by J. W. Ocker
“You’d be that popular, too, if you made awesome hot dogs.” Lowell had changed from the shirt and pants he had been wearing for the funeral to a pair of jeans and a red flannel shirt that did nothing to dispel his scarecrow-ness. Douglas had surrendered his jacket, but still wore the lizard tie around his neck, pulled loose.
“Did your family get Mrs. Laurent’s funeral?” Lowell asked.
“Yes.”
“Did you go to it?”
“No, I had homework. But I watched Moss and Feaster bury her.”
“Did you see her face?”
“No, they wouldn’t let me.”
Lowell nodded as if that made sense. “Oh, right. They told you she was a gorgon. Do you know how she died?”
“Do any of these questions have anything to do with your big news?”
“Keep your tie on, I’m getting there.” Lowell reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a sweaty newspaper page that was folded almost to the point of being crumpled.
“Is your Internet broken?”
“Shut up. I promised you a genuine, real-life monster, and here it is. Take a look.” A large, bold headline proclaimed itself through the newspaper creases:
MURDER IN COWLMOUTH
Lowell read it aloud for added emphasis, purposefully mispronouncing the name of the town again.
Douglas took the paper from his hands. “What? Murder? No way. That doesn’t happen in Cowlmouth. The worst crime here is people forgetting to pay their parking meters.”
“You’re going to want to keep reading.”
Douglas quickly sped through the rest of the column. “Wait. Mrs. Laurent was murdered?”
“Yeah. Like in a crime movie. Or a horror movie. Or a comedy movie. All movies have murders in them, I think.”
“Who did it?”
“Nobody knows.”
“And why would somebody murder that poor old woman? This doesn’t make sense. There’s hardly anything worth reading in this article.”
“But there’s more.”
“More than murder?”
“She was marked.” Lowell looked around to make sure the dead weren’t listening too closely. “I overheard my dad talking to somebody on the phone in his office at the house. Through the vent in the hallway, you know?” That vent had gotten them both close to trouble too many times over the years. Lowell reached down and took a big bite out of Dr. Dumont’s apple before replacing it on the glass. “Dad said that Mrs. Laurent had an M cut into her face.”
“A what?”
“An M, as in letter of the alphabet. You’re going to need to master all twenty-six before they let you pass sixth grade.” Lowell roughly ground the grass under one of his heels into the grave dirt. “The M was carved right into her cheek.”
“Into her cheek?”
“Yup. Like it was wet sidewalk cement.”
Douglas listened for a few moments to a group of crows fiercely cawing to each other a few dozen plots away. “I didn’t see that in the newspaper article.”
“Newspapers never tell the whole story. See, the letter is a detail about Mrs. Laurent’s murder that the police don’t want the general public to know. That’s why the newspapers aren’t reporting it. It’s special evidence.” Lowell was almost beaming with this secret knowledge. “The M was a signature, the killer’s mark. And you know what that means?”
Douglas stared down into the glass square of Dr. Dumont’s grave. The creeps rising up his spine and down his arms had nothing to do with the naked skull at the bottom of the shaft. “No, what?”
“It means that this murder wasn’t a random crime.” Lowell’s eyes grew wide. “My dad thinks that because the murderer marked Mrs. Laurent, he’ll kill again. That’s why the police need to keep some details of the crime secret. So that they can make sure they have the right guy when they catch him. Only the real killer will know those details. And you and me now, of course.”
Douglas missed most of that explanation. In fact, he only caught two words, which he repeated weakly, “Kill again?”
“Yup.”
Lowell seemed to be excited about the whole thing. He’d only been slightly more excited about the meatballs. Big news. But big isn’t how Douglas would have described it. Troubling was a good word. Terrifying was a better one. Certainly a thousand other words before exciting. But monster seemed right.
Douglas looked around. A strange feeling was boring its way up into his throat from his stomach like something had hatched down there. His head swam and his ears seemed to pop with a sound like every tombstone in the cemetery had toppled and slammed to the ground. Suddenly, for the first time in his life, he didn’t want to be in Cowlmouth Cemetery. He didn’t want to be surrounded by dead people.
