“Then I can get Joanie or someone to pick me up. Or Trista can drop me off.”
“Don’t be stupid. I’ll take you.”
“What do you mean, ‘Don’t be stupid’? One of my best friends is dead. You don’t think I want to go to her funeral?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Kiera could tell he was getting angry, but he was holding it back. She had a sudden insight that this wasn’t just about her recuperating and him wanting to check in on his classes. Something else was bothering him. Again, she wondered if he was seeing someone else, but she was too angry to confront him about it right now.
“I just was thinking . . . after everything you’ve been through . . . you don’t need the stress of a funeral.”
Kiera sniffed but said nothing.
“I would think—I’m sure Jon would understand if you didn’t make it.”
Kiera eyed him steadily, and once again—like she had so many times these last few days—she wondered if she even knew who this man was. He certainly wasn’t the man she had fallen in love with and married twenty years ago. Over the years, they had both changed, but the gulf yawning between them had grown so imperceptibly she couldn’t say exactly when or where things had changed.
But they definitely had changed. Maybe it had taken the operation for her to see it and finally admit it.
“I’m going,” she said as exhaustion swept through her. “One way or another, I’m going.”
Nate didn’t say a word, but he glanced at her and nodded. The rest of the drive home was in total silence.
2
The funeral service at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church struck Kiera as a bit hypocritical. She hadn’t known Liz nearly as long as she had known Jon, but they had bonded quite a bit after she and Jon moved back to Stratford. If there was one thing Kiera knew about Liz, it was that she was definitely not a “religious” person. Not that she was an avowed atheist, and she certainly wasn’t hostile to people who did believe, but she is—or was—an earthy person who showed little if any interest in spiritual things.
This must all be Jon’s doing, she thought as she sat through a seemingly interminable service with hymns and prayers, a sermon from Pastor Wolfe, and several very heartfelt eulogies from friends and neighbors. Thankfully, Jon hadn’t asked Kiera to say anything. She never could have gotten up in front of a crowd and said anything. Liz’s brother had died several years ago, and she had no surviving family back in Colorado where she had been raised, so the people in attendance were there because they knew her through Jon.
Throughout the service, Kiera felt terribly self-conscious about her appearance. Everyone, of course, knew she’d had brain surgery. Like any small town, word spread quickly. Before the service began, even people Kiera didn’t know very well came up to her and asked how she was feeling. She smiled and told them she was fine, considering, but it was a lie. The loss of her friend was just the beginning of how bad she felt, but there was no one—not even her close friends she’d known since she was a kid—she could talk to about everything she was going through.
It was a foolish detail, she knew, but she was worried most about her hair. Although she acknowledged it was pure vanity, she had always been proud of her bright red hair. It was practically her trademark, an essential part of her identity. She was glad the doctors hadn’t shaved off more than they had. She couldn’t imagine being bald and having to wait a year or more for it all to grow back.
Still, the large bandage was bad enough. While getting dressed for the funeral, she had considered removing the bandage—or at least taking off the gauze pad and replacing it with something smaller, something she might be able to hide beneath her hair. But she finally decided to go the way she was. No matter how she looked, she knew people would talk about her. The bottom line was, she was there to mourn her friend and celebrate her all-too-short life.
After the service, she and Nate drove with the procession out to the Pine Grove Cemetery, where Liz was interred beside Jon’s father and mother.
As everyone gathered beneath the canvas canopy by the graveside, Kiera couldn’t stop looking at Jon. He was wearing a dark, three-piece suit, and in spite of his obvious grief, he looked healthy, especially for a man his age. As she stared at him, she found herself thinking that he wouldn’t have much difficulty finding another woman, if that’s what he wanted. Especially in the last year or so, she had picked up some tension between him and Liz. Although they weren’t so close Liz had ever confided in Kiera about any marital stress and strain, Kiera knew that Liz had been pushing for them to move back to Colorado after Jon’s mother died and their primary reason for being in Maine was gone.
And now, here she was, being buried in Maine two thousand miles from her home.
A sense of melancholy filled Kiera as she contemplated how sad life could be. It seemed so limited, so definitive. When you were young, life had so many possibilities, so much potential. Eventually, though, and usually sooner than you wanted, you had to start making choices, and these choices determined how you lived until it seemed—at times anyway—as though your life was no longer under your control. Other forces—forces you couldn’t see—started to direct your life. It was like being swept away by the dark waters of a river you couldn’t see, and you floated along, doing the best you could until—finally—you went under.
Still, there’s all that potential, Kiera thought, shivering in spite of the afternoon sun on her back. What happens to all that potential, all those possibilities for lives you could have lived but never did?
“Does it all just disappear?” Kiera said out loud.
Nate leaned close and whispered, “What?”
Blinking back tears, Kiera looked at him. His face hovered in front of her, his expression frozen like a mannequin’s. Cold sweat broke out across her face and neck.
She shook her head. “Nothing,” she whispered, but when she turned away, her gaze went from the freshly dug grave down the grassy slope to the line of mourners’ cars. The sun was angled such that it and the blue sky reflected from the windows like mirrors. With the clouds shifting by, the effect it created was dizzying. Kiera stiffened her legs so she wouldn’t fall.
