“Are you sure the scouts didn’t pull a prank on you?” he said, lowering the phone under his chin for a spooky effect.
“Not a chance,” I said. “This is the real deal.”
I explained how I’d found the body behind the mantel’s large stones, which had been covered by the heavy, wooden sign.
We both shuddered.
“I wonder how long it’s been here,” he said.
I’d been wondering the same thing. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, deconstructing the odors in the room as I did so. I smelled the autumn leaves, the dirt, the rusted wheel, gate, and spade. I also picked up the scent of turkey and swiss, with a dash of mustard, that wafted from Peter’s knapsack, and a little of his Old Spice. I did not, however, smell any rotting flesh. Granted, my experience with the smell of body decomposition was limited to a squirrel that had died in my wall last year, but that odor was filed away in my highly sensitive olfactory files, honed after years of mixing and matching candle scents for customers.
“I think this guy’s been here a long while,” I said, opening my eyes.
“I can’t believe you found a skeleton,” he said, absently touching a pencil he keeps behind his ear, ready for any story. “You’re like a tomb raider.”
I had to agree I’d stumbled on an unbelievable find. I picked up my phone, which I’d left lying on the floor, and turned its flashlight toward my skeleton. Moving another stone aside with my free hand, I realized the body was clothed.
My beam of light joined Peter’s on a pair of boots with two bones extending from them. They were black leather, with decent soles and tightly bound laces, still tied into a bow. The shoes were sturdy, but the stitching looked as if it had been made by hand and not by a machine.
“They’re so tiny,” Peter said.
Tracing the light up the body, we realized that the skeleton was enrobed in a dress and matching bonnet, both in a somber gray and black.
This was no guy.
“She looks like a Quaker,” I said. “When I worked at the Whaling Museum in high school, I sometimes gave tours of the decorative arts rooms. I remember this kind of attire was from around the early to mid-eighteen hundreds.”
“I didn’t know you were a museum docent,” said Peter with a smile. Even in front of a dead body, I was suddenly very aware of his dirty-blond hair, which always flops over his left eye when he’s excited, and the blue plaid shirt he was wearing today. I love that one. It brightens his baby blues to an irresistible shade.
“The teen docent program didn’t last long,” I said. “Some of us had too much fun making up stories.”
“Too bad you didn’t have this one to tell.” Peter’s light hovered over the woman’s bodice and stopped at the hands, which were folded over what had probably once been her heart.
“Check out her shirt,” said Peter. He pointed to a pattern on the woman’s blouse.
I peered more closely. I’d never been up close to a skeleton, and I felt like I was intruding and also like she might reach out and grab me at the same time.
“That’s not a design,” I said. “It’s a bloodstain.”
“Maybe she died in an accident,” he said.
“And they buried her in the same bloody clothes? Above the mantel?”
I couldn’t believe that the cantilevered mantel had been chosen as a grave, but someone had gone to great lengths to remove pieces of the hearth’s thick wall to bury the blood-soaked woman there. I looked around the room in search of the stones that had originally been removed to make space for the small corpse. There was no sign of them. All I saw were the ones that had fallen when I’d moved the sign and those I’d cleared away. Given the condition of the corpse and the way the grave had been boarded up, it was clear to me that the woman had been hidden there.
There was only one conclusion to make.
“I think she was murdered,” I said.
“This is definitely an eerie set up, but murder?” said Peter. He pulled a small notepad from the pocket of his pants. “Either way, your find is a great local interest story, especially leading up to Halloween.”
I ignored the doubt in his voice about my murder theory. I had no misgiving that the woman I was looking at had been murdered, and not because I had some experience in the matter. I didn’t have evidence, but I had common sense. For one, although I knew it was a custom for Quakers to be buried in unmarked tombs, I’d never heard of home burials like this one. Otherwise, dozens of historic houses on the island would have produced a cemetery’s worth of remains over the decades.
Also, I had been the one to discover the body. I had seen the building’s stones fall from the wall. They hadn’t been carefully sealed into place, as one would have done in a thoughtful, premeditated burial. Instead, they had practically sprung from the wall after years of compression behind the large and heavy sign that had covered the body.
It felt as if we were far from civilization, but outside The Shack, I heard the back door to the Morton house open, along with the sound of young girls. I wasn’t exactly standing in a crime scene, given that the murder had probably been committed over a hundred years ago, but I knew enough to keep the girls at bay. I wasn’t sure whom to call about a century-old skeleton, so I hit Officer Andy Southerland’s number on speed dial before I was halfway out the door, waving my hands like an air-traffic controller to stop the girls from approaching.
Shelly came up behind them and gave me a look that said, Where have you been? and What’s inside that I don’t want to know about? (aka, better you than me), and I was hoping to let the girls run around back here for a few minutes. Three emotions rolled into one piercing stare, which ended with a mutual nod of sympathy from each of us.
As the girls headed back into the house, equally disappointed that their free play had been canceled, Tinker joined them. His ears twitched with excitement at the prospect of a dozen scouts lavishing affection on him. I hoped he could provide enough entertainment so that Shelly could have her break. While I explained to Andy our need for his services, I heard the girls already making up stories about what was inside The Shack. In this instance, I suspected that even their wildest imaginings would not match my find.
After the back door shut behind them, the reality of my discovery hit me. Outside, the sun was still shining, the clouds were still rolling, but in the building behind me lay the bones of mystery. An irresistible puzzle. I wanted to know who the woman buried behind the Cooper’s Candles sign had been. I also wanted to know who had killed her and why. The combination of the dead woman’s carefully crossed arms over her bloodstained shirt in an old candle shop made me curious. What had happened?
There was no electricity in the building, but I wanted a better view of everything inside. Fortunately, I’m the kind of person who always has at least one box of candles stashed in the back of her car, which I now retrieved. While Peter phoned the Inky Mirror, the islanders’ nickname for the newspaper, to tell them he had a breaking story, I went back into the old chandlery and placed my candles around the perimeter of the room. When Peter finished his call, I handed him a pack of matches, and we lit the wicks.
“I can’t decide if this is romantic or the beginning of a horror movie,” he said when we’d finished and found ourselves surrounded by candlelight in the small, historic room.
“It’s authentic,” I said.
No disrespect to the dead, but I would have done anything to set up a Wick & Flame holiday-themed pop-up shop right there. I felt like my candles had brought Cooper’s Candles back to life.
“I wonder if the murder weapon is still here,” I said.
“Assuming she was murdered,” said Peter. “My editor is excited about the discovery, either way, so thank you