Dead Ball

by Judith Arnold

  She had met up with Sheila and Angie outside the church, and they’d found seats together on one of the pews a few rows from the rear door. She could barely see Arthur’s coffin up at the front, but she’d already gotten a good look at it yesterday evening at the wake.

  Arthur had resembled a sculpture from Madame Tussauds, lying cold and motionless on a cushion of white satin inside an elegantly carved mahogany coffin with shiny brass trim. The pillow beneath his head concealed whatever the nail gun had done to his skull, and his autopsy cuts were hidden by the impeccable suit Patty had chosen for him.

  “It’s an Armani,” Patty had told her. “At least half his suits are Armani. I figure that’s what he’d want to be buried in.”

  “He looks very nice,” Lainie had responded, silently adding, for a dead man. She didn’t really understand the concept behind spectacular funerals. Jews tended to keep things simple: burial in a plain pine box within twenty-four hours of death. No flower arrangements that looked as if they should be hanging around the neck of the winning horse at the Kentucky Derby. No elaborate service. Say a prayer, stick the body in a hole, go home and cry.

  Once she and Roger had come to terms with his imminent death, they’d discussed how he wanted to be sent off. He’d told her that as far as he was concerned, she could have him cremated and save everyone a lot of money and effort. But Margaret and Henry had wanted a big funeral, and Lainie had acknowledged that funerals were designed to meet the needs of the living, not the wishes of the dead. A big funeral had been vitally important to Roger’s devastated parents, and once Roger had exhaled his last breath, he’d been beyond caring what happened to his remains. Lainie had been beyond caring, too. He was gone, and nothing—not a fancy coffin, not a manicured gravesite on a gentle rise at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, not mountains of white roses and heartfelt prayers—was going to bring him back.

  Whether or not Patty was beyond caring, she’d spared no expense in arranging her late husband’s final moments above ground. Huge stands of lilies, roses, and birds of paradise flanked his coffin, which was now closed, and a string trio played as mourners poured into the chapel. According to the gossipy woman seated in the pew behind Lainie, the musicians were on loan from the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

  Lainie recognized many of the mourners. Teachers, PTO volunteers, former students of hers and their parents, and members of the town’s various boards crowded the church, murmuring and nodding and giving one another comforting pats on the back. Officer Knapp entered the church with a couple of other policemen, and Lainie did her best to avoid meeting his gaze. Merely glimpsing the man caused her body temperature to plummet. Although she hadn’t heard from him since their session in the interrogation room two days ago, he’d never strayed far from her thoughts.

  The man suspected her of something, and he seemed to believe she was in cahoots with some construction foreman she scarcely knew. That a detective with so little brainpower should be overseeing such a delicate investigation alarmed her almost as much as his insinuations about her possible guilt—although what he believed she might be guilty of was a mystery to her.

  If she was guilty of anything, it was that she’d gone out for a drink with her friends instead of hurrying home when practice was cancelled. Knapp obviously felt she had a great deal more to feel guilty about. But what?

  She spotted Bill Stavik seated on the aisle a few rows ahead of her, fresh-scrubbed and clean-shaven and looking surprisingly dashing in a dark gray suit. He sat with several other men, most of them younger than he. She assumed they were his fellow crew members from Cavanagh Homes. Knapp must have spotted him, too, because he worked his way down the aisle and leaned over to talk to him. When Knapp turned away, Lainie saw Stavik’s face twisted into a frown.

  Her fellow suspect, she thought wryly. Her co-conspirator. What had they allegedly done to set Knapp’s blame detector buzzing louder than the release on the vestibule door at the police station? Damned if she knew.

  The string trio stopped playing, and the vaulted chapel filled with sonorous nasal chords from an organ. Lainie glanced toward Sheila, seeking direction. She’d been to a few masses in her life, and even a couple of Catholic funerals. But all she remembered was that there was a lot of standing, sitting, kneeling, and standing again. She wasn’t sure what to do when.

  Sheila was facing forward, so Lainie faced forward, too. Unfortunately, Knapp was facing rearward, and her gaze locked with his. His lips curved up into a slight but knowing smile. No doubt he considered her presence at the funeral irrefutable proof that she was evil. Was attending a funeral on a par with returning to the scene of a crime?

