Duval glared at him through bloodshot eyes. “Ain’t you that has to watch out for them kids every night,” he growled, lifting himself out of the chair and draining the beer in a single long pull. Leaving the television on, he followed Childress out to the car.
Childress said little on the way to the cemetery, nervously glancing in the mirror every few seconds, certain that unseen eyes were following every move the car made.
The deputy chuckled darkly. “What’s the problem, Fred? The way you’re actin’, anyone’d think you’d never even been in a graveyard before!” The chuckle turned into an ugly laugh as Childress glared at Duval, but he said nothing more until the undertaker had parked his dark blue Cadillac in the deep shadows of the dirt road that led around to the back gate of the cemetery. But before he got out of the car, Judd saw Childress glancing around yet again. “Shit, Fred, would you take it easy? There warn’t another car on the road. Now let’s just get this done, so’s you can go on home while I do the hard part, okay? Sometimes I don’t know why Phillips puts up with a chickenshit like you.”
Fred Childress’s temper flared. “For the same reason he puts up with an ignorant swamp rat like you,” he snapped. “He needs us.”
Duval’s lips curled derisively. “Yeah?” he drawled. “Well, I don’t know ’bout you, but I’d say we need him a hell of a lot more’n he needs us. Or are you startin’ to look forward to old age?”
Childress felt a vein on his forehead begin to throb as his anger rose. “Drop it, Duval,” he said. Getting out of the car, he went to the gate in the cemetery’s back fence and used one of the keys from the large ring to open it.
He hesitated before he actually stepped through the gate into the graveyard, his eyes scanning the limestone mausoleums, glowing eerily in the pale moonlight, in which lay the dead of Villejeune.
“I don’t like this, Judd,” Fred Childress said. “I don’t like this at all.” He glanced around, imagining eyes watching him in the darkness. “If anyone sees us—”
“No one’s gonna see us,” Duval growled. “If you’d just shut your mouth and get it over with, you could be back home in fifteen minutes.”
Childress steeled himself, and at last stepped into the cemetery, moving quickly to the mausoleum in which Jenny Sheffield’s body had been placed only that afternoon. He fumbled with the keys, finally inserting one into the keyhole in the crypt. Opening the door, he pulled the coffin halfway out. “Give me a hand with this, will you?”
Together, the two men pulled the casket free from the crypt and lowered it to the ground. Fred Childress opened the lid, and for a moment they both stared silently down at Jenny’s lifeless face. Finally Duval lifted her from the coffin and started back toward the gate.
Fred Childress, left alone in the graveyard, reclosed the coffin and raised it back up to the crypt, sliding it inside once more.
He had just closed the door of the crypt when he heard the sound.
A crack, as if someone had stepped on a twig, crushing it underfoot.
He froze, his whole body breaking out in a sweat.
He listened, but the sound didn’t come again, and finally he twisted the key in the crypt’s lock and hurried back to Duval, who was waiting by the car.
“What took you so long?” the deputy demanded.
Fred Childress glanced back toward the graveyard. “I heard something.”
Duval’s eyes narrowed. “You sure?”
Childress nodded silently. Now it was Judd Duval who gazed out into the cemetery. “I don’t—”
He cut off his own words.
He’d barely missed it; indeed, he still wasn’t sure he’d seen anything at all. Just the faintest flicker of movement in the shadows. “Stay here,” he whispered. “I’m gonna have a look around.”
• • •
“He heard me,” Kelly whispered, but immediately fell silent as Michael held a finger to his lips and motioned to her to follow him.
Moving quickly, he started back toward the front gate of the cemetery, slipping as silently as a cat through the deep shadows cast by the mausoleums. A few moments later he paused, and as Kelly crouched beside him, slid his head around the corner of the tomb behind which they were concealed. He saw nothing at first, but then a shadowy form stepped out onto the path fifty yards away, crossed, and disappeared again. Michael straightened up, glancing quickly around, then squatted down next to Kelly.
“We’re only twenty feet from the gate. He’s looking in the wrong place, so we can get out. Just follow me.”
He peered around the corner once more, saw nothing, and made his move. Staying low, he darted toward the gates, then dropped down behind the wall.
“Maybe we better go home,” Kelly whispered as she crouched beside him once more. But Michael shook his head.
“I want to know who it is. Come on.”
He started off again, staying close to the shelter of the low wall that surrounded the graveyard until he came to the unpaved road that led around to the back. Across the dirt track was a thick stand of pines, and Michael darted into it, stopping only as the deep shadows of the trees closed around him.
“What are we going to do?” Kelly asked.
“Wait,” Michael told her.
• • •
Judd Duval silently crisscrossed the cemetery, his eyes scanning the shadows for any sign of life. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a movement, but even before he could start toward it, the lithe form of a cat leaped off the roof of one of the stone buildings and disappeared into the darkness. Chuckling hollowly at his own nervousness, he went back to the car where Fred Childress was waiting.
“Nothin’,” he said as he slid into the car next to the mortician.
“There was something,” Childress insisted, starting the engine. “It wasn’t just the sound. I could feel someone watching me.”
Duval’s lips curled into a mocking sneer. “Are all grave diggers scared of ghosts, or is it just you?”
Childress’s prim lips tightened. He put the car in gear, but left the headlights off until they reached the main road. He paused once more, searching in both directions for any sign of another car.
Nothing.
At last he turned the headlights on and pulled out onto the pavement, pressing the accelerator. The Cadillac’s powerful engine surged, and the car shot away into the darkness.
With every yard he put between himself and the cemetery, Childress felt his sense of relief grow.
Perhaps, after all, he’d heard nothing.
• • •
“Did you see who it was?” Kelly asked as the car disappeared down the road and the two of them stepped out of the shelter of the pines.
Michael nodded, his mind racing. The driver had been Fred Childress. But there was someone else in the car with him, someone he hadn’t been able to see. “It was Mr. Childress,” he said. “He owns the funeral home. I couldn’t see the other one.”
“What would they be doing out here in the middle of the night?”
“And how come they didn’t turn on their lights?”
They crossed the dirt road again, and a minute later were back in the cemetery, making their way quickly along the paths that wound through the tombs, coming finally to the vault in which Jenny’s coffin had been placed that afternoon. Michael stepped close to it and tried to pull the door of the crypt open, but it held fast.
Looking down, he frowned, and stepped back.
Crouching low, he studied the close-cropped grass in front of the mausoleum. Though it was barely visible in the dim moonlight, he thought he could see the faint outline of something that had pressed down upon the grass only moments ago.
A coffin.
“Look,” he whispered to Kelly. “See? Look how the grass is pressed down here.”
Kelly dropped down next to Michael, her eyes scanning the area in front of the sepulcher. “Here?” she
