William Brown - The Undertaker

I neatly refolded the sections of the newspapers, returned the stack to the shelf, and carried the next few week's over to the table with a soft “Thump.” I sat down, wondering why libraries always bought the hardest chairs in town. They might be modern and trendy, but no human being could take more than an hour or so in one of them. My backside was used to a modern, ergonomic work station chair and trying to find a soft spot in one of these molded, hard-plastic monsters was hopeless. They probably special-ordered them from the Marquis de Sade Furniture Company. I gave a painful sigh and shifted my butt again, but this was going to be a long, painful morning.

Day-by-day, week-by-week, I worked my way back through the month, poring over the obituaries. There must have been thirty to forty of them each day and I noticed there were at least a dozen different funeral homes in town plus their branches. Doing a rough count in my head, the Greene Funeral Home in Peterborough must handle maybe five to ten percent of them. Throw in the services, the coffins, the embalming, the flowers, the wakes, the hearses and limos, and the burials, it made a nice piece of business, I thought, enough to keep Lawrence Greene in colorful silk ties for the duration. Each time I came across his name, I paid particular attention to the details. After all, next to air currents over airplane wings and non-linear dynamics, if I had read anything over the past year it was obituaries.

I read them and reread them. The devil was in the details, but I saw nothing odd about the dozens of funerals Greene had handled, how the people had died, where they buried them, or the causes of death. Like the other funeral homes in the area, most of Greene's clients were quite old, in their seventies and eighties, and that wasn't what I was looking for. They came in every size, race, occupation, and background. You had to give him that much. Greene was an equal-opportunity mortician. He did old people and young, children and young adults, men and women, white and black, and the written obituaries were as varied as the people described in them.

Some of the obituaries ran to several paragraphs, some even longer, listing all the civic groups that the deceased had belonged to and listing the sometimes numerous surviving relatives, best friends, military records, hobbies, dogs, cats, and anything else the family could think of. Sometimes they mentioned charities and memorials where donations could be made in lieu of flowers. Usually that was a clue as to how someone died. From the names and titles, I could see these people had died from every conceivable cause, with memorial donations recommended to every charity in town. In stark contrast, some of the obituaries were a brief two or three sentences. Other than that, I saw nothing unusual in the ones for Greene's. No pattern. No hint of anything out of the ordinary in any of them. And as the morning slowly passed, I began to think I was the one who was nuts, a crank and a paranoid who was looking for goblins under the bed when there weren't any there to find.

In fact, I had to go back a full eight full weeks before something unusual did catch my eye. It was just one more obituary in the long line of the hundreds I had scanned over the past hour and a half, but this one jumped right off the page:

SKEPPINGTON, RICHARD C., age 52, of Columbus, died Tuesday at the Varner Clinic following a tragic automobile accident. Mr. Skeppington, formerly of Atlanta, was a warehouse supervisor with a local trucking company. By authority of Ralph Tinkerton of Columbus, Executor. (See also SKEPPINGTON, JUDITH M., wife, accompanying). Funeral services for both at 10:30 AM today, Greene Funeral Home, 255 E. Larkin, Peterborough. Internment, Oak Hill Cemetery, following.

That sounded eerily familiar, and his wife's death notice was just below:

SKEPPINGTON, JUDITH M, age 48, of Columbus, died Sunday at Varner Clinic following a tragic automobile accident. Loving wife of Richard (See also SKEPPINGTON, RICHARD C., above.) Retired after thirty years as a schoolteacher in the Atlanta area. By authority of Ralph Tinkerton of Columbus, Executor. Funeral services for both at 10:30 AM today, Greene Funeral Home, 255 E. Larkin, Peterborough. Internment, Oak Hill Cemetery, following.

Interesting, I thought. And not very original. The language was almost a boilerplate to Terri's and mine. Another automobile accident. Husband and wife, both dead. Again, the ever-popular Varner Clinic and the Greene Funeral Home. Burial at Oak Hill Cemetery by the authority of that eminent local barrister Mr. Ralph Tinkerton of Columbus, Executor. Suddenly, the hard plastic chair wasn't nearly as uncomfortable. I leaned back, positively clucking to myself now. I had found something. Amazing. And with that happy realization, the frustration seemed to melt away. I eagerly pulled down the next stack of newspapers and waded into them at a more leisurely pace, knowing that I had found the link and convinced that I would find a whole lot more if I kept at it.

I worked my way back through a full ten months of newspapers, between the stacks of newsprint and the microfilm reader. In all those issues, I found three more bell ringers. Two of them were pairs of husbands and wives who had died together in various accidents. There was a Mr. and Mrs. Thomas K. Pryor formerly of Phoenix, Arizona. He was a retired autoworker who managed the Hampton Inn on U. S. 40 in Hilliard, near Columbus, until his death. The other couple was Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Brownstein formerly of Portland, Oregon. He was a retired carpenter. Mr. Pryor was fifty-seven years old and his wife twenty-six. Mr. Brownstein was forty-four and his wife was forty-two. One couple had died in a car wreck and one in a boating accident out on Buckeye Lake. I guess they threw in the boat to prove they had a touch of originality. The last obituary was for a single man: Edward J. Kasmarek, thirty-two years old, formerly from Chicago. He was an automobile mechanic with Jeffries Honda in Grandview, Ohio. Every one of them had the red flags of the Varner Clinic, the Greene Funeral Home, Oak Hill Cemetery, and the honorable Ralph Tinkerton, esquire as executor.

I got up and stretched. It was a nice little package they had put together, I had to admit. A perfect little scam. Who would ever notice? Other than the typesetter at the newspaper, who reads the thousands and thousands of obituaries you see in a big city newspaper during a typical year anyway? And once read, who would ever remember the details? Especially in the plain vanilla ones? It was clever. Very clever. And it was definitely a scam. But why?

Looking down at my notes, I could see what they were doing and I even knew how they were doing it, but I didn't have a clue as to why. What could they possibly be accomplishing? I read them over again and recognized a few more similarities. They were shorter than most of the other obituaries and lighter on details. None of them listed any living relatives. No relatives meant no one to quibble over the fine print, like the identity of the bodies, and that was important. I also noted that all seven people had died at the Varner Clinic. Add in the two Talbotts and that made nine people, none of whom had a photo in the obituary of the deceased. To be fair, only about half of all the others in the paper had photos, but none of the Varner Clinic ones did, but even the IRS would consider fifty percent versus zero to be a “statistical anomaly.” And all nine had the key elements: they were younger, it was an accident, Varner issued a death certificate, Larry Greene and his pals in the black suits boxed them up, there were no photographs, they had a private service, they had all been planted under one of those pretty green awnings in the back row of Oak Hill Cemetery, and Ralph Tinkerton, Esq. was the executor.