“We were just wondering if you could tell us more about what happened,” I said.
“Such as?”
“Such as who shot him.”
Father Taggart's eyebrows rose.
“As far as I know, that remains unclear,” he said. “He was out with a group and they must have split up. The shot fired that ultimately killed him was never traced back to a specific person.”
We lapsed into silence. As Father Taggart continued to look between me and Jack, we averted our gazes in the hopes of not giving away what we were each thinking.
“So no one ever came forward?” Jack said at last. “No one took responsibility?”
“Not officially, no.”
“What about unofficially?” he tried, shifting a bit in his seat as he drew closer to the desk. “Did anyone ever … I mean, do you know if there was someone who might've done it?”
The priest lowered his eyes to rest on Jack's dark ones.
“What are you asking me, Jack?”
“Nothing. I just –”
He broke off, unable to say what was on his mind out of concern for what the man thought of him, and so I continued instead.
“Did anyone ever admit doing it to you?” I asked bluntly. “You know, in confession or whatever?”
Father Taggart looked at me wearily.
“I'm afraid that if they did, I wouldn't be able to say as much to you,” he said, his voice low but still every bit as reprimanding as my father's was when he was shouting at me. “Confession is between the person and the Lord.”
“Right.”
I shrugged indifferently, but Jack was chewing at his lip. Father Taggart turned back to him.
“But no, no one ever confessed anything of the sort to me,” he said. “I believe that what happened out there in the woods was truly an accident – a tragic, tragic accident.”
“Right,” Jack said, swallowing as his voice grew thick with guilt. “Thank you, Father. Sorry we asked.”
“But that doesn't mean anything, does it?” I said, challenging him for a reason that I couldn't place. “Maybe no one wanted to admit it because they knew how Mr. Perenna would react.”
Father Taggart cast his eyes back over to me.
“I like to think, Enim, that one's sense of guilt and need to be absolved from it overrides any social fear of what Jim Perenna would say about him in town.”
He gave me a look that seemed to melt the outer layer of skin from my flesh, and I instinctively leaned back in my seat.
“Tommy was an absolutely wonderful boy,” he continued. “Everyone thought so, and everyone was heartbroken at his death. I remember going up to the house to say a prayer over the body: it was by far the hardest blessing that I've ever had to give.”
“I bet,” Jack said sincerely. “That would be hard to see.”
Father Taggart nodded.
“It was – and I saw nothing of it, even. They kept the body covered,” he added, noting that Jack and I looked confused. “But knowing that he was lying there beneath the sheet … it was horrible. Truly, truly horrible.”
I paused, chewing the insides of my mouth as I thought.
“Was the wake open-casket?” I asked.
“Sorry?”
“The wake,” I repeated.
“Why do you ask?”
I cleared my throat, realizing that he was suspicious of my questions due to how insolently I had spoken to him before.
“I … I just remember that my mother's was,” I said, lowering my voice to feign remorse. “I think it was helpful to see her again – you know, for closure.”
Jack had shifted beside me; it was rare to hear me speak of her at all.
“No, they opted for a closed-casket,” Father Taggart said, seemingly convinced with my explanation. “I think that sometimes the act of seeing a loved one one last time is useful, and other times it only brings the family more pain.”
We thanked him for his time and headed outside into the chilly churchyard, dragging our coat collars further up our necks to protect them from the wind. As Mea hopped around in the snow, Jack threw me a look.
“What was that about?” he said.
“What?”
“You, in there,” he repeated. “Did you have to give him such a hard time?”
“I wasn't trying to,” I said, though the lie was hardly believable. “I just wanted to see if there was anything we were missing.”
“By asking him to relive looking at the kid's dead body?” Jack said, crossing his arms. “You could have at least asked him something useful.”
“That was the only useful information we got, actually,” I countered.
“What'd you mean?”
“Think about it,” I said, letting go of Mea's leash and pushing my hands into my pockets to warm them. “He said that he gave the prayer over Tommy's covered body, and that the wake was closed-casket.”
“And?”
“And it's a little weird,” I said. “Why wouldn't they let him see the face?”
Jack paused, his eyes flickering over to me questioningly.
“I don't know,” he said. “Like he said, it would have been painful.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe there was a reason they didn't want anyone to see the face.”
Jack shook his head.
“What're you saying? It wasn't Tommy?”
“I have no idea – but it's strange that the casket was closed.”
“But tons of people have closed-caskets. The kid was shot – maybe he looked awful.”
“But even if he did, it's nothing that the funeral director couldn't've fixed,” I said, remembering how beautiful and soft my mother had looked lying in her casket even though she had been anything but just days beforehand. “They have makeup and prosthetics and whatnot. He could've looked any way they wanted by the time he was done.”
Jack hummed to himself as he thought, but his eyes were clouded and he seemed uncertain.
“You're the one who wanted me to think up a wild theory, Jack, so here you go,” I said, reminding him of why we had asked the priest anything in the first place. “The kid had a closed-casket, no one remembers shooting him – the whole thing is weird, just like you thought.”
