“Nice weather we're enjoying.”
“Yes ma'am indeed.”
“Whatcha-got-there-inyer-hand?”
“Ahhh… this? This old box? Nothing… nothing, really.”
“Interesting box. Can't get boxes like that anymore. Find it in an antique shop? Seen some file boxes with ties wrapped round them, but they were just cardboard. That's a fine box.”
“Hell of a box.”
“Wanna part with it? My granddaughter would love it. How much would you want for a thing like that?”
“I'm… ahhh… afraid… you see, if it wasn't a gift maybe…”
“Oh, really? An heirloom! How enchanting.”
“Ahhh… you could say so. It was gifted to me by… by Mother… upon her death.”
The landlady's hands shot instantly up in a mock gesture of surrender. “Oh, dear, I'm so sorry for your loss. You can't possibly part with a thing like that, and I certainly understand.”
“Thank you.”
“Just that last time I saw one like that, it was in a library, housing important papers.”
“Yes… I keep all my important papers close,” he lied. “I've got to finish packing now, Mrs. Parsons. I gotta go.” He began disappearing from the hallway as he spoke, inching spiderlike back into his apartment.
“You sure created a ruckus in there last night!” she called after him. “Making that art of yours. My, but it must take a lot of perspiration indeed, all that banging! Makes a body go loco to hear all that incessant hammering.”
But Giles had safely returned to his apartment and closed the door on the woman's ranting. He dropped the box into one of the crates. He'd move it again, put it away at the new place, and perhaps one day he'd have the guts to open it and look on every word, every item collected by his mother.
He stared around at his studio and slid down the side of the crate, exhausted. He pulled the phone to him and called UPS to come get the boxes and crates he'd be shipping.
“Chicago, City of Blues and Dirty Politics, here comes Giles Gahran, and as for professor of art, Keith Orion, get ready Dr. 0, for a visit from an old flame.”
He looked across the wood floor of his studio apartment and saw a fleck of blood he'd missed with his cleaning fluids, and while on the phone with UPS, ordering them to pick up his crates as soon as possible, he saw a trail of other specks he'd overlooked, mocking him. Lucinda's blood. He lifted a jar filled with red fluid, already labeled LW. He remained on the line, on hold, listening to “Sweet Lorraine” in its original Nat King Cole version. Annoyed by the culmination of these circumstances, he located his concoction of ammonia, bleach, Mr. Clean, and that muriatic acid the Ace hardware man had assured him could clean a gravestone of a hundred years of accumulated mold, and he sprayed the powerful, nose-pinching, eye-gouging concoction over the last remnants of Lucinda's blood.
When Jessica lifted her ringing cell phone from where she had left it beside the bed, she stood shower refreshed and staring out at the terrace where Darwin Reynolds had wandered to stretch and to lift his face into the early morning rain.
She opened the phone, careful not to allow the camera to see anything but herself. When she pressed to receive Richard's incoming call, the first noise she heard was the sound of a working backhoe.
“Richard? Is it you?” She could hardly hear him over the backhoe's grunting and bawling hue. “What the hell's that noise?”
“Backhoe!” he shouted.
“Are you in the middle of a construction zone?”
“Exhumation-in-progress zone!” he shouted back.
“What're you talking about, Richard? And what time is it? And what kind of a gin mill're you in?”
“Six-fifty… ahhh… no, seven here now… Minnesota time. What is it there? Same time zone, isn't it? Sorry to wake you, but wanted you to know…” The backhoe won out over several of his words, but she caught the single- most important one: exhumation.
“How did you get… embroiled… in an exhumation?”
“Hold on! Hold on!” He stepped away from the rhino-bellowing machine and found a quiet distance beneath a tree. There he informed Jessica of events at the Milwaukee M.E.'s office that led to the exhumation. She took the bad news about the lack of DNA evidence on file with Krueshach's office in relative stride, but Richard could not hold back. He took a moment to get his ire off against Millbrook authorities.
She shook her head as his camera phone revealed a grimace. “But it sounds-from the backhoe-as though they are fully cooperating with you now?”
“Well, yes, but only after I threatened them with more FBI descending on them. 'Fraid I woke up Eriq before you. Still, at least the lead investigator-Brannan-is onboard with us, entertaining the thought that Towne could possibly be innocent of the murder in Oregon.”
“God, an exhumation. Difficult task. How're you holding up, sweetheart?”
He sighed heavily into the phone. “I'm standing in a drizzle the middle of a rank old cemetery since before 6 A.M. and have been up all night… Now I'm amid people with whom I wouldn't share a pint and don't particularly like, and I am missing hell out of you, but otherwise… You know very well that I am managing.”
“Like the professional, I know.”
“Yes, and here digging up the sad remains of one Louisa Childe.”
“I'm so sorry you're being put through this, Richard, really I am. An exhumation, Richard? I could never have predicted you'd have reason for-”
Sharpe ordered her to stop. “I'm fine, really. I'm a big boy. I got myself here where I stand all on my own, dear, sad details of law enforcement in Millbrook notwithstanding.” He finished with a good Christian curse against ineptness that ended with “and may your Herefords sire no calves nor give milk nor sustenance to you and yours, Dr. Krueshach!”
This made her laugh. She asked that he keep her apprised.
In Millbrook, he replied, “I'm switching off now, and I'll be letting you know what, if anything, comes of this horrible morning's effort by we resurrection men.”
“Richard, you've gone above and beyond for me again. Thank you, dear, so much.”
“Not at all. A man's life is at stake. I begin to believe with each moment ticking away that this fellow in Oregon is innocent.”
“Proving it may be impossible, Richard. I'll tell you what I told Darwin. Don't build your hopes up so high that when they are dashed that you can't ever hope again.”
“Kind advice… The kind I might expect from an angel.”
“You're so sweet, Richard. I so miss you.”
“And I you.” Richard again said good-bye and put away his cell phone.
Jessica hung up, breathing a sigh of relief that Richard had seen nothing and heard nothing of Agent Reynolds in her room at this hour.
Although Sharpe had presided over a number of exhumations in Great Britain, it was never an easy process nor easy on the nerves. Still, it had been his call, and he felt he had to remain aloof. He tried to show some elan by nonchalantly leaning against a large headstone marked curiously enough with the bold name of Churchill 1893– 1933, about the average lifespan of the day, when the headstone moved under his weight. “Shit,” he muttered, quickly readjusting his stance, taking his weight off the stone.
Overhead, flapping in increasing anger or parody, the banner strung across the ancient wrought iron whipped in the breeze, distorting the good name of The Henry Knox Memorial Cemetery. The place looked to be a sad patch of earth far from the center of Millbrook on a winding country road that multiplied the ruralness of this Minnesota haven just west of the Twin Cities tenfold. Brannan had explained that the cemetery had been the old settlers' plot, but when the town was at a loss for things the city council might do with funds found leftover from the various bake sales, the city fathers had ceremoniously renamed the weed patch in honor of President George Washington's Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, commander of the first American Artillery placed in the field against the British. The tale of the Boston Siege of 1775 was postscripted with the heroic story of how Knox made the arduous overland journey that brought the guns of Fort Ticonderoga, New York, to bear on the British at the Siege of Boston
