“And are you?”
“Not that I know of. Unless living alone in the woods counts.”
“It might. Are you Godless, Ms. Deacon?” Oh, boy. Here it comes, I thought. The pitch.
“Not really. I keep my mind open, that’s all,” I said.
“That’s the first place He’ll come knocking, then,” the Pastor said and smiled gently.
“So I hear.” We sat and smoked in silence for a minute. Having decided to pay my last respects to Francy, alone in the Chapel of the Holy Lamb, I felt calm and strangely peaceful. I hadn’t felt like that for a long time.
“Well,” the Pastor said, “I don’t see why I can’t let you take a look at her. She hasn’t been prettied-up much, seeing as it was a closed coffin and all, but I saw her just a short while ago and she certainly doesn’t look as bad as how she probably looks in your mind. She’ll be buried tomorrow. We usually do it right away, but her mother wanted her to stay in the Chapel for one night. Mrs. Delaney will be back to sit with her, she said.”
“She didn’t seem to be in any shape to sit up all night,” I said, following him down the corridor.
“Well, if she doesn’t come, I guess the job will be mine. She wanted someone to pray over her, you see. A few prayers. Some thinking. No harm in that.”
He opened the chapel door and we walked together up the aisle to the casket. I tugged at the ring on my finger—an opal that my mother had given me for my eighth birthday, which, as I had grown, I had had re-set several times to fit. I had worn it always, but in that short walk to Francy’s casket, I decided, in a catch-all, ritualistic sort of way, to give it to Francy. The Pastor opened the lid for me and then discreetly stepped aside.
Somebody had fixed her up a bit—maybe the police, or whoever had done the post-mortem. The Pastor was right, she certainly did look better than she had swinging from the rafter in her kitchen. Because the funeral hadn’t included a public viewing, she wasn’t slathered in horrible pancake makeup the way bodies sometimes are, but neither was she green and wormy, the way I was expecting. She was very dead, though, and her face was still too dark.
No blood pumped through those veins, nor ever would again. No muscle would jump again to open those eyes, which by now were probably dull and opaque. Francy’s face, alive, had sparkled with mischief. No mischief now. I resisted the temptation to lift the eyelids and peer in. A kind of corpseoriented vertigo took hold of me. I wanted to sweep her up in my arms and dance with her. I reached out to touch her hand. It was cold and stiff. Rigid, in fact. Putting my ring on her finger was going to be tricky.
I felt the Pastor behind me.
“She looks peaceful, any road,” he said.
“She does,” I said. I showed him the ring. “I wanted to give her this. Can I put it on her finger?”
He sighed gently and smiled a bit. “Seems to be a trend,” he said, and, reaching out, opened the stiff fingers of her right hand. “Samson Schreier had the same idea. Took it off his wife’s neck and said a little prayer over it.”
From those dead fingers fell a gold crucifix, on a chain, which slithered quickly out of sight into the satin folds of the coffin.
Twenty-Nine
I shall stew you and chew you
and wear your bones
in a clattering jangle at my neck,
your teeth strung
on a ring hung
in the ruin of my face.
—Shepherd’s Pie
I’d like to report that I kept my cool. After all, Pastor Garnet Larkin had been kind to me. But cool wasn’t happening.
Before slipping beneath the folds of satin, that crucifix had glinted, and I knew it wasn’t a mirage. It had glinted at the neck of Carla Schreier during the funeral. It had glinted when Poe had carried it in his beak the day after John’s murder. It had glinted when it hung around Francy’s neck the day I gave it to her. The cross was the key to the whole damn thing and if Samson Schreier had removed it from his wife’s bosom and hidden it in the hand of a woman who was about to be buried in the ground, then I figured it was more than a scrap of gold he was trying to bury. Where had he been the night of John’s murder? At a farming conference? I don’t think so.
I swore loudly, and the Pastor flinched.
“No call for that, ma’am,” he said. “None of us has a monopoly on gifts to the dead.”
I reached my hands into the coffin, scrabbling around underneath Francy’s cold body like a grave-robber until I caught hold of the chain. Pastor Larkin gasped and put a hand on my arm. I wrenched away from him and ran out of the Chapel of the Holy Lamb just as fast as I could go.
I didn’t have much time. I had to get to a phone and get in touch with Becker and Morrison, and I had to do it before they charged Eddie with murder. In spite of what Samson and Carla had said, I didn’t think that Jesus was going to make everything okay.
The Chapel was just down the road from the Schreier’s place and my quickest route to a phone was to take the nearby bush-road to George’s place that Francy and I had taken the week before. Actually, my quickest route to a phone was to drop in on Samson Schreier, the fanatical holy roller who had announced publicly that he had hated John Travers and had tried to bury some evidence with the body of his second victim, Francy. But I wasn’t ready to confront Samson yet. Not without some big cop standing right behind me.
I hadn’t figured it all out yet. I mean, just because Samson had put the crucifix in Francy’s coffin, it didn’t prove that he was the murderer. I just had a very strong feeling about it. The slim gold chain and pendant was vital evidence. That much I knew. I ran along the path for a while until a pain in my chest told me I’d better slow down or I’d collapse. I was wheezing and my heart was thumping loudly in my ears. I didn’t even think about bears. I wasn’t afraid of them any more, anyway.
As I hurried along, my brain kicked into overdrive to keep up with my lungs. Why had John been murdered? Revenge? Anger? Had Samson been so enraged at John’s having taken Francy away from the Schreiers that he had harboured a grudge for ten years before doing anything about it?
Was it something to do with the four hundred bucks? What was that money for, anyway? Maybe it had nothing to do with the case at all. Maybe it was just some sort of “just in case” stash. Or maybe John had owed it to Samson and the farmer had become tired of waiting. Still, four hundred dollars is a puny sum to kill for.
According to Eddie, the two men had hated each other, and Samson had made his feelings pretty clear at the funeral. I wondered if Becker had even bothered to check out Samson’s alibi. Probably not. He had been convinced from day one that Francy had done it.
But if Samson had murdered John, why had Freddy Einarson become involved? I was sure it was Freddy who had nailed the warning and the dead squirrel to my front door, but Freddy had no reason to defend Samson, had he? If anything, the two men should be sworn enemies, not buddies, seeing as Freddy had dallied with Samson’s wife sixteen years ago, if not more recently.
I wondered why Samson had been so relaxed during Freddy’s confession in the Chapel. Perhaps he had learned to live with it. But that suggested a self-control which did not match with the idea of Samson killing John in a murderous rage.
Where had Poe picked up the crucifix and how had it come to be around Carla’s neck?
Why was Eddie hanging around the Travers place after the murder? Was he looking for Lady Chatterley, or something more dangerous? Did he really get the shiner by walking into a door?
Why