  “Who’s that guy staring at you?” Sheila whispered.

  “Detective Knapp from the Rockford Police,” Lainie whispered back.

  “That’s him? He sounded thinner on the phone.”

  Sheila had told Lainie at the wake last night that Knapp had called her. “I told him what we saw at Olde Towne Olé,” Sheila had informed Lainie, “but he seemed more interested in you than Arthur and his floozy.”

  “What did he say about me?”

  “He asked me if you had a boyfriend. You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?”

  “No. Karen’s in charge of the boyfriend scene in my house.”

  “That’s what I told him. He wanted to know if you were really a fourth-grade teacher, and I told him you’d had Brendan in your class last year. He asked if you were active in environmental groups. I told him I’d seen a Sierra Club calendar at your house once, and as far as I knew you always sorted your recyclables. The whole conversation was a waste of time, if you ask me.”

  Lainie’s interview with him at the police station had been a waste of time, too. Why did he care about Lainie’s views on the environment?

  Probably because he hadn’t yet discounted the possibility that People for the Preservation of the Planet had offed Arthur. And if Lainie wasn’t colluding with Stavik, she might be colluding with maniacal tree huggers.

  A shudder wrenched her spine as she recollected all the news reports she’d read over the years about people who went to prison on false charges. They rotted in jail cells, waiting for someone to produce the DNA evidence needed to exonerate them. If they were lucky enough to be rescued by a fiery lawyer and a decisive strand of hair, they emerged from behind bars to discover that their lives on the outside were totally destroyed, their jobs gone, their families having abandoned them. This kind of thing really happened.

  “Let us rise,” the priest said, and a symphony of creaking wood and thumps and scuffling sounds filled the chapel as people stood. Lainie stood, too, and wished she were Catholic so she could pray that Knapp would find the culprit quickly and leave her alone. She prayed anyway. Jesus had been a Jew, after all. He could put in a good word for her with God, couldn’t he?

  Somewhere to her right, she heard soft female sobbing. Up by the altar, the priest was saying something about eternal rest. Angie nudged her and whispered, “Who’s that guy staring at you?”

  Lainie was about to answer that it was Detective Knapp, but when she peered in his direction, she saw that his attention was riveted to the priest. Scanning the church, she noticed that Stavik was eyeing her.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered back.

  “He’s a hunk. And he’s definitely staring at you.”

  “He’s not a hunk.”

  “Who’s not a hunk?” Sheila whispered, leaning across Lainie so she could hear Angie.

  “That guy who’s staring at Lainie. With the blondish hair.”

  “He’s not a hunk,” Lainie repeated.

  “Yes he is,” Sheila said. “Why is he staring at you?”

  To Lainie’s relief, everyone resumed their seats in another clatter of squeaking wood and shuffling feet. Lainie sank onto the hard wooden bench and bowed her head, figuring she could simultaneo
usly look pious and avoid Stavik’s piercing gaze.

  Sheila and Angie scrutinized her. She was probably blushing. And while it was one thing to lie to the police, it was quite another to lie to your friends. “He’s Arthur’s foreman at Emerson Village Estates,” she told them, lowering her voice to a sub-whisper after a woman one row in front of her, with squinty eyes and jowls like a mastiff’s, turned and glared.

  “How do you know him?” Angie asked.

  “I met him once,” Lainie said vaguely. “He’s married, so I don’t know why he’s staring at me.”

  “Because he’s a man,” Angie muttered. “The normal kind, not like Saint Roger.”

  As little as Lainie knew about Catholicism, she wondered whether referring to Roger as a saint inside a church was sacrilegious. Certainly, thinking about the hunkiness of a man during a funeral was inappropriate. They were here to mourn Arthur Cavanagh.

  No they weren’t. They were here to support Patty. Funerals were for the living, not the dead.

  The service lasted an hour and a half, complete with a few eulogies and a trite, maudlin speech about angels, delivered by Sean Cavanagh in a reedy early-adolescent voice. With or without a brassy blonde on his arm, Arthur hadn’t been an angel. He’d torn down trees. He’d destroyed habitats. He’d never attended Colonielles games. Rest in peace and all that, but no, he didn’t deserve to be greeted by a flock of angels at the gates of heaven—which, according to Sean’s recitation, would resemble the stone gates at the entry to Lafayette Glen, one of Arthur’s more established subdivisions.

