it. Hurry your ass up here. I want to get her autopsied so maybe I can find out who the hell she is… was . We’re in Section Nine.”

“I’ll leave right now.”

“Good. Oh, Del, do me a favor. Bring me some coffee. Milk and sugar. And a chocolate donut with those multi-colored sprinky things. Haven’t had my breakfast yet.”

Perry was laughing as he hung up.

I knew the request for a favor would be coming. He knew that I would have to do what he asked if I wanted him to continue throwing business my way.

There were only two Funeral Homes left in Dankworth and we were both hurting for business. More and more people were opting for cremation, which held low profits for Funeral Homes.

The drive to Elm Grove cemetery took twenty minutes. Had I not made the trip so many hundreds of times it might’ve been pleasant, almost scenic. A nice Sunday drive to watch the leaves change in the Fall or buy fresh fruit and vegetables from roadside stands in the Summer. But after seventeen years it had only a numbing effect on me.

Dankworth isn’t quite country or suburb. The town had long promoted itself with a simple motto:

Although it sounded like a hokey public relations blurb, in a sense it was true. Roughly thirty-five miles outside of Youngstown, Dankworth was a sprawling mixture of open space, dense forest, farmland and a hodgepodge of Pre- and Post-War housing mixed in with nineteenth century barns, mills and stone houses. The closer you were to the center of town where the Home was located, houses had good-sized frontage and back yards with shade trees. The newer homes were mainly ranch with attached double garages while the older houses were converted barns, Cape Cod bungalows, traditional A-frames and Colonials.

Less than fifteen minutes out of downtown Dankworth there were horse breeders, dairy farms, small working farms, a wildlife preserve and commercial greenhouses. In warm weather farmers sold fruit, vegetables and cider along Aberdeen Road, the tree-lined two-lane highway that ran through Dankworth and connected it to the neighboring towns and villages.

Residents perceived the area as a good place to live, close to nature and far enough from the city to feel safe.

But whatever fantasy of a tranquil existence one might feel could be tarnished upon approaching the twelve foot high wrought iron gates of Elm Cross cemetery. Any momentary yearning to live around this bucolic setting was replaced with thoughts of the dead. And to most people, living too close to a cemetery, especially a cemetery where a loved one is buried, was too much to handle.

From the cemetery entrance it took another minute or so to drive through the winding lanes into Section Nine, which was located in the oldest part of Elm Grove.

Section Nine is especially gloomy, not so much because of the imposing mausoleums, above ground crypts and ornate statues of apogees of angels or soulful-looking religious figures, but because of the gnarled, twisted oaks that looked like creepy versions of the heads on Easter Island. Weeping willows loom overhead like giant witches shrouded in green, their drooping branches and brittle leaves creating an overbearing sadness as they cast eerie shadows over everything on the ground.

As I approached the crime scene I saw three police cruisers parked, one in front of the other, which meant that the entire three-man police force of Dankworth was here.

One of them I got along with just fine: Wendell Eckert. He was in his late Thirties, easy going, professional and far more capable and qualified to be Chief of Police than Perry. Perry got the job because his father had been Chief. Wendell been a cop in Cincinnati for eleven years and had been wounded in a car chase. His wife threatened to divorce him if he didn’t leave big city law enforcement. The compromise was to live in a small town where Wendell could still be a police officer, but without the stress and danger of high-risk crime.

The remaining Dankworth cop, the one I had trouble with, was Greg Hoxey. He was standing by what I assumed was the mausoleum in which the body was found. Wendell I didn’t see yet. Perry was leaning against a five-foot high obelisk talking with Mel Abernathy, Manager of the cemetery, Alton Held, Head Groundskeeper and Vaughn Larkin.

None of them even noticed my arrival except Vaughn, who winked at me. I nodded back to him and arched my eyebrows. He rolled his eyes and smirked. The gestures were a silent line of communication indicative of nearly seventeen years of friendship. He was eighty-seven and had started working at the cemetery as a gravedigger as a teenager. By the time he was thirty he was Head Groundskeeper, a post he maintained until he had to take mandatory retirement at seventy-five. Mel Abernathy kept him on as night watchman, primarily because Vaughn had come to view the cemetery as his own property and genuinely cared about its upkeep.

Vaughn was my friend, father figure and mentor since I came to Dankworth. Our initial bond was built around death. I had lost a father; he had lost a son in Vietnam. He never got a last look at his boy because his remains were never found. Vaughn still smarted over the irony that the son of a gravedigger didn’t get a grave. It was another link. Although my father had a grave, I never got to see him after his death. He died in a plane crash. The coffin was closed. His remains cremated. Vaughn and I filled voids in each other’s lives. We considered each other family.