James H. Lewis, author of “The Grave Robber”, has written six novels, including the Chief Novak series. Lewis is a member of The Author’s Guild, Mystery Writers of America, Pennwriters, and Pittsburgh South Writer’s Group.
*****
I shivered in the cold room of the St. Augustine medical examiner’s office, cursing myself for bringing only a short-sleeve shirt to Florida. Sheriff’s Deputy Grady Palmer asked, “Are you ready, Hugh?”
“Of course,” I said. “I may only be a dentist, but I’ve seen it all.” I’m a dental surgeon, but I keep an unassuming profile to get along with those I grew up with. Just a dentist will do.
“Grace,” Palmer said to the assistant medical examiner, “This is Dr. Hugh Ramsay. He was raised over in Welaka, but he’s up in Atlanta now.” Not acknowledging me, she opened the left-hand cooler, wheeled out the stretcher, and unzipped the body bag, revealing an embalmed human figure.
“Is this your aunt?” the deputy asked.
I gave him a puzzled expression. “You don’t need me to tell you it’s Aunt Ruth. She called the cops out every time she thought an intruder was outside.”
Palmer laughed. “She sure did, but since you’re the next of kin, you must confirm her identity. It’s the law.”
I snorted in exasperation. “This is the body of Ruth Ramsay Hewitt, my late father’s sister. Was it necessary to bring me down from Atlanta just for this?”
Palmer’s glare suggested I let him do his job. “If that were all, it would have been enough. But like I said when I called you, there’s more.” Turning to the assistant ME, he said, “Show him the other one.”
I snorted in exasperation. “…Was it necessary to bring me down from Atlanta just for this?”
“What other one?” I asked. The young woman opened the right-hand cooler and wheeled out a second body bag. As she unzipped it, I peered at the desiccated flesh of a face whose blonde hair was matted to its skull. Even given its decomposition, I recognized this as the body of a younger woman which, unlike my aunt’s, had not been preserved.
“Do you recognize her?” Deputy Palmer asked, his face locked in a tight grimace.
Wrinkling my nose against the putrescine odor, I replied, “No, I’ve never seen her before.”
“You’re certain?”
“It’s hard to tell what she looked like,” I said, glancing again at the shrunken features and gaping jaw, “but she doesn’t resemble anyone I know.”
Palmer nodded to Grace, who closed the body bag and returned the stretcher to the cooler. Palmer and I left the room and stood in the reception area, warmer in temperature but no less cold in appearance. “Who is she?” I asked.
Palmer and I played on the Crescent City High School football team. He’d always been three bricks shy of a load, and multiple tours in Afghanistan seemed to have shaken loose a few more. “We don’t know,” he said. “She was buried alongside your aunt … in her coffin.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” I said. “How did she die?”
“There are no apparent wounds or bruises, but given the body’s condition, you can’t tell. The ME may tell us more once he’s performed the autopsy. We held off until you got here, hoping you could identify her.”
“Thanks,” I said, not attempting to hide my sarcasm. “Take me through this again.” When Palmer had called my office the day before, he’d only told me someone had robbed my aunt’s grave and I needed to fly to St. Augustine to identify the body. When I resisted, he’d mentioned an additional factor—a “complication”—but he’d refused to be more specific. I remained hesitant but welcomed the chance to spend the weekend at my vacation home on the St. Johns River. “Why would anyone dig up a grave?” I’d asked.
“Looking for jewelry mostly,” Palmer said. He explained thieves prowled graveyards, searching for expensive headstones of women who had recently passed away. When they found a likely target, they returned after nightfall, unearthed the vault and casket, and sawed their way in. It was a noisy process, so thieves favored rural cemeteries with less risk of discovery.
“Mostly looking for jewelry, you said. What else could they be after?”
The deputy allowed himself a wry smile. “A cult of Satan-worshippers is digging up graves near Gainesville. They use the bones in some sort of ceremonies.”
I sneered. “Devil worship?”
“Don’t laugh. This is Florida, man.” His use of the derisive term made us chuckle, but he quickly became serious again. “You have no idea what we deal with these days. This isn’t like when we were growing up, sealing mailboxes with Super Glue.”
I ignored his reference to our criminal pasts, nor did I argue that it isn’t just Florida that’s gotten weird. “What happens now?”
“The coroner will give us a cause of death, estimate how long she’s been dead, and provide a physical description—age, height, weight, any distinguishing features. We’ll then search the NCIS database for missing persons, search dental records, or try for a DNA match. Once we know who she was and when she died, we’ll figure out who buried her.”
