Buried Stuff Page 10

  The human drama that was unfolding around them slowed the police officers who had been combing the fields and lawn. Everything slowed during the Sullivans’ walk to the field and their return to the driveway. Jane watched Mrs. Sullivan shake her head when an officer brought her a glass, and noticed she did not even acknowledge the folding chair that someone had placed behind her. Mr. Sullivan placed his hand on the police car in the driveway, but he did not lean on it. He stood tall, supporting his own weight.

  Jane watched them respond to Munson’s questions. She tried to imagine what they might be. Do you know what might have brought your son to the area? Was he working on a story? Had he mentioned any problems he was having at work? Trouble in any relationships? Girlfriend? What did he do outside of work? Did he gamble? Does he have any friends who might be able to tell us what he was doing here?

  Jane’s question? Why did a murder victim, the one who was dead, always have to be so accountable? Why did the first line of questioning always seem so accusatory? Why did Johnny Sullivan, weekday journalist and weekend farmer, go and get himself killed?

  Once, when Jane had overheard a police officer comment that a victim had been at the wrong place at the wrong time, she had to restrain herself from pointing out the fact that anyone who got him or herself murdered was in the wrong place at the wrong time, yes? The problem with a cliché was that it developed from a kind of truth, and people so quickly get cynical about truth since they can’t do anything else about it.

  Jane watched Johnny Sullivan’s parents shake their heads and nod slowly, answering the barrage of questions that must have sounded like words in another language. Jane thought about what the rest of their day would be like. A conversation about when they could have their son’s remains, a totally violating search of the room that Johnny stayed in on his weekend visits to their farm, the shattering realization of what an autopsy was going to do to kill their son all over again, the phone calls to relatives and friends, finally, funeral arrangements. Those are the parts of the family’s day that the television programs don’t show. Nick and all other television watchers might know the drill of what happens during the peaks of actions, but during those valleys, those lulls in confrontation, those quiet moments of dealing with the messiness of murder, there was nothing that made it on the air. Nothing prepared people; no instructional videos were available for those whose lives were turned upside down by violence. Because Jane knew all of this, because she felt sorrow and pain, she wanted to be the kind of person who could offer a prayer and a soft smile and the gift of silence to the Sullivans.

  But Jane had questions, too.

  Why was Johnny in the cornfield? Sure, she wanted to know that, but her most pressing question was why was he wearing Roger Groveland’s real estate company’s blazer?

  Jane looked around and located everyone. Tim and Charley were still at the shed, and Nick was now on the back porch with Lula, who looked like she had more food on a tray. Jeez, she’s treating this like a barn raising or something, Jane thought. How much can one woman cook in a day?

  Jane decided to find someone whom no one else was questioning and practice her own detecting. Oh had been telling her to never waste time watching others work.

  “Mrs. Wheel, there is always someone who knows something. Always someone who is holding a secret only because no one has asked him to tell,” Oh had said. “Find that someone, and you will have an answer that no one else has.”

  Jane found her someone pulling weeds in the flower beds in the front lawn. Why hadn’t anyone told Fuzzy that he shouldn’t be touching anything on the grounds? Everyone was inspecting every square inch of earth between the house, the backyard, the vegetable garden, the shed and digging site, and the cornfield, but no one was stationed in front of the house on the far side of the front lawn. There was a perennial flower bed there, and Fuzzy was down on his hands and knees pulling up tiny weeds and putting them into a brown paper grocery bag. “Fuzzy?” Jane said.

  He put his head even closer to the ground and kept pace with the creeping charley that was probably invading the garden as fast as he could pull it out.

