HOW MANY DEAD DOCTORS?
The cemetery gate was supposed to be open till sunset. The sun was still a few degrees above the hills to the west. Jenny had been parked off the road down by the pond at the lower end of the cemetery visiting her husband's grave. Beezer, the assistant superintendent, must have been anxious to go home early, hadn't realized she was there, and had locked the gate. The board would certainly hear about this at its next meeting.
What to do? Despite her board member status, she had no keys to the cemetery office. And there was no outside phone. She could easily climb over the low stone wall next to the gate and try to flag down a passing car. But the lonely stretch of Cape Cod road outside the cemetery was not a comfortable place for a woman to be by herself this late in the day. And there were no houses close by.
"Well," she thought, "I might as well be patient and wait for the cruiser." Since a vandalism spree the previous summer, Chief Edwards had the nighttime cruiser officers checking each of the cemeteries in their districts sometime during their tour. They carried keys to the gates with them in the cars.
There was no set time for the check. She could only hope it would be early rather than late — and that the officer on duty would really make the check tonight and not sluff it off.
Not that she really minded a little extra time to spend beside her beloved Harry's new grave. She could tell him again, and again, how much she loved him and how much she missed him.
She drove back and parked by the pond. There was still daylight, but it was fading fast among the huge oak trees that shaded the burial area. She took her flashlight from the glove compartment and walked over to the ornate marble bench donated by the Tavender family, from which she would have a full view of her husband's grave and of Jeffrey's. As she sat down, she had the uncomfortable feeling that someone was there sitting beside her, but she saw no one.
She shivered involuntarily. She had never been in a cemetery after dark. To Jenny, a cemetery had always been a cheerful place — a place where you brought bright flowers and holly baskets to put on the graves of loved ones. She remembered how when they had buried Harry — just a few weeks ago — the sun had shone down in all its glory on their graveside service. Mocking birds sang in the oak trees. And bumblebees buzzed busily around the flowers which surrounded Harry's flag-covered coffin. She missed him terribly, the high school sweetheart she had married right after his graduation from medical school — cut down in that awful highway accident while in the prime of his professional career. The brightness of the day and the soothing words of their minister had assuaged her grief the morning of the funeral, and the quiet serenity of the graveyard had provided solace on her frequent visits since.
But as darkness crept over the pond and the graves and the grove of oak trees, she found the cemetery growing less friendly by the minute. And now a damp, cold fog came rolling in from Nantucket Sound. She could hear the foghorn three miles away at the Point blaring its message of warning. Maybe she should drive back to the gate, climb over the stone wall, and try to hail whoever drove by. She shivered again.
"Jenny, you're chilly," said a voice from the bench beside her.
She would have screamed in panic except that her heart seemed to leap into her throat, paralyzing her vocal cords. She recognized the voice. It was the voice of Jeffrey Tavender, Harry's fellow doctor and best friend — Jeffrey, whose life was snuffed out with Harry's as they returned late at night from the medical convention in Philadelphia. It was the mellow voice of a man who might have been a spellbinding preacher or a television personality young women would swoon over if he hadn't opted for medicine, like his friend Harry.
"Don't you have a sweater in the car?" the mellow tones asked. She did. She stood up as if in a trance. Guided around the gravestones by the beam of her flashlight, she picked her way through the fog to the car, got out the sweater, and put it on.
"I must be dreaming," she thought, "a dead man's voice telling me to put on a sweater." The conclusion emboldened her. She had to get a grip on herself. She walked back to the marble bench and sat down.
Again the voice: "Warmer now? I always liked the way you looked in a sweater — though that's not one of your more glamorous ones."
How could he see her in the dark? She shone the flashlight to the right of her. This time she made out the faint figure of a man — a man who indeed looked like Jeffrey Tavender, with the beam of the flashlight filtering through him. Was someone playing a ghoulish trick? She marveled at her own calmness and her application of logic given the start she had just suffered. There was one sure way to find out if it really was Jeffrey, or his ghost. "Which of my sweaters did you like the best?" she asked, remembering the secret that only she and Jeffrey knew about.
"The purple one," the figure replied without hesitation, "the one that clung to you like a glove and that you used to wear with nothing under it when I came to call."
