Abram Lindell wasn’t a cranky old man, he just had little patience for those who didn’t adhere to the rules. At a youthful sixty three years old, Abram had lived a long life and it worried him to see crankiness and rule-following slowly melding into one definition. Anyone would be “cranky” he thought, if they too were up at 4:30 scrubbing graffiti off the concrete slabs of the sewage treatment plant. His father would have agreed.

His father had passed away seven years ago, a heart attack plucking him as he planted tomatoes in the back yard. It had been a quick death, more than most were lucky enough to get, the doctors had been quick to assure Abram when he got to the sleek linoleum casket known as Saint Francis. Francis was the closest hospital to his parent’s house in rural upstate New York, a quick twenty minute drive if the roads were clear. The roads had been clear that evening, but that wasn’t why the ambulance hadn’t turned its sirens on. Mr. Lindell had been pronounced dead by the twenty-year-old, rap-blaring, EMS personal as soon as they came upon Abram holding the old-man in the torn earth.

Abram had been devastated to lose his father for many reasons. It had left him with no immediate family since his Mother’s passing ten years prior to that (if there was anything Abram hated worse than heart attacks it was cancer; and maybe teenagers). But most significant was the loss of Abram’s moral compass. The world could try its best to tell him what to believe, berating him with abrasive TV personalities, overheard conversations at the mechanic, and half-drunken discussions with friends, but until his father and he had solved a world issue over a pint of Guinness, Abram couldn’t be sure of his own thoughts. His father had been a rule-follower too, growing up in an age where the American government was viewed as a second-religion. Thomas Lindell was American, Catholic, and then a Lindell, in that order. John F Kennedy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt held almost as revered a status as Superman or Captain America might to an eleven year old child for Abram’s father. They hadn’t been superheroes to Thomas Lindell, they had been one better; they had been real. To Thomas Lindell, a democratic government could be flawed but it was flawed in the same ways that humanity was. To not embrace the flaws was to be naïve, and as an ex-fighter pilot, Thomas Lindell was anything but naïve.

Abram had grown up in a small, one story house in a one child family. Abram had been born with small, struggling lungs which made survival in his first couple hours of life unsure. But, with the never-quit attitude he would carry with him his whole life, Abram had pulled through for his elated 19 year old parents. Thomas and Mallory had tried to have children after Abram but after two miscarriages, had given up trying. Mallory, a zealous believer in God and prominent community leader at the local church, had taken the second miscarriage as a sign that Abram was meant to be her only blessing; a miracle granted to her from god. Abram battled with the theory that he had been given to his mother as a gift throughout childhood. Miracle baby seemed to have come at the price of two innocent, unborn souls and their deaths seemed to weigh heavier on his mind than his mothers. As he grew into adulthood, Abram realized that the miscarriages had been incredibly rough on his mother and that coping came in many different ways, religion being one, but this revelation didn’t necessarily make up for the weight of guilt he had forced himself to carry; for himself, for his mother, and for the surprisingly heavy deceased babies.

Though he had never told anyone, he had named them, the miscarriage babies, as if that would ease the guilt that perched so heavily on him, two fat condors gripping tightly to both his shoulders. Evelyn and Damian. He had stolen these names from two tombstones that lay adjacent to each other at the small, rundown cemetery behind his house. It was a local cemetery, but not the local cemetery. That was Baron’s Cemetery, or Baron’s Boneyard, as the immortal-feeling high-schoolers often called it. No, the Old Vale cemetery was hardly used anymore, and thus, seldom visited; forgotten as the dead that plotted its uneven, weed-infested landscape.

This was quite alright with Abram; almost preferable. It had been a place of peaceful escape for Abram growing-up, and going to visit Evelyn and Damian to talk with them, apologizing and keeping them afloat of the day-to-day happenings on earth was therapeutic in a way. With every birthday that passed, “Happy Birthday my Miracle Boy” scribbled in Mallory’s elegant cursive with green icing, his favorite color, he would find time that evening to sneak to Evelyn and Damian’s tombstones and apologize once again for their death’s. He hadn’t meant for God to murder them, and he hoped that they knew that. He was trying his best to enjoy his own life for the three of them. It didn’t matter to Abram that there was moss sprouting upon their last name, “Edwards”, they were Lindell’s he had never met. He was as sure of this as the unchanging dates of death chiseled into the weathered stones before him; 1893 and 1895.

They had been his favorite, but he had visited all twenty seven tombstones often during childhood and his teenage years, especially after working landscape for Mr. Townsend, caretaker of the Old Vale Cemetery during his years of high school and turbulent, unsure few years that followed graduation.

In a way, Abram had grown up to become a mixture of Mr. Townsend and his father. This thought had never really occurred to him until today, as he dropped the prickly scrubbing brush to his side, breathing in the cold, misty air of a 4:30 morning.

