No Body Page 3

  Standing there in the near-rain, by a deepening grave, I shivered at the meanderings of my own imagination. If I weren’t careful, I would be seeing ghosts.

  Stan was staring at the far fence, too.

  “In your widest dreams,” I mused aloud, “did you ever think there was nobody actually buried there?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I did.”

  “What?” I stared at him. “You knew?”

  “Well, I never dug up a grave to check it out, but yeah, I’ve always suspected it.”

  I was dumbfounded and must have looked it.

  “You ever walk around in an old graveyard, Jenny? You know how the ground is uneven? Because of the sinking of the graves?”

  “Yes,” I said shortly.

  He flushed. “Well, you ever take a stroll in Union Hill?”

  “Sure.” I felt my eyes widen. “The ground is even, Stan! Flat as an ironing board!”

  “Yep. It’s decaying coffins and bodies that cause the ground to sink. That’s one of the reasons that modem cemeteries require vaults. I mean, we don’t want to drive our trucks over the ground and have them fall in a hole. But if there aren’t any bodies or coffins, there’s no sink. Believe me, nobody’s ever had to refill the graves in Union Hill.”

  “You didn’t tell anybody!”

  He shrugged, but the flush remained on his cheeks. “Look at the fuss now that everybody knows. Weren’t you happier when you thought your dearly beloved were safe and snug underground? Wasn’t Miss Grant happier? What does anybody gain from this knowledge?”

  “You think I ought to butt out.”

  He glanced at me. “Why not let sleeping dogs . . . bodies . . . lie, Jenny?”

  I gestured impatiently toward the fence. “But those particular bodies aren’t sleeping, Stan.”

  “Neither,” he said firmly, “are they walking.”

  “Stan! We can’t just fill in the dirt and prop up the tombstones and pretend our relatives are buried there! Do you think people are going to bring out their picnics and flowers on Memorial Day and sit there over empty graves? You think this town is going to rest until we find those bodies and bury them where they belong?”

  “They’re dead. What do they care where they’re buried?”

  “You surprise me,” I said. “In the extremis.”

  His smile flickered. “Extremis. Very good. You’re picking up our lingo like a born funeral director. Next thing you’ll be saying ‘remains’ instead of ‘bodies’ and ‘caskets’ instead of ‘coffins.’”

  I let him change the subject. “What’s the difference?”

  “Only semantics, I suppose.” He frowned. “They were generally called coffins until the nineteenth century. Then we pinned a label on them that connotes something fine and valuable. I mean, what would you put in caskets, Jenny? You’d put jewels, treasures, things of great worth, right? You wouldn’t dump something you valued in a plain pine box, now would you? A coffin can be a plain pine box in which to dump a body, but a casket . . . now a casket is something fine and beautiful in which to secure the remains!”

  “Fine, beautiful, and expensive.”

  He grinned. “Now you’ve got it.”

  “Stan,” I said, “are you sure you’re in the right business?”

  “Yes,” he said. I waited for him to expand on this seeming contradiction between his ironic view of his profession and his choice of that profession as a life’s work, but he didn’t. My old high school classmate was, it seemed, a more complicated man than I had previously assumed. I turned my attention back to the gravediggers.

  Two of them descended into the grave with their shovels to finish the job. The first one in was a white kid, maybe nineteen. His dark blond hair stood up in greasy, sculpted points on his head, like the spikes on a mace. He wore work boots and gray-and-white striped coveralls over a bulky gray sweater. A large gold earring—a skull and crossbones—dangled on a gold chain from his right earlobe. The other two gravediggers were black men, considerably older than the kid, maybe in their fifties, with creased and tired faces that said maybe gravedigging wasn’t the worst job they had ever had.

  As if he were suddenly aware of my gaze, the white kid stuck his shovel in the dirt and looked up at me from inside the grave. He stared at me out of dark, blank eyes. After a long, unsmiling moment, he lowered his gaze and let it travel slowly, insolently down my body. Then with a flicker of a private smile, he hoisted his shovel again.

  I shivered. “How much longer?” I asked Stan.

  “Not much.”

