Plan Bee (6 page)

The rest of us dispersed. Some of our local diehards headed for Stu’s Bar and Grill to imbibe. Others went home.

Carrie Ann shot off to Stu’s. Maybe not the best or smartest place to hang out considering her drinking problem, but she’d been behaving herself lately, even the times she spends at the bar, thanks to several watchful eyes. The first set belongs to Hunter, who’s been her sponsor through all her ups and downs. Then there’s her ex-husband, Gunnar. He often reminds her of certain responsibilities, like their two children who live with him and need a sober mom. And, of course, all her friends keep tabs on her, too.

Holly walked home with Dinky and me, since she’d parked her pricey Jag at my house to avoid crowding and the possibility of damage to its perfect paint job.

“What’s going on over at Clay’s?” she said, noticing the truck parked in the driveway next door. Lights were on inside the house, and through the window I could see several cans of beer on a metal camping table in the kitchen.

I told her how Lori had rented Clay’s house to Ford for the weekend.

“He doesn’t sound like our typical tourist,” Holly muttered as she got into her car. “Is he somebody’s relative?”

I shrugged. “He didn’t mention anything like that.”

“That was a smart move on Lori’s part, earning some income for Clay.”

“Ugh. Wait till you meet this guy. He’s a real winner. Want me to introduce you right now?”

“No thanks.”

And with that, my sister blew off in her Jag, leaving me alone and without the time or energy to kayak on the river like I usually enjoyed doing after work. Instead, I headed back toward town with Dinky, and ended up on the street outside my store, where the sidewalk action had wound down for the evening. I let Dinky lead the way.

That was my first big mistake.

In my opinion, dusk is a creepy time of day.

That brief but hauntingly eerie bit of time right between light and dark, when my eyes play tricks on me and inanimate shadows stretch out long and take on life of their own.

It’s the end of one thing, the beginning of another.

And with a full moon rising.

I remembered Patti and her theories about the madness of tonight’s lunar event.

If the moon affected my actions, made me do bizarre things, would I recognize the change in myself?

Those were the random thoughts bouncing around in my mind as I stood outside of my store. That’s when Dinky started tugging on her leash. Granted, she was a little pipsqueak, so her efforts to pull me around hardly counted. But Dinky, stubborn as she could be, kept at it, racing the full length of the leash to the very end, tipping up on her back legs, and yapping, then doing it all over again.

Talk about shrill. And annoying.

“What is it?” I said to her. “What’s wrong with you?”

She didn’t answer.

Not that I expected her to.

I wasn’t in a big rush to get anywhere. Patti would find me when she was ready to howl at the moon, so I let Dinky take the lead. Anything to shut her up. Dinky promptly headed in the direction of the cemetery.

Some of the headstones had inscriptions dating back as far as the early 1900s. None of the grave markings inside this graveyard were uniform and neat like more modern cemeteries. Stones leaned this way and that way.

I’d walked past, or near, or through the cemetery almost every day. I’d been there plenty of times before, several times recently with Dinky. But with night falling, the moon rising, and Patti’s prediction that we all would basically turn into uncontrollable werewolves, every little hair on my arms was standing at attention.

Dinky, still in the lead, stopped at one headstone after another, and at every single one she sniffed around as though she were hunting for something. After a few more pauses, she found something on the ground and started chewing.

“Oh no you don’t.” I quickly bent down and tried to wrestle whatever it was out of her mouth. But she wolfed it down, gulped, and it was gone. I sensed a vomiting episode in our near future. We’d been there, done that, more times than I cared to remember.

Next, Dinky ran behind one of the headstones and wound the leash around a crabapple tree’s trunk enough times that she could barely move. Before I could reach down to untangle her, I tripped over something, lost my balance, and hit the ground hard, face-first, barely having time to break my fall with my hands.

Dinky barked only once when I went down, and then hushed up, becoming perfectly quiet. I felt her breath on my face and her tongue in my ear, licking away. When I
rose up on an elbow to brush her back, I spotted the outline of the thing I’d fallen over.

After sitting up and more carefully considering the object, I realized what had really tripped me up.

A human leg!

Attached to a body!

(Thank God. Because an unattached leg would have totally flipped me out on the spot. Not that I was holding it together all that well anyway, because the body wasn’t moving. Not a good sign.)

I was pretty sure the person on the ground was a male, judging by the manly shoes on his feet. I couldn’t tell for sure, though, because the face and shoulders were covered with an extra-large black plastic garbage bag.

I’d like to think I’m braver than I really am, that I have the courage to face the unexpected with calm and resolve. In hindsight (that twenty-twenty kind), what I should have done was rip that plastic away and reveal the person underneath. If I’d done that, it would have saved me a lot of grief later on.

But the last thing on my mind at the time was checking to find out who was under the plastic.

Instead of displaying bravery beyond the call of duty, I grabbed Dinky, unclipped the tangled leash to free her, leaving it wound around the tree, and dashed for the bright lights of the store.

“What happened to you?” Brent called as I blew by him, racing for the back room. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

I had a lump in my throat the size of a grapefruit. “Be all right,” was all that came out before I slammed the door and slumped down in my office chair.

I tried to calm myself with deep-breathing exercises. It didn’t work.