  “Fuzzy, I don’t think the police want you to be digging around until they—”

  “If one more person—man, woman, or child—tells me what I can do or I can’t do on my own goddamn dirt, I swear I’ll …” Fuzzy turned around with his trowel raised over his head and his eyes blazing a kind of confused anger. Jane didn’t feel threatened exactly, although she knew he wasn’t kidding about being in charge of his own home, but she felt uncomfortable. She was seeing a part of this man that she had never known and shouldn’t know. They had an intergenerational friendship. The elderly friend of your parents was someone you should be able to wave at and exchange a few innocent jokes with, maybe even ask for advice. But the raw emotion Fuzzy was displaying was disturbing. She wasn’t remotely scared. He was close to eighty years old, and strong as he might be, Jane was pretty sure she could protect herself. Or outrun him. His behavior was just uncontrolled, and it left Jane feeling odd. Jane would feel the same if Lula, instead of exchanging recipes or advising her on Nick’s care and feeding, came to her with questions about what kind of lingerie she should order from a Victoria’s Secret catalog. There were just things that belonged to them and their friends. She was a generation removed, and she shouldn’t be witnessing anything as intimate as Fuzzy’s anger right now.

  Fuzzy shook the trowel at her then turned back to the ground.

  “Fuzzy, please …,”Jane began.

  Jane stopped herself and saw that Fuzzy was not, as she had at first thought, using the brown bag for weed disposal. He was, instead, removing something from the bag and planting. Tulip bulbs? Not exactly the right timing for planting flower bulbs, and the objects he was palming and burying were small.

  “What are you planting?” Jane asked.

  Fuzzy turned around, his face, a seeming mask of delight at finding her there behind him. “Janie, old girl, where’d you come from?”

  Jane dropped down on her knees beside the old man. “Fuzzy, what are you doing here?”

  Fuzzy, with a big smile, allowed his watery green eyes to roam her face before coming back to meet her own. He shook his head as if she had asked an improper but amusing question and stood, unfolding one creaky knee and pushing up slowly. He clutched the paper bag in one hand and the trowel in the other.

  “I’ll betcha Lula’s made sandwiches,” he said, running his tongue over his lips. “Let’s get us some.”

  Jane nodded and pushed herself up by putting one palm flat in the dirt. She followed Fuzzy to the house, hanging back just a few steps to examine what she had pulled out of the shallow grave Fuzzy had been digging.

  Brushing off the dirt with her thumb, she could just read the date on one of them.

  Nineteen thirty-nine. And the other looked like it might be 1940.

  What was significant about the years 1939 and 1940? Maybe nothing. It was probably more important to find the answer to the bigger question. Why in the name of heaven was Fuzzy Neilson burying pennies in his flower garden in the first place?

  Jane saw her husband and son hunched over the specimen table at the site. Nick held something up for Charley’s reaction, and Jane walked faster, afraid he might actually have been digging, which she was sure was against all of Munson’s scene-of-the-crime rules. But as she got closer, she saw they were only cleaning up some of the items that had been boxed up and stored in the shed.

  “Turns out Fuzzy has always been a pack rat,” said Charley. “He’s a collector of all sorts of things.”

  He held up a tiny skull in front of Nick, but addressed his remarks to Jane. “I think Fuzzy has saved every single object he’s ever pulled out of the ground.”

  Jane fingered the pennies in her pocket, thinking hard about the boxes of bits and pieces Fuzzy had so carefully packed away.

  “Squirrel, Dad.?” asked Nick, turning over the small bony shape in his hand.

 
; “Yep.”

  Jane leaned over the table and looked into the wooden crates whose contents Charley and Nickwere examining. Broken flowerpots, bottles, rocks, bones, pieces of ceramic tile. Fuzzy was a digger all right. Jane had heard bottle collectors refer to themselves as diggers, and although Fuzzy might not exactly display his finds like most collectors she knew, the amount of stuff he had gathered qualified him.

  “What does it mean, all this stuff he saved?” asked Jane.

  “You’re the expert here,” said Charley. “You’re the one who claims to know people by what they own.”

  Jane held up a piece of ceramic tile that had some kind of raised writing on it. A manufacturer’s date?

