No Body

  After she had hobbled over on aluminum crutches to let me in the door, she allowed me to baby her to the extent of pouring Twining’s Gunpowder Green tea from her antique pewter pot into antique cups of translucent china. “In grateful memory of the Boston Tea Party,” she instructed me by way of a toast. “December 16, 1773. But of course you remember that, Jenny.”

  “Of course,” I murmured.

  She further permitted me to lift her bandaged legs onto a footstool—an enormous, heavy wooden Victorian thing with scrolled legs—and to fluff her pillows and to pass her the cream. But then I offered to stir her tea for her.

  She lowered me back into an antique country side chair with the force of a stem glance and a frown. I was in the classroom again, caught talking out of turn.

  “There is nothing wrong with my wrist, young lady,” she informed me. I half expected to be told to write it 100 times on the blackboard. “I can stir my own tea, thank you. I may be old, foolish, and horribly embarrassed, but I am not yet feeble.” The stem expression melted and the soft skin of her jowls quivered. “Oh, Jenny, all those years I labored over the archives of that cemetery—not to take all the credit for myself, you understand, but after all, I had the time. All the years I’ve dedicated to preserving that old graveyard, and there’s nobody buried in it!” She told me then all about her aborted stroll in Union Hill Cemetery. “Oh, I am an old and foolish woman, and so horribly embarrassed. Oh my . . .”

  She trailed off into the unapproachable misery of the proud. I longed to pat her gardening-roughened hands but didn’t dare. Before I could speak words of comfort and denial, the old black telephone on the antique table beside her rang.

  “Yes?” she said crisply into the receiver. I watched as she wrote on a pad of paper, “Lewis Riss, Port Frederick Times.” Then, in firm block letters, “NO!” which she underlined twice in thick, dark strokes. The tone she used with the reporter was the same one she had employed years before when little boys giggled behind their schoolbooks. “I have made a sufficient exhibition of myself for one day, young man. No, you may not interview me. Good-bye.” She set the receiver down as if it were a ruler and the phone were knuckles.

  Miss Grant continued our conversation as if the phone had never rung. “If you only knew the irony of your coming here, Jenny.” Her smile was rueful. “I planned to approach you for money from that foundation you run! When I saw how badly the graves were eroded, I thought you might give us the money to replace the topsoil . . .”

  Abruptly, she broke off. Her lips twitched. The smile grew wide and a merriness that I recalled returned to her eyes. “It will,” she admitted, “take quite a bit of dirt, won’t it, Jenny?”

  We laughed then, until tears appeared in her eyes again. “Where are they, Jenny?” The despair in her voice tugged at my heart. “Where are my great-great-grandfather and my great-great-grandmother? How will I find them if I’m all laid up like this, trussed like a stuck pig! Oh, Jennifer.” Her voice went silent.

  I heard myself saying, to my own astonishment, “I’ll find them, Miss Grant. I’ll be your legs. And I’ll run them off if I have to, to find your ancestors for you. I know the foundation will be happy to fund my search.”

  “Jenny.” She beamed. I had earned an A. “You always were such a dear child, so pretty and sweet.”

  Stupid, too, I thought, as an awful comprehension of my promise struck me; I have always had a real strong streak of stupid. I had tax laws to learn, reports to make, meetings to attend; I didn’t have time to go chasing all over the county after 133 dead bodies! As for my bosses, the foundation trustees, agreeing to fund this wild ghost chase, well. . . .

  Besides, there was no telling how many times I would have to endure having some joker ask me who was buried in Grant’s Tomb. By the time I was through, I might well wish it were I.

  2

  “If you find those damn bodies,” Stanley “Spitt” Pittman, Sr., swore to me the next day in his office at the Harbor Lights Funeral Home, “I will bury you, your next of kin, and your dog. Free.”

  “Not anytime soon, I hope,” I said.

  “When the time comes,” he promised in a sonorous rumble.

  His son, Stan, Jr., murmured from a far comer of the office, “I guess you’ll have to get a dog then, Jenny.” I smiled down at my coffee cup. His father glared at him.

