Stuart Woods - Palindrome

"Excuse me," Williams said.

The man turned around. "Yeah?"

"If general-aviation aircraft have to have a permit to use this place, and nobody's applied for a permit recently, then what's that over there?" He pointed to the twin-engine airplane parked some distance away.

"Well, you got me there, mister," the man replied. "It turned up last weekend, and nobody has a clue what it's doing here."

"Why don't you and I go over there and have a look at it?" Williams proposed.

The man shrugged. "Sure." They got into the car and drove toward the airplane. "It's a Cessna 310," the man said. "A nice one, too."

Williams stopped the car and made a note of the airplane's registration number, which was painted in twelve-inch letters on the fuselage. Both men got out and approached the aircraft. "How do you get into it?" Williams asked.

"There's only one door; it's on the other side." They walked around the aircraft, and the man stepped up onto the port wing and peered inside. "Uh, oh," he said. He hopped back down to the pavement. "I'm not opening that door. You do it."

Williams stepped up onto the wing, as the man had done, and looked inside. Someone was slumped over the pilot's control yoke. Flies buzzed about him, and the odor of corruption leaked through the door seals. Williams hopped down from the wing. "I think we'll let your local sheriff's department open that door," he said.

An hour later, Williams phoned his captain from the airport office. "I think I found the guy who flew Bake Ramsey to Atlanta and back," he said.

"What did he have to say?" Haynes asked.

"He didn't say anything; he died of a broken neck a few days ago. We found him in his airplane at an almost-deserted airfield about forty miles north of Miami."

"Oops," the captain said. "Listen, one of our guys checked at Dekalb-Peachtree and found out that an airplane refueled there about three A.M. on Saturday morning. I've got the tail number." He read it out. It matched the number on the piece of paper in Williams's hand.

"Bingo," he said. "Can we tie Ramsey to the airplane?"

"The Dade County Sheriff's Office is dusting the plane right now." He paused. "But, Captain, I've got a fairly certain feeling that they won't find a trace of Ramsey on that airplane. I think the sonofabitch has snookered us again.

"Come on home, Lee," Haynes said. "You've had enough Florida sunshine."

"You're damn right, I have," Williams replied, trying hard to suppress his fury and failing.

Liz found Angus Drummond at the family cemetery, where there seemed to be excitement among the group of students and their leader, Dr. Blaylock. She stayed on the other side of the low wall that enclosed the graveyard and watched them. They crowded around a large hole and watched as small amounts of earth were expelled by someone down so far that Liz could not see his head. "It's intact!" a voice said from the grave, and there was a little round of applause. "I can get my hand under the coffin; the supports have held, too."

"Is this the first coffin you've found?" Liz asked a girl at the edge of the group.

"Yes," the girl said excitedly.

"What does he mean by supports?"

"Well," the girl said authoritatively, "when you bury somebody, you put a couple of lengths of wood crosswise in the grave for the coffin to rest on. This keeps it out of any immediate water that might have collected in the grave, and when the coffin is lowered, the supports allow the ropes to be withdrawn again. This grave is from 1881, and rope was a valuable commodity then, especially on an island, where it would have had to be brought in from the mainland."

"Toss me the rope," the voice from the grave said, and two coils were passed down to him. The students began erecting a tripod over the grave; when they were done, they hung a block and tackle from it, passed a rope through the sheave, and lowered the end into the grave. A male student appeared from the grave, drawing up a wooden ladder after him. "Okay, you can hoist away," he said. The group massed on the end of the rope and began to hoist. Shortly, a wooden coffin, very dirty, emerged from the grave, and the students manhandled it onto the ground.

Angus Drummond, who had been watching from the graveside, stepped over and wiped the top of the coffin with his hand, then took a handkerchief and rubbed until a brass plate appeared through the grime. "Dorothy Callaway Drummond," he read aloud.

"Eighteen thirty-seven to eighteen eighty-one."

"That corresponds with the tombstone," Dr. Blaylock said. "All right, some of you get to work cleaning up that casket." Students fell to work with soap, water, and brushes. "The coffin is in remarkable condition to have been in the raw earth for nearly a hundred and ten years," Blaylock said.

"That's because it's made of live oak," Angus said. "Before Aldred Drummond died, he specified a coffin for himself of live oak from the island's trees, lined in lead. Every Drummond coffin since that time has been made the same way. I'd be willing to make a considerable wager that when you get old Aldred's box up, it, too, will be intact." The coffin stood clean, now, if stained, its rich wood gleaming dully.

"No varnish left," Blaylock said, running his hand along the wood.

"It wasn't varnished," Angus said. "The coffin was rubbed with teak oil."

"May we open the coffin, Mr. Drummond?" Blaylock asked.

"No, you may not," Angus said. "That was not part of our arrangement, and I won't have the remains of members of my family unduly disturbed. Dorothy Drummond was my grandmother."

"Of course; I understand," Blaylock said.

"I'd like you to get her into her new resting place without delay," Angus said. "The ground has already been consecrated. We'll have a proper service when all the remains have been moved."

"Right away," Blaylock replied. "All right, young people, let's load the casket on the truck. Carefully, now."

Angus turned and saw Liz. "Good morning, my dear," he said brightly. "How nice to see you."

"It's good to see you, Angus," she said. "You've arrived just in time to meet my grandmother," he said, waving at the coffin, which now rested in the truck bed.

"So I heard. That's fascinating about the coffins."

"You think so? Come along, then, and I'll fascinate you some more." He led her away from the graveyard, back toward the main house. Soon, they came to the cluster of maintenance buildings that sat behind the mansion. Angus opened a large door and motioned for Liz to go ahead of him. The room was well lighted by a skylight set in the roof, and, immediately, the clean, pungent scent of wood shavings reached her nostrils. They were in a carpentry shop, well equipped with power tools, and others, some of them obviously quite old, were stored neatly on pegs along the rear wall. The side walls were covered with large racks which held lengths of lumber.

"We don't often cut down a live oak," Angus said. "Takes them too long to grow to have them fall to some obnoxious human's ax, but now and then a hurricane will blow one down or wound it so badly that it makes sense to harvest it. The lumber is sawn at our own sawmill, down in the woods, and left here to dry."

In the center of the room, on sawhorses, rested three coffins, one of them already lined in sheet lead, the other two still only bare wood inside. In a corner of the room, a smaller coffin sat on the floor. "We keep a supply in stock," Angus said. "We hadn't made one for a while, but it seemed a good idea to do so now. Jimmy Weathers won't be needing one, but I will, soon, and so will Buck Moses. He'll be buried in the family plot with us."

"What about the child's coffin, in the corner, there?"

"That was never needed, thank goodness. It was built when the twins' mother was pregnant with them. We were ready for anything."