  The service concluded with the string trio performing something painfully slow and solemn. Angie volunteered to drive Lainie and Sheila to the cemetery—“I love driving in caravans, really,” she swore—and they escaped from the church into the overcast morning.

  Lainie thought she heard a man’s voice call her name as she descended the stone steps with her friends, but she ignored it, congratulating herself on her willpower in not turning to see whose voice it was. A neighbor or a student’s father, she hoped. Not Knapp or Stavik. Please, not them.

  Angie had to steer around a small cluster of protesters, clad in outfits that could have been filched from a touring company of Rent, who stood at the edge of the church’s parking lot and held up signs that read, “Arthur Cavanagh Died. Animals Live,” “Those Who Destroy Heaven On Earth Do Not Find Heaven In Death,” and “Deer God.”

  “Tasteless,” Sheila muttered. “I mean, I love animals, too. But I also love people. You don’t do that at someone’s funeral.”

  “Were they from People for the Preservation of the Planet?” Lainie asked.

  “Who knows?” Angie gleefully tailgated the car in front of her in the cortège. “Arthur pissed off a lot of folks with his subdivisions. But he’s not even cold in the ground. He’s not even in the ground. And frankly, if I’m behind the wheel and a deer charges at me, I’d rather see the deer die than me.”

  “Maybe deers wouldn’t hit cars so often if people like Arthur hadn’t destroyed their habitat,” Lainie argued, recalling the denuded expanse where the mansions of Emerson Village Estates were to be built. “Or is it deer? I’m a teacher. I should know whether deer plural gets an S.”

  “Christ,” Angie growled, charging through a red light to keep up with the cortège. “Did you see that jackass? He nearly hit me. Doesn’t he know that funeral processions have the right of way? It’s bad luck to try to break into a funeral procession. That driver is going to fall and fracture his leg in the next few days, I guarantee it. So what do you think our chances are against Burlington this year?”

  “They beat us last year,” Sheila reminded her.

  “Yeah, but they’re getting old.”

  “So are we,” Lainie said.

  “You’re not getting old,” Angie assured her. “You still play like a college girl. We’re going to whip their butts.”

  “Do you think Patty’ll want to play?” Sheila asked.

  “If she’s like me, she will,” Lainie said. Roger had died near the end of the fall soccer season, but she had treasured the few practices and games she’d attended after his death. Running had been cathartic. Kicking the soccer ball had soothed her. Dribbling and passing had been a vast improvement over lying on the sofa in the den and shedding enough tears to flood the carpet. It had also been a lot more fun than reviewing the mountains of paperwork she’d had to plow through. No one had ever warned her that losing a husband was a bureaucratic nightmare.

  “What did you think of Patty’s dress?” Angie asked. “I heard she drove downtown yesterday and picked something at a boutique on Newbury Street, just for today.”

  “That’s ghoulish.” Sheila grimaced. “To turn your husband’s death into a shopping spree.”

  “Don’t judge her,” Lainie said, even though she agreed with Sheila. “People do crazy things when they’re grieving. And Patty likes to look good.”

  “I bet she got a manicure yesterday, too,” Angie said.

  “Well, she has to shake a lot of hands.” The last thing Lainie had thought about after losing her husband was the condition of her fingernails. The second-to-last thing she’d thought about was what she would wear to the funeral, although that concern had weighed heavily on her mother-in-law’s mind. But as she’d said, judging Patty—or any new widow—was unfair.

  The sun struggled to peek through the clouds as Lainie, Sheila, and Angie reached the cemetery. After emerging from the car, they followed the crowd toward a canopied gravesite. The ground was spongy, and Lainie was glad she’d chosen stack-heeled shoes. The chic women in spike heels struggled to keep from sinking deep into the soft earth with each step.

  “Nice service, wasn’t it?” Knapp said, sidling up beside her.

  Lainie turned desperately to Angie and Sheila, who peered at Knapp but said nothing. He was waiting for Lainie to speak, so she said, “I don’t think there’s such a thing as a nice funeral service.”