Somebody was out in the cemetery, maybe dead—okay, probably dead based on the lack of motion and that black plastic bag. The chicken part of me had the shakes bad, but
the businesswoman part was thinking of how the discovery of a body would affect tomorrow’s festival.

I weighed my options. I had choices here. One was that I could contain the damage by dragging the body into hiding and pull it back out tomorrow night after the Harmony Festival ended. Then I could fake the same trip over it again.

After not much thought, I threw out that choice as a really, really bad idea for a lot of reasons.

Another option, I could call Patti and collaborate with her on the next move.

She always had plenty of never-thought-of-before-by-
humankind ideas. But the reporter in her wouldn’t go along with a cover up. She’d want to make it sensational. No, I couldn’t tell Patti.

Then I thought, what if the person isn’t dead? What if I held a life in the palm of my hand this very moment, and it was expiring because I was sitting here doing nothing?

So I went with the last and final option, the most logical one, though it was the one I liked the least. I called Johnny Jay, our police chief. Or rather, I called 9-1-1, which was almost the same thing as calling him directly since he would know about my call about two seconds after I finished making it. I gave the required information to the dispatcher, pointedly requesting discretion on the part of the responders.

“Please, no lights or sirens,” I said. “This might be nothing.” That wasn’t true. Something, rather than nothing, was out there, but the less the other residents knew, the better.

The first vehicle to arrive at the scene was Johnny Jay’s police SUV, running full out with lights and siren. “Fischer,” he said when he got out and spotted Dinky and me waiting outside under the awning. “Figures you’re involved.”

I caught his typical boring, superior attitude. We ex-
changed a glare.

Johnny has the clean and polished lines of a Boy Scout, which proves you can’t go by looks. He also has a linebacker’s build that he uses to intimidate the weak and the helpless. His bully tactics have never worked on me though. That’s a good chunk of the reason behind our animosity. I don’t like how he tries to bully me; he hates that it never works.

“Johnny Jay,” I hissed. “I specifically requested a quiet arrival. Why ruin the rest of a perfectly wonderful festival by scaring people away? What’s the matter with you?”

“Cut the crap and show me what you claim you found.” Tough talk, but at least he reached into his SUV through the open window and turned off the bells and whistles.

“Where’s the ambulance?” I asked.

“Here it comes. And it better be needed.”

The ambulance made lots of noise as it raced up Main Street from south of town with a fire truck right behind it. And I heard more emergency sirens in the distance, all running every noisemaker they had. How could I have forgotten how gung-ho our emergency workers really are?

By now, customers were pouring out of Stu’s Bar and Grill down the street to check out the situation. So much for discretion and a low profile.

“I tripped over a body in the cemetery,” I told Johnny, keeping my voice low.

“Dead?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I think so. He was covered in plastic.”

Johnny eyed me carefully. “How do you know it’s a man?”

“I don’t. I’m just assuming.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

Brent came out of the store. Johnny addressed him next. “Tell the ambulance crew to stay put at the curb until I say otherwise.”

“And please take care of Dinky for a few minutes,” I said to Brent, passing the small dog over to him.

“What’s going on?” somebody from Stu’s called out.

“Stay where you are,” Johnny called back to them.

“Better do as he says,” somebody else said. “He’s armed and dangerous.” I recognized the voice as belonging to Stanley Peck, who probably was more armed and dangerous than the police chief.

Johnny had a flashlight in one hand and kept his other hand on his gun belt as we walked slowly and cautiously into the cemetery.

“Over there,” I said, heading for the crabapple tree, staying to the side of Johnny instead of in front, just in case he opened fire. Our police chief wasn’t impulsive or rash, but walking in front of a man who doesn’t like you and who’s carrying a weapon is just plain stupid.

It wasn’t completely dark yet and with the moon beaming down like its own sort of pale sun, I didn’t need a flashlight to see that I had a slight problem.

Or maybe a major one.

Because the body was gone.

“Fischer,” Johnny Jay ranted, “you’d better have an explanation for calling out
my
police officers,
my
ambulance,
and
the town’s firefighters on a wild-goose chase.” Johnny Jay was hopping mad. He jerked Dinky’s leash from around the tree trunk and gave me an exasperated glare. “I could arrest you for pulling a stunt like this.”

“That belongs to me,” I said, reaching for the leash. “I’m dog-sitting.”

“I know that, Fischer. Only I hear Norm isn’t coming back to town. That makes you a dog owner, not a sitter. Too bad the dog can’t speak up and take your phony-baloney side. That’s the thing with you. You never have any real witnesses to back up your outrageous claims.”

“When I called, I specifically told your dispatcher to keep a low profile. It’s not my fault you sent all the big guns.”

“Start explaining.
NOW!
”

“Just shine your flashlight on the ground,” I advised
him. If we didn’t find an enormous puddle of blood or a smoking gun lying on the grass, I was in such big trouble. “Maybe we’ll find a clue.”

Johnny Jay snorted and made all kinds of threatening noises. “You and your cock-and-bull stories. You want a clue? I’ll give you a clue.” He held up a pair of handcuffs. I was familiar with them from certain past events. “What does it mean when I get these out?”

I heard murmurs across the street where the contingency from Stu’s was watching and waiting to see what entertainment might unfold between the two of us. By now, the ambulance and fire trucks had pretty much blocked off Main Street to vehicles, rerouting traffic, but the bar had been busy and all of Stu’s customers were congregating as close as possible on foot.