Pilate's Cross

by J Alexander Greenwood

  Pilate indulged in a sneer as he crunched on his bacon. “Is it that bad, Mr. Pilate?”

  Pilate turned to see Abbey Prince standing beside his table, dressed in unflattering sweatpants, a Cougars sweatshirt, and a ball cap, with her brown hair sticking out the back in a ponytail. In spite of her very non-feminine attire, Abbey was pretty in a fresh-scrubbed, corn-fed, farm girl way—the absolute epitome of the girl next door. She was in his speech class on Mondays and Wednesdays.

  “Huh?” he said.

  “The bacon. You made a face,” she said.

  “Oh yeah.” He wanted to tell her that he was actually making a face at the biggest asshole on campus, but he could only assume that would not be proper. “It’s a little burnt. I prefer it chewy.”

  “Oh, me too. Absolutely!” she said.

  Pilate thought his student unnaturally perky for this time of day.

  She hovered, holding her tray and glancing at the table. “Abbey, would you care to join me?” he said.

  She seemed to smile with her entire body. “Sure.” Abbey sat with one chair between her and Pilate. Her ponytail flopped as she removed her hat and appeared to say a silent prayer over her food. Seconds later, she was spearing scrambled eggs using a fork with two bent tines.

  “Was that a prayer?” Pilate asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Sometimes I give thanks for my food, but mostly I pray I won’t eat too much.”

  Pilate wasn’t sure if she was serious and had no idea how to respond without insulting her.

  Fortunately, she let him off the hook with a laugh. “You can take the girl out of the farm…” she said.

  Pilate liked Abbey. She was studying to be a special education teacher and was one of the brighter lights among the students he taught.

  “I think it’s nice,” he said, eating a corner off a piece of buttery wheat toast.

  “Mama and Daddy made me promise I would,” she said. “So they’re farmers?”

  “Yes,” she said, a little put out. “Remember my speech on my family history?”

  “Right,” Pilate said. “Sorry. I have more than a hundred students to keep track of.”

  “Sure,” she said, drinking skim milk from a plastic tumbler.

  “So, Abbey, how’s everything?”

  “Oh, okay,” she said. “School’s all right. Grades are pretty good. I start student teaching next semester.”

  “Well, you’ve worked very hard,” he said. “As I recall, you’re already a senior after two years. No breaks, huh?”

  “Nope,” she said. “I just wish I had taken a little more time to have fun, though, ya know?”

  “Yes, I understand,” Pilate said.

  Abbey’s features made the shift from slightly heavy teenager to curvy woman at that very moment.

  “I rushed through my bachelor’s degree too.”

  “Did you have any fun?” she said, looking over her milk at Pilate in a way that suggested something a far cry different than the ring toss at the county fair.

  He smiled. “That is none of your business.”

  “Oh come on, Mr. Pilate! You can tell me.”

  “No, no I can’t, Abbey.” He ate more wheat toast.

  “Does anyone ever call you Mr. Pill-ot-ees?” she asked.

  “Never more than once,” he said.

  She finished her milk.

  He surveyed her face a moment. She really was pretty. He indulged in a small fantasy as she finished her eggs. If I were a lot less damaged and a few years younger, he thought, this young lady would be sharing my bed.

  “So you’re not married, are you?” she said, startling him a little from his impure reverie.

  “Um, no,” he said.

  Her eyes darted from his plate to hers. “Divorced?” she said, looking at her bacon. She said it as if the concept were worthy of shame but that she could make an exception in Pilate’s case.

  “Yes,” Pilate said. “What happened?”

  “Life,” Pilate said, putting the toast down and wiping his mouth with a paper napkin. He suddenly felt old, used up, and sickened at his thoughts of bedding the innocent girl.

  “Oh I’m sorry, Mr. Pilate,” she said, her eyes a little moist. “I just think you’re such a neat guy. Whoever she was, she must have been crazy to leave you.”

  “How do you know she left me?” Pilate said, smiling as he stood up. “See you in class.”

