I put on my black leather coat, which turned out to be actually longer than Penny's dress. It would probably be as hot as a furnace today, but I didn't care. I intended to wear it anyway because it made me feel slightly less revealing. We drove to the funeral home quickly, encountering very little traffic. Aodhagan parked near the front door in a spot marked Family. The funeral home, called Chestnut, Flexner, and Glick, was set away from the street in a large pink brick building with minimal landscaping. What flora and fauna there was had wilted in the hot Texas sun.
A man met us at the door in a tight black suit and a plethora of gold bracelets. Any man in jewelry other than a wedding ring immediately put me on edge. Under his sparse red hair, much of his head was sunburned. "Hi, I'm Harry Flexner. Are you the family for Joe Bob or Penny?"
"Penny." I shook the hand that he offered. "I'm Helen Harding, and this is Aodhagan MacFarley."
"Right. Aodhagan and I went to high school together. Of course he was nine, and I was seventeen, but I still knew he was there. Way down there." His laugh sounded like a guffaw. There was a cavernous gap between his two front teeth. Aodhagan smiled tightly, obviously not amused by his memories of high school.
Harry Flexner seemed to catch on and cleared his throat, reapplying his professional shell. "Let me tell you a little bit about what's going to happen."
He gave us a tour of the facility in the hushed tones reserved for libraries and funeral homes. The viewing would be two hours, followed by a procession to the church where the funeral would take place. Flexner gave me a copy of the program. There would be several hymns sung by people I'd never heard of and speeches by several people, including Aodhagan and Dooley.
The ceremony would be presided over by Lloyd Granger, who had succumbed fairly easily to Aodhagan's charms in a later phone call. After that, it was a short half-mile drive to the cemetery. Then it would all be followed up by a two-hour wake back in the funeral home common room.
I was bracing myself for one very long day. I was glad that Penny was dead. She would have hated this. What made it worse was I was the one who'd done it by telling them to do the thing up. It seemed almost sacrilege to engage in something and say it was on someone's behalf when they would have despised it. I should have thought more of Penny and less of my family's pride.
"Come on back here to the blue room," Flexner told us. "It's almost time to start, and I thought you might like a moment with her before the guests arrive." He led us to a room near the back done up in pale blue with rows of track lighting and soft blue carpet.
When Harry Flexner left, Aodhagan shifted uncomfortably. "Do you want to be alone?"
I shrugged, also uncomfortably. "Not really. I don't even really want to be in here to tell you the truth."
He stuck his hands in his pockets. "Penny would have hated all this pomp and circumstance."
I smiled slightly at him. "That's exactly what I was just thinking. She would have wanted to be buried in a pine box with a hard pack, a book of matches, and a case of Bud."
He indicated the dreaded casket with a tilt of his head. "Do you want to look now? It would be easier than when the others come."
"I'm not sure that I ever want to look," I admitted. "I've never seen, you know, a dead person before." I felt stupid saying it since he'd seen this very dead person before and in much worse condition. I felt like a clumsy teenager telling the local heartbreaker that I had never been felt up before.
"It's okay. She won't look real. And her spirit isn't there anymore, so it makes her look even less like a person. It's more like a mannequin, made up to look like Penny. Fairly badly, usually. Don't be surprised if you don't even recognize her."
I nodded wordlessly and allowed him to lead me by my elbow to the casket. He was right, of course. It looked like Penny, and yet it didn't. Mannequin was a good word. I wasn't sure the person who'd done her hair and makeup had ever even looked at a picture of Penny. Her hair was done up in soft ringlets, and her makeup made her look like a New Rochelle housewife. Her nails were painted shell pink, and she was wearing a high-necked pink angora sweater.
She looked a lot older than the last time that I had seen her, her wrinkly face artfully arranged into an expression of peace. "Wow, that's weird."
"Yes, it is." His tone was dark, and when I turned to look at him he had one eyebrow lifted the way he did when he disapproved. Maybe he just thought that if a person liked to dress like a prostitute and make themselves up like a Jersey girl in life, so too should they be buried that way.
