The cemetery covered, about twenty acress of rolling ground; it’s almost bigger than the town, since the living population has dropped to about twenty per cent of what it was when the mines were running. I guess Ann’s map was accurate enough, but one slab looks like another in the dark, and she had to get right up against the stones to read the inscriptions.
By the time we’d checked seven graves I’d begun to feel guilty about puncturing the mortal remains of former friends and neighbors. The minute I sank the probe in number eight I knew we had something different. The soil was loose, and the bar slid in almost without effort. The point struck the casket with a hollow thunk, and I had just about the same empty feeling in my chest.
Ann lifted the hammer and swung it in the awkward way most women have, with her elbow held out and forward, and I admit I shut my eyes and turned my head, wondering if I could still practice law with mutilated hands. But she hit the “T” square on, and I felt the bar make its brief empty plunge through space and then hit the bottom of the casket.
“Empty.” I forced the word through my tight dry throat.
She nodded, then opened her pad and made a notation beside the name. “Vera Yount. Did you know her?”
“Too well. She was a barfly. Honky-tonk queen grown old in the trade. Her liver gave out finally.”
Ann closed the pad and walked on. I pulled out the probe and followed her.
Dawn was flaring up in the east when I probed the fifteenth grave; it was unoccupied, just as numbers eight, twelve and thirteen had been.
The last six graves were on a hillside sloping down toward a wooded creek. My feet were dragging by this time, and I was sort of trailing the bar behind me, but then we went over the top of the ridge and a warm moist breeze hit me in the face.
I stood for a minute looking down the slope, at the ground fog swirling around those gray silent stones, and for a second it all seemed unreal — Fred Bagram, respectable attorney, out all night puncturing cadavers with a woman who looked like she’d have been at home on a millionaire’s yacht. Then I saw Ann standing beside what looked like a fresh yellow mound of clay.
“This girl was buried day before yesterday,” she said when I got there. “Look at that.”
I saw a large shoe-print mashed into the damp yellow clay. I put my foot inside it and saw that it extended at least two inches in front of my shoe.
I looked at her. “According to standard police procedure, we should make a plaster cast of this print and match it against the shoes of our suspect.”
“Good idea,” she said. “Who’s our suspect?”
“Just off-hand, I’d say Robert George, judging from the size of the shoes. We used to call him Gunboat George. He could squeeze his foot into a twelve double E, but it pinched him.”
Ann walked around for a minute, examining the ground and kicking the dirt, sniffing the air and looking in all directions. Then she bent down and picked up the hammer.
“Let’s make sure it’s empty, shall we?”
It was. So was another of the graves on that slope. Out of twenty-one graves we’d examined, six had been empty. My mind kept spinning around that fact. The deaths had been spaced out over a period of at least two months; so, apparently, had the grave-robbing.
I back-tracked and found footprints on at least four, but they’d been almost obliterated by the heavy rains we’d had at the end of September. Each of the prints were of those supersized clodhoppers which I suspected belonged to Robert George.
The sun was edging up like a tangerine slice, and cars were beginning to roll past on the highway. Both of us were too tired to talk much; I dropped Ann off at the Inn, and she said she was going to take a hot shower and then eat. I said I guessed I’d do the same, and would meet her for breakfast before we went out to visit George again. I really felt like driving off toward the sunset with Ann Valery at my side, but she didn’t seem frightened and I certainly wasn’t about to show the white feather in her presence.
IV
It seemed strange, as we sat down to breakfast, to think that only twenty-four hours had passed since I’d first met Ann Valery. I didn’t feel quite the squarish lump that I’d felt the first time, though she’d changed very little, except to put on a tweed pants-suit in a dark brown herringbone pattern.
I got a whiff of her perfume and that was another oddity, to sit across from a beautiful woman after digging in graves all night, with an, assortment of deliverymen, businessmen, and traveling salesmen sitting around us and none of them knowing.
Ann didn’t speak until she’d hacked her way through a stack of leathery hotcakes. Then she lit one of her long French cigarets, took a swallow of coffee, and pulled the notepad out of her purse. She slid it across to me, open.
“These are the people whose graves were empty. See if they have anything in common.”
Her list was written in a slashing diagonal script, and she’d drawn a round “O” before the name of each person who no longer occupied his grave.
“Let’s see. Zach Harbin went down a couple of times for hog-stealing. Ten years the last time. He got taken off in a knife-fight about six weeks ago. Vera Yount, I told you about her.
“Burt Reisner... I don’t know his record. He was a traveling man, came, home after a six-month absence, opened the door of his apartment, and got a bullet in the head from his wife’s boy-friend. Ira Hastings. No trouble with: the law, but his hardware business went bankrupt. Lots of bad loans. He was trying out one of the guns in his store and it went off, so they say. Most people assumed he committed suicide.
“Bill Means was a local bad-boy who played with drugs: too long and got hooked on smack. He dealt in small quantities, just enough to support his habit. They found him dead with the needle stuck behind his eyeball. I guess he’d run out of veins. Carla Frick? That’s the grave where we found the footprint. She’s a juvenile. I think she died of convulsions, but I don’t know anything else about her.”
“How do you know about the others?” Ann asked.
“I was prosecuting attorney for a couple of years. It’s a common practice to put new lawyers to work for the county. Idea being that they’ll be hard, energetic prosecutors, eager to show their mettle. The fact is that they’re intimidated, brow-beaten, teased and laughed at by older lawyers. You wind up feeling like an enemy of society. I suppose it’s good training, but I’m not sure it’s good law.”
Ann flashed a smile.
“You seem to have retained some idealism.”
I felt embarrassed by her steady gaze, and looked down, muttering to change the subject: “As far as having anything in common, I guess you could say that these six, with the exception of the girl, who was a ward of the county, were not what we call respectable elements of society. At least here in Gubb’s Knob, they weren’t highly regarded.”
“As a result of what?”
“Well, personal habits. Drinking, dope...”
“So if they started behaving strangely nobody would be surprised?”
“They wouldn’t even notice.”
“And you said Mr. George had a heavy drinking habit, didn’t you? He used to go out to his trailer and drink himself into a stupor?”
“Yes.”
“And the little girl, why was she a ward of the county?”
“I think she was feeble-minded or something. Her parents couldn’t take care of her.”
“Could she have been epileptic?”
“She could have been. What are you getting at?”
Ann’s forehead wrinkled as she looked down, tipping the ashes off her cigaret into the ashtray. Sunlight came through the window and made her hair glow like spun silver. I couldn’t help wondering what had turned her onto a study of the other world, when she was obviously so well-equipped to excel in this one.