Jack's eyes flickered over to me, and it only took a moment before something lit up within the darks of the irises and a grin stretched slowly over his face.
“You could be on to something, Nim.”
“That's what I've been trying to tell you,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “But now we just have to figure out how to find out for sure if Tommy Perenna ever died.”
“Well, that'll be easy,” Jack said, his grin widening into something maniacal.
“Alright, how?”
He stared at me with a gleeful sort of satisfaction.
“We'll look in his grave.”
Ch. 8
I blinked against the wind, but it did little to keep the cold from stinging my eyes.
“I was sort of thinking we could just ask someone or something,” I said. “You know – look at his death certificate. Something practical.”
“Nah, we wouldn't be able to trust a piece of paper,” Jack replied, waving the suggestion away. “We have to do this the right way.”
“I'm pretty sure that 'right way' and 'grave-digging' have never been used in the same sentence before.”
“We wouldn't be grave-digging, Nim,” Jack said chidingly.
“Yes, we would. That's what it's called when you dig up someone's coffin.”
“Pff – we're not doing that. I'm not completely conscienceless, you know.”
I rolled my eyes, not entirely certain that the statement was true.
“Alright, so what did you mean when you said you wanted to look in his grave, then?” I asked.
“The Perennas have a family crypt,” he said with a shrug. “We'll just go down and take a look.”
I stared at him uncomprehendingly.
“They have a what?”
“A crypt,”
he said again. “You know, a huge mausoleum-type thing where the whole family's buried.”
“We're not going down into a crypt, Jack,” I said, lowering my voice even though there was no one around. “That's – that's got to be illegal or something.”
“Nah, I used to go down there all the time when I worked in the cemetery,” he said. “The family brings flowers and stuff down to the coffins, and it was my job to get rid of them when they wilted.”
“Right,” I said, no less convinced than I had been before. “But clearing out dead flowers is a bit different than opening up coffins.”
“Not really,” Jack tried.
“I can't believe we're even having this conversation,” I muttered.
“Ah, come on, Nim – you're the one who started it.”
“No, you started it, I'm just trying to finish it.”
“Then come down to the crypt with me and we'll see if we can,” he said.
I wavered in my spot.
“Fine,” I said at last. “But only because I want to get this over with.”
“Great – we'll go tonight.”
“Tonight? No – we'll go now,” I said, glancing over at the cemetery again. “I'm not going into a crypt anytime but in the daylight.”
“No, I don't think that would work.”
“You said it was perfectly legal,” I reminded him.
He shrugged.
“Sure it is,” he said easily. “But I have to go to work, and I don't get off until eight. Unless you want to go down there alone, that is.”
I threw him a darkened look.
“Definitely not.”
“Alright, so we'll go tonight,” he repeated. “Glad that that's settled.”
I shook my head at him and moved forward to grab onto Mea's leash again, worried that she might realize how to get through the fence and break loose into the graveyard. As I brought her back over to where Jack was standing to light a cigarette, he snapped his lighter shut and took a long drag, looking far more relaxed than he had since I had arrived.
“Alright, well, I guess I'll see you tonight, then,” I said, noting the time.
“What are you going to do?”
I glanced back up at the church.
“I don't know – go inside, I guess.”
“You could just come with me,” he said. “It'd probably be more interesting than cleaning my room.”
“What, to work, you mean?”
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “It's a bookstore: you could just hang out and read and whatnot. It's not like you'd get into trouble.”
“Wouldn't you, though?”
“I doubt it. So long as there're no customers around when we're talking.”
I agreed and followed him back into town to the small shop, and we put Mea in the back room where we hoped that she wouldn't get into any trouble. As she had just spent a good half-hour running about in the snow, she was happy enough to lie down near the heater to take a nap. Reminding myself to take her outside regularly enough this time, I shut the door and wandered up and down the bookshelves as Jack took a seat at the register.
The books in the store were all old, and it seemed to be more of a library or thrift shop of sorts than an actual store. I looked through a few titles disinterestedly before seeing one about birds and opening it up, resolved to figure out exactly what a grouse really was.
Just as Jack had said, it was some kind of partridge that mainly kept to the ground given that its heavy tail rendered it incapable of proper flight. I studied the picture of it for a moment before deciding that it was a reasonable-enough thing to shoot, though I couldn't particularly imagine eating it or hanging it upon my wall to stare at for all of time.
The shop remained fairly empty for the most part throughout the day. A handful of people came in to sell something back or pick up more reading material, and Jack chatted politely with them as he rang up the purchases at the counter. One woman caught sight of me in the back corner and gave me a frown, but I couldn't decide if it was a reaction to not knowing who I was or if she had already heard from Mr. Perenna about what I was.
“And … eight o'clock,” Jack announced, watching as the second hand finally made its way around to the topmost mark on the clock. “Let's go.”
