by Joe Clifford
I glanced toward the next room, where Mrs. Balfour sat. Her expression remained glazed over, a million miles away.
I braced for what came next, Detective Lourey’s response and the horrid details of a gruesome crime. Instead, the detective said, “Thank you for your time, Mr. Cossey.” She moved toward the door, showing me out.
“Wait. That’s it?”
“That’s it,” the detective said, slapping closed her little notepad.
“Hold on. You ask me to come all the way up here, grill me—”
“No one grilled you, Mr. Cossey.”
“But what…what happened to Jacob?”
“I’m sorry,” the detective said. “That’s all we’re at liberty to divulge right now.”
“Please.”
Perhaps my sincerity caught her off guard or appealed to the better parts of her humanity, but Detective Lourey paused, wrestling with how much—if any—could be shared. Her posture deflated in resignation. I found the entire display disingenuous.
“The cause of death appears to be a hard blow to his stomach.”
“From what, like, a fist? Someone punched him?”
“No. A fall. It looks as though the victim fell down into a quarry.”
“Why do you keep calling him a victim?”
“Landed on a hard, sharp object,” she continued, ignoring my question. “The fall punctured his stomach, delivering the fatal wound.”
None of this made sense. I wanted to check on Mrs. Balfour, who I knew couldn’t hear from the other room. Still, I felt compelled to lean in and whisper. “Jacob wasn’t well.”
“We are aware of his mental condition.”
“That’s it? He fell…and landed on a rock…in Minnesota?” It sounded even more preposterous when I said it aloud. A rock. A thousand miles away.
“The quarry is filled with rocks,” Detective Lourey said. “Many of which are jagged, pointed, sharp. As for why he was at a quarry in Minnesota, that is what I am trying to find out. I was hoping you might know.”
Two minutes ago, I’d wanted out of this house. Now, despite the detective’s persistent movements to show me the door, I wasn’t ready to leave.
“Did he…suffer?” I asked.
“Death wouldn’t have been instantaneous. He was bleeding internally. It would’ve been hard to move. It does appear he tried driving for help.”
“Driving? He didn’t have a car—”
“He tried driving out of the quarry on a piece of construction equipment. An excavator.”
I remembered Mrs. Balfour said Jacob had been working for a construction company. I wouldn’t know my way around an excavator.
“He didn’t get far,” she said.
“This is horrible.” I rubbed my eyes, dragging my hands down my face, raking flesh. “How can you have no idea when he died? There’s rigor mortis, evidence of trauma.” I began ticking off an itemized list on my fingers. I worked with the aged. I knew how death manifested. Any medical examiner worth their salt should be able to pinpoint, or at least approximate, a reasonable time of death based on how the blood had coagulated if nothing else. There was more she wasn’t telling me.
“We can’t say definitively,” Detective Lourey said, gathering her things, signaling the big cop in the next room, “because the body was so badly burned.”
I dropped in a seat. The big cop came in but I didn’t move. I could see she didn’t want to tell me the rest. I wasn’t going anywhere until she did.
Detective Lourey halted packing up. “He couldn’t get far on the excavator because he’d lost too much blood. He passed out, the engine got too hot, and the turbocharger caught fire. We were lucky to ID the body.” Before I could ask, she added, “Dental records. Fingerprints.”
This story kept getting worse.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The funeral was held the following Tuesday. A miserable overcast concrete-gray day slabbed with hard black clouds that threatened downpour. But it didn’t rain, which would’ve been a welcome relief, a cleansing to cut through the sloppy humidity. Instead, we suffered the indignity of that in between state. Messy, wet, warm, stuffy. Water dripped from the trees as if the leaves themselves were perspiring, a rainforest in Upstate New York. Not sure it mattered the sky never broke. You still got damp, so much precipitation in the air. My suit felt soaked through, down to the tee. Even though the morning wasn’t cold, I couldn’t stop shivering.
