Page 26 of The Graveyard Girls (Detective Ellie Reeves #11)

TWENTY-FIVE

Daisy’s Diner

Ellie stopped at a table of ladies having lunch and asked their thoughts on the Brambles.

“Earl never had much sense,” one woman said. “Flunked out of school in the ninth grade. That’s why he dug graves.”

“He was a stutterer, too,” an ancient-looking woman muttered.

A thin gray-haired lady chirped, “One time someone accused him of burying their sister in the same pine box as her mama.”

A woman they called Nell tsked. “I heard he made that girl Hetty sleep in one of the pine boxes.”

Ellie shuddered at the very thought. She’d been claustrophobic as a child and during one case, the killer she was chasing locked her in a coffin. She still suffered nightmares from the experience.

A middle-aged plump woman added, “Right after Earl disappeared, my husband, Roy, said he saw Earl sneaking into the junkyard after dark. The next day an old pick-up truck was missing and so was the cash he kept in the cash box.”

“Did the police ever find the truck?” Ellie asked.

“Don’t reckon so,” Nell said. “But there were other times Earl was sighted over the years. One time Norma Jean thought she saw him prowling in her backyard but by the time the sherif got to her house, he’d hightailed it out of there. We were all terrified he’d come back and start trouble again.”

“And it looks like he did,” a bony woman gasped.

Ellie showed them Bonnie’s picture. “Take a good look, ladies. Have you seen her?”

A chorus of no’s and head shaking followed.

If Bonnie had come to Brambletown on her own, she’d stayed under the radar. Either that, or the killer had murdered her in another location and transported her body to dump at the graveyard.

Maybe someone in Cleveland where Bonnie had lived with her foster family would have some answers.