Amagansett

Thirteen

Conrad glanced at his watch. Unless they were running late, they’d be putting her in the ground about now. He had no difficulty picturing the scene, because he’d passed by the cemetery the previous day.
It was a large plot, shaded, pleasingly so, the earth heaped up beside the fresh hole. She would have approved of the headstone, nothing too ostentatious, no ornamental frills, just her name, date of birth and date of death carved into some kind of pale stone, softer than marble. He had frowned as he did the calculation. Twenty-six years old. She had lied to him about her age, adding two years. Why?
He had struggled with the question then, and he did so again now as he lay curled on his bed, fully clothed.
With time, no doubt, she would have offered up an explanation.
With time.
Did he really think their relationship would have continued on its course indefinitely? Had he ever allowed himself to believe that it could? It would have been easier to lie to himself and say no; but there had been signs from the beginning, almost from their very first exchange. They had discussed it later, or rather she had discussed it, pushing him to admit that he had sensed it too. And he had flatly denied any such immediate feelings.
That was their game. Their dance. On other occasions, he took the lead and she did her best to step on his toes. The truth was, they’d both known they would see each other again after that first chance encounter. And they had, a little less than a week later.
It was dusk, and Conrad was by the barn, tarring a fyke net in the old cauldron once used for trying-out whale oil, racing to beat the creeping darkness.
She materialized ghost-like from the gloom, clutching a bottle of whiskey.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’
‘How’s the foot?’
‘Better…Not true. It keeps opening up.’
‘I told you not to walk on it.’
‘I’m not good at taking orders.’ She glanced at the cauldron. ‘What’s cooking?’
‘Tar.’
‘This is for you.’
The whiskey was his brand—Imperial—noted and logged on her last visit.
‘It’s by way of a thank you for coming to my aid…albeit a little slowly at first.’
‘You want some?’ he asked.
‘Is it any good?’
‘No.’
‘I didn’t think so. It was the cheapest one in the liquor store.’
She tried it nonetheless, mixed with Coke. As soon as he had cleaned up and changed his clothes he joined her on the deck and poured himself a glass.
‘It’s my birthday,’ she said.
‘Happy birthday.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Shouldn’t you be out celebrating?’
‘That’s exactly what my father said when I spoke to him earlier.’
‘Sounds like a wise man.’
Lillian smiled.
‘I’ll do something over the weekend,’ she said. ‘My brother and sister are coming up. They’re throwing a surprise party for me.’
‘Some surprise.’
‘My cousin let it slip. Poor Alice, she was never the brightest flame.’
They sat in silence, staring at the stars.
‘I don’t have a present,’ said Conrad, ‘but I can offer you supper.’
‘Well, that depends what’s on the menu.’
‘Lobster and caviar?’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Where’d you think they came from?’
‘I don’t know. Lobsters, I suppose, but caviar…’
‘It’s been a good year for sturgeon.’
‘You catch them here?’
He pointed at the ocean, adjusting a little to the southwest. ‘About there. Got six hundred fathoms of net fishing just off the bar. We’ll haul the gear tomorrow, set it again, keep it up till the spring run drops off at the end of May.’
‘I had no idea.’
‘Come with me.’
He fired up the generator and led her over to the old whaleboat house beside the barn. It was here that they prepared the sturgeon roe. He talked her through the operation, demonstrating how they separated then salted the eggs. When she asked if they did good business, he shrugged. He didn’t tell her that they’d made enough in the last month alone to see them good till the end of the year. Before leaving, he took a couple of tins of their own caviar off the shelf, gifts from a grateful buyer at the Fulton Fish Market eager to do more business with them. Then he plucked two lobsters from a wooden tub and asked her to choose between them.
