It was the last stone I found, and it marked the end of my tour. I swept rainwater off the flat top of a gravestone next to the Pittmans’, after first begging the pardon of one Sarah Clark, whose grave it was. Or at least was supposed to be. Her final “resting place” was deep and empty, like all the others. I tucked my cape under my rear and sat down on top of her gravestone to rest and to think.
This cemetery hadn’t been anywhere near the center of town in those days. So why were these people buried way out here? Who buried them? Why did the burials cover this particular, relatively short span of time? Might grave robbers be to blame? But who ever heard of grave robbers taking all the bodies? Did that ever happen? When were the bodies removed, and why, and how, and by whom?
The Harbor Point foghorn blasted, and I felt suddenly warmed by the sound, just as mariners must have felt a century before when they sailed into Port Frederick. I suppose that to landlubbers it must seem a lonely sound, but to someone who has been raised by the sea, a foghorn isn’t a lonely cry at all but a signal that somebody is near, that we aren’t alone, after all, in the formless fog.
I squinted, looking for my car in the distance, and barely discerned its outlines. The world seemed far away, a century or more away. I looked in the direction of the funeral home, but it was only a twinkling of lights, cozy as a Christmas tree. The graves were only empty holes in the ground to me now; even the fog had turned warm and friendly after my exercise. I had seldom felt so utterly alone, and yet securely so, as if the fog had made me invisible—the ultimate security.
I didn’t know anyone was behind me until he spoke.
“What are you doin’ here?”
“My God.” I whipped around to locate the source of the sound, and the sight that greeted me sucked the cozy warmth from the morning. It was the punk gravedigger. He was squatting on his haunches arm’s length away. The mist beaded on the greasy spikes of his hair like water on knives; I watched it slide onto his scalp, then onto the upturned collar of his brown leather jacket. The jacket was studded, and zipped to his throat. He was also wearing brown leather trousers that were so tight they looked as if they’d cut him off at the crotch, and hiking boots. He had in his right hand a long, silvery metal object that came to a point as sharp as a needle. He made a circle of the thumb and middle finger of his left hand and then he ran the metal object through the circle, slowly, repeatedly, his eyes on me. He had frightened me, and I was angry. “What are you doing here?”
“I like it here. What’s your excuse?”
“I don’t need one.”
“Like hell.”
I kept my eyes on his dark, blank ones.
He stood up and began slowly to circle me. Suddenly he made a fencer’s jab at me with the silver spear. I caught my breath, jerked back. He laughed, a mocking sound that exploded my fear into anger. I stood up. “Stop it.”
This time his answer was to press the needle point of the spear against the fabric of my cape, in the area of my heart. I sat back down on the gravestone. The fear returned, crawling down my spine like a poisonous spider.
“You know what this is?” he said. I stared at him. “It’s a trocar,”
He waited, expecting a reaction from me.
“An embalming needle.” He smirked. “You stick it in the body here . . .” He moved the needle down from my heart and jabbed it lightly into my cape, below my left breast. “. . . and you suck out the juice, and then you pump in the embalming fluid.” He moved the thing back up to my heart.
“What’s your name?”
“Cain.”
“You’re a good-lookin’ lady, Cain.”
I had been staring into his enlarged pupils for what seemed an eternity, and I still hadn’t seen a glint of anything alive in those black depths.
Suddenly, he slapped the wand violently against his left palm. My hands flew up from my lap like startled birds. When he laughed this time, it was a low, knowing sound that sent the spider down my spine again.
“My name’s Jack. They call me Jackal.” His mouth hung open, he ran his tongue along the edge of his upper teeth. “I don’t give a fuck about dead bodies. I only like ‘em while they’re still warm and breathin’. Are you still breathin’, Cain?”
He began to circle me again, and to draw the tip of the embalming needle around my body as if he were drawing a line on it: cut here.
