Brush With Death (2 page)

“Nice to meet you.” As I held out my right hand, I noticed the tips of my fingers were stained a virulent shade from the vermilion I had been using while painting angels' robes, and my thumb was smeared with the burnt umber glaze I used for antiquing.

Cindy shook my multihued hand with her firm, clean one. We gazed into the crypt, our flashlights illuminating slices of the inky interior.

“What's with the Egyptian motif? I noticed another pyramid nearby, as well.”

“It was popular in the twenties and thirties, when a lot of the Great Pyramid excavations were going on. I'm trying to decipher some of the hieroglyphs, but I think they're mainly decorative,” Cindy mused. “It's funny, there's something special about this crypt. People bring things here all the time. A lot of them sit for a while, meditating or praying or talking to themselves. Sometimes they let me take their pictures.”

“Is it open to visitors?” I asked, nodding at the bouquets of flowers and small toys strewn about the floor.

“No, they throw those things through the bars. Bayview Cemetery keeps the crypts locked. There's no telling what would happen if they didn't. Speaking of which, how did you get past the front gates?”

“I'm working nights, so I've got a master key,” I said, playing my flashlight's beam across the interior of little Louis' sepulcher. “I was taking a break when I noticed your light up here on the hill and got curious. But what are—”

I squeaked, jumped, and dropped the light.

“Something wrong?” Cindy asked, frowning.

“Sorry, I thought I saw something move.” My heart pounded as I bent to retrieve the light from the lap of a drooping Raggedy Ann doll. I pointed the beam through the gate but everything was still. “Guess it's just my imagination.”

“Cemeteries at night,” Cindy said with a shrug as she crouched down to zip up the camera bag. “A lot of people get jumpy. It was probably just a rat.”

“That's a comforting thought,” I murmured.

“Don't worry, it's locked up tight,” she said, with a hint of condescension. She grabbed the gate and rattled it to prove her point. “Believe me, no one could possibly—”

Something leapt out from behind the bronze urn next to the sepulcher. I caught a glimpse of a distorted green face and shrank against the cold stone wall as a tall figure barreled toward us. Throwing one shoulder against the wrought-iron gate, the ghoul burst through, knocking Cindy flat on the ground, and tore down the curved access road, its long, dark cape flapping in the breeze. Swearing a blue streak, Cindy scrambled to her feet and gave chase, all five feet, one hundred pounds of her. Graceful as a gazelle, she took off like a cross-country runner, leaping over grave markers and zigzagging around monuments until she was nearly abreast of the fleeing creature. Scampering onto the roof of a burial chamber burrowed into a hillside, Cindy hurled herself onto the ghoul's back, sending them both sprawling into the shallow drainage ditch at the side of the road.

I sprinted toward the dark forms as they thrashed and rolled and emitted muffled shrieks. Cindy seemed to be holding her own, but when I was still twenty yards away the ghoul broke free and half ran, half hobbled toward the main gates, shielding its face with the cape.

“Cindy! Are you all right?” I cried as I helped her to her feet.

“Go after him!”

“Are you
insane
?”

“We can't let him get away!”

“I don't think—”

“
Dammit!
” Cindy swore as we watched the ghoul disappear into a grove of fragrant eucalyptus trees at the edge of the cemetery. She was covered in mud and grass stains, and her pink headband had fallen out. A green rubber Halloween mask of an elongated, howling face dangled from two fingers. “
Shit!
Why didn't you follow him?”

“Because he was hiding in a
crypt
!”

“Did you at least get a good look at him?” she asked, her lips pressed together in dissatisfaction.

I closed my eyes. “Tall. Thin. Green.”

“I know that,” she said waspishly, shaking the Halloween mask at me.

“I think he had white hair,” I offered, recalling a glimpse of stringy hair on the neck of the retreating figure.

“Are you sure it wasn't a wig?”

“I guess I wasn't, um, focusing,” I said. My artist's eye usually took note of anatomical details, but during midnight encounters with graveyard ghouls all bets were off. I looked at Cindy warily. What kind of a person tackled a ghoul in a cemetery?

