Keith hit a perfect drive down the middle of the first fairway at Eagle Mountain Golf Course. The ball traveled about 225 yards, clearing the trees before gently drawing back toward the fairway and coming to rest 150 yards from the green.

He was pleased with himself. He hadn’t been playing particularly well lately, and perhaps this was the beginning of a good round.

For his second shot, he selected his favorite club, a 7-iron. The ball took off in a beautiful arc toward the green but caught the lip of the sand trap on the right side and rolled into the middle of the bunker.

Okay, Keith thought. I got this.

He was a good sand player. He positioned himself properly, took his swing, and watched as the ball weakly climbed the lip of the bunker before rolling right back down to where he was standing, landing in Keith’s own divot.

Now he began to sweat.

Any chance of making par had quickly disappeared, especially with the ball seemingly laughing at him from the divot.

He took his stance and swung again, with nearly identical results, although this time the ball had the good sense to stay out of the divot.

Now Keith was pissed.

He was surely looking at a double bogey on the first hole, continuing his recent streak of sub-Keith golf.

This time he took a mighty swing, sending the ball flying across the green and into the sand trap on the opposite side.

As he angrily raked the bunker, he let loose a blue streak of profanity that would have made a sailor blush. It was so vicious that a lady playing one hole over fainted.

The three golfers accompanying him didn’t dare snicker, fearing they might wind up wearing Keith’s sand wedge.

On his last violent pass with the rake, it snagged on something. In fact, it caught so firmly that he had difficulty pulling it loose.

He looked down, figuring he’d caught a vine or perhaps a tree root.

Unable to make out what was holding the rake, he bent down for a closer look, did a double take, and jumped out of the bunker in one giant hop.

“Holy shit, you guys! Look at this!” he screamed.

“What did you do, Keith? Hit the ball so hard it split in half?” Jerry giggled.

The other three golfers cautiously approached the bunker, still concerned about wearing Keith’s sand wedge.

When they reached him, Keith pointed.

None of them could believe what they were seeing.

There, caught in the teeth of the rake, was the skeletal remains of a human hand.

For several moments, nobody said a word.

“You threw that down there as a Halloween prank, didn’t you?” Jerry finally asked.

“Not funny, Keith. You’re holding up the game,” Homer added.

“Bullshit!” Keith screamed. “I know a human skeleton hand when I see one, and that’s one! I had nothing to do with it getting there!”

“Better call the pro shop, Jerry,” Kevin suggested.

“Why me?”

“Because they’ll believe you, dipwad. Homer and I have pulled off so much crap out here they won’t even answer my calls anymore.”

Reluctantly, Jerry called the pro shop.

As usual, it rang five or six times before somebody answered.

“Pro shop!” announced Billy, the young assistant professional.

Billy or one of the bag boys always answered the telephone because the head professional, Denny, was perpetually “too busy.” Nobody knew exactly what Denny was busy doing, but nevertheless, he was always busy.

“Yeah, this is Jerry on number one. We found a dead guy in the bunker.”

“Very funny, Jerry.”

“I’m serious, dude!”

“Wait a minute. Do you have Homer and Kevin in your group?”

“Yeah, but…”

“I’m hanging up now, Jerry.”

“Dammit, I’m dead serious! Get somebody out here now!”

It took Denny and Billy fifteen minutes to drive a golf cart 345 yards.

“Damn,” Homer said when they arrived. “How’d you get the pro away from his desk and out of his office?”

“He likes dead guys,” Kevin quipped.

“Bite me, Kevin,” Denny replied. “This better be good, Keith.”

The six men made their way through a growing crowd of golfers who had gathered around the bunker.

Denny and Billy peered into the sand trap.

The dead guy hadn’t moved.

They stepped into the bunker for a closer look.

“Jesus Christ! There is a dead guy in here!” Billy shouted, scrambling backward and tripping over the rake.

“How the hell did you guys get a dead guy in there?” Denny demanded.

“We didn’t put him there!” Keith protested.

Denny turned to his assistant.

“Billy, take the cart and get everybody off the course. I’m closing it until the police get here.”

“Are you shitting me, Denny?” Billy cried. “They’ll hang me from a tree if I tell them they have to quit!”

“Billy, I don’t want to have to tell you twice.”

Denny took out his cell phone and dialed 911.

“911. What’s your emergency?”

“Yeah, this is Denny at Eagle Mountain Golf Course. There’s a dead body in one of our bunkers.”

“Which hole?”

Denny looked at his phone.

“Seriously! Number one.”

There was a brief silence.

“That damn bunker again,” the dispatcher muttered. “That son of a gun could kill anybody’s golf score.”