He was a reclusive, elderly single man who’d never really left town, a la Mr. Townsend, but with the never-to-be-stunted ambition inherent in him due to half the genes he had stolen from his father. Abram had dated but never seemed to find the “right one”, much to his mother’s chagrin. His father had been far less inclined to judge this part of Abram’s life. A wife had been something Abram had wanted as a young man. However, he wanted one in the way a five-year-old yearns for a puppy: the dream of a puppy is well and good until your parents are making you walk it at 7 o’clock on a Saturday. Yes, he wanted a wife in theory, but the flawed girls he met in dive bars and on the streets of Old Vale had never quite stacked up to the girls he met in his daydreams. This in no way stopped him from sleeping around and pouring his heart out to any twirling girl with a loving smile who would give him a sideways glance. For the better part of a decade this had been all that he did.

Abram, without a shadow of a doubt had wanted a family though, but something about fatherhood scared him. Having such a wonderful father had stunted him in a way, or so he had led himself to believe. How could he possibly live up to the shining epitome of guiding fatherly light that Thomas Lindell had been? So he had traded in family for an adventure. A brief stint as a police officer in his skeleton of a town had ended nearly 30 years ago. A routine traffic stop had gone poorly and he had been hit in the knees with a sizzling bullet. Abram hadn’t even seen the mustached man grab his weapon. And such should have been the end of his illustrious career of do-goodery, but Abram had realized he couldn’t give it up. So now he worked as a security guard for a local security firm that he himself had created. He was his sole employee. Abram liked to think of himself as a mercenary; a guard for hire. It was a much more heroic way of saying he bounced from strip malls, to sewage treatment plants, to helping the large, older mayor get in and out of the local pool safely.

The hours were shit, and the pay was shit. Fitting, considering his primary employment was at the local sewage treatment plant. Corning’s Water Treatment is where he found himself this morning, whistling into the air in forced amusement. It was the third time in a month that he had gotten on the job to find a vandalized water tanker, swooping letters in new acrylic spray paint decorating its sides. GONZA MOVEMENT it read in its shouting letters. Abram didn’t have the slightest idea what it meant other than a cry for recognition and belonging. He could think of so many other ways to find these two human needs, but he tried hard to remember what it was like to be young and fleetingly destructive. A past Abram who would have considered this act tolerable (or at the very least having a considerable motive) had long since exited his body, but the remnants of empathy could be found if he searched long enough. This morning, however, he didn’t search long before falling back on cursing the teenagers. He was sixty three and had earned the right to be angry he finally decided, and to hell to those who would decree that as Crankiness 101.

A noise behind Abram startled him, and he jerked to his feet a bit quicker than his body could handle. A twinge of pain shot through his long-ago wounded knee, but he stifled the cry of pain. His cop instincts would not allow for an utterance of pain. Pain showed weakness, and criminals were like wolves. Abrams had settled this analogy long ago with his father on a particularly drunken Sunday night. The game was over and he had told his father this theory. His father had concurred.

“You bare your teeth and they run, but if they smell the limping calf of self-gain, it’s over.”

Thomas Lindell had taken a long chug of beer.

“I like it, son” he had said with a belch.

Abram stifled the imagery of him being the actual limping calf in this scenario. He was not some wounded wildebeest struggling across pounding Serengeti waters. He worked out at the local gym twice a week, although his work outs mostly consisted of watching middling dramas on the treadmill, backed with a seventies soundtrack in his earbuds whose upbeat funk seldom matched the dour complexity of the law proceedings unfolding on screen. He was in decent shape, despite the battered knee, and could take even the healthiest of crocodiles he might encounter in the rough rapids.

Abram clutched at his side, un-velcroing the utility flashlight that hung at his side, quickly pressing the rubber button that brought it to life. Its steady stream of light was much dispersed by the morning dew that hung in the air. Abram was glad he had gotten the most expensively stocked one he had found at the hardware store.

The light fell on the chain link fence that surrounded the water-tankard. It was as askew as most things in Old Vale, having been built on uneven ground. Those charged with installing the fence had either been extremely oblivious of the minor barriers discrepant footing, or had been wholly uninterested in putting forth the effort necessary to fix it. As it was, the fence was silent as the morning, unshaken as it shimmered amid Abram’s light. His watchful ear trained for the source of the noise, Abram was still for several moments. What had seemed a stumbling, flesh on earth, no longer rang in the air. Abram’s heart-rate slowly subsided. His free hand drifted slowly from its hovering position over the Taser on his opposite hip.

His sole job description was to patrol the perimeter he reminded himself, he just so rarely had anything to worry about that he often used self-imposed custodial duties as a means of escaping the monotony.

