“Come on,” Janet said. “Let’s go inside so you can wash up.” She made a mental note to check Ellie’s fanny pack later for face powder.
The girls scurried out of the van and started chasing each other around the yard. Janet took the keys from the ignition, found the one labeled CH for Carlton house, and made her way to the front door.
Once inside, she crinkled her nose at the smell of old upholstery and mothballs. Hard as she tried, Janet never felt comfortable in this place. There was something about the dark paneling and old oak floors that seemed determined to keep the past as present, consequently leaving her to always feel like an intruder.
The floors creaked beneath her feet as she walked down a narrow foyer to the dining room and opened the windows. On the way to the kitchen, she flipped on the auto switch for the air conditioner and breathed a sigh of relief when she heard it start to hum. It was the only modern renovation she’d been able to talk Michael into and even at that, it was still eight years old.
She’d just turned on the kitchen faucets to check for water when Janet heard the screen door slam and the girls run into the house. They raced through the dining room, past the kitchen, then rounded the hall, which led to the family room.
“No running up the stairs,” Janet called after them. “And clean that stuff off your face, Ellie.”
“Okay, Mama,” Ellie called back, her voice already an echo from the top of the stairs.
Janet shook her head and shut off the water. Watching two kids instead of one would keep her on her toes for the next couple of days, but at least Ellie had company. It wasn’t easy keeping a five-year old entertained when you had a television that caught only two channels, no VCR, and the nearest Chuck E. Cheese was a hundred and fifty miles away.
She lifted the hair off the back of her sweaty neck for a moment, then began to take inventory in cabinets and drawers. A glint of silver caught Janet’s eye when she passed the window on her way to the old Frigidaire. She stopped in mid-stride and watched as the front end of a vehicle entered the clearing near the house. A second later a horn honked, and Rodney Theriot’s battered, green pickup truck came into full view. Janet smiled and waited until he’d parked alongside the van before going outside to greet him.
“Well I’ll be corn fed and slaughtered,” Rodney chortled while getting out of the truck. “Little Bit, ain’t you a sight!” He straightened the bib of his overalls and waddled toward her.
To Janet, Rodney’s laugh was larger than his three hundred pounds and brighter than his crystal blue eyes. The band of hair that surrounded the back of his head seemed whiter than she remembered, and his puffy, vein-lined cheeks and double chin, if anything, had grown larger.
“It’s great to see you, too, Rodney,” she said warmly. They hugged briefly, and she motioned him inside. “How’ve you been?”
He lumbered up the steps. “Any better they’d outlaw it.”
“And Sylvia?”
“Even better’n me,” Rodney said, his voice booming through the foyer. “How ‘bout Michael and the munchkin? They around?” Before she could answer, he shuffled into the dining room and peered over the snack bar into the kitchen. “Don’t tell me you came up here all by yourself.”
“Ellie and Heather came with me. Michael’s still back in Brusley, but he should be getting here sometime tomorrow.” She pulled up a chair and offered it to him.
“Naw, I gotta exercise the gimp as much as I can,” Rodney said, and tapped a hand against his left thigh. He walked to the entrance of the family room and looked around. “What’s a Heather?”
Janet laughed and turned toward the kitchen. “She’s my sister’s daughter. Hey, I’ve got tap water if you’re thirsty.”
“’Preciate it, but I just finished a bottle of cream soda back at the Patch.” Rodney followed her to the kitchen and rubbed the bald dome on his head. “Saw you drive past a bit ago, and Sylvia wanted me to come by and make sure you come to supper.”
A clatter followed by shrill laughter suddenly rang overhead.
Rodney looked up and bellowed, “Is that you, munchkin?”A wide, expectant grin spread over his face as he cocked his head to one side and waited. When no response came, he said, “Okay, then I guess it wasn’t my munchkin. S’pose I gotta give these peppermints to some other little girl.”
Within seconds, footsteps thundered from the stairs.
Rodney chuckled, and his barrel chest and belly did an aquatic roll. He winked at Janet. “Gets ‘em every time.”
