in dead of winter. The entire story seemed a reminder to Richard that he was a guest in this Land of Nod, and that his host was an Irishman whose ancestors enjoyed killing British soldiers. No love lost there. The surreal circumstances only enhanced the notion that the differences dividing Americans and the Crown remained intact after nearly 230 years.
Brannan told the story of Knox with a boastful pride, but Richard knew it was to also cover his nervousness in this place, doing this work, to help pass the time while the backhoe desecrated the ancient earth they stood on so many miles from Boston and Washington, D.C., hallowed as it was by the local citizenry and given sanctity as result.
“Why was Louisa Childe buried here?” Richard asked. “I mean, rather than in the large cemetery in Millbrook? Was she D-A-R?”
“D-A-R?” Krueshach then asked.
“Daughters of the American Revolution, Herman,” explained Brannan.
“Oh, far from it I'd say,” replied Krueshach, his arms tightly wound about his shoulders. “No ties really to any organization. Rather a recluse, wasn't she, Dan?”
“Then why the burial in Fort Knox here if you're all so proud of this… ahhh… cemetery?”
Brannan glared for a moment at the aspersion to the cemetery. Pointing to one side of the field, he said, “This section is the old settlers' graveyard.” Then wheeling, continuing to point to where the deafening backhoe continued its work, he added, “While this other section is a potter's field.”
“Potter's field, as in a place for John and Jane Does- called A.N. Others in England.”
“If you mean by that the anonymous John or Jane Doe,
yes.”
“But you knew her identity.”
“Louisa Childe had no burial insurance, nothing other than a health insurance policy, and no one came to claim the body. City couldn't house her indefinitely in Hotel Krueshach's refrigerated suite, so the city paid the freight. She had a great huge turnout at the church service at the Unitarian chapel though, didn't she, Herman?”
Krueshach nodded successively. “Folks from every county within a fifty mile radius came to show their respects.”
“I'm sure they did.” Richard wondered how many came out of curiosity to see the woman whose spine had been ripped from her by a brutal monster. He was reminded of stories he'd read of the old American West where outlaws were not only hung, but as in early English history, their bodies put on display. The display tickets paid the local undertaker's wage, and sometimes he sold the display, body and all, to a traveling carnival. Ironically, the criminal made more “honest” money as a dead man than he had earned in a life of crime, but it was his reputation as a criminal that got people to pay. The larger the reputation (often created for the show), the larger the take.
Knowing human nature and the criminal tendencies of the mind, Sharpe felt instant skepticism as he tried to imagine the motives of the fifty-mile-radius people who'd ostensibly come out of genuine concern or pity. Had that been the case, why had they not raised enough money to give Louisa Childe a decent burial? Still, he knew that in rural areas of England, say Bury St. Edmonds, such a death would be equally poorly handled and made the more curious by the local authorities and press. Little difference at all. Rural was rural and parochial parochial the world over, Richard just hadn't been braced for it in America, not even in Minnesota, not in the year 2004.
Rather than be contentious and ask more pointed questions surrounding the woman's burial, Richard, turning to his military training, decided to allow Brannan's smalltown-cop illusions about human nature to remain intact, as he saw no tactical advantage to stripping them away.
Sharpe thought briefly of Jessica, wishing he could be with her now, in her bed, rather than here with the gloom and grim wail of the backhoe. The unnatural noise amid all the surrounding trees and foliage felt so like a desecration. To push off the chill, Sharpe again ruminated about Jessica and the warmth of her body close to his; he recalled how they had first met: how he had approached her for help, hat in hand, and how from the moment he saw her that he'd been struck by the need to have her, and how he tried to resist, and how futile was the attempt.
Sharpe glanced now from Dan Brannan's red-splotched drinker's face to the sullen Dr. Herman Krueshach's raw-boned German features. Both Millbrook men had agreed that the matter should stay in their jurisdiction after all. Still, a nervous agitation wound around the predawn light as thick as the cemetery fog.
Sharpe hated the damp earthy smell of cemeteries. He tried to focus on the work of the backhoe as it systematically uncovered Louisa Childe's crypt. The workmen then got atop it and removed the concrete lid with pulleys. Then they climbed atop the coffin, working like hunched-over gargoyles to inchworm thick old world hemp ropes beneath it. Then the coffin was lifted and gently placed on level ground.
The workmen pried open the lid, and inside they found the skull's empty eye sockets staring back. The corpse still had swaths of skin here and there, and some strands of wispy hair went fluttering as the wind dove into the coffin and sifted through it. Sharpe felt a pang of sympathy for the woman, and he was suddenly struck with why Krueshach wanted the fingertips returned to her-after all, she'd gone to eternity without her vertebrae. The least Krueshach could do to restore some dignity to the corpse was to return her fingertips-all but one that was never recovered.
Now they had dishonored her grave. Violated its below-ground sanctity. No one was happy about this, least of all Richard Sharpe.
Sharpe now watched Krueshach lift the bony hand and pry it open, first from the sketch that Lieutenant Dan Brannan had returned to her, and then from its three-year position of a hard fist. Sharpe lifted the bloodstained sketch of the woman in her lifelike pose feeding the birds. Strangely, save for some splotches of now-brown blood and insect activity about the edges, the charcoal drawing appeared as fresh as the day it had been rendered. Sharpe thought it the most peaceful scene he'd ever laid eyes on, not unlike a Hogarth portrait.
Her right-hand nails remained barely intact, coming away with Dr. Krueshach's tweezers. The sun had come up while the backhoe had completed its work, and the light- made to dance through the flurry of leaves-caused each fingernail to wink like mother-of-pearl. Krueshach bottled each nail separately, and for good measure, he took scrapings of the area below each nail, all bone now, and each of these scrapings he bottled, labeled, and capped. Sharpe, no longer able to stare at the corpse, saw the sad, small evidence bag filled with fingertips that had been placed alongside the body. Krueshach offered up a silent prayer, his lips barely moving. When he was finished and back on his feet, the little M.E. in wire rims shouted, “Place Miss Childe back into her earthly chamber!”
Before the workmen could do so, a small swarm of chirping meadowlarks appeared, flew about the scene in a circle and as quickly disappeared, all but one. The straggler landed on a low-hanging tree limb overlooking the coffin, silently staring down at Louisa Childe, as curious as a Minnesota farmer, rubber-necking, tweeting as if a lone voice in the desert, wailing a cosmic complaint that Richard Sharpe himself felt like making.
TEN
Just a line to let you know I love my work.
Apartment of Giles Gabran, Milwaukee
The apartment smelled so strongly now of bleach and ammonia and muriatic acid that it'd gotten into the air ducts and visited apartments throughout the building. People began pouring past Giles Gahran s door, exiting the building, fearful some sort of terrorist attack had been accomplished, fearful their lungs were already in advance stages of collapse and decay. Even Mrs. Parsons was ambling past his door, and seeing him peeking out, shouted, “Giles! Get out of the building! It's awful. Some sort of airborne poison has been let loose in the building. Get out! Get out now!”
More people filed past as firefighters in protective gear rushed in, searching for the source of the disturbance.