“Where you think the bodies are, Cain?” He was behind me now, whispering in my ear. “I hear there are cults that use dead bodies, you know what I mean? Satanic cults, like. Fee, fie, foe, fum, I suck the blood of an Englishman. They dig up the body, see, and they have this Black Mass, and they cut up the corpse, and they eat it. You think they cook it first, Cain?”
“I doubt it,” I said in the coldest voice I could manage. “Roasted embalmed bodies taste like death warmed over.”
There was a horrible beat of silence before he laughed. But the laughter was worse than the silence; it echoed wildly, horribly, on and on into the fog, and stopped only a second before I broke. It would have been stupid to attack him; he wasn’t much taller than I, but he had the extra weight and the advantage of a young man’s muscles.
“That was good, Cain.”
Abruptly, he pulled the hood of my cape down, jerking my neck back, exposing my head. With unbelievable speed, he raised the trocar in both of his hands like a club, and I knew I was dead. In the split second I had to react, I thought he was going to bring it crashing down on me. A scream caught in my paralyzed throat.
He dipped the wand delicately onto my hair. Onto my left shoulder. Onto my right shoulder.
“I choose you, Cain.” It was a guttural whisper, nothing I recognized as human. “In the name of all that is unholy, I choose you.” When I heard him next, it sounded as if he spoke from some distance away. “They’re not all gone, Cain. Anybody tell you that? Some of them are still in the ground waiting for you.”
After a few moments, I turned around, but the fog did not disclose him. I wanted to run screaming away from there, but instead, I picked my way carefully back through the obstacle course of heaped earth, tombstones, and deep holes. When I reached my car, I did not pause to think but started the ignition immediately and drove at all deliberate speed back to Geof’s house.
“Where is a cop when you really need him?” I said aloud in the car, to see if my voice still worked. It did, but shakily. I bit my lip to silence the sound of my own fear.
If Geof had only been in town, I would have fled to the police station. As it was, I had nothing to report to Ailey Mason except that a teenager in a weird hairdo had freaked me out in a cemetery. And I knew what Ailey would say: “What were you doing wandering around by yourself in that cemetery?” “What difference does that make, Ailey?” “All right, did he attack you?” “Well, no.” “Did he harm you physically in any way?” “No. . . .” “Did he threaten you?” “Not exactly.” “Then what do you expect us to do?” “You mean I just have to wait to see if he hurts me?” “He’s just a punk, don’t worry about it.”
Thank you so much, Ailey.
I managed to get my car into the garage without hitting anything, and then to get into the house without tripping or dropping my keys.
I made myself walk slowly up the stairs to the fourth floor. In the bathroom, I removed my wet clothes, draped them over the counters to dry, turned on the water in the shower, stepped in, and pulled the curtain shut.
I stood directly under the water and closed my eyes.
Was he only getting his kicks? Was he trying to scare me away? If he was going to harm me, wouldn’t he have done it then, when there was no one around to hear him and there was the fog to cover him?
My knees started to give out, and I sank, down to the floor of the shower and sat there, naked, in the pouring water for a long time. It took a lot of hot water to wash the fear out of me. When it had all drained away, the residue left in me was a clear, sharp fury.
I turned off the water and stood up.
/> If the police could not help, at least I would have a sharp word with the Jackal’s employer that afternoon.
I looked at the bar of soap still in my left hand.
My threat sounded so anticlimactic, even silly.
As if in response to it, the Jackal’s sneering, leering face appeared in front of me in my imagination.
I threw the soap at it, hard enough to break the bar in two when it struck the faucets and dropped to the bottom of the shower stall.
“Damn you!” I said to his shattered visage.
7
I skipped lunch.
About one-thirty that afternoon, when I thought I could talk without twitching, I drove back to the Harbor Lights Funeral Home, only this time I drove up to the well-lighted front door of the management wing. The fog had lifted, so the day was presenting a more hopeful face, if still a gray one.
In the foyer I saw an empty bulletin board above an American country antique side table. There was a box of pushpins on the table, and a stack of photographs. I walked on toward the offices, only to stare in surprise at the smiling, middle-aged woman who greeted me from her post at the secretary/receptionist’s desk.