She stared at Jon’s car, which was parked behind the hearse, and then at the hearse. The sun reflecting off the black roof was as bright as a welder’s torch. The glare hurt her eyes and left trailing afterimages whenever she blinked. The funeral director was standing beside the limo, his arms folded as he leaned against its shiny, black fender for the duration of the service.
And then, as she shifted her gaze, Kiera saw something that made her breath catch in her throat.
A woman’s face appeared in the back window of the hearse. One second it wasn’t there. Then it was. But Kiera had the impression it had always been there. It was only when she shifted her focus that she saw it.
She let out a gasp and staggered, taking a quick step backward, fighting for balance. Nate turned and grabbed her arm, but his touch, distant and cold, didn’t help. The muscles in her legs had become unstrung and were about to fold up. Her eyes widened with fear, and she sucked in a quick breath as she stared at the face in the hearse window, unable to look away.
The face hovered in the darkness behind the curved glass that was framed with a black curtain. She almost lost it in the glare of the sun, and it seemed clearest when she didn’t look straight at it. The face looked like a photographic negative that was slowly developing, and the longer she looked at it, the clearer it became; but it was maddening because it was clearest only when she looked to one side or the other. When she looked directly at it, it was lost behind the burning glare bouncing off the glass.
There’s nothing there! . . . It’s just the reflection . . . a passing cloud or something, she told herself, but she didn’t believe it. That face with its vacant stare looked directly at her. The wide eyes and hollow, dead expression seared her mind.
It’s Liz, Kiera thought as chills weaved up and down her back.
But even as she thought that, she knew it wasn’t Liz. While the face looked familiar, she was convinced it wasn’t Liz or a passing cloud.
Nate leaned close and whispered something, but she couldn’t make out what it was. She wanted to look at him if only to prove to herself nothing was wrong, but she couldn’t tear her gaze away from the face behind the hearse’s window.
“You want to sit down?” Nate’s grip on her arm tightened until it was almost painful. Kiera pulled her arm away from him and shook her head.
“I’m fine,” she said in a raw, tight voice.
At the grave site, Pastor Wolfe was still intoning the funeral service. When he asked everyone to bow their heads in prayer, Kiera folded her hands, closed her eyes, and lowered her head, but she couldn’t keep her eyes closed for long. When she looked down at the hearse again, she wasn’t sure what she expected to see. She hoped the face wouldn’t be there, that she would see it had been just a cloud or an illusion. She wasn’t prepared for what she did see.
The woman’s face was still there, glaring at her from inside the hearse, but the same image was reflected in the windows of all the other cars that lined the narrow cemetery road.
A small, whimpering sound escaped her. Squeezing her hands together, she looked at Jon, who was standing at the graveside with his head bowed. The sunlight wasn’t shining directly on Liz’s casket, but the polished wood glowed with an unnaturally bright light. In the swirling wood grain of the casket, Kiera thought she saw a repetition of the face that was watching her from the car windows. In the dark wood grain of the coffin, long strands of dark red hair wafted like they had been caught in the wind.
A sudden clutching at Kiera’s throat cut off her air supply. She watched as the face inside the wood grain shifted ever so slightly. Its eyes moved back and forth until they fixed on Kiera with penetrating intensity. She gasped, knowing that those eyes would remain fixed on her, no matter where she went or what she did.
Even worse, though, she recognized the face.
It was a mirror image of herself, frozen as if trapped inside the polished wood grain.
3
“. . . Honey . . . ?”
Nate’s voice sounded faraway. As Kiera drifted closer to consciousness, she realized she was lying on something hard and uneven. She thought she might still be in a hospital bed, but they weren’t as hard as this. She struggled to figure out where she was and how she had come to be here. When she finally managed to wedge her eyes open, she found herself looking up at the sky.
But there was something wrong with the sky. Instead of being blue, it was a wide, undulating swatch of dark tan. As her eyesight gradually adjusted, she saw blurry splotches of darker brown against the arching tan background.
Her throat clicked when she took a breath. The cool flood of air that filled her lungs surprised her. She had been expecting stale air laced with the smell of death and decay, or maybe the antiseptic sting of a hospital room. Figures leaned over her, peering down at her, but the bright beige backdrop behind them made it so she couldn’t distinguish anyone’s features. She had no idea who these people were.
She was sure that one of them was Nate. He—or someone else—was much closer to her than the others. As her vision cleared, she saw a worried look in his eyes.
“Are you all right, sweetie?”
His voice still sounded faraway, and when he spoke, his lips were out of synch with his voice; but she winced and nodded and said, “Yeah, I—What happened?”
“You fainted.”
The crowd around her murmured, but Kiera couldn’t make out anything anyone said. She groaned as she shifted to sit up, but something was pressing her down on the ground. She finally remembered that she was at Liz’s funeral.
“I . . . I’m so embarrassed,” she said, fixing her eyes on Nate, who was gently caressing the side of her face. His touch was as cool and refreshing as spring water.