“I'd like to know what he was up to,” Cindy muttered, brushing dirt from her blouse.

“You said people liked to hang out here,” I replied, rescuing her pink headband from the ditch and shaking off some leaves. “Isn't that what you're writing your dissertation on?”

“Respectable people hang out at crypts in the daytime. At night you're looking at a whole different breed. We're talking druggies or Satan worshippers.”

Ick,
I thought.

“Still,” she continued. “Junkies and Dark Lord types don't wear cheesy Halloween masks and capes.”

“What's that?” I asked as my flashlight beam illuminated a rectangular object the size of a shoe box lying in the grass a few feet away.

“I
thought
that guy dropped something,” Cindy said, picking it up.

It was a dull gray metal box, rusted in spots, with a small, keyed latch. The sole embellishment was a simple cross with a rose in the center, echoing the design of the stained glass window in Louis Spencer's crypt.

“Is it—um—an urn or something?” I quelled a desire to flee as I envisioned a tornado of ashes bursting out of the box and devouring us.

“I doubt it. I've never seen an urn like this.”

We stared at the box for a moment.

“Let's go back and check out the crypt,” Cindy said with a determined look on her face. She started marching up the hill toward Louis Spencer's final resting place.

I reluctantly fell in step. For the past few weeks I had been restoring two murals in the Chapel of the Chimes Columbarium, adjacent to Bayview Cemetery. As I learned only after I accepted the job, a columbarium is similar to a mausoleum but holds urns of cremated remains, known in the business as “cremains.” Designed in the early twentieth century by the renowned architect Julia Morgan, Oakland's Chapel of the Chimes was a glorious Romanesque-Gothic building decorated with fabulous mosaics, colorful murals, and elaborate carvings.

One of the commission's stipulations was that I paint at night to minimize the disruption to the columbarium's visitors. Disconcerted at the idea of working in the midst of grieving families, I had been happy to oblige. But adjusting to the swing shift had been more of a challenge than I'd anticipated, and halfway through the evening I often fought waves of drowsiness. Twenty minutes ago I had taken a break from the neck-breaking work to get some fresh air. I had not bargained on encountering Cindy— much less a masked ghoul—and at the moment wanted nothing more than to return to the restoration. Paint, unlike so many other things in my life, was eminently predictable.

“I hate to be a party pooper, Cindy, but I need to get back to work,” I said as we skirted a lush pond dotted with water lilies and edged with aromatic hyacinths. “I don't want to leave you out here by yourself, though. Why don't you investigate the crypt tomorrow, during business hours?”

“What if he comes back tonight to finish the job?”

“That's what I'm afraid of.”

“Aren't you the least bit curious about what that guy was doing in Louis Spencer's crypt?” Cindy asked, not slowing her pace one bit.

“Not if he was communing with the dead, I'm not.”

“He wasn't communing with the dead, he was
stealing
from the dead.”

“That makes me feel so much better.”

She ignored me as we picked our way up the grassy hill and through the maze of headstones. Some of the markers were large and ostentatious, featuring sculpted angels and complex family lineages, while others were all the more poignant for their simplicity. When I began working here I had sought out the grave of the columbarium's architect, Julia Morgan. Morgan had been one of the best-known professional women of her day, and the first ever to be admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Morgan designed hundreds of buildings in the Bay Area, and spent more than twenty years working on the spectacular Hearst Castle on the California coast. In death, Morgan's name had been simply chiseled into an unpretentious block of granite along with other family members' names. I had sketched the plain memorial, hoping some of her talent and tenacity might rub off on me.

“I'll just wait out here,” I told Cindy when we arrived at Louis Spencer's pyramid. I was not unduly skittish around the dead—so long as they were ensconced in urns or graves—but I wasn't as sanguine about the living. Especially when they wore masks and hung out in cemeteries robbing graves.

Cindy stood at the open gate, crossed her slender arms over her chest, and lifted one eyebrow in what I presumed was a supercool form of “double-dog dare ya.” Apparently we'd time-warped back to the fifth grade.

“I'll stand guard if you want to poke around,” I said, sticking to my guns. “But I am
not
going in there.”

“Suit yourself.”

