From his seat in the back row he had glimpses of Howard at the front sitting with his father on one side and Kay on the other, and beside Kay, Chizzy. This was his family, his only family, and he very much wanted to be sitting with them as they’d asked him to do. But he didn’t trust his own emotions, so he sat near the rear exit, mute, suffering, smothering in the fumes of Mrs. Cunningham’s perfume.
“Do you know,” Mrs. Cunningham said, “what fibrillation is?”
When she repeated the question, Ben realized that she was addressing him and not her son. He responded with a shake of his head. “No, I don’t.”
“It means a very, very rapid beating of the heart. It can be extremely dangerous, often fatal. I am fibrillating right this minute.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“You don’t happen to have a Librium or something on that order, do you?”
“No. Sorry.”
“People don’t go around prepared the way they used to. In my day I never went anywhere without smelling salts, for instance. They had an odor like lavender but they contained something like ammonia that could knock you for a loop.”
“I see.”
“Now whenever I go out my son searches through my handbag to make sure I’m not carrying anything of that nature, not even a wee drop of booze for use in an emergency like this. A very small amount of bourbon or scotch would tide me over if you—”
“I don’t have any.”
She frowned at him through the little maroon veil that reached to her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. “I don’t understand why people go about unprepared.”
“Maybe because they don’t know what to be prepared for.”
“They must be prepared for the worst because that’s what happens.”
“Amen,” said the Reverend Michael Dunlop, and went over to the coffin and placed both his hands on the lid and bowed his head. People thought he was praying because what else would a minister be doing beside a coffin with his eyes closed, his mouth moving? But he was not praying; the words his lips formed were not part of any liturgy.
“Good-bye, dear child. Your murderer will be found, will never be forgiven or forgotten, will never spend a single day without torment. I swear this to you, Annamay Rebecca Hyatt.”
Without opening his eyes he was aware that Lorna was standing beside him. He could hear her angry rapid breathing and then her voice, whisper-soft but still managing to sound urgent:
“What on earth are you doing, Michael? This isn’t what’s supposed to come next.”
“What’s supposed to come next?”
“You say a prayer aloud asking for the salvation of her soul and pleading for mercy for the perpetrator of the deed.”
He opened his eyes and gave her a look of such intense hatred she stepped back, holding her purse across her chest like a shield. “That’s what you did when Mrs. Vallancourt was hit by a truck and the driver was never found. Then after the plea for mercy you led the procession of mourners past the body. Why aren’t you doing that now?”
“There is no body. There is a pile of bones.”
“Stop repeating that. I want to remember her as she was, whole and pretty and—”
“Seven and a half pounds of bones,” he said.
Chapter Three
On a bluff overlooking the sea, Annamay was buried in the Hyatt family plot. Granite headstones marked the graves of those already there, Howard’s mother, and his older brother and his wife who’d been killed in a plane crash.
“Don’t you worry,” Mr. Hyatt told Kay. “Grandma will take good care of Annamay just the way she did of me. You mustn’t fret that she’ll be neglected.”
Kay pressed his arm. “Thanks, Dad.”
“She never let me miss a meal or go out in the rain without my umbrella… It seems to me it never rains anymore, Kay. Did you notice that?”
“The rains will start soon.”
“Aristophanes had something quite blasphemous to say about rain but I can’t remember what it was. Did Chizzy make the right kind of sandwiches?”
“You’d better ask her.”
He asked her and Chizzy said, well, yes and no. She’d made a few peanut-butter for him and Dru but the rest had to be fancier for Vicki and her husband and Ben and the Reverend Dunlop.
“But Annamay never served anything but peanut-butter.”
“Now you stop fussing here and now. If Mrs. Hyatt were still alive she’d give you one of those sharp looks of hers and you’d shut up like a clam.”
The old man was pleased. “She could stare down the devil himself, couldn’t she? I don’t mind admitting I used to shake in my boots sometimes.”
“You can start shaking again right now because Miss Vicki is giving you the eye. That means she’s fixing to make one of her speeches if you don’t be quiet.”
“God forbid.”
“Him and me too.”
Vicki was not, in fact, paying any attention to the old man. She was watching her daughter, Dru, with critical appraisal. Dru, who’d inherited her father’s mousy brown hair and gray eyes, was not turning out as pretty as she’d hoped. If she was to make a good marriage she would have to be taught some of the charming little graces that came naturally to Annamay. Dru was devastatingly direct. She bossed her boyfriends, beat them at games, and if they still had any doubts about their inferiority she put it to them in blunt language. She treated her stepfather, John Campbell, with equal candor and she didn’t mind in the least when she was treated back the same way.
“I think I see a whale,” Dru told him.
“What kind?”
“Gray.”
“Wrong time of year,” John said. “The herds of gray don’t pass here on their way to Baja until late winter or early spring.”
“Maybe this one is independent and decided to go ahead on his own.”
“Her own.”
“You can’t tell if it’s a female all the way from here.”
“If a whale decides to be independent and louse up the whole routine it’s a her.”
“I guess you’re right,” Dru said fairly. She had few illusions about either sex or any species.
“On the other hand,” said John Campbell who could be as impartial as Dru, “I must point out that females often make excellent leaders. When a flock of pintails or widgeon flies by, it will be a female at the head of it. And among predators like hawks and owls the female is about one-third larger and much fiercer.”
“I’m going to be big like my father, aren’t I?”
“Very likely.”
“Oh well, I don’t care. Maybe I’ll be a professional basketball player, maybe the world’s first girl champion slam dunker.”
“I’ll come and cheer.”
“Why did you marry my mother?”
“I’m not sure.” He looked across the open grave at Vicki who was standing with Kay and Howard waiting for the casket to arrive. “She’s pretty and cute. Also, she asked me.”
“Did she really really truly ask you?”
“Yep.”
“You could have said no.”
“I didn’t want to.”
He had met Vicki through his job at the Museum of Natural History. She was into Conservation at the time and was taking a course in marine biology. She often stayed after class to ask questions and she appeared so interested in the subject that he would take her down to the beach to make on-the-spot studies of tide-pool life. He would remove a starfish clinging to a rock or a sea urchin half buried in the sand, show her how each one functioned, then replace the specimen carefully where it belonged. She listened with wide-eyed fascination. By the time he discovered that the object of her fascination was not inside but outside the tide pools, it was too late. Her previous husbands, daughter, succession of lovers, didn’t matter.