  “I sure don’t know Fuzzy. Not anymore. One minute he’s his old sweet self, the next minute he’s a fiery-eyed old tyrant. I have no idea what anyone’s up to,” said Jane, “except Lula. She’s out to make sure that every one of us gains twenty pounds. Every time I turn around she’s putting out more food. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was enjoying this. Her Aunt-Beacome-and-get-it-boys role.”

  “People cope in all kinds of ways, don’t you think? Somebody gets killed in her cornfield; she starts cooking to keep away scary thoughts,” said Charley, fiddling with a latch on one of the cupboards.

  “Munson said we could go over the stuff in the cabinet here. It had been locked up last night and the door hadn’t been tampered with. It’s as if,” Charley stopped and smiled, “it’s as if Fuzzy had his own little museum here, his own little curiosity shop.”

  “Charley, last night, you came over here, then saw me, and followed me out to the field?”

  Charley nodded.

  “Are you sure you didn’t stop in the outhouse?”

  “We pee outside, Mom,” said Nick. “I’ve told you that’s what we do on-site.”

  Jane nodded, considering her son’s words. Every man she had ever known seemed to take advantage of the great outdoors in that manner. What was it about men and marking their territory? Jane suspected that all those manly men, the ones who chose unlimited opportunities to pee outside.

  Tim came into the shed, wiping his hands on a Nice ’n Clean antibacterial wipe.

  “My dear, Munson has given me permission to take you away from all of this for a while,” he said, peering over Nick’s shoulder at the tiny squirrel skull that Nick was carefully cleaning with what looked like a delicate paint brush.

  “Shouldn’t we be playing catch or tossing a football around or something?” Tim asked. He shook his head and assumed his deepest protective voice. “This doesn’t look like a healthy hobby for my godson,” said Tim.

  “Let him teach you about bone preparation for a second, Timmy.” Jane took Charley’s hand and led him outside. They stood on the flat, concrete slab that served as a kind of porch area for the shed. The tables with some of Fuzzy’s more recent dug up treasure, including the fossils that accounted for their presence at the farm in the first place, were in front of them. They looked the same as last night, except for the bare space where the bones of Otto the cat had been.

  Jane pointed to the path from the cabin to the cornfield, marked midway by the old outhouse off to the side. If Charley had seen her walking out to the cornfield from here, cut over across the lawn, and followed her down the path, the outhouse would already be behind him. Whoever spoke to Jane from there could have run off toward the road while they were discovering Johnny Sullivan.

  “If you were here and not in that outhouse, who talked to me?” asked Jane.

  Jane knew the answer and wished she had not posed the question out loud. She was beginning to get comfortable in this skin. The Jane Wheel, girl detective, role was beginning to feel right. Then there was Charley’s hand holding hers. The way he had looked at her last night, that was feeling right, too. All of her restlessness and boring middle-aged angst and wonder about the rest of her life, the whole chapter 2, the one door slamming, but the next door opening kind of crap was beginning to feel less clichéd and more real. If Charley became too protective, all flannel-shirt-and-chino, strong-man-husband-I-pee-outside guy, what would become of her sudden I-am-woman-hear-me-rummage-and-be-a-detective surge of well-being?

  “The killer,” said Charley, matter-of-factly. His grip did not tighten, did not pull her away from the scene, but remained steady. He kept hold of her hand while he pointed to the road. “If a car had been parked out there on the road, you know, if someone didn’t bother with the driveway, no headlights would have shone into the house. The killer could have parked there, met up with Sullivan in the cornfield, shot him, and taken off for the road,” said Charley.

  “Ducking into the outhouse when he saw you by the shed or heard me come out of the cabin,” said Jane.

  They both stood there for a moment, considering how differently the night could have gone. Someone with a gun who had already killed a man had stood within a few feet of them and their son, a few feet farther away in the tent.

  “If he had decided that we …” Jane didn’t need to finish. She wasn’t sure which made her feel instantly cold—the fact that she and Charley so easily could have been killed last night or the more frightening thought that Nick would have come running out of the tent and found them.