  “Bye, Mr. Pilate. See ya,” she said, her bright smile returning, though her cheeks were flush with embarrassment.

  “Abbey?” he said, stopping and walking back to her. “Yes?” she said, turning to him.

  “You’re neat too,” he said, smiling. Abbey smiled back, relieved.

  Pilate put his tray in the return, walked to the door, and ran into Kate, who was just on her way in. “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” she replied. “You okay?”

  “Sure, but I was going to ask you the same question,” he said. “It was a rough night, but we made it, thanks to Curious

  George, chocolate milk, and graham crackers.”

  “Okay. Well, if there’s anything you need—” Pilate started to say.

  Abbey appeared behind them and interrupted him. “Mr.

  Pilate, could I come by during office hours?” She glanced at Kate. “Oh, Miss Nathaniel, hi. Sorry to interrupt. I didn’t see you.”

  Kate nodded, turned away three-quarters, and rolled her eyes.

  “Um…sure, Abbey. Come on by,” Pilate said.

  “It’s a date!“ Abbey said, perky as ever. The door closed behind her as she bolted back to her dorm.

  “You really shouldn’t date your students,” Kate said. “Hilarious,” Pilate said.

  “You were saying, before your girlfriend interrupted?”

  “I was just saying if you need anything…” Pilate said, his hands in his front pockets, looking at the floor like an embarrassed schoolboy.

  “How about a drink Friday night?”

  “That sounds good,” Pilate said, “but you’ll have to drive. My car’s in intensive care at Jimmy’s.”

  “I can handle that,” Kate said. “But do me a favor in the meantime.”

  “Anything,” Pilate said.

  “When you have your date with Abbey, ask if she babysits,” Kate said, gently poking Pilate in the arm as she walked away.

  Like a good boy, Pilate went to work. He taught his classes, graded papers, and met with the other instructors for an in-service meeting about plagiarism. Kate attended with him and eight other instructors. They listened to Dean Trevathan talk about the hazards of online rip-offs of source material for term papers.

  Pilate stole a glance at Kate, who sat on the opposite side and far end of the conference table. She was earnestly taking a few notes, carefully ignoring Pilate’s attempts to catch her eye.

  Afterward, Pilate retreated to his deserted office. Abbey strolled in just long enough to ask about the next class assignment and make a couple of thinly-veiled queries about Pilate’s sex life.

  “That Riley Pierson sure is a nice guy,” Pilate said.

  “He’s immature,” Abbey said with a pout. “He peed his pants on the bus in grade school.” She crinkled her nose.

  “People change. You wouldn’t believe what I did in high school to this obnoxious guy in the school play,” he said.

  “What?” she asked, her face alit.

  “Let’s just say it involved a harmonica and something, uh…unhygienic. The point is, you shouldn’t judge people by one event in their lives, right?”

  She nodded.

  He shooed the oversexed coed from his office and locked himself in.

  Pilate didn’t really have much to do, but he just couldn’t face a return to his depressingly lonesome apartment. It was Thursday, and the next night promised more time with Kate. She would be a welcome diversion from the bizarre happenings of the past few days and his paranoid thoughts, but until then, he had to entertain himself somehow.

  He str
aightened his desk, glancing at the photo of his parents. He thought about calling them, but decided he wasn’t really in a talking mood. His mother would sense his anxiety and start to worry anyway; and Pilate’s mother had enough problems of her own.

  The office was like a prison cell in its dimensions and pretty warm from the unmanageable steam heating system employed by the nearly century-old building. Pilate opened the window that overlooked a small alley between the Arts building and admin. A gust of cold January air revived him in an instant.

  He wanted a cigarette, but he knew that would be playing right into the hands of fate. With his recent luck, he’d set off some hidden smoke alarm, even with the window open. I guess I used up all my good fortune at that Indian casino, he thought.

  Another gust of wind whistled through the window, blowing several graded papers off his desk and onto the floor next to his book bag. As he scooped them up, the 1963 murder file in his bag caught his eye.

