The Appearance of Death, Chapter Twenty-One

 (To read all previous chapters, please click on the book title in the header bar above.)

Chapter 21

Karen was waiting for me on the front porch. She peered at me over the top of a package of Fudge/Marshmallow Pinwheels. I think she might've scowled at me and said something snarky, but the pinwheel currently stuffed into her mouth prevented her.

“Hiya!” I said. “Sorry to be gone so long.” I stepped onto the porch. “What do you want for dinner?”

“I don't feel so good,” she replied gloomily.

I took the half-empty package of pinwheels from her lap and laughed. “I wonder why?” I said. “Pinwheels are not a good precursor to a healthy dinner, you know.” I smiled down at her. “Salad? Stir fry? Fruit yogurt?”

Karen rolled her eyes. “I think Rick's picking up KFC on his way home. I'm eating all the mashed potatoes though.”

I laughed. “Well then!” I exclaimed, and went inside, slamming the screen door behind me.

“Grammy!” both boys squealed together. “Grammy Grammy! We missed you! Beau ran away again and we found him in the creek!”

The evening was delightful. I cut up some fruit salad to accompany our fried chicken. Since Rick declined to tell him what they were, Jeffrey tried chicken gizzards for the first time. Karen and I ate all the cole slaw. Then Rick pulled out the desserts – toffee sundaes for the boys, and Oreo Krushems for the adults. By 7:00 the boys were swinging on the tire hung from the oak tree in the front yard while Karen, Rick, and I rocked slowly on the porch. Rick was on his phone.

“I have to go back to the coffee shop,” he said, closing his phone. “We've got somebody coming to the B&B upstairs. I'm gonna go welcome them and make sure everything's good there.” He stood up. “Be back in a bit.”

Karen and I put Jimmie to bed, and I helped Jeffrey with his phonics. Karen was wiped out in bed by 8:00, so I returned to the porch and put Beau in my lap. His little body shuddered in relief at being with me again. “I'm sorry, big guy,” I whispered to him. “It's been a rough month, I know. But it'll be better now, don't worry.”

The scent of the blooming trees drifted past us on the porch on a fickle breeze. Beau fell sleep. A chorus of spring peepers in the creek added a dreamy, rhythmic feel to the evening, so I closed my eyes. I don't know how long I was asleep before Rick's feet clomped up the steps.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey, yourself.”

“Is Patty working tonight?” he asked.

“I don't think so. She doesn't stay at the office past 5:00. She's particular about overtime.”

He sat down and lifted a beer from a cooler behind his chair. “Well, I thought I saw somebody there. I couldn't tell who in the dark.”

“They put in a surveillance system this morning, because of the break-in before,” I told him. “I'm not going down there by myself. I'll call the police, and then we'll watch the video in the morning and see if there's anything on it.” I pulled out my cell phone. “Let's hope it was nothing.”

I told the police officer what Rick said and asked him not to call me back that night unless he found evidence of a break in – a bashed window or maybe a broken lock. I received no calls by 11:00, so I went to bed and slept well. A steady rain all night long helped my rest. The entire household seemed to sleep deeper, longer that night, waking up groggy and befuddled in the morning. Jimmy stumbled into my room rubbing his eyes. He collapsed onto my bed.

“Grammy,” he mumbled.

I rolled over. Thunder rumbled outside. Without bright morning light streaming through my south window I couldn't tell what time it was. I stroked Jimmy's tousled hair.

“What's up, buddy? You sleep okay?”

“I think it's late, Grammy.” He climbed into bed with me and curled up sleepily. “The bus drove by.”

My brain registered his words in about five seconds. The bus! It was late. If I were a younger woman, I would've leapt out of bed. As it was, I struggled with the bedclothes, cursed my arthritis, and tried to get my feet in my slippers. Bus or no bus, I had to visit the bathroom first.

“Jimmy! Get ready for school, honey!” I called to Karen on my way to the bathroom. “Karen! The boys are late! The bus has run already. Jeffrey's still in bed!”

