An Unquiet Grave (Louis Kincaid Mysteries) Read Online Free Page A

there,” he said. “I thought about it, but it would have meant taking Frances, too, and I just couldn’t do that.”
    Louis formed the question, and then wasn’t sure he wanted to ask it. But he knew he needed to. “The Irish Hills was your place with her?” he asked.
    Phillip glanced at him, then turned his gaze back to the road. “Only for one weekend.”
    Phillip didn’t say anything else and Louis held the rest of his questions. This wasn’t some passing fling. It was something that had survived Phillip’s thirty-one-year marriage to Frances. Longer than Louis had been alive.
    A first love.
    It wasn’t something he knew much about. It sure as hell hadn’t happened for him in high school. In the midseventies, many parts of the country were beginning to tolerate interracial relationships, but he never had the sense Plymouth was one of them. He had never gone to a dance or any other school function with a white girl on his arm. His first real girlfriend had been in college, but even she didn’t come with those tender memories that should accompany a first love. Right now he couldn’t even remember her last name.
    He settled back in the seat, watching the empty land, feeling the cold swirl of air from Phillip’s cracked window against the back of his neck.
     
    There was no sign for the cemetery. Only a listing black iron gate stuck deep into the mud, as if it had been left open for quite some time. Two towering pines stood guard on each side of the entrance and the land beyond it was a flat expanse of brown grass bordered by thickets and trees. As they walked up to the gate, Louis could see a silent backhoe sitting at the far end next to a heap of black dirt. Near it was a gangly yellow hoist, used to lift the concrete vaults from the graves. Three muddy vaults sat off in the far corner of the cemetery.
    Only the cawing of crows broke the still cold air. Louis looked up and spotted two of the birds staring down at them from the two sentry pines.
    Phillip walked on ahead and Louis followed, scanning the ground. The grass wasn’t very high, only five or six inches, but Louis didn’t see any headstones or monuments. A yard or two into the cemetery, he spied a plot of freshly disturbed ground where he guessed someone had been dug up and the hole refilled. Then there was another, and a third, before Phillip finally stopped.
    At his feet was an open grave, the bottom puddled with dark water. Phillip knelt at the head of the grave and pushed aside the dead grass. Louis stepped closer.
    A small stone square was pressed into the ground, no larger than six inches by eight inches. Louis squatted to look at the stone. It was well worn, but someone, probably Phillip, had scraped away the moss and mud, and the engraving was easy to read.
    No name. Just a number—1304.
    “What kind of cemetery is this?” Louis asked, looking up at Phillip.
    Phillip rose slowly, his eyes drifting back to the road they had driven in on, and beyond, to a cluster of taller trees. “There’s a hospital over there. This is where they buried their unclaimed dead.”
    Louis looked off in the same direction as Phillip, but he saw nothing. “What kind of hospital?” he asked.
    “A sanitarium.”
    “An insane asylum?”
    “Yes.”
    “Your friend died there?”
    “Yes. At least that’s what I was told.”
    Louis looked back at the stone marker embedded in the grass. “And all these people got were numbers on their graves?”
    “I suppose it started out as some kind of privacy thing, maybe to keep the curiosity seekers from coming in and vandalizing the graves,” Phillip said. “There were a couple of well-known criminals who were sent here back in the fifties and sixties.”
    Louis looked off at the far trees. Something was coming back to him. He stood up, facing Phillip. “This is Hidden Lake, isn’t it?”
    “Yes,” Phillip said. “You know about it?”
    Louis hesitated. He knew. He had heard about Hidden Lake many times,