He turned it over and looked at the signature.
Lucille Parker.
It took him a second to realize that it was the dead girl’s mama.
Thirty-nine years late, he opened the letter at last and started to read.
18
o who would have moved your father’s body?” asked Russ.
“Stupid question,” said Bob.
He stood up. They were bunked in Bob’s old trailer on land he still owned seven miles out of Blue Eye on U.S. 270, abutting Black Fork Mountain. In the years since he’d left, the souvenir hunters had taken their toll and so had the graffiti writers, but his keys still opened the padlocks. In just a little time they’d restored the place to livability, though of course there was no phone and no electricity. But a fire kept the water hot and Coleman lanterns kept the place lit at night. It was a hell of a lot better than camping and a hell of a lot cheaper than staying in the Days Inn.
It was dark outside and the drive back from the cemetery was bleak and silent. Bob wasn’t talking. He’d paid the laborers, and the doctor said he’d bill him for expenses but not for professional services. They’d stopped at a diner and eaten and now they were back.
“Why is it stupid?” Russ asked.
“Don’t they teach you nothing at that fancy university? I thought you were supposed to be smart.”
“I didn’t say I was smart,” said Russ. “I said I wanted to be a writer. Different things.”
“I guess so. You can’t ask who until you first find out if, and then how. Who don’t have no meaning until you have figured out that there was a who. Got it?”
“Well—”
“Well, yourself. Think about it. How could it have happened?”
“Could the ground have shifted in some way?”
“No. The earth doesn’t work like that. I thought you grew up in Oklahoma, not New York City.”
“I did, but not on a farm. Anyway, they could have come at night and made an exchange with another body somewhere in the cemetery and—”
Russ paused.
“You saw for yourself how hard it was to excavate a body,” said Bob. “It took three strong men the best part of a morning to uncover one. We didn’t even get to the moving. It would involve block and tackles, a hearse or some kind of cart or something. Then you need the same thing with the other body. Then you got to patch up all that dirt so nobody would notice. Couldn’t get all that done in a single night. Too much to do. So they’d have to do it in the day, under some kind of legal guise. But that wouldn’t do ’em no good neither. You’d have to have lawyers, you’d have to concoct some kind of legal justification, it would end up doing exactly what maybe it was trying to avoid, and that is draw a lot of attention to itself.”
Russ nodded.
“So what do you do?” asked Bob. “Think, son. Either come up with it or call that Princeton place and get back the half million or so your poor dad spent to get you educated.”
“He didn’t spend a cent,” said Russ.
“Oh, that’s right, I forgot your dad was such a bastard. Anyhow, think. Think!”
“I can’t—”
It came from nowhere. Hooray, humiliation momentarily avoided!
“The stones. They move the gravestones! Two men could do it in a few hours under the dark of night. No problem. Especially since the original records have long since disappeared and whenever they did it, no one was there to give a damn.”
“Not bad,” said Bob. “But you are ahead of yourself. Maybe some night in the sixties a bunch of high school kids got drunk and went gravestone tipping. And maybe they was caught and maybe some judge made ’em replant the stones. But they were kids, they didn’t give two shits. So they just stuck ’em in any which way. So what does that leave us?”
“Fucked,” said Russ.
“Yes, it does. On the other hand—well, well, lookie here.”
Russ saw headlight beams sweep across the windows and heard the car engine.
Bob opened the door.
“Howdy, Deputy,” he called. “Come on in.”
He stepped back and Duane Peck entered. Without his sunglasses, his eyes were small and dark.
“Mr. Swagger, I just wanted to tell you something. Remember I told you I’d see about getting the sheriff’s records?”
“Why sure, Duane. You want a cup of coffee? Russ, put some coffee on.”
“No, no,” said Duane, then paused quickly to look around and up and down the room. “I’m on duty, got some patrol patterns to run. I just wanted to say they moved them records over to the courthouse basement. That’s where most of the municipal records was stored. You know, it burned down in 1994.”
“Damn!” said Bob. “I knew the court records were lost but I was hoping maybe the sheriff’s records were different. Damn!”
“I’m real sorry.”
“Duane, don’t you fret on it. So far we got pretty much a big zero. With the body lost and no cemetery records, the whole damn thing is falling apart on us. We just may have to hang it up.”
“Okay, I just wanted to tell y’all.”
He gave each man a hearty smile, then backed out.
They waited until they heard the car pull out.
“Now, where were we?” Bob asked.
“You were saying that if it was kids who messed up the tombstones we were screwed. On the other hand …”
“On the other hand, if just for the hell of it we figure someone did this on purpose, then don’t it follow only two tombstones were exchanged?”
“Yes.”
“And we know the wrong one belonged to a twenty-five-year-old fellow killed in the Civil War?”
“I got it, I got it. We try and find records—in the courthouse, dammit, burned again, no, no, the historical society—on deaths in Polk County during the Civil War. Maybe we can find the names of the young men who fit that category. That would cut way down on the possible alternative grave sites. But what—excavate ten or twenty of them? I don’t—”
But Bob was fishing through the familiar manila folder of clippings and soon enough produced the front page of the Southwest Times Record, July 26, 1955.
HERO TROOPER BURIED, it read.
Under a spreading elm, on rolling fields filled with trees, a group of mourners stood, somber people putting a good man into the ground.
“I don’t—” Russ said. “The trees are all gone. You couldn’t get much out of that picture. It’s just a field.”
“The trees are gone but the land’s the same. Look at the rolls in the earth, the orientation to the sun, the mountains in the distance. I’m betting I can read the land from the photo and pretty much triangulate on that part of the graveyard. We link that with a name and bingo.”
“You’re not thinking of giving up?” said Russ.
Swagger fixed him with the sniper’s glare.
“Not hardly,” he said.
Duane Peck drove away from Swagger’s, then, a mile or so down, pulled over. He snatched the little cellular folder from the glove compartment and pushed a button.
When the phone beeped, he made his report.
“Swagger and the kid seem stuck. They got nowhere to go ’cause they couldn’t find no body. I went over to see ’em tonight and they were both down in the dumps. I think they may be moving out or giving up. So far they have nothing.
“Also, I went over to Sam Vincent’s. I knocked on the door and he wasn’t there. So I went around back and looked into his basement. Goddamn, he was sitting there, reading some old file. Couldn’t tell what it was but I seen a picture on the floor of some nigger gal. I knocked and knocked. I yelled, I did everything. That old goat’s losing it big-time. Wherever he was, he sure as hell wasn’t on this earth. Didn’t even hear me, though I was but ten feet away. Maybe he’s going deaf.”