The Burial Society

by Nina Sadowsky

  “I’ve never met someone before, you know, from…” she begins, her tone surprisingly thin and tentative given her solid persona.

  “Well, the boss says that’s best, of course. The less we know, the less we can let slip.”

  “Who exactly is the boss?” The question bursts out of her and I can see she’s thrilled at her daring, while also slightly appalled she had the nerve to ask.

  I shrug. “I was given an assignment and I’m here to do it, that’s all I know. No more than you do.”

  Her bulk deflates into her chair, the frisson of daring evaporating just as fast as it had ballooned. “I just hope that you’ll relay, you know, that we’re really grateful here at Haven for the times the Burial Society has been able to help. If you get a chance, would you communicate that to…whomever?”

  I assure her I will. And truth is, I’m pleased by the compliment. Invisibility is so much my hallmark that I rarely get to hear words of gratitude directly.

  I raise the subject of the Burrows family and Ivy’s face remains impassive save for a sudden twitch in her right eye. She blinks it away. Years of working with women burdened by tortured pasts and possessed of uncertain futures has taught this woman the value of listening while appearing neutral.

  “Did you know any of them?” she asks me. “The Burrowses?”

  I shake my head.

  She releases a heavy gust of a sigh. “Mallory I knew best, of course. She volunteered here. And really came alive! A wonderful, sweet woman. I think she got as much from being here as we got from her help. Maybe more. She’d even talked about going back to school to get her master’s in social work.”

  My heart twists. I cost Mallory that chance. I denied Mallory and all the women she could have helped in the course of her life. My transgression is worse than I knew. I force my attention back to Ivy.

  “Brian, I only met once, after she disappeared. A condolence call. Her kids, I met a couple of times. Never the uncle.” Ivy shudders thinking about Frank; she’s read all those articles too. She reaches into her knitting basket and extracts a pair of needles. Starts clicking away at a length of pale blue yarn.

  “It all looked so normal, you know?” she continues. “No, not even normal, so perfect. They were all healthy, attractive, had financial comfort and success, the kids were growing up, starting their own lives….So shocking, all of it. You never know, right?”

  We never do.

  I ask Ivy what she knew about Will Crane.

  “Well, that was the first shocker. That Mallory was having an affair with him. I’m not judging. It’s just that it blew the lid off that pretty family portrait. But I never believed Crane killed her, I’ll tell you that.”

  I lean forward in my chair. “Why’s that?”

  “I saw them together. Ran into them one night at a restaurant. They were seated already when my friend and I came in and didn’t see us at first. The way those two looked at each other? God knows, I’m no romantic, but that was as close to pure love as I’ve ever seen.”

  Or lust. Or infatuation, I think cynically.

  “But it was more than that,” Ivy continues. “Do you know about the creepy things that started to happen to Mallory?”

  I do, of course, but I ask her to tell me.

  It started with a bouquet of dead roses left on her car’s windshield. Shortly after that, Mallory found her car keyed when she returned to the parking lot after a movie. Mallory had told Ivy she’d felt watched as she surveyed the damage, nothing she could pinpoint, no one she could see, just an uneasy sense that sent a prickle down her spine.

  The final straw was the blood she’d found splashed on her doorstep. The word bitch scrawled. That’s when Mallory finally had confided in Ivy.

  “That’s when we, you know, linked her up with TBS,” Ivy says. “It was escalating. Creepy shit.”

  “Did Mallory report these incidents to the police?”

  “I don’t know. I advised her to. I know she told Crane about them.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We keep our location a strict secret, of course.”

  I nod.

  “He insisted she give him a nearby cross street. That’s why she confided in me. Mallory wanted to make sure I would be okay with her giving him even a hint of our location. They designated a different spot every day and he met her after she left here. I escorted her to the meet-up point. Crane followed her home to make sure she was safe, every single day. That man loved her, I’m sure.”

  “Plenty of us hurt the ones we love.”

  Ivy’s knitting needles still. “All too true.”