Death Douglas got.
Murder, that was different. Murder was a puzzle to be solved in stories. A word to be ignored on the boring newscasts his father liked to watch. Murder was an adult word. A coffee-drinker’s word. The type archaically printed in newspapers. It didn’t have a meaning in real life. Not in Douglas’s real life, anyway. Not in Douglas’s Cowlmouth.
“Low?”
“What?”
“Why an M?”
Lowell picked the apple up again, hooked his arm, and sent the fruit in a graceful arc deeper into the cemetery. “For murder, I guess. M for murder.” The crows immediately attacked the missile when it hit the ground. “Or M for monster.”
The polished mahogany lid of the coffin slowly lowered, eclipsing the moon-white silk of the interior until a soft thud announced complete darkness inside. After Douglas had closed the coffin, he took a rag and a can of cleaner and began removing finger smudges from the long brass handles. Once they were shiny enough to glow, he attacked the thin skim of dust on the smooth wooden surfaces of the casket. His father was a couple of caskets away, pushing a broad-headed broom around the dark wood floor that bordered a pair of large red rugs.
The showroom was the second largest room in the house, behind the chapel. It had wide floor planks, dark beams in the ceiling, walls painted in pale cream, and an old granite fireplace that hadn’t been used in decades, except by the squirrels that built nests in the chimney. It had originally been two rooms, but had been combined to accommodate as many caskets as the local fire code would allow them to display in the space.
The oblong boxes lined the walls and formed a grid in the center of the room. Each box was set on a thick, transparent stand that, when the light from the overhead fixtures threw the shadows of the caskets directly beneath them, made the boxes look like they were floating. The caskets ranged in style from simple to grand. Most were more box than a dead person would ever need, but, as his father was fond of saying of many aspects of their trade, “Not for the deceased.”
Douglas took a deep breath and threw a question out among the caskets, one that he’d been keeping in check on a fraying leash inside since he and his father had started cleaning.
“Was Mrs. Laurent murdered?”
The broom in his father’s hands froze. Mr. Mortimer studied the rounded end of the wooden handle as if it were suddenly the most important object in the universe. A lump at the upper corner of his jaw spasmed. When he finally spoke, he seemed to be addressing the broom handle. “There are a thousand conversations I want to have with you, Douglas. This isn’t really one of them.”
“The news said that Mrs. Laurent was murdered.” He was careful to leave Lowell’s name out of it.
“Have I ever told you about the birds and the bees? Because I suddenly feel like having that talk.”
“They both die.”
“Right. That birds and the bees talk. We’ll have to have the other one sometime.” Douglas’s father leaned the broom against the wall and started flipping through the pages of a thick leather binder on the fireplace mantel. It was a catalogue of special-order casket designs. Douglas sometimes liked to take the binder and lay down with it on the rug, flipping through the pages and memorizing the names of the
brands and designs like they were the genuses and species of animals in a book of natural history. After a few seconds of page fluttering, Mr. Mortimer shut the book and looked up. “Listen, Douglas, murder is a lesson you honestly don’t have to learn too much about right now. You’re only eleven.”
“I’m twelve. And I want to.” Douglas moved to another open casket and peered inside. The velvet interior was almond-colored, triple-quilted, and the half-couch lid had an image of a willow tree embroidered on its underside. It looked much more inviting than the sagging wire-spring mattress upstairs in his room. He carefully closed the lid. They closed the caskets every evening. Even though everyone in the house was used to death, a casket lid accidentally banging shut was a generally unpleasant noise to hear in a funeral home in the dead of night. Plus, it could damage the expensive inventory.
