25

THE FUNERAL was finished. Shamas Greenlaw lay, at last, in his grave. Whether he rested at peace, no one on this earth could say. His cousin Newlon lay next to him, and the family had made a great event of the double funeral. They had ordered matching headstones carved with angels strumming harps, their wings lifted, their eyes cast toward heaven-whether smiling up at the two departing souls, or conveying their regrets as the deceased were cast out in the opposite direction, was equally uncertain.

The funeral had not, as Lucinda feared, been an embarrassing display of bad taste.

She had told Wilma she was afraid Dirken would take over the rosary arrangements, would create a loud, drunken Irish dirge, with loud weeping and louder music, to bid farewell to Shamas. That was why she had planned to meet with Wilma and Father Radcliff the night that she disappeared.

On her way out of the house that evening, to keep the appointment, she heard Dirken calling to her to get a move-on, that it was time for the two of them to leave.

She'd had no intention of taking Dirken. Quickly, she'd slipped out the kitchen door, got in her car, and took off in the opposite direction from the church. She didn't have time to call Wilma or call the rectory. "I just wanted to be away-from Dirken, from the whole family."

After Lucinda was released from the emergency room of Molena Point Hospital, the two women had sat at Wilma's kitchen table late that night. Dulcie, curled up on the rug, had tried to imagine the kind of colorful Irish wake that worried Lucinda, and that the Greenlaws seemed to want, tried to envision the long-winded and drunken eulogies, as Lucinda described to Wilma.

"All I want is to get the funeral over," Lucinda said. "A traditional, solemn rosary and mass and burial, and then to be done with it. As cold as it sounds, Wilma, all I want is to be done with Shamas.

"Funerals aren't for the dead anyway," Lucinda said. "They're for those left behind. And I don't need it.

"For that matter, what good will a mass and a rosary do Shamas? Shamas made his bed with the Lord. Nothing in Heaven or earth is going to change that."

Dulcie had been both shocked and amused.

"The empty money bag," Wilma had said, gently changing the subject, "the bag the pups dug out. I'm surely curious about that."

Lucinda laughed. "Oh, I knew about that money, long before Dirken came snooping.

"It started several years ago, when Shamas repaired the foundation. Shamas never did a lick of work around the house. His sudden, unexpected project so puzzled me that I snooped into the garden shed.

"I found the sledge he used to break the concrete, the bucket and trowel with which he'd repaired it; and after that day I watched him more closely, paid attention to the musty-smelling money that Shamas brought back from the bank a time or two. To the way, when he returned from Seattle after a business trip, he always had some excuse, early in the morning, to putter in the yard. And I'd get home from my walk, find he had done a load of laundry. Washed the clothes that, I suppose, he'd worn to crawl under the house. He'd say he had brought so much laundry home from his trip, he didn't like to burden me with such a lot of work."

Lucinda smiled. "He must have thought little of my reasoning skills. Must have thought I would never crawl under the house myself, but I did. The next time he left for Seattle I put on some old clothes and took a flashlight and went under there.

"I found a patched place about two feet wide, and a little square in the middle of it, maybe six inches across, where fresher concrete had been troweled in. He must have made the big hole the first time, and then just the smaller one, after that-enough to stick his hand in. I got the sledge from the garage and gave it a whack.

"I was surprised it took so little effort, five or six blows, and the smaller patch of concrete fell right out. When I shined my light in, there was a big canvas bag.

"I didn't understand why he hadn't put some kind of screw-plug in the foundation, maybe that looked like a cleanout for ashes, something he didn't need to cement over each time. I suppose he thought a workman might believe it was a cleanout and try to use it, or that someone else might find it and be curious.

"Well, I didn't like reaching into that dark place, but I could feel the drawstring. I got it open, and I could feel money, that greasy feel of money and the right size. The bag was filled with packets of money. My heart was pounding, I didn't know if it was from excitement or if I was scared stiff.

"When I pulled out a packet, I had a whole fistful of hundred-dollar bills! Counting those bills made me feel a little faint. I kept twenty of them and stuffed the packet back into the bag. I was afraid to take more.

"He'd left the box of patching cement in the garage." Lucinda laughed. "It had directions printed on it just like a box of biscuit mix.

"Well, from that time on, when I wanted extra money, that's where I got it. When Shamas never caught on, I grew bolder, took enough to set up a new bank account in my name, in a bank Shamas didn't use, as far as I knew. I had the statements sent to a post office box-I guess I did learn something from Shamas.

"I always knew when he put cash in the bag. I could hear him down there tapping-he would leave the radio or TV on in the living room to mask the sound. And he would either have just arrived home from a trip, or have come directly from the post office or from UPS.

"Well, then Shamas died and Dirken was here poking around. I took all the money out of the bag, put some in my account, but most of it in a pillow slip. Left the empty bag in there for Dirken to find-my little private joke."

Lucinda smiled. "With Dirken sneaking around telling me those silly stories about how the house had dry rot, I found his backbreaking work with the pick and hammer most entertaining."

Dulcie, too, was highly entertained. She wanted to cheer for Lucinda. Well, she thought, the funeral had come off all right. The Greenlaw clan hadn't turned the mass into a loud and abandoned display, or turned the rosary into a dirge of unseemly weeping. Nor was there any unchurchly music at the gravesite, such as the marching band Dirken had favored tramping through the cemetery tootling on horns and beating drums; the mass and burial ceremonies had been restrained and tasteful.

If a number of ushers of severe countenance stood in strategic locations about the church and cemetery, scowling at any show of wildly unleashed emotions, that fact may or may not have contributed to the solemnity that prevailed among the worshipers. If those ushers looked like cops in civilian attire, that, too, may have added to the sober atmosphere, as did Captain Max Harper's presence, where he sat at the back of the church. The Greenlaws, every one, moved through the ceremony as quietly as a gathering of nuns, their bowed heads and clasped hands a solemn credit to Shamas and Newlon Greenlaw.

The Church of the Mission of Exaltation of Molena Pinos, with its lovely eighteenth-century Spanish architecture-its heavy beams and antique stained-glass windows, its hand-decorated adobe walls and whitewashed plank ceilings painted with garlands of age-faded red roses, its thick clay floors-and its ancient traditions, embraced the Greenlaws in their parting ceremony as generously as it had embraced, over the centuries, any number of murderers, confidence men, and horse thieves, whenever such deaths occurred among the general populace.

Cara Ray Crisp did not attend Shamas's funeral; nor did Sam Fulman. One could only imagine Cara Ray there among the mourners, dressed in the form-fitting little black dress that she had bought for the occasion, her eyes cast down with maidenly grief.