“We’ve had a report of possible vandalism,” I said, which wasn’t a total lie. “Have you had any problems here? Anything out of the ordinary?”
“Maybe one thing,” Chabot nodded. “A funeral director fainted dead away last Tuesday when a woman he’d just embalmed tossed a white rose on her own casket.” He waited.
“A twin?” I offered.
“Eye-dentical,” the old man nodded, chuckling. “Scared the livin’ bejesus out of ole Digger Don, though. That odd enough for ya?”
“Actually, I’m concerned with graves that may have been rifled or disturbed. Have you noticed anything amiss?”
“Sonny, we got fifteen thousand, seven hundred and forty-one loved ones in our charge as of Tuesday,” Chabot said proudly. “When I hired onto this job, we had more citizens under the ground than Valhalla had voters. Me and Bud here make our rounds every single day, and we note every pebble left on a stone to mark a visit. I guarantee you nothin’s been disturbed on our watch, and if we caught somebody at it, we wouldn’t trouble the law about it. They’d need an ambulance. Does that answer your question?”
“I believe so. Is this the only cemetery in the county?”
“We’re the largest by far, but there are a few old churchyards in the hills. I imagine the locals keep a pretty close eye on ’em, though. What kinda trouble you got, son?”
“This,” I said, passing him the duped photograph. “It’s possible it came from an old grave, turn of the last century or even earlier.”
“We got no residents that old here.” Chabot shrugged, massaging his beard. “This yard wasn’t laid out till nineteen and aught eight. Before that there were the churchyards, family plots on farms and estates, and the boot hills near the lumber camps, for fellas who got kilt loggin’. Dangerous work, that.”
“It was,” I agreed. “My father was a logger, grandpop too.”
“These pictures, though,” Chabot said, massaging his beard as he frowned at them. “They ain’t nothin’ a lumberjack could afford. They’d be more along the lines of — I don’t know — family graveyards? Like them lumber-baron mansions up on Sugar Hill. Most of them have family crypts. Even dead, they didn’t want to rub elbows with workin’ folks. Look down on the rest of us like buzzards.”
“They’re not as bad as all that.”
“No? Get a lot of invites up there, do ya?”
“Nope,” I admitted, “but that’s one of the perks of my job.”
“What is?”
“I don’t actually need an invitation.”
Chabot was right; the folks who lived on Sugar Hill were a breed apart. Old money, serious money, in a blue-collar county of a redneck state. I definitely didn’t belong up here, but there was a time...
In high school, my cousin Andre and I played hockey for the Valhalla Vikings. In theory we played defense, but we were really enforcers, thugs on ice. We’d had plenty of practice. Growing up, we’d roughed each other around almost daily.
Junior year the Vikes made the state finals, senior year we went all the way, erasing Grand Blanc in a three-game sweep. State champions, Class B.
And for one golden season, Dre and I were hometown heroes, welcome at any party. Even at the estates on Sugar Hill.
High school was a ways back, though. I doubted their memories were that long.
Driving into the hills that overlook the village was like motoring down a corridor draped in russet and gold. The Sugar Hill estates are ancient by American standards, built by lumber barons during the timber boom, from the late 1870s to the Roaring Twenties. Most haven’t been touched since. It’s tough to improve on splendor.
Sprawling, Gone With the Wind verandas, medieval turrets, carriage houses updated for limos and roadsters. Some have Olympic pools, tennis courts, servants’ quarters, all duded up with the gingerbread that epitomized the excess of the day. Back then they were considered nouveau riche. Old Money, now.
I drove down a curving lane that circled the Deveraux estate, with the autumn colors in full bloom. There was no address on the mailbox. Homes on Sugar Hill have names, not numbers. If you bought the estate and lived in it a hundred years, it would still be “the old Deveraux place.”
I rang the bell, half expecting to get the butler and a brush-off. Got the lady of the house instead, a tall gazelle of a woman in riding clothes — dressage boots, skin-tight breeches, and a competition silk blouse. She was slim as a riding crop, pushing fifty, her ash-gray hair trimmed short as a boy’s. Nothing boyish about her, though.
“Yes?” she said, frowning.
“Sergeant LaCrosse, ma’am, Valhalla P.D.” I held up my ID. “We actually met, some years ago. You taught History of Western Civ at Valhalla High.”
“I did,” she nodded, “but I’m afraid I don’t recall—”
“I wasn’t one of your students, but I played hockey with your son Mark. I was here several times, at parties? And I recall seeing a crypt on the grounds.”
“You came to a party here, but remember the crypt? Wow. I probably don’t want to know, do I?”
“We were looking for a quiet corner. It was — definitely quiet.”
“So this is what? A trip down memory lane?”
“No, ma’am, we’ve had a report of possible vandalism of old graves.”
“Here?”
“Not necessarily. But I need to start somewhere, so—”
“Gee, my day just got a lot more interesting,” Mrs. Deveraux said with a shrug. “This way.” She set off at a brisk pace. I fell into step beside her, circling the house to a rear corner. The crypt was built of the same fitted fieldstones as the house, massive, but not overpowering. It was surrounded by an ornate cast-iron fence, eight feet tall, every baluster topped with a spear point that looked sharp enough to draw blood. The crypt’s heavy oaken gate was slightly ajar, though.
“Is this door normally left open?” I asked.
“Why would we lock it? To keep people out, or keep them in?”
Mrs. Deveraux pulled it open without difficulty and I followed her into the crypt, a tall room of stone, roughly the size of a motel business suite. The sepulchers were stacked like bunks against the walls, three on one side, two on the other, with room for more, each with its own marble plaque.
Gerard Deveraux, beloved father, blah blah blah. Chantal Deveraux, beloved, and so forth. The tombs were covered with a light coating of dust. They clearly hadn’t been disturbed for quite some time.
“You can open one, if you like,” Mrs. Deveraux said, facing me, her arms folded. An amused twinkle in her eye.
“Why? What would I find?”
“Nothing. Not so much as a chicken bone. They’re empty, you know.”
“No, I don’t know. What are you talking about?”
“Do you remember studying the Great Fires in school? Eighteen seventies to nineteen ten?”
“Vaguely. Big forest fires, right? Leveled half the state. What about them?”
“Our original family estate was built several miles from here in what’s now state forest, near the logging camps. It was convenient then, construction lumber could be milled on the spot, and it gave my great-greats a short walk to work. Unfortunately, after logging off the timber, they left the slash behind. As it dried, it became tinder, flammable as gasoline. No one knows what started the fires, but they torched these hills like the Devil’s flamethrower. Do you recall the pictures?”
I shook my head.
“These hills looked like Hiroshima after the bomb. Miles and miles of nothing but gray powder. Houses and barns burned down to the dirt, heat so intense even the foundations crumbled to fly ash.”
“What about graves?”
“Graves?” she echoed, surprised at the question. “Sergeant, they couldn’t find the houses, or the roads that led to them. Grave markers were wooden in those days. They would have been erased as completely as the buildings.”