Death Notice

by Todd Ritter

  “Does it really matter?”

  “It might,” Nick said. “You can’t just run into Wal-Mart and buy one.”

  “I got it from some guy. He sold it to me really cheap if I promised to give him a cut of whatever money I made.”

  Nick added pressure to Lucas’s shoulders, causing him to sink slowly in the chair. “Let’s make a deal, Lucas. If you tell us who sold you that coffin, we’ll let you go. We’ll forget about your side job in the cemetery, granted you promise not to do it again. How does that sound?”

  “The guy’s name is Bob,” Lucas said.

  “Bob who?”

  “Bob McNeil.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Henry felt a pair of lips brush his earlobe.

  “Wake up, sleepyhead,” a voice whispered. “It’s morning.”

  He rolled onto his side, trying in vain to delay the inevitable moment when he had to get out of bed.

  “Just five more minutes.”

  “You said that five minutes ago.” Deana climbed on top of him in an effort to rouse him. “This time you have to get up.”

  She was right. It was morning, and that meant getting ready for another day at the Gazette. Deana also had work obligations, in the form of Troy Gunzelman’s wake. But even though Henry knew they had to get out of bed at some point, it didn’t mean he had to like it.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll get up.”

  Deana remained on top of him. “You have to kiss me first.”

  Henry pecked her lightly on both cheeks and her forehead.

  “Was that acceptable?”

  “Not really,” she replied teasingly.

  “Then let’s try this.”

  Wrapping his arms around Deana’s lithe frame, Henry rolled until he was on top of her. His open mouth was instantly upon hers, kissing her so deeply that soft moans formed in the back of her throat. When they finally broke away, Henry was aroused and Deana was breathless.

  “That was much better,” she said.

  “I’m glad you approve.”

  He approved, too. Five years was a long time to go without the touch of a woman, and Henry was surprised by how much he missed it. Deana awakened a desire he thought had vanished long ago. And when he finally did crawl out of bed, it was with extreme reluctance.

  He got dressed quickly, knowing speed would be the only thing that propelled him from the safe confines of Deana’s bedroom. If he lingered, he was likely to be drawn right back into bed, taking Deana with him. And that wouldn’t be good for either of them.

  Yet on his way out, Henry paused at a photograph hanging by the door. He hadn’t noticed it during the night. There had been other things to focus on. But in the morning light he found himself fascinated by the picture. It depicted a little girl and a little boy standing with two adults in front of the very house he was now occupying.

  “Is that you?” he asked, pointing to the girl.

  Deana crept up behind him and wrapped her arms around his chest. “That’s me. Little Deana. I think I was nine when that was taken.”

  Although clad in a frilly pink dress, the girl in the photograph was already showing signs of the woman she’d eventually become. Henry saw the same bright eyes, the kind smile.

  Deana pointed to the boy. “And that’s little Martin.”

  “And these are your parents?”

  “They are. I think they would have liked you.”

  Mrs. Swan was pretty, with teased hair and a slim figure. She held the hand of Deana’s father, a tall, powerfully built man with jet-black hair and pale skin. Although his facial features were strong, they were overshadowed by a scar that cut through the left side of his face.

  “Was that from the first mill accident?” Henry asked.

  Deana nodded as she reached out from behind him and touched the photograph.

  “He was so self-conscious about it. The rest of us didn’t care. We still thought he was the most handsome person in the world.”

  “Is that what drew you to me?” Henry turned around and kissed her. “My scar?”

  “No,” Deana said. “It’s the way you deal with it. I know what people say about you. I know how mean they can be. But, as with my father, I can see past it, at the man you truly are.”

  They kissed again, more forcefully. But before it got too heated, Henry broke it off.

  “I need to go.”

  Leaving Deana alone in her bedroom, Henry descended the stairs. When he reached the front door, he saw a small den just off the living room. Something else he had failed to notice during the night.

