Free Skeleton Key by Jane Haddam

and swearing, not quite under his breath. Other than that, the world might as well have been empty. There weren’t even any cars going by on 109.
    â€œHenry?”
    â€œIt’s that Dallmer woman,” Henry said. “She’s probably dead in a ditch up there. Her car’s sure as hell about as dead as it can get.”
    Martin switched on his flashlight and waved it into the dark. He caught Henry, looking furious.
    â€œHer car’s where?” he asked. “In the cemetery?”
    â€œOf course it’s in the cemetery,” Henry said.
    â€œBut how can it be in the cemetery? There aren’t any roads in the cemetery. Nobody’s supposed to drive in there.”
    Henry reached the porch and came up the steps. “It’s the Jeep with the wheels, the one she has done up like a damned tank. It went right over the meadow and in where the Gordons are buried.”
    â€œBut…” Martin said.
    Henry went past him, into the house. Martin heard him pick up the phone and punch the pad. He hated Touch-Tone phones, all those weird beepings they made. If he’d had the money, he would have gone to one of those antique stores and got himself a rotary model. The rotary models always reminded him of his own mother.
    Henry came back onto the porch. He looked angrier than he had when he went in.
    â€œI talked to Rita,” he said. “She says the Dallmer woman called the thing in stolen, almost an hour ago. Kids, she says. There were kids in it.”
    â€œHow does she know?”
    â€œI’ve got to go back up and look around. I can’t leave some asshole teenager lying in a hole up there with a broken neck and then all the TV stations saying what a bastard I am when he dies. Did I ever tell you all teenagers are assholes?”
    â€œYes,” Martin said.
    Henry walked down the porch steps and into the dark. “If it was that Dallmer woman, I could have left her where she was to rot, and nobody would give a damn. If it’s somekid, everybody will say they care even if they don’t. Assholes.”
    Martin shined the flashlight at Henry’s back. He didn’t want to be left here on the porch alone. It was close enough to midnight for him to be getting the heebie-jeebies. He didn’t like the idea of a fresh body out there, never looked over by a funeral parlor. Martin liked his dead men to be really dead, sucked dry of blood, immobile.
    â€œHenry?” he said.
    Henry stopped walking. Martin’s flashlight caught the red and black of his checked flannel shirt.
    â€œCome on if you’re going to come,” he said. “Don’t just stand there getting cold.”
    â€œAll right,” Martin said.
    He came carefully down the porch steps and onto the bed of leaves that made up their backyard every fall. They were going to have to get around to raking it pretty soon. If they didn’t, the snows would come and dump on top of it all. Then, when the spring thaw came, the yard would be nothing but slime.
    â€œHurry up,” Henry said.
    Martin drew up behind him and trained the flashlight on the ground just ahead of them. It didn’t help much.
    â€œI’m beginning to see the point of that priest used to be over at St. John’s,” Henry said. “Halloween is the devil in disguise. Halloween ought to be abolished. Maybe they should just get Jackey and his friends and put them in jail every October first, and not let them out again until Thanks-giving.”
    It wasn’t Jackey anymore, Martin thought. Jackey worked at a gas station in Middlebury. It was Jackey’s brother Skeet, who was just as bad and just as stupid. They were rounding up the hill now, though, and Martin could see the Jeep. It was lying all the way over on its side, with its oversized wheels mostly in the air.
    â€œThat wasn’t an accident,” Martin said, waving the flashlight. “Look at it.”
    â€œI am looking at it,”