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

by Laura Giebfried

  “What's the song that you were playing?” the priest asked, coming closer with careful steps as he navigated the ruin. “It's the same one as before, isn't it?”

  “I guess,” I said, though before I had played it impeccably. “It's Dido's Lament.”

  “A lament,” he said, giving a nod. “That's fitting in a time such as this.”

  He looked up at the sky, his eyes quivering slightly in their sockets, and I wondered if he was looking for any hint of the sun through the whiteness of it all, or if he was hoping to see any hint of the god that he prayer to every night.

  “I'm sorry about your church, Father.” I had told him before, but I hadn't meant it in the way that I did now. Even if I hadn't set fire to it as Mr. Perenna so adamantly thought, I knew that I was every bit as responsible as the person who had, and I needed him to know it. “It's my fault. And – and Jack's. We've been … getting up to trouble, and poking around in things that we should have left alone.”

  “I know.”

  “You – you do?” I stared at him blankly, and for a moment I feared that I had made some horrible mistake in saying as much, as though he might have been the killer wrapped in the innocent clothing of a priest just as I had thought that Beringer had been or that Albertson had turned out to be, but the fear came and went as hurriedly as the thought had crossed my mind.

  “Jack told me,” the priest said, finally looking down again. “He was uncertain – after you had left two weeks ago – that he was doing the wrong thing.”

  “He did?” I frowned. “What'd he say?”

  “Oh, this and that,” Father Taggart said, waving his hand back and forth with the wind. “But he told me that he didn't believe Anna had killed herself, and that Tommy's death hadn't been an accident, and he wanted to know the truth.”

  “And what'd you tell him?”

  “I told him that the best that he could do is to try to do the right thing. And, despite all of this,” he said, indicating to the wreckage around us, “I think that he's succeeded thus far.”

  I bowed my head towards the organ, uncertain of what to say.

  “What's it about?” he asked.

  “What's what about?”

  “The song,” the priest said, nodding to the instrument behind me. “Are there words?”

  “Oh – right,” I said, having forgotten that there was anything to speak of other than the utter destruction of his home. “It's – it's just about Dido. Lamenting.”

  “I rather think that there's a further explanation somewhere in you, Enim,” Father Taggart said quietly, and despite not being able to bring myself to feel connected to him, I sighed and consented to try.

  “It's … Well, it's from an opera,” I said. “And, ah … Dido is the queen of Carthage, and she falls in love with Aeneas when his ship lands there. And then he, ah … he gets called away, I guess, by the gods, and she's not too happy with him for going.”

  “It sounds like he didn't have a choice – if the gods willed it.”

  “He had a choice,” I countered irritably, “and he chose to leave.”

  “So she laments about his departure?”

  “She laments about her death,” I said. “She gives up after he goes – she sees no reason to live. And her lament – she sings it to her friend, Belinda – is about how she hopes that people will remember her, and what she did with her life and how she ruled her country, and not just about how she died.”

  Father Taggart looked at me steadily.

  “And how did she die?” he asked quietly.

  “Heartache, I suppose,” I said. “Or suicide. Whichever way you want to interpret it.”

  “It can be both, I assume,” he responded.

  “Sure, but either way, it's all anyone will think about when she's gone,” I said. “Not who she was or what she did, but how she died.”

  We were silent for a long moment, letting the cold air drift around us in the broken place that no longer had walls or ceilings to hide the hideousness of the foreboding graveyard in the distance, and my thoughts had slowed to such an extent that I almost thought I could see the cemetery melding together in the distance and wavering like the waves on the ocean, beckoning for me to wade into it.

  “People will remember, Enim,” Father Taggart said after several minutes, his voice solemn and his expression grave. “You might not think it now, but they will remember – and they will remember well.”

  “There's nothing good to remember,” I told him quietly.

  “I see something good,” he said, “and I will remember, if no one else does, what you've done here, for me and for Jack, and for that poor girl who no one thinks to mourn.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder and clutched it firmly, the fingers shaking my form as though trying to waken me from a deathlike sleep, and then he stepped back again and made his way out of the ruins to the main path to make his way back to town.

  And in the silence that he left behind, I could hear the music playing from the opera the way that it so often did, though it wasn't Dido and Aeneas that I thought of, nor Turandot or Rusalka, but the one that Karl had claimed to be his favorite and offered to take me to before I had ruined it all the way that I always managed to. And now that I thought about it, I realized that while I wouldn't have gone down to the underworld to pull back my mother, or Beringer, or Ilona, or my father, I would have gone down there if it meant that I could bring back who I had once been.

  But I had looked back too soon, and he couldn't follow me out.

  Ch. 16

  Jack had returned to Kipling by midweek, though by then the town had become so unbreathable that it rather felt as though I was the one who needed to be treated for smoke inhalation. Despite my initial plan to stay at the Perennas' and keep a careful eye on them, I had resolved to take a room at the local inn instead for fear of being in the company of Anna's parents or brother given their blatant disregard for me; the innkeeper charged nearly four times the standard fee to house me, citing it as a poor business venture, but the price hardly bothered me considering everything else.

