Cold Case by Linda Barnes

’78, seven years later.
    The caretaker had finished raking his patch. I looked for him outdoors before heading toward the official-looking stone cottage. Cemeteries keep records. If you can’t recall the last resting place of some dearly beloved, a cemetery map is generally available.
    I wanted more than a map.
    He was drinking a can of Coke, his head tipped back, the folds of his chin wiggling as he swallowed. I waited, finally made a deliberate noise, dragging my shoe across the gravel.
    â€œYep?” he said, slapping the can down on a nearby countertop, looking as guilty as if he’d been caught wielding a bottle of Wild Turkey. “Can I help you?”
    â€œHave you worked here long?” I asked.
    â€œYep,” he said, relaxing. “Best part of thirty-five years.”
    â€œAre some of the plots memorial plots?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œNo body buried there, just a stone marker, the way Paul Revere’s ‘buried’ in three, four places,” I said.
    â€œWe got ashes,” he said. “In the crematory.”
    â€œNo. I’m asking if all the stones, the monuments, are indicators that an actual body was buried here.”
    â€œYou better get specific with me, miss. Somebody in particular on your mind?”
    â€œDorothy Cameron. She was a writer, one book in 1970. Her tombstone says she died in ’71.”
    â€œThat’s right,” he said. “In the big plot. Died and buried in ’71. Pitiful thing when parents outlive a child.”
    â€œIt’s not a memorial stone. You’re sure? Are there records you can check?”
    â€œI could but I don’t need to. I remember that funeral, because she was famous. Fine family. We used to get all the fancy funerals; now we’re almost plumb out of space.”
    â€œThere was a casket,” I said.
    â€œRight,” he agreed, scratching the back of his neck, shrugging his shoulders like he was loosening them up, getting ready to go back to work with the rake. “I didn’t go to the funeral home or nothing, but I do remember it was a white casket, white lilies just mounded all over that grave. Everythin’ white, not a speck of color.”
    â€œIt was a long time ago,” I said.
    â€œI been around a long time. But I remember. Maybe not what I ate for breakfast, you know, but a big funeral like that, keeping the press away and all, I surely do remember that.”
    â€œThank you,” I said, turning away, feeling the grocery sack hanging from my wrist turn into a heavy weight.
    If Thea’s new manuscript was genuine, whose body lay under the marble stone? Was that what my client had meant when he said that he was sure someone had made a mistake? A mistake …
    On the way out of the cemetery, keeping one eye peeled for the blue denim man, I saw it.
    Adam Mayhew’s tombstone. His monument, rather. The engraving was directly at eye level. Ornate. Large. Anyone visiting the Cameron plot would have been sure to see it, maybe even remark on the detailed border, a ring of carved doves.
    I took notes as to the date of birth and the date of death. I’m a detective after all. Then I found a phone booth and dialed the number my client had written down last night.
    It was not in service within the 617 area code. I tried 508, the western suburbs, just to make sure. An automated voice told me to check the number and dial again.

7
    On the overcrowded, overheated bus, and then on the blissfully air-conditioned Red Line car, possibilities thrummed through my brain, keeping pace with the speeding subway. Number one: My client was a liar and a fraud. Liar and fraud. Liar and fraud. The rhythm fit the rumble of the rail and the sway of the seats.
    On the other hand—I tried to convince myself as the train emerged to cross the Charles River at the Longfellow Bridge—Mount Auburn Cemetery’s Adam Mayhew didn’t have to be my Adam Mayhew. The sun