I drove up to #4 Crossroad, turned in there, and stopped. By then the Cemetery Man was moving again, down to #2 Crossroad — heading for his car. Same thing as yesterday, then: he took another bunch of artificial flowers from the trunk, brought them back to the new grave he’d found in J Section, arranged them in front of the headstone there, and stood for another minute or so with his head bowed. The bouquet looked to be identical to the one he’d put on Evelyn Brown’s grave — white carnations, white lilies.
Ten minutes later, he was back in his black sedan and gone.
Didn’t take me long after he passed through the gates to go have a look at the marker on the J Section plot. Peter J. Anderson. 1977–2002.
Well, that should have satisfied me. The Cemetery Man had come hunting for two graves, not just one, found them both, paid his respects and left flowers — end of story. Except that I had a feeling it wasn’t. And it still didn’t explain why he’d given me Peter J. Anderson’s name and not Evelyn Brown’s, or why he’d been so bent on locating their graves without help.
I drove to the administration building and asked Kay O’Brien, who has worked at Shady Oaks almost as long as I have, to look up the records on both plots. She didn’t ask me why I wanted the information. If I have too much curiosity, she doesn’t have any at all.
There was no connection between the Brown and Anderson plots, or at least none in the records. I’d been thinking that maybe the same person might be paying annual maintenance fees for both, but that wasn’t the case. One of the surviving members of the Brown family paid for upkeep on their plot; nobody paid for upkeep on the Anderson grave. That’s often the case with deceased individuals who come from poor families or have no families at all. We try to do a minimal amount of upkeep on those anyway, gratis, but there’s too much other work and barely enough public funding to maintain the roads and pay my and my crew’s salaries.
The only thing Evelyn Brown and Peter J. Anderson seemed to have in common was that they’d both died young, in their twenties, about fifteen months apart. Something about that stirred in the back of my mind, but it was vague and my memory’s not as sharp it used to be. I couldn’t quite dredge it out.
I told myself to forget it, it was really none of my business, and in any event the Cemetery Man was now gone for good. But I wasn’t a bit surprised when he showed up again the following day.
I was just pulling out of the maintenance yard above the administration building, heading out on my morning rounds, when his black sedan rolled in through the gates and stopped in the same place as before. He was still wearing that black overcoat even though it was even warmer today. He walked up to #4 Crossroad, then over into M Section.
Picking up where he’d left off the day before. Still looking.
Well, now I really had the wind up, as the British say. I had to fight down a couple of impulses, one to go poking around inside his car — he hadn’t locked it — to see if I could find out who he was, the other to chase after him and ask him point blank what he was up to. I had my job to consider, after all, and one sure way to lose it would be to hassle a visitor without good cause.
But I couldn’t just ignore him, either, and go on about my work as if he wasn’t there. So I hung around the general area, doing little make-work projects while I watched him conduct the same sort of methodical search as on the previous two days.
He went from M Section up to Q and down to N. The noon hour came and went; I didn’t bother to eat my lunch, which shows you how intent I was on the Cemetery Man. At one-thirty he was in R Section, which is mostly lawn on a gently rolling plateau, the grave markers nearly all plaques and small slabs that he had to stoop to read. And that was where he found the third grave.
I was standing alongside the pickup, fiddling with the tools inside the open side compartment, when he stopped and stared, then straightened and stood stiff-backed and bowed his head — exactly as he had at the Brown and Anderson sites. He stayed at this grave even longer than the others before he went off to his car. The ritual with the bouquet of flowers would be the same as before, I thought. And it was.
When he finished and walked away again, I hurried down to that third grave in R Section and leaned over to read what was etched on the already-tarnished bronze plaque.
All sorts of bells went off in my head then. Even with a bad memory you don’t forget a name like Sarah Jane Nowitzky. Or what happened to her. And once you remember that, you can’t help but remember the connection between her and Evelyn Brown and Peter J. Anderson.
The Cemetery Man had almost reached the main drive. I ran for my pickup, got it turned around, and went barreling down that way. He had the door to the black sedan open when I got there. I braked nose up to the car’s front bumper and jumped out and faced him square.
“Mister,” I said, “I saw you put those flowers on Sarah Jane Nowitzky’s grave.”
All he said was, “Yes, I was aware of you watching me.”
“Evelyn Brown’s and Peter Anderson’s, too. You know what those three people have in common besides being young when they died? I sure do.”
He knew, all right. “They were all murdered,” he said, “between Two Thousand Two and Two Thousand Four. Each in a terrible way.”
“That’s right, and the murders were never solved. And now here you come ten years after the last one, looking for their graves and putting flowers on ’em. I think you better tell me why.”
“Or else you’ll go to the police.”
“Straight to the police.”
“That’s the right thing to do, Mr. Foley. I’ll even go with you if you like.”
It wasn’t what I’d expected him to say, and it took some of the wind out of me.
“You will?”
He nodded and then looked past me into the middle distance. “Evelyn Brown, Peter Anderson, Sarah Jane Nowitzky,” he said after a few seconds, in a voice not much louder than a whisper. “The only three in this area, thank God.”
“What do you mean, the only three in this area?”
“I don’t suppose it matters if I tell you. It won’t be long until it all comes out.” The Cemetery Man pulled his coat collar up to his chin, as if he were feeling a sudden chill. “There were thirty-four others over nearly thirty years. Not only in California — in eleven other states across the country.”
I guess I gawked at him. “Thirty-seven murders?”
“Twenty-six women and eleven men, most under the age of thirty. All killed by the same man, an itinerant carpenter named George Lampton who died of lung cancer three weeks ago. During his lifetime he was never identified, never punished for his crimes.”
“But then... how do you know he’s the one?”
“There was a diary among his effects. Names, dates, places. Methods. Each of his crimes recorded in explicit detail. A scrapbook, too — newspaper clippings, burial notices.”
“My God!”
“The FBI has them now,” the Cemetery Man said. “They’ll release the story to the media only after they’ve completed a thorough investigation. I should have enough time.”
“Enough time for what?”
“To locate most if not all of the graves of his thirty-seven victims, pray for each of them, tell them how sorry I am.
“But why? Why would you want to do that?”
“I have to,” he said, and tears glistened now on his ravaged face. “George Lampton was my son.”
Toiling in the Fields of the Lord