Free The Death of a Much Travelled Woman by Barbara Wilson Page A

the lights vanished. I began to hear voices. Had Andrea discovered the perpetrators; was she fighting with them?
    But then I heard a voice I thought I recognized. “Put those bones down! I’ll have you in court for this. Grave robbing is a criminal offense as well as a sin!”
    “What you did to Francine is a sin and a crime,” another even more familiar voice shot back. “Give me back my shovel. She deserves to have a better resting place than the one you gave her.”
    “I was her husband, I have a right to decide where she’s buried.”
    “You gave up your rights long ago.”
    Then there was only the sound of grunts as they grappled again.
    “Peter,” I said. “Andrea. Stop this. Stop this right now!”
    I picked up one of the flashlights and shone it at each of their faces in turn. “What’s going on here?”
    “I suspected her right from the beginning,” said Peter, looking like a large wet muskrat in his brown oilskin jacket. “I’ve been keeping an eye on her. Lives right across from the churchyard; easy enough to break into the grave. Tonight I heard the car starting up and decided to follow her. Called the journalists first, they’ll be here in a minute. You’ll go to jail for this, Addlepoot!”
    “Oh, Cassandra,” groaned Andrea. “I’m sorry. I had it planned so differently.”
    But she didn’t have time to exonerate herself. The journalists were suddenly on us like a pack of hounds; there were bright lights everywhere, illuminating a stone marker that said FRANCINE CROFTS, POET and a muddy sheet piled, haphazardly, with thin white bones.
    Some weeks after this, when I was back in London, Andrea came up to see me. If it hadn’t been for the surprising intercession of Mrs. Putter, Peter’s mother (for she had been the woman we’d seen crying at the grave), Andrea would have been on trial now. As it was, Francine’s bones were back in the churchyard of St. Stephen’s, and Andrea had closed up her cottage and was thinking of moving back to London.
    “I didn’t have completely ignoble motives,” she said. “I always did believe that Francine deserved better than a Putterized headstone or no headstone in a grim little grave under the eye of people who had hated her. But I have to admit that I saw an opportunity. When the blue plaques started to appear, I thought, why not? Someone’s bound to do it, why not me? I wouldn’t say I was the one who’d done it, of course. I’d steal the bones, rebury them, erect a marker and then—with you as a witness—I’d discover the new site and let the media know. It would have been the best kind of publicity, for me and for Francine. I would have solved a mystery, my name would be back in the news, my publisher might decide to reissue my books…but instead…”
    “Instead the newspapers called you a grave robber and filled the pages of the tabloids with photos that made you look like a refugee from Nightmare on Elm Street . And they spelled your name wrong.”
    Andrea shuddered. “I’m going to have to put all this behind me. Start over. Science fiction perhaps. Or why not feminist horror? Skeletons that walk in the night, the ghosts of Mary Wollstonecraft and Emily Brontë that haunt us still today…”
    “I did read in the newspaper today,” I interrupted, “that the owner of the farm has decided to put up a marker to Francine himself, and to open the farm up to readings and poetry workshops. Apparently he’s something of an artist himself, in addition to being a stockbroker. He said he never knew that Francine had lived there. So something good came of it.”
    Andrea cheered up. “And Putter didn’t look so terribly fabulous in those photographs either.”
    We started to laugh, embarrassed at first, and then with gasping and teary amusement, recalling our wet night in the mud.
    Then we went out for a walk to look at some of the blue plaques that had gone up recently. For, you see, the remembering and honoring hadn’t