No Body

  Stan pushed his hair off his forehead with one hand. “See if you can get everybody to go home, will you, Beryl? And Russ, I’d appreciate it if you’d go back to the funeral home and sit on my father, see if you can keep him from having a coronary, okay?”

  As one, they nodded. I received a parting smile, like a benediction, from Russell Bissell. My knees weakened, as if they wanted to bob in a curtsy. Beryl Kamiski tucked her hand firmly into the crook of his elbow and they walked away. It was impossible to tell who was leading whom, but such was the magnetic pull of his looks and her personality that I felt the urge to tag along after them. Compared to them, Aaron Friedman had been only a dim and narrow shadow.

  “I’ll bet the prearrangement business is pretty darned good,” I murmured to Stan, but he was transfixed by the coffin again and didn’t reply other than to whisper, “Sylvia?” and to shake his head.

  “Sylvia?” exclaimed a rougher, deeper voice.

  The three gravediggers ringed us in a grimy trio, pushing us, with the intensity of their curiosity, closer to the edge of the grave. The mud from their previous endeavor clung to them, and was it just my imagination or did there also cling to them the hint of an odor one might not wish to identify? I began to breathe through my nose.

  The two black men stared into the coffin with wide eyes and slack mouths, as if they’d never seen a dead body before. The young punk stared, too, but his pale face wore that closed and private smile I had seen on him before.

  “Jesus,” one of the black men spoke, reverently, like one who witnesses a miracle. “How’d she get in there?”

  “Didn’t you guys close the coffin, Freddy?” Stan asked in a high-pitched, querulous voice.

  “Not me.” The one named Freddy was defensive.

  “Never seen her before,” the other black man volunteered.

  The white kid snorted, a derisive sound.

  “But you guys moved the coffin, didn’t you?” Stan sounded more hesitant than definite. “I mean, you had to move it from the morgue to the visitation room, and from there to the chapel, and then into the limo, right, Freddy?”

  But it was the punk who answered him.

  “So what? The lid was down, we didn’t notice nothin’ wrong, we didn’t do nothin’. Sir.”

  “All right, Jack.” Stan made appeasing movements with his hands. “Nobody’s blaming you for anything.”

  “If she worked here,” I interrupted, “why hasn’t anybody missed her?”

  “Everybody missed her,” Stan said with a hangdog look. I was beginning to feel annoyed with him. “She didn’t come to work this morning, and she didn’t call in, and it wasn’t like her to be so irresponsible. But she was young, and I thought maybe she’d never been to a funeral before, and . . .” He paused, as if aware of the absurdity of a funeral-home employee who was afraid of funerals.

  The punk was grinning in open contempt.

  “Didn’t anybody call her husband when she didn’t come to work?” I persisted.

  There was an infinitesimal pause, during which I sensed, more than saw, a shifting of eyes, an exchange of quick glances among the people around the grave. Stan scuffed his good black shoes against the coffin and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his black trench coat.

  “Uh, she was separated from her husband,” he said. “She lived by herself.”

  “More or less,” the punk said, and sniggered.

  I stared at him. His response was to raise his upper lip in a lewd grin. I hadn’t felt such an urge to slap the bejesus out of a man since college.

  Stan, ironically, edged closer to me.

  “Police,” I said firmly.

  Again, there was a sudden stillness around us, as if we stood in a shell. I had a fleeting impression of breaths held, bodies tensed. Then Stan cleared his throat. The world around the grave relaxed once more into movement, though it had a staccato, stop-and-go feeling, like an old movie. The mourners seemed torn between a desire to stay and satisfy their curiosity and a desire to escape from that awful graveside.

  “Would you call them, Jenny?” Stan asked. And then he added, without inflection, “You know them better than I do.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  The punk shot me a quick, curious look, then just as quickly looked away. To Stan, he said, “Don’t you want to know about the grave we just opened?”

  Stan blinked.

  “Everything’s okay,” the punk told him, then paused a beat. “Except for the headless dog . . .”

