Garden of the Dead Read online

  Recent Titles by Andrew Neiderman

  AFTER LIFE

  AMNESIA

  ANGEL OF MERCY

  THE BABY SQUAD

  BLOODCHILD

  BRAINCHILD

  CHILD’S PLAY

  CURSE

  THE DARK

  DEAD TIME

  DEADLY VERDICT

  DEFICIENCY

  THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE

  DUPLICATES

  FINDING SATAN

  THE HUNTED

  THE IMMORTALS

  IMP

  IN DOUBLE JEOPARDY

  LIFE SENTENCE

  LOVE CHILD

  THE MADDENING

  THE NEED

  NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH

  NIGHT HOWL

  PERFECT LITTLE ANGELS

  PIN

  PLAYMATES

  REFLECTION

  SIGHT UNSEEN

  SISTER, SISTER

  SISTERS

  THE SOLOMON ORGANIZATION

  SOMEONE’S WATCHING

  SURROGATE CHILD

  TEACHER’S PET

  TENDER LOVING CARE

  UNDER ABDUCTION

  This first world edition published 2010

  in Great Britain and in 2011 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Copyright © 2010 by Andrew Neiderman.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Neiderman, Andrew.

  Garden of the dead.

  1. Cemetery managers–Fiction. 2. Grave robbing–Fiction.

  3. Suspense fiction.

  I. Title

  813.5’4-dc22

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6978-4 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-311-3 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7801-0004-3 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  EPILOGUE

  For my wife Diane.

  I am the words; she is the music.

  Together, we sing on.

  PROLOGUE

  He had never felt uncomfortable in the darkness. Even as a little boy, he didn’t ask that a light be kept on or cry when the door of his bedroom was closed. In fact, he welcomed the darkness. It was in the darkness that he was able to think deeper thoughts, thoughts he wouldn’t want anyone else to hear or to know.

  Some people could look at your face and read your thoughts no matter how good you were at hiding them. In the dark that wasn’t a worry.

  He even disliked the stars and certainly disliked the moon because of how unmasked their light made him feel.

  When he was twelve, he found this coffin-like cabinet on their property and tested himself by climbing into it and letting it close over him. It was warped enough to permit all the air he needed, and he never went into it during hot weather.

  At first it was admittedly difficult. What if the lid jammed? No one might hear his screams and he would starve or become dehydrated and die in the darkness he cherished so much. After a while, however, he was very comfortable. It was a great escape, even better than tree houses or caves. He didn’t have to share his hideout with anyone and in it he could plan and plot without anyone criticizing him or offering any opposition.

  And then there was Lazarus.

  He had heard that story enough times to memorize every word. He didn’t believe in the story, but it was always fascinating, and now when he climbed out of the cabinet he thought of himself as resurrected every time but in a far different way. Every time he was resurrected, he was sure he had grown more powerful, more self-confident. It was in the darkness that he could leave the heavy baggage others imposed on him. So that when the time came to make a very important decision, one surely most men his age would retreat from making, he could do it easily.

  So easily in fact that he never heard a peep from his conscience.

  Actually, he believed that when he climbed out of the cabinet for the last time, he had left his conscience completely in there. It wasn’t his conscience anyway. Church, school, parents and government had forced it on him.

  Getting rid of it was a relief.

  Now he could be who he always wanted to be without the slightest pang of guilt, especially now.

  ONE

  Carving out a grave perfectly was an artistic endeavor to Quinn.

  He used a backhoe, of course, but after he had the hole deep and wide enough, he would lower himself into it and, with a small hand shovel, sculpt it into a perfect rectangle with a smooth floor. Except for Jack Waller, who co-owned and operated the Sandburg Cemetery in what was now an exclusive residential community in the upstate New York area once famous for its summer resorts, no one seemed to take any particular notice of the graves Quinn dug. Most mourners avoided looking down into a grave, and few in the eye of the storm of grief would pause to compliment anyone for such a thing anyway.

  Quinn had a suspicion that the dead appreciated his extra efforts, but he wouldn’t ever say such a thing. Most people thought he was weird enough as it was, especially since he had been digging graves since he was fourteen, working with his father first and then taking over when his father was too sick to work. He insisted on helping dig his father’s grave. It was one of his last opportunities to do something he considered significant for him. He and his father had dug his mother’s. Neither was buried in the Sandburg Cemetery. It was a relatively new cemetery.

  Waller and his partner Richard Valentine bought the tract of land twelve years ago and made it something special with the elaborate landscaping, tiled walkways, and fountains adorned with angels, birds and flowers. They built a state-of-the-art, full service funeral home with a mortuary and reposing and slumber rooms with expensive furnishings and beautiful paintings of tranquil scenes. The home included a non-denominational chapel that could easily become a Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish sanctuary in minutes. There was even a small theater for video remembrances accompanied by music.

