“I’m having a lot of trouble with him, Delphine. He died of food poisoning. Fargo restaurant.” There was a whisper of distress in her voice. “Tissue gas.”
The north wall was outfitted with glass-fronted cabinets, the top shelves neatly decked with small tubs of lip pins, mouth and eye cement, bandages, and glue. There was a small box of leftover calling cards from visitations. Benta kept the cards to dip in paraffin and she used them instead of cotton to make a durable barrier between the gums and lips. There was Bon Ami, used as a tooth polish, massage cream and lemon juice, vinegar and soap. Piles of clean towels. Hand brushes, hairbrushes, nail files, and clear lacquer. The broad lower shelves were stocked with serviceable gallon bottles of methanol or wood alcohol, ethanol, arsenic solution, formalin, and smaller bottles of oil of cloves, sassafras, wintergreen, benzaldehyde, oil of orange flower, lavender, and rosemary. Aurelius Strub’s original embalmer’s diploma, the first awarded west of Minneapolis and east of Spokane, hung from the wall in an elaborate frame. Although the basement was always cool, the general heat was wreaking havoc with the burials. Amid all of this Clarisse maintained her cheerful curved smile and her graceful prettiness. She suddenly put Delphine in mind of Malcolm’s line, Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace, yet grace must still look so. She pushed the quote from her head.
There were two nice plush chairs in the corner, and even a tiny electric stove and a pot for brewing coffee.
“All right,” said Clarisse. “I’m all ears. Now, what is it, really?”
Of course, an afternoon visit signaled some emergency, inner or outer, and Delphine got immediately to the point.
“What costume did you wear when you played the lady in The Lady and the Tiger?” asked Delphine.
“It was a cute little number, all—”
“Red, pink, peach flapper beads, those tube iridescent kind.”
“I sewed a million on that dress, remember? It was practically a work of art.”
Clarisse was, in fact, a clever seamstress and used a variation of herstitching to create perfect hidden sutures in her clients, even using two crisscrossing needles sometimes and hiding the knots. Even underneath the clothing, where no one would ever see, her work was perfect and she scorned lock stitch or bridge sutures—That’s just sewing, she’d say.
“Where is it?”
“I think it’s in my closet somewhere,” said Clarisse, easily. “Why?”
“Get rid of it,” said Delphine.
“After all that work I put into it?” Clarisse dropped her jaw in false outrage.
“Listen, I got wind of the way Sheriff Hock is thinking. You know the cellar door at my house was pasted shut with this awful solid goop and in it there were beads just like your beads.”
Clarisse opened her mouth, but then a look of pain and panic suffused her face, and she put her hands to her pretty cheeks. Her little oval nails whitened with the pressure of her fingers, “Oh God, Delphine! I told you that Sheriff Hock practically ripped the dress off me that night…”
“I have this feeling that Hock’s cooking something up in his fat, fevered head.”
“Hock is baiting me,” said Clarisse. “He’s… impossible. I can’t reason with him. He’ll use this coincidence — the dress, poor Ruthie and Doris… how can he? There was a little girl down there!” She burst into quick, frustrated tears, but after a few moments, she took down her hands and said, “No, no, I’ll not let him get the better of me. He should lay off. I’m a professional and I have to finish Mr. Pletherton by five, and he’s a really difficult case.” She suddenly drooped, very tired, frowned at Delphine, and then shook her curls. “Hey, would you be a real girl pal and grab that dress from my closet? Just go home and throw the damn dress in the fire.”
Delphine said yes in the conspiratorial intensity of the moment and walked out the door in a blur. When she reached her friend’s house and opened the back door, she realized that she was doing something stupid. It would look terrible if Sheriff Hock caught Delphine removing the dress from her friend’s closet or in fact found her anywhere near the dress at all. And anyway, what was she supposed to do with it? The beads might melt but it looked as though they wouldn’t burn up and disappear. Swiftly, worried, she walked up the stairs to the room in which she’d stayed over often with her friend. She had treasured those nights, normal family dinners, an easygoing family life, all she didn’t have. No wonder the Strubs liked their jobs so much — no emotional surprises from the dead, though Delphine knew very well they often presented difficulties. The only joke Aurelius Strub had ever permitted himself, and it might have been simply an exhausted mistake, was to refer to the boy who went through the corn picker as a grave challenge.
Delphine entered Clarisse’s room — childishly messy — her friend needed some place to let her hair down, after all. What to do with the dress, the dress that she knew, already, from a hollow feeling in her chest, would be composed of the same color of apricot and sweet pink and red beads she remembered pasted into the pantry floor? Delphine argued with herself, but eventually she walked smoothly out the door with the dress in a sack and ducked around the back of the house. She couldn’t fulfill her promise to Clarisse to the letter, she decided. If she brought the dress home the piece of evidence, realistically she had to call it that, was in her hands. There would be no explaining it away. She could just see the beads glittering in the ashes of the outdoor fireplace. Delphine got a shovel from the shed beside the house and began gardening instead. She worked for about half an hour. In case anyone should see her, she thought it best that she just be thinning her friend’s iris bed, taking some extra perennials home for herself. In the process, she dug a deep hole and then very quickly stuffed the dress down into it. She shook the bag out, making certain every single bead was in the ground. She put some iris roots into the bag, a few crowded daylilies, and then returned the shovel to its place and walked home.
AS SOON AS she got back to the farm, Delphine made a quick outdoor cooking fire in the fireplace, let it burn down to a perfect bed of coals. She rolled some potatoes into the glowing embers, next, put the grill over the coals, and built a bit of a fire over the ashes to pan-fry some fish in bacon grease. She took a second picking of beans from the icebox, where she had left them to marinate all day. They were cold and sweet and vinegary. Outside in the cool of the evening, the mosquitoes quelled by the smoke, Roy, Markus, and she ate. Delphine took out the cream she’d bought in town and the raspberries Markus picked. That cream was a luxury. She had to admit she liked the money that Cyprian brought back — he gave her most of what he made — because it gave them leave to eat like kings and she had fixed up the house. Still, she was hit with a wave of irritated relief when he drove up as they were finishing, for although she kept him in the back of her thoughts, his absence had been a nagging worry. She hated to admit how glad she was to see him safe, and she grabbed him, hugged him, and shook him, all at the same time.
“You’re staying,” she said.
He kissed her hand and slowly lifted his hot black eyes to hers. He could flirt, even worn out, with great conviction — had he learned it as a kind of protection for his secret, or was it just in his blood?
There was plenty of fried fish left, and she heated up the string beans in more bacon grease. She prodded a baked potato from the edge of the coals, juggled it from hand to hand before she forked it open on his plate. A jet of steam rose from the potato, and she spooned bacon drippings into the soft meal. He made a grateful sound.