Mausoleum Read Online Free

while reading the accounts of Newbury’s first general store in a monotone—represented the original Village Cemetery Association, the pre-mausoleum, anti-mausoleum faction that had secured a sixty-day court injunction against new mausoleums. They wanted to hire me to investigate the murder.
    I wanted the job, but all I said was, “Why?”
    Dan said I was qualified.
    â€œSo are the cops. They sent the best squad in the state.”
    â€œIt is important that we appear to take charge of the situation that affects the perceived integrity of the association,” said Rick Bowland.
    I knew enough about the struggle to ask, “Is this to influence the court?”
    â€œThe new people are attempting to get the injunction lifted.”
    â€œWhat does that have to do with Brian getting killed?”
    â€œQuote: ‘The security breach proves that cronyism has undermined the competence of the entrenched bloc who seized control of the Cemetery Association.’”
    Everyone started talking at once.
    â€œThey’re making us sound like Rumsfeld in Iraq.”
    â€œThey’re trying to steal the Association, Ben.”
    â€œSteal it?”
    â€œSteal control, so they destroy the cemetery. They’ve got plans for fifty of them.”
    â€œFifty what?”
    â€œ Mausoleums . It’ll look like a Toll Brothers subdivision instead of our burying ground.”
    â€œThey’ll do anything to beat us.”
    â€œThey’re making hay out of this murder.’
    â€œYou know what we’re saying, Ben?”
    I said, “You are saying that you don’t want anymore Hummer-house headstones in the burying ground. Neither do I.”
    â€œSo you’ll help us?”
    I said, “This could get expensive, guys.”
    â€œWell, we’re thinking you’ll do it pro bono,” they said, not surprising me a lot.
    I wanted the job for numerous reasons. The money, of course. Unless the state police immediately turned up an obvious killer, then a man shot in his own mausoleum was a case to get the juices flowing. And I disliked gross mausoleums as much as my friends who were fighting to retain control of a beautiful burying ground that was my cemetery, too. But I had no intention of taking as deep a pay cut as they were plotting.
    The Cemetery Association was solvent, and happened to own enough open ground right on the edge of the borough to bury Newburians until our next Tercentennial, because its trustees were tight-fisted, skin-flinty, penny-pinching Yankees and had been for the last three hundred years. If I allowed myself to get taken by a mob that regarded knocking my price down as a godfearing act, I’d get jerked around next time I negotiated a real estate deal with any of them.
    I wasn’t particularly worried: playing hard-to-get gave me an edge; that they felt under the gun helped; nor was it in their nature to hire an outsider.
    Indeed, Banker Dan Adams, whose family had been around almost as long as mine, grudgingly sweetened the offer. “Maybe we could work out something where you’d get a free burial plot.”
    â€œI already have a burial plot,” I reminded him. “In fact, I believe I have an extra one as my mother has announced she prefers to be buried in Frenchtown.” Having fled “snobby” Main Street when my father died and left me the house, she was threatening to make the move eternal, even though it would mean leaving my father alone with his family.
    Dan glowered. “Okay, how about we give you a break on your dues?”
    In a sensible world a part-time private investigator would not have been invited to address the Cemetery Association’s board of trustees that evening. But a town that’s been home for centuries is not always a sensible world. Salary negotiation notwithstanding, there was no way I would dodge a request from any of the associations of volunteers that made Newbury work, be they