“I don’t think they set the house afire to kill me. They didn’t really care whether they killed me or not. If they cared, they would have made a more direct effort to get me. They set the fire to cover up Angela’s murder. That was the reason, nothing more.”
Sniff, sniff, sniff-sniff-sniff: out with the remaining bad air of the burning house, in with the revitalizing scent of squirrel, out with the bad, in with the good.
“God, she was such a good person, so giving,” I said bitterly. “She didn’t deserve to die like that, to die at all.”
Orson paused in his sniffing but only briefly. Human suffering. Terrible. Terrible thing. Misery, death, despair. But nothing to be done. Nothing to be done about it. Just the way of the world, the nature of human existence. Terrible. Come smell the squirrels with me, Master Snow. You’ll feel better.
A lump rose in my throat, not poignant grief but something more prosaic, so I hacked with tubercular violence and finally planted a black oyster among the tree roots.
“If Sasha were here,” I said, “I wonder if right now I’d remind her so much of James Dean?”
My face felt greasy and tender. I wiped at it with a hand that also felt greasy.
Across the thin grass on the graves and across the polished surfaces of the granite markers, the moonshadows of wind-trembled leaves danced like cemetery fairies.
Even in this peculiar light, I could see that the palm of the hand I had put to my face was smeared with soot. “I must stink to high heaven.”
Immediately, Orson lost interest in the squirrel spoor and came eagerly to me. He sniffed vigorously at my shoes, along my legs, across my chest, finally sticking his snout under my jacket and into my armpit.
Sometimes I suspect that Orson not only understands more than we expect a dog to understand, but that he has a sense of humor and a talent for sarcasm.
Forcibly withdrawing his snout from my armpit, holding his head in both hands, I said, “You’re no rose yourself, pal. And what kind of guard dog are you, anyway? Maybe they were already in the house with Angela when I arrived, and she didn’t know it. But how come you didn’t bite them in the ass when they left the place? If they escaped by the kitchen door, they went right past you. Why didn’t I find a bunch of bad guys rolling around on the backyard, clutching their butts and howling in pain?”
Orson’s gaze held steady, his eyes deep. He was shocked by the question, the implied accusation. Shocked. He was a peaceful dog. A dog of peace, he was. A chaser of rubber balls, a licker of faces, a philosopher and boon companion. Besides, Master Snow, the job was to prevent villains from entering the house, not to prevent them from leaving. Good riddance to villains. Who wants them around, anyway? Villains and fleas. Good riddance.
As I sat nose-to-nose with Orson, staring into his eyes, a sense of the uncanny came over me—or perhaps it was a transient madness—and for a moment I imagined that I could read his true thoughts, which were markedly different from the dialogue that I invented for him. Different and unsettling.
I dropped my bracketing hands from his head, but he chose not to turn away from me or to lower his gaze.
I was unable to lower mine.
To express a word of this to Bobby Halloway would have been to elicit a recommendation of lobotomy: Nevertheless, I sensed that the dog feared for me. Pitied me because I was struggling so hard not to admit the true depth of my pain. Pitied me because I could not acknowledge how profoundly the prospect of being alone scared me. More than anything, however, he feared for me, as though he saw an oncoming juggernaut of which I was oblivious: a great white blazing wheel, as big as a mountain, that would grind me to dust and leave the dust burning in its wake.
“What, when, where?” I wondered.
Orson’s stare was intense. Anubis, the dog-headed Egyptian god of tombs, weigher of the hearts of the dead, could not have stared more piercingly. This dog of mine was no Lassie, no carefree Disney pooch with strictly cute moves and an unlimited capacity for mischievous fun.
“Sometimes,” I told him, “you spook me.”
He blinked, shook his head, leaped away from me, and padded in circles among the tombstones, busily sniffing the grass and the fallen oak leaves, pretending to be just a dog again.
Maybe it wasn’t Orson who had spooked me. Maybe I had spooked myself. Maybe his lustrous eyes had been mirrors in which I’d seen my own eyes; and in the reflections of my eyes, perhaps I had seen truths in my own heart that I was unwilling to look upon directly.