  Luckily, the phone on Spitt’s massive Victorian desk interrupted us as it had continually since I had arrived for my appointment at 1:30 that afternoon. My trustees, it turned out, had not only okayed my mission, but had blessed it enthusiastically since some of their ancestors were among the missing. Stan, who looked rather unfortunately like Stan Laurel to his father’s Oliver Hardy, leapt up to grab the receiver. Spitt continued to glare at him as if the whole fiasco were his son’s fault. I waited as Stan listened to the now-familiar plaint of a burial-plot owner.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said in his reedy, hesitant voice. “I understand your concern, but I assure you, your Uncle Talbot still lies where we buried him. We don’t even own Union Hill Cemetery anymore, ma’am . . .” He listened to a voice whose dismay I sensed though I couldn’t hear the words. Suddenly Stan had the look of a man in a pain-reliever commercial. He sighed. He raised a finger to the narrow space between his eyes and pressed it there. “No, ma’am, there’s no need for you to sue us. If you wish us to dig up your uncle to make sure he’s still there, we’ll certainly do that for you.” Because he was listening intently, he failed to notice his father’s grimace. “A minimal charge, that’s all, ma’am, for the labor. Yes. Thank you. Good-bye.”

  His father detonated. “That’s twenty-five of those nuts this morning alone!” Spittle flew from his mouth like sparks, lending a whole new meaning to the childhood nickname that had originated as a combination of the first letter of his first name and the first syllable of his last. “We’re gonna have to disinter the whole damn place to prove nobody’s stolen our stiffs! And what do you mean, minimal charge? What about the wear and tear to our equipment, what about oil and gasoline, what about soil and sod replacement? What about that, Mr. Minimal Charge?”

  “We won’t have to dig up the whole place, Dad.” Stan returned to his chair and sat down with his hands under his thighs, his fingers grasping the front of the seat. He leaned forward like a small, earnest boy in the principal’s office, though this small boy was over thirty years old and nearly six feet tall. “After we dig up a couple, people will see that our park’s intact, and they’ll calm down. I’ll just dig up a few, Dad. You’ll see how quickly it all smooths over, honestly.”

  “Dig up.” His father looked to the ceiling and spread his arms wide as if in appeal to a greater force, possibly one lodged within the acoustic tiles above him. “Ten years in business the boy’s got. Eight generations of funeral directors in the family. A degree from the best mortuary-science college in the country he’s got. And he still says, ‘dig up.’ The word is disinter, you dumb bunny. When are you going to learn that vocabulary is very important in this business.” Spitt appealed to me. “Wouldn’t you rather have your great-great-granddaddy disinterred than dug up?”

  “I’d be happy just to find him,” I said to the man who had just called my late loved ones “stiffs.” “Some of my relatives are among the missing of Union Hill. May we talk about that?”

  “Talk to Stan here.” He waved toward his heir. “He’s the damn historical buff around here, he’s the one got us involved with all those damn freeloaders in that historical society.” Spitt let out a great bark of ironic laughter. “Trim the shrubs, cut the grass, prop up the tombstones . . . and all the time, there’s nobody there! Pouring money down a damn hole, that’s what we’ve been doing! One hundred and thirty-three empty holes!”

  With a discreet nod to me, Stan signaled our exit. At the door, he said to his father, “One of us has to attend John’s funeral, Dad. I’ll stick around to handle the phone if you’ll go on to the service.”

  The old man pulled himse
lf erect in his chair. He tugged at his shirt cuffs, flicked lint from his lapels, and straightened his tie. His complexion faded from grape to pink with amazing rapidity, and, as if his face were sculpted in wax, his expression melted down from ferocious to bland. In an instant, he was the very picture of a dignified funeral director.

  “Thank you, son.” He smiled graciously at me.

  Stan Pittman quietly closed the door of his father’s office, wearing the look of a lion tamer who has managed to escape with only flesh wounds.

  He led me down a hallway that was lined with nineteenth-century American country antiques of the sort one finds all over Port Frederick. They are a source of local pride because they are homegrown, all of them having been constructed in the previous century at a local cabinetmaker’s shop. Above the furniture, Stan’s ancestors glared down at me from oil paintings, framed in rococo, on the walls. Most of them wore stiff white collars and grim expressions, with the exception of one blond, mustachioed fellow who twinkled at me across the centuries.