The gate screeched as she swung it wide, and from my position of relative safety I peered inside as Cindy's flashlight beam swept the interior. On either side of the mosaic floor were two dusty Carrara marble benches flanked by massive bronze urns. Denuded branches bore witness to the long-dead floral sprays that had once filled the urns with symbols of life. Bright Egyptian funerary designs had been frescoed on the crumbling plaster walls. At the rear of the crypt was the lichen-covered sculpture of the boy and his dog resting atop Louis Spencer's sepulcher of dove-gray marble. Behind the tomb, weeping stone angels in scalloped wall niches watched over the boy, the drooping stained glass window between them. From the ceiling hung an ornate, and very dusty, bronze chandelier.

Louis Spencer had been a much-loved boy.

Cindy inspected the marble benches, the bronze urns, the weeping angels, and the sepulcher.

“No drug paraphernalia, no candles, no animal sacrifices,” she muttered.

“Animal sacrifices?” I repeated, aghast.

“Wait a minute—
hell-o,
Betty . . .”

“Hello who?” I rasped, hoping she hadn't spotted something that had once been alive.

“I found some tools.”

Curiosity got the better of me, and I slipped inside. On the floor between the sepulcher and the rear wall were a shiny new crowbar, a mallet, a hammer, and a chisel. Scuff marks in the dust and the tattered remnants of once-splendid cobwebs indicated the tools had been placed there recently. I shone my flashlight on the sepulcher. A marble panel on one end was crooked and showed fresh gouge marks, as though it had been removed and replaced.

“It looks like the box came from the sepulcher,” I said. “See this panel here?”

The graduate student inspected the pry marks. “I think you're right. Let's open it.”

“Absolutely not. I draw the line at opening graves. Besides, I don't want to be trapped in here if that guy comes back, do you?”

“I guess you're right,” Cindy conceded. “But I don't want to leave the box here, either.”

She tucked the metal box under one arm and we hurried out of the crypt. I slung the leather photography bag over my shoulder, Cindy grabbed her canvas carryall, and we wasted no time jogging down the hill to the main gates. Actually, the perky graduate student jogged, while I sort of stumbled, feeling the effects of my earlier sprint. Cindy unlocked the pedestrian gate and held it for me.

“What do you suppose is in the box?” I asked as I shut and locked the gate behind me.

“Beats me,” she said with a shrug, popping the trunk of a yellow Volkswagen Cabriolet parked at the curb. “It's locked. We'd have to break into it to find out.”

Our gaze held for a moment.

“That wouldn't be right,” I said, superstitious enough to fear a curse from beyond the grave but rational enough to hide my fear behind ethics.

Cindy nodded. “Well, whatever it is belonged to little Louis. It's probably just an old G.I. Joe or something.”

“G.I. Joes weren't made until after World War Two,” I said, recalling last summer's “Toys Toys Toys!” exhibit at the Brock Museum in San Francisco. “More likely it's a Shirley Temple doll.”

“Even for a boy?”

“Lead soldiers, maybe.”

“A petrified gum ball, or whatever.” Cindy wrapped the metal box in a bright orange beach towel emblazoned with the grinning face of Garfield the Cat, and nestled it between her camera bag and a cardboard file box. “I'll bring it to the cemetery office in the morning. They'll probably want to call the police.”

I reached into my pocket and extracted one of the business cards I was so proud of.

“True/Faux Studios, huh?” Cindy said, pronouncing the name correctly.

“I'm restoring some paintings at the columbarium,” I said. “Chasing goblins through graveyards is just a sideline.”

“Really?” Her dark eyes assessed me. “Can I ask you a question about art?”

Artists—especially those who did restoration work— often felt a bit like a doctor at a cocktail party: complete strangers did not hesitate to demand instant, free appraisals. The sad truth was that most artists were not well schooled in art history, much less in the chemistry of paint, and seldom knew anything more esoteric than how to maintain a red sable paintbrush. (Rinse thoroughly with mineral spirits, wash with mild soap and water, apply brush conditioner, and never,
ever
lend it to your young nephews, even if they swear “to be supercareful this time, honest.”)