We wandered back to the cemetery with Mea in tow, slipping through the front gate before making our way through the snow-covered path towards the Perenna Crypt. It was so dark that it was difficult to navigate through the headstones, and more than once we collided with one and cracked our toes against the granite.
“Fuck,” Jack muttered from in front of me, clutching his stomach as he hit against something sharp. “A little light wouldn't hurt this place.”
He backed up and made to move around the stone that he had walked into, and I paused upon realizing that it was the statue of the gruesome-looking angel. Squinting again at the base, I reread the Latin that was etched on the stone: Memento Mori. I frowned as I tried to remember enough of what I had learned at Bickerby to interpreting what it meant, and finally came up with a rough translation: Remember to Die. I pulled away and circled around it to catch up with Jack. The statement was far from appeasing.
“So …. here it is,” he said a few minutes later.
We had reached a stone building of sorts that was situated off to one side of the cemetery. Though the facade was twice my height and several feet across, the actual area of it was much smaller than I had expected it to be. The entirety of it was mainly just a huge, thick door that had intricate carvings creating designs on the surface, and on either side it was flanked by heavy pillars atop which a pediment sat with the family's name etched in. It was weathered and chipped in places, and the construction of it looked questionable at best. Running my eyes over it again and wondering how such a small space could comprise of so many coffins, it finally occurred to me that the actual structure must have been underground. Considering as much, I hesitated and took a step back.
“Come on, Nim, you said you'd come.”
“That was before,” I replied. “Now that I'm looking at it, I changed my mind.”
It was hardly unreasonable to do so: the crypt looked as though it might collapse at any moment beneath the snow, and I preferred to be back in the safety of the church when it happened rather than inside. As I continued to stand a firm distance away from it, Jack rolled his eyes.
“Don't worry, Nim: the spirits only come out on Halloween.”
“Wonderful.”
“Are you really scared?” he asked, seemingly delighted by the idea. “I never pegged you as being afraid of ghosts.”
“Forgive me for being wary of venturing down into a crypt,” I said dryly. “My reaction is undoubtedly uncalled for.”
He grinned even more widely.
“Ah, come on, Nim,” he said in his characteristic way. “They're just dead bodies. It's the live ones you've really got to worry about.”
“How comforting,” I muttered, but finally consented to follow him all the same.
He heaved the bolt upwards to unlock the door and swung it open. Scooping up Mea, I carefully stepped around the door and made my way sideways down the steps. The place had a putrid smell that I very much hoped was the result of mold rather than anything else, and the walls were wet and dripping from snow that had made its way inside.
“Feels a bit like home, doesn't it?” Jack said in mock reminiscence.
“Speak for yourself.”
“Well, not your home, I suppose,” he backtracked. “What with Karl being such a neat-freak and all. But if you'd ever gone into my father's office after one of his drinking binges, you'd know what I mean.”
We reached the ground floor and Jack took out his phone to light our way. I wasn't entirely sure what I had expected it to look like, but it both met my imagined depiction and looked nothing like what I had thought all at once.
The place was entirely made of stone and cement, with once-smooth floors that had succumbed to cracking and dust, and the w
alls were lined with rectangular doors where I could only assume that centuries' worth of dead Perennas laid. I wrinkled my nose as I took the sight in, more certain than ever that it had been a bad idea to come.
“I changed my mind,” I said. “Now I get why the casket was closed.”
“Don't chicken out on me now, Nim.”
“No, really,” I said. “I realized why no one in their right mind would ever want to look at a dead body.”
Jack cackled.
“Good thing that you're not in your right mind,” he joked. “And I'm fairly off it myself, so we're all set.”
He moved further into the room and shined the phone light over the walls to read the names printed on each door. Staying in place, I shifted Mea in my arms and held her closer to me, wondering if she was as frightened as I was. Judging from how her tail had curled around my wrist, I rather thought that she was.
“Here it is,” Jack called from somewhere down the crypt. “Or here he is, I should say.”
I discontentedly pulled myself from the spot and moved to stand next to him. Handing me his phone, he placed both hands on the door to the vault and heaved it open.
“Ugh – wonderful,” I said, turning my face away as the coffin slid out in front of us and he opened it up.
It was more disgusting than I could have imagined, and though it must have been preserved in some sort of way, it certainly didn't appear as though it had been given the harsh smell that rose up from it and entered my nostrils. Even in the near-dark the body looked gruesome, and all that remained of it were the remnants of once-fine clothing and browned, brittle bones.
“I don't think I can breathe,” I wheezed.
Jack shook his head with his arm over his face, seemingly reiterating the statement.
“Okay, well, he's here,” he said in a choked voice, once he was brave enough to lower his arm. “See anything?”
“Unfortunately.”
“See anything useful?”
I shook my head initially, not overly concerned with laying my eyes on the body for longer than necessary. When it finally occurred to me that he probably wouldn't leave until I made a better attempt at looking for something off about the body, though, I held my breath and cautiously leaned over the skeleton to take a closer look.
When I Am Laid in Earth (Damnatio Memoriae Book 3) Page 11