Perhaps sensing my doubts a small county sheriff’s office could handle the task, he said, “This was no accident. Whoever did this murdered her. It’s the only reason to go to all this trouble. And whoever it is, we’ll find him.”
I wished him luck and stepped out into the searing mid-August heat.
*****
Holding my golf cap at my side, I stood before the open wound that had been my aunt’s grave. Her marble headstone lay on its back, nearly covered by the mounds of dirt and loose sand someone had unearthed. During the forty-five-minute drive from St. Augustine to Welaka, I’d reflected on what Grady Palmer had told me … and what he had not. I understood why the deputy focused on the woman’s death. Still, he’d expressed little interest in the vandal or vandals who had desecrated this grave.
Not that the plots of my ancestors were in much better shape. I kneeled before my parents’ headstones and pulled at the encroaching vines. The lettering on my grandfather’s concrete slab was so weathered I could no longer make out the inscription. Another monument lay face down, perhaps kicked over by whoever had robbed Aunt Ruth’s casket. I tried to put it back in place, but the ground was too soft to support it. Another stone was so eroded I couldn’t make out a word. From its position in the graveyard, however, I suspected the person who lay at my feet was my great-grandmother. She’d accompanied her husband from Pennsylvania in 1893, only to lose her life to a coral snake within months of her arrival.
Not that the plots of my ancestors were in much better shape.
Generations lay in our family’s corner of this small county cemetery, sheltered by live oak trees at the end of a dirt road. How did the grave robbers even find this place? And why did they pick this specific plot among the three hundred surrounding it?
Reflecting on my two visits since my aunt’s funeral, I recalled her grave was always well tended. Someone among her lifelong friends left flowers and raked away leaves from the overhanging trees. Which led to another question: Who discovered the grave had been robbed? Was it the same person who showed concern for her resting place?
*****
After a short drive down the county road leading to the house, I parked my rental, took the front stairs two at a time, and unlocked the front door. The living area, perched safely above flood stage, looked much as it had during my previous visit two months before. It smelled musty, but opening the front windows would soon address that. I turned on the tap to pour a glass of water, but not even a drip came out. Suspecting the source of the problem, I descended the front steps again and walked the fifty yards to my utility building. I found the reset switch on the purification system and was rewarded with the sound of water pulsing through the filters.
The construction company had finished work on this building less than a year before, and I was pleased with how solid it was. It stood on a concrete slab twenty-five feet above the river level, high enough to withstand most storm surges. Neither it nor my home was likely to float away if another hurricane like Irma swept through. I’d spent thousands of dollars seeing to that.
As I turned to leave, a shadowy figure appeared in the doorway, backlit by the sun. “Hugh?”
I slowly exhaled, recognizing the voice of Wallace Harney, my next-door neighbor. “You scared me,” I said.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone,” the old man said. “When I heard a car come up the driveway, I thought I’d better check.”
“I appreciate it,” I told him, and I meant it. His house was concealed behind live oak, pine, and cypress trees. A lifetime spent in the Florida sun had clouded his eyes with cataracts, but nothing was wrong with his hearing. He and my father had been best friends, looking after each other after both their wives passed away in the same year. When Dad died and Aunt Ruth moved in, Wallace continued to look after the place, a role he still played now that the house stood empty for weeks at a time.
“What brings you here?” he asked as we walked toward the house.
As I told him about the grave robbery, he shouted, “What bastard would do that to Ruth’s grave? If I were younger….”
“It gets worse,” I said. “Someone had stuffed a woman’s body into her casket. Grady Palmer’s convinced she was murdered.”
“Palmer’s handling this?” Harney spat on the ground. “That boy couldn’t find an elephant in a snowstorm.” While I shared his assessment, I refrained from asking him what a pachyderm would be doing in a blizzard. “Anyhow,” he said as we reached the front stairs, “no one’s gone missing around here that I know of. I wonder who she is?”
“They’re searching through the missing person database. Come on. Let’s open a few beers and discuss the good old days.”
Harney followed me up the stairs, groaning with the effort. I grabbed two Stellas from the refrigerator. As we sat under the front deck awning, he asked me questions about the dead woman, none of which I could answer. “I’m only here for the weekend,” I told him. “I pushed a day of patients off on my associates, but no more. I need to take a week off to repair our cemetery plots. My ancestors deserve that much.”
“Showing respect,” he said. “It’s the proper thing to do.” I’m sure he had his own legacy in mind as he viewed the future through his clouded eyes. “If I can help, just ask.”
