Free Ten Thousand Islands by Randy Wayne White

bushel basket of unopened mail, all delivered by JoAnn two days before.
    My ability to ignore mail has grown stronger over the years. I view it as a sign of maturity.
    It was dusk. The storm cell was a foggy mushroomcloud above us. Thunder vibrated in the windows; lightning popped and sizzled outside. Rain flowed down off my tin roof, so that the mangroves and bay beyond were blurred as if through a waterfall.
    A waterfall is exactly what it was.
    To take advantage, I’d slid open the cover of my thousand-gallon rain cistern so that it might fill faster, then, standing naked in the rain, shampooed and sluiced away three days of beach sand before joining JoAnn.
    Because it seemed like a good idea to go to a primary source, I’d already tried to phone Tomlinson at Della’s trailer. While JoAnn waited outside, I left a message on the recorder. I also called the place Della worked, the Mandalay, on Key Largo. They weren’t at the restaurant, either, so I left another message: “Have him call, ASAP.”
    Tomlinson, apparently, was already a popular fixture on the island because the waitress who answered said, “You callin’ for Tommy-san? Oh, I just love that guy! ‘Course I’ll give him the message if ya’ll’re a friend a’ his.”
    Tommy-san? Tomlinson collected nicknames as quickly as house pets and small children.
    So now I was sitting beside JoAnn while she told me what she knew, which wasn’t much. Her voice provided a steady alto tempo to the lightning and chilly rain.
    “Early this morning,” she began, “one of the Marco Island cops was driving past the old town cemetery. It was still dark and he noticed some kind of light through the trees. How well do you know Marco, Doc?”
    “Not well. It’s changed a lot. Years ago, I spent some time on the island. It was already pretty heavily developed. My uncle had a ranch in Mango, south of there in the Everglades.”
    “Then you probably saw the cemetery but didn’t notice it. It’s a little tiny thing, real easy to miss. There’re some pine trees and old tombstones. When we were kids, we used to say the place was haunted. There’re all these old graves of sailors and fishermen, and we’d dare each other to walk through it at night. Which is what the cop thought, it was just kids playing around. So he shined his spotlight and saw at least two people run off, maybe more. He told Tomlinson he couldn’t be sure, but didn’t think it was important. He’d scared them, so the cop drove away.”
    At first light, though, the cemetery maintenance man found that Dorothy Copeland’s grave had been exhumed. After a check of the cemetery records, they’d tracked down Della, who still paid a yearly fee to keep her daughter’s plot trimmed and neat.
    “What a nightmare for Della,” JoAnn said. “The poor lady’s been through so much. The cops asked her for permission to rebury her, but Della said no. She wants us to meet there tomorrow and have a little ceremony. Say goodbye to her little girl one last time, plus she thinks something might be missing from the casket.”
    “So they
did
get the casket open.”
    “She’s not sure. The guy from the funeral home, the guy who called Della, he didn’t think so. He opened it with the some official what-a-ya-call-it standing by. The medical examiner? They opened it just to be sure and he said everything appeared normal. Whatever that means. But only Della would know, because of something she put in there when Dorothy was buried.”
    “Did she say what it was?”
    “I didn’t hardly talk to her at all, she was in such hysterics. Tomlinson, he’s the one told me. You two—youand Tomlinson—he said you guys need to take a look inside the casket, because he doesn’t think Della can deal with it emotionally. He said that’s why you need to do some reading first. To understand what it is you might find.”
    I’d already noticed that, along with the blanket, she had a book and some papers in her lap. She’d been