‘I reckon we’re good for both,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’
She set the table while he cooked. She remarked on the beauty of the sideboard, and he told her that it was made from the wood of one of the tall elms on Amagansett Main Street felled by the ‘38 hurricane. He explained that the house too was a victim of that apocalyptic storm. It had started life in East Hampton, on the western shore of Georgica Pond, put up as a summer home by a New York publisher at the turn of the century. Shattered by the high winds, it had lain derelict throughout the war before Conrad bought it, transporting it along the beach on skids to the plot of land he’d just purchased on Napeague. A section of the roof, the back bedroom and one corner of the main room were all missing, and all were replaced with lumber and shingles recovered from the old Amagansett Gun Club, sold off by the members when they decided to upgrade their bunking quarters out on Montauk.
The barn had arrived a few months later, dismantled in Amagansett then re-erected, piecemeal, beside the house. After more than two hundred and fifty years of service, the Van Duyns no longer had need of it. Ten generations of the family had stored their hay in the barn, and many more generations of cows had brushed against its sturdy uprights, rounding them off, buffing them smooth as glass.
As for the whaleboat house, the third side of the open yard formed by the buildings, that had been Rollo’s contribution to their joint enterprise. For as long as anyone could remember it had stood, sleek and low, just back from the beach at the end of Atlantic Avenue. If Conrad had offered to take Rollo on simply as a member of his crew, it would still be standing there. But he hadn’t; he had proposed that they go into business together—a true partnership, equal shares, riding out the highs and the lows together, the good years and the bad.
After Ned Kemp had overcome his initial reservations and consented to the venture, he insisted that Rollo bring something to the table. Conrad was, after all, providing the dory, the cat-boat, and a whole bunch of other gear. Rollo had never wanted for anything, but nor had he ever received payment for his labors. He was housed, clothed, fed and cared for, and in return he did what was asked of him—working the farm, crewing on the Ariadne during the bunker season, dragging for yellowtail flounder in fall, codfishing off the ocean beach in winter. There was no injustice in this, it made sense to everyone, not least of all Rollo, and it worked. Or rather, it had up until then.
When Conrad refused to accept a cash payment from Captain Ned, Rollo chipped in his only asset, his inheritance, gifted him ahead of time by his father. It was never in doubt that Rollo, of all the brothers, would be the one to inherit the whaleboat house. Since childhood he had been drawn to the building and its mysterious contents, dusty and disused, his fascination fueled by the thrilling tales of derring-do learned at the knee of his grandfather, Cap’n Josh.
By the age of ten Rollo had become the official repository of all matters relating to the Kemps’ long association with inshore whaling off the East End. He was a storehouse of anecdotes, too young to detect the whiff of embellishment clinging to them. Had a right whale, a notoriously sluggish creature, really dragged six men in a twenty-eight-foot boat two miles out beyond the bar in as many minutes?
Rollo knew of every rally made by the Kemps off the ocean beach. He knew who had first sighted the whale, who had raised the weft above their house on Bluff Road, and who had crewed for them. He could tell you the sea and weather conditions at the time, as well as the exact course taken by each whale after it was fastened on to. And he could describe in detail the nature of each kill, clean or messy, depending on the accuracy of the man administering the coup de grace with the lance, and the ferocity of the exhausted animal’s death flurry.
His accounts only became sketchy when it came to the contribution made by the other crews who had participated in the rallies. Inshore whaling was, necessarily, a collective affair. How else to tow sixty tons of dead whale ten miles back to shore in a heaving sea? Rollo wasn’t to blame for the omissions in the stories he told. He was only repeating his grandfather’s words, and Cap’n Josh had never been renowned for the high regard in which he held rival whalemen. At best he had a grudging respect for the Van Duyns who worked the other end of the village. This diminished by degrees the further west one headed. The East Hampton crews were barely worthy of consideration or comment, and as for the ‘Wainscott dumplings’, as he called them, well, they were fit only for ridicule, putting to sea in those clumsy, oversized dories of theirs.
It was all bluster, of course. Any man who has thrust iron into a creature a thousand times his own size is inextricably bound to others who have done the same.
Conrad and Billy were eleven years old when Rollo first shared with them the secrets of the whaleboat house. It was a Friday, after school, a sunny, windblown afternoon, with choppy waves thumping against a stunt beach, and they’d had to clear the sand banked up against the doors before they could enter.
