The corpse was Tiffany. No, they hadn’t been friends. It was still tragic. Everyone had someone who loved them and the murder was horrible.
Marcy seemed to remain in shock. Hayley put blankets around her; she made her hot tea. Mary was oddly calmer now; the worst had passed.
The boys were quiet and thoughtful. She knew Tommy felt as if he had been a failure; he was ashamed of himself. They tried to assure him the shock of the situation had gotten to all of them.
Detectives were on the case, of course, but as time wore on, it was Officer Claymore who stayed with all of them, almost like a mother hen, watching them, helping with anything — coffee, water, tea, pillows, whatever.
“Water,” Hayley told Claymore at one point. “The man in the cemetery — I gave him a bottle of water.”
“We did find an empty water bottle,” Claymore told her, but he still looked at her sadly.
“A real person drank it,” she said.
“Maybe one of your friends, maybe Tiffany before...”
“Why can’t you believe me? I wish I’d had the courage to stand up against such a monster, but I’m telling you—”
“Maybe there was a man who saved you. Maybe, in all the trauma, you don’t know what really happened; Hayley, it doesn’t matter. You couldn’t have saved Tiffany; others are alive, you’re alive!”
She knew that. She should just be grateful.
But she wanted to be grateful to the stranger.
Claymore stayed with Hayley and she sat with him while she waited; her father was on the way. He’d be taking her and Marcy with him back to New Orleans.
New Orleans would be fine now. The City Slicer had come here. He had been taken away with a serious head injury; he might or might not live. Whether he did or didn’t, he’d be safely locked away.
Claymore looked at her, smiling gently. “You’re a strong one, Hayley.”
She shook her head. “No. I’m not trying to be a pest, but I wish they could find him. I know that everyone questions me on whether he was real or not. I know that he was. Whoever he is, he saved our lives.”
“Hayley, I’m afraid if he was there, he’s disappeared.”
“Well, I wish he hadn’t disappeared,” Hayley said.
“Are you absolutely sure you didn’t throw that piece of gargoyle sculpture yourself?”
No, she hadn’t. Or had she? Was she losing her mind?
No. She’d seen him, as clear as day. Even by moonlight. He’d been real; her savior had been real. He had spoken to her. She’d left him her bottle of water.
“He’s gone now,” Claymore said. He offered her a grimace. “Hey. Maybe you were saved by the ghost of Ethan Fray. Anyway, I thank God that with that madman loose here we only lost one; it could have been so much worse.”
Hayley just gave him a weak smile. It was still sad; so tragic. Tiffany had been a jerk, but no one deserved what had happened to her.
And still, Claymore was right. It might have been so much worse.
She knew she was grateful to be alive. And eternally grateful to the man — living or dead — who had helped her.
She saw her father’s car pulling into the front yard; saw his face — the love, the fear, and the concern.
She ran to be taken into his arms.
She knew only one thing.
Never again. She would never, ever be in that cemetery again after midnight.
Because she knew now that, curse or no, nothing good happened there after midnight.
No, nothing good happened after midnight. Even in a garden of death.
The Sixth Decoy
Paul Kemprecos
Elmer Crowell had a sharp eye and a sharper blade. He could take a block of wood and cut away everything that didn’t look like a bird, creating a masterpiece that looked as if it could quack, waddle or take flight. Some people say he was the best bird carver in the world.
Ol’ Elmer was an authentic American genius, no doubt about it. He was also a humble man from what I’ve heard. He would have dropped his whittling knife if someone told him the carvings he turned out in his ramshackle shed would bring millions of dollars at auction. And his gentle soul would have been burdened if he knew the desire to possess the things of beauty that sprang from his mind and his hands could lead to bloodshed.
Crowell had been dead more than a half century before the golden, late fall day when I crossed paths with his ghost.
I had spent the morning scrubbing down the deck and cleaning out the galley of my charter fishing boat Thalassa. The rods and reels were stowed in the back of my pickup truck. I’d scheduled a forklift to raise the boat out of the water and lower it onto a wooden cradle to be tucked under a plastic blanket for a long winter’s nap.
The fishing season had been as good as it gets. Nantucket Sound teemed with schools of hungry striped bass, and every one of them had a death wish. The skies were sunny, the seas gentle and the tips generous.
Hooking fish wasn’t something I thought I’d be doing for a living, but as the ancient poet Homer once said, our destiny lies on the knees of the gods.
The Immortal in charge of my fate must have had restless leg syndrome, because I fell off his knee, cutting short my college education in philosophy for a lesson in life, and death, paid for by the U.S. Government in Vietnam.
After mustering out of the Marines, I became a cop and worked my way up to detective in the Boston Police Department. I was engaged to be married to a beautiful and intelligent woman whose only blemish was her judgment in men.
I might have weathered a corruption scandal at the BPD if I kept true to the code of silence, but I lost my will when my fiancé died in a car accident.
After the funeral I got in my car and headed south from Boston with a bottle of vodka, driving until the road ended at a deserted Cape Cod beach. After a few slugs from the bottle, I fell asleep in the lee of a dune. I woke up to the cries of hovering gulls and the rustle of breaking waves. I staggered off the beach and was sobering up in a coffee shop when I met an old fisherman named Sam. He was looking for a crewman. I said I might be interested in the job.
Either Sam had been desperate, or he’d seen the desperation in my face, because he simply nodded and said, “Finestkind, Cap.”
Fishing was tough, but cheaper than stretching out on a headshrinker’s couch. More effective, too. Rolling out of bed at three in the morning to catch the tide, commuting twenty miles into the Atlantic Ocean and working a twelve-hour day forces your mind to ignore the little demons of regret tap-dancing in a corner of your brain.
The wind, and sun reflecting off the glassy sea had burned most of the sadness from my face and darkened my skin, hiding the lines of bitterness lurking at the corners of my mouth, even though they were still there. Sam accused me of going native when I went for the pirate look, with a gold earring, and a droopy mustache that decorated my upper lip.
More often than not my mouth was set in a grin as Sam gossiped about townspeople, fish, and the cooking prowess of his wife Mildred. When Sam retired I took over his boat, but couldn’t cut it on my own. I cleaned up my act, mostly, and bought a charter fishing boat with a loan from my family.
Every day was an adventure. I had to make sure my clients didn’t fall overboard or hook themselves instead of a fish — a state of alertness that had called for a higher degree of sobriety than I was used to. I’d been busy from sunup to sundown, subsisting on Mountain Dew and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
In the off-season I’ll earn a few bucks with an occasional commercial diving job. There’s not much demand to go underwater during the winter. I’ve held onto the private detective license I got after leaving the Boston PD, but there’s even less call for a PI.