Jeffrey had been her lover. Their affair had started when Harry was overseas as an Army Reserve doctor in Operation Desert Storm. He had driven her home from a meeting of the Arts Council, and she had invited him in "for a few minutes." They had been friends since elementary school. And now both were lonely. Harry was overseas. Jeffrey had gone through an unhappy divorce. The "few minutes" lasted all night.
The first night Jenny had thought that it was a one-time thing. But they found each other habit forming. It was as if each of them was driven to get maximum enjoyment from a relationship which both knew would have to end when Harry came back from the Gulf. And end it did. They spoke occasionally on the phone, and she wrote him an affectionate letter telling him how much he had meant to her during this short interval in their lives. But neither of them made an attempt to continue or to revive the relationship.
Now she was on a marble bench in Oak Hollow Cemetery with her lover's ghost. Or she was dreaming the wildest, most realistic dream in her 41 years on the green earth.
She was tempted to recall some of the pleasures they had shared. But a sudden thought stopped her. What if Harry's ghost was lingering behind one of those oak trees?
"A penny for your thoughts," said the figure on the bench. "But it will have to be a figurative penny. We spirits don't handle hard curr ency."
"A penny for my thoughts? I was just wondering whether Harry's ghost is here with us."
"Can't be," said the figure. "Harry's not dead!"
This shock was even bigger than the first one. "Not dead? But who did we bury?"
"A passenger named Stepanian — Stephen Stepanian."
The dream was getting even wilder. It had to be a nightmare. She was about to ask another question when suddenly she heard the motor of an approaching car and saw the headlights of the police cruiser coming down the road through the fog. She jumped up, ran to the road, and waved the flashlight back and forth.
The cruiser eased up to her and stopped. She walked around to the driver's side and gasped when she saw from the dash lights reflected on his face that the officer was Muggs Murphy, the "bad boy" of the Seaside Police Department. Chief Jimmy Edwards had tried to fire him at least twice for propositioning women he had stopped for speeding, but a sharp lawyer and a politically minded Board of Selectmen had let him off the hook. Jimmy had intimated there were even worse trangressions on Muggs's record, but that victims were too embarrassed to come forward. Even in high school, she remembered, Muggs had the reputation for driving girls to the sandpit on Shore Road and not taking them home until they satisfied his demands. Now she was alone with him in Oak Hollow Cemetery.
Muggs quickly sized up the situation. "Got locked in, huh? Prob'ly down at Harry's grave and lost track o' the time. Gee, Jenny, I was sorry to hear about Harry. Nice guy. Too bad him and Tavender didn't stop at some motel stedda tryna drive all the way home in one night. And too bad they didden have their seat belts on — though from what I understand about how Harry got burned, it might notta made no diffe rence."
Muggs made her very uncomfortable. "How about getting me out of here?" she asked him. "It's late, and I'm hungry."
"Sure, just a minute," he replied. He reached over and pushed open the passenger side door. "Just sit down in here for a minute and give me the basic facts for my report."
Reluctantly she walked around the front of the car and got into the front seat. She knew it was a mistake when she saw Muggs touch a button on the driver side door and heard the lock snap closed on the door on her side. There was nothing on her door to allow her to unlock it.
Muggs took a clipboard from the door pocket and made a pretense of writing down a few particulars: name, address, time locked in the cemetery. He put the clipboard back in the door.
"Jenny," he said unctuously, "I've wanted to get you alone ever since Seaside High School. To them who watch and wait, good things finally happen." His face, in the dashboard lights, looked like sheer evil — confident and leering.
He put his hand on her knee.
"Why dontcha take off your pants, and we can...."
Suddenly, in the dim light, she saw a look of absolute terror cross his face. In a single panic driven motion, he pushed the button to unlock the cruiser doors, reached across her to push open the passenger door, and shoved her out onto the ground.
He turned his cruiser around, grinding the gears as he went from forward to reverse to forward without pausing, and headed for the gate as fast as he could go through the fog. She jumped into her car and was right on his bumper as they went out onto Oak Hollow Road. He turned to the left, she to the right. She wondered what the cemetery people would say the next morning when they found the gate wide open.
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