The whaleboat held center stage, like a dusty sarcophagus in some ancient tomb. Around it lay an armory of weapons to ensnare a boy’s imagination—harpoons, lances, axes, grapnels, and blades of every description for cutting into blubber. But Rollo directed their attention to the boat itself. He made them trace the sheer lines of its white pine hull with their fingertips. He pointed out the sharp stern end, explaining that the ability to retreat rapidly without turning was vital during the whale’s flurry, when a crashing blow from the vast flukes could tear the boat and its occupants apart. He showed them the wooden tholepins trimmed with leather to deaden the sound of the oars, of approaching doom; and he demonstrated how, in time-honored tradition, the boat-steerer switched places with the boat-header in order to deliver the death-stroke.
Most impressive, though, was the change in Rollo. What had happened to the nervous, downturned gaze, the halting speech, the struggle to put names to all but the most commonplace objects? He spoke with a confidence he had never once displayed in the classroom, plucking technical terms from the air at will.
Conrad and Billy must have passed the test, for they were invited to return time and time again. Together they re-enacted the stories handed down by Cap’n Josh to his grandson, Rollo standing tall and proud in the stern, barking orders to his depleted crew of two—‘Slack back!’…‘Hold water!’…‘Spring ahead!’…‘Stern all!’—before hurling the harpoon into a big burlap sack of hay conscripted to play the whale. With time, willing crew members were found to man the other oars. Then numbers climbed beyond the capacity of the boat, and tales of inshore rallies made way for grander, more epic yarns of deep-sea, round-the-horn whaling that could accommodate a larger cast of characters.
There was never any shortage of adventures to be played out. As a young man, Cap’n Josh had sailed from Sag Harbor on the ocean-going whaleships, the last of three generations of Kemps to do so. He had made three trips in all, visiting both frosty ends of the globe, rising through the ranks from pimpled greenhorn to chief harpooner. When gas lighting finally put paid to the demand for whale blubber, he returned to the wife and young family he hardly knew, a respected man, and a rich one.
Like others in Amagansett and East Hampton fortunate enough to have survived their time aboard the whaleships, he’d had to content himself with sporadic rallies off the ocean beach in late winter. After the speedy finbacks and hostile sperm whales of the southern oceans, the local right whales—long on blubber and bone, short on speed—made for easy quarry. Then suddenly, some years before the Great War, the whales disappeared. Inshore whalemen up and down the coast hung up their harpoons. All the gear was stowed away, forgotten.
The Kemps’ boat hadn’t seen the light of day for almost twenty years when Rollo, Conrad, Billy and the pack of other local kids first heaved it out of the whaleboat house under the approving gaze of Cap’n Josh. The building itself was to double as a whaleship, its boxy construction not unlike the square-sterned, blunt-bowed vessels that used to clog the quayside in Sag Harbor—‘Built by the mile and cut off in lengths as you want ‘em,’ Cap’n Josh had said, before dispatching two men into the mastheads to keep watch for whales.
‘Ah blow-O!’ they hollered from the roof.
‘Where away?’
‘Sperm whale, two points off the weather bow, sir, four miles away.’
‘Stand by to lower.’
And so it continued, Cap’n Josh marshaling his troupe of young actors, feeding them their lines, directing the chase of a particularly feisty sperm whale encountered in the South Pacific, which, once ironed, had proceeded to strip all three hundred fathoms of manila line out of the boat before dragging it on a heart-stopping Nantucket sleigh ride (Cap’n Josh rocking the boat fiercely to mimic the effect of it crashing over the waves). The whale had fought till the last, capsizing the boat on two occasions before finally expiring.
That wasn’t the end of it, though. They had lost sight of the whaleship on the long pull back. Then the wind breezed up from the sou’west. They were six men in a cockleshell boat tossed on an angry sea, many hundreds of miles from land, rowing blind in a fading light, dragging a dead whale. When the last vestiges of day dipped below the western horizon, hope went with them. Some among them began to pray, not for succor, but final prayers, beseeching forgiveness for sins committed.