The details surrounding Jacob’s death had been impossible to shake. I had nowhere to turn for clarification. I couldn’t grill Mrs. Balfour. My meeting with Detective Lourey had left me with more questions than answers. Leading up to the burial, I replayed our exchange ad nauseum. Nothing made sense. No consistency. Despite the detective’s frequent use of the word “victim,” Jacob’s death had been ruled an accident. Never mind the preposterousness of a man in Jacob’s state traveling a thousand miles to hurl himself to the bottom of a pit—this was the official determination, final say, case closed. Then again, aside from my random truck driver serial killer theory, I didn’t have a better one to swap in its place. The detective’s parting shot, that an unrelated quarry explosion was responsible for the fire, didn’t quell confusion or temper suspicions. What was I suspicious of? That someone had abducted and murdered my mentally ill friend? For what? A robbery? Jacob didn’t have anything worth stealing. And if you’re going to kill a guy, what makes Minnesota so special? Maybe the simplest answer was the right one: Jacob had gone off his meds, and his latest breakdown delivered him somewhere far away and fatal. I didn’t believe it. I didn’t not believe it.
Knowing nothing about construction, I looked up excavators and turbochargers on the web. At least that part of the story panned out. Apparently, turbochargers could be problematic, combustible. Something about turrets, main hydraulic valves, and engines running at high heat, leaks, and debris. There was a magic number of three thousand PSI where hydraulic fluid was concerned. If the air/fuel mixture was off, turbochargers could ignite the flame. Manufacturers were supposed to put in firewalls to combat the problem but accidents still happened.
When I pulled up to St. Paul’s, the intimate gathering center for believers and alcoholics on scattered weeknights, AA commandeering the location on faith’s off hours, I slogged out of my car, shutting the wet creaking door, and popped my umbrella to join the rest of the guests in the black parade. I longed for rain, a bargain baptism to rinse away this pain. Despite my upbringing, I didn’t believe in the supernatural or demons or invisible men in the sky. The evil I felt was grounded in stone-cold reality, the sad truth that fashions a thousand useless gods. Because that’s what this was, eons of evolution, humanity crawling from the primordial slime, and the first order of business: find an all-knowing, all-powerful deity who will oversee, protect, keep us safe. Go visit the children’s cancer center and tell me about God. Watch a ninety-year-old man suffer the indignity of dying alone, eating baby food, and soiling himself in adult diapers. In life, he could’ve been a lawyer, a banker, or a business owner. And this is how you go out: drooling like a toothless infant, helpless and unable to control your bowels.
The whole reason we were here today was because Mr. Balfour hanged himself in the family garage, which set in motion a series of disastrous events. Jacob’s slow descent to hell began with his father’s selfish act and ended with him several states removed, dying in a ditch with a ruptured stomach, charred beyond recognition. No one knew how he got there. And no one would try too hard to figure it out. People like Jacob didn’t provide a service. You couldn’t get anything from them. Therefore, they were expendable.
Given Jacob’s mental health problems, the trouble he caused the community with his unhinged antics, I had expected a sparsely attended affair. But St. Paul’s parking lot was overflowing, cars spilling into the backup one at the old community center. A hundred vehicles clogged the lots and side streets, unleashing droves of mourners who descended with the pious reve
rence reserved for the death of celebrities. Inside the church, every pew was filled. A sellout was hard enough to pull off on Christmas let alone a middle-of-the-week ceremony for the town nutcracker.
I tried to brush aside the cynicism I felt creeping in. That wasn’t me. I strove to maintain a positive outlook. Regardless of our inception, we have the power to change lives. Our fate is, ultimately, in our hands. But does that philosophy apply to the sick and suffering, the broken and the damned?
It was touching to see so many people taking time off work to pay their respects. I was happy to have been proven wrong. People did care about Jacob. Though I soon realized that wasn’t it. These people weren’t here for Jacob; they’d come to support Mrs. Balfour. I shouldn’t have been surprised. People loved Mrs. Balfour, who gave so much of herself, a friend to everybody, a living saint if ever there was one. They should’ve chiseled another marble slab, added her likeness to the field of pious and prayerful in the common garden.