  They couldn’t discriminate against any race, but to make it even more exclusive they charged four times the price any other cemetery would charge for any grave-site and maintenance. They had very restrictive rules on what kind of monuments to permit, its size, shape and cost. There was nothing inexpensive. When someone said, ‘You can’t take your money with you,’ Quinn would think metaphorically that the dead in the Sandburg cemetery certainly took a significant part of their wealth with them.

  Today was the first time he had an opportunity to literally believe it. He was in Jack Waller’s adjoining office waiting for instructions. The door was slightly ajar. Waller kept one well appointed and furnished office for greeting his bereaved and making the arrangements, and another for his detailed business work. That office was Spartan, practical and, to Quinn, a bit dreary with its Venetian shades instead of curtains, bland dark-gray walls, tightly woven light gray rug
and fluorescent lighting. It was always untidy. It reminded him of the detention room in high school, not that he was in that room much at all.

  Quinn was tired this morning because he had been suffering from insomnia lately and as a remedy thought he would stay up watching television until he was too exhausted to keep his eyes open. Unfortunately, he got hooked in a thriller and was unable to turn it off. He battled sleep until the film ended and then fell asleep quickly. He would have overslept, but Waller woke him to tell him to come to the funeral home. There was an immediate assignment. Matthew Kitchen had died and arrangements were being made quickly, so quickly in fact that ‘It’s almost as if his children wanted to get started as soon as possible on forgetting him.’ That was the dry humor of Jack Waller.

  Quinn would be there and not only because it was Matthew Kitchen, one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the community, and not only because he had once had a serious crush on Kitchen’s daughter Evelyn in high school. He would be there quickly because Waller paid him too well for him to jeopardize his job. He was the only yearly salaried employee for Sandburg Cemetery, which under his title of cemetery manager included overseeing and maintaining the landscaping, snow plowing the long driveway in the winter, de-icing the walkways and servicing any electrical or plumbing issues. He had an ever changing roster of part-time assistants, ever changing and part-time simply because it was difficult holding on to anyone for this sort of work. They either got drunk and didn’t show up or moved on to better paying labor.

  Quinn had fallen asleep in his clothes so he just had to wash his face with cold water, brush his hair and leave for the funeral home. It wasn’t the first time he was roused and rushed out without breakfast or putting on fresh clothing. There was no one else at his home to care.

  At twenty-eight, he still lived alone in his father and mother’s house, an eighteen hundred square foot two story Queen Anne with twelve acres of surrounding forest, none of which had ever been cleared. The house was paid for so all he had was its maintenance and the real estate taxes. There was always some talk about housing developments being started adjacent to his property, which made the prospects for its appreciation very good. A quarter of a mile in on the west, there was a small creek that trickled into the larger Sandburg Creek. He had a productive submersible well and good leeching ditches for sewerage.

  Bachelorhood wasn’t difficult for him. He was self-reliant from his early teen years and since then had always looked after his own things, washing his own clothes and cleaning his own room with the same compulsive immaculate behavior his father evinced with everything he did. His mother wasn’t as neat and was never much of a homemaker. Life itself seemed exhausting and overwhelming to her. He loved her dearly, but he had no emotional cataracts when it came to seeing her for whom and what she was . . . lazy.

  Working beside his father, he cared for the property, took pride in its pristine appearance, learned how to plumb, do electric work, automobile maintenance and carpentry. He poured cement and improved the sidewalk, repaired any equipment, helped his father add on a room for them to use as a den to house their television and a pool table, laid carpet and wood floors and cut firewood for their self-made, fieldstone fireplace. There never seemed to be an hour lacking something to do.

  Quinn slept in the room he had slept in since he was three years old. In fact, as silly as it seemed, he still had the pictures of comic book heroes on his walls and still had old baseball and football stars’ pictures hanging where they had first been hung. It gave him a sense of security, a feeling that he hadn’t lost the magic of family. Years had gone by; his parents, who had him late in life, were gone, but he remained safely encased in his cocoon.

  Sometimes, at night, when he heard a creak that sounded like footsteps, he would imagine it was only his mother getting up to get herself a glass of milk. She said it helped her sleep. If he heard what sounded like a pickup truck nearby, he would imagine it was his father coming home from work.

  There was no obvious reason for him to be a loner. Randy Quinn wasn’t an ugly man by any means. He was six feet two inches tall with broad shoulders and a lean, muscular body firmed by years of manual labor. He had played football in high school, but he was always too slow to be more than a defensive lineman and despite his strength and size, he was really never aggressive enough to suit his coach. Because his father had some health problems and he had to complete his work more often, Quinn never played during his senior year, which was probably the year he should have played the most.