And then they saw it, a beacon in the night—the distant fires of the try-works burning on the deck of their mother ship—and the strength returned to their backs and arms. Safe alongside at last, one of the oarsmen, a Scotsman, cursed then kicked the whale that had almost cost them their lives. Too exhausted for further labor, others were assigned to undertake the cutting-in while they recovered on the deck, smoking their pipes. When the first blanket piece was hoisted aboard from the carcass, the block made fast to the main masthead came free, and two tons of suspended blubber felt the fierce grip of gravity.
The scene was enacted in somber silence, the whaleboat’s lugsail doubling as the blanket piece, Billy playing the unfortunate Scotsman on whom it landed. The message was clear, though Cap’n Josh spelled it out for the younger ears. Even in death the whale had sought satisfaction for the disrespect shown it by one of its hunters. It was a lesson they would all be wise to remember.
These expeditions to far-flung corners of the globe were played out almost every weekend for a year. Then Cap’n Josh suffered a seizure, and after a brief, humiliating struggle turned up his toes. That he died well after his time was poor consolation to Rollo, who withdrew into himself. The whaleboat house fell dormant once more, until given new life on Napeague almost twenty years later, taking its place between Conrad’s house and the barn. It was pleasing to Conrad that all three buildings had experienced previous lives. It somehow made them one with the landscape, the ever-changing sands on which they were perched.
None of this he had any intention of revealing to Lillian, but she drew it from him in the way that only a stranger can, fueling him with questions. At a certain point, though, she grew silent, pensive.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘The stories.’
‘What about them?’
‘I don’t have any to tell. Nothing that comes close, at least.’
‘I doubt that’s true.’
‘It is. But it doesn’t matter.’
‘They’re just stories,’ he shrugged. ‘Maybe I made them up.’
‘Now you’re just trying to make me feel better.’
‘If I am, it’s not working.’
His words brought a smile to her lips. She lit a cigarette and looked at him intently.
‘What are you doing here, Conrad?’
‘What?’
‘Why not over there with everyone else? Why out here on your own?’
‘It’s my home.’
‘You made it your home.’
He felt himself coming to, like waking from a dream, the cold wash of reality bringing him to his senses, suddenly aware of the shattered lobsters on their plates.
‘It’s late,’ he said. ‘I should drive you back.’
She asked if she could borrow a book and he told her to take her pick.
‘Is this any good?’ she asked, plucking one off the shelf.
‘Not bad.’
She turned to him. ‘I thought you hadn’t read them.’
‘That one I’ve read.’
‘I hear it’s tough going, but worth it.’
He didn’t take the bait, but he did reach for a pen and write in the fly-leaf: To Lillian, on her…
‘How old are you?’
‘Never ask a lady her age,’ she said, but told him anyway.
…28th birthday, he wrote.
‘Aren’t you going to say who it’s from?’
‘You’ll know,’ said Conrad.
They barely spoke on the drive back.
‘Thanks for the book,’ she said as they pulled up in front of her house.
She reached for the handle, but hesitated. Turning back, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
‘That’s the best birthday I’ve had in years.’
And the last she would ever have.
Sunday was a better day.
He rose early, venturing outdoors for the first time in two days. There was an ominous ground swell running, with waves breaking over the bar and banking up in their eagerness to strike the shore, the outer ripples of some distant Caribbean storm.
He stripped off and fought his way through the break, struggling against the pain in his ribs. It had diminished little in the past week, though the bruising had lost some of its lividity, dulling to a grayish purple tinged with yellow. He still welcomed the injury inflicted by Ellis Hulse’s boot. It had offered him the perfect excuse to lay off the fishing for a while, to be alone, no need to keep up appearances of normality.
That changed a few hours later, when Rollo showed up fresh from church in his ill-fitting suit and clutching a Bible. He had brought some aspirins with him to speed along Conrad’s recovery.
Rollo had spent the past week crewing for his father on the Ariadne, a 110-foot subchaser from the Great War, the fastest rig in the Smith Meal bunker fleet. The fishing had been good—Conrad had seen pods of menhaden darkening the waters off the back side all week—but Rollo seemed unwilling to talk about it. This meant only one thing: a spell on the ocean in the company of his father and brothers had undermined his confidence.
