A Veiled Antiquity (Torie O'Shea Mysteries) by Rett MacPherson Page A

as angry as my rooster does when he gets caught out in the rain. Bill is bald, short, and has a huge belly. He is one of those middle-aged men who are not overweight anywhere except in the midsection. His stomach could rival a midterm pregnancy.
    “Torie, for God’s sake! What have you done?”
    I stood there with a pair of scissors in my hands, and assumed that he was referring to them. “I’m making a banner for the Octoberfest,” I said.
    “Torie!” my mother yelled. “It’s Colin. He wants to speak to you.”
    Colin? I couldn’t get used to my mother calling Sheriff Brooke by his first name. I couldn’t treat him like an outsider if everybody was on a first-name basis with him. Rudy had capitulated about two weeks ago.
    “Bill, would you come in? I have a phone call. Just for a minute,” I said. He stood just inside the door with his fingers linked just below his belly, waiting impatiently.
    “Hello, Sheriff,” I said into the phone. I smiled at Bill.
    “Torie, I don’t know what to say,” Colin said.
    “About what?”
    “You had better not be responsible for this … this atrocity or I swear, I will kill you with my own bare hands.”
    “Jeez, all I’m doing is making one little ole banner.”
    “Really, Torie, you’ve gone too far,” Bill said to me, unable to keep quiet any longer. “I’m going to have the sheriff arrest you.”
    “Torie, you have gone too far,” the sheriff said.
    “Okay, would somebody please shut the heck up and tell me what it is that they think I have done?” I yelled.
    Bill shut up with a quick flap of his lower jaw, and surprisingly the sheriff did as well. Finally, after a few seconds of blissful silence, Sheriff Brooke began again in a calm voice.
    “Somebody dug up Marie Dijon’s grave, and it had better not have been you.”
    “What?” I felt sick. I felt sick because the thought of somebody digging up that poor woman’s grave gave me the creeps. I also felt sick because the sheriff thought I had done it. “Do you really think that I could do something like that?”
    “Well, no, not really,” Sheriff Brooke said into the phone.
    “Then why are you treating me like I did? What made you think such a horrible thing?” I asked.
    Both men simultaneously answered, “Eleanore Murdoch.”
    “Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” I stomped my feet a few times and took a deep breath.
    “I bet you can tell me why her grave was dug up,” the sheriff said.
    “Why would somebody dig up her grave?” Bill asked. He was beginning to panic.
    “Bill! Take a pill,” I said. “Why would either one of you think that I would be able to tell you something about a person digging up Marie’s body?”
    “Because,” the sheriff began, “I think the night you were in her house, you found something that you didn’t tell me about. Remember how you told me to listen with an open mind? You gave me your nice little well-thought-out, hokey bunch of bullshit!” he yelled. I pulled the phone away from my ear.
    “You don’t have to yell at me,” I said. “Where are you?”
    “I’m standing in the middle of the godforsaken rectory, for Christ’s sake—oh, excuse me, Father—and I’m thinking to myself: This smells like Torie O’Shea.”
    “I’ll be there in five minutes.”
    “No! Don’t you dare come down—”
    I hung up on him. “Bill, you can either drive yourself or you can ride with me,” I said to him. He decided to drive.
    *   *   *
    I pulled my station wagon in behind the mayor’s car at the Santa Lucia Cemetery on Jefferson Street and New Bavaria Boulevard. It was dark by now, about eight-thirty in the evening. The mayor didn’t want to ride in my car, which was fine with me, because I talked to myself the whole way there and he wouldn’t have appreciated anything that I had to say.
    The mayor’s property backs up to mine, and I have every animal known to mankind living back there. Chickens, rabbits, cats, fifteen species of birds, squirrels.