  A strong, moisture-laden gust of wind came off the ocean. I shivered again. The folks at the graveside service, even nearer to the ocean, must be freezing, I thought. I hoped their minister and our gravediggers hurried. I felt unaccountably chilled by something colder and more penetrating than the weather. I wished I were back at the office or, better yet, at home beside the fireplace.

  “Who are they burying over there?” I asked, to take my mind off my misgivings.

  Stan looked in the direction my finger was pointing.

  “One of ours,” he said. “John Rudolph. He was one of our funeral directors. That’s his wife over there in the brown coat, and his kids.” Stan, too, pointed, and said morosely, “I should be there. If it weren’t for this disinterment mess, I would be, along with everybody else from our shop.”

  That explained the empty desks and the closed doors. Not to mention the unusual number of perfectly correct black suits, male and female, that I observed in attendance at the graveside. Maybe Sylvia Davis, the receptionist, had a good excuse, after all, for her absence from her desk. Or maybe she’d had too good a time at the Founder’s Day party the night before.

  “What did he the of, Stan?” It seemed somehow callous to watch a burial without becoming acquainted with the deceased, however slightly and posthumously.

  “Terminal hominess,” Stan blurted out. He blushed. “God, I shouldn’t have said that. A heart attack, Jenny, that’s what it was. Only thirty-eight years old. Built like a bantam rooster; you’d have thought he was one of those tough little birds who would live forever. Thirty-eight years old! You know, if I weren’t already surrounded by plenty of evidence of mortality, that’d do it for me.”

  I hardly heard him. I was squinting into the rain at a most remarkable sight. I nudged Stan and pointed again.

  He, too, stared at the unlikely vision coming toward us across the muddy lawn in the rain. “My God, I’ve never seen my father run,” Stan said in awestruck tones. Then, half-jokingly, “What do you suppose the old man thinks I’ve done now?”

  From inside the grave there came a disembodied bellow: “We’ve hit the vault!”

  “Open ’er up!” Stan yelled back.

  But we weren’t nearly so interested in that operation anymore as we were in the arrival of Spitt Pittman. He came puffing up to us like a short, fat locomotive.

  “Stanley!” It was all he managed to sputter before he bent over and placed his hands on his knees. Stan and I had to bend over, too, to catch his words. We must have looked, I thought, like penitents, or three drunks losing our lunch. Between gasps, Spitt issued commands: “Get over there, boy, and get that damn woman to calm down! Tell her it’s in bad taste, tell her it’s locked, tell her it’s against the law, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Who?” Stan asked, reasonably enough, I thought. “What?”

  “Muriel Rudolph, you dumb bunny!” Plainly, Spitt Pittman was furious and his son was the nearest handy target. The open grave behind us had become quiet as a, well, tomb. The third gravedigger stepped back a few feet from the edge of the grave as if he hoped he could disappear between rain-drops. “She wants the damn coffin opened! Says she’s got to make sure he’s in there! Says with all those bodies missing, maybe somebody has stolen John!”

  Stan groaned. “Incredible.”

  “You’re telling me?” His father managed to stand up, so Stan and I rose again, too. “What does the damn fool woman think, that w
e want to keep him around because we’re so sorry to lose him? Hell, he was a pain in the butt when he was alive, so who’d want him when he’s dead?”

  “Now, Dad.”

  “Go,” his father commanded.

  Stan went, followed in single file by Spitt and, for lack of anywhere else to hang out in the memorial park, me. We approached the green canopy like referees approaching the foul line, and the occupants stared back like fans expecting to get the short end of the call. I heard, behind us, the sound of a forklift being started as the gravediggers prepared to lift off the cement lid of the vault.

  I paused, with Spitt, on the far side of the coffin, opposite the mourners. Together we watched Stan go to the widow.

  Muriel Rudolph was tiny, with lank, brown hair and sallow skin. She looked as if she were constructed of bird bones, and a wren’s at that. She was plain as a wren, too, and haggard as any other widow, making it difficult for me to guess her age. Even from across the grave, I could see the blue pools under her eyes and the deep lines of weariness that no makeup could disguise. I watched her oldest child, a teenage girl, turn her two little brothers away from the grave and shuffle them off through the rain to one of the waiting limousines.

