“You want to make something of it?” Absalom’s voice was a lot like Absalom himself, big and heavy, so no, I didn’t want to make something of it. Instead, I watched as he lit a candle in a yellow votive glass and placed it in front of the doll.
The way I figured it, it was as good a time as any to get down to business.
“OK, people!” I sounded as perky as a phys ed teacher and reminded myself that was not like me, either. It certainly wasn’t the image I wanted to portray, for my team or for the TV cameras. Before Greer showed her gnomey little face, I knew I had to get my act together.
I found a right-height tombstone that was nice and flat, and sat down on it. “We need to come up with a plan,” I said.
Sammi rolled her eyes.
Delmar and Reggie kept digging.
Crazy Jake put his camera three inches from my nose and snapped.
When the light show stopped flashing in my eyes and I could almost see again, I realized Absalom was standing right in front of me, his massive arms folded over his even more massive chest. “You’re not serious, are you?” he asked.
I guess there was something about that booming voice of his (not to mention the whole menacing presence thing) that made his fellow teammates sit up and take notice. One by one, they drifted closer, and suddenly, I was surrounded. There wasn’t room for me to stand, not without getting too close to Crazy Jake. With no choice, I kept my seat and looked up at the felons… er… parolees (or was it probationers?) around me.
“Look, I could throw you a line of bull,” I told them. “But something tells me you’ve all been lied to before, so I’m just going to lay this on the line. You don’t want to be here? Well, I don’t want to be here, either.”
I was trying to be flexible, so I ignored it when Sammie mumbled a curse. I continued.
“None of us have any choice. I’m here because my boss says I have to be here. You’re here…” With Reggie glaring, Absalom staring, and Sammi sneering, this did not seem to be the time to bring up their criminal pasts.
“I’ve never done a cemetery restoration before,” I said instead, and big points for me for being so honest. “So I’m not really sure how this is supposed to work. I do know that those TV cameras will be over here in a little while, and when they are, we should at least try to look like we know what we’re doing.”
“Won’t make no difference.” Delmar scuffed the toe of one sneaker against the bare ground. “You know what’s gonna happen. That TV show is going to make us look like losers. That producer…” He gave the word an acid twist, and I decided right then and there that Delmar was a good judge of character. “She’s gonna make those rich ladies look better than us. No matter what we do.”
“Then I guess we’re going to have to do what we do so well, she won’t be able to do that.”
It was a convoluted answer on my part, and to cover up my inadequacies and try and look in control, I stood. None of my teammates gave an inch. In fact, Reggie took a step closer, his eyes narrowed. Crazy Jake stuck the camera under my nose. “I’m taking pictures,” he said. Lucky for my retinas, he didn’t demonstrate. “Then we’ll know what it looked like. You know, before and after.”
This struck me as a very uncrazy idea. I told Jake to run with it. With him busy and out of the way, I handed out the listing of burials that had been included in the mountain of files Ella had delivered in those tote bags the day before, along with the hand-drawn maps of our section that some volunteer had taken the time to prepare. “Jake’s right,” I said, and for my efforts, I got a creepy kind of smile from him before he snapped another picture of me. “We can’t start to change things until we know what’s here. So let’s each take a portion of our section and compare the headstones and names to what’s on this map.”
Without bothering to take one of the papers I offered, Absalom went back to his voodoo altar.
Reggie and Delmar picked up their shovels.
Sammi snatched one of the maps out of my hand and gave me a snappy, “Whatever,” before she walked away.
“What have you found out?”
Have I mentioned that ghosts don’t show up in real life the way they do on TV or in the movies? I mean, ghosts on TV, when they pop up, there’s usually some sort of spooky music playing. But the truth is, there’s nothing that signals their arrival. One second they’re not there, the next second they are.
One second I was all alone watching my teammates skulk away.
The next second, Jefferson Lamar was standing at my side.
I controlled my little shriek of surprise, and just so nobody thought I was as crazy as Jake, I moved away from his grave. There was nobody around near that dilapidated mausoleum, so I went over there, and I didn’t say a word until I knew I couldn’t be overheard.
“You haven’t exactly given me a lot of time,” I told him.
“You had all night. What were you doing?”
Honestly, did he expect me to answer that?
“These things take time,” I told him. “Your case is more than twenty years old.”
“But you could have gone to the library and read the old newspaper articles,” he said, and I made a mental note of it. It was what a real private investigator would do. “You could have checked out the scene of the crime.”
Another mental note. “I’m going to do all that,” I said, my conscience clear now that he’d made the suggestions and I thought they were good enough to actually follow. “But I’ve got this day job, see, and the TV station is here filming, and-”
I didn’t have a chance to explain the rest of my complicated life to Jefferson Lamar. I mean, how could I when I heard the unmistakable sounds of a fight?
4
By the time I got there, Absalom, Crazy Jake, and Sammi were standing in a circle, watching Reggie and Delmar go at each other. They were down on the ground, rolling in the dirt, and Reggie had Delmar in a headlock. That wasn’t enough to stop the kid. His teeth were close enough to Reggie’s arm to do some damage, and he took full advantage-and a huge chomp. Reggie screamed and swore a blue streak, and when he loosened his hold, Delmar rolled and kicked.
Crazy Jake jumped out of the way just in time to avoid serious injury, but Delmar’s kung fu-fighter impression wasn’t wasted. He caught Reggie in the jaw with one beat-up Reebok, and Reggie’s head snapped back. He wasn’t down for the count, though.
His eyes narrowed and fiery, his breaths straining, Reggie lunged, and when he did, he looked a whole lot like that pit bull on his forehead. Growling, he grabbed Delmar’s ankle and twisted. Delmar grunted, rolled, and kicked again.
And I knew if I didn’t do something quick, somebody was really going to get hurt-and the whole crazy mess just might get caught on camera.
“Stop! Right now!” I sounded like a desperate kindergarten teacher and, honestly, that’s exactly how I felt. I raced over, and because she wasn’t about to give an inch, I had to nudge Sammi aside to get close. Since I’m about twice her size and she wasn’t expecting it, my push knocked her off her feet. The last I saw of her, she was butt down in a patch of weeds.
Sammi was less than happy, even after I mumbled a hurried, “Sorry.” Her curses were just as loud and colorful as Reggie’s.
And I so didn’t care.
It wasn’t until I was right on top of where they were still tussling in the dirt that I saw Delmar had something pressed to his chest.
The something in question was a dirt-coated box. It was about half the size of a piece of computer paper and made of wood. I have a degree in art history, but believe me, that doesn’t make me an expert in things old and moldy. Even so, I could tell the box had been buried a long time.
I could also see where it came from-there was a hole right next to Jefferson Lamar’s headstone.
