Chapter Nineteen
NINETEEN
AROUND THE GRAVE, WORD spreads through the small crowd. Whispers at first, then mutterings, then hissed questions and prayers—all coalesce into a jumbled cacophony of suppressed voices.
“It’s a miracle!” someone whisper-yells.
And then all eyes turn to Will.
“Yes,” he says, eyes wide and round with astonishment. “My God! It’s a miracle! The Lord has called Brother Ezra home! He is risen!”
The susurrus of whispers swings into a loud, unbridled celebration of faith and wonderment with “Praise the Lord!” “Praise Jesus!” “Amen!” “He has risen!” all sounding at once.
I take a step closer to Chief Dishman, and together we watch as people prostrate themselves in front of the empty grave or fall to pieces in humble tears or join Will in prayer. I look up at Dishman and watch him shaking his head, taking in the same scene I am.
“Looks like this isn’t going to put an end to all the crazy talk,” I mutter to Dishman.
Under his breath, he says, “Jesus Christ.”
Then he moves into action, attempting to calm down the small crowd and roping Officer Gavin in to do the same.
I back away and watch the scene from a distance.
Will with tears streaming down his face.
Coroner Bradley talking to his gravediggers, gesticulating frantically at the empty coffin.
Thelma Worley still sitting in her little camp chair, pouring herself a cup lid full of coffee, shaking her head.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s Katie.
“Annie? Are you there?” she asks. She sounds panicked. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything is—Wait, are you okay?” I ask. “You don’t sound okay.”
I walk farther from the graveyard, across the gravel road, and down the hill toward the parsonage. The porch is crisscrossed with yellow police tape and I veer off and stand near the tree line.
“Katie?” I ask. “Are you there?”
I listen as she breathes out through pursed lips and then says, “I saw it again. The hand. I had the same nightmare and woke up and saw the hand again. It was writing on the wall.”
“What did it write?” I ask.
“The same thing. The king has been judged. His kingdom is no more. I had this feeling … like icy water rushing over me. I was chilled. I’m actually shivering.”
“You should call someone,” I say. “Have them come over and—if nothing else—watch the baby while you get some sleep.”
“You’re right,” she says. “I don’t think I’ve slept more than an hour or two at a time in … What day is it?”
“Wednesday,” I say. “You hired me on Sunday.”
“It’s only been four days?” she says. “Wait, what time is it? Did they—Has the exhumation happened?”
“Yes,” I say. And then I tell her what I’ve just witnessed.
“Empty?” she exclaims. A few silent seconds drag by and I almost ask her if she’s still there when she says, “Does that mean they buried an empty coffin?”
“I’m pretty sure they didn’t,” I say. “It seems clear that a body was in there.”
“Are you telling me that they buried my father on Sunday morning and then someone robbed his grave before you could have it exhumed?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“But why?”
“Probably for the same reason we decided to get the exhumation order to begin with,” I say. “Because there was likely incriminating evidence on the body that was missed before he was buried.”
“What are you going to do now?” Katie asks, still sounding somewhat dazed.
“Well, there’s not a lot I can do besides try to find his body. Do you want me to stay on the case for now?”
“Yes,” she says, immediately. “Yes. Let me know if you … Well, just keep me updated, please.”
“I will. Try to get some rest.”
We hang up and I walk back toward the cemetery and find Chief Dishman talking to a man in his thirties, tall and broad shouldered, who’s saying, “Chief, I swear to you he was in there.”
“You were a pallbearer?” Dishman asks.
“That’s right, sir. The coffin was thin and, well, if you’ll excuse me saying it, it was cheap.
The lid came askew when we put it down beside the grave and I could see him in there, all wrapped up.
My aunt Thelma told me he wanted to be buried like Jesus, but, good Lord, I can’t imagine the Son of God would’ve stank like he did. ”
Coroner Bradley, standing just beside Dishman, says, “Look, it wasn’t my fault he smelled! The man refused embalming. In the middle of a heat wave! I can assure you, I did everything I could. I kept him in cold storage the whole night he was in my mortuary and—”
“I couldn’t give a damn how bad the man stank,” Dishman says. “What I’m concerned about is whether or not he was ever in the coffin to begin with because he sure as hell ain’t in there now.”
“He was in there,” the pallbearer—Thelma’s nephew, apparently—says.
Coroner Bradley nods in agreement.
I walk around behind them, back to Ezra’s grave, and stand next to Thelma, who holds out a hand so I can help her to her feet. She grips tight, but I feel the shakiness in her legs as she stands. When she’s situated, she meets my gaze, and I’m stunned to see that her eyes are bright with tears.