  “I thought you were going to give that up,” I said to Jack, who had cracked the window open so that he could have a cigarette only moments after entering the room.

  “I thought about it – for all of thirty seconds,” he said. “They wouldn't let me smoke at the hospital – can you believe it? It's like I have no rights.”

  “Or that they were trying to save your lungs from collapsing,” I said offhandedly.

  He smirked.

  “Did Father Taggart fill you in?” I asked, leaning down to scoop Mea up and bring her up to the bed. She wagged her tail upon seeing me, and I vaguely noted how I had missed her company before remembering who had given her to me and pushing the thought away.

  “About how everyone's under the impression that we lit the church on fire?” Jack said. “Yeah, he mentioned it.”

  He took another drag from his cigarette before suppressing a cough and chucking it out the window.

  “Not that we haven't been in a similar position before,” he went on. “I'm beginning to think that we give off the illusion of being untrustworthy.”

  “The illusion?” I rolled my eyes. “Right.”

  Jack grinned.

  “Alright, I'm beginning to think that we're getting paid back for all the years at Bickerby when we got away with stuff that we should've, then,” he said. “No matter, though. We've got good old Uncle Karl to plead our case.”

  I twitched unwillingly.

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing.” I gave shrug, though it did little to mask my bothered expression. “I … just don't think we should be getting Karl involved right now.”

  “Better sooner than later,” Jack said. “I don't want to flee the country again – though Canada isn't so bad. Better health care.”

  “Right.”

  I dissolved into silence, focusing my gaze on Mea rather than him, but he was hardly fooled.

 
“What?” he said. “What's wrong?”

  “Nothing.” When he continued to stare at me disbelievingly, I gave another halfhearted shrug. “My father died.”

  “Your – he did?” Jack slid a bit from the windowsill before catching himself and straightening. “I – Jesus Christ. That was – why didn't you say?”

  “Didn't seem important.”

  “Ah, Nim,” he said, “I – it's important.”

  When I didn't respond, he sighed and pushed his hands into his pockets.

  “Are you going back to Connecticut?”

  “What? Why would I?”

  “For the funeral, Nim.”

  I stared at him blankly. The thought hadn't occurred to me.

  “No, I don't think so,” I said, deciding almost immediately.

  “Ah, Nim, come on: even I went to my father's funeral,” he said, “and he was a creep.”

  “Right. Maybe.”

  Jack gave me a look.

  “Nim,” he said lowly, “you can go. I'm not – I won't be all pissed like I was before. I get that you have to.”

  I shook my head.

  “No, I really just don't want to. There's too much going on here.”

  He eyed me warily.

  “Nim, it can wait,” he said. “You'll go down for a day or two, then you'll be back. I'll come with you, even –”

  “I don't want to,” I said again, a forcefulness in my voice that I hadn't meant coming through. “There's too much going on here, and it's more important. Someone's onto us, and they clearly want us dead and don't mind who else they kill along the way, so we've got to stay and figure it all out –”

  Mea yelped and jumped from the bed at my raised voice, skirting beneath the bed frame to hide until I had lowered it again. As Jack's eyes rested on where she was cowering, he cautiously chewed the inside of his mouth.

  “I think you'll regret it if you don't go,” he said quietly.

  “I'll add it to the list,” I replied bitterly, knowing that he couldn't possibly know how many things I had already come to detest myself for. I hadn't gone to my mother's funeral, after all, nor visited her but for the one time after her accident to break her from her solitude; and I hadn't said what I might have hoped to my father upon seeing him the one time before he died, or even given him more than a briefness of thought though I had known that he was dying. I hadn't told Karl about his illness, or thanked him for what he had done for me, or told him that I did care about him, more than the others that he had thought that I had overlooked him for, even, because I knew that my parents had felt for me and forgiven me for what I had done solely because I was their child and they were obliged to, and that Beringer had done the same because it was his job to, and it didn't make me think that they weren't good people, because I knew with every bit of adamance that I contained that they were, and it didn't make me appreciate what they had done for me with any less forcefully. But Karl had done it for another reason, and it wasn't out of loneliness as I had thought it was, or a need to take care of someone: it was because he did care, for no other reason at all, and I had never so much as thought to care about him in return.

  And the worst part of it all, I realized, was that I still felt nothing at all, and I knew that I never would. I had used up the emotion, or peeled it from my skin before it could seep down to the bloodstream again, and I had wasted every bit of energy that might have been put to better use in doing so, and it was all – just like everything that I did – for no better reason than to serve myself.

  “Fuck,” I said, grasping at my hair as I realized that tears had come to my eyes, and I bowed my head in an attempt to shield my face while I composed myself, but the standard, vacant expression wouldn't return. “Fuck.”

  “Ah, Nim – don't – don't get upset,” Jack said, shifting uncomfortably. “I didn't mean to – I wasn't trying to – to make you feel bad or anything ...”

  He moved around the bed so that he was standing beside me, and gave a cautious, light pat on my shoulder.

  “I'm fine,” I said thickly, my hands still covering my face as though they might shepherd the tears back into the sockets, and the words had never quite been less true. “I'm not upset.”

