Amy Cross - The Purchase

Reaching over to the table, she picked up a piece of paper that she’d already put into a sample bag.

“Richard Garrett,” she read aloud from the faded page. “Was that you? Were you Richard Garrett? Were you the one who visited the Lordstown Sheriff’s Office and made a purchase of two bodies? And would that be the two bodies on the cart out there?” She turned back to the dead man. “Call me cynical,” she added, “but something about this whole situation doesn’t feel like a simple robbery gone wrong.”

She waited, almost as if she expected the man to answer, and then she set the paper aside.

“Excuse me, Mr. Garrett,” she continued, as she reached out and gently pulled aside the edges of his jacket. “No disrespect intended. I just want to know a little more about you.”

Much of the flesh on the man’s chest had rotted away, exposing great sections of his rib-cage. The bones were yellowish but, for the most part, in fairly good condition. There was what looked like a healed section of damage on one of the ribs, which Chandler immediately recognized as the sign of a battle wound. So this Mr. Garrett had once fought, and given his age and other indicators it seemed most likely that he’d been a combatant in the American Civil War. The wound had obviously healed a long time before death, though, so for now Chandler turned her attention to the knife blade that was protruding from between two other ribs. This, she reasoned, seemed much more likely to have been acquired very shortly before Mr. Garrett went to meet his maker.

“Stabbed and shot,” Chandler whispered. “Someone must have been very keen to make sure you didn’t come back.” She pulled the edges of the jacket out a little further. “Was this cabin your home, Mr. Garrett? Or were you only—”

Suddenly the head turned slightly, and Chandler gasped as she pulled away and fell back. Landing hard on her butt, she shuffled to the wall, staring at the dead body with wide-open, terrified eyes. Her heart was racing, and after a moment she heard movement nearby.

“Catherine?” Muriel said cautiously, still examining the strange box. “Are you okay over there?”

“Yeah, I…”

Chandler’s voice trailed off as she continued to stare at the dead man. His head had definitely moved, but she realized now that it been more of a downward movement, consistent with the body’s weight having shifted. Still, she waited a moment, just in case the head twitched again.

Finally, taking a deep breath, she told herself that of course that’s what had happened. She’d been examining the man’s chest and pulling his jacket open, and she’d merely caused a very slight adjustment in his position. This had been enough to make his head tilt a little, and now she breathed a sigh of relief as she realized she’d allowed herself to get spooked.

Getting back onto her knees, she shuffled back over toward the chair and – at the same time – she smiled at her own foolishness.

“Forgive me, Mr. Garrett,” she said. “You gave me a little scare there.”

Leaning down, she began to examine the knife’s tip more closely. As she worked, Garrett’s head remained perfectly still above her. Even though it had moved, however, its empty eye-socket remained fixed on the broken window – and on the spot where, many years earlier, Stuart Munver had hung himself.

“Of course, it’s perfectly possible that these things were antiques by the time they ended up in that cabin,” Levant said as he examined the coins in his hotel room, with his phone set neatly nearby. “There are markings, but I just can’t quite make them out.”

“I’ve never seen anything quite like them before,” his colleague, Doctor Doreen Mellors, replied over the phone’s speakers. “When you sent those photos through just now, I was really stumped. The text isn’t Latin or Greek, it’s nothing I recognize. The size seems unusual too. The most I can tell you is that they don’t seem transactional. I highly doubt that they were used as currency.”

“Do you think they were more symbolic?” Levant suggested. “Ceremonial, perhaps? Religious?”

“The size makes it unlikely that they were used in everyday life,” she replied, “but I’m sure they had value. And you say there were just the two of them?”

“As far as I could tell.”

“They’re identical?”

“As far as I can tell.”

“And they were with two sets of human remains?”

“They were with the two on the cart, yes.”

“Interesting.”

“Why’s that interesting?” he asked.

He waited, still examining the coins, and then he turned and looked at the phone.

“Two coins,” Doreen said after a moment, “one for each of the two bodies. I’m leaning toward the idea that they must have been placed there for very specific ritual reasons.”

“Some kind of superstition?”

“You’d be surprised what people believed in some parts of the country,” she replied, “even as recently as a century and a half ago.” There was the sound of a chuckle, although her voice was briefly lost in static. Even in town, cellphone coverage was patchy at best. “We shouldn’t laugh,” she added. “There were some very primitive ideas floating around, and people genuinely believed them. That doesn’t mean they were idiots, it just means that had rather backward-looking ideas about the world. Simple ideas.”

“A coin for the ferryman,” Levant whispered.

“What was that?”

He paused for a moment.

“Jack? What did you just say?”

“Nothing,” he replied, shaking his head as he set the coins down. “Doreen, thank you for your time, but it’s getting late and I think I might need to get to bed soon.”

“By which you mean, you’re going to the hotel bar.”

“There’s no bar in this rundown place,” he muttered, allowing himself to sound a little tired. “No, I think I shall get to bed nice and early, and then I shall go back out to the site in the morning and see what I can turn up. No doubt Chandler and those other idiots have missed all the important stuff. Oh, and Doreen… I hope you’ll remember what I said earlier. I acquired the coins in a rather unfortunate manner, and I wouldn’t like people to talk. Not until I’m ready to make an announcement, anyway.”

“Your secret’s safe with me,” she replied. “Anything’s better than letting a bunch of foolhardy students run the roost. We both know how idiotic they can be.”

“We should shoulder some of the blame,” he pointed out. “After all, we’re the ones who taught them everything they know. And I’m sure we were just as bad when we were their age.”

“Speak for yourself,” she said. “I for one was far worse. Mellors out.”

With that, the call went dead, and Levant leaned back in the creaking old chair and stared down for a moment longer at the coins. His conversation with Doctor Mellors had helped clarify his own thoughts a little, but he still wasn’t exactly sure where the coins had come from or why they’d been left on the cart with those two bodies. He disliked the idea that they were ceremonial, since that made them less interesting to him from an academic perspective, but he supposed Doreen might have been right. Still, as he continued to stare at the coins, one other – far more tantalizing – possibility remained in his thoughts.

“A coin for the ferryman,” he said again.

For a moment, in his mind’s eye, he imagined two dead souls standing on the shore of a dark lake, watching as a boat slowly sailed toward them. At the rear of the boat there stood a tall, hooded figure shrouded in darkness. This figure did not move a muscle until the boat bumped against the shore, at which point he stepped off and allowed the two dead souls to approach. From beneath his robes, the figure uncurled a withered, deathless hand, into the palm of which the souls placed one gold coin each. Now that they had paid their toll, they were allowed to step onto the boat, ready for the journey to the other shore, which waited out in the cold darkness of this terrible underworld.