Greely's Cove (16 page)

Then the final touches. Having decided against sewing shut the eyelids and jaw, he removed the body to the dressing room, where he lovingly washed, combed, and brushed its hair. Filed and lacquered its nails, both hands and feet. Daubed on sealing compounds to hide blemishes and bruises and discolorations caused by pooling blood. Applied facial makeup, eyeliner, mascara, and peach-colored lipstick to complement Lorna Trosper’s radiant blond hair. All with love, with anticipation. And with
hunger.

At last he stepped back from the gurney to behold the product of his labors in its wholeness. She lay on her back, naked, needing no clothing. Her skin was flushed and rosy, her face positively angelic. Mitch had taken great care in applying the makeup, lest he overdo it and fail to achieve the look that Lorna had had in life, of purity and wholesomeness. All flaccidity was gone, thanks to pressurized injection of embalming fluid, which had given her limbs and torso the firm, ripe look of a living woman. She seemed almost radiant.

Only touching her would dispel the illusion of life, for her flesh was dead-cold, but Mitch was prepared to live with this one small shortcoming. After all, never in his living memory had he touched a warm woman. You can’t miss what you’ve never had, he told himself.

After wrapping Lorna Trosper’s beautiful body in a clean sheet, he moved one of the massive black hearses out of the garage and drove his burbling, rust-cratered El Camino into its place. He then gently laid the body into the cargo bed of the half-car, half-pickup truck and covered it with a sheet of plastic to protect it from the rain. Back to its place went the hearse. The mortuary went dark as he shut off the last light. The garage door rattled closed, and Mitch Nistler, feeling both weary and exultant, drove away into the black night, bound for home with his woman.

That the sun shone on Greely’s Cove seemed a small miracle after two days of gloom and sleety rain. Lindsay Moreland rolled out of bed, heaved open the bedroom window, and drank deeply of the crisp, winter air. She savored the miracle, small though it was, with its pine-laden breeze and dazzling patches of blue sky. A good feeling washed over her, and the dark age since her sister’s death appeared to be on the verge of ending. Even so, she suffered a nibble of anxiety over being away from the brokerage on a Monday morning, and she thanked God for sympathetic associates who were willing to cover for her.

While her mother puttered over breakfast in the kitchen, Lindsay showered and dressed in a red cotton sweater and fitted oatmeal slacks. She topped off the outfit with a black linen jacket, simple brass bracelet, and earrings. Not in the mood for contacts this morning, she wore her horn-rims with the thin bows and larger-than-usual lenses, which her friends said made her look “bookish.”

Nora presented her with a plate of French toast and a welcome cup of black coffee when she came into the kitchen. “Mmmhh,” she said after the first bite. “No one does French toast like you, Mom.”

“You can thank that Miss Hazelford person,” said Nora, sipping from a coffee cup. “The woman must have spent a small fortune in groceries for this household. We could’ve had Tillamook cheese omelets or smoked salmon or even eggs Benedict, for that matter. But I know how much you love my French toast, so French toast it is. By the way, are the others stirring yet?”

“Not according to the sound of the rumbling snores coming from Carl’s room,” answered Lindsay. “Or the silence that seeped through Jeremy’s closed door.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” she offered, “if Carl’s feeling a little under the weather this morning. He didn’t come in until two o’clock.”

“I know,” said Nora. “I was awake myself.”

“I hope it wasn’t because of my tossing and turning.”

“Not at all. My head was just so full of thoughts and memories, so many”—her voice cracked ever so slightly, and her eyes fluttered, but she kept control—“so many questions. Even though most of her old things are gone, this house is still so full of Lorna. I don’t think I could ever sleep well under this roof.”

“I know what you mean. I’m glad that tonight’s our last night here. There’s no reason we can’t go back home after the memorial service tomorrow.”