  Pilate replaced the papers on his desk and tucked the thick murder file envelope under his arm as he reached over to close the window.

  Falling wearily into his chair, he opened the envelope and flipped through the photocopies until he found a story printed in the journal of the state historical society. Written about twenty years after the murders occurred, it turgidly put all the details together in a neat bow, citing “moral decay“ as the culprit.

  “Is this how you take your mind off grave robbers? Reading about an old murder?” Simon teased from over his shoulder.

  Pilate ignored the voice.

  “You haven’t taken your pills in two months.” This time, Simon’s tone was a nagging I-told-you-so. “Aren’t you having trouble concentrating?”

  Pilate indeed was having trouble concentrating, and he’d been doing reckless things. Probably for the first time in years, he was completely off the antidepressants that usually kept him on an even keel. His moods went from elation to depression in a matter of hours. Fortunately he was good at concealing the churning seas inside him from people, as long as he didn’t have to spend much time around them.

  “That’s why you didn’t call good old Mom, huh? She’d know in two sentences how crazy you are right now,” Simon said. “And she knows from crazy.”

  He hadn’t been sleeping well, and intellectually, he knew he was beginning to feel more than slightly paranoid. The problem was, once he became paranoid, his intellect couldn’t save him from its effects. The emotional side took over, as if he were a spectator watching himself perform an erratic show.

  “Paranoia…or is it reality?” Pilate said aloud.

  “You tell me,” Simon said. “That doctor cleared you years ago of being schizophrenic. You’re just severely depressed. You don’t actually hear my voice, do you?”

  Pilate felt an odd comfort to be reminded that he merely had bouts of severe depression—hellish, yes, but it was still preferable to schizophrenia. “Then why don’t you go away?”

  “Everyone needs a hobby,” Simon said.

  The question of who Simon was would have to take a back seat to the matters at hand. “Well, someone did run me off the road.”

  “Were you just in the way of someone in a hurry? A drunk driver, perhaps?”

  “I have no idea,” Pilate said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I just know I can’t stay here forever.”

  “The way you’re going, I don’t think that will be much of an issue.” Simon chuckled. “Besides, Sam called you again, didn’t she? She obviously still cares.” He said the last three words like a giggly schoolgirl would if the star quarterback winked at her.

  “She was drunk.”

  “Well, sometimes a strong drink brings out the strongest feelings, you know. Mr. Vodka lets the old guard down.”

  Pilate rubbed his forehead with his palm. “You’re not real, Simon,” Pilate said. “You really can fuck off now. Just get out of my head.”

  “I can only assume you want me in your head. Otherwise you would refill your prescription,” he said.

  “First thing tomorrow, I will, buddy. You can bank on it.”

  “Tough to get to the Goss City pharmacy/five-and-dime soda fountain without a car,” Simon said. “Besides, do you really want Opie and Andy and everyone in Mayberry knowing you take those embarrassing antidepressants?”

  “Why would I be embarrassed that I need medication? It’s just that I don’t need Lindstrom using it against me, and—”

  Pilate’s phone jingled. Simon evaporated. “Hello?”

  It was Abbey, who claimed she’d “forgotten to mention“ that she was going bowling that night in Goss City and that it would “totally rock“ if he came along.

  He made his apologies, telling her “some other time.” Her pout was nearly audible.

  He hung up the phone, smiling. Yawning, he started to put the old historical society article about the murders back in the envelope when a word in the story caught his eye. “Cremated. Professor Bernard’s body was cremated, though his family never claimed his cremains.” Pilate reread the sentence twice, then the paragraph, and then the complete story. Cremains? That’s a new one. As of the 1980s, no one from Bernard’s family had claimed his ashes from the Nathaniel Mortuary. Pilate clicked a pen against his front teeth. What happens to a person’s ashes if nobody claims them?

  Back at his apartment, he powered up his computer and used Krall’s password to access the library’s LexisNexis account and the Internet. Once he got into the college network, he did a Web search on cremated remains, cremains being his keyword.