“Hi, Jenny.”
“Francie!” It was Francine Daniel, an old friend of my mother’s. That’s the thing about living in your hometown: you are always running into people who changed your diapers. It is why I get cravings for anonymity the way other people crave chocolate; they binge on Godiva, I fly to New York. I was, nevertheless, glad to see her. I heard unpleasant echoes of the morning as I asked her, “What are you doing here?”
“I’m what they call a ‘temporary,’ Jenny.”
So was the last occupant of that desk, I thought morbidly.
“How’s your mother?” she inquired, the sweetness of her nature showing in the concern in her eyes. In her buttoned-down shirt, red string tie, and wool skirt, Francie looked like somebody’s aunt. But however kindly her question was meant, it was not one to lift the clouds from my mood.
“Oh, about the same,” I said, and examined the painting on the wall behind Francie’s head. My mother, a victim both of a chemical imbalance and imbalanced fate, had been a resident of a psychiatric hospital for several years. She had been more or less comatose for a long time now, always seeming near death, never quite getting there. “Would you tell Stan I’d like to see him, Francie?”
While we waited for him to respond to her page, I quizzed Francie about the police investigation from the funeral home’s point of view.
“Well, of course, I wasn’t here yesterday.” She leaned forward, lowered her voice. “But I gather everybody was in a tizzy. Nobody likes to be questioned by the police, Jenny.” She laid a finger against her cheek. “No matter how polite or handsome the detective may be. And some of them, if I may say so, are less polite than others, my dear.”
“I detect the subtle tracks of Ailey Mason. I’m afraid you’ll see more of him before this business is finished. Geof’s out of town, Francie, so Ailey’s got the case.”
“Heaven help us,” she said.
“From your lips to God’s ears,” said Stan Pittman as he walked up to her desk. His smile of greeting looked tired and forced. “We could use a little divine intervention around here.” He picked up a staple remover from the top of her desk and began to snap it, like talking jaws:
“When did you last see the deceased, Mr. Pittman? At the office party? What did she say? Where did she go after the party? Where had she been before the office party? What sort of mood was she in when you saw her at the party? What did she wear to the party? How much did she drink at the party? Did she always drink so much? What was the nature of her relationship with the other deceased? Did she have any enemies? Did he? Do you know of anyone who would have a reason to want to kill her? What did you do the rest of that night, Mr. Pittman? Do you have any witnesses to confirm that?”
Stan heaved an enormous sigh and tossed the staple remover back down. “Poor Sylvia. Gosh, she’d have hated this. She always tried to make our jobs easier, and she’d have hated to think that her death was interfering with business.” He grimaced, as if his words left a bad taste in his mouth. “Well, come on, Jenny. I’ll show you the archives for Union Hill Cemetery.”
He waved an arm at me in a halfhearted fashion.
“There’s something else I want to ask you, too,” I said. Stan looked back over his shoulder, raised an inquisitive eyebrow.
“Privately,” I said, as I followed him.
As we walked down the corridor, past the first of the oil paintings, I hazarded a guess as to its identity.
“Your father?”
Again, Stan nodded.
It was a work of genius in its way, managing to transform Spitt Pittman into a man from whom you would not only buy the used car but the undercoating, as well.
I stopped to examine it, thus pulling Stan to a halt.
At that moment, the father himself materialized at my shoulder, over which he stared with apparent fondness at his own portrait.
“An excellent likeness,” Spitt pronounced.
“Amazing,” I countered, and moved quickly on down the line. “Who’s this one, Spitt?”
“That is my grandfather, Americus Pittman.” He said it graciously, basso profundo, as if he were introducing us. “And this,” he said, moving on to the next painting, “is his brother, Justice, who was my great-uncle. And his other brother, Honor, my other great-uncle. And here’s their father, Erasmus Pittman, who was my great-grandfather and Stanley’s great-great-grandfather.”