Douglas’s father walked over to the urn shelf, which took up almost an entire wall of the showroom and was loaded with about two dozen of the ash vases in a wide range of shapes and colors, like the treasures of some looted foreign tomb. He slowly ascended a small stepladder, and plucked an elaborately detailed piece from the top shelf. Drawing a soft cloth from his pocket, he began cleaning the urn, which was emerald-colored, spider-webbed in gold filigree, and adorned with a small black-and-white picture of a young woman with curly dark hair and long eyelashes. This ash holder was the only urn on the display wall with actual cremated remains in it … those of Douglas’s grandmother. Mr. Mortimer liked to think that having it here in the showroom kept his mother a part of the business. “Mom always wanted to be a model,” he’d once told Douglas. Mr. Mortimer carefully put the urn back on the shelf and returned to floor level.
“I think there’s a saying about putting genies back in bottles. I’ll have to remember it when I explain this to your mother later.” He looked uncertainly at Douglas across the casket lids. “We might as well go sit down for this.” He led Douglas out of the showroom and toward the sitting room where they met with families about funeral arrangements.
The large house had been renovated, refurbished, and updated many times since Douglas’s great-grandfather, Hammond Mortimer, turned the place into a funeral home sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. The only room that had remained almost untouched over those hundred years was the sitting room.
Paintings of famous funerals like Jesus Christ being laid in his tomb, the Norse god Balder sent out on his ship-born pyre, and Alexander the Great driving the funeral carriage of his general, Hephaestion, covered the walls. A small glass cabinet at the back of the room held six-inch-tall Mexican funerary figures—hollow clay effigies of beasts and people that were buried with the dead to keep them company in the afterlife. A pair of wooden African death masks adorned spaces on either side of the entrance, while on a table in the corner, a small bronze statue of the sarcophagus of the Egyptian boy-king Tutankhamun stood. The whole room was a history lesson in funeral custom and lore.
Douglas and his father sat down on one of the simple green couches facing each other across a low glass coffee table. For a few moments, they both stared at the vase of fresh plastic flowers and the fan of Mortimer Family Funeral Home pamphlets on the table.
“I don’t know,” his father began. “Your mother and I have been mercilessly up front with you about death. We’ve had to be.” Mr. Mortimer waved a hand around in a small gesture that somehow encompassed the entire house and four generations of Mortimers. “You’re probably better equipped to deal with death than most adults. I mean, I think so.” He paused. “But murder …”
“So Mrs. Laurent was murdered?”
Mr. Mortimer nodded slowly. “In this business, we go out of our way to emphasize how much death is a part of life. How natural and, I don’t know, right it is. And while, sure, that’s a way to comfort the bereaved, it’s also a way for us to cope with what we do, dealing with the dead day in and day out. But murder … I mean, technically, all deaths are natural. People die. Whether it’s quietly in their sleep or in a horrible accident, it’s just death when it all comes down to it. But murder … that’s different. It’s kind of like a death that shouldn’t have happened. Or, I don’t know. It’s a terrible kind of death, and it makes us react with far worse than grief or sadness. Anger. Terror. Black emotions.” Mr. Mortimer stared for a moment at a model of a terracotta warrior in the corner and blew out air from his cheeks. “I think I’m going about this the wrong way. What do you think about murder?”
Douglas carefully pushed aside the black stripes of hair on his forehead. “I don’t know.” In his head, the word conjured a vague, menacing image of a shadowy man with a bloody knife in a gloved hand. “Murder happens all the time, right? I mean, if the funeral home were in a big city, we’d have murder victims every day.”
“Well, it doesn’t happen all the time, even in cities. And here, yes, it’s pretty rare.” Mr. Mortimer looked at his son with more certainty. “Douglas, there’s a lot of evil in the world. A lot of good, too, but a lot of evil. I’ve eaten, drank, breathed, and worn death my entire life. And I still find it unfathomable that one person can kill another, that the person on the table whose suit jacket I’m adjusting could be there because somebody else put him there on purpose. When it comes right down to it, murderers are broken people. Or bad people. Actually, not bad. Bad is when I caught you and Lowell sneaking out to the graveyard at night when you were nine. Evil. That’s what they are. Evil. Monsters, really.”
“Monsters,” echoed Douglas.
“Yeah, monsters. I don’t know. I think that’s about as good an answer as I can give you. It’s inadequate, and, well, the whole thing plain stinks, if I’m honest, both the fact of it and how difficult it is to explain.”