  “Stan.” The widow’s voice was small and piping, a bird’s chirp, ending in a sob. She stopped, bit her lower lip, risked one more word. “Please.”

  “Sure,” Stan replied easily, quickly. A collective sigh escaped from the canopy like a soft wind. “No problem. You know we didn’t prepare him for an open-casket service, Muriel, so maybe we’d better step on around to the other side of the box and just the two of us take a quick look. Okay?”

  She sagged onto the arm he offered, nodding her head again and again as if she were beyond words. The top of her head came barely to the middle of his chest, so that she looked from the rear like a little girl all dressed up for a walk with daddy. At my side, Spitt sucked air like a flat tire. I supposed he didn’t dare object, but God only knew what he would say to his son later.

  With a show of sweet and gentle protectiveness, Stan ushered the widow to our side of the grave. He led her onto a relatively dry patch of earth a couple of feet from where the coffin was suspended for lowering into the hole. He squeezed her arm reassuringly, then walked alone to the edge of the grave. With quick, efficient movements, Stan unsealed the coffin. He wrapped his fingers around the brass handles and lifted the lid to reveal a plush interior upholstered in champagne velvet. From what little I could see, it looked warm and cozy on this miserable day. The body of the late John Rudolph, humped under a white sheet, waited a good deal more comfortably in there than the rest of us did outside. I did not, however, go so far as to envy him.

  Stan turned back to face the widow.

  “Muriel? Now?”

  She nodded. He guided her forward, then he slowly drew back the sheeting that covered her husband.

  Muriel Rudolph screamed.

  “It’s John,” Stan said in a loud, stunned voice, “. . . and Sylvia.”

  4

  Spitt Pittman clutched my arm. “Sweet Jesus,” he breathed. Shrill cries and startled oaths flew up around us as pandemonium broke out among the crowd of mourners. There were a few in the crowd who screamed and ran away to their cars, as if they were afraid of being sucked, like matter into a black hole, into that crowded coffin themselves. But most of the mourners surged forward, to see for themselves. Spitt released the death grip he had on my elbow. He trudged toward the open coffin like a man who hopes that if he gives it enough time, the thing he doesn’t want to see will disappear. I followed on unsteady legs.

  I stared into the coffin.

  Face down, the dead secretary embraced the dead funeral director, like a widow who has thrown herself into her husband’s coffin in a fit of passionate grief. They fit snugly together in the deep coffin, as if they had fallen asleep after making love on a couch. Their faces were covered by a fan of her long blond hair, so that I couldn’t tell if she had been pretty. But judging by the cut of her hair and by the plump firmness of her thighs, which showed beneath the skirt that was hiked up to her hips, I figured her to be younger than I, maybe twenty-five or so. Her suit looked new, the kind of unbecoming thing a young woman not yet old enough to fill her closet with clothes for deaths as well as for parties runs out at the last minute to buy for a funeral. If she had lived, she would have hated the suit, I thought irrelevantly; after a few years, she would have put it out in a paper bag for the Goodwill truck to pick up. Her white ruffled blouse and her backless high-heeled shoes were expensive looking but wrong; the sort of thing a young career woman buys before she acquires taste. I decided, however, that her taste was not nearly as wretched as mine was for conducting a fashion seminar over a corpse.

  “Police,” I said to Stan. “You have to call them.”

  “Police.” The crowd took up the foreboding word like a chant, and it whispered all around us like a hissing breeze, “Police, police, police.”

  “She’s right,” said a baritone voice at our shoulders.

  I turned to find that it belonged to a slender, olive-skinned man who looked about thirty-five. He wasn’t wearing glasses, but he looked as if he ought to—thick, sturdy ones, with black frames. There was something about him, standing quietly there in the rain in his black suit, that made me think of a slim, young tree, in the late autumn when its leaves have fallen and its branches are plain and bare. He was saying in his pleasant, neutral voice, “And we’ll have to tell her husband, Stan.”

  The crowd took up those words, too, like a second chorus to their chant: “Her husband . . . husband . . . tell her husband.”

