Grave Images

by Jenny Goebel

  THE MOMENT I PUSHED THROUGH THE HEAVY DOORS, I KNEW something was wrong. I knew it from the tingle on the back of my neck and from the nagging echo of my footsteps as I treaded lightly as I could down the marble hallway. I could tell something was wrong at Sacred Heart Parish the same way I could tell when a house was empty, or when someone was lurking in the shadows. I could feel it.

  The door to Mrs. Evans’s office was open and I slipped inside.

  When I saw her, I wanted to think she was just bent over in prayer. The way I find Mimi sometimes — peaceful and closed off to the world. But when she didn’t respond … when I touched her arm lying stretched out on the desk, and it felt cold — colder than any living arm should be — I knew.

  Mrs. Evans was dead.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have been quite so shocked. Maybe I should’ve seen something like this coming. I couldn’t have possibly believed that Mr. Stein would stick to people that I only kind of, sort of, knew. But it caught me way off guard nonetheless. Death always does.

  I thought to myself, I really should be screaming. I couldn’t, though. I couldn’t make a sound. My mouth hung open. Ready. But my heart was too busy shattering for me to let loose the wail stuck in my throat.

  When something finally did shift aside and the noise was able to claw its way to the surface, it escaped my mouth in one long, shrill “Nooooooooooo.” So trilling and animal-like was the sound that I didn’t even recognize it as my own. The sound was eerie enough to call Father John out of the chapel to investigate (when not many things could), and it didn’t stop until he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook.

  “Enough, Bernie! I have to phone for help, and I need you to be quiet so they can hear me.”

  I was quiet then. Deathly so. I waited and watched in silence as the paramedics arrived, as Mrs. Evans’s vital signs were taken, and as shaking heads passed on what was obvious. I waited and watched as her body was covered with a sheet and — like a ship’s billowed-out sail — was rolled away.

  I think questions were asked of me. I know they were. I had fuzzy images in my head of faces appearing in front of me and mouths moving, and of my arm being gently squeezed once, maybe twice. Then I was alone.

  How different I felt walking out of Sacred Heart Parish than before I’d walked in. I’d left Michael’s feeling stubborn. Feeling blown up with my grand reason for telling Mrs. Evans I couldn’t join her dumb outreach committee. How quickly things could change. Why hadn’t I learned that already?

  Back outside, the sun was still hot. The air, still dry. The smell of charcoal and sizzling red meat wafted over from the grill across the street. On the sidewalk, people (most of whom I recognized) had bunched together. They must’ve been drawn to Sacred Heart by the bright spinning lights and roaring sirens; the silence the emergency vehicles were now leaving in had to seem equally as blaring. The small crowd stood frozen to the pavement as the county coroner pulled her car away from the curb.

  I looked at them. And they looked back at me curiously, whispering among themselves, “What happened? Who was it? What’s going on?”

  Then my tired eyes rested on a figure standing away from the group in his black overcoat, and I noticed the way his head hung down while everyone else stood perched on tiptoes.

  I clenched my fists tight, my knuckles turning as pale as the sheet on Mrs. Evans’s gurney. My fingernails cut into the skin on my palms. He didn’t have to stretch and strain to see what was going on. He didn’t have to listen to the whispers of the small crowd.

  Mr. Stein already knew.

  I took off running like never before. People, houses, cars, everything was a blur until I reached the carriage house. I jimmied the window latch again and slithered through the opening. I yanked the drawer on the worktable and pulled it entirely off its tracks. CLANG. BANG. The heavy drawer rattled as it slammed to the floor.

  One by one, I lifted granite tiles from the stack inside. Then I swung each tile high up in the air and smashed it down on the side of the worktable, not stopping to think it through. Lightning-like cracks splintered the faces etched in stone, and the pieces crashed down, clattering and spinning across the carriage house floor.

  It felt good.

  I felt a surge of power race through me with each smashing of stone … until I reached the last one in the drawer.

  I’d expected to find Mrs. Evans’s portrait there; any lingering doubts had vanished as soon as I saw Mr. Stein standing on the street outside the parish. But I wasn’t prepared for what holding it in my hands would truly be like.