The house erupted in its usual morning chaos. We were late for school more mornings that we were on time. Beau barked at us. Rick ran out the door to the coffee shop. Karen moaned with a head-ache while the boys shoveled Cheerios into their mouths.

“I'll drop them off,” I offered. “I'm heading to work anyway.”

The office was quiet when I arrived. Southern summer heat was beginning to work its way into the hours of the day, and I was glad for the air conditioning. I plopped Beau down by his food bowl and poured some Purina in. When I checked my phone, there was a message from Patty.

“Headache,” it said. “Be a little late.”

After Rick's warning the night before of an intruder on the premises, I carefully inspected Patty's office, my office, all the adjacent rooms and work rooms, the chapel, the crematory, and the morgue. Nothing looked disturbed. The locks were secure. Even the stoop at the back door, surrounded by cedar trees and deep shade, was as green and mossy as ever. No one seemed to have stepped there.

I opened the morgue and slid Anita's body from its positive temperature cabinet. Decomposition had proceeded, albeit slowly. She no longer looked like her sister. Changes in skin tone and tissue structure were significant. I would cremate the body later in the morning; this was my last chance to view it, to study it. It seemed, at last, to want to give nothing away. As I rolled Anita's body away from the cabinet, I glanced at the bottom of the feet, at the offending tattoo that had caused all this trouble. Such a simple thing – a heart, two letters. A loving symbol, but hidden where no one would see it. A secret symbol of affection between aunt and niece – why? Then I wondered, did Desiree have a matching tattoo on her foot? Wouldn't that make sense, especially for a secretive, private expression like this, that both parties would have one? I shrugged my shoulders and assumed that was one fact I'd never be able to find out.

It seemed a good time to cremate the body at last, to put an end to all the questions and frustrations. Anita Wagner had not specified the container she wished to be placed in for cremation, so I selected the simplest cardboard cremation container. Before placing the lid on the container I looked at the tattoo one last time, as if to imprint it on my mind. Ashes to ashes, they say. Dust to dust. What does one tattoo matter on a body, when we're all reduced to dirt sooner or later?

Anita Wagner's remains entered the flames at 9:45 that morning. I returned to my office and made a record of the event, adding it to all the notes I'd written on Anita Wagner's funeral arrangements from the beginning. I intended to add to it the photographs I took of the tattoo, once I had hard copies made at the local CVS. I closed the file. It was done. What had Emery said to me that day?

“Do not return until you have some sort of satisfaction concerning that tattoo.”

He also said, “You know that the only person who would've had cause to tamper with the body was Desiree Steele. She must be compelled to answer you on the subject.”

I looked at Emery's urn, sitting small and elegant on its ledge in its niche, glowing under a small recessed light that also fell beatifically on Beau's head.

“I failed, Emery,” I said aloud. “You would've been tougher. I let her hide behind her mother, and I got no answers.”

“You did not fail, Ivy,” he answered clearly. “You were fabulously successful. You returned with something better than answers from those recalcitrant women.”

I was baffled. What had I returned with? I'd brought back nothing and the body was in the crematory. The tattoo had disappeared, and I'm sure Angela and Desiree would be thrilled to know it.

“The stone,” he said softy. The stone.

Where had I put that tiny gemstone? I'd forgotten all about it. Instinctively I felt my pocket, but of course I'd changed clothes this morning. Where had I put it? I'd worn my green slacks the day before. They were in the laundry now, which I knew Karen had not thought of, much less made an attempt on. I stood up, about to return home upon Emery's suggestion when I remembered: I'd put the stone in the car, in the change holder in the console between the seats. It should be there now, where I'd parked out front.

“Go,” he said. “Go now.”