I thanked him, but I could never repay the man for all he’d done for my father, my aunt, and now for me. I loved the old guy and wished he’d allow me to pay for eye surgery. “It’s a simple procedure,” I said as I made the offer for the third time. “They open the front of your eyes, extract the cloudy lenses, and give you brand new ones. They even correct your vision so you can see like a kid again.”
“I’ll give it some thought,” he promised. We sat for a few minutes, enjoying a light breeze and a sailboat crossing our vision as motorboats swooped around it. “I don’t see your wife around these days.”
“She doesn’t care for this place. Her idea of a Florida getaway is a condo in Naples.” This was an understatement. Gaye hated the river house, the heat and humidity, and the bears, snakes, and other wildlife. Most of all, she didn’t like the neighbors, referring to them as “those bumpkins of yours.”
This was my retreat, left me by my father with the stipulation his sister was to occupy it as long as she lived. Which had been too damn long. Aunt Ruth lingered for seven years, living for free while I paid the upkeep and resisting my efforts to improve the place. “I don’t want all that noise going on,” she’d said. Meanwhile, the house had deteriorated around her, making the inevitable restoration work even more expensive.
In the two years since her death, I’d poured thousands into the property, strengthening the bulkhead, replacing the rickety dock, restoring the interior, and updating the kitchen. I’d promised Gaye, who’d waged war over every dollar I spent on the place, that the utility building was the last step.
But it wouldn’t be. This was my home. I intended to turn what had been little more than a shack on stilts into a comfortable getaway. I had resources my ancestors had not, and I meant to do them proud.
*****
When I returned to Atlanta, I found Gaye and her parents visiting on the enclosed patio porch. I said a quick hello and headed upstairs to change and empty my carry-on bag. I’d spent Saturday scrubbing the river house—both rooms downstairs, the two guest suites on the top floor, and the three bathrooms. The cleaning service came once a month, but their efforts were rudimentary.
When I returned to the patio, Doug, my father-in-law, asked how my trip had gone. I didn’t think he cared, but before I could answer, Gaye shook her head to warn me against providing details. “Uneventful,” I said. “Just a quick in-and-out to make sure it’s in good shape.”
“I don’t know what you see in it,” he said with a self-satisfied harrumph. “Hanging out with all those rednecks when you could stay at our place in the mountains.” He turned to his wife Angela for affirmation and got a smile and a suppressed chuckle.
I resisted the temptation to ask if he’d moved Appalachian rednecks away from their summer home. Nor did I retort, “It’s mine,” since the house I was sitting in was not. Doug and Angela had bought it for us when we were starting out, putting it in their daughter’s name. They also paid for my post-graduate dental studies, even investing in my practice. “Investment” was the right word, for what I first took for fatherly concern turned into domination. It was the price I’d paid for prosperity.
I listened to the sagging end of the conversation without participating, the uninvited guest who crashed the party. After they left, I helped Gaye carry the plates and glasses from the patio. As I arranged them in the dishwasher, she said, “Tell me about this grave business.”
“It was more complicated than I thought,” I said, recounting what I’d learned. To her questions about the identity of the woman found in Aunt Ruth’s coffin, I replied with variations on I don’t know.
“Will this make the news?”
Until she’d asked, I hadn’t considered it. “Someone dumps a dead woman in a cemetery plot, and a grave robber unearths it. The media will gobble it up.”
She shook her head and emitted a deep sigh. “We don’t need the notoriety. It could affect your practice and reflect on Dad’s reputation.” Since Doug had been forced into retirement when his healthcare company pled guilty to Medicare fraud, I couldn’t see what reputation was at stake, but I kept the thought to myself. “And I don’t look forward to the looks from my friends,” she concluded.
“It has nothing to do with us. We’re victims.”
She sighed again, making sure I heard it. “I wish you’d sell the place. It’s nothing but a money pit.” I dropped a plate into the washer with such force I thought it might shatter. Perhaps I hoped it would. “This property has been in my family for over a century. It’s part of my heritage. And I like it.”
“I don’t,” she said. “I’ve tried, but twice is two times too many. Don’t put any more of our money into it.”
There it was again: Our money, the definition of “our” being fluid.
It didn’t take long for Gaye’s fears to be realized. The Palatka Daily News reported the story on Monday, and by that evening, the AP picked it up, and TV news crews mobbed St. Augustine and our little cemetery. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution put the story on an inside page the following morning, also reporting the dead woman had been three months pregnant. The sheriff’s office still hadn’t identified her. Fortunately, they left my name out of the article, treating it as another wild incident that could only have happened in Florida.