  Stan looked as if he had been struck. “The . . .”

  The punk burst out laughing.

  I pulled Stan away before he could humiliate himself any further. We skipped the limos and slogged back across the memorial park in the rain. I kept my arm hooked through his to steady him and to keep us moving purposefully forward.

  “Jenny, I’m sorry about all this.”

  “It’s hardly your fault, Stan.”

  “No, listen, about your missing bodies

  “I’d just as soon you didn’t call them mine.”

  “Come back tomorrow, and I’ll show you the archives from the old cemetery. We store them as a favor to Miss Grant. And if you catch my dad when he’s not playing king, you’ll find he knows a lot about the old days. It’s part of our family heritage, you see, and that’s important to him.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  I tugged him along toward the inviting warmth of the funeral home and the telephone. He came with heavy steps, dredging his shoes through the mud like a small boy being hauled home by his mother.

  “Do you think she was murdered, Jenny?”

  “Well,” I said gently, “the alternative is that she killed herself, then crawled into the coffin, pulled the sheet over her head, and closed the lid. I suspect that’s unlikely, don’t you, Stan?”

  He hung his head and shook it, as at a dismal fate.

  Once inside the funeral home, I divested him of his coat. I pushed him down into his own chair, poured him a cup of coffee, and called the Port Frederick police department.

  “Thanks, Jenny,” said Detective Geoffrey Bushfield. “I’ll send Ailey out with a crew immediately. You’re all right, aren’t you?”

  “Sure, just a little shaky. I’ll admit it’s an awful shock to find an extra body in a coffin.”

  “I know a sure cure for shock,” the policeman told me.

  “What’s that?”

  “Bed rest,” he said, and hung up.

  I hid my smile from Stan.

  “They’re coming,” I told him.

  But I left before they arrived. Partly because I didn’t want them to waste their time or mine in questioning me about a murder that was none of my business. Mostly because if I knew Detective Geof Bushfield, he’d want to question me privately. Alone. At home.

  5

  Late that night, I reluctantly rolled over in bed to answer the telephone.

  “Jenny, this is Lew Riss.” The reporter’s voice sounded as if its owner abused it with three packs a day. I knew him, slightly, as the police reporter for the Port Frederick Times. “Let me talk to Bushfield, will you?”

  “I would if I could, Lew,” I lied. I put my hand over the receiver and glanced at the naked police detective in bed with me. It was officially his house and his bed, though we had shared both for nearly two years, and I kept promising to marry him and make them mine, as well. I mouthed the name “Lewis Riss” at him. Geof raised his eyebrows, rolled his eyes, lifted his hands as if to ward off a blow, and generally gave a good impression of a cop who didn’t want to talk to a reporter. I said, “He’s on his way to Philadelphia for some forensic seminars, Lew.” That much was true. “And he’s already gone. I took Geof to the plane myself not an hour ago.” The detective nudged me in the ribs, a reminder that crooks and liars hang themselves by talking too much.

  “Gone?” Lew’s voice rose to a squawk. “How could he do this to me? What’d he say before he left town?”

  I considered
. I could tell him the police said that Sylvia Davis had been strangled with her own long blond hair. I could tell him they thought she had been killed in the morgue at the funeral home, because that’s where they had found a few of those hairs, pulled out by the roots. I could tell him they didn’t trust their own estimation of the time of death, because her body could have been stored in the refrigeration unit in the morgue. Based on when she was last reported seen by other people, they did know she had died sometime in the early-morning hours before the Rudolph funeral; they just didn’t yet know which hour.

  “He said good-bye.”

  “Come on, Jenny!”

  “It’s not his case, Lewis.”

  “All right.” Grudgingly. “But you were there, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Good-looking women shouldn’t ask leading questions like that, Cain. What I want from you is what it was like to be there when they found her body, for Christ’s sake. What do you think I want? What about it? You gonna be my source, or what?”