  My knees nearly buckled. I glanced down at the shattered pieces of stone lying on the floor and they stared back at me accusingly. Ghost-gray eyes, turned-up noses, receding hair lines, smiling teeth — all shattered apart.

  I lifted Mrs. Evans’s face, looking so happy and full of life — nothing at all like the way I’d just seen her — and used the worktable to shatter her portrait, too. I couldn’t stop myself — not with horror and anger exploding like fireworks inside me.

  The worst of it was the guilt. I could’ve tried harder to make Mimi listen to me, I knew I could’ve. But I was too busy being upset with her for her meddling. And Dad? It was so selfish of me to think his good mood was more important than this. Mrs. Evans was dead. I might’ve been able to stop it, but instead I’d done practically nothing. Sure, I’d told Michael and we’d had a few conversations, but that wasn’t enough. It didn’t matter what I did, it was never enough.

  “I take it you weren’t as fond of these portraits as you are of Isabella’s.”

  I jumped high and fast, spooked. More than I’d ever been in my whole life. My heart, beating hard from the running, from the anger and the smashing, threatened to punch itself right out of my chest. And there was Mr. Stein standing before me, as calm and cool as a mountain lake.

  Mr. Stein. To have made it back so quickly, he must’ve run, too. But even in his overcoat, he hadn’t broken a sweat. And, during my wild fit of destruction, I hadn’t heard him come in. I took a step back, positioning myself closer to the open window behind me.

  Mr. Stein’s jaw, as usual, was rigid, but in his eyes was a look I couldn’t quite place. I thought it must be a twinkle of smugness, a look of pride, but that’s just what as I was expecting to see. In reality, his eyes were moist, clouded.

  Then he took a step — a dreaded step closer — and the moistness in his eyes turned to ice. He reexamined the sea of sharp, jagged pieces I’d created, and the look he gave me was one of pure hatred — evil all the way through.

  I lifted my foot and angled my body away from Mr. Stein, but before I could take my chances and split out the back window, Mimi stepped through the open door of the carriage house. “What on earth happened here? Bernie, did you do all this?”

  She must’ve heard the ruckus. I didn’t know whether to run to her arms or scream for her to turn and run away. It didn’t make any difference, ’cause before I could do or say anything, Mimi saw all the anger and shock, the guilt and sorrow, painted in bright colors on my face and took that for her answer. “I don’t know what gets into you sometimes, Bernie. Really, I don’t,” she said angrily. “First peeking in the window and now this?”

  I pointed my finger accusingly at Mr. Stein, hoping Mimi would forget about me looking guilty as sin once she saw the murder and madness in his eyes. But, by then, Mr. Stein had dropped the devilish look. He just seemed distraught and shrunken inside his black overcoat and was doing a fine job of appearing the victim in all this. (In his mind, maybe he was.)

  Mimi turned back to me and put her own finger to her temple, applying pressure as if to ease a growing migraine. If she’d been upset with me for spying on Mr. Stein, she was as mad as a whole hornet’s nest now.

  I glanced down at the floor at all the shattered, unrecognizable portraits, and then I bit back at both Mimi and Mr. Stein with my glare. Honestly, I didn’t know what had gotten into me, either. Not in the way Mimi thought, but because I’d just destroyed all
the evidence. How could I’ve been so stupid? I knew more people were gonna die. The proof of it lay broken at my feet. My rage had taken over, and now I had nothing. Nothing to prove Mr. Stein was the guilty one, the one responsible for all this death and darkness.

  It occurred to me then, from the way Mimi was standing with her arms now crossed and her face pinched, and from the way she’d responded with such a force of anger, that she hadn’t heard the news. News like this traveled quickly in Stratwood, but surprisingly I had beaten it home. “Mrs. Evans — she’s dead,” I said flatly.

  I flew past Mr. Stein and reached Mimi about the time she crumbled. I caught her by the arms and held on as she let out a moan to rival one of Mama’s.

