The coffins get dusty.
Two times a week I go downstairs to the Selection Room and give them a once-over. A little Fantastic and an old Fruit of the Loom t-shirt do the trick. That’s where I was on the Sunday morning the phone call came. We had no bodies on view. No one was scheduled to come in to make arrangements. I was alone. Usually, there was at least one person around to talk with, but not that day.
Lew Henderson, owner of the Home, was in the middle of a month-long vacation in Florida. It was something he’d done every October since the death of his wife seven years before. Lew considered himself semi-retired after Karen died, but he came in every day to shoot the breeze, maybe go over the books, handle things if I needed time off, before heading to the golf course.
Clint Barnes, my assistant, was at ten o’clock Mass at St. Ann’s Catholic Church in Croybridge, the next town over, where he and his wife, Cookie, lived. Sunday was Clint’s day off unless we were swamped with several funerals at once.
Nolan Fowler, our primary embalmer and restoration man, was at a weekend Seminar in Cincinnati sponsored by the National Embalmers Society. He was due back on Monday. And our cosmetologist, Elaine Whurley, only came in when we had bodies. Elaine was a fifty-eight-year-old beautician who for years had moonlighted for us and DiGregorio’s, the other Funeral Home in Dankworth.
I’d worked my way through twelve of the sixteen coffins on display when the telephone across the hall in the Embalming Room rang. We don’t keep a phone in the Selection Room. The process of choosing a coffin is of such a delicate nature a ringing phone might be a jarring disruption. And I always turn off my iPhone when I’m giving a showing. I dropped the T-shirt onto the base of the coffin and trotted into the hallway.
I went straight to the cream-colored door with the word PRIVATE stenciled on it in two-inch thick chocolate brown letters, opened it and stepped into the clammy aroma of formaldehyde which hung in the air like the scent of new tires in a Sears Automotive Department. The telephone was on the wall. Taped beneath it was last year’s inspection certificate from the Ohio Board of Health.
“Henderson’s Funeral Home,” I said. “May I help you?”
“Who’ve I got?” said the deep-set male voice which I recognized instantly as belonging to Perry Cobb, Chief of Police of Dankworth. ”You ghouls all sound alike.”
“It’s Del,” I said, thinking so much for his perception.
Nolan, Lew, Clint and I sounded nothing alike.
Lew’s rich baritone made him sound like an announcer on a classical music program, which was in contrast to my modulated, soft-spoken greeting which, I was once told, made me come off like a priest answering the phone in a rectory. When Nolan took a call he would blurt an inappropriately cheerful “Henderson’s!” into the receiver as if it were happy hour at a bar. And Clint’s tentative voice had a disarmingly childlike quality.
I reached for the pen in my shirt pocket, held it up to the lined yellow notepad hooked onto the wall next to the phone and prepared to write down the name and address I assumed Perry would be giving me.
“What do you need, Perry?” I asked, my tone businesslike. I ignored the ‘ghoul’ remark, just as I always disregarded his jibes. He’d been ragging on me ever since my mother and I moved to Dankworth after my father died when I was in high school. As my mother would say about someone’s poor behavior, ‘It was his way,’ and I’d accepted it. I had to. When Perry Cobb called it usually put money in my pocket.
Because Dankworth is only a township we don’t have our own Coroner. We fall under the umbrella of the County, so when a body needs to be transported to the Coroner’s office for autopsy, Perry calls us or DiGregorio’s. We get a small fee for this: fifty dollars plus gas mileage.
“I’m at Elm Grove cemetery,” he said. “How soon can you get a hearse up here?”
“Twenty minutes. What’s going on?”
“Seems the grave robbers have struck again,” he said, the last word slightly slurred, no doubt because of the chewing tobacco in his mouth.
Over the last six months somebody had been breaking into turn of the nineteenth century mausoleums and above-ground crypts at Elm Grove cemetery looking for jewelry and valuables on corpses. Cemetery management considered themselves lucky that whoever was doing it wasn’t interested in body parts for satanic rituals or potions.
“What’s that got to do with you needing a hearse?”
“We got a body. A female.”
“You have an exhumation, Perry?”
“Not quite. There’s been a murder.”
I leaned back against one of the four portable embalming tables. The icy chill from the stainless steel ran through my slacks and reached the backs of my thighs, instantly sending a mild tingle up my spine.
“Where’d you find her?” I asked.
“I didn’t. Vaughn did.” Vaughn Larkin was night watchman of the cemetery and a good friend of mine.
“When Vaughn was making his midnight rounds he heard a noise. Checked it out and found that the entrances to seven mausoleums were broken into. One had the corpse in it. Hurry your ass up here. I want to get her autopsied so maybe I can find out who the hell she is… was. We’re in Section Nine.”
“I’ll leave right now.”
“Good. Oh, Del, do me a favor. Bring me some coffee. Milk and sugar. And a chocolate donut with those multi-colored sprinky things. Haven’t had my breakfast yet.”
Perry was laughing as he hung up.