“That would be the Halloway interpretation,” I said.
With sudden excitement, Orson pawed through a drift of fragrant leaves still damp from an afternoon watering by the sprinkler system, burrowed his snout among them as though engaged in a truffle hunt, chuffed, and beat the ground with his tail.
Squirrels. Squirrels had sex. Squirrels had sex, had sex right here. Squirrels. Right here. Squirrel-heat-musk smell here, right here, Master Snow, here, come smell here, come smell, quick quick quick quick, come smell squirrel sex.
“You confound me,” I told him.
My mouth still tasted like the bottom of an ashtray, but I was no longer hacking up the phlegm of Satan. I should be able to steer to Bobby’s place now.
Before fetching my bike, I rose onto my knees and turned to face the headstone against which I had been leaning. “How’re things with you, Noah? Still resting in peace?”
I didn’t have to use the penlight to read the engraving on the stone. I’d read it a thousand times before, and I’d spent hours pondering the name and the dates under it.
NOAH JOSEPH JAMES
June 5, 1888-July 2, 1984
Noah Joseph James, the man with three first names. It’s not your name that amazes me; it’s your singular longevity.
Ninety-six years of life.
Ninety-six springs, summers, autumns, winters.
Against daunting odds, I have thus far lived twenty-eight years. If Lady Fortune comes to me with both hands full, I might make thirty-eight. If the physicians prove to be bad prognosticators, if the laws of probability are suspended, if fate takes a holiday, perhaps I’ll live to be forty-eight. Then I would have enjoyed one half the span of life granted to Noah Joseph James.
I don’t know who he was, what he did with the better part of a century here on earth, whether he had one wife with whom to share his days or outlived three, whether the children whom he fathered became priests or serial killers, and I don’t want to know. I’ve fantasized a rich and wondrous life for this man. I believe him to have been well traveled, to have been to Borneo and Brazil, to Mobile Bay during Jubilee and to New Orleans during Mardi Gras, to the sun-washed isles of Greece and to the secret land of Shangri-la high in the fastness of Tibet. I believe that he loved truly and was deeply loved in return, that he was a warrior and a poet, an adventurer and a scholar, a musician and an artist and a sailor who sailed all the seven seas, who boldly cast off what limitations—if any—were placed upon him. As long as he remains only a name to me and is otherwise a mystery, he can be whatever I want him to be, and I can vicariously experience his long, long life in the sun.
Softly I said, “Hey, Noah, I’ll bet when you died back there in 1984, undertakers didn’t carry guns.”
I rose to my feet and stepped to the adjacent tombstone, where my bicycle was propped under the guardian gaze of the granite angel.
Orson let out a low growl. Abruptly he was tense, alert. His head was raised high, ears pricked. Although the light was poor, his tail seemed to be tucked between his legs.
I followed the direction of his coaly gaze and saw a tall, stoop-shouldered man stalking among the tombstones. Even in the softening shadows, he was a collection of angles and sharp edges, like a skeleton in a black suit, as if one of Noah’s neighbors had climbed out of his casket to go visiting.
The man stopped in the very row of graves in which Orson and I stood, and he consulted a curious object in his left hand. It appeared to be the size of a cellular telephone,
with an illuminated display screen.
He tapped on the instrument’s keypad. The eerie music of electronic notes carried briefly through the cemetery, but these were different from telephone tones.
Just as a scarf of cloud blew off the moon, the stranger brought the sour-apple-green screen closer to his face for a better look at whatever data it provided, and those two soft lights revealed enough for me to make an identification. I couldn’t see the red of his hair or his russet eyes, but even in profile the whippet-lean face and thin lips were chillingly familiar: Jesse Pinn, assistant mortician.
He was not aware of Orson and me, though we stood only thirty or forty feet to his left.
We played at being granite. Orson wasn’t growling anymore, even though the soughing of the breeze through the oaks would easily have masked his grumble.
