She smiled down at us, and I felt my disappointment melt away. I was a sixth grader again, listening in rapt attention as she made history come alive with tales from her own memories. Lewis reached for another cookie. I sipped my tea; it was Earl Grey.
“Every Decoration Day,” Miss Grant continued, “Mother made us trim the grass around the family graves and wash the stones. Can you imagine it? We had to dig the dirt out of every letter, with brushes! And we tended the flowers that my grandmother had planted. They were perennials, of course, can you guess why?”
Lewis and I glanced at each other in a panic.
“To symbolize rebirth,” Miss Grant explained kindly. “I came by my interest in cemeteries through her, and through my mother.” Lines appeared between her eyebrows. “Oh, Mother would be so very distressed to know . . .”
“Stan told me that nobody has been buried in that cemetery since the last century,” I said quickly. “I didn’t think to ask him why. Do you know why, Miss Grant?”
“They ran out of room,” Lewis suggested.
“Oh no,” Miss Grant murmured. “There is ground remaining that might have served for burials for at least a few more years. I’ve always assumed that they wished to retain the open beauty of the property, rather than to crowd it fence to fence with tombstones.”
“Early environmentalists?” I opined.
“Well, I’ve been thinking,” Lewis interrupted, surprising me with the admission. “Maybe grave robbers did it. You know, for loot o’ for medical research.”
Miss Grant pursed her lips, shook her head gently. “It is true that grave robbing for the purpose of medical research continued well up into the Victorian era. Resurrection men they were called, those awful men who robbed fresh graves for bodies to sell to the anatomists. Why there was even an infamous pair of them who killed wayfarers and sold their bodies!”
Like a child, I felt a delicious shiver run through me.
“Dreadful!” she exclaimed, her eyes wide. “That was one of the reasons that people took to erecting wrought-iron fences around family plots, you know, although it was mostly for show, to let the rest of the world know how rich and important they were. That custom never caught on in a small, poor town like Port Frederick, thank goodness. Such a silly, expensive conceit.”
“So maybe it was the resurrection men!” Lewis insisted.
“No,” I interjected. “Sorry to be morbid, but there were plenty of bodies around for the taking during the war years, without anybody having to resort to grave robbing.”
“They robbed for loot, then,” he said.
Miss Grant and I exchanged smiles, and I said, “There has never been much loot in Poor Fred, Lewis. Besides, you’ll never catch a New Englander burying something that he might be able to sell for a good price later.”
Miss Grant laughed into her napkin, quickly hiding the laugh when she saw the frustration on Lew’s face. I could have told him he wouldn’t find any easy answers, any more than I had so far.
But he leaned forward, not giving up. “I’ve been checking in the history books, Miss Grant, and I read that people used to be buried in churchyards or in commons in the center of town. So why did they bury people way out there at Union Hill? It must have been a good five miles from the center of town in those days.”
“Well, my dears.” She took an instructive tone with us. “The condition of those old graveyards was quite scandalous by the end of the eighteenth century. Just imagine . . .” Again, her hands moved in vivid concert with her words, “. . . there were scores and scores of bodies, all buried on top of each other in tiny, tiny graveyards . . . without the faintest regard for sanitation . . . the town’s dogs dug up the bones . . . there were dreadful sights, horrible smells! Why, it became a matter of public health and decency to remove the burials to the countryside . . .
“The story that came down to me was that the town fathers of Port Frederick wished to move the cemetery outside of town, but the sexton resisted the idea. Sextons, you recall, were church officers who were charged with, among other duties, the rights and responsibilities of burial of the dead. They rang the bells, laid out the bodies, dispensed permits, collected fees, even dug the graves. It was quite a lucrative sideline, as you may imagine.
“At any rate, the sexton didn’t want them to move the graveyard off church property, because he would lose the income from the burials! But he finally had to admit it was a losing battle, so he offered to open the new graveyard on his own property, and to sell plots just as some of the big modern cemeteries had already begun to do in the larger cities, like Boston. He was really quite ahead of his time, a shrewd businessman in that regard.”
