by Siara Brandt
It was no secret that Bayley didn’t like Lise. He had never liked her. You’re not my family, he had told her on more than one occasion. She used to feel guilty that she had come to share the sentiment but she had managed to let go of the guilt over the years. Bayley was so rude, selfish and sneaky that the only way she could deal with him was to ignore him. Sometimes that worked. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes she didn’t even know when she had pissed him off. Once she had found a glass bottle wedged under her tire. Unfortunately, she hadn’t realized it was there until after she had rolled over it with both her front and back tires. It exploded and cost her two new tires. She was pretty sure Bayley had deliberately put the bottle there because she later found out he had been mad at her that day for asking him to clean up a mess he had made in her living room. That, plus it was the same kind of soda bottle he had been drinking from the day before. The smug, self-satisfied smile on his face, one he could barely hide, when he heard about the flat tires all but confirmed her suspicions.
“I want pizza,” she heard Bayley say. She had no doubt that pizza would be on the menu tonight. He would badger and pout until he got his way. He was a spoiled, manipulative brat, and if he didn’t get what he wanted, he’d become downright mean and vindictive. He must have taken lessons from Uncle Alford.
“I don’t know what could be keeping Linwood,” she heard her mother say. “He’s always on time.”
“Do you want me to give him a call and see what’s holding him up?” Lise asked.
Not that she actually wanted to talk to her brother or his wife. It was hard to decide who was worse out of the two of them, Linwood or Floris. Floris had never liked Lise, either, but then Floris didn’t like- well, practically anyone. Just the thought of having dinner with her condescending, know-it-all sister-in-law and having to listen to her horrible nasal laugh, usually at someone else’s expense, raised her stress level several degrees. That laugh was comparable to nails on a chalk board.
Before her mother could answer her question, Mirin leaned forward and whispered, “Where’s a good place to eat, Lise?”
There wasn’t going to be a good enough place to eat. Not for Mirin. Not in Stone Creek. Unless they drove all the way out to the winery. Lise had heard that they were serving dinner on the weekends now and that the food was supposed to be good. But there was no way she was going to suggest they all drive out there.
Pretending she hadn’t heard the question, Lise asked her mother again, “Should I call him?”
“Not just yet.”
Lise had been hoping to get away from the cloying heat and the almost-nauseating funeral home smell and catch a breath of cool air outside.
“I picked out his suit,” her mother said with a wistful expression on her face. “It’s the same one he wore to Mirin’s wedding. It’s a very nice suit, isn’t it?”
“Yes, the suit’s nice,” Lise replied and, without thinking, asked, “Why does he look like that?”
She regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth. Mirin froze with her tissue halfway to her nose. Her mother’s horrified look seemed to be frozen in place. One of Bayley’s eyes peeked at her from behind his mother.
Lise immediately tried to undo the damage. “What I meant to say was, he seemed so healthy the last time I saw him. Was he sick before he- passed?”
“You saw him what? Two- three years ago?” her mother asked in a half-veiled accusatory voice. Lise knew what she was getting at. She had already explained why she had missed that family reunion a year ago.
“I don’t remember,” Lise replied, hoping her answer didn’t sound like another apology.
“He always took care of himself,” her mother’s comment was accompanied by a slow, disbelieving shake of her head. “And he kept up with his shots, too.”
“He got a shot? How many days ago did he- ” Lise began.
“Lise, don’t start that,” her mother cut her off. “Not now. Not here. It does no good to start scaring people.”
“I’m not trying to start anything. Or scare anyone.”
“It is starting something when you let your imagination run wild and you continuously come up with all kinds of crazy theories to explain the bad things that happen.”
“Crazy theories? Is there something I don’t know?”
Lise looked askance at her mother and then at Doradean Dinwitty who had just asked the question after taking a seat behind them. Apparently eavesdropping as usual, Doradean proceeded to tell them that they had finally found Elzy Bunyen’s truck wrecked in a ditch off the County Road south of town. It was big news. Elzy had been missing for more than a week.
“There was no sign of Elzy,” Doradean went on before Lise could ask any questions.
“So he’s what?” Lise asked the woman. “Wandering the woods out there somewhere?”
Doradean shrugged bony shoulders. “No one knows.”
Anything else she might have said was interrupted by a long, rolling peal of thunder. Apparently a storm was blowing in, a bad one from the sound of the thunder. The lights flickered. Went out. Went back on again. Mirin ran her gaze along the ceiling as if she could read a weather report there.
A wake. A storm. Mysterious deaths and disappearances, not to mention the accident she had passed on her way here. What was next?
Bayley was whispering in his mother’s ear again. Mirin asked Lise, “Have you decided where we should eat?”
Lise stared at her without mentioning the winery. Instead she shook her head and abruptly announced, “I’m going to call Linwood,” Without another word, she got up and left the three of them staring silently after her.