No doubt they’d had him working the winch, or below decks in the engine room manning the old Fairbanks-Morse, awaiting instructions from the pilothouse. Nothing too challenging. Never anything too challenging.
Conrad announced that he’d be ready for action by Wednesday, and Rollo visibly came to life, rolling a smoke and demanding a coffee.
‘We’ll be into them Wednesday, get us a bunch, you’ll see,’ he said when he finally left, taking off towards the beach.
Conrad watched him all the way.
Rollo turned as he crested the frontal dune, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Looks fishy to me!’ he yelled.
Conrad waved, and he was gone.
Wednesday was pushing it, but it would force him to dig himself out of the irremediable gloom into which he had sunk. Something needed to change, and fast. He’d taken to muttering to himself as he shuffled around the house like a soul in limbo.
Maybe things would be different once he’d visited her. He felt ready to. That in itself was something. He checked his watch. Still too early. The cemetery would be milling with people paying tribute to their dead.
By midday they should all be gone, driven indoors by the building heat.
He parked on Three Mile Harbor Road and walked the last couple of hundred yards. He was wearing fawn twill pants and the white shirt reserved for special occasions. He had even dug out some lace-up shoes.
He felt foolish in the clothes, and no doubt he looked it too. He knew Lillian would have laughed at him, but somehow he didn’t care. In fact it brought a smile to his lips, picturing the glint of playful mockery in her eyes.
The cemetery was deserted except for a scrappy-looking dog loping about, forlornly nosing the ground as if aware that all those bones were down there but far beyond its reach. Bouquets of fresh flowers laid that morning studded the ground like colorful pins in a green felt board. The sun was high, intense, and it cast his shadow black on the ground at his feet.
Her grave was buried beneath a deep blanket of wreaths and other flowers, and it struck him that even now they were shielded from each other. He clamped his eyes shut in the hope of blotting out the scene. But dim shapes took form in the darkness, coalescing to produce her features, set in repose, a low, gloomy light cutting across them. Her wide-spaced eyes doomed to collapse in on themselves, her lips to draw back into a hideous rictus grin, her tongue to protrude, the flesh of her barely freckled cheeks predestined to blacken, blister then liquefy, consumed from within by the very organisms that had struggled so hard to ensure the body’s survival.
He knew what happened to the body after death, he knew that decay was in fact life for a multitude of other creatures. He knew that the deeper you buried a corpse, the slower the process of decomposition. He knew that in the heat of summer it raced ahead, and in the bitter chill of a mountain winter it ground almost to a halt. He knew all this because he had gone out at night to recover the bodies of his fallen comrades.
They were rarely whole. Often days would have passed before any attempt at recovery could be made, time enough for the scavengers that inhabited the dense Italian macchia to feast away at leisure, to drag off the limbs, or bits of limbs, cleaved away by a mortar blast or a burst of fire from a German 88.
Had his unit not been operating behind enemy lines for so much of the time, there would have been others to perform the grisly task. But the boys from the Grave Registration Service were deemed lacking in the necessary skills to move around undetected in enemy territory, and only one of their number had been assigned to Conrad’s Company. He was a young corporal from southern Illinois by the name of Harold Bunt, although everyone called him the Professor because he’d broken off his studies to go to war.
The Professor’s orders were to co-ordinate the retrieval and dispatch of the dead from the safety of their own lines, assembling the bodies as best he could, then shipping the canvas-wrapped packages back down the mountain on mules. He soon ignored his orders, though, extending his remit to assist in the recovery of the dead. He did this selflessly, aware of the terrible toll it was taking on the soldiers.
To the Professor, those weren’t his buddies out there, they were just KIAs, brave men killed in action who’d earned the right to a decent burial and a small white cross with their name on it. Circumstances permitting, he extended the same respect to the enemy, burying their dead in shallow graves where they’d fallen, to be recovered at some future date by either side, depending on which way the territorial pendulum swung. This courtesy was the cause of some surprise to the fighting men, boiling over into anger on a couple of occasions. But the Professor assured them it was customary practice for the men of the Grave Registration Service and he saw no reason to abandon it now.
