Ding Dong Dead by Deb Baker Page B

aunt’s ability to tune into her own thoughts.
    Aunt and niece looked at each other.
    “A family plot,” they said simultaneously.
     
    “The cops have already been through all this,” Bonnie’s friend Anne said. Her arms were wedged into the top drawer of a filing cabinet. She pulled out a manila folder, shut the drawer, and sat down at her desk.
    “Did my Matty check into this particular file specifically? You know, this one for Swilling?” Bonnie’s pet name for her son had seemed endearing at first but was quickly starting to annoy Gretchen almost as much as it did Matt.
    “There isn’t a Swilling file, and I told them the same thing,” Anne said. “Several officers went through all the files, the cabinet, and the computer records, like they didn’t believe me.” She withdrew a single sheet of paper from the file and leaned forward. “This is the extent of the records from the old cemetery. The rest burned up in a fire in the fifties.”
    “What is it?” Julie asked. Some of her color had returned since they’d left the graveyard and entered the office.
    “It’s a document from the Arizona Historical Preservation Office,” Anne said. “The old cemetery has a historic designation. We can’t remove any of the bodies.”
    “Would you want to?” Julie asked, losing her color again.
    “No, no, it’s only a formality.”
    “The victim died right on top of the Swilling graves,” Gretchen said. “We were hoping to learn who else was going to be buried in that plot.”
    “Didn’t she crawl for a ways and collapse there? If that’s the case, then those people buried beneath her wouldn’t have anything to do with her murder anyway,” Anne said. “We don’t even know why she was in the cemetery after dark. Was she meeting someone? Was she with somebody? What if she had a partner, and they were robbing a grave?”
    “Robbing a grave?” Gretchen stopped reading the historical document over Anne’s shoulder. “Does that happen often?”
    “You never know what a coffin might contain,” Anne said. “Gold, jewelry. Thieves even sell body parts.”
    Gretchen thought Anne’s theory a bit far-fetched. Gretchen hadn’t seen a shovel or other tools the night the body was found. If Allison Thomasia had been trying to exhume a corpse, she would’ve had to have been digging with her bare hands, certainly no match for the desert rock under which the coffin lay.
    Bonnie, however, was buying into her friend’s grave-robbing idea. “Really? I never thought of that. Wow. I’ll have to pass that one on to Matty.”
    Matty . Okay, now it was sounding like chalk on a blackboard or like a dentist’s drill in action.
    “So there’s no way of learning anything about the Swilling graves?” Gretchen reached for the folder. Sure enough, no other documents were inside.
    “Those grave sites have been around for a long time,” Anne said. “Clients these days might talk to us about their plans for interment. You know, they might say, sure let’s get a plot with enough room in case the kids want to be buried with us. You know, they like to plan into the future, just in case.”
    Everyone nodded.
    “But they don’t put that part of their plan in writing. John Swilling apparently purchased space for four coffins. That’s the extent of what we’ll ever know.”
    They were driving back to the street when Gretchen returned to wondering if the grave had any possible significance. “What if Allison crawled over to that particular grave for a reason? What if that was a clue?”
    “She was trying to escape,” April said. “It was random that she happened to die on that particular grave. Where she died doesn’t mean anything.”
    “I’m with Gretchen on this one,” Nina said.
    Gretchen stopped the car beside Nina’s car. Tutu glared at her from the backseat.
    “Allison Thomasia left a clue that will lead to her killer,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”

18
    Gretchen arrived home physically and mentally