  “I’ll finish telling Munson about the someone in the outhouse,” said Jane.

  “Yeah. He’ll be more interested in that than what I think I figured about the bones,” said Charley.

  Her husband explained that he pointed out a few of the tinier bones belonging to Otto on the ground near the body of Johnny Sullivan. They appeared not to have been part of the setup on his lap, but it looked like they had fallen from his pocket when he fell. Charley pulled out a tiny fragment encased in plastic from his pocket.

  “I’m giving this to Munson now. I picked it up before the police even got here. There was a little trail from the shed to the field to the body. I didn’t find any on the cabin path or out in the lawn heading toward the road.”

  “Maybe Munson’s men …,”Jane began.

  “I knew what I was looking for, these little bones and fragments, so I admit it was easier for me. But the police didn’t find anything like this where they were looking on and near that path because that isn’t where the person carrying the bones walked.

  “Somebody scooped up Otto from here and headed toward the cornfield,” continued Charley. “And the thing is, Otto’s skeleton wasn’t very big, but there’s no way somebody could pick up all those bones and carry them out there while carrying some kind of gun, put them all down, shoot Sullivan, then replace them on top of him,” said Charley, “because you saw Sullivan fall, then headed right out there. There wasn’t time for such a deliberate maneuver.”

  “Were the bones placed correctly in his lap, Charley?”

  “Not exactly. I didn’t really get that good of a look, I …” Charley stopped himself, and Jane knew what he meant. Neither of them had wanted to study the sight. “But it’s pretty obvious where to put the skull in relation to the ribs and the legs …,” Charley said, “you know, for the right effect.”

  “Maybe the killer didn’t carry the cat,” said Jane. “Maybe Johnny was over here, grabbed the bones, and was heading out to the cornfield to cut through and go home, back to his folk’s house.”

  Charley nodded. “That’s what I think, that Sullivan came to get the bones, or something out here, then headed off when he heard me coming from the tent. If he was cradling them just so,” said Charley, demonstrating by hugging his arms to his chest, “then got shot and fell, the bones could spill into his lap in a recognizable pattern.”

  “Why would someone want those bones?” asked Jane aloud, then, listening to her internal Oh, counseling her to ask the deeper question, the question that the question demanded, as Detective Oh had phrased it, she amended her musing.

  “Why would somebody kill somebody who wanted those bones?”

  Tim drove fast and Jane knew from experience that if she mentioned it, he wou
ld drive faster. Fuzzy’s farm was just about three miles due west of Kankakee, and zooming in on Route 17, Tim barely slowed, put on his turn signal, and jerked the Mustang into the parking lot of the EZ Way Inn.

  “No,” said Jane. She slouched down in the seat and covered her face. “I didn’t get a lot of sleep; I don’t have the strength.”

  “What do you think is going to happen if Nellie reads all about this in the Journal and her own daughter, an eyewitness, didn’t even bother to tell her?”

  “That’s funny. I am an eyewitness, but I don’t even know what I saw,” said Jane.

  After telling her story over and over to Munson, Jane began to have some respect for the method. The more she described the same thing, the more she realized what was missing from what she saw. And the more she realized what was missing, the harder she tried to remember, to envision. That must be the method. Eventually, a witness remembered something new. That effort paid off with the filling in of some gap, some hole in the memory.

  So far Jane’s memory had not been spackled with some magical recall compound, but it had gotten her to think about timing. She got up and went to the window, but when did she hear what she had thought was distant thunder. Could that have been the gunshot? Is that what a shot sounded like? She didn’t think so, but Munson didn’t seem that concerned.

  The memory that grew more and more clear was seeing Fuzzy on the porch, heading into the house. During her last interview with Munson he had not gotten called away or interrupted by a phone call and they had almost gotten to the point where her memory was, quite literally, Fuzzy.

  “Did you see anyone else or hear anyone else out there in the yard?”

  “Someone answered me from the outhouse when I passed,” said Jane. “I thought it was Charley, but—”