Pulling Back the Shroud

          A full night’s sleep had become virtually impossible for Jeremy Stuart since he moved into the apartment above the Barcom & Sons Mortuary three months ago. 

           Of course, one would expect trouble resting in a building housing the remains of the dead, and possibly their spirits.

            Jeremy’s sleeplessness, it seemed, stemmed from much more than battling with the occult. Every time the newly-appointed funeral director attempted to close his eyes, around midnight. a loud clanking assaulted his ears.  The eerie sound, apparently coming from the basement, left him paralyzed.

       Strangely enough, the bizarre disturbances did not appear in the early morning before he started work, in the evening when he ate his dinner, or during visitations.  Throughout most of the night he rested quietly, except when he tried to mentally review his schedule for the next day.

      Finally, the clanking had taken such a toll on him that he felt it threatened his health. Also, his lack of sleep began to interfere with his responsibilities as the director at the sole mortuary in Raintree, Md. 

        Although his apartment’s location on the second floor of the funeral home could account for the creepiness quotient of the basement sound, Jeremy had lived in homes above funeral establishments throughout his 25-year career and this never had disturbed him.

     Since he had just taken over the reins at the Raintree burial establishment, he had been too busy to fully explore every nook and cranny of the 19th century Victorian building.  Maybe the time had come for some more thorough investigation.

     One particularly quiet afternoon, when the director didn’t have any funerals scheduled, he opened the ancient door to the funeral home’s basement and started walking down the creaky stairs.  He turned on the light at the bottom of the stairs and began exploring with his high-powered flashlight.  Turning right he shone the beam into corners of the unlit portion of the downstairs rooms where he previously had no reason to venture.

     There, in one particularly cobwebbed corner, he found a black mahogony door, apparently locked tight by a number of very heavy chains.  Turned out, the sounds that had led to his sleepless nights seemed to have come from this area of the basement.  Now that he had begun his investigation he saw no reason why he shouldn’t follow it to its conclusion–no matter where that would lead him.

      He remembered when he first took over the funeral home his renovation crew had used a number of heavy duty tools and left them behind in a storage room in another corner of the lowest level.  In that room he found a pair of bolt cutters and began to hack into the huge chains holding the mahogany door closed.

     As the chains fell away he used every ounce of strength he had to pull open the door on its rusty hinges. It let out a loud creaking sound. The renovators apparently had overlooked this old room when modernizing the building. The wind howling through the cracks in the rear wall of the room let out a roar that shook the whole building–so much for the noise that had awakened me from a sound sleep almost every night.

      Jeremy recalled that, when interviewing him for his position, the funeral home’s previous managers had excitedly talked about the shady past history of the site where the burial business now stood. 

       During the Roaring 20s, when rum runners prowled the Chesapeake Bay, gangsters began partying and setting up their headquarters and hiding the profits of their crimes in secret speakeasies around the state. One of themt previously stood on the site of the funeral parlor.      

      On a table in a corner of the basement room Jeremy found a metal box. As he opened it, the lid creaked almost as loud as the rusty door to the room.  Inside he discovered a well-worn binder that contained some type of document.

     The document read, “I, Joe (Big Joseph) Tersanco, head of the Fortisimo Syndicate, on February 1, 1927, presided over the last Summit of my Family.  The Feds had begun really turning up the heat in the Baltimore area, so we decided to hide out in obscure areas of the Eastern Shore.  I also stashed the gold I had stored away after looting some of the city’s biggest mansions. I figured I or my descendants could return when the heat was off to recover the loot and escape. We had the perfect setup, since we had decided to convert our speakeasy into a legit funeral parlor business. The coppers likely would have no idea the basement of the building now would become our Fort Knox.”

    Granted, the boss had taken elaborate precautions to protect his stash, but, like most mobsters, he couldn’t resist bragging about the riches he had squirreled away in his secret hideaway. His fellow capos began to plot ways to get their hands on Tersanco’s treasure. 

      They never succeeded because Big Joseph and most of his descendants died in jail or found themselves on the wrong end of other gangsters’ machine guns.

      Apparently, none of the other capos ever had found a way to get to the stash and, after jailing the remaining members of the mob, the authorities had given up searching the area.

      Spooked by the possibility of gangster types from the spirit world guarding the loot,  Jeremy gingerly moved the binder aside.  Under it he found 10 gold bars. The mob boss’s diary didn’t mention how large a stash he had buried. This meant the funeral director had no way of knowing if any of Big Joseph’s own gang members had removed any of it before they met their makers.

    Jeremy turned the gold bars into the Baltimore County Police.  They contacted federal Treasury officials, who estimated the value at $20,000.   After 30 days, since no one stepped forward to claim the treasury, they cashed it out to the funeral director and he walked away with a handsome check.

    His sleepless nights soon ended.