  For the moment, everything else was forgotten. The broken portraits. Mr. Stein. The fact that I’d just ruined my best shot at proving something horribly twisted was going on with the etchings. All I felt was the grief passing between Mimi and me as I hugged her thin and trembling body.

  Somehow we found our way out of the carriage house and to the kitchen table. I told her all about finding Mrs. Evans, cold like she was. Then we huddled together, remembering, but not talking. Mrs. Evans had been so kind to our family ever since Thomas died. Who was gonna deliver care baskets now? Baskets delivered by anyone else would seem empty — no matter how full they were.

  I stayed with Mimi for a while. She didn’t question what had happened out in the carriage house again. Grief-stricken as she was, I don’t think she had enough spirit left over for anger. She cried. I didn’t.

  Sweet, kind, Jolly Rancher–pushing Mrs. Evans was gone, and strangely, I wasn’t aching with sadness anymore. I wasn’t feeling helpless or scared, either. All of which I should’ve been.

  I just felt numb.

  When Mimi’s tears finally trickled dry, I asked her if she thought it spooky, all the people dying lately. Mimi just said, “When you get to be my age, Bernie, so many people you know start passing away. You have to check the obituaries each morning to make sure you aren’t one of them.”

  I think she was trying to lighten the mood, but it just made things worse. What if Mimi was next, or Dad, or even Mama? I had destroyed everything in his drawer, but what if Mr. Stein was working on a new portrait that very minute?

  Mimi finally stood up from the table and started rustling around in the cupboards. She would bake something — cookies, bread, maybe a lasagna to bring over to Mr. Evans. That’s how she’d move on from this. As she was pulling out a pan and fretting out loud about whether or not to tell Mama the horrible news, I slipped back outside.

  There were still six tiles left in the box beneath Mr. Stein’s window. I tried to remember just how many portraits I’d broken, and I thought there were four, counting Mrs. Evans’s, which meant all the tiles were accounted for. To say I was relieved was as large an understatement as saying I didn’t like Mr. Stein.

  I hauled the box and blank tiles with me back into the garage, found a sledgehammer, and — well — it didn’t take long for the remaining six tiles to be smashed to bits, too.

  I was sweeping up when Dad wandered in. He rubbed his hands together and then laced his fingers, as if in prayer, before studying the mess and the look on my face. I could tell he was uncomfortable without his goggles on or the blare of the sandblasting machine to fill the space between us.

  Dad cleared his throat. “About Mrs. Evans,” he said quietly as he released his hands and then fiddled with a button on his shirt. “Mimi just told me.” He cleared his throat again and his eyes traveled down to the broken chips and pieces of black tile scattered across the floor and in the dustpan. “Are you doing okay, Bernie? Are you feeling all right?”

  “Yeah,” I lied. I knew both he and Mimi would expect me to be in some sort of shock or something. It’s not every day you happen upon a dead body — especially one whose life meant something to you. Sure, I’d seen them before, at funerals and viewings, and I’d never get over the image of Thomas’s still body lying in his tiny white casket, but finding one on your own was different. And, truthfully, I didn’t know what I was supposed to be feeling.

  Dad nodded his head and looked like he was about to amble off like the giant bear that he was. He’d done his job. He’d checked on his only daughter who’d just witnessed something awful. But then he surprised me and said, “Did I ever tell you I wrecked an upright monument after Thomas died?”

  I shook my head, afraid that if I spoke, he might stop.

  “It feels good to destroy things when you’re hurt and angry, doesn’t it?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. He just made a hollow noise that seemed like a chuckle but wasn’t. “I had to buy a new sledgehammer and everything — tore the head off the old one, cracking it against the stone.”

  I pictured my dad releasing his anger on a piece of rock the size of a human. But then my father said something that really got to me. “It’s a good thing when you’re hot inside — to take it out on something that will break, but that you can’t do any real damage by wrecking. Something like those tiles. As long as you’re careful” — Dad paused and reached for his safety glasses before handing them to me — “no harm can come from chipping rock.”