Pinn raised his face from the hand-held device, glanced to his right, at St. Bernadette’s, and then consulted the screen again. Finally he headed toward the church.
He remained unaware of us, although we were little more than thirty feet from him.
I looked at Orson.
He looked at me.
Squirrels forgotten, we followed Pinn.
17
The mortician hurried to the back of the church, never glancing over his shoulder. He descended a broad set of stone stairs that led to a basement door.
I followed closely to keep him in sight. Halting only ten feet from the head of the stairs and at an angle to them, I peered down at him.
If he turned and looked up, he would see me before I could move out of sight, but I was not overly concerned. He seemed so involved in the task at hand that the summons of celestial trumpets and the racket of the dead rising from their graves might not have drawn his attention.
He studied the mysterious device in his hand, switched it off, and tucked it into an inside coat pocket. From another pocket he extracted a second instrument, but the light was too poor to allow me to see what he held; unlike the first item, this one incorporated no luminous parts.
Even above the susurration of wind and oak leaves, I heard a series of clicks and rasping noises. These were followed by a hard snap, another snap, and then a third.
On the fourth snap, I thought I recognized the distinctive sound. A Lockaid lock-release gun. The device had a thin pick that you slipped into the key channel, under the pin tumblers. When you pulled the trigger, a flat steel spring jumped upward and lodged some of the pins at the sheer line.
A few years ago, Manuel Ramirez gave me a Lockaid demonstration. Lock-release guns were sold only to law-enforcement agencies, and the possession of one by a civilian was illegal.
Although Jesse Pinn could hang a consoling expression on his mug as convincingly as could Sandy Kirk, he incinerated murder victims in a crematorium furnace to assist in the cover-up of capital crimes, so he was not likely to be fazed by laws restricting Lockaid ownership. Maybe he had limits. Maybe, for instance, he wouldn’t push a nun off a cliff for no reason whatsoever. Nevertheless, recalling Pinn’s sharp face and the stiletto flicker of his red-brown eyes as he had approached the crematorium window earlier this evening, I wouldn’t have put money on the nun at any odds.
The undertaker needed to fire the lock-release gun five times to clear all the pins and disengage the dead bolt. After cautiously trying the door, he returned the Lockaid to his pocket.
When he pushed the door inward, the windowless basement proved to be lighted. Silhouetted, he stood listening on the threshold for perhaps half a minute, his bony shoulders canted to the left and his half-hung head cocked to the right, wind-spiked hair bristling like straw; abruptly he jerked himself into a better posture, like a suddenly animated scarecrow pulling loose of its supporting cross, and he went inside, pushing the door only half shut behind him.
“Stay,” I whispered to Orson.
I went down the stairs, and my ever-obedient dog followed me.
When I put one ear to the half-open door, I heard nothing from the basement.
Orson stuck his snout through the eighteen-inch gap, sniffing, and although I rapped him lightly on the top of the head, he didn’t withdraw.
Leaning over the dog, I put my snout through the gap, too, not for a sniff but far enough inside to see what lay beyond. Squinting against the fluorescent glare, I saw a twenty-by-forty-foot room with concrete walls and ceiling, lined with equipment that served the church and the attached wing of Sunday-school rooms: five gas-fired furnaces, a big water heater, electric-service panels, and machinery that I didn’t recognize.
Jesse Pinn was three-quarters of the way across this first room, approaching a closed door in the far wall, his back to me.
Stepping away from the door, I unclipped the glasses case from my shirt pocket. The Velcro closure peeled open with a sound that made me think of a snake breaking wind, though I don’t know why, as I’d never in my life heard a snake breaking wind. My aforementioned flamboyant imagination had taken a scatological turn.
By the time I put on the glasses and peered inside again, Pinn had disappeared into the second basement room. That farther door stood half open as well, and light blazed beyond.
“It’s a concrete floor in there,” I whispered. “My Nikes won’t make a sound, but your claws will tick. Stay.”
I pressed open the door before me and eased into the basement.