I'd locked the car, a habit I'd yet to change from all my years in Atlanta, although no one else in Peace Valley ever seemed to lock their cars. The stone was still there, and I held it in my palm again. This little gem stone had stunned Angela Steele as she stood by my car window. This stone had canceled her anger and made her afraid. I turned it over in my palm. Anita Wagner's personal effects remained in a plastic bag in a storage closet near my office. No one had come to claim them. I returned to my office with the stone in one hand, the bag in the other. I opened it and dug through her clothes – the black leggings and orange shirt, and found the shoes. I set them both on my desk. A double row of fake, clear gem stones ran in a band across the top of each shoe. The right shoe was missing the last stone on the outside, the prongs that would have held it in place pried open and splayed out. I placed the gem stone from my hand in the middle of those prongs. It was a perfect fit.

I disliked this development intensely, as I'd just congratulated myself on finishing this distasteful death. “This means nothing,” I told myself. “I'll forget it.” I dropped the gem stone into the pencil tray in my desk, slid Anita's shoes into the bag, and put it back in its dark storage closet, from whence it would be tossed into the trash dumpster next Friday by Patty, never to be considered by me again. I wanted badly to dust my hands together in a movement of finality and self-congratulation.

“Ivy,” he said.

“Shut up, Emery,” I replied.

Patty had left the instructions for the surveillance system on my desk, so I spent the next hour reading its headache-inducing complications. This seemed a good activity while Patty was recovering from her head-ache. She'd written a note to me about my responsibility, which was simply to view the tape on my desktop computer when I needed to. The software had been installed and it was ready to go. I made a cup of coffee, dug into Patty's snack stash, and settled into some light morning viewing of nothing at all – nothing at the back door, and nothing in the morgue.

The surveillance cameras were set up with motion-sensing technology also, which assisted by noting on the video stream the moments when motion occurred. In the morgue – hopefully – this was not an issue, as nothing at all should be moving in there. But by the back door, in the dark of a summer night by the trash dumpster, the activity was higher than in day time. I saw a few raccoons, a few possums, and one feral cat creeping across the steps.

Bored to tears by this activity at 10:30 a.m. in a quiet office, I drank three cups of coffee and listened to Led Zeppelin while the footage kept rolling. I don't listen to Led Zeppelin in front of other people because it destroys their perception of me as a ditsy old grandma. But the truth is that Led Zeppelin was important in the music of my youth, and in moments of private boredom, it keeps me going. I was returning to my desk with my fourth cup of coffee doused with vanilla creamer, rounding the desk corner to view my computer screen, when something caught my eye. A shadowy figure was crouched over the back door, fiddling with the lock. He was there a long time, his entire body obscured by a huge black hoodie, long pants, and dark gloves. After several minutes in that position, finally he stood up, gingerly opened the back door to my funeral home, and stepped in. It was 10:02 p.m. the night before.

I stood there, cup in hand, shocked. I felt invaded, violated. I was instantly angry and slammed the coffee cup on the desk, causing a horrible mess. This was too much! This would try the nerves of the calmest funeral director on the planet! My hands were trembling, but I sat in the chair and switched to the second camera, the one in the morgue. I had to know. I forwarded the time to 10:05, assuming the intruder would need a couple of minutes to finagle the lock on the morgue door. Sure enough, at 10:08, the same dark figure entered the windowless room, switching on the light. He walked to the wall of cabinets and tried one after another, searching for Anita's body. Was this Myron, I wondered. Was he enraged that he was prevented from managing his wife's remains? What would he do?

The intruder found Anita's cabinet at last. He unlatched it, rolled the stretcher out, and tenderly lowered the plastic sheet from her face. From the gentleness of movement I felt it could not be Myron, not from what I'd heard of him. Was this someone from the Gillespie family? His hands moved down slowly and then lifted the plastic from Anita's feet. He lifted the plastic there as well and cradled her right foot in his hands, the foot with the tattoo. This was what he came to find, to see, to touch. His hands were small, delicate, and then I realized it was a woman. It must be Desiree, come to say good-bye one last time.

Her shoulders began to shake in weeping, and she put her hands to her face. Even on a surveillance video, the wrecking emotion in the woman's form was painful to observe. She leaned forward against the cabinet wall, placed her hand on the body, and then jerked them away. She covered Anita's body again in its plastic sheeting and, covering her mouth with one hand, slid the stretcher in and closed the cabinet. She lay one hand on the door in a gesture of good-bye. Then she cried much more, and the hood fell from her head. The bright auburn hair was unmistakable. It was Angela Steele.

