Let the Devil Out (Maureen Coughlin #4)(44)
“Nice try,” Maureen said. “Save it for your tour guide career.” She turned in a circle. “I’m on a shelf or something up here. I can see the whole cemetery almost.”
She looked over the tops of the vaults and crypts. From her vantage point, the cemetery really did look like a ruined cityscape, maybe an old Greek or Roman village after a century or two of neglect. And okay, she had to admit, the vibe was extra-creepy. Nothing more eerie, she thought, than an empty, silent city. Not that she’d ever tell Preacher how she felt.
“You see our body?” Preacher asked.
Maureen frowned. “I do not.”
At second glance, she realized less of the cemetery was visible to her than she’d thought.
Magnolia trees rose in various spots, hiding some of the tombs. Live oaks grew on the sidewalks surrounding the cemetery, and their long, gnarled branches reached over the brick wall, hiding the inside edges and corners of the grounds in shadow. Many of the structures stood close together, creating narrow alleyways, invisible to her from where she stood. The cemetery mirrored the neighborhoods she patrolled, Maureen thought. The closer and longer that she looked at them, the more untended and mysterious, and possibly dangerous, spaces she discovered. She would have to get down from her perch and search the cemetery on foot. The longer she looked at it, the larger the cemetery seemed to grow. Searching the corners and shadows and alleyways alone would take a lot longer than she had anticipated.
“You realize what you’re standing on, right?” Preacher said.
“What’s that?” The wind was rising again. Maureen thought she heard musical notes. A flute, maybe a toy piano.
“What you’re standing on,” Preacher said, “is the mausoleum. You know, a big marble-and-concrete filing cabinet, basically, full of two centuries of human remains.”
Maureen looked down at her feet, transmitting a silent apology to the spirits of the dead. “I’ll let you know when I’ve found our body.”
She walked to the edge of the shelf. She sat, fighting the wind, letting her legs dangle, and then she dropped to the ground.
She landed with a thump. A sleeping stray cat shrieked to panicked life right at her feet, darting into the darkness. Maureen shouted and stumbled backward against the mausoleum. Startled by the noise and the commotion, two more cats shot out of the grass, launching themselves in opposite directions, shadows darting among the crypts. Maureen dropped her flashlight. She had her weapon halfway drawn before she stopped herself.
From the other side of the wall, she could hear Preacher laughing at her. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she might have heard the security guard chuckling as well.
“I’m fine,” she shouted. That she’d been so quick to draw embarrassed and frightened her. The panic felt out of character. “God, I hate cats.”
She re-secured her weapon and picked up her flashlight, shined it to the left and then to the right down the path of hard dirt and dead grass. Nothing. No body, no ghouls, and thankfully no more stray cats. The surrounding streetlights shed a pale glow on the grounds. At least she wasn’t fumbling about in the pitch-dark, she thought. The idea occurred to her, looking around, that this whole scenario could be part of some elaborate welcome-back prank. Please, God, she thought, don’t let me shoot one of my coworkers because he jumped out at me wearing a monster mask.
Her radio crackled. Preacher’s voice, “This was your idea. Get to work.”
She keyed her mic. “We got nothing as to where the body might be?”
“Inside the walls, that’s the best we got,” Preacher said.
“Fuck me.” Should’ve waited for backup, she thought.
She walked the wide grass path with careful steps, flashlight beam sweeping in front of her from side to side. She was looking for signs of foul play, for signs of a dead body, but it was hard not be distracted by her surroundings. Some of the crypts and tombs were badly neglected, crumbling, ashen, and stained, the angels adorning their peaked rooftops having lost an arm or a wing or a halo, the engraved family names all but worn away by time and weather. Other buildings shone white and new in the beam of her flashlight. Oddly, age had little bearing on condition. On one of the cleanest tombs, the inscription revealed that the most recent inhabitant had been interred more than eighty years ago. Another cold winter gust rushed along the path and Maureen heard the musical notes again. Like someone blowing into the top of an empty bottle.
Maureen caught herself reading the names and the dates and the titles inscribed on the marble slabs on the faces of the crypts. Who had been married, who had been a parent. So many children; New Orleans had proved a hard place for them. Many of them had lived brief lives, only weeks, sometimes only days. Other people had survived into their seventies and eighties, even in the nineteenth century, having lived and died in New Orleans, she thought, before the first of her starving ancestors had ever boarded a ship in an Irish port. She read many Irish names, more than she’d figured she’d see. She both wanted and didn’t want to see Coughlin on one of the nameplates. Or Fagan, her mother’s maiden name.
At the foot of each nameplate was a small marble shelf, and on some of the shelves passing mourners had placed gifts and offerings for the recent and long-ago departed. Coins. Paper flowers. Tall glass candles. A warped and browned paperback copy of King Lear. A filthy white teddy bear tucked into an old urn, Mardi Gras beads placed around his neck, the beads as dull and colorless as the ashen marble tombs. Maureen fought the urge to reach out and touch the bear’s little nose, to scratch its frayed ears.