Orson remained outside, at the foot of the stairs. Perhaps he was obedient this time because I’d given him a logical reason to be.
Or perhaps, because of something he had smelled, he knew that proceeding farther was ill-advised. Dogs have an olfactory sense thousands of times sharper than ours, bringing them more data than all human senses combined.
With the sunglasses, I was safe from the light, yet I could see more than well enough to navigate the room. I avoided the open center, staying close to the furnaces and the other equipment, where I could duck into a niche and hope to hide if I heard Jesse Pinn returning.
Time and sweat had by now diminished the effectiveness of the sunscreen on my face and hands, but I was counting on my layer of soot to protect me. My hands appeared to be sheathed in black silk gloves, and I assumed that my face was equally masked.
When I reached the inner door, I heard two distant voices, both male, one belonging to Pinn. They were muffled, and I couldn’t understand what was being said.
I glanced at the outside door, where Orson peered in at me, one ear at attention and the other at ease.
Beyond the inner door was a long, narrow, largely empty room. Only a few of the overhead lights were aglow, suspended on chains between exposed water pipes and heating ducts, but I didn’t remove my sunglasses.
At the end, this chamber proved to be part of an L-shaped space, and the next length, which opened to the right, was longer and wider than the first, although still dimly lighted. This second section was used as a storeroom, and seeking the voices, I crept past boxes of supplies, decorations for various holidays and celebrations, and file cabinets full of church records. Everywhere shadows gathered like convocations of robed and cowled monks, and I removed my sunglasses.
The voices grew louder as I proceeded, but the acoustics were terrible, and I still couldn’t discern any words. Although he was not shouting, Pinn was angry, which I deduced from a low menace in his voice. The other man sounded as though he was trying to placate the undertaker.
A complete life-size crèche was arrayed across half the width of the room: not merely Joseph and the Holy Virgin at a cradle with the Christ child, but also the entire manger scene with wise men, camels, donkeys, lambs, and heralding angels. The stable was made of lumber, and the bales of hay were real; the people and animals were plaster over chicken wire and lath, their clothes and features painted by a gifted artist, protected by a waterproof lacquer that gave them a supernatural glow even in this poor light. Judging by the tools, paint, and other supplies at the periphery of the collection, repairs were being made, after which the crèche would be put u
nder drop cloths until next Christmas.
Beginning to make out scattered words of Pinn’s conversation with the unknown man, I moved among the figures, some of which were taller than I am. The scene was disorienting because none of the elements was staged for display; none was in its proper relationship to the others. One of the wise men stood with his face in the bell of an angel’s raised trumpet, and Joseph appeared to be engaged in a conversation with a camel. Baby Jesus lay unattended in His cradle, which stood on a bale of hay to one side. Mary sat with a beatific smile and an adoring gaze, but the object of her attention, rather than being her holy child, was a galvanized bucket. Another wise man seemed to be looking up a camel’s butt.
I wended through this disorganized crèche, and near the end of it, I used a lute-playing angel for cover. I was in shadows, but peering past the curve of a half-furled wing, I saw Jesse Pinn in the light about twenty feet away, hectoring another man near the stairs that led up to the main floor of the church.
“You’ve been warned,” Pinn said, raising his voice until it was almost a snarl. “How many times have you been warned?”
At first I could not see the other man, who was blocked by Pinn. He spoke quietly, evenly, and I could not hear what he said.
The undertaker reacted in disgust and began to pace agitatedly, combing one hand through his disarranged hair.
Now I saw that the second man was Father Tom Eliot, rector of St. Bernadette’s.
“You fool, you stupid shit,” Pinn said furiously, bitterly. “You prattling, God-gushing moron.”
Father Tom was five feet eight, plump, with the expressive and rubbery face of a natural-born comedian. Although I wasn’t a member of his—or any—church, I’d spoken with him on several occasions, and he seemed to be a singularly good-natured man with a self-deprecating sense of humor and an almost childlike enthusiasm for life. I had no trouble understanding why his parishioners adored him.