“What’s going on here, Miss Gore?” she asks. “Who could’ve done this?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
Behind us, Officer Gavin approaches.
“Get all these people out of here,” Dishman tells him. “This is a crime scene.”
“A crime scene?” someone shouts. “This is the site of a miracle!”
“Amen!” someone else shouts.
“Yes! Praise Jesus!” another voice says. Together, Thelma and I watch them.
After a while, she shakes her head. “This is evil,” she says, her voice thin but determined. “Whatever happened here … this wasn’t the Lord’s work. It was the Devil’s. I just know it.”
Shaken, Thelma takes her coffee thermos and her camp chair and allows her nephew to escort her away from the grave. I watch as she treads carefully back down the hill. When she’s out of earshot, I approach Dishman and Coroner Bradley.
“What did the grave look like this morning,” I ask Bradley, “when you first got here?”
Bradley looks from me to Dishman, as if expecting the chief to put me in my place. Instead, Dishman says, “Well, hell, Bradley, answer the woman.”
“The sod looked exactly like it did when we put it back on Sunday morning,” he says.
“After we replace the dirt on top of a coffin, we hose it down to get the earth to settle. Then, we tamp it with a machine to bring it all level before we replace the sod that was cut from the ground before the grave was dug. When we leave, it’s clear the grave is new, but it’s neat.
And that is how it looked this morning. There was no sign of it being disturbed. ”
Dishman says, “Thelma Worley told me she came up and visited it yesterday evening. Took the dead flowers away. She said it looked normal.”
“He was in that coffin, Chief,” Bradley says.
“I pronounced his death, took him straight from the parsonage to the mortuary, cleaned his body and wrapped it, then put him in cold storage overnight. Sunday morning, we put him in the coffin and brought him over here and they had the funeral in the church. Then, we buried him. He was in there.”
Dishman nods and then makes a gesture that says Bradley can move along. I watch as he walks down the hill, looking over his shoulder at the empty grave more than once.
Several feet away, it’s clear that Gavin is having trouble getting the rest of the parishioners to clear out.
Three women and two men have stopped on the hillside, shouting solemn Amens.
Their eyes are closed and they hold their hands to the sky as another woman prays in garbled syllables, supposedly speaking in tongues.
“I know you’re a man of faith,” I say to Dishman as we stand together, watching the believers on the hillside. “But you don’t believe this was a miracle, do you?”
“No,” Dishman says, flatly. “If Ezra King came out of that grave, it’s because somebody drove out here in the middle of the night and dug him up.”
Officer Gavin jogs back up the hillside.
Behind him, a few people from town have their phones out, taking photos and videos.
The mourners are still standing where they were, joined now by a couple more elderly ladies who hiked up the hill.
A chorus of prayers rings out alongside the chatter of people on phones calling whoever they know to tell them the news.
“Chief, I can’t get ’em to budge. We’re gonna need more officers up here, I think.”
“Call Mike and Jeanine,” Dishman says. “Get them to come out. We need to tape this place off, catalogue tire tracks, footprints … anything.”
As Gavin walks away with his phone, Dishman rubs his hands over his face and a low rumbly growl emanates from his chest. When he looks at me again he says, “This place is a circus. We’ve got to find that body and I’ve got a pretty decent idea where to start.”
I think about everything I know so far, everything I’ve learned about Mount Zion, Ezra’s church, Brimstone Hollow, and the huge sinkhole at the middle of it, the one where everyone disposes of the things they never want to see again.
I smile up at him. “The Hell Hole?”
He breathes out an exhausted laugh, shaking his head.
“You’ve been here three days and you already know about that place?”
“I’m good at my job,” I say with a shrug.
He starts walking toward the cruiser and says, “It’s not far from here. But it’s full of hydrogen sulfide from the spring that runs through it. Makes it too dangerous to go poking around so nobody ever goes down there.”
I fall in beside him and ask, “But you’re going down there?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m going down there.”
“Then I’m coming with you.”
He stops and turns to face me. “Maybe you didn’t hear the part about it being dangerous.”
“No,” I say. “I got it.”
“You ever rappelled before?”
“Chief,” I say. “Come on. I was in the military.”
He grunts something like an assent and says, “Fine. Meet me at the station and we’ll gear up.”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, HE leads me through the STAFF ONLY door into an equipment room. Lockers line the walls and there’s an old squat rack and bench with iron plates set up next to a heavy bag with almost as much duct tape as leather.