Tomb With a View

I breathed what I hoped didn’t look like too big a sigh of relief. This was going to be easy and it involved absolutely no effort on my part except to remind her, “The volunteers don’t have lockers anymore.”

“Of course.” Her smile was shaky. “You were in on the meeting when we decided we would no longer provide lockers to the volunteers. Like Jim said then, it’s too much of a liability from a security standpoint, what with having to keep an eye on their personal possessions and then having the volunteers going up and down those steps into the basement. A lot of them aren’t as young as they used to be, you know, and I’d hate to think that someone might slip and fall. And it’s not like the old days when most of our volunteers lived right in the neighborhood and walked to work. Back then, they needed a place to store umbrellas and coats and things. Now most of our volunteers live outside the area, and they drive here to the cemetery. They leave a lot of their stuff in their cars, and their coats, of course, get hung in the main coatroom off the reception area. You remember how Jim thought that was such a good idea. Jennine can see the coatroom, right from her desk, and we don’t have to worry about anything getting misplaced or stolen.”

I nodded, and waited for more, but even before Ella said it, a spark ignited inside my brain. Like that idea was the rocket that propelled me, I rose to my feet. “But Marjorie was a volunteer for a long time. That means—”

“She still had her locker.”

We finished the thought in unison.

A world of possibilities spun through my head, but before I could get them in any sort of order, Ella continued. “She was told not to use it anymore, but you know how Marjorie could be. She thought she was special and she didn’t have to follow the rules like everyone else. I just thought of it a bit ago, the locker I mean, and I went downstairs to check and . . .”

“You found something?” My spirits soared to the ceiling. If the clue I needed to wrap up the case was under my nose all this time, I’d give myself a mental slap—but not until I flaunted my success in front of Quinn. I was moving toward the door even before I realized it and I only stopped when Ella put a hand on my arm.

“I didn’t find anything. Not exactly,” she said. “I mean, I didn’t even look inside the locker. I just came right up here to get you.”

“Because . . . ?”

She led the way. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

I hate basements. They’re mostly damp and stinky, and the dark and the quiet along with the moldy smells freak me out. This is especially true at Garden View, where the basement of the administration building is as old as the cemetery itself and had once (back in the olden days) been used to store bodies in the winter when the gravedigger’s shovels couldn’t penetrate the frozen ground.

Naturally, I wasn’t at all sorry when Jim decided to eliminate the locker room down there. It meant I never had a reason to go into the basement.

Except, of course, when Ella had a hold of my arm and was leading the way.

We got to the door outside what used to be the volunteer locker room and she drew in a calming breath. “You ready?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. If there’s a body, or—”

“Oh, it’s nothing like that,” she said. She pushed open the door and flicked on the overhead fluorescent lights.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dull light. In the recent past, the locker room had been used for storage, and against the wall to my right, there were boxes piled on the tan linoleum floor. At the far, shadowy end of the room was a door that I knew opened up to stone steps that led right into the cemetery. Directly across from the door were two rows of gray metal lockers with a wooden bench between them.

“That’s Marjorie’s,” Ella said, pointing to the left, all the way down at the end of the row and farthest from the door. “It was just like that when I came down here.”

“Just like . . .” I closed the distance between the door and locker, taking a closer look. “It was open? It was—?”

Ella nodded.

I stood in front of the locker. Not only was it opened, the lock had been forced, and it didn’t take a genius detective to figure that out. The door near the lock was smashed and dented.

The contents of the locker itself looked as if they’d been put through a blender. “Ransacked,” I mumbled. “Just like Marjorie’s house.”

“What do you suppose they took?”

I’d been so busy examining the locker, I hadn’t realized Ella had crossed the room and was standing right in back of me. When she spoke, I jumped.

“Sorry.” She patted my arm and leaned forward. “What do you suppose they took?”

I shrugged. “If something’s missing, we can’t possibly know what it is.” I was tall enough to see up on the top shelf of the locker. “Head scarves,” I said, making a face as I plucked a pile of the nasty, filmy things out of the locker and handed them to Ella. “Our thief didn’t take them, so whoever it was, he had better taste than Marjorie.”