  A baby’s cries pierce the thin walls, followed by a softly sung lullaby. The baby’s howls grow louder.

  “But after all the years I’ve spent doing this”—Ivy gestures with her needles at the rooms surrounding us—“I trust my instincts. And they tell me Will Crane never would have touched a hair on poor Mallory’s head.”

  “You must have suspected someone when Mallory disappeared,” I coax.

  Ivy is silent for a moment. “I always thought it was some random nut job who just got fixated on her. I knew her husband was away when the dead roses and all that started, so even though I know some people thought he might have hurt her, I never did.”

  “Why are you so sure the disappearance and the ‘creepy shit’ were the work of the same person?”

  “Well, it makes sense, right? Wouldn’t it be too random otherwise?” A faraway look enters Ivy’s eyes as she remembers. “She was a beautiful woman, you know. And charismatic, in a way that went beyond her looks.”

  Ivy lays down her knitting and fixes me with her warm brown eyes.

  “And then Crane disappeared and sent that confession.” Ivy shrugs. “I didn’t really buy it, but the cops strongly encouraged me to take it at face value. So I did.”

  An international funeral shipping provider. Jake sits opposite the woman bearing that title, wondering, How the hell does this end up being someone’s job? She’s got frizzy gray hair and angular gray-framed glasses. Pinned to one lapel of her neat charcoal suit is an old-fashioned enameled pin shaped like a vase containing a bunch of flowers.

  Her unlikely name is Maria O’Donahue-Keyes. It feels like marbles in Jake’s mouth.

  Her office in the funeral home is appropriately sober. Nondescript, solid furnishings in neutral colors, a couple of framed inspirational quotes on the wall, a big vase filled with lilies. Kind of a cliché, the lilies, Jake thinks.

  They’d decided to bury Brian here in Connecticut, in Westport, the town both he and Natalie still thought of as home.

  Maria O’Donahue-Keyes has been talking and talking and Jake has given the appearance of listening. But he’s distracted by Miss Marbles’s unlikely career path, by the very surreal nature of the task before him, by Natalie, slumped in the chair next to him.

  The words Marbles has been spewing, acte de décès (death certificate), permis d’inhumer (burial permit), as well as all the details of the procedure for repatriation of the body, have floated on the air before Jake but escaped into the ether before he could really grasp them.

  Isn’t this why we’ve hired old Miss Maria O’Donahue-Keyes anyway? So that she can handle all this shit?

  He glances at Natalie. She looks dazed, as if she too is overwhelmed by the torrent of words coming their way. She’s gnawing the side of her thumb bloody, and he longs to reach out, pull her hand away from her nimble teeth.

  Somehow it seems too intimate an act in front of a stranger.

  Jake’s gaze turns to one of the framed pictures on the wall. A golden sunset turns a smooth, sandy beach luminous. A silhouetted woman faces the horizon, her flowing black hair lifted in a breeze that whips her long dress around lean bare legs. The text reads:

  The only people who think there is a time limit for grief have never lost a piece of their heart. Take all the time you need.

  Sure. Great advice. But what if new grief keeps getting tossed on the old,
incendiary kindling stoking an already raging fire?

  What if my grief will never end?

  Jake glances back at Maria O’Donahue-Keyes, who is looking at him with an expectant air. He realizes she’s asked a question.

  “What? I’m sorry,” he mutters, his color rising.

  “I asked if you also wanted to make arrangements to bring your uncle’s body home.”

  Natalie pulls her thumb away from her mouth. Stares at Jake with panic-stricken eyes.

  “No. I don’t think we do.”

  He grasps Natalie’s hand and runs his index finger along her thumb, leaving bloody smears on both of their hands.

  The Westport, Connecticut, police station is a plain, two-story russet brick affair. It projects solid, affluent, suburban American values, set back behind a white-striped asphalt parking area.

  I pull my rented Ford Escort into one of the empty parking spaces. In the visor mirror, I give myself a last check. Dark hair streaked with gray is pulled into a chignon at the base of my neck. I practice pulling the furrow between my brows. I look serious, a bit severe.