  He wasted an hour surfing between horror stories of mistreated human remains. For starters, the director of a Georgia funeral home had claimed to be cremating people but was instead stacking the rotting corpses in a storage shed. He’d substituted concrete dust and wood chips for ashes.

  His need for news of the prurient satisfied, he surfed until he found what he was really searching for. Many mortuaries are faced with the problem of families not understanding that cremation in itself is not the final disposition of remains. Several articles revealed stories of ashes stored in mortuaries for years, even decades.

  One funeral director had the ashes of more than 200 people in his care. The director was quoted as saying he had tried all avenues to contact next of kin, to no avail. So, he reported he was going to bury the ashes in his cemetery and be done with them. “These are human remains, after all,” he said. “You wouldn’t leave an intact body lying around for decades, would you?”

  Pilate wondered if Brady Bernard was still “lying around“ Nathaniel’s Mortuary. Krall had mentioned a tornado that had hit in the 1980s, followed by a fire a few years later. An Internet search of the Cross Courier’s archives verified his reports.

  The cremains of Brady Bernard could have been inadvertently discarded then or unceremoniously buried since…or put in a vault.

  His eyes throbbing, Pilate shut off the computer and crawled into bed. He could only think about Friday, about tomorrow, about Kate.

  Drinking coffee in the small café overlooking the student union fitness center, Pilate eyed Abbey Prince through the condensation-fogged glass as she exercised. She wore her hair in pigtails. She stretched, putting her farm girl posterior pleasantly in view.

  “Sure, she’s pretty,” Krall said, “but two years after you marry that gal, her ass will spread out like a week’s washing.”

  Pilate waved him off.

  “But man, what a ride in the meantime, huh?” Krall leered over his coffee cup.

  “You’re a dirty old man, Krall,” Pilate said. He looked down at the packets of sugar he was aimlessly arranging on the table in front of him.

  “A badge of honor I wear proudly on my shabby breast,” he said. Friday was crawling by; Pilate’s only class of the day was done. He’d been meeting Krall for coffee and a chat in the student union the past few Fridays.

  “Krall,” Pilate said, “something’s really been bugging me.”

  “What?” Krall looked o
ver his shoulder at a gaggle of girls coming in from the cold and rushing up to the counter.

  “The whole crypt thing,” he said.

  “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. Why the hell did Scovill invite you along to that little picnic?”

  “Not sure.” Pilate shrugged. “I thought it was odd, too, but maybe he thought of me as a disinterested party who could offer an objective opinion. His deputy was upset. Or he may have thought I did it and was hoping I’d trip myself up. Don’t know. I just wish I could say I hadn’t seen that stuff.”

  “Well, have ya heard anything new?” Krall said. “No. You?”

  Krall shook his head. “Not a peep. I think the whole thing’s got Scovill flummoxed.”

  Pilate swallowed a sugary mouthful of coffee. “Why would anybody want to break into Martin and Millie Nathaniel’s coffins?”

  Krall’s face took on a pained look, as if he were working out a tough math problem. “You got me. Probably just a stupid, meaningless prank.”

  Pilate gestured at the girls and at a couple of young men who were studying at a table. “Do any of these kids look like ghouls to you? Heck, eighty percent of the kids who come here came from a twenty-five mile radius,” Pilate said. “Surely they’d have no interest in digging up the dead, especially since half of them are related somehow. And the other kids, the ones from the city, would be scared to death of pissing off the locals. I just don’t buy the student prank explanation.”

  “So you read the new marketing guy’s demographic report, eh? You’ve really put some thought into this, haven’t you?” Krall said.

  “Well, when you’re nearly killed by a truck speeding away from the scene of the crime and then the local constabulary introduces you, up close and personal, to Grif Nathaniel’s decomposing ancestors…”

  Krall watched Abbey as she chugged away on the Stairmaster. “Work those glutes, Abigail,” he said shamelessly.

  Pilate tossed a sugar packet on the table.