“Mr. Rodney!” Ellie squealed. She whipped around the corner of the room and flew to his side. “Here I am! Here I am!”
Heather, who had followed her cousin downstairs, inched shyly up to Rodney, her eyes bright with anticipation.
“Well, look at that,” Rodney said, putting a hand into his pocket. “Here I was thinking that I was going to have to find me some other little girls.” He pulled out a handful of peppermint sticks and handed them to Ellie and Heather. “Hmm, what’s this?" he asked Ellie. "You been playing in your mama’s makeup?”
Janet stepped around him so she could see her daughter. The chalky film on Ellie's face looked even thicker than before. “Back upstairs and wash that stuff off your face like I told you,” she said.
Ellie shoved the peppermints into the pockets of her shorts. “I was gonna, Mama, but Heather wanted to see my room.”
“Fine, but go and get it cleaned off right now.”
The girls whirled around and scampered out of sight.
“And what do you tell Mr. Rodney?” Janet called after them.
Two voices chorused from the next room, “Thank you, Mr. Rodney!” and the old man smiled.
Janet shook her head. “I don’t know what Ellie got into, but I’ll bet one of my old compacts found its way into her fanny pack.”
“That’s just kids for ya.” Rodney pulled a red bandanna out of his back pocket and blew his nose. “Well, I gotta head back to the Patch before Sylvia calls out Sheriff Crocket and starts a search party. I swear that woman worries more the older she gets.”
“That’s because you’re such a prize catch,” Janet said. She clapped him gently on the back.
Rodney snorted. “Oh, she thinks I’m a catch all right. Right out of Black Lake.”
Janet laughed and followed him out the door and to his truck. “Tell Sylvia I’ll be by later to pick up groceries and that we'd be glad to come by for supper. What time?”
Rodney hoisted himself into the truck, then closed the door and rested his arm across the window track. “Seven okay?”
“Sure.”
“Good deal. Now if you wind up at the store earlier’n that, Sylvia may not be there. She said something about going over to Mae Beth’s so she can get her hair done up . . .” He twirled a finger against his sparse crop of hair. “. . . in a do thingy. But I’ll be there. If you need anything before then, just give me a call.” He wiped the back of his neck with the used bandana. “The phone’s working, ain’t it?”
The cabin phone was a twenty-pound rotary that hadn’t been changed since the sixties, but Janet knew that wasn’t what Rodney referred to. Without warning, any resident of Carlton could pick up their telephone and experience an earful of static or dead silence, both of which could hang around for days. She’d learned some time ago that cell phones didn’t offer a compromise to the dilemma. You had to go five miles out of town to get even a faint signal.
“Haven’t tried it yet.” Janet backed away from the truck as he started the engine.
“Well, if I don’t see you least by seven or so, I’m coming back, ya hear?”
“I hear.”
He backed up the truck, then after a whine and grind of gears, the pickup jerked forward toward the road. Rodney waved at her just before disappearing beyond the clearing.
Still smiling, Janet rolled her head from shoulder to shoulder. Gradually, she let it flop back and gazed up at the fading blue sky. How nice it would be to stretch out somewhere right now and do nothing. Sh
e dreaded the thought of unloading the van.
With a sigh of resignation, she turned on her heels, glanced up at the house—and froze. Pressed against the second story window was Heather, her eyes wide with terror, her mouth open as though in mid-scream. Behind her, barely visible in the shadows, stood the figure of a man.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Anna rested her head against the back seat of the station wagon and stared out the window while Mario Galupane, a distant cousin to Ephraim, barreled along the highway in the fast lane. The radio blared as he sped to catch up to the procession of cars ahead. His wife, Bagusta, her belly full of wine and vodka, snored next to Anna. Anna dismissed them as one would flies at a picnic. She counted each throb from the freshly bandaged wounds on her wrists, matching them to the number of headlights that passed them on the interstate.