  With deep set dark blue eyes, a shock of thick light brown hair, male model high cheek bones, a Romanesque nose and firm, strong lips, he also should have been a heart-throb, especially in his senior year, but he was attending a small school with a K-12 population of barely more than one thousand students. Everyone’s family, business and sibling history was well known. No one had to spill his or her intimate details on a talk show here. It was as if the community had its own nerve endings through which news of a marital crisis, the criminal action of a relative, the unwanted pregnancy of a teenage girl or simply a serious illness shot through the community’s spine with the electric speed of a reflex. What that unfortunately meant was Quinn could not disguise the work he did or avoid the negative connotations associated with it.

  He was nicknamed Corpsey early on in junior high, and the name stuck. Everyone knew what his father did for a living and everyone knew what he did on his summers and holidays and weekends. The fact that he had little or no contact with any corpse didn’t seem to matter. Anyone in any way attached to a cemetery and a funeral home was smeared with the same brush. It was as if they were infected by death and others thought they might infect them.

  Often the subject of jokes, he retreated from much social contact with other students. He did well enough in school, but saw graduation almost the way an inmate viewed his prison release. He had some interest in going to college. However, his father didn’t encourage him and by now his mother was in an alcoholic retreat, slowly closing the lid of her own coffin with gin and cigarettes. He toyed with enlisting in the army, but was afraid of joining any organization from which he couldn’t make an instantaneous retreat and with the Iraq war still raging, he envisioned once they had discovered what work he had done as a civilian, he’d be assigned to escort the dead.

  Just recently, in fact, he had dug the grave of one of his former high school classmates, Nick Reuben, killed in Iraq. Usually, he didn’t know the people that he buried in this cemetery that well. They had traveled in more exclusive circles. He knew who some of them were and occasionally knew their relatives, but he hadn’t had the same sort of close contact with any of them that he had with Nick. Nick had sat two desks behind him in math and next to him in English literature.

  When Nick’s coffin was being lowered into the perfect grave, Quinn thought about the time they had read Hamlet and Nick had teased him with some of the gravedigger’s speeches. He would follow him through the hallway quoting lines like ‘Whose grave is this? Mine sir. How long hast thou been a gravedigger? How long will a man lie in the earth ere he rot?’

  Quinn would walk faster, but once, tired of it when Nick followed him on to the school bus and continued quoting and teasing him to show off for some girls, he turned and punched him just under his nose, loosening some of his teeth and causing a nosebleed. Quinn was suspended for a week and in detention for two days, but Nick never teased him again.

  Two years after their high school graduation, Nick actually apologized to him for the incident in junior high. Since he had enlisted, Nick had become surprisingly mild, careful, and generous. It was as if he were trying to stack his good side to strengthen his chances of making it back in one piece. Quinn bore him no malice and wished him good luck. He had worked extra hard to make Nick’s grave perfect, smoothing the sides and leveling the floor as if his old classmate were actually going to live in it.

  Right now, still half asleep, he waited in the adjoining office and ba
rely paid attention to the voices in the arrangements office, but then the voices made him sit up, especially the female’s voice. He recognized Evelyn Kitchen. Sometimes, even now, he would pause no matter what he was doing and recall her walking through the high school hallways. To him it was more like she was floating. Her steps were that soft, her body that lithe. She had an angelic glow about her. He had noticed her before, of course, but in her senior year, she seemed to bloom like a flower that had waited for just the right amount of pure sunshine.

  When he got up enough nerve to approach her, he felt himself tremble, his voice crack. She was friendly in a polite and proper way, but disappointingly aloof. He felt as if he had been dismissed. To the rest of the students, especially the boys who also had been rejected, and the girls who were dying of envy, Evelyn and her fraternal twin brother Stuart were the epitome of snobbery. Neither had much to do with the other students, and neither participated in any extra-curricular activities. The story was that Matthew Kitchen insisted they attend a public school to develop their character, but they were friends only with students their age who attended private schools. Perhaps that was the only way they could show their father defiance.

  In Quinn’s mind, maybe hopefully so, Stuart was far more of a snob than Evelyn. He had a slim, almost feminine body with small shoulders, thin wrists and a narrow waist. Quinn had a suspicion Stuart spent just as much time on his complexion and hair as Evelyn did. He was admittedly very bright, but usually sardonic to a fault and when he was pushed too hard or when he pushed hard enough to rile up someone, he usually effected a quick retreat. The other guys called him Hit and Run Kitchen. Everyone said that if his father wasn’t so important and influential, he’d be dead.

  Matthew Kitchen had built a small empire with his brilliant real estate acquisitions, and then he parlayed the money into other ventures like racetracks, festival sites, and successful restaurant chains. County politicians wined and dined him. His influence was said to have reached deeply into the state capital and even the governor’s office no matter who the governor was or what party was in power.