  “I’ll call him, if you like,” the dark young man said.

  “Oh, God,” Stan replied, which the man seemed to take as assent, because he started to move away. But Stan suddenly began to babble introductions. “Jenny, I’d like you to meet Aaron Friedman, our personnel director. Aaron, Jenny Cain. She’s an old friend of mine, and . . .”

  “Police?” The widow had remained so quiet and frozen beside that awful grave that I had nearly forgotten her. Now her tiny hands were plucking at Stan, her colorless little mouth was trembling. “Police?”

  Aaron Friedman placed a slim hand briefly on her shoulder. Then he nodded courteously to me and walked off to perform his unpleasant duty. The whites of his eyes had been clear, the brown irises alert, and he struck me altogether as a man who would never have cause to regret the excesses of an office party. I watched him pause on the other side of the coffin beside a well-dressed couple: the man, tall and blond, in a dark blue suit and white shirt; the woman, elegant in a black suit with a white blouse. The two of them listened to Friedman, looked toward us, and then began to walk our way.

  At the sound of the widow’s voice, Stan seemed to come awake to the dreadful reality of her situation. “We have to get you out of here,” he murmured in a distressed tone. He looked out over the staring, milling crowd. “Dad?”

  The crowd took up the call: “Spitt. . .. Where’s Mr. Pittman? Where’s his father? . . . Spitt?”

  But his father was busy yelling contradictory orders at employees: “Get that coffin up! Don’t touch those bodies! Who closed this damn thing? Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know! Get back, get back! Come here, dummy!”

  Stan raised his voice. “Dad? Don’t you think you ought to take Muriel back inside, Dad?”

  Spitt paused in mid-tirade.

  “You poor, poor child,” he said then, coming toward Muriel Rudolph with outstretched hands.

  “Poor child,” murmured the crowd. “Poor, poor Muriel.”

  Spitt jerked her hands out of his son’s grasp. “What are you doing, letting this poor woman stand out here in the rain, you dumb bunny? Don’t you know somebody ought to take her back inside?” Spitt wrapped an arm around her like a fond uncle. Without so much as a backward glance, he steered her toward the limousines, leaving his son to cope with the extra body in the coffin.

  “What can we d
o to help, Stan?”

  It was the tall blond man with the woman in black.

  I stared again, only this time at a living, breathing wonder: Michelangelo would have carved a statue of this man and called it David. I found my glance caught in the amused contemplation of his companion, the elegantly dressed woman in the black suit. It was silk. Close up, it was also apparent that she was about ten years older than he, maybe in her early fifties. She was a big, handsome woman, but she had tamed the generosity of nature with fine tailoring. She had the knowing, understanding eyes of a good listener or a barmaid. Up close, I could also see that beneath the perfect makeup her skin sagged a bit, as if this barmaid had sampled a few too many of her own wares at the party the night before. I resisted a sudden urge to put my head on her shoulder and tell her all my troubles. I also resisted the urge to put my head on his shoulder.

  “Help?” Stan parroted. He flapped his arms at his sides like long black wings, completing the image of a big, awkward bird. “God, I don’t know, Russ. They didn’t exactly cover this situation in mortuary science.”

  “Well, it’s awful,” the woman said in a strong, sympathetic voice, and I suspected the men suddenly felt as confirmed in their dismay as I did. If this woman said it was awful, then it must be. “I do not understand how this could have happened to that poor girl. I simply cannot imagine it. But you know we’re here, Stanley, if you need us.”

  “Thanks, Beryl.” He was grateful as a puppy. Somebody must have punched his courtesy button again, because he started making introductions. “Beryl Kamiski, I’d like you to meet Jenny Cain. Beryl’s the manager of our prearrangement company, Jenny. And Russ, here, he’s one of our top salesmen.”

  “Russell Bissell,” the man said, and he held out a tanned, well-manicured hand to me. I thought he was living dangerously to offer any part of himself to a woman, because she might not give it back. I shook the hand, which was warm and muscular, then released it with regret. Close beside one of his broad shoulders, the corners of Beryl Kamiski’s wide, red mouth turned up again.