Abram bounded down from his concrete slab resting place, scanning the speckled chain fervently for signs of movement. It was most likely a raccoon or deer wandering through the nearby undergrowth, but Abram wanted to be prepared.

Abram felt the exhilaration of possibility and that so often hitched along with the slight dread of danger. These moments that bred fear in most were what heroic deeds were made of. Even after sixty-three years, his mind still craved the chance to do something important, something sent to shatter his ordinary life. It was no longer the enthralling pull he had possessed in his youth, but he reveled in the fact that it hadn’t subsided completely yet. It was one of the few things about him that neither of his parents had ever truly understood.

The beaten path of hardened earth that twisted its way through the grass alongside the inside fence was sleeker than normal, and Abram had to remind himself to watch his step to avoid falling. This was a new concern that had grown with age, his body no longer recovered from falls, sprains, bumps, and awkward twists as easily as they used to. After about a minute, Abram had resigned to the fact that the noise that had startled him was nothing more than an early morning manifestation of the waking wildlife that the Corning Water Treatment Plant so uncaringly impeded upon. Downgrading from mission-bound security to leisurely patrol, Abram decided he might as well finish a preemptive loop of the whole facility.

It was the stillness that first drew Abram’s attention that something was amiss.

The mornings he worked were tranquil, but not stilled to absolute zero. Whistling birds, fluttering birds, the brisk slamming of brakes in the distance. This was the chorus of an average morning, not this hollow moment between minutes that seemed to have settled over Abram and the Sewage Plant under his watchful vestige.

And as he turned the corner, the source of the stillness became clear. A mass, ghostly white and twisted was laying silent amid the tall grass on the other side of the fence, resting upon its crookedy frame. In the slim light of morning, the flashlight battling through a million specks of water that floated between Abram and the scene, it was hard to determine what exactly it was. It was something that had not been there when Abram had shown up at three, and it certainly was content in its odd position precariously perched along the fence. It wasn’t moving and the utter lack of curious critters surrounding the scene made Abram think it must have been recent. Was it the source of the noise, this quiet heap of white and blue?

As he drew closer, the grotesque scene came more and more into view, the details sparce on what had happened. But with each step, one thing became abundantly clear, causing Abram’s blood to run cold. He wanted to run away but his legs continued to be pulled along slick, mud track. It was his creation and it now rolled him along, the momentum of destiny too far along to be stopped. He would reach this figure, whether he wanted to or not.

It was a body.

A dead body Abram’s panicked brain yelped but he quelled the thought quickly. It didn’t have to be dead. Where was the blood? He thought to himself, his logical mind temporarily disabling the prior knowledge that lived somewhere in his brain; the knowledge that would have reminded him that death could occur in ways that did not spit blood from flesh. Death could be unknown and quiet.

The first attribute that really laid into Abram was the bodies’ hair. Or woman’s hair he amended, since it was long and stringy, clinging like pasta to the chain link fence. Her face was smashed up against the metal webbing, her left arm crumpled at her side.

Abram fumbled the flashlight momentarily, the sweat on his hands making its metal form difficult to hold onto. He regained control of it but not before letting a curse hiss into the air from behind gritted teeth. The radio at his side was heavy, and he considered in the moment whether he should alert Harris, the senior guard also on duty this morning. Harris was internal control, hired to work exclusively at the sewage plant with a salary paid only by the sewage plant. He was certainly sitting in the cluttered maintenance room stocked with a flickering black and white TV someone must have commandeered for free on the side of the road. It had been rigged to get a few select stations from a neighboring feed (illegally Abram guessed) and at this time Harris was probably watching the early morning soaps Abram knew he loved so much. His first few stints on the job, Harris would try to click over to ESPN any time Abram had walked into the room but by now the heavy-set man who smelled of cheese puffs and stale booze unflinchingly left his programs on for Abram to see. Harris had not been a member of the force, and in his physical state, despite being twenty years younger than Abram, it was clear that Harris would not be much help in a situation other than his ability to work a cell phone and alert authorities.

The scene was startling in its setup, and a curiosity to explore further stayed Abram from reaching for his radio and sending a crackling distress through the air to Harris. He crouched down at the fence, his flashlight now inches from the woman’s face, illuminating every aspect of her. She was in her early forties, a slender face to match her slender body type, and an agape mouth to match her dead brown eyes. With her eyes unreactive to the flashlight shining into her eyes, Abram now could be certain this was a dead body that he had stumbled upon. Morbid curiosity had Abram reaching for the right hand that had its fingers intertwined in the chain links before he even recognized what was happening. He flicked the delicate fingers free of their hold and watched the arm flop, lifeless towards the ground. The momentum caused the woman’s face to slide down the fence momentarily before coming to a rest about a foot from the mud and grass floor.

