eight

GLEASON and Sons Mortuary was a place of heavy carpeting and dark corners. It was picturesquely located in an old Victorian-style home, and it was landscaped outside and painted a serene blue inside, with stained-glass windows that must have cost a small fortune. The restored Victorian held the two viewing rooms, an office where the families could select—and pay—for caskets and other services, and a kitchen to brew the constant stream of coffee consumed by mourners. A low, discreet modern addition in the rear held the grimmer rooms where the actual functions of the funeral home were conducted.

Elijah Gleason showed us the more public part before we went to the modern addition. He was proud of his accomplishments as the third Gleason in the funeral business in Sarne, and I had respect for following an honorable tradition. He was a short, stout man in his late thirties with slicked thick black hair and a wide, thin-lipped mouth.

"This is my wife Laura," he said as we passed an open door. The woman inside waved. She had very short brown hair and a rounded figure. "She does my books in the winter, and in the summer she's Aunt Hattie at Aunt Hattie's Ice Cream Parlor." The woman smiled and nodded in an abstract way and returned her attention to the computer screen before her. From the coatrack in the corner hung a soft, flowered bonnet and a matching long apron. I hoped Aunt Hattie's was air conditioned.

"I guess your business is pretty constant, rather than seasonal," I said, for lack of some better response.

Elijah Gleason said, "You'd be surprised. We get at least two deaths a summer from the tourists. Of course, those are usually just getting the remains ready to send to their home mortuary, but it all adds up."

I could think of nothing to say to that, so I just nodded. I reminded myself to stay away from Sarne in the summer. It was somehow embarrassing to think of these people dressing up to imitate a past that was hotter, smellier, more ignorant, and chock-full of deaths that nowadays could be easily prevented. Women in childbirth, kids with polio, babies with conflicting Rh factors, men whose fingers turned septic after little accidents with a saw... I'd seen all these during my little outing at the cemetery. Most people didn't think about this aspect of living in the past when they tried to imagine how it must have been. They saw the absence of what they perceived as modern ills: abortion, homosexuality, television, divorce. They saw the past in terms of Friday evening fiddling with the neighbors on the front porch, shoofly pie, gospel singing, long happy marriages.

I saw sudden, needless death.

Soon enough we were in the new part of the funeral home, and the director was showing us Helen. Hollis had asked him to do it, after assuring Gleason I wouldn't faint or throw up at the sight of the body. I like funeral homes. I like the attempt to make death presentable and palatable. It's a cushion to life. It's like the pretty padded lining to the coffin. The dead sure don't care, but makes the living feel better.

The buzzing in my head steadily increased as we grew closer to the room with the closed door. It reached a high drone when I stepped into the bright white sterility of the modern embalming room.

"I haven't started on her yet," Elijah Gleason said. "I just got her back from the state crime lab. It'll take them months to finish the toxicology, they told me, they're hundreds of cases behind."

"Would you stay outside?" Tolliver asked. "It's just that my sister has a pretty startling reaction sometimes, and it might alarm you."

"Sorry," Gleason said firmly. "Helen's body's under my care, and I'm staying with her."

Well, I hadn't expected much different. I nodded, all my attention focused on the form on the tilted table. I held up a hand to ask the two men not to speak.

I approached Helen. From her neck down, she was covered by a sheet. Her hair had been brushed. The hum of her presence filled my head. Her soul was still there. That was very unexpected. I jerked with surprise. For the soul to linger three days after death, especially when the body had been found, was almost unprecedented. I knew I would get more information since she was still intact. But I felt full of pity. My neck muscles began to jerk, almost imperceptibly, because I wasn't trying to search for her, she was right in front of me. And she was intact.

The funeral home director was eyeing me with ill-concealed disgust. "She's there," I said very softly, and I saw Gleason's face go slack with horror. I glanced at Tolliver, and he nodded, understanding. "I'm just going to touch her," I explained to Gleason. "With respect."

I stared down at Helen's battered face, my neck and facial muscles relaxing finally. All the bruising made her look as if someone had painted her in shades of dark. Under the edge of the sheet, my fingertips made contact with the skin of her shoulder.

From a distance, I could hear myself gasp—a deep, throaty, alarmed sound. I could see the arm upraised, the arm that held a candlestick. I was crouching down, trying to avoid the blow. The arm was a man's, in a long sleeve. An overwhelming sense of betrayal and shock. The glimpse of the descending arm. Pain and disillusionment, bitterness, the hope of resurrection, a terrifying blend of final emotions. And then nothing, nothing, nothing.

"I know," I whispered. "You can go, now."

And the soul of Helen Hopkins left her body.

This had only happened to me once before. I hadn't known what to do then, had only stumbled on the presence of the dead person by accident. This is what leads to the stories of haunting. The soul wants some acknowledgment of its struggle; the agony involved in the death of the body, and the emotional turmoil of being killed, somehow adhere the soul to the body. If not addressed before burial, this adhesion leads to hauntings.

I'd laid Helen Hopkins to rest before she was even buried. I had done something good.

But I'd endured her final moment with her, and the aftermath settled in. I was very shaky, and I felt Tolliver take my arm and lead me to a metal chair. What was in front of me finally registered in my brain, and I realized that Elijah Gleason was staring at me, mouth agape, eyes narrowed. I knew that look. It was a witch-burning look.

"Helen is at rest with our Lord," I said immediately, and I managed to smile. They like that.

Gleason looked a smidge less horrified. "You can tell?" he asked, at last.

"Yes," I said, my voice firm. "She is in heaven with all the saints, in eternal glory."

This toeing of the line always impressed them and got them off my back. It was a card I hated to play. I'm not saying I'm an unbeliever. Nor am I an agnostic. But I have to talk to other people about God in ways they'll understand, because my God doesn't seem to be anything like theirs. Even if they don't believe—really, truly—themselves, they're always reassured to hear the terms of fundamental Christianity. In fact, coming from me, it shakes their half-concealed disbelief.

And it keeps me safe. Tolliver, too.

Gleason flung the sheet over Helen's face, and I looked at the length of flesh draped in the bleached cotton. It was empty now, and it was just a collection of cells that would accelerate its dissolution now that it had served its purpose.

When we were back in the cool sunshine again, I asked Tolliver if we could track down a friend of Helen's. After a phone call to Hollis, who said Helen's best friend was Annie Gibson, we consulted a Sarne directory. Five minutes later we were sitting in a front room that was nearly a clone of Helen Hopkins'. The photographs of children as they aged, the big family Bible on the coffee table, the crowded clean furniture and the smell of cooking... it was all familiar. The only touch that differentiated the house was the set of newer pictures: Annie Gibson had grandchildren. There was a basket of toys in the corner, waiting for little hands to strew them around the small room.