“No way you would have gone along with a request to open the grave,” I said.
“I’ve never had cause to warrant an exhumation order, nor any reason to approach Darlene about such a thing.”
“You never wanted this grave opened anyway, Sheriff.”
“That’s not entirely true. Ever since I started with the department, I’d see Darlene driving with someone, always in her car, always in the middle of the night. One time or another, everyone in the department has seen him with her, believing he was her special mystery man. Well, after a time, I quit believing that. Thirty, forty years is a long time to be keeping nightly company with a man and not have him be noticed coming or going out at her place, at least once. So I started imagining what else might be going on, for Darlene to be out in her car in the middle of so many nights, and I got to speculating it might be so she could accompany someone who needed to get out, drive around a bit, before going back to hiding during the daytime. That’s when I became convinced there was no little fancy man at all, but rather, Alta Taylor, alive and well for all these years.”
“Did your grandfather wonder?”
“I think he regarded her death, real or not, as a chance to close the book on an ugly incident.”
“An ugly incident caused by his biological daughter.”
“That part’s only rumor,” she said, in an even tone.
“Rumor or not, it was enough to keep you from investigating anything that might reflect poorly on your grandfather.”
“Why didn’t I stop you two grave raiders after you turned the first shovelful of dirt? That’s all I needed for an arrest.”
She had a point. She could have stopped us then.
“Because of what didn’t come up in my conversation with Lieutenant Plinnit,” she went on. “You didn’t mention your suspicions about my grandfather. For that, you were allowed to dig into Alta’s grave.”
“And because finally, you want to know what’s not in this ground?”
“Fair enough,” she said. “We haven’t been able to find Alta’s death certificate. The undertakers that would have done the burial are long out of business, so there’s no way to check their records.” She pointed to the video camera I’d set on the ground. “However, there will be no video, Mr. Elstrom. Nor is there to ever be any mention of what you’ve done here. You open the box, everyone gets satisfied it’s empty, you close the box and fill the hole. You leave Hadlow, for good.”
“Sounds good to me, especially that last part,” Leo said, subterraneanly.
“Agreed,” I said.
She turned on her bright beam and shined it into in the hole. “I was expecting more of a child’s coffin.”
“Alta was what, fourteen, when she supposedly died?” I asked.
“Fifteen, but quite small for her age, I’ve heard. Stunted, actually.”
Not so stunted as to not be lethal, I thought, remembering the feral creature who’d taken me down behind the Taylor cottage and again in Sweetie’s penthouse.
Ellie Ball told Leo to open the coffin.
The corroded metal box wasn’t secured. Leo lifted the lid.
It contained no feed sack, filled with rocks or dirt.
There was a flannel shirt and denim jeans, covering what was left of a corpse, lying facedown.
CHAPTER 69.
We stared, stunned by a corpse that was not supposed to be there. Leo scrambled out of the hole as if his feet were on fire.
“I want you gone,” Ellie Ball said to us.
“I have to know if that’s Alta Taylor,” I said.
“You will leave. You will never say anything about this, you will never come back, you will never call me.”
“I’m going to hang around until your coroner verifies that’s Alta.”
“You’d rather be arrested for desecrating a grave?”
She whistled with her teeth and lower lip. The people who’d come with her to the cemetery began rustling the leaves behind us. They’d be big men, I imagined, and armed-and loyal enough to do, and say, precisely what she wanted.
“I will call you, Mr. Elstrom,” she said.
Leo threw the small tools in the backpack and picked up the shovel and the pick. He’d not made a sound since he opened the casket. He took off toward the gate, shuffling stiff-legged, as if his brain had lost its ability to fully command his feet. I picked up the video camera and hurried after him.
At the truck, he dumped everything into the bed and moved to the passenger’s side. His hands were shaking too badly to open the door.
“You all right?” I asked.
He made no sound.
I opened his door, went around, and levered myself carefully in behind the wheel.
“Jeez, Dek, did you see her?” His words came out too high and too fast. “That coffin leaked. Her skin was oatmeal, damp and wet and probably full of bugs. Jeez, Dek, did you see her? I’m never going to sleep again.”
He slumped against the door, out cold. He’d had too many hours of driving and too many hours of digging, and too many seconds of looking at a corpse gone to oatmeal in the ground. I drove us the hell out of Hadlow, Minnesota.
Four hours passed. I had no trouble keeping the truck straight on the road, but I couldn’t steer my mind in any direction that made sense. I’d come to Minnesota certain that Alta Taylor had done the Chicago killings-right down to eradicating her sister Darlene and George Koros-and the proof of that would be an empty grave. To have found a body made no sense. No matter how I thought, and rethought, the only thing I was sure of was that Ellie Ball was spending the hours since we left racing to dig a new hole for the corpse, and filling the old one, so that no one would ever find out anything again.
She called just after I’d passed Madison, Wisconsin. She didn’t say my name, nor did she identify herself. She spoke slowly, and deliberately, and said, “A man. Absolutely, not her.” She hung up. It was relief.
Leo woke up an hour later. “I nodded off,” he said in a normal voice.
“You nodded off for almost five hours.” I rustled the bag I’d brought from Rivertown. “Ho Ho?”
“I need coffee, and something adult to eat.”
That, too, was relief. I took the next exit, and we stopped at a McDonald’s at a big truck stop. I was no longer concerned about security cameras. Ellie Ball would deny we’d ever come back to Hadlow.
We ate Egg McMuffins quickly and silently, as though afraid to say one word for the flood of them that might release, and took coffee back to the truck.
This time Leo got behind the wheel. Once we’d gotten back on the interstate, he gave me a sly grin. “Who shall we dig up now?” he asked, and I vowed never to underestimate the healing power of McMuffins.
“I heard from Ellie Ball,” I said. “It wasn’t Alta in that cemetery.”
“Who, then?”
“A man. Beyond that, she’ll never give anyone the chance to find out more. By now that body has been buried somewhere else, where no one will ever find it.”
His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “What’s that mean?”
“Her grandfather knew who was in that box, and who did the killing.”
“Who’s the oatmeal, and who dunnit, Holmes?”
“Best guess?”
“Fair enough.”
“The man in the tin box is Herb Taylor.”
“Dead by daughter because immediately following Mr. Taylor’s drop from sight, Alta got pulled from school, and was never seen again.” He nodded to himself, pleased by his thinking. “It works, circumstantially.”
“Maybe not conclusively enough for Ellie Ball,” I said. “She hustled us out of there because she wanted to hide the body while it was still dark. She doesn’t want a forensic examination.”