Elbert Durnan of Durnan and Durnan funeral home mopped his sweat-beaded brow with his handkerchief. Then he used the back of his hand to swipe at the moisture dampening his upper lip. Not only was the heat getting to him, but his conscience was also bothering him. He couldn’t stop worrying that he would be found out. And then he would be disgraced. Not for something he had done, but for something he hadn’t done. He hadn’t attended to the deceased, hadn’t embalmed the body before the wake. He had never been so negligent before. It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that there was something strange about the condition of the body. It was because he simply hadn’t had the time.
So now Elbert was mercilessly plagued with guilt. In fact, it took everything in him to face the bereaved and offer the usual condolences. Even though Alford Cagle had been a mean shit when he had been alive, like anyone else, he deserved a proper send-off. It was bad enough that the air conditioning wasn’t working, but he had heard rumors that there was something strange about the death itself. He had been hearing speculations and conjectures all day. Nothing that could be substantiated, but people were talking. Not openly, but they were whispering all kinds of crazy notions among themselves. Elbert didn’t like to listen to rumors, but he, too, couldn’t help but wonder if one of the deceased’s family members hadn’t poisoned him. His wife? One of his children? Alford Cagle had enough wealth to make people to wonder. That, Elbert reasoned, was cause enough for all the speculation. Besides the fact that the death was so sudden and so unexpected.
At the moment, however, it wasn’t a possible murderer’s guilt that Elbert was most concerned with. It was his own. If anyone found out that he hadn’t done his job properly, he would be ruined in this town. And then what would he do? Where would he go? Pack up and move somewhere else? It just wasn’t done in the funeral business. An undertaker couldn’t just set up shop anywhere. Elbert had lived in Stone Creek all his life. Uprooting his family because of one mistake was unthinkable.
To himself, he fully admitted that he had messed up big time, but he vowed he wouldn’t let it happen again. Ever. The thing to do was to get through this and then get past it. He would see to the embalming tonight. Until then, the lack of air conditioning was worrisome. People were uncomfortable. They were sweating. He turned slowly and looked at Alford Cagle with growing dread and anxiety. The effect of heat
on the body-
Would only hasten the deterioration. He had never seen anything like it. You could see the changes right through the makeup. More than once, Elbert had wondered if Alford Cagle had not been suffering from some kind of disease that no one knew he had, maybe not even Alford himself.
He glanced at Erna Alden, Alford’s sister. There was one thing he knew for certain. If Erna Alden ever found out about his negligence, there would be hell to pay. She would be a holy terror if she ever knew. Just thinking about her finding out caused a new rush of apprehension that seized his gut and made him feel the need for another antacid even though he knew he needed to slow down. He had taken far too many already.
He glanced at the clock. Only a couple more hours to go. And then he would work all night if that’s what it took to make things right. Until then, he did what he had been doing all day. He put on his professional face and prayed that no one would ever find out that Elbert Durnan was negligent in his duties, which to Elbert was inexcusable. Wholly inexcusable.
Standing at the rail of the wraparound porch outside the funeral home, Lise looked out over the professionally-landscaped lawn. Sunlight pierced the overhanging leaves and danced across the porch floor all around her. Except for the dark clouds just starting to show past the trees over beyond Loeckler Park, it was a peaceful summer day, almost a perfect day. If you closed your eyes and let yourself forget why you were here, you would hardly think you were at a wake. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was a little off. She had no better words to describe it. It was as if the whole world around her was holding its breath, waiting for a change that was about to happen. She supposed wakes did that, made you think about things more deeply. Just like accidents, especially ones involving fatalities. Lise had only gotten a glimpse of the man slumped in the front seat of the car, but she would never forget it. She could still see the minutest details very clearly. The man was obviously dead. He had to be dead because his eyes-
She stopped herself from thinking about that again. Still, in spite of her best efforts, she couldn’t help thinking that the man in the car had looked eerily like Uncle Alford.
She closed her eyes for a moment and drew in a deep breath as she tried to put it out of her mind once and for all. When she opened her eyes again, she found herself staring at a man who had stepped up to the rail beside her, a man she had never seen before.
“Is it me or is it hot in there?” he asked.
She looked around. Was he talking to her?
“The air conditioning isn’t working,” she said in reply his question. Her explanation was followed by a long, awkward silence. She didn’t know what else to say. The last thing she wanted to do was to be forced into small talk about the deceased, which she knew was what was usually expected at a wake.
She closed her hands around the railing as the silence stretched into long, uncomfortable moments, until the man pointed his chin at the clouds and said, “Looks like a storm is brewing. A bad one by the look of those clouds.”
Just as conscious of the awkward silence, Jes Rawlins searched for something else to say. The truth was he never knew what to say at a wake. Nice turn-out? That wouldn’t go over very well. Sorry about your loss was all he could think of, but that was lame and overused. Everyone said the same thing at a wake. He couldn’t talk about the deceased because he had never even met the man. Before he could offer any kind of condolences, she gave him a generic weather report, one that she must have heard earlier.
