The Gravedigger's Ball (2 page)

About fifty yards in front of them and to their left, a dark figure crossed Coletti’s line of vision and walked between the gravestones. “Stay here,” Coletti said to Lenore.

Coletti got up and ran toward the spot where he’d seen the dark figure, but when he got there, the area was filled only with an eerie stillness. He looked frantically around him as he made his way through the maze of headstones and crypts, spires and mausoleums that peppered the sprawling graveyard.

As he did so, the sounds of nearby traffic seemed to fade. Joggers slowed on Kelly Drive—the tree-lined, scenic road that wound along the Schuylkill’s banks. The sky was silent, the river still. Coletti could hear the sound of his own breathing and the crunch of leaves beneath his feet. He was sure the gunman could hear them, too, so he stopped moving and tried to get his bearings.

Everywhere he looked, it seemed, there was an angle, a corner, a hiding place where a man could lie in wait. As soon as Coletti started moving again, he rounded one such corner, and on the other side of a mausoleum, he saw the dark figure again, just a few feet away.

His face was pasty and white. His mustache was thick and crooked, and his high, wide forehead was topped by stringy black hair that was parted and combed to the left. He was wearing a long black topcoat with the wide lapels of centuries gone by and a bow tie that hung limp against a high-collared shirt.

“Don’t move!” Coletti shouted.

The man looked at him with coal-black eyes and disappeared behind an ornate headstone.

“Hey!” Coletti yelled, running to catch him. But when Coletti rounded the headstone, the man was gone.

Holding his gun out in front of him, the detective looked left, then right, then left again, scanning the cemetery for the man whose cold, dead eyes made him look as if he’d climbed out from one of the graves.

When he didn’t see him, Coletti walked forward slowly, watching and waiting for the figure to emerge from the shadows. Slowly, agonizingly, the seconds ticked by, and Coletti began to wonder if the man he’d seen was himself a shadow.

Doubling back and retracing his steps to the spot where he’d first seen the man, Coletti rounded the corner of the mausoleum and nearly stumbled into a deep hole. He caught himself just as he looked down into what appeared to be a freshly dug grave. At the bottom was a green piece of tarp with a body on top.

The dead woman was gray-haired and thin, lying flat on her back with eyes stretched wide and a string of pearls hanging loosely around her neck. Coletti couldn’t see any blood. Just a smear of what appeared to be dirt around her mouth.

For a moment, Coletti stood there, unsure of what he was seeing. He hadn’t seen the hole in the ground when he passed by the first time, but there it was now, with a dead woman staring up from the bottom.

Coletti’s breath came faster. He held his gun tightly and took ten steps, hoping to see the man in black again. He stopped on the other side of the mausoleum, listening to nothing, and the longer he stood there, the more stubborn the silence seemed. Then suddenly he heard the crackle of footsteps on leaves. He swung around and aimed in the direction of the sound.

“Wait!” Lenore screamed, shielding her face with her hands as she looked down the barrel of Coletti’s gun.

The detective sighed and lowered his weapon. “I thought I told you to stay put.”

“I was afraid,” Lenore said in a quaking voice.

“Looks like you should’ve been,” he said, taking her hand and leading her over to the grave.

“Oh my God,” she whispered when she looked down and saw the body.

“That’s the woman you were with, isn’t it?”

Lenore nodded slowly and swallowed hard. “Her name is Clarissa Bailey. She was showing me around the graveyard.”

Coletti spotted something at the edge of the grave. “What’s this?” he said, bending down for a closer look.

Lenore looked over his shoulder as he used a stick to turn over the small piece of parchmentlike paper.

Coletti squinted as he read the words that were typed on the sheet.
“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before.
”

He looked at Lenore. “Do you have any idea what that might mean?”

Lenore shook her head and looked away from the body. She appeared to be growing ill. Coletti looked away, too. He could feel himself growing suspicious.

Just then, something rustled the branches of a nearby tree. Coletti turned and aimed his gun in the direction of the sound, but lowered it when he realized that it was merely a bird.

As they watched the black, crowlike creature fly into the distance, Coletti wondered how Mary’s sister was connected to the victim. Then he wondered if the only witness to the murder had just flown away.