With public school classes about to resume, families flocked back to Atlanta from wherever they had gone to escape the heat, bringing with them dental issues they’d spent the summer trying to ignore. I was so swamped I had little time to think about the investigation. I learned from the Jacksonville papers that the sheriff had called in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, making Wallace Harney’s dismissal of Deputy Palmer’s abilities moot. I twice called Palmer to learn when he would release Aunt Ruth’s body for reinterment, but he was evasive.
Nearly two weeks passed when Wallace called my office, telling the receptionist it was an emergency. “The FDLE is at your house, executing a search warrant,” he said, breathing heavily. “They’re about to break down your front door. I can save you damage by letting them in.”
I gripped the phone so hard my hand turned white. My voice caught in my throat, but finally, I choked out a response. “I can’t imagine what they’re after, but yeah, let them in.”
What the hell?
*****
I bounded up the front stairs of the river house shortly before eight, having told Gaye only that someone had broken in. Sunset painted the great room a bright orange, but my face was crimson. Wallace Harney stood in the kitchen, picking pots, pans, and various cooking utensils off the floor and running a washcloth over each one before putting it away. “They tore up everything,” he said. “I’m putting things back together for you.”
“What the hell were they looking for?” I asked.
“No need to shout. You wouldn’t have a front door if it weren’t for me.”
I apologized and took a deep breath to cool off. “They’ve invaded my home, treating me like a criminal. They could have called and asked me to come down. And for what?” I looked past Wallace at the destruction in the great room that spanned the front of the house. “I didn’t know this woman, whoever she was. What are they looking for?”
Wallace had no answers. After picking the heavy items off the floor, he turned to the counter, where empty bags and boxes of staples lay in profusion. “They poured everything out,” he said. “I’ve taken two bags out to the garbage.”
I entered the front room and picked up an official-looking document from the dining table. It was a copy of the search warrant, stating the case’s file number, describing this as a murder investigation, and listing items covered by the order, of which the most prominent words were “any and all.” I dropped it where I’d found it, replaced the cushions from the sofa and chairs, and picked up magazines, newspapers, and flyers strewn across the hardwood floor. “There’s nothing here,” I said aloud as I returned books to the shelves.
Moving upstairs to the guest bedroom, I picked up a comforter heaped on the floor and tried to double it. Wallace joined me, and together we folded and compressed it. I opened the closet door, but Wallace said, “It goes in the chest at the foot of the bed.”
“Thanks,” I said, the first time I had expressed my appreciation. He returned my smile, his blue eyes sparkling. Where would I be without him?
After he left, I tried to sleep but lay awake, stewing. Hoping to organize my thoughts, I searched for a pen and notepad, but the sheriff’s office had also taken them, obtaining evidence I needed to buy more laundry detergent. I finally caught a couple of hours of restless sleep and, in the morning, called the lawyer who had handled my father’s estate. “I’m not experienced in criminal matters,” he said, “but I can refer you to a St. Augustine attorney who is.”
Criminal matters? For the second time in as many days, I shuddered. The sheriff thought I had killed this young woman. This was murder one, and Florida not only issues the death penalty, it executes it. But if I hired a criminal attorney, Gaye and her father would find out. I couldn’t afford their ensuing wrath. No, I’d have to handle this as best I could.
I called Grady Palmer but was told he wasn’t in. He didn’t return my call, although I left two more messages during the week.
*****
Palmer finally reached me four days later, saying he and the FDLE detective sergeant had a few questions for me. Could I make myself available that afternoon at one? I agreed and again considered calling the attorney, but I didn’t.
I reported to the Putnam County Sheriff’s office with three minutes to spare. Palmer didn’t come out to greet me. Instead, a uniformed officer issued me a plastic ID badge and led me through the hallway to a spartan interview room whose overhead fluorescent light panel emitted an annoying hum. Palmer stood, greeted me without shaking my hand, and introduced me to Detective Sergeant Barry Wheadon. He was Black, which, Florida being what it is, suggested he was more intelligent than the average white boy promoted to the position. He neither smiled nor frowned, giving no sign of what he was thinking.
Palmer motioned me to a seat and turned on a recording device. He identified the two officers, stated the date and time of the interview, and asked me to state my name. “Is this a formal interview?” I asked.
“It is. Do you object?”
“I object to how you tossed my house without so much as a phone call. I would have let you in.”
“We don’t announce our presence in advance,” Palmer said. “That’s the point.”
“Do you know a woman named Carli Sanders?” Wheadon asked.
“I’ve never heard of anyone by that name.”
“Do you recognize this photo?” he said.
I studied it. “No. Is that the dead woman?”
