‘So he started using a corn cob pipe to hold his cigars, because its mouthpiece was thin enough to jam into his wired jaw?’ Mac laughed.
‘There’s an unfunny part. The guy who broke his jaw?’
‘Yes?’
‘Best-case scenario? He got run out of town alive.’
‘Worst case: he was killed and his body was never found?’
‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this,’ she said, and clicked off.
Two weeks and two days.
News of Betty Jo Dean’s upcoming exhumation helped the Bird’s Nest stagger along. Old-time customers who’d fallen away after the indictment came back to eat, drink and dust off their memories of the place and the case. Curious newcomers came too, for a look at the last roadhouse Betty Jo Dean had ever seen.
And some came, though not nearly as many on the night of the Crosstown Classic, for a glimpse of Mac Bassett, the man behind the whole business of raising up Betty Jo Dean.
They left disappointed. Rogenet had been explicit about Mac not risking any untoward comment that Bales or Powell could use to null the exhumation. So he holed up in his office upstairs, staring at mostly blank old calendars, doctor and dentist bills and precious little else, seeing nothing that could prove he spent most of his nights as a board trustee sleeping at home in Linder County.
Two weeks and two days.
Somewhere in there, Maggie Day made up her mind about strangeness.
One afternoon, setting up the dining room, she said to Mac, ‘Abigail Beech stopped in last night.’
‘I’d forgotten to ask you about her. She was mentioned in an old news account, insisting Betty Jo was alive for two days after Pribilski was killed.’
‘Isn’t that what you believe?’
‘Well, sure, but…’
‘She still believes she was right.’
‘She’s an entertainer, Maggie.’
It was difficult, sometimes, to gauge Maggie’s facial reactions because her low riding, broad brimmed cowboy hat and large tinted glasses obscured so much of her face.
She smiled a little. ‘She went out to Betty Jo’s grave in Maryton. She said something’s wrong.’
‘Wrong, how?’
‘She doesn’t know, just that it’s wrong.’
Mac let it go. Abigail Beech was likely just looking to build interest in another gig.
Two weeks and two days.
Three days after the judge had issued his order, Mac began stopping into the sheriff’s department. It was his only violation of Rogenet’s admonishment to keep a low profile.
‘When?’ he asked, each time.
Bales was always in, always available, and always semi-reclining in the chair he’d worn almost all the leather off from all that semi-reclining. Always, he mouthed the same words: ‘We’re on it, Mac.’
‘When exactly, Sheriff?’
‘Just as soon as we can get everybody singing out of the same hymn book. Lots needs to be done. We’ve got to get the proper paperwork out to the custodian at Maryton Cemetery. We need to do a soil test of the ground, arrange for a backhoe operator to open the grave and get someone with a hoist to haul her out. We need a flatbed truck to bring the vault to wherever the state forensics people say. But first, we’ve got to hear from the state, so we know the forensics experts they’re going to assign, and just exactly when they plan on doing this thing.’ Bales would then sigh. ‘Such a muddle, Mac. Lots to do, but we’re working on it.’
After hearing this for the sixth time, Mac said, ‘I’m going to beat my indictment, Jimmy. I’m not leaving.’ Bales and whoever tugged his leash were stalling, hoping to drag their feet until Mac got caught up in standing trial, getting convicted and being sent away. They could then work on Reed Dean to withdraw his petition for exhumation.
‘I surely hope you win,’ Bales said, without a trace of sincerity on his face.
Two weeks and two days.
April brought up the exhumation only once. She was standing by a counter in the kitchen. Her face was rigid, absent of any of the bravado she used to keep the world at bay.
‘Why expose us to all this on top of everything else?’ she asked. ‘Do you really need retribution or justice? Is it really for a girl you’d never heard of until a few days ago?’
He looked at her face, this woman of such quiet strength, and realized it mirrored the doubt that kept him clutching a glass of Scotch most nights.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
FORTY-SEVEN
On the second Thursday following the judge’s order, after Jimmy Bales again smiled and shrugged when Mac stopped in to find out what progress had been made, Mac took a copy of the court’s exhumation order down to the cemetery.
Mac had never had occasion to go to Maryton. He knew the town had prospered in the late 1800s as a crossroads trading center, but had withered after the railroad was put through Grand Point, five miles to the north. Houses and stores were abandoned; its few streets crumbled. Folks could not make a living. They’d left.
The dead began coming, then, in abundance. County-owned Maryton Cemetery, surrounded by acres of suddenly worthless land, became the cheapest place to bury the departed of Peering County. Among them were interred the members of the Dean family, going back three generations. Including Betty Jo, in the summer of 1982.
The gray-faced custodian’s name was Gerald. He sat in a clammy stone storage building, surrounded by muddy water hoses, rusted lawn rakes and a not-quite-closed desk drawer full of skin magazines.
Mac handed him the exhumation order, which Gerald pointedly set down without reading.
‘Never mind these papers, Mayor Bassett,’ he said. ‘Sheriff’s got to set it up. He’s paying for the exhumation.’
‘Almost two weeks have passed. I’m trying to speed things along. Who will you use for the digging?’
‘Ralph, but the sheriff’s got to approve.’
‘Give me Ralph’s number. I’ll call him.’
‘You need a soil test before anything,’ Gerald said.
‘Who does that?’
‘Ralph. He’s got to make sure he don’t sink into the beloveds.’
‘Let’s call him now.’
‘I’ll have to hunt up his number.’
A large, smiling man in faded overalls appeared in the doorway.
‘Wait outside,’ Gerald snapped.
The large man extended his hand to Mac. ‘Name’s Ralph,’ he said.
‘Damn it,’ Gerald muttered. Then: ‘Ralph, this here’s Mayor Bassett of Grand Point. He’s here about the Dean exhumation.’
‘Heard about the court order,’ Ralph said.
‘Nothing’s happening,’ Mac said.
Ralph looked at the custodian. ‘We’re waiting for the sheriff, right, Gerald?’
‘How’s the soil?’ Mac asked.
‘Shit,’ Gerald said.
‘Worse than that, maybe,’ Ralph said. ‘Like to step outside?’
Mac followed him around to a second door. Ralph went in and came out with an eight-foot steel rod. They walked several hundred feet to a small headstone cut with Betty Jo Dean’s name. It was small and modest, and hinted nothing at how she must have screamed on Poor Farm Road and, if Ridl was right, in the two days that followed.
Ralph set the steel rod perpendicular to the ground.
‘Gerald in there,’ he said, cocking a thumb back at the stone building, ‘he’s been running this cemetery for nigh on forty years. He ain’t going to push the sheriff for papers because he don’t want no part of any exhumation. Worried hell will pay.’
‘Why?’
Ralph wrapped both of his ham-like fists around the rod and pushed down. It quickly slid three feet into the earth.
‘Mush,’ Mac said.
‘That ain’t the only problem,’ Ralph said. ‘Gerald’s records are incomplete.’