Skeleton Key(92)

“What’s down there?” he asked.

“Capernaum Road,” Henry said. “Town-maintained dirt. Except I think it’s Watertown, not Morris.”

“It is Watertown,” Martin said.

“All these towns up here sort of wrap around each other,” Stacey Spratz said to Gregor Demarkian.

Gregor Demarkian was looking at the ground again.

“Does anybody have any idea of how the Jeep actually got here? Did it drive up from the house?”

“It couldn’t have,” Henry said. “We would have heard it. We were sitting right there in our front room.”

“How about down from the Litchfield County Museum?”

“It couldn’t have gotten through,” Martin said. “There’s a path to that but it’s a footpath. It’s not wide enough for a Jeep.”

“Trees,” Henry said solemnly.

“All right,” Gregor Demarkian said. “That seems to leave two possibilities. Either in from the road out front, or up from down there. There was no indication?”

“It’s all rocks,” Stacey Spratz said apologetically. “There’s nothing to leave tire tracks in. Everybody likes gravel drives.”

They all looked down at the hill that led to Capernaum Road. That was rocks, too, but bigger ones than what would be on a gravel drive. Martin thought this was really pitiful. On television, when the police conducted investigations, they used state-of-the-art equipment and mobile crime labs. They were able to find microscopic cloth fibers on blades of grass.

“I don’t know what you’re going to find up here, just looking around,” Martin said. “They took the Jeep away the next morning. That was Saturday. And then we tidied up some. That’s what we’re paid to do. Keep the cemetery tidy.”

“The cemetery is not in use any longer?” Gregor Demarkian asked.

“Well, of course it’s in use,” Martin said. “We’ve got dead people up here. Dozens of them.”

“He means in use by people today,” Henry said. “They don’t bury anybody new up here, that’s what he wants to know. They haven’t buried anybody new up here for a long time.”

“How long a time?” Gregor Demarkian asked.

“Maybe a hundred and fifty years,” Henry said.

“There are still Fairchilds out there someplace,” Martin said. “They’ve got a right to be buried here if they want to be. ‘Cept none of them ever seem to want to be.”

“Do they visit their dead?” Gregor Demarkian asked.

“Of course they don’t.” Henry said. “Do you visit the graves of people in your family died around Civil War? Nobody visits graves that old.”

“Mr. Demarkian’s graves would probably be in Europe somewhere,” Martin said.

Gregor Demarkian made another circle of the area. Then he straightened up. “All right,” he said. “That’s the most I can do here. The Jeep was really banged up?”

“It was damned near totaled,” Henry said.

“You can go down to Faye Dallmer’s place and see it,” Stacey Spratz said.

“What I want to know is whether it was more banged up than it should have been just from driving up to this part of the cemetery. Even if, say, it came from down there.”

“It looked like it had been in a head-on collision,” Henry said.

Gregor looked from one to the other of them and nodded. “All right,” he said again. “That’s what I needed to know. I thank you both for taking the time and the trouble to help us out.”

“It was no problem at all,” Martin said.

“It put a little interest in the day, if you want to know the truth,” Henry said. “Not a lot happens up here. You get bored.”

“I don’t get bored,” Martin said.

They walked down the hill toward the house and Stacey Spratz’s state police car. What Martin had said was perfectly true. He didn’t get bored—listless, sometimes, but not bored. But then, he didn’t think of the Jeep and the murder of Kayla Anson as putting a little interest into the day. He didn’t know how he thought of them.

They got to the state police car. Gregor Demarkian got into the front passenger seat. Stacey Spratz opened the driver’s side door and leaned on it for a moment.

“We’ll probably have to come back,” he said. “We’ll give you a call.”

“Fine,” Henry said.

Martin went back up on the porch. It was definitely colder than it had been. He should have worn his barn jacket instead of just this thick flannel shirt. He wondered what would happen to him when he died. He couldn’t be buried in the Fairchild Family Cemetery. If he died before Henry, maybe Henry would have him cremated. If he died after, there would be nobody to do for him at all.