“I told you coming here wasn’t a good idea. Didn’t I?”
The edge of accusation in his voice stabbed her. She had no idea how to respond, but a surge of anger filled her . . . anger at Nate for saying “I told you so” and at herself for making a scene.
“Come on. Step back and give her some air,” someone said. It sounded like Jon, but she couldn’t be sure.
Someone moved closer, and from both sides, hands took hold of her, sliding under her armpits, and started to lift her, but the crushing weight pinning her down only got worse. It was almost impossible to take a deep enough breath as pinpoints of white light trailed like fireflies across her vision. A gentle breeze blew across her face, sending chills through her, but that was nowhere near as bad as the embarrassment she felt. Before the day was over, people would be talking about how she had fainted because of the brain surgery, and there would be speculation that she was suffering from irreparable brain damage.
She finally got to her feet but still didn’t feel stable. Holding on to Nate helped. She realized the beige sky was the canvas awning that had been erected over the grave site in case of rain. She was humiliated that she had disrupted the burial by fainting. She felt like everyone was staring at her, and she wondered if it was up to her to let the minister know he could finish the service.
A small measure of relief passed through her when the people turned their attention back to Pastor Wolfe, who began to intone the remainder of the ceremony. Leaning close to Nate, she whispered, “I’m going down to the car.”
“You want to go home now?”
Kiera shook her head. She wouldn’t consider the suggestion even for a second. She had to go to Jon’s house after the interment if only to talk to Jon. She didn’t know how she knew, but she was convinced that whatever was happening to her was connected to Jon somehow.
“I just need to catch my breath.” She stared at the open grave for a moment. “I’ll be fine if I can just sit down.”
When she started to walk away, Nate tagged along with her, keeping his arm around her waist to support her.
“I just need a little time,” she said.
“You’ve got all the time you want,” he said, but his words made her shiver, because she knew it wasn’t true. She was painfully aware that she was running out of time. Remembering the cold, lifeless stare of the woman who had been watching her from inside the hearse chilled her. And as impossible as it seemed, she was suddenly convinced it was her, trapped in the back of the hearse.
4
“How you holding up?”
Kiera forced a smile when she looked at Jon and saw the genuine concern in his expression. It broke her heart to think that an hour or two after burying his wife, he seemed to be more worried about her than he was about himself.
“I’m really sorry . . . about what happened at the cemetery,” she said.
Jon’s house was filled with relatives, friends, and colleagues from work who had stopped by after the funeral. Several people had provided food and drink, and the conversation was dominated by talk of Liz. She had only lived in Stratford for a little less than two years, so not many people could say they really knew her. But many of them had known Jon from childhood, and they were there to console and commiserate with him. When Jon was out of earshot, people also talked about how she had been murdered, and that the police had no leads and no suspects in custody.
It struck Kiera as odd that Jon didn’t seem to need all that much consolation. He never came right out and said it, but she knew him better than most of the people here, and she sensed something different in his demeanor that convinced her, at least, that he wasn’t as broken up about his wife’s death as he might have been.
Maybe he had changed more than she realized in the time he’d been away. How could she say she really knew him? She remembered the high school boy, not the man. Maybe he was keeping his grief to himself, bottling it up, but it certainly seemed like he was detached from everything going on around him.
“Can we go outside for a sec?” Kiera asked. She pulled at the coll
ar of her black dress and added, “It’s getting kind of stuffy in here.”
Without a word, they walked out the back door and onto the deck that looked out over a wide field leading down to a narrow stream that marked the edge of Jon’s property. As they stepped outside, Kiera caught a glimpse of Nate, who was talking to Pete Johnson, a teacher at the high school and one of his poker buddies. Nate seemed not to notice that she was leaving with Jon, and she felt a mild twist of guilt. As if she was trying to sneak something.
The day was still unusually warm. The fair-weather clouds scudding across the sky cast the field with rapidly shifting swatches of shadow and light. The effect was a little like the rapid flashing of a strobe light, which gave Kiera a feeling of vertigo. She gripped the porch railing for support.
“So . . . still no leads?” Kiera asked. “The cops have no idea who did it?”
Jon’s expression froze as he fought to contain his emotion. Then he shrugged and shook his head.
“Nothing.” There was a note of bitterness in his voice, and who could blame him? “They say it must have been a random act of violence. Whoever did it was probably trying to rob her, and it just got out of hand.”
Kiera sighed and closed her eyes, letting the sunlight wash across her face, but a mental image flashed across her mind of the woman she had seen in the hearse. She made a soft whimpering sound and quickly opened her eyes again.
“I’m not cracking up, you know,” she said without preamble as she looked at Jon, who was looking at her with a bemused expression.
“I never said you were,” Jon said, “but you know—sometimes I think I might be.”
“Why do you say that?”
Jon didn’t reply as he gazed at the shadows shifting across the field.
Kiera gave him a sympathetic smile and said, “I don’t wonder. What happened to Liz was horrible.”
Jon inhaled sharply and nodded, looking like he was fighting back tears. “That’s not all,” he said softly.
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