©1 September 2025 Levite
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1.
"Yes, can you come look in our closet?"
Sometimes what people say to me on the telephone, or, for that matter, to other law enforcement personnel, or even other professionals, make me wonder what they were thinking, or even, if they were thinking at all.
But I have to hand it to the lady that called me. She did get right to the point.
I have no idea who she was, whether or not she was with a county or state agency, or even if the closet she was talking about was in New York State. But she did get to the point instead of asking me if I'd had a good breakfast and how the traffic was on my way in today. Which has also happened.
I have to remind Derek of that once in awhile. He says it is an occupational hazard from dealing with customers who are waiting for the mechanic's report on their car. But he is an absolute master of small talk. He can go on for an hour on almost any subject that comes up, and sometimes, really not say anything at all. And sometimes that is exactly what I need.
I have an example. A week or so ago I had to go to court and testify about a matter that is unrelated to anything in my journal of unusual cases. Suffice it to say that a county employee in a position of some authority and power had redirected funds for their own personal use. A lot of funds. For a long time. And they had passed an audit several years ago that had simply missed it. The matter was eventually uncovered, it got messy, a couple of us had to dig through records going back over a dozen years, and then sort out how they managed to transfer 'a little bit at a time' out to an account in another name that they had access to.
I spent two days in the courtroom. Testifying, being cross examined, then recalled, and so on.
After it was over I sat in an Italian restaurant and nursed a rather mild drink and listened to Derek go on and on about how the dealership was replanting their flower beds.
Finally he looked at me. "Do you want to hear about the new rose bushes?"
I smiled, "you told me about them about half an hour ago. 'Full season bloomers' I think you called them, yellow, and red, and pink."
"I didn't think you were listening."
"I was, and thank you." I said and leaned over and kissed him. "Did they ever find you the white roses?" I, ALMOST, felt human again.
"They're on their way."
The lady on the phone with the closet didn't say any more.
"This is the Sheriff's Office ma'am, perhaps you want your building's maintenance department."
"Oh, no, you don't understand, I was given your name by the lady at the Historic Office, we're part of the same lady's club."
"Oh. OK. What office are you with?"
I got my things together and announced that I was going to be out of the office for a little while.
"Going anywhere good?" The Sheriff asked me.
"Out to MacArthur."
"Catching a flight?"
"No, going to security, they've got issues in their closet. And it is a city operation. I made sure."
He stood there and stared at me as he tried to make sense of that. "I have no idea what would be in a closet. At the airport."
"At the airport. I don't know either, wanna ride along and see what's in the lady's closet?"
"Sure. Should we pick up a critter trap on the way?"
"If we need it we'll run out and get one."
2.
The traffic wasn't bad getting to Islip, and my badge got us into the 'official' parking area so we only had to walk half a mile to get to where we needed to go.
Finally, after a bit of misdirection as to which security office we were going to, the airport security office instead of TSA, we found the lady that had called.
"Good, I can finally sit this bag down," the Sheriff said. He had gallantly offered to carry my kit bag while I carried my laptop.
"I usually get to park closer to a case, sorry about that, sir."
Mrs. Baxter, the office Admin, was very friendly, and delighted that we were there. "I've been here for almost twenty years, and it's always been odd. Sometimes you hear a voice or two, and sometimes there's knocking and tapping." She opened the closet door and showed us the shelves of papers and forms and other things airport security offices keep in their closet. "But over the last, I don't know," she looked over at Ms Carter who was the Admin's admin, "how long has it been?"
"I noticed getting worse last fall, so, it won't be long and it'll be a year."
"And what did you notice first?" The Sheriff asked her.
"Just, like she said, tapping from inside, and then once in awhile when I'm in here to get something, whispering. Sometimes it's loud."
"Always during the day?" I asked her.
"Yes, we're really never here at night."
"And there's nothing on the other side of the wall?"
"No, we thought of that. This side is made of concrete blocks, our back wall is the back of the closet in the services manager's office, and he's never there, and this side is our manager's office."
I looked around at the walls. "OK, let's see what I get."
I put a couple of digital recorders in open spots on the shelves, and set them to simply record, then I tagged them with where and when they were being used. I shut the door and we walked quietly out of the office and stood around on the main concourse and watched the people for several minutes.
"Does anything ever happen in the office after hours? Things move, or even disappear?"
The office ladies looked at each other. Then Mrs. Baxter shook her head, "Not that I've noticed."
