Grave Concern (27 page)

“Please keep it mum, Kate, what I am going to tell you. We have, or had, regular Friday night meetings.”

“Oh, really?” said Kate.

“At the cemetery.”

“You don't say.”

Gupta looked at her queerly. “So after finishing up the last time, all going back to our vehicles, I forgot my water bottle and returned. Nicholas appeared, well, in a
compromising
position.”

“You're kidding me. A woman?”

“No, no. Not at all. Nicholas was … acting most unusual, as though waiting for something.”

Now Kate was really confused. Hadn't they
all
been waiting for something? Wasn't that why the men were meeting in the first place? For a guy who wasn't beating around the bush, it seemed like Prakash Gupta was having an awfully hard time bashing through.

“Waiting for something, eh?”

Again, the head-bob.

“Like a spy waiting for a contact to show up?”

Now Gupta looked confused.

What the hell, she'd just say it. “Not waiting for something
feline
to appear?”

Gupta started at the mention of cat, but quickly recovered. “No. More like … I don't know … you'll think it weird.”

“I've heard weird,” said Kate in a bored voice, a false ennui she'd found useful to elicit information in the past.

“He kept glancing up, Kate. It was — it was like he was watching for something in the sky.”

Kate's hands flew to her mouth “Oh, no! You don't mean aliens!”

“What? No, no,” Gupta said.

“
What
then?” said Kate, rearranging her face into a serious expression.

“No idea. I hoped, as you were seen talking to him — ”

And there it was, thought Kate, Pine Rapids in a nutshell.

“ — you might have some information.”

“Only wish I had, Mr. Gupta. So what's this about the merry band of men breaking up?”

“Some want to get rid of danger altogether.”

“Shoot it, you mean.”

“While others, Buck Miller and myself, Mr. P. Gupta, not so much. We simply want to know what is going on.”

“Going on? Like what kind of ‘going on'?”

Gupta lowered his voice to a whisper. “It is rumoured danger is not, as my son is saying,
random
. Some villagers say MNR is behind. Not only now but for
many years past
. And now it is all coming around again, like bad karma.”

“MNR's behind what?”

“The danger. With all due respect, am I
very
difficult to understand?”

“Look, sorry,” said Kate. “It's just I've got a crashing headache and it's been a ‘no-good, horrible, very bad day,' to quote something or other.”

“Ah!” said Gupta, his eyes lighting up. “A children's book, correct? My daughter loved this book when she was little.”

“Glad to hear it. Look, Mr. Gupta, I'm going to go home and have a long, not-too-hot bath and a glass of uh, rosé, I think, on this hot a day, and think over everything you've said. Thank you for your, uh, concern.”

Gupta stood up from the chair, and ambled toward the door.

“Oh, and I completely forgot. I've been meaning to ask you about.”

Kate's tank was nearly drained. “Yes.”

“Just a little thing I noticed. My mother's grave. You remember, she passed away not long after we arrived in your beautiful town.”

Kate tried the head waggle as a kind of neutral response. She didn't remember a mother at all. But now she thought about it, there was a Gupta stone in the graveyard. She'd never put two and two together.

“Well, I must tell you what I noticed, Miss Smithers, the last time we went up to pay our respects.”

“I'm all ears.”

Gupta's brow furrowed, but he went on. “The flowers we had placed had disappeared.”

“Not unusual,” said Kate. “Town workers take away the old, dead bouquets sometimes when they're cutting the grass.”

“But these were not old. And they were
fox
.”

“Fox? Oh, foxglove! A natural bouquet; how nice.”

Gupta picked up a Grave Concern brochure and began twisting it in his hands. “No. I mean ‘fauks.' You know, silk. They have such ones at the dollar store.”

“Ahhhh,” said Kate. “
Faux
. Got ya. Fake, it means.”

“Although looking very real. There was one particularly, a yellow rose, Aama's favourite …” Was Gupta tearing up?

“I, I'm sorry, Mr. Gupta. I've no idea where the flowers went. I'll keep an eye out next time I'm up. I think your mother's grave is on the north side, there? Perhaps they got blown into the trees by the wind.”

Gupta's grimace was half-pained, half-skeptical. “Perhaps,” he said and left.

When Kate woke up, she was in her own bed. With the worst headache she'd ever had. It's not like she'd drunk
that
much from J.P.'s mickey. Had she?

