Mausoleum Read Online Free Page A

firefighters, ambulance crews, Lions, Rotary, or custodians of the dead.
    I promised the guys I would attend the meeting. I didn’t necessarily buy into their reasoning about the court case. But I totally agreed that we should do whatever we could to prevent our burying ground from becoming a gated community for the eternally crass.
    Aiming to wow the salary committee with clues the State Police would never turn up, I telephoned my sticky-fingered cousin Sherman Chevalley. None of the “Notables” pageants had been that close to Brian Grose’s mausoleum. Brian and/or somebody could easily have slipped inside unnoticed. But Sherman had to have gone to the cemetery much earlier than the other performers to set up the complicated gas engine and weave a spider web of drive belts to his corn sheller, water pump, and buzz saw.
    Alone in the cemetery, with an eye ever-roving for valuables not nailed down, Sherman could have noticed something like a car or a truck or someone lurking around the mausoleum— information that he was unlikely to share, voluntarily, with his nemesic foes, the cops, or even his parole officer. But he might talk to me if I bought him enough beers and promised to keep him out of it.
    His cell phone rang and rang and rang. He didn’t answer and it didn’t take messages. I drove down to Frenchtown to his mother’s house trailer, which huddled in the lee of a tumbled-down barn last painted by Sherman’s grandfather. She was “Aunt Helen” to me, although there were several cousins once or twice removed between her and my mother, and she greeted me warmly. She was tall and skinny, like Sherman. Fifty years of mothering him would have worn most women to the bone, but in Aunt Helen a cheery optimism had somehow survived.
    She sounded a little worried that he hadn’t showed up for any free meals since Sunday morning. Which made me really worried. He could be off on an innocent drunk, but disappearing hours after a shooting where several hundred people had seen him all day was the sort of behavior that could pique the curiosity of the State Police.
    â€œHow did he do at the cemetery thing?” she asked hopefully.
    â€œStar attraction,” I assured her, thinking to myself, Sherman, what have you gotten into this time?
    â€œDo you think Scooter McKay will write about him in the paper?”
    I told her I thought he would, a safe bet. The Notables was big news to the Clarion , easily as big as Brian’s murder—How many Tercentennials will most people experience? But even if Scooter neglected to mention his antique gas engine in the many pages of Notables coverage, Sherman’s name would most weeks be attached to minor infractions in the Police Reports. I was just hoping that this time it wouldn’t be a felony.
    I asked her if the police had been by about Brian Grose’s murder.
    â€œThat doesn’t have anything to do with Sherman,” she said with complete and utter faith in the boundaries of Sherman’s criminality. With that she repeated one of those mottos that get a mother through the day: “I have always said that Sherman can’t be all bad because animals and kids love him.”
    ***
    When I took Aunt Connie home Sunday, after we talked to the cops, I had pressed her about her Brian Grose gossip that would “curl your hair.” She had alluded, tangentially, to what she called, “assignations.” “With an ‘S?’” I had asked. More than one? “‘S’ as in several,” said Connie. When I asked if she had heard any names attached to the assignees, she reminded me that she did not repeat gossip.
    Now I had to ask her again, and this time it was business. “I know that you don’t repeat gossip, Connie. But in view of the circumstances, could you possibly tell me a little more about Brian Grose’s ‘assignations?’“
    â€œYou mean the