The well-attended church ceremony prohibited my speaking in depth with Mrs. Balfour. After I placed my flower arrangement at the altar, I waited my turn in the receiving line, relegated to another local acquaintance uttering empty platitudes about being sorry for her loss, as meaningless as thoughts and prayers in the wake of a national tragedy. I watched the liturgy slumped in a back pew, awash in the organ’s drone and children of the corn chorus, feeling alienated and alone.
I’d never been religious or spiritual. When I’d first come to live with the Balfours, I attended weekly services out of respect for Mrs. Balfour, who possessed a devout faith. And because I was eight—at that age you don’t get much agency. When I hit my teens, I was able to wriggle out of going most Sundays. Of course, I had to go for Jesus’s greatest hits: Christmas, Good Friday, Easter. Birth, death, resurrection. I didn’t have anything against Catholicism. At least no more than what I held against the rest of organized religion, whose stranglehold on fear and convention offended erudite sensibilities. I could appreciate the rituals and performance, the rites and tradition, stained glass pictorials and Stations of the Cross.
Today, however, as I observed the priests glide by in their gilded robes, ivory, emerald, and gold, hands held up to heaven, promising salvation and eternal life, I couldn’t suppress my ire. I grew angrier and angrier with all these fools around me, caught up in mythology, the vacant promise of hope based on a campfire story.
There was one moment, however, where logic and internal debate gave way to the external and awesome. The sun cracked the sky, and the heavy cloud cover parted. A bright light seared through the glass ceiling, and a golden ray struck the casket with laser-like precision, illuminating the cherry wood. And in that instant, I felt the presence of something bigger. I ached for that conviction to remain, desperate to believe. I wished I had faith in anything.
Then it was gone. The clouds returned to blot out childish beliefs as shadows crawled over the church floor. That sunbeam had been nothing but a confluence of cosmic chance—celestial rotation, rate and time, a solar alignment conspiring to create the illusion of security. And as the light slipped from the crown of the casket, with it went all poetry, leaving only the disillusion of broken promises.
The white wreaths juxtaposed against the colorful bouquets were pretty, though. Shades of cream and titanium, accents of maroon and violet, asleep in beds of fresh green.
The congregation celebrated life with hymns, their ragged, off-key voices joining in unity, masking the tone deafness.
Mrs. Balfour had chosen a younger portrait of Jacob, one from before he was sick—a time I remembered well and lamented often. Blown up and placed on an easel, the photo showcased Jacob at thirteen, fourteen, smiling, displaying the hope and joy he did not possess at twenty-three.
The priest read several passages from the Bible. About life never ending; about how no one is ever really gone; about how we keep their memory alive in our hearts. Comforting. “He’s at peace.” “He’s in a better place.” Sounded nice. But this lip service only works if you remind yourself how horrible the deceased’s existence was to begin with. You don’t say billionaires who die cruising the Mediterranean on their yacht are “in a better place.”
Afterwards, we all headed to the cemetery. About a third of the church made the pilgrimage, a good forty, fifty people. Except when I glanced around and took in their faces, these weren’t the same people. Which didn’t make sense. Guests at the church were familiar. At the cemetery, I didn’t know a soul. The weird part was—the part I couldn’t explain—they weren’t strangers either. For instance, I recognized Mr. Caliandri, who’d given me my first job, rotating milk and stocking shelves at our local market. Except it wasn’t Mr. Caliandri. Years pass, people change, but this wasn’t the same man. He was a facsimile, a representation, a forgery. I couldn’t shake the impression these were stand-ins for the real thing, replacement actors hired. Ridiculous, not true, impossible, but my mind would not let it go.
When I was younger, I used to watch soap operas with Mrs. Balfour. Although, in my memories, I couldn’t see her face. I wasn’t watching them alone, I knew that. Chloe was too young. Jacob wouldn’t have watched soap operas. I recalled another person in the room with me, an older presence, compassionate, kind. Who else could it have been? Maybe I was conflating memories of Ledgecrest, mixing up players. Only the soap opera I remembered watching, Guiding Light, had been off the air for years, long before I started at the convalescent home.
