Farther back was a scattering of people, alone and in pairs. I wondered if the mysterious Karen was among them. As the chapel slowly quieted, I heard a faint sound coming from a man in the rear, just below us. He looked to be in his mid-fifties and wore a pilled brown jacket. He was sobbing softly. I’d want to speak to him.
The service was short and simple. The family didn’t strike me as being especially religious. The minister mentioned the fact that Sheila was in some sense returning to home ground, the place where her mother had been born and her grandmother was buried.
Abe got up to speak about his sister. He was three years older than her. He described the science experiments they’d conducted when they were young, and the fact that when they played “doctor” it was to simulate and diagnose actual medical conditions; the other kids in the neighborhood gave up on playing with them. This got a chuckle from the audience. Abe and Sheila read biology books and delighted in regaling each other with bizarre tales from the microbial world. He spoke with the affection of an older brother, but his face remained rigid. His voice carried the same force and righteousness I’d heard in his words to me.
Then the white-haired man on the other side of the aisle got up. He turned out to be Harry Salzmann, Sheila’s mentor in graduate school. He used the same phrase McKinnon had to describe her: a natural scientist. He talked about her devotion to discovery and her attitude of cooperation with other students. It was tragic for her to be taken now, when she’d found such a happy research home with his former colleague, Dr. McKinnon. By the end of his remarks, tears were streaming down Salzmann’s face. Sobs could be heard elsewhere in the chapel, too — though, I noticed, no longer from the man below us.
As the service came to an end, I stood. Jenny stayed where she was. “I just want to sit here for a few minutes,” she said.
“Okay. There’s someone I want to talk to. I’ll see you up at the main building.”
I caught the man in the pilled brown jacket as I came to the bottom of the stairs. He was trying to make a quick exit. I paced along with him out of the chapel and up the path. He reluctantly exchanged greetings with me. I extracted a name: Carl Steiner. I asked how he knew Sheila.
“We worked together.” He’d put on a straw sun hat, which he had to hold down against an afternoon breeze. Skin sagged at the corners of his mouth.
“You were in her group?”
“No.” His eyes were fixed on loaves of fog thickening in the sky to the west. “I was in another division. She liked to come to the garden I tended, out in back. Watch its progress…” His voice trailed off.
“Very sad about her.”
He stopped, fastened his nimbus-gray eyes on me, and said with conviction, “She was a wonderful girl. Those people have no idea. They act like they care — but they’ll just go on with their lives.”
“And you?”
He shook his head and jammed the hat down tighter. “I can’t live with it.”
He ducked away from me and strode off. I began to follow. He raised a hand to ward me off and disappeared over the hill. I turned to see the casket being borne from the chapel, then returned to join the gathering. As the casket moved off in the direction of the green lawns, I saw McKinnon split off. He marched back up the path. Dugan followed about fifteen feet behind. I took off after Dugan.
The door to the main building was propped open. As I came up the steps, I glimpsed McKinnon at a table with a large urn of coffee. His expression when he looked up to see Dugan was not what I expected. It was cold and distrustful. They might have been executives in the same company, but they were not allies.
McKinnon turned away when he noticed me. I needed to be a fly on the wall. Having the two men alone in a room was one of those experiments that would be ruined by an observer. I acted as if I’d forgotten something, spun on my heel, and sidled back along the wall outside. After a few seconds, I edged closer to the door again.
Silence, then voices. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I’d been lugging my briefcase around like a nerd. It was time to use it. Quietly I opened the latches. Setup took only a minute. I slid a wind baffle over the mike and screwed it into its battery base. The rig was unobtrusive, about the size of a slim baton. After plugging the cord into my portable DAT recorder, I inched close enough to set the mike just inside the door frame. A shotgun mike, it ought to pick up enough of the conversation for me to hear it later.
I hit RECORD. The dB indicator spiked in synch with the murmurs. I pushed the levels, covered everything but the mike with my jacket, then sat back against the wall, trying to look casual. Now and then a mortuary employee bustled by. They were preparing for the return of the mourners, or perhaps getting ready for the next funeral. I smiled stupidly at them, and did things like dig my finger in my ear or inspect my arm. Anything to look busy. I was glad they were trained not to bother the bereaved.
A few minutes later, the voices stopped. McKinnon emerged with his jacket slung over his shoulder. He stared out over the hills, dotted with markers, and his muscles went slack. His long frame lurched to one side, like a willow in the wind. He sighed, turned, and gave a start when he noticed me. It was only a glance; I registered as neither friend nor foe. He straightened, checked his watch, then strode off to the parking area.
I used the cord to reel in the mike. People were starting to file back up from the burial ground. I unscrewed the mike, put the whole rig into the briefcase, closed it, and shrugged on my jacket.
Abe was the first to return. He gave me a long, hard look. Jenny straggled along at the end, ahead only of Mrs. Harros, who was being pushed in her wheelchair by a man with a carnation. Jenny’s face was puffy. When I asked if she wanted to leave, she gave me a toss of the head and pushed past me. She’d expected me to be down at the burial with her.
I followed her into the reception room. She made a beeline for the corner. There, beside a vase of pussy willows, stood Mr. Harros. Next to him was Neil Dugan. Jenny marched right at them. I wanted to stop her, to tell her it wasn’t time for Harros yet. Professor Salzmann was across the room, getting coffee. He was the one we wanted first. Or Karen, if she was there.
But Jenny was resolved, and I couldn’t stop her without causing a scene. I hung a few feet back, listening. “We’ll have it all ready for you tomorrow,” Dugan was saying to Harros. “Come by whenever you like.”
Dugan had the courtesy to step away as Jenny approached. He perched on the arm of a nearby sofa. Swaddled in the cushions, whispering together, were Marion and Fay.
Jenny planted herself. “Mr. Harros, I want to say how very, very sorry I am, and how badly I feel—”
“Who are you?”
She swallowed before answering. “Jenny Ingersoll.”
His blunt features stiffened. His brows gathered like thunderclouds. “You dare to come here?”
“Well, yes, I feel involved. We were the ones who went to the hospital—”
“You’re involved, young woman. Up to your ears.”
Jenny flushed. “What, you think I poisoned your daughter?”
His hands quivered. He looked ready to throw her out. “We’ll settle that soon. You’ll own up to your responsibility!”
I moved in. “It’s true the dinner party was at her house. But Jenny and Fay were very careful about the menu.”
Harros’s eyes flashed on me. Their fleshiness turned imperious when he opened them wide. “What does this have to do with Fay?”
“She hosted the party with Jenny. Didn’t she tell you?”