Also Grave Robber
by Tom Sheehan

Somewhere along the line it had all gotten out of hand. Somebody was robbing graves at Riverside Cemetery, sitting just above the Merrimack River on a flat hilltop. Stealing coins, too, strange as it seems. That’s the kind of thing can jerk a town right off its feet, even if the spread of the cemetery was closing fast on its capacity and a new site required.

From my perspective, I figure it started more than half a century earlier. That’s when Mr. Zinias, on the side of a steep rise on Main Street, began placing coins into the wet cement of new steps rising from the street, 72 steps in all, to his front door. Never gold, never precious or collectibles in their own right, but often copper pennies and now and then silver and knurled, they became midnight targets for us, four kids of the neighborhood as tight as a gambler’s wad.

We’d bring our tiny hammers and cold chisels and tap away near Friday midnights for coins for our theater visits on Saturday, The Lone Ranger or Flash Gordon or Buck Jones calling for us. Each of us slipped out of bedroom windows for the thievery, silent as nighthawks or footpads or other prowlers. Often I have thought that Mr. Zinias sat on his screened-in porch listening to us, miners in our own right, giggling at our clumsy thefts, enjoying the cheap comedy. Oh, there were small curses galore and pinched fingers aplenty, and knees that cement left bruised and memorable, and it only recently occurred to me that he was henchman and plotter along with us. Kind of a Santa Claus in reverse gear. On good days we knew he sat there looking out over the Merrimack River; you could almost smell his coffee.

Now, a whole half century later, someone was robbing the graves at Riverside Cemetery, also stealing coins, among other items left in memory. Some of the coins had been set into small cement additions on the stone bases (Oh, we had some hard labor artists in our town) and these had been chipped away from their eternal banks. Probably with little hammers and cold chisels, clinks and pings never heard, but someone, I figured, who knew about Mr. Zinias’ steps. Our inlaid treasure trove of the old days.

Dirk Edmunds, one of us tight-wad four, out of a long and imposing silence since his son’s death, had come to the police station, yelling at Chief Clembeck. “I leave coins on my son’s grave. He was a coin collector. Every time I find something he never had, I leave it on the base of his stone. Not for long, but to let him know I’m thinking of him. Now, someone’s stealing them!” He was a big man, deeply browed, and his arms loomed like separate chassis coming out of a short sleeve shirt. Anger was hiding just out of sight when it came to Dirk. Anger could have been easy with him. “I just leave them on the rim of the stone. Now I’m going to put them down with epoxy, you can bet your sweet ass on that. Son of a bitch, I’ll kill the guy if I ever catch him!” Down the steps of the station he went, at a plod, almost gargantuan, head big as a beehive, wide red suspenders tight on that massive chest, his fists hard against pants pockets. Just through talking more than he had talked in a year.

Not a chance his ever being the brightest apple in the barrel, old Dirk, but he had been one of us. Early on we had noticed that he always squinted his eyebrows at every part of a conversation going on around him, as if he were measuring each word said, each thought proffered, a deep measurement. It took us some time to realize that behind his dark brown eyes was a space like a huge garage that had gone out of business, and all the stalls were empty. In most of those conversations, he kept quiet, nodding, squinting, being himself. Of course, we never really got to know him. Silence takes some people out of normal orders, and into strange sanctuaries. But he had been one of our boyhood chippers, one of our pals, though time had long since dropped its strange veil between us.

I was wondering how deep that old bond would find itself these days, lots of spilt milk along the way.

The runner, Mary Appolinaire, came the very next day to the station, her voice raucous and strident coming out of such a slight frame. To me she was mostly a stranger in town, becoming nothing more than a slim shadow in local road races, an apparition loping alongside the Merrimack River.

“They’re grave robbers! Nothing but grave robbers! I want that known!” Oh, that lady had a voice.

A fifty-year-old school teacher, she had retired early, and was now given to running long distance races. Her twin sister was buried at Riverside after a horrible accident, and Mary had spent the better part of three years in the cemetery, morose, clinging to the old days, a bag of woes. Running, initially away from her problems, had given her a new liberty, a new outlook. But her little gifts left for sister Margaret were being taken in the night. They were simple things, like Margaret’s first harmonica found in the attic, an old collection of Quaker Oats paper dolls wrapped in Cellophane or Saranwrap, a white metal penny from World War II, a small but highly understood page from a dance book three times holding the name of a boy who never came home from some war, things that made Mary ache all over again. “I want the police down there every night!” Truth is, Mary knew a couple of cops met their quick dates in the dark cemetery, but decided to leave well enough alone. Some of the cops wore stripes. Some of the ladies she knew.

The new chief was an old patrolman who had slowly and methodically climbed the ranks, like a mountain climber learning on the job, at The Matterhorn or K-27 itself, a long haul. His name was Tutor Clembeck and at a rather boisterous meeting with some of the victims had made a promise. “I’ll have a patrol car in there a few times every night. No schedule, just a random kind of visit, so as not to frighten away the thief until he’s in our sights. That place is going to be full up before we know it.” His patrolman’s eyes, long used to measuring intensity or danger or doubt or incredulity in faces, scanned the audience. His round face had a big mouth, bigger ears, and a nose once clubbed into near submission in a small riot. He had no trouble in being unpleasant.

Clinton Mobley was surprised at that dictate. Clint, like Dirk, was one of the old four. “Chief,” he said, “I don’t doubt that you mean well. You do have our respect.” Everybody in the room knew he was saying, “Even if you are slow as hell in most things, we respect your determination.” After the modulated pause, Clint continued. “Never has been a sighting. Never has been a light seen in the cemetery to show this crud where he’s going, what he’s at. Does that strike you as odd, chief?”

“Just says he’s real careful, to me. Maybe uses one of them pocket kind of flashlights. Could be a number of things.” The chief leaned toward the audience, which Clint knew was one of his learned but crude reactions, a ploy the man tried to employ.

Clint waved one hand and bounced it off the side of his head in subtle exasperation. “Ever think, chief, that we won’t get a look at him at night at all, because he goes in there during the day and sees everything he wants to see and needs to see and knows exactly where to go in the dark. Without benefit of light. Not a single match struck in the outing. Plots his time and target, he does, right under everybody’s eyes.”

“What you’re saying, Clint, is that he could be one of us in this room right now.”

“You’re damn right,” Clint threw back at him. “Could be any one of us. We’ve all seen what the hell kind of stuff has been ending up as mementos, and all the time the character of the cemetery, right under our noses, has been changing. That’s not news to any of us. The town is changing. Old, sedate Riverside is no longer sedate. It’s about had its day and we better face that sooner than we thought.”