I was still looking at her when the first group of people arrived. The first two hours actually went by amazingly fast. Dozens of people I had never met before and several that I had met in the last week approached me and told me stories about Penny's antics. A lot of them, especially the ones told by men, I could have gone my whole life without hearing. But I appreciated what they were trying to do, share her life with me.
After I asked him to, dreading to be left alone, Aodhagan stood by my side the whole two hours, expertly fielding most of the questions for me. He was a large part of the reason I was able to make it through.
At noon, we all made a sort of a procession over to the church, and more people I had not yet met were there. Also present there, but not at the funeral home, were Lloyd and Dennis. Lloyd was sitting on one of the chairs behind the pulpit, looking important, and Dennis was fidgeting near the back, accompanied by a woman who could not possibly have been his wife a long time, since she was younger than I was and sporting a fine pair of silicone breasts.
Everyone who had some sort of role in the procession was making their way up to the stage. Aodhagan led me to the family pew and started toward the stage. I grabbed his arm. "Can't you just sit here? I feel really stupid sitting here in this huge family pew all by myself."
He looked doubtfully to the stage, back again, and, to my relief, he sat down beside me. "Unfortunately, I think half of these people are just here to look. It's not everyday that something like this happens around here, thank goodness."
I turned to look at some of these apparent gawkers and saw her. "That's her!"
"Who?" Aodhagan turned as well.
"That lady, there." I pointed to her. "I saw her watching me from her car outside of Abbie Walker's house the other day."
His intense glare made me squirm. "You never told me about that."
"I didn't think that it mattered. So, who is she?"
"I have no idea. I've never seen her before. She's not really the sort that you'd forget."
That she wasn't. She was at least 6'3", taller even than Billie Jo, but still unbelievably beautiful. Somehow, she seemed to still present an essence of femininity, despite her large size. She was clad in a long flowing black dress made of natural fibers, and her silver hair was braided around her head in a kind of coronet. "She's very tall, isn't she?"
Aodhagan didn't miss my implication. "We can't very well go around asking every tall woman we see if she's a murderer."
Maybe not, but I had already decided to go and speak to her as soon as I got the chance.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The service was mercifully short. First, two women with horrific voices tortured a couple of traditional hymns. Then Lloyd got up and made some actually moving and respectable comments, and I wondered how much he was charging me for this. After that, we worked our way through several small speeches.
Most were tolerable, some didn't make sense, and Dooley cried all the way through his. Aodhagan got up and delivered his in a smooth, calm voice that seemed to seep most of the tension out of the audience. I was gratified to see that I wasn't the only one he had that effect on.
He talked fondly of his childhood with Penny and their familial relationship. Surprisingly, he also talked fondly about how she had called him a busybody and a smarty-pants. This elicited affectionate laughter, and I was glad for it. Penny would have wanted people to get over her death quickly.
"Penny believed in life," he told us, as
if he had been reading my mind. "She believed in doing everything as big as it could be done. She loved life. She loved beer and cigarettes." More laughter. "She loved her niece Helen, and she loved Birdwell. And I know that she loved all of you. That's the way that she would want to be remembered." He made a few more closing remarks and then returned from the pulpit to sit next to me.
"Thank you," I whispered, while the next guy talked so close to the microphone the only thing I could make out was mumbling and breathing and the occasional sharp whine that emits from an abused microphone.
Aodhagan squeezed my hand in response but then didn't let it go. Slowly he worked his fingers in between mine. I should have made him move it, but I didn't. Either for comfort or because it was giving me a thrill, I do not know. The good old-fashioned feeling of having my hand held by someone safe and strong was something that I hadn't experienced since high school.
The interment turned out to be another brief service, again given by Lloyd, committing her body to the ground and her soul to Heaven or something like that.