Mario had muttered something about their going to Houston, some local festival the tribe was sure to take advantage of. Not that it meant anything to Anna. She knew she’d only be maintained like an aging family pet.
At Thalia’s graveside service, Ephraim had not allowed her anywhere near the casket. She’d only been able to watch from behind a nearby tree as the crowd sang and danced their final farewell when Thalia was lowered into the ground. After they dispersed, Anna had snuck to the grave while Bagusta stumbled her way around the cemetery distributing flowers to other tombs.
A beefy-faced man in a dingy work shirt buttoned only at his navel drove up on a backhoe. A concrete slab dangled from the contraption, and the man shouted for Anna to move aside. She’d ignored him, peering into the darkness that was to be her daughter’s permanent berth. The eight-foot hole looked fathomless, and the fading sunlight offered only a glimmer from the top of the casket, like gold peeking through crevices in a mine. Anna took the kerchief from her head and tossed it onto the casket.
The irate man’s machinery clanged and groaned, working around her until the slab came to rest over the coffin, sealing it away like a secret. The monolithic cap left a barren, four-foot hole, which created the illusion that Thalia had simply disappeared. The depth that remained was intended for a future casket. Anna knew, however, that the future casket would not be hers. She’d disgraced Ephraim, which meant he would never grant permission for her body to rest atop Thalia’s.
Where they placed her physical body made little difference to Anna. She didn’t need flesh and bone to be with Thalia.
Unfortunately Anna’s attempt to reach her daughter had failed. If she’d only cut deeper and vertically instead of across. Now Ephraim would have her watched constantly, which meant if and when she got another opportunity, she would have to make it fast and sure.
Moonlight shown through the car window, and Anna noticed her shadowy reflection in the glass. Her face seemed to belong to a stranger. Parenthetical lines ran on either side of her mouth, her frown so deep it appeared to extend beyond the confines of her jaw. Bags hung beneath her eyes. Her dark hair, parted down the center of an unusually long widow’s peak, fell lackluster to her shoulders. This was the face Ephraim no longer wanted, the one that had embarrassed him, had not submitted to him unquestioningly. The corners of Anna’s mouth turned up in a wry smile.
Bagusta snorted, expelled gas, then turned her ample body to one side before settling back to sleep. Anna glanced back at the woman briefly before directing her attention back to the window. She considered her future and found that it only consisted of the next mile of highway, the next headlight, the next whoosh of air from a passing truck.
Anna stuck a hand into her skirt pocket and pulled out the music box she’d hidden there. She drew herself up into a ball, knees to her chin, and faced the window. Holding the box close to her ear, she opened it and hummed the familiar tune.
Hush, little baby, don’t say a word. Mama’s gonna buy you—
She imagined herself lying alongside Thalia in the velvet-lined box, her arms wrapped around her, nodding their bodies to the lullaby.
“Mama?”
Anna looked up at the window and saw Thalia peering back at her, her daughter’s face pressed close to the opposite side of the glass. Anna felt no shock at the sight, not even the slightest hint of surprise.
“I’m right here,” Anna whispered.
“I’m afraid.”
Mario belched out the ending chorus to ‘Hot Nights, Cold Beer’, then lit a cigar that filled the car with cherry-scented smoke.
Anna gently ran a finger down the center of the window. “I won’t leave you.”
“But it’s cold here.”
Anna pulled her legs closer to her body as though the movement alone would warm her daughter.
Thalia’s face vacillated in time with the music box’s melody. “It’s dark, Mama.”
Bagusta snorted in her sleep again and kicked a leg out against the front seat. Mario looked back at her with a scowl. When his attention went back to the road, Anna closed the music box and nestled it into her lap.
“I know,” she murmured.
Thalia’s dark eyes widened with fear. “And I’m so alone.”
“Not for long.” Anna trailed a finger across the window. Her heart felt ready to burst from her chest. No one would stop her this time.
“When?”
A pause as a tractor-trailer roared by.
Anna sneezed from the cigar smoke, then said, “Soon. Very soon.” She counted the headlights as they collected behind them in the right lane. Two cars zipped by.