He kept to himself, eating alone, wary of forming friendships, conscious that his role made him a figure of some suspicion. As a scout, Conrad came to know him better than most, guiding him over the hostile terrain on nocturnal forays whenever there was a lull in the fighting. Nothing pleased the Professor more than sneaking past an enemy foxhole—hearing the voices, smelling the cigarette smoke—in order to bring a KIA home. It amused him to imagine the look on the Germans’ faces the next morning when they discovered the body was gone.
For Conrad these missions were a welcome change from the normal demands of a night patrol. It was a relief to just slip by in the darkness, no obligation to draw his knife, drop into the hole and silence the enemy’s murmurings.
They started spending more time together, playing chess with a set the Professor had recovered from the rubble of a bombed-out farmhouse. Each time the regiment advanced they split the chess pieces between them so that only half the set would have to be replaced should either man step on a mine or take a direct hit from a mortar or a shell.
For the first few weeks their games were conducted in near silence, each man alone with his thoughts, his strategy. But with time their friendship found a precarious footing, the only kind possible under the circumstances. Experience dictated that to know a man too well was only to store up unnecessary grief for the future. As the fighting increased in ferocity Conrad came to appreciate the true value of their chess games. They permitted him to keep functioning at a certain level of aggression, the right combative pitch. He feared what might happen if he ever allowed himself to come down in between the fire-fights, to think about what he was doing, what he had done. Chess, it seemed, was his way of dealing with things, of keeping going. Others had theirs.
Some talked big and brave and carved notches into their rifle butts. Others retreated into themselves, drawing on resources they never knew they had. Others sought refuge in humor, black as the night at a new moon. You did what you did to get through, that was all. The Professor was no different, turning to science for his crutch, laying his theory on Conrad late one night while they sheltered in a church.
Men died, said the Professor, and when they died the microscopic creatures that inhabited their bodies suddenly turned on them and consumed them. Everyone knew that they came first—the micro-organisms, the protozoa, the bacteria. That’s what all life had once been about. But maybe it still was, maybe the evolution of life was a load of bunk. Life, the life that mattered, was the same as it had always been: microscopic. Only its external appearance had changed, the husk it had molded around itself, the tendrils it had sent out—legs to carry it to better feeding grounds or away from danger, hands to kill on its behalf and nourish it. We were like servants, he went on, laboring under illusions of selfimportance, convinced that they’re the true masters of the house. In truth, we nourish the bugs, and then we die, and then they devour us, their vehicle, before moving on.
Conrad could remember thinking at the time that what the poor fellow needed was a spell of leave, a few days’ furlough in Naples—take in a show or two, flirt with some Red Cross girls. But now he found himself reaching for what the Professor had said that night, trying to see sense in it, draw some kind of solace for what had happened to Lillian, for what was happening to her in that coffin.
It didn’t work.
And he knew then that he would break the pledge he had made to himself, the vow muttered through clenched teeth in the garden of the English hospital, beneath the dying heat of a September sun, the long grass in the orchard littered with fallen fruit.
In that moment, he saw with absolute certainty that he would take another human life.
‘Hello.’
Conrad spun, startled. An elderly woman was standing behind him, frail and stooped, her thinning silver hair as light as goose down.
‘Did you know her?’ she asked.
‘No.’
He saw his lie reflected back at him in her rheumy eyes. How long had he been standing at the grave, adrift on his thoughts? Five minutes? Twenty? More? Hardly the actions of someone with no association.
‘She drowned,’ he said. ‘I found her.’
‘Oh, you’re the fisherman.’
‘One of them. I just came by to pay my respects.’
She seemed satisfied with his response, and turned towards the grave. ‘A tragedy. She was a right beauty.’
The East Hampton Star had run a small piece, along with a picture of Lillian taken at some charity event at the Guild Hall, smiling as always.