  I sighed. “I’ve never been a source before. God, what a thrill. Be still my heart.”

  “Jenny.” Lew Riss was only a few months out of Asbury Park. His New Jersey accent came in handy when he wanted to sound threatening.

  “Well,” I began, as a prelude to no.

  “Great. Meet me at The Buoy tomorrow night, sixish. We’ll have a couple of drinks, map out our strategy on how I’m gonna get this story.”

  “Strategy? Wait a minute, Riss

  But he had hung up. I decided I would meet him to suggest another destination for him.

  “Go to hell,” I said to the receiver, practicing.

  Geof put down the police journal he had been reading. “Say what?”

  “Not you . . . the jerk who just hung up on me. I think you ought to have him arrested.”

  He grinned. It was a nice sight—that wide grin, those brown eyes, the wide, bare shoulders, the broad chest, and all that tousled brown hair against the white pillow. Two ex-wives had found him equally attractive, though they found his police work less so. I tried to concentrate on what he was saying: “It may be criminal to hang up on a beautiful woman, but to the best of my knowledge, it’s not a crime. Besides, with me gone, he’ll have to deal with Ailey. From your point of view, Jenny, anything more than that would be cruel and unusual punishment. Right?”

  I lay back down beside him and pictured in my mind the coming confrontations between the egos of Lewis Riss and Detective Ailey Mason, Geof’s young partner on the force.

  “Yes.” I smiled at the ceiling. “That will do.”

  “Jenny?”

  I rolled onto my side to answer his inquiry and saw that he had suddenly turned serious on me.

  “He’s on his own,” Geof said. He gazed at my face as if I were an idea he was considering. “Ailey, I mean. This is important, to see if he has what it takes to rise to any role of responsibility in the department. Particularly in dealing with homicides.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “He won’t be reporting to me while I’m in Philadelphia.” He nodded as if to say he noted my surprise, understood my doubts. “I know. I’m not convinced it’s the smartest move I’ve ever made, but at some point I’ve got to let him sink or swim. I’d kind of been waiting for the next homicide, and when you called from the funeral home I thought, hell, this is it, perfect timing.”

  He paused, but didn’t seem to be finished, so I said: “And?”

  “And I don’t want any news.” He flopped over on his back, crossed his arms behind his head, turned his face to me.

  “From me.”

  “From anybody. What I don’t know won’t worry me, and if I’m not worried, I won’t stick my nose into his case. Then when it’s over, we’ll know that he managed it entirely on his own.”

  “Or he didn’t.”

  The grin appeared, fractionally. “I am overwhelmed by your confidence in my good judgment. I know you don’t like him, Jenny, but that doesn’t make him a bad cop.”

  “You forget that I am a fine judge of character. Why else would I choose to live with a former juvenile delinquent like you?”

  “Jenny?”

  This time, that single word held a different inquiry, one that carried a familiar, compelling invitation. I inched closer to him on our king-sized bed. We lay still for a moment, regarding each other without touching. Finally, I reached over to stroke his naked chest, from the curve of his left shoulder down into the hollow of his shoulder bone, over the bone, across the smooth width of his chest, and up the swell of the muscles on his other shoulder.

  “What a lovely man you are. It’s not just the way you look, it’s your intelligence, your sensitivity, your sense of humor, your integrity, your . . .”

  “I’ll miss you, too, Jenny.”

  We smiled at each other then.

  “Prove it,” I suggested.

  The detective presented evidence sufficient to convince a grand jury.

  The next morning, when he did leave for Philadelphia, I felt bereft with an intensity that surprised me. I felt oddly vulnerable to the elements as well, as if I’d forgotten to wear a warm jacket on a cold day.

  In the kitchen, I raised my coffee cup to absent lovers: “E pluribus unum.”

  After a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs and bagel with cream cheese, I called my secretary to let her know I might not get to the office that day. “I’m going to visit the cemetery this morning,” I told Faye, “and I’m going to try to see Stan Pittman this afternoon.”