“Americus, Justice, and Honor?” I asked delicately.
“Great-grandfather,” Spitt said, “had a fine sense of patriotism.”
Or a hell of a sense of humor, I thought. Old Erasmus was the twinkly one, the blond with the huge mustache. His three sons were darker, clean shaven, and dour looking, and who wouldn’t be with a father who stuck them with those names?
We traveled on down the line of unsmiling male faces.
“This one is Amos Spencer,” Spitt informed me, “who married one of my great-aunts and who owned the livery stable in town. And here’s his cousin, Reynold Spencer. He was an upholsterer, married another one of my aunts, Libby, I think. Here’s his son, old what’s-his-name. And here’s my great-great-grandfather on my grandmother’s side, who had the forge in town, made horseshoes and nails and what have you, and here you have two of his sons. . . .”
Spitt was rolling now.
I interrupted the flow: “Why do you have paintings of all these fellows who married into the family?”
“Oh well, their businesses merged with ours, don’t you see? We needed the horses from the livery to pull the wagon to the graveyard. And the forge supplied our hardware, and the upholstery shop supplied the lining for the caskets. Why, do you realize that very same livery stable became our present-day limousine service? And our cabinetmaking shop and upholstery shop merged into the coffin-manufacturing plant we still run to this very day? We had to close the forge, of course, when it was no longer economical to make our own hardware.”
Spitt strutted on down the hall, applying names to frames. Finally, he indicated a small blank spot opposite the men’s room. “And here’s where Stanley will go someday. And then his son. . . .”
“You have daughters, too, don’t you?” I inquired pointedly of Stan.
“Yes.” He was rocking from one foot to the other and fidgeting with the change in his pants pocket. “Every now and then we allow women into the family, a necessary evil.”
But Spitt was off on an introduction of the next ancestor in line. As I followed, I was struck by the strange similarity that each portrait had to the others. They looked as if they had been painted by successive generations of artists from the same family, all of whom had inherited identical artistic styles. A suspicion dawned.
“Spitt,” I said. “There’s no way you could have oil portraits of all these guys going clear back to . . . what?”
?
??The seventeenth century.” He grinned at me like a boy who has been caught with his pet snake in his pocket, and then he smirked at his son. Stan had flushed red. “This girl’s too damn smart, Stanley.” Then Spitt said to me in a congratulatory tone, as if I had correctly answered the question that won the trip to Hawaii, “Jennifer Cain, you’re the first person to guess our little secret. Of course we couldn’t have paintings of them, not unless we were descended from John Adams or King George or some other blueblood. And to tell you the honest truth,” Spitt towered his voice, as if a reporter might hear, “these first fellows, they were just carpenters or cabinetmakers. That’s how most morticians got started. I mean to say, they only made coffins as a sideline, you see.”
“So how did you get the pictures?” I persisted. “If they go back to the seventeenth century, you surely didn’t work from photographs!”
He chuckled. “Oh, but we did work from photographs. That painting there, Jenny . . .” He pointed. “That’s from a photo in a history book. I think the real guy was a vice-president or something. And that one there . . . he’s somebody’s idea of John Alden, remember him and Priscilla? And we took that one over there from a bunch of old photos at a library, and . . .”
I was laughing, I couldn’t help it.
“For God’s sake, Dad,” said Stan.
“Well, what the hell?” The old man winked at me. “Our own flesh and blood couldn’t have looked much worse. Besides, it’s not everyone who gets to pick his relatives.”
We had reached Spitt’s office, and he abruptly abandoned us to enter the room and close the door. I looked at Stan. His complexion had slid from crimson to white.
“I used to hope my mother would poison him,” he said in mournful tones. “But I don’t think she’s ever going to do it.”
I laughed, and finally he managed a smile, too. Then we resumed our trek down the hallway under all those somber eyes. Only this time I had the feeling that twinkly old Erasmus was laughing, too, behind his mustache.