“It was Erasmus Pittman,” I volunteered, and added for the benefit of Lewis, “That was Spitt Pittman’s great-grandfather. He was the town sexton, as well as the cabinetmaker, the undertaker, and just about everything else.”
“Was he, dear?” Miss Grant looked surprised, and pleased. “Why, I’d forgotten he was sexton, but of course, it stands to reason. So many of the men who turned to undertaking were sextons, or carpenters, or liverymen. It was a natural progression . . .”
“Life,” Lewis pronounced suddenly, “is a natural progression.” He stretched out his legs, rolled over on his side, crooked an elbow, and propped his head on his fist, looking set to wax philosophical. “Birth to death, love to marriage, marriage to divorce.”
“So cynical, Mr. Riss?” Her tone was regretful. “Although, I must admit that your ‘progression’ from marriage to divorce seems more ‘natural’ now than it did during the era about which we were talking. Theirs was a hard life, but not a very long one for most of them . . . a small comfort to the unhappy, I suppose. It does seem to me that one of the reasons we have so much divorce nowadays is simply that we live too long for some marriages to endure. A soup with too little meat on its bones will not improve with time, no matter how long it’s left to simmer.” An expression of sadness crossed the broad, plain features of her face. “I never used to hear of divorces among my ‘children.’ Now it seems I learn of new ones every day. Sometimes I think I’ve lived beyond my time. I feel it particularly when I outlive one of my children. Dear, silly Sylvia. First that separation from her sweet husband, and now . . . this.”
Lewis and I exchanged glances, and he sat up again.
“You knew her?” he asked.
“Of course,” she replied. “Sylvia was in one of the last classes I taught before I retired. A beautiful child, but my goodness, what an outrageous flirt!” Her mouth drew up into a smile of fond memory. “Why, from the principal on down to the smallest kindergartner, Sylvia Davis had them all under her spell.”
“Pretty is as pretty does,” Lewis said, with a smug grin for me.
“No, no.” She rebuked him sharply. “Sylvia was quite a nice and intelligent child, as well. She was one of my brighter and more responsible students, except perhaps when it came to the boys.” Miss Grant gazed in a severe manner at Lewis. “Really, Mr. Riss, I expected better of you as a reporter than to parrot clichés. Just look at our little Jenny! If pretty is as pretty does, then pretty is exceedingly well. Wouldn’t you agree?”
His nod was grudging.
“Little” Jenny, all five feet seven of her, tried not to grin.
“Lewis.” I looked at my watch. “We’ve taken up enough of Miss Grant’s time.”
She cut the ground out from under me, of course, by smiling at him and murmuring, “I have far too much time, my dears, and every minute of it that you fill is time well spent for me.” She gestured toward her knees, still tightly bound with bandages. “I still can’t get around well at all, you see, at least not without the crutches my doctor gave me. I only wish I could attend the services for Sylvia tomorrow, but . . .”
“I’ll take you,” I said, before Lewis could.
Her eyes, behind the horn-rimmed glasses, glinted mischievously. “I rather hoped you would, Jennifer. Oh, I am a wicked old woman, aren’t I?”
<
br /> “Awful,” I said fondly. But it was Lewis who kissed her on her cheek. I don’t know who was the more surprised, Miss Grant or I, but it was clear which of us was the more pleased.
“Good night, my dears,” she called to us as we locked and closed her door behind us.
I followed Lewis down the stairs. “Apple polisher,” I muttered. To which he stuck out his tongue and replied, “Nya, na, na, na, na.”
12
I waited until my car was moving before telling Lewis that we weren’t going right back to The Buoy. “I left something at Harbor Lights,” I said, with what I hoped was a winning smile, “and I need to run out there and get it before they close tonight. You want to come along?”
I stepped harder on the gas.
“No, I don’t want to come along.” He was sarcastic. “I want to pick up my car and then go to the police station to see what’s new on the Davis murder. But I have a feeling I’m being kidnapped. Do I have a choice in this, Cain?”