  AS IT TURNED OUT, MIMI DECIDED NOT TO TELL MAMA about Mrs. Evans, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to. But that didn’t stop me from imagining it.

  When I delivered Mama’s supper tray that evening, I stood over her, willing her to look at me … not through me. I imagined what it would be like to have a mama who wasn’t sick with sadness, or maybe just my mama back the way she’d been when we were sketched together at the county fair.

  I’d tell her what happened and about Mrs. Evans’s cold, cold arm. Then my mama would hold me and stroke the unruly hairs away from my face, and when she looked at me, it would be in the eye, and she’d absorb some of the hurt she saw there. But my real mama, the one who rarely made it out of bed, didn’t have the room to absorb any more pain.

  So when she did turn her face toward mine, I shielded my eyes from her so that she couldn’t see all that was there. The hurt. The want. The numbness that was beginning to transform into something else entirely. Fear.

  “Enjoy your dinner,” I said, and quietly left.

  I usually saved delivering Mama’s meal for last, but I’d wanted to put off visiting the carriage house for as long as I possibly could. Forever would’ve been nice. My plan was to drop the tray off and slip away unnoticed, but before I could, Mr. Stein threw the door open quickly with a wry smile on his face.

  I desperately wanted to expose him for the evil man that he was, and I wanted him to answer for the wrongs that he’d done, but I had no idea just how wide and far and deep the blackness of his heart could reach. Were the portraits even important? Had I smashed the tiles for nothing? Could he simply wish anyone dead, and then it would be so? I was utterly and fearfully at his mercy. Any words I might’ve spoken fizzled and died in my throat.

  “Looks tantalizing,” Mr. Stein said. He retrieved his dinner tray and then shut the door softly in my face. I picked up the tray containing the leftovers of his lunch and walked away in a daze. Halfway across the yard, the tray slipped from my hands and landed flat on the ground in front of me. Remnants of a pork chop bounced from the plate and onto the ground, and a half-empty glass of milk toppled over and began flooding what remained of a pile of peas. I didn’t take any steps to correct it.

  Dad must’ve been watching out the window and sensed something was wrong, ’cause right away, he rushed out, righted the glass, and picked up Mr. Stein’s dirty tray, all without saying a word. He waited for me to come back from standing on the edge of terror, and then he followed me inside to deliver the tray to the kitchen himself.

  For the next few days, I dragged my body around the house like it was too much for my bones to carry. Mimi took notice of how I didn’t talk to anyone, the way I slumped everywhere, and how the simplest of duties ran me plumb out of energy. Even though she was dealing with her own pain, she lighte
ned my chore load.

  I’d like to say I used the extra time to plot against Mr. Stein, that at the very least, I figured out a way to convince Dad and Mimi to get rid of him. I didn’t, though. Mostly I sat in my room dreading the sound of the phone ringing or the doorbell buzzing. I feared either one would only bring more bad news. What concerned me the most was that all of the victims (other than Isabella) had been connected to my family in one way or another. Were we somehow luring the victims in for him?

  Who would be next? I was betting it would be someone else I knew. Possibly even someone truly close to me. As if I hadn’t punished myself enough feeling guilty over Mrs. Evans’s death, I was now obsessed with the people in the other portraits. If I knew who they were, and if by some miracle they were still alive, could I somehow throw a monkey wrench in the works? Could I stop their deaths from coming?

  I hated myself for not really paying attention to the other faces as I smashed their portraits to bits. I was too focused on finding Mrs. Evans’s portrait (not to mention blinded by fury) to think of anything or anyone else. But there was this one image … The shadowy memory of it haunted me even more than the rest. What if … ? No, it was too horrible to think.

  I also sketched. Of course, I sketched. The point of it this time wasn’t to ease my guilt or to bring me some small relief, though. And I wasn’t foolish enough to pretend that learning how to do hand etchings was still in the slightest bit important — not in light of everything else going on. No, I sketched like mad trying to re-create the destroyed portraits on my pad. But it was no use. The faces hadn’t fully imprinted themselves on my brain in the few seconds before I’d destroyed them. And it felt tragic that they hadn’t.