I gasped. This, I had not expected. The hardened woman, the angry woman, had been weeping in my morgue only twelve hours before. She followed me here – drove those miles simply to see her sister's body. Why didn't she come before? Why didn't she come with Desiree and take charge of the funeral, plan a memorial, pay her respects in a proper way? Why this breaking-and-entering in the dark, this private grieving in a cold morgue? It made no sense to me. As with all this family's behavior, it made no sense at all.

On my computer screen, Angela Steele turned around, her face red and swollen with crying. She wiped it with her hoodie sleeves and stood clearly in front of the camera lens, unaware I would be watching her. Her shoulders and chest shuddered with grief and loss that had in no way been assuaged by viewing the body moments before. Her expression – how can I describe it? – was not what I expected. It was the face, not of a woman ending something, but of a woman only beginning. She was beginning something long, exhausting, unwanted, but necessary. She was setting her stubborn self to the terrible task and moving forward. I recognized that face; I'd worn it myself after I left Sam, after I'd decided to start a new life for myself away from him, away from Atlanta.

Suddenly the room went black and I heard the morgue door shut and lock. The remainder of the video was blank. I sat at my desk pondering this woman's actions: her anger in Maude's room at the nursing home, her rage at my car window, the sudden deflating of anger when she noticed the gem stone in my car, the long drive to Peace Valley, the risky breaking-and-entering at the morgue, the overwhelming passion of grief at her sister's body. There was one more emotion I'd seen in her face, simmering low under the rest. She felt guilt. Somehow, she felt guilty about Anita. There was a look of weary responsibility in her eyes that was misplaced for a woman who had nothing to do with Anita's death and was not responsible for the funeral arrangements.

A tiny thought struck me then, as I sat musing in my office. Why exactly did Anita Wagner leave her niece in charge of her funeral? If she had a sister, a sister that devoted to her, why choose the niece? Why had Angela Steele been so absent in the entire event, until last night in the morgue? Had Anita Wagner considered her twin sister so inept as to overlook her for the task, choosing instead a niece who was utterly negligent? Again, I felt frustration rising inside me.

The front door opened. I heard Plato meow. He scurried into my office to sniff Beau and say good morning. He ignored me, of course, as cats always do because I wish they wouldn't.

“Good morning, Patty,” I called. “I hope you're feeling better?”

She coughed. “Not much. That Myron Wagner gave me this headache yesterday.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. I walked to her desk. “Pull up the surveillance video from last night, Patty. I've got something to show you. Put it around 10:00 last night.” I perched on the edge of her desk. It groaned a little and I shifted my weight. “We had a visitor.”

Patty shot me a look and quickly pulled up the video. We watched together as Angela Steele jimmied the back door lock. Patty was stunned. “We're gonna need an alarm system next!” she exclaimed.

“Switch to the morgue camera now,” I said, “and watch this.”

Patty was silent as Angela Steele broke into our morgue, handled a dead body, and wept her agony all over again against the hard metal of the cold chamber. I could feel the resentment and disgust wafting off my secretary's body as I hovered over her shoulder. Then Angela turned to face the camera, wiping her face again, looking up. For a few moments her face was clear on the screen. Patty gasped. She clicked the keyboard to pause the video, and Angela's face froze on the screen.

“That's not --” Patty said, startled. “That's – I don't know.” She shook her head. “That's not what I expected.”

“I know!” I responded. “I thought it would be Desiree! But it's Angela, the twin sister! She never even came up here after Anita's death, and now she shows up on our surveillance video!”

Patty swiveled her chair around and looked at me. “No,” she said. “That's not what I meant.” She pointed to the screen. “I can't be sure, I really can't be sure,” she said, “but that woman in the video, the woman who broke into the morgue, I think that's Anita Wagner!”

Copyrighted by M.K. Christiansen