"Do you get any odd sensations when you go into the closet?" The Sheriff asked her, proving that he had been paying attention for the last couple of years.
Ms Carter nodded, "Now that you mention it, yes. Sometimes I'll get the feeling that somebody is watching me. But not from behind me, from, I guess, on the shelves."
We all walked over to a coffee cart and got an overpriced cup of coffee, then we headed back to the office.
I retrieved the recorders and hooked them up to the laptop, and I wasn't expecting to find anything at all except the sounds of the building around us.
I was surprised.
"This is on the recorder from the third shelf down. I'll turn it up." I put down my headphones and played the entire recording through the laptop's speakers, including my tagging it 'MacArthur Airport', and closing the door behind me.
"... .. ... i am still here..." a soft male voice said.
Mrs. Baxter's eyes were watery, "Was that. Is that. From."
I nodded, "Let me check the other one."
It was about five minutes after my 'airport' tag. There was something there, but it was hard to make out on the unit that was on the top shelf.
"It's in exactly the same place time-wise as the other one."
"Mrs. Baxter, you've got a voice in your closet." The Sheriff said.
"But Why?"
"Let me go look." I said and got my flashlight out of my bag.
Ms Carter was shocked, not at the voice, but at what I was doing. "There's a ghost in the closet and she's going in there alone to check it out?"
My boss nodded, "That's her. And if she meets the ghost, I'll feel sorry for him."
3.
I noticed something right away. The closet hadn't always been a closet. The shelves were a bookcase that had been put in the closet ages ago. I got a chair and tried to peek over the top. Then I remembered something I'd picked up from Derek's parts department, and I did pay for it. Well, I tried to pay for it, Derek put it on his account. A mechanic's inspection mirror with a telescoping handle and a tiny LED flashlight built in.
Using a chair and the mirror I was able to see behind the bookcase and found a void between it and what was a false wall on the other side. And I could see several objects sitting on what appeared to be a wooden crate or box.
The Sheriff didn't say anything as I taped one of the cameras to the inspection mirror and lowered it ever so carefully into the void as it recorded video with only the mirror's LED light to see by. Then I pulled it out and plugged the camera into my laptop.
The others were sitting around the office watching me.
I looked up and took a breath. "Sir, you need to call the Medical Examiner. We've got remains."
The Sheriff nodded and took out his phone and made the call.
"You're just calling, you don't want to see what she found?" Mrs. Baxter asked him.
"If Detective Elaine says she has human remains, she has human remains." Then he was talking to the ME.
But he did come over while he was talking to them and described what was on my screen. One of which had a readable label that had a name and dates. "They look like the cartons they ship cremated remains in. The date says nineteen fifty four. There's another date on another box, but I can't read it in the picture."
An hour later Mister Mills and I were renewing our acquaintance as we moved the bookcase. The ladies had already removed everything from the closet that they'd need to find later, but we didn't want to touch the bookcase until the Medical Examiner was there.
And, because we had found something, the Security Director for the Airport came in from a scheduled day off for a dentist appointment to check out the closet.
"You'd rather see a cremation box than go to the dentist?" The Sheriff asked him.
"I'd rather do anything than go to the dentist."
We'd walked the bookcase out of the door of the closet, then we angled it to one side and slid it over.
"Well, there they are," Mister Mills said after the way was clear.
I looked back in the closet and saw more of the containers beneath the ones I'd videoed, and a couple on the other side.
Mister Mills went in and crouched in front of them, "And I'd say that's what they are. Can I borrow your camera before we move them?"
"Yes, sir."
He got good shots of the collection of boxes, and one actual funeral urn, and then each one as we took it out with whatever label or tag was on it. On top of one of the boxes was a hand written shipping label with the date of June 11, 1955, with a name and that the package was supposed to go to Washington DC on an Allegheny flight. It didn't make it.
Now, word was out, and the Sheriff was keeping the people out who suddenly found they had urgent business in the security office.
"Another one, no name on the outside. I'm opening it to see if it is inside." Mister Mills said as he carried one out and gently sat it on a table.
I took a picture as he slowly lifted the lid and looked inside.
"There's a three by five card inside. I'm getting it. It's got writing on it. Get ready to photograph it."
"I'm ready. ... got it." He was holding the card so I could read it through the camera. "Jacob Kinsey, Kinsley, 1955."
"That's it. I'm putting it back and closing it."
We had eleven containers. Eight of which were identified on the outside. Two had cards inside, one was totally unidentified.