  As we glided past closed doors, Stan gave me a quick Cook’s tour, pointing as he talked. “This is the management wing, Jenny. The public wing is through that door behind us, and the morgue is down that corridor to your right, and the crematorium is outside. This office belongs to Aaron Friedman, the personnel manager for all our companies . . . and this is Beryl Kamiski’s office, she’s our prearrangement sales manager . . . and this office is shared by Russell Bissell and our other salespeople . . . and my office is down here.”

  There was a single secretary/receptionist’s desk midway down the hall, equidistant from Stan’s office and his dad’s, and a small reception area and a smaller lobby beyond that. The secretary’s desk was at the moment unoccupied, though a plastic nameplate said the desk belonged to one Sylvia Davis. Neatly stacked piles of paperwork surrounded her electronic typewriter, and her telephone bore three rows of red, throbbing buttons. As we passed her desk, Stan punched down one of the buttons and lifted the receiver.

  “Harbor Lights Funeral Home,” he said pleasantly, and then after a few seconds, less pleasantly, “Yes, I know who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb!”

  From the look on his face as he slammed the phone down, I suspected that Sylvia Davis had better return from lunch pretty soon if she valued her job.

  We stepped into Stan’s office—a smaller, plainer version of his father’s—and he closed the door. I took a seat across from his desk. In his bookshelf there were framed photographs of a pretty woman with three small children and an inconspicuous sign: “Thou Shalt Not Be Unctuous.”

  Stan took the raincoat I had brought with me and hung it over a hook on the back of his door. Then he walked over to the chair behind his desk and slumped into it. “I wanted to be a writer,” he said in wistful tones as he sat down. “That’s all I ever really wanted to be, you know? I just wanted to sit in a small, quiet room at the top of a quaint Victorian mansion and write Pulitzer Prize-winning short stories on parchment with a quill pen. Would you like some more coffee, Jenny?”

  I accepted gratefully the hot refill he poured from a coffeepot on his desk and sipped it while he took more calls from worried descendants of people who were buried in the Harbor Lights Memorial Park. Maybe, I thought, the caffeine would compensate for all the hours of sleep I had sacrificed on the altar of worry about this impossible task I had set for myself. One hundred and thirty-three missing bodies, indeed. Did I think I would find them under a few telltale humps in somebody’s basement?

  “But, sir,” Stan said to one of his callers, “we buried your mother only last month, and it was an open-casket funeral. You saw her yourself.” He paused to listen. “Well, everybody else said she looked just like herself.” And to another: “He was cremated, ma’am. It would be difficult to identify the remains.” And finally: “No, Mr. Riss, please don’t call my father. I’ll talk to you, although I don’t know what I can tell you to help you with your story.”

  Stan answered the other flashing red lights by unplugging his phone from the wall. Then he leaned his elbows on his desk, placed his palms against his forehead, and grimaced. “Lord, I felt bad enough this morning, even before these calls started. We had our annual Founder’s Day party last night, Jenny, and we’re all a little the worse for wear. At least, I am. It’s probably why Dad’s such a bear today.” He sighed, then picked up his coffee and drank it in straight gulps, then poured himself more.

  “Do we,” I inquired, after a tactful pause to allow him time to pull himself together, “do we have any reason to suppose those bodies were ever buried there at all?”

  “Yes,” he said with what sounded to me like regret. “Our diggers found evidence of cribbings.”

  “Cribbings?”

  “Wooden planks. Nobody has been buried there since before the turn of the century, which was also before the day of the backhoe. In those days, gravediggers had to drive planks in parallel to the sides of the grave to keep the dirt from giving way and burying the gravediggers. You see, there wouldn’t be any reason for cribbings if there hadn’t ever been any graves.”

  It seemed to me there was a slight flaw in his logic, but I let it go. “Next question, Stan . . . if you don’t own Union Hill, who does?”

