It read: MALCOLM CUZINS.
“Ain’t that something?” Jinx said. “Here we was just looking and looking, and we sat down to have a boiled egg and we found it.”
“It’s God’s will,” Terry said.
“Or we found it because we had a map and was looking around,” Jinx said.
I grabbed up the shovel, knocked the poison ivy back, and started digging. I could tell pretty quick that the dirt had been moved and not too long ago. My first thought was May Lynn might have got to the money already, but then the shovel clicked on something; I dropped it, got down on my hands and knees. So did Jinx and Terry. We all started scraping the dirt back with our hands.
As we dug, the day slipped away, and I heard a whip-poor-will call from somewhere over the hill. We kept digging.
My fingers wrapped around something solid, and I called out. Terry and Jinx started helping me dig there, and in no time at all we came upon a large piece of crockery. It had a tight cover on it, and when we felt around the lid, we realized it had been sealed with wax.
We dug more, knocked away the dirt around it, and lifted it out. It was a small crockery pot, but heavy enough. Terry pulled out his pocketknife and trimmed around the waxed-on lid until the wax was loose enough we could get the lid off. There was a bag inside with a blue-and-white flower pattern on it. I pulled it out. I recognized it as a match to the pillowcases and curtains and May Lynn’s dress. It was pretty heavy. It was tied shut with a string. Before I could loose the string, Terry went at it with his pocketknife. We opened the bag and looked inside.
It was full of greenbacks, and even a bit of change. There was a daddy longlegs in there, too. He was dead and dried up, like a salesman’s heart.
“Oh, hellfires,” Jinx said.
“That’s a lot of money,” I said.
“I don’t mean that,” Jinx said. “Looky there.”
She was pointing at something in the grave. It was right under where the crockery had been. We had been so excited we hadn’t noticed. It was a row of teeth, and they was partly coated in clay.
“Well,” Terry said. “It is a graveyard. You are going to find bones.”
“Yeah, but look there,” Jinx said, and pointed again.
Down a ways was a hand. The hand still had some flesh on it, and there were worms digging into it.
“Them worms would have done chewed up anyone buried long ago,” Jinx said. “This fella may not be fresh as this morning’s milk, but he’s fairly new to the ground.”
“She’s right,” Terry said. He stood up, got the shovel, and started gently digging around the body. It took a long while, but in time it was uncovered. It was a man in a brown-and-white pin-stripe suit, lying slightly on his side with his knees pushed up toward his middle. The teeth we had seen was in a skull. A lot of him was missing, but he didn’t need any of it back.
The white stripes on his suit had turned the color of the red clay, and there wasn’t any shoes on the feet, just brown silk socks with blue clocks on them. There were still strips of flesh where the face had been, and on the skull was a brown narrow-brimmed hat. It was crushed up, but it was easy to see that, like the suit, it had been something that cost money and most likely went with a new cigar and gold watch chain.
Terry got down on his hands and knees and looked the body over. He said, “It still has an odor about it. You’re right, Jinx. He hasn’t been in the ground all that long.”
Terry opened the man’s clay-caked coat. When he did, way it stuck to the rotting body, it made a sound like something ripping. He reached inside the man’s coat pockets, but there wasn’t anything in them. He fumbled through the outside pockets and found some threads and a button. He pulled off the hat, and when he did the man’s skull crumbled somewhat. You could see that the back of his head had been crushed. Terry took the hat, which was dark in the back, and shook it into some kind of shape. He looked inside of it and let out his breath.
“It has his name stenciled on the inside band,” he said. “Warren Cain.”
He showed it to us. I let out my breath.
“Wasn’t that name in May Lynn’s book?” I said.
“That was the man her brother was running with,” Terry said. “The one who helped him rob the bank. Now we know what happened to their partnership.”
“And if that ain’t enough, they took his dadburn shoes,” Jinx said.
“Jake would be my guess,” Terry said. “It would make sense they came here to bury the money, and an argument ensued-”
“Ensued?” Jinx said.
“Started,” Terry said. “And when it did, it turned ugly, and Jake killed him, buried him, and put the money on top of him. My assumption is they had already dug the hole for the money, and Jake didn’t want to dig another. Probably caught him from behind with the shovel.”
“Maybe there wasn’t an argument, and he planned to kill him all along,” I said.
“Either way makes sense,” Terry said. “He killed him, hid the money on top of him, and took his shoes because he liked them. He’d have probably taken the hat and the suit, too, if he hadn’t covered them in blood by hitting Warren with that shovel.”
“That’s all tough on the dead man and all,” Jinx said, “but maybe we ought to count the money. Ain’t like he’s gonna get any deader.”
We counted it twice. There was close to a thousand dollars. When we put the money back in the bag, it was on the edge of night.
“It’s like we done dug up a pirate’s chest,” Jinx said.
“It is at that,” I said.
Jinx cleared her throat, said, “You know, that’s a lot of money even if we don’t burn May Lynn up.”
“We have to stick to the plan,” Terry said.
“Do we?” I said.
“We do,” Terry said. “She’s why we found the money.”
“We sure gonna use a lot of it going out to that California,” Jinx said. “We could use a lot of it someplace closer.”
“That sounds greedy,” Terry said. “If not for her we wouldn’t have known about the money, and when it comes right down to it, it’s not our money.”
“When it comes right down to it,” Jinx said, “it’s not her money, neither. Nor her brother’s. It come from a bank.”
“Do you think her daddy knows where it’s buried?” I asked.
Terry shook his head. “He did, he would have already dug it up and drank it up. He’s not exactly a salt-away- for-a-rainy-day sort of individual. Jake told May Lynn where it was when he was sick because he didn’t want anyone else to know. She obviously didn’t have time to dig it up and leave before things went wrong.”
“Think she knew about the murdered man?” I said, nodding at the hole.
“I don’t know,” Terry said. “I think when Jake realized he was dying he had her draw up the map and didn’t tell her his bank-robbing buddy was here under it. Listen, we want to get out of here, don’t we?”
Me and Jinx nodded.
“Here’s our chance,” Terry said. “And we ought to take May Lynn with us.”
“She’s pretty snug in the graveyard,” Jinx said.
Terry gave Jinx a hard look. “She’s our friend.”
“Was,” Jinx said.
“Should we forget her because she’s dead?” he said.
“I ain’t forgetting her,” Jinx said. “I remember her real good. But what I’m saying is she’s dead and there’s a lot of money in that bag and I don’t think she had plans to share it with us.”
“Does that matter?” Terry said.
“You got the bus tickets to get, the food for going out there, someplace to stay, and so on,” Jinx said. “It can run into some expense, and I’m not sure that’s how we want to spend the dough.”
“May Lynn didn’t want to end up buried in some hot plot of dirt in the pauper’s section of the local graveyard,” Terry said, “and I don’t think we should let her.”