Honestly, I had stopped listening. I was in another place. Drowning in the realization that it was over. It was over for Penny. It was over for her and Dooley. Over for her and Aodhagan. Over for me. Here in this blazing hot sun with birds chirping and kids running through the sprinkler at the house across the street. If only I could have those summers back now. If I could relive them when I was old enough to know how much they meant.
The knowledge was sudden. A flash of memory in front of the Port Victoria house, metal numbers secured next to the door. Of course. The Port Victoria House.
I was still standing there staring at Penny's grave, which two men were getting ready to fill, when Aodhagan materialized out of nowhere and joined me. He didn't say anything to me or touch me, but his solid presence was undeniably comforting. After a few minutes, I broke the silence. "I remembered what 4128 means."
"Really?" He didn't seem overly interested, and I suspected he was more interested in how I was handling the day's proceedings.
"Yes. But it doesn't help us. It was just the address of our Port Victoria house. 4128 Boginvilla, or something like that. Some sort of plant."
"Bougainvillea?"
"That's it. Anyway, that's why she wrote it on the back of the picture, to remind herself where it was taken. I'm not really sure about the cigarettes."
"Bougainvillea x buttiana. They're vines. If you don't trellis them, they'll just grow all over your yard. Aggressive SOBs."
"I take it you're into gardening." I smiled up at him.
He shrugged slightly, ruining the outline of his beautiful suit. Never in my life had I ever met anyone who shrugged so much. "Not particularly. Plants were the bane of my general biology years. I was never very good at them. So, what about the zip code?"
"Of the Port Victoria house? Come on, I didn't even remember the address. It doesn't matter anyway because Canadian zip codes read like TR52C6."
"Guess that wouldn't be it." He gestured toward the limousine provided by the funeral home. "Need a lift?" His casual gesture suggested that he still didn't doubt some time soon I would remember the right numbers. Continued faith without having produced results. I didn't know what to do with it.
"Yeah, actually, I do." I followed him toward the car.
Inside, he held my hand again in silence.
Back at Chestnut, Flexner, and Glick, everyone was eyeing the food as though it were live prey that might flee if they turned their backs for even a second. True to Thelma Sue's word, no one was being allowed to eat.
I signaled to ruddy-cheeked Mr. Glick, and he announced that everyone could begin, as though this were a potluck instead of a wake. Among the crowd, I saw Lloyd Granger surrounded by admirers. The abnormal giantess was standing by the punch bowl with another enormous person, this one a man, and Dennis Strinton and his sixteen-year-old wife were making eyes at the door. I figured that he looked the most likely to flee. "Aodhagan, will you ask around and see if Kitty Audbergen is here so we can catch her before she leaves?"
He eyed me suspiciously. "What are you going to do?"
I looked grimly over the crowd. "I'm going to mingle and accept condolences."
"I'm warning you—don't mingle with anyone potentially dangerous."
I gave him my most innocent look, thirty years in the making. "I would never do that."
He gave me his most cynical look, probably only just the last week in the making, since he wasn't very good at it. "Uh huh."
I figured I was fairly safe at any occasion where there was so much free food. People were crowding the buffet table like the place was on fire and that was the only way out. Skirting up to Dennis, I took care that he wouldn't see me coming and run away. I murmured a few appropriate responses to mourners who approached me along the way, gazing over the crowd to make sure that Aodhagan wasn't spying on me. He wasn't.
I was right on top of Dennis Strinton before he noticed me. I could see his eyes darting around for any way to avoid talking to me. He was blocked on one side by me, one side by a wall, and one side looked free to me. However, he looked that way, saw someone he clearly wanted to avoid, and decided that I was the lesser of two evils. Amidst that crowd of mourners were a number of people I didn't recognize, Lloyd Granger surrounded by the reverent, and the preternaturally tall couple.
A big sigh slid from his body, like a beach ball deflating, and he pointed halfheartedly in my direction. "Chyna, this is Penny's niece. I'm sorry—I've forgotten your name. This is my wife, Chyna."
