"You got that right," he said. "Anyway, it was a weird day."
"I bet. Were you there when the casket was opened?"
"I was nearby."
"What happened when the casket was opened?"
"Shit hit the fan."
"Because it was empty."
"Yup."
"Where's the casket now?"
"In the back."
"The police didn't confiscate it?"
"Nope. But it's roped off. We were told not to let anyone near it."
I showed him Detective Hammer's card. He took it from me and called the number. A few exchanges later and the caretaker was hanging up again. "He says you're reliable enough."
"He's always thought highly of me."
"But he said not to touch anything."
I felt my gorge rise at the thought of touching the casket. I'm a private eye, after all, not a medical examiner. "Wouldn't dream of it."
Chapter Eight
My life is weird, I thought, as the groundskeeper led me through a rear wood shop where a guy with goggles was actually building a coffin.
I learned that the cemetery offered these simplified boxes to those who could not afford the more expensive wooden caskets. I found the whole business of death unnerving. The coffin builder stopped working and watched us quietly as we moved through his shop. Saw dust rested lightly on his shoulder and there was a nail in his mouth. His eyes were impossibly big behind the goggles. The hair on my neck was standing on end.
I nodded politely and pardoned myself as we moved past him. He made no sound or movement. Instead he watched us until we exited through a side door. The hair on my neck and shoulders prickled.
"Why do I feel like I just walked onto the set of a horror movie?" I asked in the next room, shivering a little. A very discomfiting experience, to say the least.
"Probably because Boyd is about as weird as they come," said the caretaker. And I figured that if a cemetery caretaker was telling me someone was weird, well, you could damn well take that to the bank.
We walked through a storage room full of gardening equipment...and then I saw it. Lying flat on the ground with the lid closed was a freshly exhumed coffin. Yellow police tape encircled it and the staff themselves had placed some cones around it.
With the steady - and disturbing - sounds of coffin-making going on behind us, I found myself slowly circling another eternal bed for the dead.
I said, "How often does your cemetery exhume graves?"
"Not often."
"How much is not often?"
"Once every other year or so."
"Was there anything unusual about this exhumation?"
"Other than the coffin being empty? No. It was a routine dig."
The caretaker stood off to the side of the cones. He looked bored and a little nervous. I would be nervous, too, if a coffin showed up empty on my watch.