  “You’re not going back there, are you?” she said in horrified tones. “Jenny, they found a dead body there yesterday, didn’t you read this morning’s paper?”

  “I promise you, I’ll stay out of coffins.”

  “But Jenny, it’s miserable outside.” Faye was taking her best motherly tone with me this morning. Usually that meant she was having trouble at home in getting her teenagers to listen to her. When that happened she tended to use me—or Marv, or Derek—as surrogate kids to discipline. Since Faye was long on heart and strong on common sense, we usually fell nicely into line for her. But on this morning, I was the stubborn five-year-old who wants, by God, to play in the rain. Faye was admonishing me: “It’s cold and wet, and you’ll catch your death of a pneumonia, Jenny. You don’t want to go walking around in a cemetery in this weather.”

  “Yes, I do, Faye. I want to get a sense of the place. I want to know who was buried there, and when, and . . .”

  “You couldn’t just ask your old teacher?”

  “She always told us to look things up for ourselves,” I said. “Bye, Faye. I’ll check in with you later.”

  I heard the sound of a “tsk” as I hung up.

  I could have asked Miss Grant, yes. But I wanted to see for myself the names of the missing, the dates or their births and deaths, and the sentiments—loving or otherwise—with which they were ushered out of this world. Then perhaps I would know in which world I should dig, as it were, for their remains . . . the present or the past.

  I climbed the stairs to the bedroom again to dress for the odd occasion: thermal underwear, blue jeans, red turtleneck sweater, green plaid wool jacket. I clamped my hair back with barrettes and threw on a waterproof, hooded black cape, and then I pulled black rubber boots over my thick socks and tennis shoes. I might not raise any ghosts this morning, but I suspected I could exorcise any fashion designer within a hundred miles. The thought gave me a perverse pleasure.

  It occurred to me as I walked to my car that I was glad to be facing my mystery instead of Ailey’s this morning-too few bodies, all of them long dead, are infinitely preferable to too many bodies, one of them all too recently and prematurely deceased.

  6

  The morning could have passed for twilight.

  I stepped out of my car near the gate to Union Hill, pulled up the hood of my cape, and trudged off in the rain and mud
to look at the tombstones.

  “Damn.”

  I trudged back to the car to turn off the headlights. Then I returned to examine the first gravestone I came to. “Joshua Marsh,” it said, “b. 1792, d. 1863.” There had been an inscription once, too, but the years had worn it down to a shallow shadow in the stone, unreadable. “How you doin’, Josh?” I inquired, taking my cue from Miss Grant’s folksy approach to ghosts. “And where the heck are you doin’ it?”

  I moved on down the ragged row.

  Edgar Allan Poe couldn’t have picked a better day for tiptoeing through the tombstones. Fog. Mist. Tilted grave markers. Mounds of earth beside empty graves. In the distance, a dog barked, although howling would have better suited the atmosphere. I told myself it was only a rainy day on a dismal piece of real estate.

  The earliest gravestone I found was dated 1848; the latest, 1886. That span of thirty-eight years seemed to account for every grave in Union Hill Cemetery. I recalled the dates 1861 and 1865 as marking the beginning and the end of the Civil War, so that meant the burials began about thirteen years before the first battle of Bull Run and they ended only twenty-one years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Beyond those historical benchmarks, I was getting an education in epitaphs. One grim little ditty in particular seemed to have been popular with the good folks of Port Frederick back in those days:

  “As I am now so you shall be,

  Prepare for Death and follow me.”

  I recognized some of the names I came across, including some Cains, the Grants, and a few Pittmans. Many of the stones were only modest slabs of slate a couple of feet tall, cut in a box shape with a half-moon rising from the top, with simply a name and birth and death dates below. The only truly grand monument was an Italianate bust recessed into a block of white marble. It was engraved: “Erasmus Pittman, b. 1810, d. 1886” and “Seraphim Pittman, b. 1816, d. 1879.” And there was a motto: “Saving Grace.”