The jostling had closed her mouth, but her eyes remained open and transfixed on Abram. Something clicked in Abram, that hadn’t hit before her mouth had stopped miming a scream and settled into a more peaceful expression; He had seen this woman before, around town. Old Vale was small enough that, even if you didn’t know everyone in town, you saw their face once or twice in passing. This woman was such a face. He parsed through his memories, hoping to come across her face and where he had seen her. Maybe the Old Vale church he thought. She seemed like a church going soul, or at least it had been a few minutes ago, before the life had been removed from her body, and although Abram hadn’t been to church since his Mother’s passing, he passed their every Sunday on the way to the Library. Somewhere in his memory he thought he saw her with an obnoxiously large floral hat bouncing along on her head. The type of hat that belonged more in an old-time southern movie; debutante-like in its vivacious flair. Yes, this was surely the same girl.

What was her name? Why had she been near the sewage plant? Why had she died? Was her killer close, lurking just outside of the visibility of his flashlight, awaiting their next kill?

All these questions flashed in Abrams brain in quick succession, so fast that he had little time to dwell on any single one long enough for any coherent answer to surmised, despite their pressing seriousness.

And then he saw the golden clasped purse.

While Abram wasn’t much for fashion, its floral design, purple and pink lilies stitched into life on a blue fabric, was appealing even to him. It was by her right hand, resting at the foot of the fence.

On the other side of the fence actually. On his side.

This struck Abram as odd immediately, although no odder than stumbling upon a dead body he imagined. Had she thrown it? Why would she throw it? Did it have special significance? A family heirloom? Maybe monetary value? What was even odder was that its golden clasp was unclipped, and it lay splayed on the ground like a butterfly batted from the air, struggling through its last breaths. The design only enhanced this image for Abram. It was majestic and it was dead, just like its former owner. Her killer may have taken what he wanted from the purse, credit cards, bent social security card, driver’s license, family photos containing smiles that might never be the same after the events of the morning, and maybe even some money (although she looked to Abram like someone who was more comfortable paying with plastic than anything else) before ditching its carcass onto the other side of the fence?

These were all possibilities, but ones Abram realized he might never truly know. He walked to the purse, hoping and praying that some form of identification was available for him. If this woman had a family they had a right to know what had happened. They didn’t deserve to grieve, to have such a tragedy thrust upon them on an innocuous looking day in April, but they did have a right to this gradation of evil.

Abram knelt to the ground and pulled the purse. It was heavier than he would’ve thought and he stupidly considered maybe the clasps truly were real gold.

All the contents seemed to be there, and aside from a lack of cash which may or may not have even been present before the events of this morning, it all seemed untouched. Yet, something was off. Every single one of the many, many credit cards were tucked neatly in their respective cloth burrows. It was almost meticulous, the colors of each congregated to match its nearest brethren in a Technicolor array. Abram could not comprehend the complexity of such orderliness (he himself owned a leather clip to hold his cash and driver’s license, nothing more) but it came together rather nice. What stood out amid this neurotic rainbow scale of cards was the woman’s ID. Her driver’s license would not have really fit well into the scheme of the colors, but it seemed out of place for it to have been placed perpendicular in the purse.

It seemed as if someone had looked at it recently and shoved it back in without a care; carelessness that seemed to run counter to the rest of the purses general upkeep.

Abram pulled the license from the pouch. He had to bring it incredibly close to his face, his eyes not being what they once were, and the flashlight shined on it, reflecting back into Abrams eyes and making the already difficult task even more so. Finally he adjusted and he was looking at what was clearly a younger version of this dead woman, smiling with a youthful exuberance that Abram thought surely had not once contemplated a future where she would possibly be slumped dead at a sewage plant.

It wasn’t the picture that held his eyes though, but the name.

Evelyn Moser.

His eyes hovered on the name.

Abram Lindell was alive and Evelyn was dead, once again.

Abram Lindell was still crying when the paramedics arrived an hour later.

******************************************************************

“Mr. Lindell,” said the droning elderly voice of the judge, “you’re currently giving this court no choice but to find you guilty.”

Abram Lindell remained silent as he had for the entirety of the court proceedings. He had not hired a lawyer. As the jury saw it, and as the whole town of Old Vale saw it for that matter, this was as good as any admission of guilt ever could be. He had been the only one at the Sewage Treatment Plant to find her, alone. He had been crying when the paramedics showed up. He hadn’t called for help at any point. His partial DNA was the only thing found at the scene. He might as well have signed his name in blood on her chest as far as most residents of the small town were concerned. The guilt had caused his crying meltdown, his inability to flee the scene, and the corresponding muteness.

The cold handcuffs snapped against Abram’s worn wrists, the Bailiff jostling him with a force that did not bode well for the bones of a man of sixty three. The Miracle Boy was heading to prison, twenty five to life, and for the first time in a very long time, he felt oddly at peace.