When I Am Laid in Earth (Damnatio Memoriae Book 3)

by Laura Giebfried

  “Person or animal?” he asked, calling across the room in a croaking, old voice.

  “Ah – person, I guess,” Jack said, throwing me a glance.

  “Alright. Let me change shoes.”

  He retreated back into the back room while Jack and I stared at one another quizzically, and while I found myself rather curious about the answer, I resolved not to ask him why he needed a different pair of footwear to speak to us.

  “Where do I collect the body?” he said when he returned, smacking his hands together as Jack and I hesitated.

  “Oh. Right.” Jack cleared his throat. “Actually, we were sort of – I mean, we don't actually have a body, per se, for you. We more of … wanted to ask you a question.”

  Mr. Zapatero looked at us with an expression of decry.

  “You want to what?”

  “Ask you a question,” Jack repeated quickly. “About Anna Perenna.”

  “I don't answer questions.”

  “Ever?” Jack asked.

  “We wanted your – your expertise,” I cut in, doing my best to appear largely interested in his work rather than completely appalled. “About – you know – dead people.”

  Jack rolled his eyes at me.

  “Right,” he said regardless, hastening to further my point. “We had a question about … death … that probably only you could answer.”

  “I don't answer questions,” Mr. Zapatero repeated, flapping his hand at us as though trying to swat us away. His voice was a shout rather than a normal volume, and I rather thought that he was mostly deaf. “See yourselves out.”

  “It'll only take a second,” Jack said quickly, then smacked the back of his hand against my arm. “Ask him, Nim.”

  “Oh, right.” I straightened, realizing that I had completely forgotten why we had come after the distraction of our surroundings. “Ah … Right. We were wondering, is it possible to tell if Anna really cut herself, or if someone else might've slit her wrists instead?”

  “What?”

  Mr. Zapatero leaned into my face as he spat the question, and I instinctively took a step back. He smelled like something that I had dissected in biology lab at Bickerby.

  “Did the cuts on Anna's wrist come from her or someone else?” Jack repeated loudly.

  Mr. Zapatero threw him a look.

  “Don't raise your voice at me, young man,” he said, putting his hand on the edge of the casket to straight himself from his hunched position. “And what type of question is that? Of course she cut her own wrists.”

  “You're certain?” I said. When he didn't hear me, I sighed and repeated the statement.

  “Yes, yes, I'm certain,” he responded, waving his hand at me again. “The lacerations on her left arm were deeper than the right, which is in keeping with her dominant hand producing a deeper cut.”

  I frowned. It had not been the answer that I had been hoping for.

  “But that could've been coincidental,” I said, considering that the killer had sliced her right wrist first when she was still moving, then had an easier time with it on the other arm once she had been subdued. “Right?”

  “Doubtful,” Mr. Zapatero said.

  “So she could've, say, been held down and had her wrists slit by someone else?” Jack proposed.

  The mortician eyed him distrustfully.

  “Doubtful,” he said again. “There was no sign of blood-clotting upon exsanguination.”

  “Ah … okay,” Jack said uncertainly.

  “That means she did it under the water,” the man explained. “It's common. The water's warm, so the blood doesn't clot like it would in the air. It's a faster and less painful death.”

  “I'll remember that,” Jack noted with feigned appreciation.

  Discouraged, we walked back to the bookstore just as Jack's lunch hour was coming to an end and resolved that, despite the fact that the mortician had dispelled our initial theory that someone else had slit Anna's wrists, there was still another explanation.

  “Maybe it's a cover-up,” Jack said. “You know, Mr. Perenna's warned everyone not to answer questions about her death, just like he made sure no one knew Tommy was shot between the eyes.”

  “Could be,” I said. “Or maybe the killer just slit her wrists under the water.”

  “That's more likely. Guess we should have asked if Anna had any depressants in her blood stream that might've knocked her out – though I sort of doubt he ran a toxicology test.”

  We parted and agreed to think more about it later, though it did us little good. After running through theories for the next week and a half, we had gotten no further, and Anna's death was only appearing to look more and more like a suicide.

  Holed up in his room at the church the following Saturday, we sat on opposite sides of the room as we continued to exhaust the possibilities surrounding the Perennas' untimely deaths. It had begun to snow again, and the white flecked against the small window in sharp contrast to the black backdrop of the sky.

  “Alright, so what if Anna really did kill herself?” I asked, sitting back in the chair by the table and running a hand through my hair.

  “You're not starting that again, are you?”

  “No – well, yes, but it's not the same. What if Anna killed herself, but Tommy really was murdered?”

  “That's ridiculous.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe someone in the family killed him, and then she found out about it, and ...”

  “Killed herself?”

  Jack rolled his eyes.

  “I'd be pretty depressed if someone in my family was psychotic enough to kill someone else,” I said.

  “Right, well I'd be more likely to call the police, not off myself,” Jack countered.