Chyna, which was probably a stage name that she'd taken on at the strip club where Dennis had undoubtedly picked her up, looked me over with her well-trained eye. I could feel her sizing me up, and I knew immediately which category she had put me in. Elizabeth Arden Red Door haircut, Roberto Coin bracelet, ring, and earrings, nails that were natural but manicured French. She dismissed my trashy dress and had me pegged as an upper-class East Coast WASP in about fifteen seconds.
And that's about how long it took her to dismiss me as competition for her bearded hubby, who evidently liked his women a little on the trashy side, judging from her black Lycra dress that gave a new definition to the phrase little black dress. She needn't worry anyway. I had been known to be attracted to the older members of the opposite sex but not that much older. Strinton was a senior citizen.
"It's Helen," I said, shaking her limp hand, weighed down, no doubt, by her wedding ring, which was roughly the size and general mass of a Volkswagen Jetta. "Helen Harding."
I turned to him. "Listen, Mr. Strinton, I just wanted to apologize for the other day at your office. You were right, of course. I have no business taking up my aunt's cause just because she's died. She'll never know, will she?"
I gave him my best conciliatory smile, all gleaming white caps put on by my insistent mother. A mouth full of expensive, unwanted porcelain teeth for an expensive, unwanted wedding. There seemed to be a sort of justice in that. But they seemed to calm Dennis Strinton, if only slightly.
His strained smile made him look like nothing more so than a baby with constipation. "I understand how the pressure of a…sudden death could make you want to carry on with what she thought was important, but you're doing the right thing."
"I know. I've decided to write a book about Penny instead." I flashed him another dazzling smile while his eyes tried to pop from their sockets. "All the information about her life is so much more accessible to me."
"I'm sorry about your aunt," Chyna told me, surreptitiously pulling up a black thigh-high stocking that had started to slip. "How did the old bird go?"
"She was strangled in her shed by the same person who murdered her best friend forty-seven years ago." Dennis started to cough while Chyna looked at me like what I had just said was soaking into her brain. "It's okay, though. I think she expected it."
I felt a hand come to rest at the small of my back, and I knew it must be Aodhagan, because my knees trembled at the touch. "Are you telling these n
ice people morbid things?" His voice was deep and mellow, but I could tell that he was speaking through clenched teeth. Uh-oh. Now he was mad.
"She asked how Penny died, and I told her. Chyna, this is Aodhagan MacFarley. Aodhagan, this is Dennis Strinton's wife, Chyna."
She obviously thought we were lovers, at the very least, and looked between us a few times, as if trying to decide how deep our relationship went. Then she went through the same process of sizing Aodhagan up, but it seemed to take her longer than it had with me. Or maybe she just liked looking at him more than she did me, which I could hardly fault her for. She seemed to come up with a category at last, and she smiled sweetly at him.
I really wanted to know what she had decided. I didn't know what to make of him myself, and even though she was probably a gold-digger and an opportunist, she was nobody's fool. "Hi," she purred. She shook his hand for much longer than she had mine.
"Hi." He smiled back, giving her a taste of his full thousand-watt charm, which I had rarely seen. Inexplicably, I wanted to slap them both. I looked at Dennis and realized that he was thinking the same thing. That brought me back to reality very quickly. "It was good of you to come. It's so nice to see all of Penny's old friends here. Have you had a chance to talk to Lloyd and Kathleen?"
Dennis Strinton's throat worked desperately, like something really large was trying to work its way up. Probably nothing more than all the dirty words he really wanted to call the pair of us.
"Not yet. I meant to, before I leave." He certainly had not meant to. He was ready to flee even as I'd come up on him. He still was. Even more so now, if his frenzied fidgeting was any indication.
If they had just drifted apart over the years, he would have been at least willing to say hello. So why the bitter breakup? It was probably better not to just come right out and ask, considering his reaction to my last round of direct questioning. He made a show of looking at his Rolex. "As a matter of fact, it's getting late. I better go say hello to them now."
Digging Up Bones (Birdwell, Texas Mysteries Book 1) Page 18
