Mausoleum Read Free

cousins who stayed behind, kept on being farmers, tradesmen, preachers, horse traders and, starting with my great-grandfather, real estate agents. They often served as selectmen of their nice little town, which was no way to get rich if you were honest, which they were. I was the only one who had ever made a ton of money, but that was during a misspent youth on Wall Street doing yeoman service for bubbly exuberance—and the loot hadn’t lasted longer than it deserved to.
    â€œ Scooter McKay !” Connie raised her cane.
    On the verge of blurting, “Aye, Me Hearty!” and unsheathing his cutlass, Scooter lost his nerve and turned pale. There were few men in Newbury under seventy who did not recall delivering the newspaper to Miss Abbott’s mansion, or raking the front yard under her watchful eye, and Scooter had lived his whole life directly across the street from her. How he thought he could get away with this act was beyond me.
    His daughters crept toward a bigger elm. Eleanor got very busy swapping out her camera’s memory card, and Scooter fell back on the manners we learned as day-students at Newbury Prep. He swept his pirate hat off his head and bowed low. “Good afternoon, Miss Abbott.”
    â€œYou just wait until the next tercentennial, Scooter McKay.”
    â€œThe next —yes, Miss Abbott?”
    â€œI will portray your great-grandmother Emily, the pig farmer. And I will bribe the fattest McKay children I can find to portray piglets.”
    A sudden blast of organ music drowned out the sound of hefty teenage daughters weeping and saved Scooter from having to come up with a polite, much less bright rejoinder. The music was so loud it seemed to fall from the sky. Bach (his Mass in B-Minor, I learned later), thundered down the hill, echoed to Main Street and, judging by the volume, halfway to Massachusetts. It was both moving and exuberant, but it totally derailed the Notables’ Tour.
    All eyes focused on the Grose Mausoleum. I had not believed the rumor that Brian Grose had installed surround sound to entertain him through Eternity. Now that rumor sounded stentorianly true.
    â€œBen,” Connie said, “please do something about that.”
    I hoofed it up the hill to tell him to put on a headset and worked my way through the crowd gathering around Grose’s spike fence. Up close Bach shook the ground. I expected to find Grose sitting inside the thing’s foyer, mind blown on his own loudness. But the mausoleum was shut tight as a bank vault. I climbed over the front gate, stepped under the portico, and knocked on the thick bronze door, which had the effect of making very little noise, while hurting my knuckles a lot.
    I looked down for a rock to bang on it.
    Instead of picking up a rock, I stepped back, gingerly. Then I took out my cell phone, and tapped 911.

Chapter Two
    â€œBenjamin Constantine Abbott III” on Resident State Trooper Oliver Moody’s caller ID was not a name to put a smile on his grim face or warmth in his truculent voice. We had been butting heads since I was a mutinous teen.
    â€œWhat do you want, Ben?”
    I had to clap a hand on my ear to hear him over Bach. “Come up to the cemetery.”
    â€œWhat part?” The cemetery was enormous, much of it open space—wooded Castle Hill—reserved to bury generations unborn.
    â€œBrian Grose’s mausoleum.”
    â€œAre you tying up a 911 emergency line to report an act of vandalism?”
    â€œBlood is seeping out of it.” I would have thought a mausoleum door would be sealed at the bottom, but I was standing in sticky, half-dried blood and tracking it on the grass.
    â€œSure it’s not red paint?”
    â€œNot this time. Better bring the ambulance—And Ollie?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œMaybe a wrecker to open the door. It’s locked tight.”
    â€œBen,” Connie called. “Is everything all right?”
    She was surrounded