  “I can tell,” he drawled, but then gave my shoulder another pat. “Listen, Nim, it sucks. Believe me, I know. And it'll probably suck forever.”

  I was aware that he was referring to Miss Mercier rather than his father, and possibly acknowledging why he had moved up to Kipling and gotten involved in the Perennas' misfortune at all, as well, and for once I didn't think that we were quite so different – or that I was quite so different, really – for finding things to occupy my mind or ways to be or act that might counter the mistakes that I had made, and it was oddly comforting when it came from him.

  “Listen,” he said after another moment, waiting as I wiped my sweater sleeves across my face to absorb the tears that had managed to streak down it. “Is there anything that I could do? You know to … to make this better?”

  My face twitched as I thought of the answer that I wanted to give, and I raked my nail across my lips to dig at the dry skin there, both wanting to not say it and say it all at once before deciding on the latter.

  “You could promise me … that you'll never go,” I said lifelessly.

  And he couldn't promise it, because he couldn't put on hold the inevitability of death or the uncertainty of the future, and he couldn't say that he would never leave and never die the way that I wanted him to do. And a part of me thought that that was the answer that I was looking for – to know that he knew as well as I did that he would abandon me the way that the rest of them had, and then I would have a legitimate reason to not trust him, and to not become attached to him again, and to not feel anything for him other than a sense of relief that he helped pass the days without monotony and allowed me to be someone other than who everyone else saw. And if I knew as much, then I wouldn't have to feel anything when the day finally crept up on us as it had with my mother, and the impact wouldn't shock me like it had with Beringer and Ilona and my father, and I could be indifferent to it all and brush it off like the lint that had stuck to my sweater where it ought not to have been in the first place if I had just kept it away from the wrong material.

  “Ah, Nim,” he said, pulling his hand up to rake through his hair. “I'm not going anywhere.”

  “You don't know that,” I said. “You could die at any second – of anything.”

  “Well, not of anything,” he said, giving me a wry smile. “I think we can cross ovarian cancer off the list.”

  When I didn't so much as twitch with a hint of smile, he dropped back to a more serious tone.

  “Listen, Nim, I'm not going to die,” he said. “Not that I know of, anyway. And when I do, rest assured, I'll be sure to come back and haunt you.”

  “You might not want to,” I said, giving a dreary look around the small room and wondering, only briefly, that if there was an afterlife, he was sure to want to stay in it.

  “Nah,” he said, waving his hand offhandedly. “You're kind of stuck with me, if you haven't noticed. So when I come back as a ghost, just make sure you remember that it's really me and not one of your hallucinations.”

  “Yeah,” I said, giving the slightest scoff in lieu of a slight laugh. Running my sleeve across my face again and shaking my head to clear the last bit of discomposure from it, I straightened and looked over at him properly. “Yeah. Let's – let's just get back to the Perennas.”

  “Fine by me,” he said, falling back onto the bed and leaning against the foot-board to look across at me. “Anything else happen when I was gone?”

  “I went up there with Father Taggart – to their house,” I said. “There wasn't much to see. It could be any of them, really.”

  “Or all of them,” he agreed. “Though that seems unlikely. Why kill the two normal kids and keep the creepy one?”

  “Maybe it's a satanic cult they're forming or something.”

&nbs
p; “Could be, but they're pretty involved in the church – they're there every Sunday, help out with the functions, raise money with fundraisers ... I mean, if I didn't actually know them, I'd think they were nice people.”

  “Then maybe they are,” I said. “Maybe we've got it wrong again and it's someone outside the family after all.”

  “But if that was true, then why is the family so evasive about the whole thing? Why wouldn't they mention how Tommy was shot through the head – and why didn't Mr. Perenna go out of his way to persecute whoever killed his son?” Jack shook his head and took out his lighter to light another cigarette; the orange light gleamed in his darkened eyes. “You've seen enough of the way he runs this place. Do you honestly think he'd be happy enough to just let whoever shot the kid – accidental or not – walk away unpunished?”

  I dropped my chin to my hands and let out a breath.

  “But that would make it him, wouldn't it?” I concluded. “He'd only be covering it up if it was his crime, and that just doesn't fit.”

  Jack took a long drag and scratched absently at the side of his face.

  “Yeah, he doesn't seem like the type to forgive his wife if it was her – he doesn't even trust her enough to put her in his will,” he said. “And there's no way he'd cover it up if it was Eliot. I doubt he even likes him.”

  “Or maybe he just can't bring himself to lose his last heir,” I said.

  “I don't know. More likely he'd lose the kid, divorce his wife, and try for a new family while he's still got time. Or maybe he's incredibly oblivious to it all and it was his wife, and she's going to kill him and then somehow wrangle the money from Eliot ...”

  “He's not oblivious, though,” I said. “He's got a ledger detailing everything about the residents in the town.”

  Jack's eyes suddenly lit up, and he glanced over at me.

  “His ledger,” he said slowly, the hand with the cigarette falling to his side. “Nim, I bet that has some information in it that would help us.”

  I gave him a look.

  “You really want to break into his office and get it?” I asked, though I knew that the incredulity of the idea would hardly faze him. “He'd skin us alive if he caught us.”