“What difference does it make?” Denny yelled. “We need somebody out here now!”

He hung up.

“You must’ve been talking to Paul,” Kevin said. “I’ve brought him out here a few times. He’s so afraid of that trap he uses his putter on every shot once he gets within two hundred yards of it.”

By the time the police arrived, nearly every golfer on the course, along with most of those that had imbibing at the nineteenth hole, had gathered around the first green.

News trucks began arriving, disgorging bubble-headed, bleach-blonde reporters eager to interview anybody who knew anything about the dead man, who might have murdered him, why nobody had been inspecting those sand traps regularly, and, most importantly, what Keith knew about the whole affair.

“Damn, Keith,” Homer said. “You’re gonna be famous.”

The police called in the grounds crew to help excavate the bunker. What they uncovered was almost beyond belief.

Buried beneath the sand was an entire human skeleton.

Several golfers standing nearby took the opportunity to complain that this proved the sand in the bunkers hadn’t been replaced in decades.

“I’ve been telling them for twenty years they need to replace this sand,” one member grumbled. “Instead we got a damn pickle ball court.”

“There’s a dead man in there, Frank,” another golfer reminded him.

“That’s my point!”

Interestingly, when the skeleton was completely uncovered, the investigators discovered the remains of a wooden-shafted golf club clutched in its other hand.

One of the older members standing nearby identified it as a niblick, a club that had largely disappeared from golf bags by the 1930s.

“Jeez,” Jerry said. “The poor bastard’s been down there for decades.”

Another old-timer, standing nearby with a beer in his hand, wondered aloud whether the skeleton might belong to Ernie Ball, a club member who had disappeared in 1957.

“My father told me about him,” the man explained. “The poor bastard was an old-timer even then and refused to play with anything but his wooden-shafted clubs. He wanted no part of those newfangled steel shafts. Dad said Ernie was a horrible golfer, particularly out of the sand. In fact, his sand play was sort of a running joke around the club.”

“Kind of like yours, Keith,” Jerry giggled.

Keith ignored him.

As the investigators carefully removed the skeleton, they discovered a small metal container, about the size of a cigarette case, buried nearby.

Inside were a scorecard and a ten-dollar bill.

Sure enough, the name written across the top of the card was Ernie Ball.

But what made the discovery particularly interesting was the scorecard itself.

Ernie had started his round on the back nine and had apparently been having the round of his life. According to the card, he had shot even par through nine holes.

For a man whose golf game was legendary for all the wrong reasons, this was quite an accomplishment.

Just then, Johnny, the oldest member of the club, arrived. Johnny was eighty-six years old and had belonged to Eagle Mountain since the early 1960s. He surveyed the scene for several moments before removing his cap.

“Well, I’ll be darned,” he said.

“What is it, Johnny?” Billy asked.

“I think you boys finally found Ernie.”

Johnny had heard all about Ernie’s last round. It had become something of a legend around the club, although the story had gradually faded as the old members died off and the club began attracting younger whippersnappers with its low dues.

“Old Ernie was havin’ the round of his life, I tell ya,” Johnny began. “That is, until he got to the trap on the first hole.”

The men gathered around him.

“He tried twelve shots to get out of that damn trap. Twelve! And it was gettin’ dark. His partners finally told him to pick up his ball and forget about it, but Ernie wouldn’t hear of it.

“Finally, the other three fellows gave up and headed for the nineteenth hole. Ernie told ’em he was gonna stay right there until he got that damn ball out of the sand.”

Johnny paused and scratched his chin.

“Not long after, a hell of a storm blew through. Lots of wind and lightnin’. Rain came down in buckets. The next morning, nobody could find Ernie. His car was still in the parking lot, but there wasn’t a sign of him anywhere.

“Some folks figured he’d had a heart attack out there. Others thought maybe the storm had washed him into one of the gullies. Nobody ever knew for sure.”

Johnny looked down at the skeleton.

“I gotta wonder if the poor bastard didn’t have himself a heart attack right there in the bunker. With all that rain and sand washing down, he might’ve been buried before anybody knew what happened. The grounds crew would’ve come along the next morning and fixed up the trap without ever knowing he was underneath it.”

He shook his head.

“Course, I might’ve had a heart attack myself if I’d taken twelve shots out of a bunker and was still in there.”

“Kind of like you, Keith,” Jerry chuckled.

Keith gave Jerry the finger.

The course remained closed the following day while the police finished their investigation.

They interviewed Keith extensively about how he had discovered the skeleton, but Keith was too embarrassed to tell them the whole story.

In fact, according to his official statement, his first shot out of the bunker had landed about ten feet from the cup.