“Mama, I don’t know where to go.”
“You will.”
“How?”
A pickup and motorcycle edged by, and several yards behind them huge headlights, like monstrous white eyes, bounced along the highway.
“How?” Thalia asked again.
Anna kept one eye on the fast approaching headlights and took off her shoes. She curled her toes around the edge of the seat near the door, then looked back at Bagusta. The woman’s head had flopped to her shoulder and bobbed with every bump in the road. Mario was preoccupied with his cigar and the latest song blaring from the radio.
The question sounded again. "How?”
Anna held her breath, watching the bouncing headlights, the huge white eyes, now only a few feet away. She grabbed the door handle and pulled. The wail of wind suddenly filling the car sounded to Anna like the cry of angels. She hunched forward, and amidst Mario’s shouts and the screech of brakes she sprang into the night.
The last sound Anna heard was the crunch of bones beneath a truck tire.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A thorough search of the funeral home proved fruitless. No one was hiding in any dark corner or behind any piece of furniture. Michael had gone so far as to open the refrigerator in the visitor’s lounge to look inside, but nothing lurked in there either. After a while, he forced himself to explain away the incidents. The shadows, the snickers, only figments of his imagination, tricks his eyes and ears played on him due to fatigue. The prep room door closing, a quirk of fate and timing. Chad probably forgot to secure it before he left. Though the plausibility of that excuse seemed about as far-fetched as icicles in the Sahara since Chad rarely forgot anything, Michael left it at that. He had too much work to do and no further incidents to make him push the issue further.
With one body already embalmed and the second nearly finished, Michael worked a crick out of his neck. His stomach rumbled, reminding him that dinner was way past due. He ignored the hunger pangs, clipped the excess thread from the baseball stitch he’d made over the corpse’s carotid, then reached for the trocar.
Just as he positioned the point of the hollow, metal rod against the side of the abdomen, the prep room door banged open, and Wilson barged in.
Startled by the intrusion, Michael missed the incision he’d made for the trocar and punctured a new hole into the cadaver’s stomach. “Goddamnit, look what you’ve made me do!”
Wilson dismissed him with a quick wave. “Who the hell cares about that? Nobody’s gonna know. Look here, I n
eed the—”
“For starters, I know.” Michael said, his heart rate finally slowing to just below a gallop. He pulled out the trocar and laid it alongside the body. “And for finishers, I don’t give a damn what you need. You and I have to talk.”
Wilson stomped over to the opposite side of the embalming table. “Now you listen here, boy. It’s about time—”
“You’re damn right it’s about time,” Michael said. “It’s time you stop acting like a fucking juvenile delinquent.”
Wilson’s face went from a sickly chalk color to bright red. “Who the hell do you think you are, talking to me like that?”
Michael stripped the latex gloves off his hands and threw them into a hazardous waste bin. “Where’s the stuff from the Stevenson girl’s casket?”
It took a millisecond for the look in Wilson’s eyes to shift from one of panic to
bemused. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. And don’t try to change the subject. You have no right to talk to me this way!”
“When you start ripping off caskets, I have the right to say any damn thing I want.”
Wilson pounded the edge of the stainless steel table with a fist. “You’re accusing me of stealing? Your own father?”
“Stop with the games.”
“I’m telling you I didn’t take anything!”
Michael leaned over the table and brought his face closer to his father’s. “Bullshit.Besides a few Stevenson guests, you were the only one in the viewing room after I went to see Janet and the girls off.”
Wilson’s eyes shifted rapidly as though he were reading from a distant cue card. “I wasn’t alone. Sally was with me.”
“Not the whole time. She told me she left the room to answer the phone.”
Wilson slapped his hands together. “See how gullible you are? She said she went to answer the phone, but you don’t know that for sure, do you?”
“No, but Sally wouldn’t take a nickel if it fell at her feet, and you know it.”
“So? People can change. They get into binds and do stupid shit.”
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