An Unquiet Grave (Louis Kincaid Mysteries) Read Online Free

alone and small as the bus let him and the other kids off in front of the Mayflower Hotel for their lunch.
    He knew now that the Mayflower wasn’t a fancy place. But it seemed like it then, with its dark green carpeting and shining wood desk and the sour-looking woman in a black uniform who handed them menus in the restaurant. The menu was huge in his hands and he didn’t know anything. What to order. What to do with the heavy white cloth napkin. Where to go if he had to pee.
    The teacher was standing up and talking about the Pilgrims, pointing to the wallpaper with its pictures of the Nina , Pinta , and Santa Maria . She was saying that they should all be thankful for the sacrifices of their forefathers who came here in ships to make their lives here possible. He had sat there listening to her, thinking, well, they sure the heck weren’t my forefathers.
    “The town is changing,” Phillip said.
    Louis heard something in Phillip’s voice and turned.
    “All these young folks moving out here, looking for some lost idea of a perfect small town,” Phillip said, his eyes steady on the road.
    “Plymouth isn’t perfect,” Louis said carefully.
    “They closed Cloverdale’s, you know. Some chain came in on Main Street.”
    Phillip was shaking his head in disgust. But Louis was remembering soft Sunday evenings, walking to the old ice cream parlor, he and Phillip getting double-dip cones of lush black cherry ice cream and ignoring the stares of all the white faces.
    Louis rubbed a sleeve over the fogged window. They were passing the high school now. The press of memories kept coming. Four years of being the only black kid in an all-white school. No one was mean, no one called him names. He was accepted, but almost like some weird mascot. Shared jokes in the john and always a seat in the cafeteria. But never an invitation to the parties at the white kids’ homes.
    Phillip was looking at the high school as they waited for the light to change.
    “You still run?” he asked.
    “Not as much as I should,” Louis said. He was still back in high school, trying to bring a face into focus, the face of some asshole PE coach who told him he should go out for basketball. The man didn’t care that Louis hated basketball, just kept pushing him until Louis started cutting PE. Finally, Phillip had a talk with the coach and then with Louis. Eventually, Louis went out for track just to please Phillip. But to his surprise, he liked cross-country. He liked the rush of the cool air on his face and the sound of his pulse in his ears. He liked the brain-cleansing feel of running. He liked the aloneness of it.
    “Frances found your letter sweater the other day in a box in the basement,” Phillip said. “She sent it to the cleaners so it would be ready when you came home.”
    “I don’t want that old thing.”
    “Take it anyway,” Phillip said. “Okay?”
    The light turned green and they drove on in silence. Phillip reached down and jabbed the lighter, and with a gesture born of decades shook a cigarette from its pack and lit it with one hand, his eyes never leaving the road. He cracked his window and blew the stream out.
    “What did you tell Frances about today?” Louis said.
    “Just that you wanted to go for a drive.”
    “Phillip, I need to know something. How much exactly does she know about this? Does she even know you visited this cemetery?”
    Phillip nodded. “She thinks it’s an old army buddy.”
    “That’s what you told her?”
    Phillip nodded again. “I could never bring myself to tell her the truth.”
    Louis let that go. The landscape changed as U.S. 12 stretched into the Michigan countryside. Flat, and tufted with yellow grass, the air swirling with crumbling rust-colored leaves.
    “Where are we going?” Louis asked.
    “The Irish Hills.”
    Louis was trying to remember if Phillip had ever taken him to the Irish Hills. But he didn’t need to think long. Phillip answered for him.
    “I never brought you out