Torturous sunlight streamed in her window, and the clock said 2:15 p.m. She'd slept right into the afternoon. Had last night's events really taken place? Or was it all just an extraordinarily vivid dream? Kate rolled over — an electric pain shot up behind her ear — and peered under the bed. If the army coat was there, she would have her answer.

It was. Keeping as still as possible, so as not to dislodge the large boulder in her skull, Kate got up and locked her bedroom door, then dragged the coat from its dusty lair. She brought the rough boiled wool to her face: sweat and cigarettes. She inhaled again. Wood resin: spruce?

There was no way she could use the coat again — questions would be asked. She would either have to get it back to J.P. or hide it away. No way she would throw it out; that would be like throwing out their time together.

She tucked it back under the bed. And lay — carefully — down.

Kate persisted in querying Nicholas. Did J.P. ever mention her? Did Nicholas ever bring up Kate with him? Could he, please?

“Okay, if you really want,” Nicholas said. He hadn't said a word to Kate about J.P. saving his life. He figured that would just clinch her hero worship. She would build it into her dream like a castle of light. “Give me a week.”

He knew exactly what Kate was thinking as he spoke:
Good old Nick — quiet, straight up, devoted. Nick won't let me down.

Did she have any idea what it cost him, running go-between?

Kate lay in her coolish bath and worked on the last problem first. What exactly was Gupta getting at? The missing bouquet was a puzzle, she had to admit. But the crazy story of the tiger and the raven: What was the point of that? And the rift in the posse of cougar hunters — why was he telling her this? Simple altruism, or was there an agenda?

Gupta had asked her about Nicholas's character, and she had answered as honestly as she could. Still, what did she really know of Link's present life? He had always been a straight arrow; if he'd shown any evidence of change, she would have been first in line to take advantage. Gupta was worried about Nicholas's interest in the sky. Could Nicholas not simply have been reading the clouds? Would the weather have some significant impact on cougar movement? Unlikely. Gupta believed Nicholas was
waiting
for something. A helicopter, perhaps? More MNR support? Had he called in airborne trackers?
Less likely still
, Kate thought.

Kate was getting nowhere with this. She slid completely under the water and blew some bubbles. She opened her eyes and looked up. A transparent skin of water separated her from the world above. As Kate was wont to do in the bath, she played with ideas, experimented with possibilities, or impossibilities.
A transparent skin
. What if such a skin existed between this world and the next, or, in Leonard's quantum language, between this world and its alternates? The main difference Kate could see between old-time religion and quantum physics was in how they imagined time. Religious intuition through millennia had created a “hereafter,” effectively stacking one life on top of another like caskets in an overcrowded cemetery, following one after another in linear time. In the quantum view, multitudinous variations of a life worked themselves out side by side from the outset, coexisting in parallel.

What if, as in her bath, a transparent skin were all that stood between life now and the life beyond, between one's existence here and everywhere? Of what did that skin consist? Could its membrane be ruptured? Would one break through in a particular location, a graveyard, for instance? Or was the membrane perhaps
temporal
— consisting of something common to present and future, or
(now Kate was really excited)
present and past?

Something common to present and past. That was it — a link! A link of some kind was what Kate was looking for! If only she knew what the link was. She surfaced and sat up, swooshing water over the rim of the tub and across the floor. She climbed out, swiped the flood with the bathmat, towelled off quickly, and dressed. Grabbed an apple for dinner on her way out the door.

Kate found herself in the car, heading out to the graveyard, with no clear idea why.
Something linking present and past
, tying the mysteries together. What could it be? As of yet, her bathtub insight was ephemeral, like a powerful dream one grasped briefly on waking, then lost. There was something she kept missing, again and again, something mundane she was overlooking. This something had a life of its own, it seemed, dancing like Peter Pan's shadow just out of reach.

As she drove, she went over the day in her mind: the morning's enigmatic meeting with Gronk, followed by the fickle dissimulations of cyberspace, the foreboding missive from Bill Chambers, and Prakash Gupta's visitation, topped off by the transmogrifying bath. All day long, it seemed, Kate's right front bumper had been grazing the guardrail of quantum realms. So why shouldn't a chunk of Gothic poetry four decades dormant in her head find voice now on her tongue: