I remembered a wise friend once told me that if you want to know how a man will treat you, look at the way he treats his mother.
“That, and — I don’t know — he sampled every girl in town.”
I was both sickened and excited to have this information. I wanted to keep this woman talking, and I wanted to hear nothing more. She made the decision for me.
“Been a pleasure,” she said, rising. “Give my best to Renee.”
She left me with my untouched coffee and the feeling that I had chosen the wrong profession. I knew nothing about people.
• • •
Lisa picked us up in an old, black Jeep Cherokee. She gave Renee her arm as we walked to the car. Vanessa got out of the passenger seat to let her mother sit in the front, which meant that she and I would share the backseat. She hadn’t changed clothes for the funeral. Renee wore a black wool skirt and cardigan over a print turtleneck, black stockings, and flats. Lisa had made an effort. She wore a simple, fitted, black dress under a camel-hair coat, and black, knee-high boots.
Vanessa said, “Would you turn on the radio?”
Lisa sounded shocked. “Are you kidding?”
“What’s wrong with a little music?”
Renee said she didn’t mind if they put on a classical station.
“Then forget it,” Vanessa said.
My pulse sped up when she said that — it could have been her brother speaking.
We rode in silence after that, except for the sisters contradicting each other about the better route to the church. Bennett had told me he was raised Catholic, so I was not surprised to see Lisa turn into the parking lot of Our Lady of the Lakes in Oquossoc, an elegant red-brick Catholic church ten minutes from Rangeley. Inside it reminded me of a German beer hall with its Bavarian beams crisscrossing the ceiling.
I would not have been surprised to see every pew filled, nor would I have been surprised to see them empty. If it was the former, I felt the townspeople would be there for Renee, not her errant son. I was right: the congregation included only people Renee’s age, and most of them were women — and I was wrong: the pews were far from filled. An organist played “Be Not Afraid,” one of the standard Catholic funeral hymns, I knew. Give me a reason, I thought, to be not afraid.
“What did you spend on that casket?” Vanessa asked her mother.
Lisa shushed her, so their mother didn’t have to.
“Seriously,” Vanessa said. “You need a new furnace.”
Renee said, “Drop it.”
Then the priest approached. Father Bernard greeted the family and nodded my way when Renee introduced me. He held Renee’s hands and spoke softly to her, the time-worn words of solace. When he turned from her to walk to the pulpit, I debated whether I would kneel along with the congregants during the service or keep my seat. I wasn’t Catholic, but I didn’t want to draw any more attention in the small town. Even if I knelt, I would not be able to take communion. Damned if I did, damned if I didn’t.
The funeral mass was in Latin — Renee told me she had asked for that — and I let the sounds wash over me without meaning. I found the rituals soothing, even though they were not my rituals.
The last funeral I had attended was Kathy’s, a “green” funeral. No coffin, no headstone; we carried her shroud-wrapped body on a handcart deep into a forest in her native Virginia to a designated area where we, her friends, dug the grave. Kathy weighed practically nothing at the end. We lifted her off the cart and laid her in the ground. After we filled the grave, we scattered leaves over the freshly turned earth and brushed away our footprints with branches.
After this service, the priest summoned several young men from the congregation to carry the coffin out of the church. It was customary for the family to follow before everyone else, but was I family?
At the graveside service the priest invited the mourners to make “a suitable gesture of farewell.” Renee, crying quietly, threw a single white rose onto the lowered coffin. Lisa threw a handful of dirt into the grave. Vanessa looked down on her brother’s coffin. I had the terrible feeling that she was going to spit on it. But she simply turned away without doing a thing. I wondered if she would yank me back if I stepped forward to say a farewell. I had nothing to say, and nothing to scatter on his coffin.
Vanessa helped her mother leave the graveside. Lisa stood off by herself crying.
I was not a good enough actress to convince Lisa that I shared her loss, but I tried to express something along those lines anyway. She thanked me and said she would miss him, even though she’d already been missing him all those years since he had left the family. And then she said it upset her that his death was so violent.
“Can I ask you something? Was he ever violent?”
“What do you mean?” Lisa seemed surprised by my question. “Was he violent with you?”
I told her that the Boston police think he murdered a woman.
“No one told us that. Who do they think he killed?”
“His fiancée.”
“Then who the hell are you?”
“He had more than one.”
“I don’t understand. What are you saying?”
Vanessa noticed her sister’s agitation and left their mother surrounded by friends. She came over to ask what was going on.
“She says Jimmy’s a murderer,” Lisa said. “That he killed his fiancée. His other fiancée. How do you like that?”
“I don’t know who you are or what you want from us, but you can leave right now,” Vanessa said.
She looked and sounded so much like Bennett that it felt as though he were ordering me to leave his own funeral. It was the last time I would obey him.
21
Before I left for Maine, I had contacted animal sanctuaries that might take Cloud, starting with the gold standard — Best Friends, in Kanab, Utah. I wanted Cloud as close to me as possible, and I thought they might be able to refer me to a suitable place in the Northeast. But every place I tried had a wait list up to a year. And since a “dangerous dog” would be kept by itself and not allowed to play with other dogs or socialize with people other than the handler who would take the dog out to eliminate, it would be a life of solitary confinement. I knew people in the rescue world who felt that there was something worse than euthanasia, and this was what they meant. Dogs went crazy in such a situation, and the manifestations of their misery were many. Could I subject my dog to this? Was choosing the lesser evil the best I could do for Cloud? What was the lesser evil? I wanted McKenzie’s opinion.
I was still sleeping on Steven’s foldout. I made myself coffee and phoned McKenzie’s office.
“Laurence McKenzie’s office,” a familiar voice answered.
“Billie?”
“Yes, may I take a message?”
“It’s me, Morgan.”
“Morgan! We were wondering where you’ve been.”
“What are you doing there?”
“Helping out. His secretary quit on him.” She was making herself indispensable to him.
“When will he be back?”
“Faye, stop clicking your teeth,” Billie said to McKenzie’s dog. “Sorry, what did you ask me?”
“I wanted to talk to McKenzie about Cloud. Every sanctuary I contacted has a waiting list.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m wondering if George was the luckier one,” I admitted.
“You weren’t asking that two weeks ago.”
“I need to talk to McKenzie. Can you ask him?”
“He’s right here. I’m in the outer office. I’ll get him for you.”
Before I could register this, McKenzie was telling me it was good to hear my voice.