“There’s always a choice, Lewis. You could throw open the door and fling yourself to the pavement.” I took a corner too fast; Lewis grabbed the edge of the dashboard to steady himself.
“Women drivers,” he muttered. He leaned forward and dug for something in his back jeans pocket. “They don’t call it power steering for nothing.” He pulled out his wallet and removed the stubby joint. In a conciliatory move, I pushed in the car lighter for him.
“You’re so cute when you’re in a snit,” I said.
He leveled his best New Jersey-gangster glare at me.
“I used to know a man,” I told him, “who made plenty of money, but he refused to buy a car for his wife.”
“Damn right.”
“She left him,” I said. “A few months after the divorce, her husband was mysteriously killed by a hit-and-run driver. But he, the husband that is, hadn’t changed his will yet, so she got all the money. With the settlement, she bought a Mercedes dealership. Now she drives a new demo to work every day.”
“You made that up,” he said, but I heard amusement in his voice. The lighter popped out. I removed one hand from the wheel and held the lighter out to him so he could light the joint. Lewis leaned back against the seat then, and propped his dirty running shoes on my dashboard. He sucked energetically, then released the smoke with an audible sigh. He nudged my elbow and offered the joint to me.
I shook my head.
He grunted. “You hang around with too many cops.” But he leaned back again and seemed content to ride along. I wondered briefly what my trustees would say to the idea of funding a study to examine the salutary effects of marijuana on hyperactive adults, like Ritalin on kids.
After a few more peaceful moments, we pulled into the parking lot at Harbor Lights.
“Hey,” Lewis said lazily. “There’s a party goin’ on.”
The lot was surprisingly full for the late hour. The funeral home, all lit up, did indeed look less like a mortuary than it did like a large private residence where the family was throwing a big party. I half expected a butler to take our coats and a maid to serve Dubonnet. All it needed to complete the illusion of affluent domesticity was smoke rising from a chimney. On second thought, maybe smoke rising from a chimney wasn’t the most tactful note on which to greet visitors to a funeral home. I found a place to park beside a small brown station wagon.
“You’re not coming in?” I asked Lewis.
“Brilliant deduction,” he said. “Maybe you can lead me to water, baby, but that don’t mean I got to drink.” He had removed a Baggie full of joints from somewhere on his person and was now smoking a fresh, fat one. After breathing the same air with him in the closed car, I was beginning to swim upstream myself. I shook my head to clear it, but only succeeded in making myself dizzy. I focused at a point over his shoulder to steady my vision.
The point materialized into a face, small and pale.
It belonged to a little brown-haired woman wearing a brown coat who was sitting alone in the brown station wagon, in the driver’s seat. As if she sensed my observation, she turned her face our way. She met my eyes, then quickly turned away again to resume her straight-ahead stare out the windshield toward the funeral home.
I shifted my glance away from her before Lewis could notice. If the widow of the late John Rudolph wished to maintain a lonely vigil in the parking lot of the funeral home where he had been employed, that was her business. She didn’t need a nosy reporter to probe her grief with his questions. What, I wondered, would Lewis ask her, given the chance? “Tell me, Mrs. Rudolph, how does it feel to find your husband in a coffin with another woman?” There was something about Muriel Rudolph—so small, so plain, so serious—that made me wish to protect her.
I felt my elbow jarred again.
Lewis, his face wreathed in the most relaxed and generous of smiles, held out the joint to me. Again, I shook my head. I realized with a shock that I had been sitting, lumplike, for several minutes in that car. I had to get out of there and breathe fresh air before I fell asleep. But I couldn’t leave him there to discover the presence of the widow in the next car.
I roused myself to speech.
“Come with me, Lewis,” I said in seductive tones. “If you do, I’ll get you into the morgue to see where she died.”
He sat up with surprising briskness and snubbed out the joint. Again, the stub went into his wallet. “On second thought,” Lewis said cheerfully, his voice sounding unnecessarily loud to me, “I’m pretty damn thirsty, after all.”
He started to turn toward the door.
“Lewis, wait!”