  Exiting the Escort, I tug my fitted navy skirt suit into place. Adjust my crisp white collar. With four-inch heels on my simple black pumps and a black leather envelope bag clutched under one arm, I exude stylish French efficiency.

  Aimee Martinet from the 8th arrondissement, Annexe Madeleine, is coming to have a casual chat with the detectives who handled the Mallory Burrows disappearance. Professional courtesy between law enforcement officers on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

  I can’t shake Ivy Phillips’s certainty about Will Crane’s innocence. Ivy is a woman trained to expect the worst of people, yet she was certain Crane would never have hurt Mallory. And if Crane hadn’t killed Mallory, who had? Could it have been Brian after all? Someone else altogether? And if Crane hadn’t killed Mallory, why would Frank have killed Crane?

  I remind myself Frank’s confessions have come to me only repeated through Natalie’s filter. The girl was attacked, fighting for her life. Could she have misunderstood? Is it possible Frank murdered Mallory too? And then every other man Mallory loved? Had Frank been in love with her? Is that where this whole twisted story began?

  The more questions I ask, the more I seem to have.

  Detective Benson is pleasant enough, but pointedly dismissive, as Detective Karen Cooke sits silently beside him. As far as Benson is concerned, their case is open only to the extent that William Crane is considered their prime suspect and still at large. He sees no connection between what happened in Paris and what is old news here. The Burrowses are certainly a tragic family, but he can’t understand why I’m even asking questions. No bodies have been found. No new evidence has been offered. He fixes me with piercing black eyes.

  I wave off his intensity with a laugh and a fluttering hand. I can see he will give me nothing. In French-accented English, I make a collegial joke about “we police,” who can’t help being “on” even when “on vacation.” I thank them both for their time and ask Cooke if she can direct me to the ladies’ room before I head back to New York. I have tickets for a Broadway show, I tell Benson happily, as Cooke escorts me from the room.

  Once in the hallway, I put my hand on Cooke’s elbow and draw her toward the front entrance. She doesn’t resist. Nor does she seem surprised. She may have been silent in our meeting, but her compressed lips and shifting body told me she had things on her mind. As we step outside, I suddenly regret my heels. I loom over the petite detective in her flat shoes. She squints up against the sun to see me.

  “I can tell,” I plunge right in, “that your partner is taking the official position. But maybe you have other thoughts?”

  The detective shifts her weight back and forth like a fighter getting ready to feint. She shoots a glance back inside the station. “You understand, in an affluent community like this, an unsolved disappearance, well, it didn’t sit well,” she says quietly. “But there were always things I questioned. For one thing, why did Crane hang around so long after Mallory disappeared? We weren’t looking in his direction for like three weeks, didn’t even know about their affair. Why didn’t he take off then?”

  I nod, encouraging her to continue.

  “Plus, when we did learn about them…I interviewed him. He admitted to their relationship right away, even that he had seen her the night she disappeared. And that man was crushed. His anguish felt totally real to me. And he completely cooperated with us. It just didn’t hit my gut right that he did it.”

  That’s two people who believed Will Crane wouldn’t have hurt his lover, Mallory Burrows.

  “Then there was the confession letter itself. No drafts of it were found on either Crane’s office or home computers.”

  “Maybe he used another computer?”

  “Okay, but why, when he had two readily available? And why use a different computer if he was claiming responsibility anyway? Also the letter had no fingerprints on it. Why bother to sign a confession, but be so careful not to leave fingerprints?

  “Plus”—Cooke leans in closer—“Crane left all his bank accounts open, he’s never used his credit cards. The man simply vanished.”

  She makes eye contact affirming I register the significance of these details. I do.

  “We looked into the whole family, of course, at the time,” the detective continues. “Two of Jake’s friends confirmed he was with them. Natalie was at her friend Melissa Masterson’s. We looked into Frank, but he was at a fundraiser for his kids’ school, seen by dozens of people. But Brian had no alibi for the night Mallory was killed; he insisted he was home, alone. And you know, with the affair…” She shrugs. “It’s usually the husband, right? I always thought Brian did both of them, if you must know. Jealousy.”