  “But maybe she couldn't call the police,” I said, thinking of how Miss Mercier had done something similar on Bardom Island. “Her father's affiliated with them, right? So maybe he did it, and so she decided that she couldn't –”

  “Are you still trying to pin it on the father?” Jack asked, raising his eyebrows. “Really, Nim, I think you've got a vendetta against him or something. Either that, or your own father didn't hold you enough as a child. Mr. Perenna seemed pretty convinced that his daughter's death was by her own hand, and he wasn't remarkably happy about it.”

  “Exactly, does that seem like a normal response to you?” I said. “Who says, 'Gee, my daughter was a lost soul. Wish she had just gone to college like I planned and became a veterinarian instead of slitting her wrists in my bathtub'?”

  “Pretty sure that's not what he said.”

  “I'm paraphrasing.”

  “You're paraphrasing badly,” he informed me. “Listen, the guy's a bit cold – but so is your father, for Christ's sakes. And, as far as I know, he wouldn't kill you, and that's a pretty big feat considering all the trouble we got into at school.”

  We lapsed into silence as we thought of where else to go with the information that we had been given. As I sat on the edge of the chair, the distinct smell of smoke rose up around us and I scrunched up my nose. Between the smell of it and the mention of my father, it was difficult to keep my mind where it ought to have been presently.

  “Put your cigarette out, will you? I can't think.”

  Jack looked over at me.

  “I'm not smoking.”

  “Then what's that ...” I faltered momentarily, suddenly noting how warm the room was and tugging at my collar. “... smell?”

  We saw it at the same time: beneath the crack in the door, an orange-hue had come to the floorboards that created a bright line in the otherwise dark room, and no sooner had we jumped up from out seats than a billowing of black smoke swept its way into the room.

  The church was on fire.

  Ch. 14

  “Fuck.”

  We leaped back against the back wall, each of us pressing our backs into the wood as the air around us turned thick with heavy smoke, and Mea jumped up into my arms as I beckoned her to me. Choking against the smell and squirming beneat
h the heat, we stared at the flames devouring the opposite wall for a brief yet utterly long moment before something registered in the backs of our minds to get out.

  “Open the window – quick.”

  Jack turned and heaved on the frame, pushing it up with force as the ice that had built up on the other side cracked and shattered to fall down to the ground below. The cold air struck our faces while the heat continued to burn at our backs, and I ran my hand through my hair as I looked out into the darkness.

  “Come on, we're going to have to jump.”

  “It's two stories,” I said, searching through the black in the hopes of seeing some alternative that would allow us to climb down.

  “There's four feet of snow – just do it!”

  He pushed me ahead of him to ensure that I wouldn't change my mind, and I heaved myself up onto the sill to crouch in the small open space, Mea still cradled in my arms. Hesitating for just another moment and feeling my muscles become rigid and tense at the thought of what I was doing, I pushed myself from the spot and dropped like a dead-weight to the ground below.

  The snow had a thin layer of ice covering its top, and smacking it felt as though I had jumped straight through the glass itself. As my legs buckled beneath me and I crashed onto all fours before they collapsed beneath me and sent me rolling onto my side, my face pressed against the cold and burned far worse than the fire had against my skin, and Mea yelped and scurried away.

  “Move!” Jack shouted.

  Realizing that I was directly in his path and preventing him from jumping down after me, I rolled over further and clawed at the ground to get myself out of the way. He dropped with a dull thud beside me, his legs crumpling beneath him in a similar fashion, and he let out another stream of swears as a definite crack came from one of his bones.

  “Fuck,” he said, clutching his wrist between his opposite hand and cradling it to his chest.

  “Is it broken, do you think?”

  “Probably,” he said through gritted teeth.

  I glanced back up at the church, which was lit up like a beacon against the blackened sky, and it occurred to me that it was bound to come down entirely in several minutes.

  “We should move,” I told him. “Get further back.”

  The whites of Jack's eyes were lighted by the fire, and there was a definite fear in them as he observed the place that had acted as his home for the past three years crumbled beneath the flames.

  “Father Taggart's still in there,” he said hollowly.

  “No, he – he probably got out already,” I said, noting the tone of his voice and knowing all too well what it meant. “He's probably on the other side, calling the fire department –”

  “He's still in there,” Jack repeated, wobbling as he got to his feet with an arm still clutched to his side. “I have to get him.”

  “Jack, don't –” I said, reaching to grab his arm and hold him back. “He's probably out already, and if he's not –”

  “Let go of me!”

  He yanked his good arm away and stumbled backwards, his form thrown off by the imbalance that his ruined wrist was creating, and his eyes had darkened at the thought of what I was suggesting. And before I could scramble up and grab him again – knowing that the only way to prevent him would be to latch onto his wrists and hold him there until someone else came to help us – he had turned and ran up the steps back into the quickly falling building.

  “Jack!”

  His form was obscured by the heavy smoke billowing all about, and I swore and struck the ground with my fist as he disappeared into it. The priest could fend for himself, I thought angrily. There was no reason for Jack to have gone back in.

  “Jack!” I called again, my voice hoarse between the smoke and the bitter air, and I shouted again for several minutes despite knowing that he couldn't hear me.