Palmer began to answer, but Wheadon overrode him. “She moved from Cincinnati to Jacksonville five months ago. Ms. Sanders told her mother she’d met a surgeon on the flight down from Atlanta. He invited her to dinner, but she said she didn’t date married men. The doctor told her he’d filed for divorce. When she still balked, he said his wife and her parents controlled his life. Her mother says she finally gave in, and they began seeing each other. Whenever he came to town, he’d invite her for weekends at his river house.” He delivered all this in a monotone, as though reading from a prepared script. “Sound familiar?”
Shrugging, I said, “I told you I don’t know her. Didn’t.”
“You keep your place real clean, don’t you?” Palmer said. “Spotless.”
What could he be driving at? “You’ve been there,” I said. “You’ve seen it.”
“Except the p-trap in the bathroom.”
When my face telegraphed ignorance, Wheadon explained. “It’s the bend in the pipe beneath the sink. It traps solid material that falls into the sink.”
“We pulled a wad of human hair from that trap,” Palmer added. “Woman’s hair, dyed blond.”
I said nothing but felt my heart race.
“The DNA from these samples matches that of the victim.” Wheadon and Palmer batted questions at me like table tennis players. “Ms. Sanders spent time at your house. Do you still say you didn’t know her?”
“I’m only here for a week at a time. Anyone could have used this house. Squatters are a problem all over these days.”
“A witness swears he saw the victim at your home and in your company on several occasions,” Wheadon said in the same neutral tone. “He says you referred to her as your wife. Now, do you want to tell us the truth?”
Wallace was the only possible witness. Doing a quick calculation, I pictured a defense attorney asking him to identify someone in the first row of the courtroom through his occluded eyes. “He’s mistaken,” I said.
“According to the medical examiner, Ms. Sanders died from heart failure,” Wheadon said, “brought on by a massive injection of digoxin, a drug commonly used to treat patients with heart failure. Your aunt took it, didn’t she?”
“So do many people. It’s a common prescription for those suffering from arrhythmia.”
“Which you’d know from your pre-med studies at Georgia Tech,” Palmer said. So they’d checked my undergraduate degree. I wondered what else they’d discovered.
“After your aunt died, I got an anonymous call accusing you of causing her death. The caller didn’t say how you’d done it, and since the medical examiner had determined she died of heart failure, I dismissed it. My mistake,” Palmer said. He smirked. I realized he was enjoying himself, the county boy getting the better of the big city hotshot.
“The ME ran new tests on your aunt’s body and found a concentration of digoxin in her bones,” Wheadon said. His expression changed from cold detachment to relentless intensity. “We know you refilled her prescription days before her death, but our witness says she had an ample supply.”
“Under your father’s will,” Palmer continued, “Aunt Ruth was to occupy your home until she passed away. Given her heart condition, you thought that wouldn’t take long. But she hung on, didn’t she?”
The ball returned to Wheadon’s side of the table. “We know you’re in an unhappy marriage. We know your wife’s family owns your practice. You tell friends you can’t get out from under them. We’ve confirmed that much of what you spun to Ms. Sanders, but you lied about ending your marriage. When she got pregnant, she expected you to marry her. But if you filed for divorce—even if your wife discovered your affair—she would ruin you, leaving you with nothing. So you killed her.”
My face fell as, with a blinding flash of the obvious, a flurry of tiny hints came into focus. The unknown person who tended Aunt Ruth’s grave. The person who knew where Aunt Ruth put every piece of cookware, every utensil, and even the bedroom comforter. The person who wore dark glasses in my presence, concealing what, days before, I’d recognized as bright, twinkling eyes. Who’d paid for his cataract surgery, the VA? How much had he observed while I thought he couldn’t see?
He hadn’t just looked after Aunt Ruth during her life. He’d been in love with her. Two widowers living next door to each other. I was the one who was blind.
When she died from a condition that had been under control, he suspected I’d killed her to get control of the house, but he couldn’t prove it. He had seen (or heard) Carli at the house, even spoken to her. When she disappeared—”I don’t see your wife around these days”—and he found Aunt Ruth’s grave had been disturbed, he figured out what I’d done.
He knew from experience an anonymous call would be futile. He’d reported his suspicions about Aunt Ruth’s death to Grady Palmer, but the deputy had done nothing. He needed proof. What better way than to unearth the evidence and then notify the sheriff’s office someone had defiled Aunt Ruth’s resting place?
“Well?” Wheadon said, his dark brown eyes drilling into me. Both men waited, expecting me to admit my guilt.
“I want to speak to an attorney,” I replied.
Wallace Harney, the grave robber, had done me in.
*****
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