He looked back, eyebrows up.
I pulled down the mirror on the back of my visor and pretended to examine my hair and makeup. I took my time about applying new lipstick, pursing my lips at the mirror, running my tongue over them slowly, and blotting them caressingly with a tissue.
“And pretty damn hungry,” he murmured.
I reached for the door handle on my side of the car, and Lewis reached for me. I slipped out of his grasp and was standing outside the car, looking down at him, before he was able to complete the pass.
“They don’t call them power brakes for nothing, either,” I said.
Lewis, sprawled over the driver’s seat, stared up at me. Then he sang softly, “Hey little girl, is your daddy home, did he go and leave you all alone? Oh, oh, oh, I’m on fire.”
I recognized the Springsteen, and smiled.
After a moment, Lewis grinned back.
I held out a hand to him to help him slide out of my side of the car. Once out, he tried to keep hold of me, but I took his hand and slipped it into the pocket of the pea coat. He laughed. We walked companionably up to the funeral home then. Lewis didn’t so much as glance at the brown station wagon.
We tried the door to the management wing first, but no luck. Locked. My only choice, short of breaking and entering, was to go with the flow of mourners into the public wing.
Once in, it was not a butler but a short, fat, extremely neat man in a blue suit who greeted us. There was a sprig of baby’s breath in his lapel. His shoes were shiny; so were his eyes, as if with repressed tears.
“Did you folks come for the Davis visitation?” He whispered, as if our visit were a secret he would tactfully keep for us. Lewis and I glanced at each other with “oh” in our eyes. That explained the full parking lot: the employees of the Pittman companies were here to pay their respects to Sylvia.
I nodded, signifying nothing.
The short, fat, neat man seemed to think my nod signified assent, because he pointed gracefully. “Down the hall, second double door on your right.” He was still whispering, still keeping our little secret. It did seem bizarre, when I thought about it, for people to get all dressed up to go visit a corpse. Lewis, of course, was not all dressed up, but the little man bravely included him in our conversation anyway. In fact, when he looked at Lewis his welcoming smile grew even sadder and kinder, if anything, as if he understood that grief took all for
ms, even to the extreme of underdressing. He whispered, “It’s in the Chapel of the Resurrection.”
“Has it ever worked?” Lewis asked.
I grabbed his elbow to pull him away. But not fast enough. The short, fat, neat man innocently inquired, “What is that, sir?”
“The chapel,” Lewis called back over his shoulder as I dragged at him. “Has anybody ever come back to life in it? Make a great story for the Inquirer . . .”
The kind, wet eyes looked hurt.
I pushed Lewis into an empty visitation chamber and then into an antique American country chair. “Sit,” I commanded. I took off my raincoat and dumped it on his lap. “Stay. And keep your mouth shut so nobody starts asking what we’re doing here and why I’ve wandered off into the offices at this time of night. And don’t you go asking any of the relatives what it feels like to buy a coffin for their cousin when she already had a free one!”
His reporter’s instincts were suddenly and obviously aquiver. “Hey, Cain, what are you after here? Maybe I’d better come with you, make sure you find it . . .”
“You want to see the morgue, or not?”
“Christ.” He drummed his fingers on his knees. “All right, all right, but hurry, will you? I got work to do. If you’re not back in ten minutes, I’ll find old man Pittman and offer him a jay in exchange for information as to your whereabouts.”
At the door, I turned back to examine him critically.
“Actually, Lewis, in that pea coat, you look halfway respectable.”
His initial offended expression gave way to an ominous grin. “I’ll see what else I can find on the coatrack. Shake it, Cain.”
I stepped into the hallway with the idea of blending into the crowd of mourners so that I might work my way inconspicuously toward the door marked Staff Only. It’s not easy to be inconspicuous when you’re a tall female of Swedish descent, but I thought it was worth a try. Francie had trusted me, and I had let her down. I thought it was important to retrieve that file before it was found by somebody who might wonder how the new secretary could be so careless with confidential material. It wouldn’t do for her to get fired on my account.
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