  Looking wildly around, I raked my hand through my hair and collected Mea, gathering her up into my arms and clutching her to me, before finally spotting several figures in the distance who had come at the sight of the orange and yellow hues visible from the main part of town.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” I repeated, staring as the left-hand side of the building crumbled completely and disintegrated into a heap of broken parts onto the white ground. “Fuck, he should have just left him –”

  There was a clattering of noise and voices from the opposite side, and several of the townspeople rushed forward as a bulky shape appeared from the main doorway. Plowing my way through the snow, I stumbled with Mea still tightly grasped in my hold before making my way over to them, and with a rush of relief like none that I had felt before I made out the individual forms of both Jack and Father Taggart staggering their way into the open air.

  They were both choking for breath as they fell forward onto the snow, Jack heaving heavily while the priest tugged at the white collar to get more air. I rushed to Jack and grabbed him by the shoulder, certain that they would have to dig my fingertips out of his skin to detach me from him again, and he wheezed as he looked up at me, his pale skin streaked with dark ash like a painting that had been saturated before it had had the chance to dry.

  “Don't ever do that again,” I said, shaking more than he was, but he was too weak to warrant giving an answer.

  It took the town until mid-morning to put the church out entirely, and by then it had turned into something resembling a gruesome ice castle that sat amongst the surrounding graves: the water that had been used to put it out had frozen in the frigid air, and the icicles hung from the dilapidated exterior like thick, white pickets fencing the place in. Jack was shepherded away to be brought to one of the nearby homes to get warm and looked after, but Father Taggart refused. He stood at the edge of the property and stared up at the ruined church, a sadness filling his eyes that sunk down to overtake every bit of his expression.

  I watched him for a long moment, not feeling anything for him or towards him in the way that I suspected I ought to have. The idea that Jack had run back in to save him unsettled me, and not solely because I knew that I would not have done the same, but because it reminded me again of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Despite knowing that it was a purely fictional narrative and that I would never be granted the chance to do so, it bothered me that I couldn't will myself to want to go down into the underworld to retrieve my mother or Beringer or Ilona. They were people that I shouldn't have wanted to live without – who I shouldn't have accepted living without, even – and yet I had numbly moved along as though they had been nothings, and no ones, and that I had never so much as felt for them just as I hardly felt anything now.

  “Dominus regit me, et nihil mihi deerit. in loco pascuæ, ibi me collocavit. Super aquam refectionis educavit me ...”

  I turned as the priest's voice was carried over to me in the wind, and his head was bowed as he spoke the prayer over the place of worship that had fallen to dust just like the people buried in the graves no too far away.

  “I'm sorry about your church, Father,” I said, my voice clear in contrast to his lowered, shaky one.

  He kept his head bent for several more moments, his hands shaking where they were pressed before him, but then he nodded and thanked me in a quivering voice.

  “I'm thankful that no one was hurt,” he said, his voice thickened and eyes damp. “I'm thankful for God for getting us out.”

  “Jack got you out,” I said, annoyed that he had overlooked whom to give credit to.

  “I'm thankful for Jack's kindness, and his bravery, and his soul,” the priest added, giving me a nod as though he both knew what I was thinking and didn't fully agree with it.

  I broke from him and wandered through the crowd that had formed around the place to find someone who could tell me what house Jack had been brought to. Once retrieving the address, I set off for it and was shown to where he was sitting in the back kitchen with a blanket wrapped around him and being tended to by an aged, gray-haired woman.

  “He'll be fine,” she told me after
I asked. “His wrist looks like it's been sprained – and the smoke bothered him more what with that habit of his. But he'll be fine.”

  I stepped over to him and took a seat at the table beside him, looking at him carefully as though I might spot any sign that what she had said wasn't true.

  “Still think no one's after us?” he asked, managing the statement before dissolving into another fit of coughing.

  I sighed and shook my head, but the image of the demonic figure was still so clear in my mind that I couldn't accept it to be anything other than imaginary.

  “Think you'll be alright?” I said, handing him another towel as the one that he had been coughing into became soiled.

  “They're sending me down to the hospital,” he said in a rasping voice. “Something about smoke inhalation being deadly, if you can believe it.”

  “Not really,” I replied sarcastically. “You'd think they'd have told you before you started smoking – put a warning on the cigarette pack or something.”

  He gave a halfhearted grin.

  “Don't get into trouble while I'm gone,” he wheezed. “You know, steer clear of burning buildings and whatnot.”

  “I'll do my best.”

  He leaned forward and gave Mea a pat on the head.

  “See you later, Mea. Keep an eye on Nim for me.”

  She wagged her tail accordingly, but I lifted her from my arms and handed her over to him.

  “Why don't you take her with you?” I said. “She'll be better off.”

  Someone came to collect him a half hour or so later, and we parted at the doorway as I followed him from the house. When he had gone, I lingered on the street, unsure of where I was supposed to go. My presence in town was only warranted by the fact that I was his guest, and without him there I had become something of an impostor. Tugging my sweater further about me and realizing that my coat had been burned along with the rest of our belongings, I heaved a sigh and wandered back to the churchyard to find Father Taggart after all.

  “They took Jack over to the nearest hospital,” I said. “They'll treat him for smoke inhalation.”