*   *   *

By nine thirty, swirling dome lights from a dozen police cars filled the cemetery. Boats from the department’s Marine Unit trolled the river, a helicopter hovered overhead, and police flooded Fairmount Park, the acres-wide swath of woodlands that flanked the graveyard and extended along both sides of the river.

Officer Frank Smith was among them, and he was determined to find the suspect, because doing so might finally get him out of the park.

He’d been banished to park duty two years before, reassigned from the ninth district after a high-profile drug conviction was overturned because he badly mishandled evidence.

Despite that blemish on his record, he was a cop’s cop. Known to his fellow officers as Smitty, he was hewn from a long line of men who’d stood on the front lines of the city’s war on crime. He was proud of that distinction and anxious to carry on the legacy of his forebears.

Smitty had done so in the ninth, having foiled bank robberies and muggings on more than one occasion. But here, in the park, he was left to patrol a sector that included five acres of woods, three baseball diamonds, two eighteenth-century mansions, and a broken-down amphitheater.

He spent most of his time rousting couples who stayed in the park after the ten o’ clock curfew or writing tickets for people who raced their cars along the park’s winding roads.

In Smitty’s mind, two years of park duty was ample punishment for his sins. Now, he wanted to get back to doing real police work, and if finding a pasty-faced man wearing old-fashioned clothes was his ticket back, the cop was determined to do that.

He’d spent the past twenty minutes riding through the park with his head on a swivel, looking through the trees for signs of anything unusual. He’d checked the locked doors on the mansion that housed Smith Playground and the historic home on the other side of Reservoir Drive. He’d checked the hiding spaces along the sides of the roads and the open spaces in the fields.

Smitty took one more swing through his sector, riding past a statue of General Ulysses S. Grant and beneath a bridge that connected Kelly Drive to the park. When he turned right on Mt. Pleasant Drive, a sliver of road that ran near the reservoir, he passed Smith Playground and saw something in the woods to his right. It appeared, at first, to be a large animal of some kind—a deer, perhaps. When he looked again, he was sure that what he’d seen was a man.

He parked his car and looked into the forested area known as Sedgley Woods. In warm weather, it was a mix of fallen trees, worn paths, and metallic baskets that served as a disc golf course. On rainy fall days like this one, the woods were largely abandoned, which made the man’s presence there all the more unusual.

Smitty got out and walked past what would have been the third hole on the disc golf course. As he moved farther into the woods, he saw the man again. Breaking into a trot, he grabbed his radio to call for backup, but when he pressed the transmit button, nothing happened. He tried again with the same result, and when it was clear that his handheld radio was out, he didn’t go back to his car. He drew his gun. He wasn’t going to let whomever he’d seen get away.

The skies grew darker, and Smitty followed the man as he veered off the dirt path and into a thicket of fallen trees, moss-covered rocks, twisted vines, and uneven earth. Along the way, the cop stumbled over fallen branches and sunk into piles of leaves. With each step he took, he caught another glimpse of something that appeared to be the suspect. He churned his legs harder in an attempt to catch up to him, but as the woods surrounded Smitty, both his legs and his eyes began to betray him.

He tripped and fell over a discarded beer bottle. He fell again on a slippery rock. And when he got up, trotting past a tree with the names of long-dead lovers carved into its bark, a pasty white face flashed in front of him and disappeared. A second later, the face was visible to his left. Then it showed up on his right, staring at him with those coal-black eyes.

Each time Smitty looked in the direction of the face, he saw only the suspect’s black coat. The black of the coat gave way to the high-collared shirt, then the floppy bow tie, and again, the face. The images appeared and disappeared in a deluge of black and white, assaulting the cop’s eyes like fists.

Smitty looked in front of him and thought he saw the suspect again, nearly fifty yards away in a deeper section of the woods. He ran to catch up, trudging through a patch of dead vines so thick that they looked like tangled yarn. He fell once more, dropping his hat in the process. Then, with sweat trickling down his face, Smitty struggled to his feet and beat back the vines as he moved deeper into the woods.