  “You know,” Knapp remarked with phony nonchalance, “it’s common for a murderer to attend a victim’s funeral. Do you suppose Cavanagh’s murderer is here today?”

  “It never crossed my mind,” Lainie said, clenching her hands at her sides, squeezing her tension out through her fists so it wouldn’t emerge in her voice. “It was thoughtful of you to attend, Detective Knapp.”

  His smile faded and his eyes hardened. “Don’t leave town,” he warned, then stalked over to a group of police officers standing behind the rows of folding chairs that had been set up under the canopy.

  “He’s weird,” Sheila commented.

  “Yeah, I’d steer clear of him if I were you,” Angie concurred.

  Lainie wished she could.

  She and her friends remained standing, leaving the chairs for Arthur’s relatives and the more elderly mourners. The priest made another speech, the casket was lowered into its hole, a classical guitarist performed something slightly less gloomy than the last piece the string trio had played at the church, and flowers from one of the arrangements were distributed to guests, who dabbed their eyes and tossed the blossoms down the shaft, on top of the coffin.

  Angie and Sheila joined the line of people waiting to throw flowers at Arthur’s corpse. Lainie held back. Her stomach churned and her tongue tasted like rusty metal. She didn’t want to deal with Knapp’s shiny black eyes and his stupid suspicions, or Stavik’s hunkiness and his questionable intentions. She didn’t want to deal with all the memories of Roger’s death that this funeral stirred inside her.

  “We have to talk,” a man’s voice mumbled behind her—the same voice that had called her name outside the church.

  Not Knapp’s voice, she realized, glancing at the polished loafers next to her shoes, and the tailored gray trousers. She caught a whiff of Stavik’s aftershave and inched away. “No we don’t,” she muttered, refusin
g to look at him and barely moving her lips. “I don’t want anything to do with you.” God help her if Knapp saw him standing next to her.

  “It’s important.”

  “It’s important for you to stay away from me. You’ve already gotten me into trouble.”

  “That’s why we have to talk. I’ll call you.”

  “No,” she said, but he was already walking away. She knew he’d be able to find her phone number online. She was the only Lovett in Rockford.

  She didn’t want to talk to him. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She wanted to go home, lace on her sneakers, and run a few miles. She wanted to run until she was awash in sweat and her brain was empty. She wanted to run on a trail through a pristine forest, but there was precious little pristine forest left in Rockford, thanks to developers like Arthur Cavanagh.

  She wanted not to be a part of this entire mess. But she was, and with Knapp watching her and Stavik threatening to call her, she couldn’t seem to extricate herself from it.

  She remembered the time a few years ago when one of her students got rubber cement stuck in her hair. Lainie had never learned how the glue had gotten there, although she suspected Amanda had put it there herself, a playful experiment. Lainie had spent much of her lunch break trying to get the dried, congealing glue out of Amanda’s hair, and then had sent her to the school nurse. The next day Amanda had come to school with a new, extremely short haircut.

  Lainie wished a haircut could rid her of the sticky goo that Arthur Cavanagh’s death had splashed on her. If only Marianne at Stellara could give her a nice, neat trim and make this all go away.

  Deer God, she thought with a sigh.

  Chapter Eight

  BIG BRAD, KAREN’S car, a bucket of sudsy water, and a hose filled Lainie’s driveway when she arrived home. She’d opted out of the buffet lunch Patty was hosting at the Old Colonial Inn. The notion of returning to the historical restaurant for a gathering that would include Bill Stavik transformed her stomach from unsettled to downright turbulent. The notion of being there with Stavik while Knapp was spying on them made her even queasier. En route to the restaurant, Angie had detoured to Our Lady of Mercy to drop Lainie off in the lot, where she’d left her car. The protesting environmentalists had disbanded—or perhaps they’d moved their picket signs down to the restaurant. Were the tree huggers under suspicion, too? Lainie would grant that their signs were pretty tasteless, but could people who loved animals and nature and life that much pull off a murder, let alone one involving a nail gun? Then again, she couldn’t pull off such a murder, but for reasons she couldn’t begin to fathom, Knapp suspected her of . . . well, something.