  Henry craned his neck to peek inside. Like the rest of the house, the den looked warm and tidy. He glimpsed more books, more plants, and the edge of an antique desk that sat next to a window.

  He stepped inside, the floorboards lightly creaking under his weight as the desk came into full view. Another framed family portrait sat on top of it, this time missing a father. Next to that was a telephone, also antique. And sitting beside it, quite unexpectedly, was a blue jay.

  Startled by its presence, it took Henry a moment to realize the bird was stuffed and mounted onto a piece of bark. He saw another animal on the floor—a rabbit looking ready to nibble one of the houseplants. On the wall opposite the desk was a deer head. A single cobweb stretched between its antlers.

  “I see you’ve met Bambi.”

  It was Deana, who had entered the den unnoticed.

  “I call the bird Tweety,” she said. “The rabbit is Thumper.”

  “Where did you get these?”

  Deana looked more than a little chagrined as she said, “They’re bizarre, I know. But they belonged to my father.”

  Henry knelt before the stuffed rabbit. It was so lifelike it was eerie. He didn’t know if he wanted to pet it or run away from it.

  “He was a hunter?”

  “A big hunter,” Deana said. “And he stuffed them himself, something the rest of us found barbaric. But I can’t get rid of them. I tried once but just couldn’t do it. As strange as it sounds, they remind me of him.”

  She held out her hand and Henry took it, allowing himself to be pulled to his feet and out of the den. In the foyer, they kissed again, just as passionately as they had upstairs. The kiss was so strong and the attraction between them so palpable that Henry found himself hoping with all his might that Deana was telling the truth.

  When Kat reached the funeral home, she discovered that talking to Bob McNeil wasn’t going to be easy. A crowd had gathered there. A huge one. Sheathed in black, they loitered on the lawn, weighed down the front porch, and filled the foyer to capacity.

  Nick Donnelly would have had no problem parting the crowd. But Nick wasn’t there. He had decided to stay with Lucas Hatcher until after they got Bob McNeil’s side of the story. If it panned out, then Lucas was a free man. If it turned out he was lying, then the state police would be calling his parole officer.

  The only problem was finding Bob McNeil. After squeezing through the cluster of people on the funeral home’s porch, Kat had to push her way across the foyer. When she reached the viewing room, she at last understood the reason for the crowd—she had just crashed the viewing for Troy Gunzelman.

  Laid out in a casket, hands folded over his chest, he looked better than when Kat last saw him, in another coffin in a far different location. His face had more color, and the black suit he had been dressed in covered up the gash in his neck. But he was just as dead as when she found him on Lake Squall, just as tragically lifeless.

  Surrounding the casket, seated in rows of folding chairs, was a parade of familiar faces—Alma Winnick, Jasper Fox, Adrienne Wellington. Martin Swan hovered next to his sister, carrying his ubiquitous reporter’s notebook. All of them wore the same expression. It was fear mixed with anger, worry tinged with disappointment.

  Kat knew they were fearful and suspicious. She also knew they blamed her for not finding the killer yet. No one said this to her outright. Folks remained as polite as always. Some nodded in her dir
ection. Others offered small waves. But Kat knew the way Perry Hollow worked, and as soon as she passed, the whispering started.

  She received different reactions from the two women in Troy’s life. Amber Lefferts and Lisa Gunzelman seemed not to notice Kat at all.

  Amber looked paler than usual, thanks to the black dress she was wearing. She also seemed inconsolable, weeping openly and loudly as she signed the condolence book by the door.

  Kat felt sorry for the girl. She was young and had little experience with loss. She wore her grief on her sleeve.

  Lisa Gunzelman was another story. Sitting next to the casket, she displayed no tears, no trembling lips. Nothing about her grief was showy. It was lodged in her gut so deep it could never be removed.

  Kat was about to express her condolences when she saw Bob McNeil enter the viewing room. He paused in the doorway, looking bearlike in an ill-fitting brown suit. Kat was by his side in a flash and tugging on his sleeve.