“Who murdered Mrs. Laurent?”
“I don’t know. Nobody does. But Lowell’s dad is working on it, and you know what a good detective he is. Chief Pumphrey’ll find out who did this evil thing, and the murderer will be punished and put somewhere he won’t be a danger to anybody. That’s the important thing. Until then, your mom and I want you to be extra careful. Don’t go anywhere alone. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t go out at night.”
Douglas filled in the unspoken conclusion. So you don’t get murdered.
“How did it happen?”
“Not important, Douglas. Well, I guess it is. No sense in me leaving holes in the story for your imagination to plug with all sorts of ghastly ideas worse that the, well, ghastly facts. Mrs. Laurent was out by herself at night. And she was killed. Stabbed.” Mr. Mortimer winced. “Okay, that was probably one word of explanation too far. You understand, though?”
Douglas nodded and decided not to push it and ask about the M on Mrs. Laurent’s cheek. Maybe he’d ask Eddie the next time he saw him.
“Have we ever had a funeral for a murder victim before?”
Mr. Mortimer pursed his lips and turned his head to look out the window. “I don’t think so. At least, not while I’ve been here. But your great-grandfather did. A long time ago. At least, that’s what he told me. It was supposed to have happened at a house over at the bottom of Chatman Street, near Druid Park. That place has been abandoned since I was a kid. Do you know about Death House? Do kids even still call it that?”
Douglas shook his head. It was an unfamiliar name to him.
“Anyway, they say something bad happened there. A man went crazy on his entire family …” He stopped and sighed. “I’m not sure, though. I could never quite tell if my grandfather was putting me on. He had a morbid sense of humor.” Mr. Mortimer winked at Douglas. “My grandfather had a morbid sense of everything. He was a mortician, you know.” Douglas’s father reached out and straightened his son’s tie. “So, are you okay?”
“I guess.”
“You don’t have to be.” Mr. Mortimer looked up at the wide strip of crown molding that framed the ceiling. It had been carved to depict a New Orleans jazz funeral, a procession of musicians with brass instruments and dancers with parasols eternally
parading above the room. “Tell you what. Why don’t you go on up to your room, get ready for bed, and read for a bit. I’ll finish the showroom and take care of the chapel by myself.”
“Sure, Dad. Thanks.” Douglas tried to sound as cheery as he could, as if everything was okay now and he would completely forget about it all by breakfast. But his relieved expression was as much a mask as the African ones on the wall or King Tut’s golden faceplate. Truth was, what his father had told him had only made things worse.
Worse than murder.
Worse than murder in Cowlmouth.
Worse than a murder victim in the basement of his own house with an M carved in her cheek.
He’d never really thought about it before, but if death can be unnatural, then every word of comfort and consolation he’d ever heard was a lie. It was like being told your whole life how safe airplanes are and then seeing the wreckage of a crash scattered across a field on TV.
If some deaths were unnatural, maybe they all were. Maybe death wasn’t any kind of completion, no finish line in a race, no last page in a book. Maybe death was just horrible no matter how it happened. Maybe the ritual that his family had dedicated itself to for generations was a fraud. Maybe it was a way of hiding the awfulness that was the end of life, or even the awfulness of life, itself.
Douglas didn’t read in bed as his father had suggested. He just lay there, cringing every time one of those thoughts crossed his mind.
When he finally did fall asleep, the boy who had slept in a bedroom above the dead for his entire life had his first nightmare.
SEPTEMBER 16
FRIDAY
Douglas chewed on the pink eraser of a No. 2 pencil and stared back into the hollow triangular eyes that were leering into his soul.
Miss Farwell had jumped the gun again in decorating her classroom for the upcoming holiday. Last year, her Easter decorations had gone up before the March snow had melted. Her St. Patrick’s Day had collided with her St. Valentine’s Day in a magnificent holy war. She’d even put up Christmas decorations before they’d gotten to Thanksgiving break. The territorial fights between the reindeer and the turkeys were savage.