child’s voice against the noise of the trains rushing by every few minutes.
But it was also the perfect place to bring a corpse for disposal if one had committed murder elsewhere. A body that small would’ve fit in a PBS-donor tote bag.
I heard sirens in the distance, growing loud enough to drown out everything else as patrol cars pulled into the tiny dead-end road beside us, one after another.
The noise died out and I heard several car doors open, then the racket of hard-soled cop shoes on the broken asphalt.
A bunch of young guys in blue uniforms pushed through the gate, then headed straight for us.
7
One of the patrol guys came over to keep an eye on all of us sitting on the lawn. His name tag identified him as Officer Albie, but he seemed uncomfortable with the formality and told us to call him Fergus.
His compatriots, in consultation with Cate, started running yellow plastic marker tape around and through the bushes to keep anyone from stumbling into the child’s bones and corrupting their resting place any more than I had.
The kids in our group started getting restless, saying they needed to get home and do chores or schoolwork or take care of younger siblings, or even just run across the street to use the pay phone to tell their families where they were and what was taking so long. The young officer did his best to keep everybody calm and seated, asking the kids to “just simmer down, there” until the arrival of the detectives and whoever else would be needed to check out the whole burgeoning circus officially.
I was pretty out of it in the aftermath of discovering the tiny set of bones, but I still felt for the guy. He looked like he’d graduated himself about two weeks earlier, and high-school kids are about as easy to corral as a bunch of amphetamine-pumped ferrets dipped in Crisco, especially when there’s major drama in the offing.
The kids peppered him with questions and demands and objections in between shoving each other and laughing. His voice strained for increasing volume as he struggled to keep a lid on things. Ten minutes in, the guy’s hands had achieved an emphatically Sicilian range of motion.
Cate came back and sat down with us. At first the kids grew quiet, but soon the babble started up again, even more overwhelming.
I tried closing my eyes for a minute after swabbing my face with my clammy bandanna.
I couldn’t keep them shut, though. I was too intent on checking the gate for plainclothes arrivals.
Then I looked up at the young cop’s face. His short hair was dark with sweat, and I worried he’d have a stroke and keel over onto the scrubby brown grass or pitch headfirst against the blunt edge of a gravestone.
I leaned over toward Cate. “He’s not looking too good,” I said.
Cate stood up to place a gentle hand on his arm.
“Would you like to move us into the chapel?” she asked. “It’s a great deal cooler inside, and we can all drink some cold water.”
The cop gratefully agreed, and the two of them began herding the kids indoors.
I was about to follow them in when I saw a dark sedan pull up alongside the cemetery gate, a chrome-free Crown Vic with a fat antenna sprouting off the lid of its trunk.
We all savored the chapel’s cool interior with the young cop as our shepherd, drinking ice water and grateful to be sheltered from the sun.
The kids’ restlessness tapered off once we got inside. Maybe it was the dimmer light indoors that made us all settle down, or maybe it was just that we’d all worked ourselves hard on the brush clearing and were now settling into a midafternoon blood-sugar crash exacerbated by post-adrenaline-rush torpor.
The girls all grabbed their school backpacks from the room’s back wall and started in on homework assignments. Three of the boys made binder-paper airplanes and lofted them down the nave, competing to see whose craft could drift the farthest before succumbing to gravity.
The sun shifted lower in the sky, sending a thick shaft of light slanting down from the arched western doorway, highlighting the toy planes’ wake through whirling motes of dust.
The sounds outside seemed more distant: rush of trains muted by the chapel’s pale gold stone walls, mutter and hiss of the cops’ radios unintelligible.
High stained-glass windows faced north and south, their intricately fitted cobalt and scarlet and butter-yellow panes interspersed with empty spots that laid bare the