  “We need to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Coffins.”

  “What about them?”

  “How much they cost,” Kat said. “I’m guessing you know all about that sort of thing.”

  Bob stayed motionless at the threshold of the viewing room, squirming in his suit. He tugged at his collar, pulling it away from his thick neck. He seemed as uncomfortable in Kat’s presence as she was in his. A welcome change. Usually Bob McNeil was the one doing the creeping out.

  “Are you looking to buy a coffin?” he asked.

  Kat shrugged. “Not really. I’m more interested in if there’s a black market for them.”

  She thought back to the evening spent with him in the embalming room. There, he told her a black market existed for everything. She had no idea he was speaking from experience.

  “I’m assuming there is,” she said.

  Bob yanked at his collar again before dropping his hands to his sides. Staring at Kat through his bug-eyed glasses, a grimace played across his lips.

  “Am I being accused of something?”

  “Should you be?” Kat asked. “I mean, couldn’t you lose your license if it was revealed that you sold a coffin to someone for a purpose other than burial?”

  She enjoyed the way Bob flinched ever so slightly, wordlessly admitting his guilt.

  “Not here,” he whispered, glancing at the mourners shuffling all around them. “Follow me.”

  He lumbered through the crowd, clearing a path for Kat. She followed him out of the foyer, through a side door and down the steps to the embalming room. Unlike her first visit, the stainless steel table was empty. The lights above them were shut off, making the room darker—and more unsettling—than before.

  Bob stood in the center of the room, staring at Kat with those huge eyes, not blinking, forcing her to make the first move.

  “I know about the coffin you sold to Lucas Hatcher,” she said. “And I’m assuming your father doesn’t. Think I should fill him in?”

  “Please don’t tell him.” Desperation crept into Bob’s voice. “I don’t want him to find out about it.”

  “Then you better explain yourself.”

  Above them, the ceiling creaked, moaning under the weight of all those mourners. Kat heard footsteps, muffled voices, and the lone, inappropriate flutter of a laugh.

  “I did it for a reason,” Bob said.

  “Which was?”

  “Money, of course.”

  “You’re the only funeral home in town,” Kat said. “I doubt money’s too tight for you and your father.”

  “I need money my father can’t know about.”

  “For what purpose?”

  Bob removed his glasses. He wiped them across the sleeve of his suit, using his thumb to swirl the fabric over the lenses. When he put them back on, there were tears in his eyes, the lenses making them look as big as raindrops.

  “To get the hell out of here,” he said. “Do you think I enjoy living with my father two floors above an embalming room? That I like seeing more people who are dead than alive? It’s torture, Kat.”

  “Things can’t be that bad.”

  “You have no idea what bad is,” Bob said. “You don’t have to live in the same house as that monster.”

  Kat couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Arthur McNeil a monster? She doubted that. Art was as harmless as a puppy. Bob was the dangerous one, with his surly attitude and his shady dealings on the side.

  “You should stop making excuses for yourself,” she said, the harshness in her voice surprising even her. “And you should stop blaming your father.”

  “You don’t know what kind of person he is.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “I already did. A monster.”

  Bob was red-faced now, the raindrop tears falling with increased frequency. When he wiped them away, Kat saw his hands were shaking. Bob was afraid—but not of getting caught. He was afraid of his father.

  “Did he do something to you?” Kat asked. “When you were a boy?”

  Bob sniffed. Then he nodded.

  “Did he abuse you?”

  Another sniff. Another nod.

  “How?”

  Bob McNeil remained surly in his pain. “How do you think?”

  A shiver of horror entered Kat’s body. She had never considered there was a reason behind Bob’s attitude, a cause for his discomfort around people. She thought it was just part of his personality. But she was wrong. People didn’t get that way on their own. Someone had to cause it.

  “How old were you when it started?”

  Bob looked away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Kat knew he didn’t, but she needed him to. She approached him slowly and laid a hand on his shoulder. Bob shrugged it off with a grunt.