I even thought that maybe they'd written on the outside of the unidentified box and it had faded, so I got the full spectrum camera and took several images of the paperboard carton from every angle, even the bottom, then looked at them on the laptop through various filters. Nothing.
All of the dates we had were from the middle nineteen fifties, and the ones that had a town listed were on the Island. One even had an old style phone number that began with CH3.
We found a large box and a luggage cart from the concourse, and Mister Mills thanked us for our assistance.
"I've already emailed you everything I have," I said to him.
"I appreciate it, we'll have to split a pizza sometime and I'll let you know what I can find out about them and why they're here." He said nodding to the contents in the big box on his cart.
The airport security office staff were having issues with the fact that they had eleven dead people in their closet since any of them had been there, and they hadn't known it.
I found out from one of the old timers on the janitorial staff that "back in the day" these rooms were the package shipping office. Which made sense.
We helped the ladies put the bookcase up against the wall and put their papers back on it.
"I think we'll leave it out here for awhile." Mrs. Baxter said.
"That's a good idea, it'll be easier if the ME needs to get back in there for anything." The Sheriff said.
"Yes, sir. Then we'll leave it right here and just keep the door shut." The Security Director said.
In my car on the way back to the office the Sheriff was unusually silent.
"I heard you had a theory about why there was forgotten ashes in the closet?"
"It's just something I remembered from a long time ago. I mentioned it to your friend and he agreed with me."
"Which was?"
"That back in the old days when the airlines were brand new, sometimes the pilots were superstitious. You know, a lot of them were veterans from World War Two and all, and some of them may not have wanted to fly with a dead person in their cargo."
"What did they do when it was a coffin?"
"Send it on a train. Either that or air freight. Remember the tag on the one box? That was a passenger airline, and that was a luggage ticket."
"And they didn't let it on the plane."
"And then it didn't get on the next plane, and ended up in there, and then somebody put the bookshelf in front of them instead of dealing with them."
4.
It was about two weeks later when I split a pizza with Mister Mills and we went through the case of the "airport eleven".
"We've tracked down surviving family for several of them." He chuckled, "And with one of them, I believe it was Dorothy..." he checked his tablet, "Yes, Dorothy Clayton, her grand daughter asked me who was in the niche in the cemetery if she was still here." He shook his head, "I had to tell her I had no idea, but the label on the urn matched what I had for her birth and death and location on the death certificate."
"How many do you have left?"
"Five. So we've gotten more than half of them back to their families. Of course, the one without a label we can't do anything with. I even dumped the ashes out and checked in the container, and I made sure that the ashes were human remains." He got another slice of pizza. "And they are, human male, but I can't do any better than that with what's there."
"I checked for claims for missing urns through the airport, but records from that long ago aren't a lot of help." I offered.
"We appreciate that. And we've reached out to the funeral homes that are still here that were in business in the fifties. But we haven't heard back yet."
"Not surprising."
The local media picked up the story, but we managed to keep my involvement in the case out of the story. It was just stated that during some routine furniture moving in the office at the airport, several forgotten cremation urns were discovered.
A few days later Mister Mills said they delivered another one to a veteran's organization that would bury it with honors. While they had the name, and service record, there was no surviving family to claim the individual in the box.
Mister Mills continued with, "I saw the video. They interred the box in a columbarium in the veteran's cemetery with an honor guard and flag presentation to the retiring head groundskeeper who had been taking care of the place for years."
In the end, there were two containers left. The one that was unmarked, and one that belonged to a "J Williams" who died in March of 1954, on Long Island. There was no city, no birth date, not even a full first name.
"We tested it, it's a female, and she had been exposed to some industrial metals like copper and zinc during her life. We don't think that's what killed her, but it narrows down what she did."
"How's that?" I asked Mister Mills.
"Think about it, during the forties, whoever Miss J Williams was, she probably worked in a war related industry. Everything from electrician to welder to even a machinist. And there was a lot of that sort of industry on the Island. Which is where she got exposed to the metals. But there's too many Williams's to find the right one."
"OK, I learned something today."
"Good. Now you can go home and go to bed," he laughed, and then so did I. But I still had work to do back in the office.
- end closet -
The Elaine Investigates index page.
[NOTE: The above story were written as adventure fiction, and is to be taken as such. While most of the geographical features of Suffolk County exist, including the Islip / MacArthur Airport, the rest of the setting is fictional.
Thank you, Dr. Leftover, TheMediaDesk.com]
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