Mausoleum Read Free Page A

by a crowd of kids and parents who were watching anxiously from the fence. They couldn’t see the blood, but they knew something was wrong and now they heard sirens in the distance. I called, “Would some of you kids please find Scooter McKay and Ted Barrett and Rick Bowland?”
    The guys came running and gently moved people away.
    Sirens descended; Ollie’s cruiser whooping, the ambulance howling, the wrecker’s air horn baying like a pack of pit bulls. Ollie got there first. The volunteer EMTs and Chevalley Enterprises Garage tied for second.
    Ollie, six-foot nine-inches from his storm trooper boots to the top of his broad-brimmed Stetson, and wearing a grey uniform so crisp that he might have ironed it out of sheet metal, crouched down for a close look at the blood. He beckoned Betty Butler from the ambulance. “I don’t want to mess up a crime site. How fresh is this? Could they still be alive?”
    â€œNo way I’ll say no,” said Betty. “Open the door.”
    Ollie beckoned Donny Butler, the Cemetery Association’s groundskeeper who was hurrying up to see what the excitement was about. Donny was shaggy, craggy, and cadaverous, and every woman in the cemetery brightened at the approach of the handsomest gravedigger in New England.
    â€œYou got the key?”
    â€œNope.” Donny did not look unhappy that there was a problem at Grose’s mausoleum. Last Spring, with a couple of beers in him, he had used the rusty bumper of his pickup truck to clear the cemetery service road of a “Freakin’ Yuppie Audi” which Brian Grose had parked inconsiderately. Harsh words invited a poke in the eye and Grose had pressed charges, calling the beaming owner of a body shop as his first witness and a bored ophthalmologist as his second.
    â€œOpen the door,” Ollie told Pinkerton Chevalley, a large cousin of mine who was looming beside his wrecker like the Grand Coulee Dam.
    Pink issued heavy tools to a pair of our vandalistic cousins he had brought along.
    â€œOpen the door.”
    Dennis and Albert swaggered up to the mausoleum grinning at this amazing turn of luck. I overheard Dennis mutter, “You believe we are getting paid to nuke this ‘sucker?”
    â€œRight in front of Ollie. And he can’t do squat.”
    They attacked the bronze with crowbars and sledge hammers. They were powerful young men, and they made a wonderful noise almost as loud as Bach, but didn’t do much to the door. In fact, all their banging and crashing had no effect at all, except for some gouges and scratches. Pink stepped in, shouting over the din, “The blood’s coming under the door. That means there’s a crack under the door. Shove your bar in the crack. Morons.”
    Albert and Dennis did as they were told. Perplexed, they stopped.
    â€œWhat?” chorused Pink and Ollie, the first time the anti-social Pink and his natural enemy the state trooper ever agreed on anything.
    â€œThe bar’s stuck.”
    Pink, known to bench press a Harley Davidson when in a playful mood, yanked it out with one hand and tossed it at Dennis. “ Open the door !”
    Sweating, grunting, Dennis and Albert attacked again.
    Betty Butler said, “Somebody could be bleeding to death in there. We really ought to open the door.”
    Pink, who regarded all women except his mother as inept food and sex delivery systems, turned red from his cap to his black Chevalley Enterprises T-shirt. “What do think we’re doing, Betty?”
    â€œI got some dynamite,” said Dennis. “It’s in the—Oww! Whad you hit me for?” He swung back, punching his brother before he realized that Albert was nodding his Minotaur head in the direction of Trooper Moody who, even before 9/11, had taken a dim view of explosives in the hands of private citizens—especially Chevalleys. “Oh, yeah,” said Dennis. “Thanks, Dude.”
    Aunt Connie said,