He was breathing hard as he jogged through the wilderness, hoping all the while that he’d catch another glimpse of the suspect. The farther he ran, however, the more useless the chase seemed to be. The trees were more numerous than they’d been just seconds ago, and their branches seemed to weave together to blot out all signs of daylight.

“Hey!” Smitty yelled, but the woods simply swallowed his voice. “Hey!” he yelled, louder this time, and still, to no avail. “Hey!” he screamed, his voice now tinged with panic.

The answer he received was darkness, punctuated by the sound of a stick breaking in front of him. He raised his gun and aimed in that direction. Then a tree branch was brought down on his arm with such force that it knocked him off his feet and made him drop the gun.

Smitty yelled in agony and grasped his forearm, knowing that it was broken. When he looked up to see where the branch had come from, the man he’d been looking for was standing over him, preparing to swing again. Rolling to his right, the cop eluded the heavy branch and scrambled to his feet before the man could swing a third time.

Smitty dove for the gun, but the man kicked it away before he could reach it. If he was going to win this battle, he’d have to do it the old-fashioned way.

Smitty slowly rose to his feet and circled left in a fighting crouch. “Come on,” he said through clenched teeth.

The man simply looked at him, his coal-black eyes, crooked mustache, and unsmiling mouth fixed rigidly in his ghostly white face.

Smitty charged with his nightstick in his left hand and managed to land a glancing blow before the man sidestepped him. He tried to swing again, but the man blocked the nightstick with his much heavier tree branch and grabbed the cop’s broken forearm with his other hand.

Smitty screamed and fell to the ground clutching his arm. The man tried to stomp on him, but Smitty swept his adversary’s legs from under him. Fists flew as they rolled among sticks and fallen leaves, each struggling to overcome the other.

Scrambling to his knees, Smitty caught the man with a hard left hook that temporarily swung the battle in his favor. The man rolled onto his back. Smitty tried to jump on top of him. The man put both feet into Smitty’s stomach and pushed with all his might, sending the cop sprawling.

Both of them rushed to get to their feet, and, for the first time, the cop got a good look at the man he was fighting. His eyes were black and bottomless. His mustache was brittle and his flesh was devoid of color. His face showed no signs of life. Even the drop of blood that trickled down his forehead appeared to be black instead of red. He looked dead and alive all at once.

Smitty took a step backward as the man in black approached. He took another when the man moved closer. The cop looked behind him and saw a mound of dirt. Then he looked once more at the man in front of him. As Smitty’s face twisted in fear, the man’s lips parted, revealing a black-toothed smile. Smitty yelled and tried to charge him, but the man swung mightily and the cop stumbled backward toward the mound of dirt. Smitty tried to stop himself, but before he could regain his footing, the ground beneath him gave way.

He fell into a freshly dug hole that had been covered by leaves and sticks. He tried to crawl up the side of the narrow opening, but his broken arm betrayed him and he quickly slid down the dirt wall.

Again and again he tried to crawl out of the hole. When he couldn’t try anymore, he looked up and saw the man in black watching him. He was holding a shovel, and when he dropped the first pile of dirt into the hole, Smitty screamed out for help, but the makeshift tomb muffled his voice.

As the man in black methodically filled the hole, Smitty continued his desperate calls for help. In twenty minutes, the hole was filled. Smitty was silent. The man was gone.

The only thing that remained was a single black bird, perched high above the scene. When the bird finally flew away, one thing was abundantly clear. The Gravedigger’s Ball had begun.

CHAPTER 2

By ten o’ clock, the cemetery was abuzz as officers looked among the dead for evidence to assist the living. Thus far, they’d failed to find anything to prove that a gun had even been fired—not a bullet casing, not a bullet hole, not even a trace of gunpowder.

They’d also been unable to contact Mrs. Bailey’s husband. Coletti wasn’t one to wait for answers, however, so he asked a uniformed officer to stay with Lenore while he questioned the manager of the cemetery.

The slightly built man in the black suit and bowler hat had been standing off to the side, watching intently as investigators went about their work. Coletti knew from the manager’s anxious demeanor and troubled facial expression that he was deeply invested in the cemetery.