The reason I was thinking about soap operas in the first place was this device they employed. When an actor left a role and another took over, a calm voiceover would state, “Now playing the part of Phillip Spaulding is…” And that was that. Didn’t matter if the new actor looked nothing like the old one. The viewer accepted this new representation. From now on, this was what the character looked like. And that’s how I felt at the cemetery, like I was surrounded by different actors playing familiar parts.
A gloomy pallor hung heavy over the rest of the day; the finality of ashes and dust wasn’t going to lighten the mood. And why should it? A disturbed young man had been struck down in the prime of his life. That his fate came at his own hand? The bitterest pill.
Soft breezes lushed through budding cherry blossoms and sodden pollen drenched the fragrant air. I wanted to believe what they say—how the wind is everyone we’ve ever known. I wanted to believe that the goosebumps on my skin weren’t because temperatures plummeted but because I was part of a greater collective. Jacob, my mother, my father—everyone I’d lost was still present in my life, as if I could will them near me by refusing to let them die. If I could keep them on this plane, I could force them to be participants in my world, and a chance to repair remained—patch up, thread needles through hearts and carry on.
I could not, of course, do any of this.
The dead stay buried.
CHAPTER NINE
Afterward, Mrs. Balfour hosted the reception at her house, which further thinned the herd. I never understood the post-burial party, mourners gathering in black to look somber while sampling cheese platters and casseroles. I appreciated the need for community and camaraderie. The world keeps on spinning with or without you. But like so many human rituals centered on ceremony, this one felt odd, awkward, a forced step in the stages of grief, which left me feeling cut off. The alienation rooted deeper than canned green beans, fried wonton shrapnel, or ruminations on Kübler-Ross.
Since the church, I’d felt a strange presence. Like with the wind at the graveyard, I wanted to assign identity to cosmic divinity, thus ruling out all things creepy-crawly, but it didn’t feel like that kind of sensation. This felt real, tangible, an actual person—or persons—watching me.
We have an innate sixth sense that tells us when someone is watching us. It’s steeped in our bones from caveman days to avoid ending up in the jaws of feral beasts. You can be sitting in a car and feel the driver next lane over doing it. Laundromat, supermarket, gas station. At the Bal
four home, eyes circled me, predators waiting to pounce. Which left me whipping my neck around, thinking I’d catch a creeper lurking, letting their lascivious gaze linger too long. But I never did, not once. No one was watching me.
Poking around the buffet table, a smorgasbord of donated dishes, warmed-over fare consisting of various noodle pies laden with sauces out of a can, I found I didn’t have much of an appetite.
I entered the dining room, a space seldom used for eating. Mrs. Balfour had set it up as a family museum, with pictures of her and Mr. Balfour, Jacob and Chloe on the sideboard, shelves, and walls. Today, these photographs served as memorial: half the people in these pictures were gone.
Out the window, on the front lawn, I saw them. At first, I didn’t recognize the old man talking to Mrs. Balfour, even though I’d seen him a week earlier.
Francis.
He and Mrs. Balfour were by the long row of parked cars, two wheels tilted up on the curb, partly concealed by the hedgerow. I couldn’t make out what they were saying but I could tell the conversation was not friendly. Mrs. Balfour was doing most of the talking, restrained expression teetering on explosion, repressing ballistic for the neighbors’ sake. Mrs. Balfour stabbed an accusatory finger at the window where I stood. I didn’t think she saw me but still felt the need to duck behind the drapes, using the taupe curtain to shield me from view. Observing their interaction, I felt like I was invading privacy, a spy. I’d never known Mrs. Balfour to lose her cool like that. She was furious, animated and gesticulating, arms swinging wild. Her face betrayed murder. She pointed up the road, into the distance where suburbia’s safe confines ended and the cold, uncaring city began. Francis dropped his head, turned, and trudged toward that horizon.