“The roads, once you get away from the commercial district, can get a little confusing. Let me drive you out there, then I can bring you back once you have an idea of where you’re going.”
I couldn’t argue with logic like that. He led me out to one of the cruisers and held the passenger-side door for me as I sat down.
“Have you lived in this town long?” I asked, as he pulled out of the lot onto the Morgan Highway.
“All my life,” he said. “My father was a farmer. His father was a farmer. All the Wheelers back to before the Revolutionary War were farmers.”
“You’re not a farmer.”
“Had to end sometime. I wasn’t very good at it. Guess I didn’t inherit the right genes. Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to be a farmer in Prosperity in a few years.”
“Why’s that?”
He pointed to a subdivision off to the left of the highway. It was filled with large, boxy, redbrick houses of the style I had come to refer to as “garage-mahals.”
“Tax refugees. They think they’re getting away from it all, but they insist on having all the comforts of big-city life. These neighborhoods are spreading like seventeen-year locusts. The population in Prosperity has doubled in the last five years. I expect it’ll double again in the next two.”
“Tough break, suburban sprawl. And you have to keep a lid on all of it.”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”
We drove past an opulent new high school, and over a bridge spanning a tributary called Six Mile Creek. Slowly, the McMansion developments faded away, the land seemed to become more fertile, and farms began to appear on each side of the highway.
“This is the Prosperity I remember from when I was a kid,” Wheeler said. “I’m going to miss it. Now, to get to Quincy’s church, you turn left just past this tobacco-drying barn up here, onto the Ebenezer Church Road…”
A few minutes later, we pulled into the gravel parking lot of a white frame church. A plaque screwed into the siding next to the front door proclaimed that the church had stood on that spot since 1764.
As we climbed out of the cruiser, a man stepped out the front door and waved at Wheeler. He stood in the high five-foot range, with a paunchy stomach, two and a half chins, and thinning hair. He wore glasses. He stepped down to the gravel lot and extended his hand to the chief.
Wheeler shook with him, and then pointed in my direction.
“This is the fellow I mentioned on the phone,” he said. “Quincy Pressley, Pat Gallegher.”
I grasped Quincy’s hand. Despite looking out of shape, he had a surprisingly strong grip.
“I was so sorry to hear about Katie,” Quincy said. “The Costners have been a tragic family over the last several years. If you’ll follow me…”
He turned and started to walk around the church. We followed him. As we rounded the corner, I saw a cemetery behind the building. It stretched for almost an acre.
“We have people in our churchyard from pre-Revolutionary times,” Pressley boasted. “People come from five counties in every direction just to do gravestone rubbings. Katie’s parents are buried just over here.”
He wended his way between faded gravestones and depressed patches of earth to a section filled with more recent monuments. We stopped in front of a rectangle of relatively new grass.
“Katie’s mother,” he said, pointing to the rectangle. Above it was a flat bronze plaque set into the ground, with the word COSTNER in large raised letters.
“There’s a space on the other side reserved for Katie. I had hoped that it would be many years before I would have to use it.”
“So she’s going to be buried here,” I said.
“Yes. John and Susan insisted on it. Despite the fact that Katie left them many years ago, they always believed that they would be reunited. And now, I suppose they will. How did she die?” he asked.
“It was murder,” I said. “She was strangled.”
“How sad. I’m afraid there aren’t many people here in Prosperity who will attend the funeral. So many of the young folks have gone off to the cities, or have married and moved away for new jobs.”
“Hold on a minute,” I said, as I pulled out my cell phone.
Farley was in his office at the Rampart Station. There were no new leads in the case, but the forensic team and the M.E. had completed all their procedures.
“The family belonged to a Lutheran church here in Prosperity,” I reported. “They had arranged for a burial site for her, before they died.”
“Okay. Have the preacher there fax the release papers, and we’ll arrange for transport.”
He gave me the numbers for Pressley to send the information.
I folded the phone and placed it back in my pocket.
“Fastest five hundred bucks I ever made,” I said.
“What?” Pressley asked.
“My boss hired me to find Katie’s parents. I did. I guess my job’s over.”
“Did you know Katie?” Pressley asked.
“A little. She waited tables in the bar where I work.”
“Would you mind, in that case, staying on for a while?”
I guess my face reflected the question in my head.
“For the funeral,” he clarified. “It’s so sad when I hold a funeral and nobody attends. It would be nice to have someone here who knew the girl. I never really got to know her, personally. Someone should be here who did.”
I know a thing or two about lonely deaths and somber, empty funerals. Next to an advertisement for an unused wedding gown, a funeral without mourners is about the saddest thing I can imagine.
“Sure,” I said. “No problem. I’ll need to find a place to stay until they deliver the body.”
“Why not stay with me?” Quincy said. “The church provides me with a nice little house — three bedrooms, lots of space. It’s just me there. You’d be welcome to stay.”
I thought about it for a second.
“Sounds great,” I said.
“I’ll take you back to your car,” Wheeler said. “And I’ll draw you a map to get back here. It’s trickier than it looks.”
I awoke the next morning to the smell of frying sausage and cinnamon.
I pulled on my clothes, made my bed like a good guest, and found my way to Quincy’s kitchen. He stood there in his black slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, with an apron tied around his waist.
“Thought the aroma might awaken you,” he said, as he sat at the table. “I have oatmeal with brown sugar and cinnamon, sausage, and scrambled eggs. You take coffee?”
“Sure,” I said, as I took a seat.
I picked up the fork with my weak hand and started to sample the sausage, when I noted that Quincy had his hands folded in front of him, and his eyes closed. One eye winked open.
I set the fork down and waited for him to finish his prayer.
“Are you a religious man?” he asked.
“I was raised Catholic,” I told him. “Even went to seminary, but I didn’t finish.”
“Crisis of faith?”
“You know about that sort of thing?”
“Of course. Doubt is a human condition, Mr. Gallegher.”
“Please, call me Pat.”
“How’d you do that?” he said, pointing to my cast.
I told him the story about the poodle and the tough guy. Some of it was funny, if it hadn’t happened to you. He laughed at the appropriate places, but as I finished the story his face seemed to go dark.
“I have a feeling you lead an adventurous life,” he said.
“Things happen,” I said.
“And then you have to fight your way out.”
“It isn’t something I do on purpose, at least not most of the time. You get a reputation, though. People know you can do something other people can’t, and they come to you when they’re in need. I have a hard time turning down people in need, no matter how badly I want to.”