  “Well, actually, we used to own it, Jenny, but we weren’t using it, so my father gave it to the historical society in, I don’t know, the early 1950s, ’round about then.”

  “That was nice of him.”

  “Yeah, it was a nice tax deduction. And it was nice to get out from under the upkeep and the property taxes, that’s how nice it was. Of course, now it’s a not-for-profit organization.” He was tapping his long, narrow fingers against a file folder on his desk and seemed hardly to be listening to his own answers to my questions. When he looked up at me again, he had a determined gleam in his pale brown eyes.

  “You ever seen a grave dug up, Jenny?”

  “Can’t say as I have, Stan.”

  “Probably not high on your list of fun things to do in your spare time.” He smiled briefly. “But as long as you’re looking for bodies anyway, let’s go find one. We can talk about Union Hill while I get this business over with. Kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.”

  I thought perhaps kill was a verb better left unsaid in a funeral home.

  “Whose body are we looking for?”

  “Anybody’s. Just to prove we’ve still got our bodies buried in our yard. I’d like to have positive, visible proof for that reporter when he shows up this afternoon.” I glanced out the window at the drizzly day and felt dubious about the entire proposition. Stan was saying, as if to himself, “I’ve already got the approval of the health department, and God knows we’ve got the approval of the next of kin.” He helped me into my coat. “You know, I’ve heard of runs on banks to get money out, but a run on a memorial park to get the bodies out? Give me a break.”

  As we headed outdoors, Stan said, “What I want to do is prove the business in Union Hill Cemetery is an isolated case that has nothing to do with us.”

  “You’re sure that’s true?” I asked him.

  He looked at me. “Don’t even suggest it, Jenny.” With the unfailing courtesy of a born funeral director, he held open the front door for me. “Whatever happened in Union Hill happened a long time ago, and it doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

  “If you say so.” I stepped outside and pulled up my collar against the cold mist. “But what will your father say?”

  “The same thing he always says.” Stan puffed out his thin cheeks in a passable imitation of his dad. “‘You dumb bunny!’ “

  I laughed sympathetically.

  Stan steered me toward the entrance to the memorial park, a wide, green expanse of cemetery, which surrounded the funeral home on three sides. On its far northwest edge, the park abutted Union Hill Cemetery, from which it was separated by a century and a chain-link fence. “We’ll start at this end, Jenny. I don’t think these late, great customers will mind if we disturb the
ir slumber.”

  “Slumber?”

  Stan, who was looking at his feet as we walked, smiled at his shoes. “That’s funeralese for dead, Jenny. We do not die, you know. We rest, we sleep, we slumber.”

  I thought about that.

  “Listen, if these guys are merely resting, I’d like your personal assurance we won’t wake them up. You know how cross Count Dracula could be when awakened early from his naps.”

  Stan smiled at his shoes.

  3

  From inside a maintenance shed where they had been hovering to escape the weather, Stan retrieved three gravediggers to do the job. Under a rapidly lowering sky, we watched them remove squares of sod from atop a grave and then tear into the earth with a backhoe.

  “We don’t call them gravediggers anymore,” Stan corrected me when I did that very thing. “They’re maintenance men. Or groundskeepers. Like at a ball park.”

  “Or a ritzy home?” I suggested.

  He smiled.

  I raised my eyes from the macabre operation that was proceeding before me and looked across the park toward Union Hill Cemetery. I saw that a graveside service was at that moment being conducted near the fence that separated the two burial grounds. There was a green canopy to shelter the family, and even from that distance I could see that Spitt Pittman seemed to be patting a lot of hands.

  Still farther on, across the fence, Union Hill looked like a playground for prairie dogs, or a bomb site; the “graves” had not been refilled since they were dug up. Their tombstones leaned forlornly over nothingness, like an existentialist’s ultimate metaphor: Sartre would have loved it. If God was indeed dead, our twentieth-century churches marked, like those tombstones, empty graves. Or maybe God wasn’t dead but only missing, like those Civil War corpses. Maybe angels had rolled away the stones from those 133 graves, and their occupants had walked, like Jesus, into immortality. Where, I wondered, do 133 dead people go when they’re not at home?