  “What about when Crane disappeared? Did Brian have an alibi then?”

  “That’s the thing. We don’t know exactly when Crane left. Or was killed, if that’s what happened. He was seen at a local market on a Tuesday, but had told his employees he was taking Wednesday and Thursday off. No one was really looking for him until that Friday.”

  I regard Cooke sympathetically. “You seem to have all of this information, how do you say in English? Right at the tips of your toes?”

  She smiles faintly. “At my fingertips. Yes. Well, you know how it is, some cases just stay with you.”

  Indeed I do.

  “And now what do you think? After Frank Burrows?”

  “I don’t know. I keep wondering what exactly went down in Paris.” She shrugs. “Something keeps itching at me.”

  A kindred spirit.

  As Aimee, I express my own reservations about the tragic events in Paris. We commiserate on the topics of gut instinct, sexism in our respective forces, and the administrative pressure to close cases, or at least not stir the pot.

  Before I get back into my Ford Escort, I extract Detective Cooke’s promise to email me her case notes on Mallory Burrows.

  Jake’s had enough.

  Funeral arrangements, lawyers, taxes, wills and trusts, partnership valuations, settlements and outstanding bills. Making sure Natalie’s school fees and logistics are sorted. Deciding what to do with the apartment on the Upper West Side. The mess that is Uncle Frank, his dead body abandoned in France, no one willing to bring it home, his muddled, unfinished, convoluted affairs.

  After getting off the phone with crazy Aunt Della, Jake feels like he might just explode right out of his skin.

  He’d had a very different notion of what his life would be like after the Paris trip. With the lease signed on his new place in Brooklyn, and a job lined up bartending at a local restaurant, he’d planned to work nights and devote the days to figuring out his next steps. He didn’t necessarily know what he wanted to do with his life, but he could support himself while he figured it out. That was enough.

  He was on the cusp of the beginning of everything.

  But death is everywhere. He doesn’t want to feel sorry for himself, yet he can’t
help it. How many of his recently graduated peers are dealing with this kind of bullshit? They’re coming back from European backpacking trips or cross-country drives. They spent the summer having a last taste of freedom before facing new jobs. None of them buried a parent, lost an uncle, became responsible for a sister. Probably none of them learned all too fast the necessity of growing the fuck up.

  Jake thinks about calling Rami and seeing if he wants to go out. Get blotto. But Natalie is home, tucked up in her room, and he worries about leaving her alone.

  God, he can’t wait until she starts school. It’ll be easier to worry from afar than to be on constant watch, worried she’ll start to hurt herself again.

  He reminds himself to ask Natalie if she’s followed up on finding a therapist in Providence. Someone with training and skills needs to be looking after her. There’s only so much he can do.

  Maybe when Natalie starts school, Jake thinks. Maybe my life can begin then.

  The homes in Westport are massive. Set back behind scrupulously maintained topiary, emerald green lawns, flowering trees, and sturdy stone-crafted walls, these palatial estates exude wealth, privilege, security, safety.

  This story started here. And it always makes sense to start at the beginning.

  I’ve circled the neighborhood a few times. I’ve cruised past the site of the former Burrows home (razed to the ground and rebuilt by its purchaser), passed Crane’s former place of business (still a bustling nursery but under new ownership), saw Crane’s neat little colonial home on the less affluent side of town. I buzzed by the high school that Natalie and Jake Burrows attended. With a few weeks to go before the school year, the building was deserted, its brick and glass façade closed, the parking lot empty.

  The home where Melissa Masterson was raised is one of the more impressive in this cavalcade of veritable castles. It’s located in an exclusive waterfront enclave, nestled on the river’s edge, where it opens to the Long Island Sound. The house is designed to meld artfully with its environment, with soaring windows that bring light and nature in harmony with traditional post-and-beam craftsmanship. Or so says the architect’s tony description.