The man had a nice face, a very masculine face, Lise couldn’t help thinking. There was a presence about him that she couldn’t immediately explain, but it was one that she could almost feel, so strong was it. Self-possessed. That was another description that came to mind. Capable also seemed to describe him. Experienced in life? Maybe.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Doradean Dinwitty also step out onto the front porch. The woman was obviously straining to hear what they were talking about while trying not to appear like she was eavesdropping, but she was literally tilting her ear towards them as she dabbed a tissue to her red nose. Lise knew this town, knew that even the most innocent conversations could be the catalyst for speculation and false rumors, that even at the hint of a conversation between her and a stranger, especially a stranger as good looking as this one was, could very well be the spark that would ignite a wildfire of conjecture.
She glanced up at the man’s profile again and thought: He was that. Good-looking. Very good-looking. Not to mention that he was tall and broad-shouldered. He looked like he was in good shape under that suit coat- She stopped her thoughts short. Dear Lord, was she actually thinking about a stranger’s body in the middle of a wake?
She forgot about that, forgot all about Doradean. In fact, every thought flew out of her head in an instant when the man focused his intense, smoke-gray gaze on her. At the same time, the suggestion of a smile, a very sexy, very masculine smile, softened his features for the briefest of moments. A smile that transformed his face so completely that it took Lise a moment or two to recover.
When she realized he had just said something to her, she found herself apologizing again. “Sorry. I was distracted for a moment. What did you say?”
“I’m Jes,” he repeated. “Jes Rawlins.”
He glanced at Doradean, somehow without openly appearing to do so, and looked back at Lise. And then he shared a conspiratorial look with her that was subtle, yet deep, as if he was very much aware of what was going on around him. He knew that Doradean was eavesdropping. You didn’t often meet men as perceptive as that. So he wasn’t just a handsome face, Lise found herself thinking. He was insightful and intelligent, too.
“I’m Lise- Alden.”
“Rough day,” he commented in an undertone, as if they were sharing some intimate secret between them.
“You have no idea,” she said under her breath.
“You were close?” Those stormy gray eyes glanced briefly in the direction of the open door to the funeral home.
Ah, he meant Uncle Alford.
“He was my uncle.”
He nodded, acknowledging that information. “I hear there are questions about the cause of death.”
“I- Yes, I have heard that myself.”
Jes could have kicked himself for asking the question. It had come out automatically and he wasn’t usually this insensitive, but this woman had a strange effect on him with those unusual amber-clear eyes.
Get yourself out of interrogation mode, he chastised himself. He didn’t know the deceased. It was Bron who had mentioned that there was something strange about the cause of death. He was only here because Bron was supposed to meet him here. Hell of a place to meet, at a funeral home. Last time he had been in Stone Creek, it had been because of the birds. This time, he could only guess.
His first instinct was to seek answers when there were questions, but he didn’t want to intrude upon these people’s grief. He looked around at the young woman and commented noncommittally, “Lots of things happening lately.”
As she stared back at him with those heavily-lashed eyes, he heard himself say, “There was a bad accident on my way in.”
“I passed by that myself,” she said.
“Traffic was backed up all the way to the laundromat.”
He watched her blink her surprise.
Lise frowned in confusion. The laundromat? That was clear across town from the accident she had seen. Had there been another accident? Two accidents? A third accident if you counted Elzy Bunyen’s abandoned truck.
“You saw an accident on the south side of town?” she asked, her own interrogation mode coming out in full force.
“They had their hands full,” came the reply. “They were working on people in the diner.”
“The diner?”
“Yeah, it must have been quite a shock when that car plowed through the front doors.”
“That’s not the accident I saw,” Lise said, half to herself.
He stared at
her now.
Lise was rapidly processing the new information. If there were two accidents, Kel would be hard pressed to have people at both scenes. She glanced back over her shoulder, wondering, but knowing she couldn’t possibly leave her mother-
No, her mother absolutely wouldn’t stand for that. Lise would never hear the end of it.
Jes saw the look on her face and immediately regretted being so callous. The woman was here because she was mourning someone and obviously his questions had affected her deeply. Was she worried about family members possibly being involved in the accident? Friends? A spouse? He didn’t see a ring. Or worse, was she trying to figure out a way to get away from him?
He was surprised when she fired a question back at him. “Did it look like anyone was hurt badly?”
“Yeah.”
She thought about his answer, then re-focusing, she said, “I saw a different accident.”
There was a new interest in the man’s eyes now, some knowledge that Lise could only guess at. She divined at that moment that he had as many questions as she did. But he didn’t ask any of them. Those stormy eyes lifted to the sky to hone in on a loud whirring sound overhead.
She looked up, too, squinting at the military helicopters. There were three of them. Like giant black locusts against the churning chaos of angry clouds, they passed directly over the funeral home.
“First, a rash of accidents. Now, military helicopters,” she heard speculatively.
The reporter in her asked, “What do you think is happening?”
Her question brought his head around. “What do I think? I think all hell is about to break loose,” he said enigmatically and she could have sworn that there was an almost sad look in his eyes as he gazed down at her.
