And so it was at six-thirty on the dot on this wintry night in early November. It had turned cold suddenly, after a month of Indian summer, gusting autumn winds skittering oak leaves down the cracked sidewalk and making frosty snowflake patterns on the windowpanes in the early morning. It was too cold in the house, but it had always been that way. Low temperatures helped keep fresh the dead bodies in the cellar.
The embalmer turned and closed the doors behind him, walked to the table, and as was his habit, checked to make sure the mother had set it according to his rules. The child sat very still as the father put his big hand down and measured the child’s dinner plate. There was to be exactly the length of the embalmer’s thumb between the table edge and the bottom of the Blue Willow plate, which had been in the family for one hundred years. The child let out a breath of relief when the embalmer found it exactly correct. He measured the child’s glass then, making sure it was filled with milk to only a thumb’s depth from the top rim, and then he checked that the dinner knife was a thumb’s length from the spoon, with the fork in between but not touching. The woman used a Popsicle stick that the embalmer had cut to the proper length with which to measure, and she used it religiously in all her household tasks. The father checked the child’s napkin and found it starched and ironed and folded into perfect thirds. He moved around the table and measured the woman’s place setting, then his own.
“Very good,” he whispered, patting his wife’s bowed head.
The embalmer sat down, and his family watched him so they’d know exactly when to fold their hands in prayer. He prayed about duty and obedience until the hall clock began its hollow chimes announcing the seven o’clock hour. On the third bong, he whispered amen, and the three of them picked up their napkins and unfolded them together. He picked up the platter of fried ham and forked out a piece for the child and the mother, and then put the rest on his plate. He served the steamed rice and black-eyed peas precisely the same way; then they waited for him to lift his fork, and they all took the first bite together. Tonight they ate the rice first.
No one spoke—it was against the rules to speak while dining, even in a whisper—and if they finished the food served to them before the clock struck eight o’clock, they would sit without speaking and wait for the soft bongs to commence. On this night, an unimaginable catastrophe happened at eighteen minutes before eight o’clock. The child dropped a salad fork, and it clinked against the hardwood floor and scattered grains of rice on the faded red-and-brown oriental carpet.
Everybody froze. The mother and the child looked at the embalmer, saw the ruddy flush rise up his neck and darken his face. He put down his own fork exactly a thumb’s length from his plate. He looked at the child, and the child made a low moaning sound deep inside his throat, eyes wide with terror.
The mother whispered, “Please, please don’t.”
The embalmer’s eyes switched to her, and then he moved so quickly, she never saw the fist he drove into her nose. The blow hit her with a sickening crunch of cartilage, and blood spouted all over the white linen tablecloth and pooled in the child’s plate of rice. The force knocked her chair over and onto its back, and she rolled onto her side, unconscious and bleeding.
The embalmer grabbed up the child and shook his thin shoulders until the child gasped for air. The big man dragged the child over to the mother and pushed the child’s face down close to the woman’s head. The embalmer mopped his hand over the mother’s nose and mouth until it was slick with warm red blood, and then he brought it up to the child and rubbed blood, all over the child’s face.
The father whispered harshly, “See what you did? You’ve got your mother’s blood on you now, and you can keep it there until you learn your lesson. Your mother never disobeyed me before you were born. This is all your fault. We were happy before you were born. You are an ugly, stupid brat, and don’t you dare cry. If I see one tear fall, I will put your mother back in that chair, and I will hit her in the face again. I will hit her over and over until you are obedient. Do you understand me?”
The embalmer slammed the child back into the chair, and the child ate the blood-soaked rice while the mother’s blood dried into a tight brown crust on his face. The child did not look at his mother again.
The child was five years old.
1
I got the call at 5:35 A.M. on my cell phone. As a Canton County Sheriff’s Department detective, I get plenty of early morning calls but none like this one. The temporary dispatcher said, “Like, it’s a real homicide, Claire! Awesome, like, can you believe it?” Guess that tells you a lot about what passes as excitement here at Lake of the Ozarks. I might live on the Lake Tahoe of mid-Missouri, but a haven for gangsters and murderers it ain’t, believe me. My partner, Bud Davis, and I are more likely to investigate who stole somebody’s yard gnome or who left an X-rated message on the answering machine down at Maudie’s beauty shop. That last one comes to mind because I handled it yesterday, all by myself, too. But that’s okay. For years, I worked Los Angeles Robbery/Homicide, or shall we say, Murder Unlimited, California Style, so the quiet life of purloined gnomes was one reason I immigrated to the Midwest.
My heart rate picked up because, hey, a murder is a murder. I sat up on the edge of my couch. I sleep on the couch a lot because I can’t sleep anywhere a lot, and I forced my bleary eyes to focus on the dock in front of my teensy-weensy A-frame cabin. The lake cove was quiet and calm, dark green waters lapping dark green, forested shores. See why I came out here to live? The sky was trying to do the dawn thing it did every morning around this time, but the lake had pulled up its blanket of mist and was saying, not yet, not yet, please let me sleep, just ten more minutes.
“Guess what else, Claire, like, just guess?” Somehow I wasn’t in the mood to guess much, but the question was rhetorical, anyway. Fact is, the dispatcher was an emergency temp named Jacqueline, Jacqee for short, which tells you a lot. On the other hand, she’s the sheriff’s youngest and flightiest of four daughters. My partner and I call her Dude-ette. She was home from college for the summer, and I guess nineteen-year-olds majoring in fashion design like to play guessing games with detectives at the crack of dawn. Thus, Dude-ette went on, oh, so excited: “And it’s a Hollywood celebrity, can you believe it? Like, a real live celebrity down here at the lake that got herself killed!”
Now that one did make me wonder what Jacqee had been smoking down at the station house. “Okay, Jacqee, I’m awake now. Calm down, and tell me when and where.”
“Cedar Bend Lodge.”
“Oh, damn.” Now I believed the celebrity part. Cedar Bend Lodge was the primo address on all fifteen hundred miles of the lake’s mountainous, rugged shoreline. Worse news was that Nicholas Black, world-renowned psychobabbler, owned it. I’d never met the handsome and suave Doctor Black, of course, but word was he was more self-absorbed than his Tinseltown patients. Shorthand for: I am not eager to deal with him.
“Call Bud Davis. Is there a uniform on it?”
“Uh-huh. O’Hara. She’s the one on duty.”
“Does Charlie know?” I felt I needed to guide Jacqee through the drill, she being a student of hem lengths and peasant blouses, and all.
“Daddy had to go to Jeff City last night, and like, talk to some dudes up there, you know, the governor and those guys.”
Oh, them.
“Okay, I’m on my way,” I said, then remembered who was on the other end of the line. “Listen, Jacqee, don’t talk to anybody about this, got it? Nobody. Especially the press. Understand?” Redundant, yes, but it paid to be with Jacqee of the two e’s.