‘Kind with it. Always found time to speak to an old lady.’
Conrad cast an eye over the washed-out colors of her dress, the cheap handbag, the swollen feet squeezed into scuffed shoes, and he tried to imagine her moving in Lillian’s circle.
As if reading his thoughts, the old lady turned to him. ‘I used to see her here.’
‘Here?’
‘I come every day, sometimes twice. Hubert likes me to come, you see, even if it’s for a few minutes, just to say hello. Oh, I know it sounds silly, and maybe it is, but I live close, on Osborne Lane, just along from the crossing, so it’s no great hardship, though sometimes my joints protest when the wind’s off the ocean.’
Out of politeness, Conrad allowed her to finish.
‘She used to come here?’ he asked. ‘To the cemetery?’
‘Who?’
He nodded at the grave. ‘Lillian Wallace.’
‘Oh yes, almost every week. To visit someone over there.’
She pointed towards the northeast corner of the cemetery.
‘Almost every week,’ she repeated. ‘Always with flowers.’
‘What kind of flowers?’
‘Just…flowers. I don’t know.’
The directness of the question had unsettled her. Why should he care what variety of flowers Lillian Wallace had brought with her?
‘I best be going.’ She shuffled off, casting a suspicious glance over her shoulder as she went. Conrad waited till she was lost to sight on Cooper Lane before making for the northeast corner of the cemetery.
Apart from the names, there was little to distinguish the headstones from one another—a scattering of rough-hewn granite blocks with polished faces. The resting place of the poor. Poor but not forgotten. Flowers adorned many of the graves.
Which one had drawn her here? And why? Who amongst this silent gathering of the dead had she known or cared about enough to warrant her making regular visits?
It didn’t make sense, not unless it was something to do with a member of the household staff. The maid, Rosa, perhaps. They were close, very close, he knew that. Could Rosa have lost a son, a daughter? No, Lillian would have said something to him. He would have known.
He silently hoped that he didn’t stumble upon an innocent explanation. He wanted the reason for her visits to have a bearing on her death. More than that, he needed it.
He had dredged the memories of their times together for clues, but had turned up nothing. The father she feared, the ambitious brother, the sister who had always belittled her, the fiancé who had left her for another woman. Hardly a happy life, but commonplace stories nonetheless, unremarkable. All he had to go on was a faint impression of disquiet in her last weeks, a remoteness that would settle on her face like a veil when she was off her guard. If she hadn’t been more eager than ever to spend time with him, he might have assumed she was having misgivings about their relationship. He certainly now wished that he’d pushed her a lot harder on the matter.
He glanced around, reading off names at random—familiar names, names still carried by the living—but the answer didn’t present itself. There were just too many to choose from.
He fought the frustration building inside him and cleared his head. Think. If she’d left flowers around the time of her death, they would have to be over a week old, well past their prime, dead even. That excluded most of the graves. In fact, it left only a handful of candidates.
He moved slowly between them, dismissing them in turn: a woman some twenty years dead, Edna White’s stillborn daughter, Orville Hatch who had lost both legs to poor circulation before the end. No obvious connection there.
The name on the next headstone stopped him dead in his tracks.
Being a long-lived flower, the lilies had stood up pretty well, though a scattering of petals lay around the rusted metal vase. He approached slowly, crouching down.
One lily for every year of the short life memorialized in the cold granite. Lilies, a symbol of purity and innocence. He knew that from the somber print that used to hang on the landing of their house, the one his stepmother had brought with her when she moved in with them, the one entitled The Annunciation—the Virgin Mary on her knees before the angel, clutching a single lily.
He could sense Lillian’s mind at work, her hand at play. More than that, though, he had a dim recollection of a conversation, an idle question, or so it had seemed at the time: Lillian asking him if he had known Lizzie Jencks.
Yes, had been his reply, but not well. His father had fished with her father once, setting gill nets off the ocean beach.
Young Lizzie, hair the color of copper wire, always so ready to spring a smile on you, her cheery disposition snuffed out late one night on a lonely lane, victim of a hit-and-run driver.