  “Please tell me,” she said gently. “I can help you.”

  “It started when I was eight. It ended when I was ten. After Mom killed herself.”

  Kat flashed back to her childhood, when she had stared at her dinner plate as her father talked about how Leota McNeil took her own life. She remembered hearing him mention the layers of clothing and the bricks that weighed Mrs. McNeil down. Like a stone, was how he had phrased it. Leota McNeil sank like a stone.

  When she was a girl, she couldn’t comprehend why an adult would do something like that. Especially a wife and mother. But now Kat knew the reason. Leota McNeil had discovered Art’s dirty secret and opted to throw herself into Lake Squall instead of confronting her husband.

  “Do you think your mother’s death made him stop?”

  “I know it did.”

  “Did Art tell you that?”

  “Right here in this very room.”

  There was pain in Bob’s eyes as he glanced around the embalming room. Kat couldn’t imagine having to come down there every day, knowing there was such a terrible memory associated with the place. But Bob had done it. And he continued to do it.

  He pointed to the embalming table. “My mother lay right there. They had just pulled her from the water. Her skin was still blue.”

  The shiver of horror had never left Kat’s body. But listening to Bob, it grew until it became a quake.

  “She was naked,” he said. “The first naked woman I had ever seen. I was repelled and excited at the same time. Later on, I threw up thinking about it. Or it might have been the embalming that did it. It was my first.”

  Kat felt nauseated herself. Deep down, she wanted Bob to stop talking. It was a struggle to keep from holding her hands over her ears.

  “Dad gave me the scalpel. He made me slice the neck. And then the arteries. He made me do it all. I didn’t want to, but he said it was punishment for making her kill herself.”

  “But you weren’t responsible,” Kat blurted out.

  “I didn’t know that. I was ten, for Christ’s sake.”

  Ten years old. The same age James was now. If Bob was telling the truth, then Art McNeil really was a monster.

  “He also told me he’d stop,
” Bob said. “He’d stop if I helped embalm her. And I wanted that more than anything. So I did it. I embalmed my own mother. He made me sew the mouth shut. It wasn’t the way I showed you. It was the old-fashioned way, a needle and thread through the lips. Dad said it was special. That it was important to do it that way. After that—”

  Kat knew what he was going to say next. “You put pennies over her eyes.”

  Bob nodded. “And then we were done.”

  Kat’s nausea increased, making her woozy. She had to steady herself on the wheeled tray next to the embalming table. Scattered across it were all the tools of the mortician’s trade that she had learned about during her first visit there. Scalpel. Eye caps. Aneurysm hook. Trocar.

  That night, Bob had explained the things someone would need to embalm a corpse. One was formaldehyde, which was locked in a cabinet on the far side of the room. Another was space, which the embalming room provided in spades. The third was drainage, and lots of it. Looking at her feet, Kat saw she was standing over the drain in the floor.

  A bit of clarity cut through her dizziness. She thought of George Winnick and Troy Gunzelman. They both had been embalmed in that room. Not just once, after she had found them dead. But most likely another time—before they were found.

  The second embalmings were done by Bob McNeil, in the professional way. But the first ones, occurring before anyone even knew they were dead, were more primitive. The results were so rough because the person doing it had ignored modern methods in favor of something more old-fashioned. And that person wasn’t Lucas Hatcher or Bob McNeil.

  It was Art.

  “I need to talk to your father,” Kat said.

  Bob’s expression changed into one of abject terror. The wide lenses of his glasses reflected what he saw—a figure standing just outside of the embalming room. The person moved inside, close enough that Kat could make out his face in the reflection.

  “Talk to me about what?” Art McNeil asked.

  Kat whirled around to face him. He was smiling, but it was cold and meaningless—a liar’s grin.

  “Art, I’m going to have to take you in for questioning.”

  “Have I done something wrong?”

  Oh, yes, Kat thought. The list of things he had done wrong was so great she didn’t know which one to address first.