After breakfast Lindsay placed a telephone call to her lawyer in Seattle, Denver Moreen, a trusted old friend who had handled the Moreland family’s affairs for a quarter-century. All she wanted was some “quick and dirty” legal advice, she told him, on her chances of winning a court battle against Carl Trosper for custody of Jeremy. But like all lawyers, Moreen was wary of giving quick advice over the phone. He posed a dozen questions about Carl’s moral and emotional fitness, finances, ability to earn a living, and the answers were hardly encouraging to Lindsay, the prospective litigant. Moral turpitude, Moreen explained, is difficult to prove in a custody case, even on the basis of expert testimony and documentary evidence, and nigh impossible with only hearsay and suspicion. After forty minutes of jawing, he offered the tentative conclusion that she would be crazy to challenge Carl over custody of the boy. Absent some unknown factor that would override all else that was known about him, Carl would win.

Lindsay thanked him, told him good-bye, and wandered back into the small kitchen to refill her coffee cup. Her mother had settled at the dinette table with the morning newspaper.

“I couldn’t help but overhear,” said Nora. “Denver wasn’t very encouraging, was he?”

“No, he wasn’t. In fact, he was downright discouraging, which makes you happy, I’m sure.”

“Lindsay, would you please keep your voice down? I think Carl is awake.”

“He’s in the shower, and I don’t care if he hears. There’s no way I’ll ever believe that he’s fit to raise Jeremy.”

“That’s not for you to decide, is it?”

“Mother, there’s nothing to decide. Look at his behavior last night: Lorna hasn’t been gone two days, and he’s out on the town, getting blotto with that police chief friend of his. You and Denver can say what you want, but that’s not my idea of responsible fatherhood.”

“Maybe I’m becoming weak in the head as I get old,” said Nora, “but I’m not so sure I disapprove of it. I was tempted to do the same thing when your father died.”

“You can’t even handle one martini, Mother.”

“That is hardly the point, dear. Now listen to me, because I’m about to give you some good advice—”

“I don’t need any more advice.”

“Well, listen anyway. As the contributor of half your genetic makeup, I’m entitled to give it. Let this
drop
, Lindsay. You can’t accomplish anything by going to war with Carl. Oh, you can throw away hard-earned money on legal fees, and you can create lots of heartache and ill feeling, and you can probably alienate your nephew forever—which could very well happen if you pursue this insane notion of yours. Instead of fighting Carl, you should be trying to help him. Why not become an ally instead of an enemy? Do you really think Lorna would have given her blessing to a war between you and Carl over Jeremy?”

This last thought shook Lindsay, and her iron-woman bearing faltered. “That’s not a fair question! Lorna wasn’t herself during—”

“It
is
a fair question,” insisted Nora. “Your sister was kind and decent. She lived to bring joy to others—in her art, her friendship, her generosity. She would have wanted nothing more than for us to help and love each other. The best way to keep her memory alive is to be like her, don’t you think?” Lindsay suddenly broke down. Tears gushed from her blue eyes, and her mouth contorted in a stifled sob. She had fought back this onslaught since that dark hour on Saturday morning when the coroner had called from Greely’s Cove.

Nora rose and went to her younger daughter, now her only daughter, and wrapped her in motherly arms, cradled her head as she cried, daubed at her tears with wadded Kleenex. They huddled in a pair of dinette chairs, patting and stroking each other’s heads until the onslaught finally subsided.

Red-eyed and stuffy-nosed, Lindsay said, “Oh, maybe you’re right, Mother. I’ve been acting like a slug.”

“No you haven’t, dear,” said Nora, caressing her daughter’s blond hair. “You’ve been acting like your father, that’s all. I’ve always said that you inherited his spirit.”

“I’ll back off over this custody thing,” said Lindsay. “I’ll even try to be helpful—really I will. But I’m going to stay on guard, Mother. If things start to go wrong for Carl, I’m going to be on hand to take care of Jeremy. Lorna would’ve wanted that, don’t you think?”

Nora cradled her daughter’s head against her shoulder again and sighed. “Yes, dear, you may be right. You just may be right at that.”

Mitch Nistler woke from the deep sleep of exhaustion and, as usual, panicked. He was late again. The old Westclox alarm clock on his fourth-hand bed table showed 8:38, and dust-specked sunlight streamed through a grimy bedroom window. He should have been up and at work long before the winter sun had risen this far.

He climbed out of his lumpy bed with its tattered blankets and herded himself toward the bathroom, stepping awkwardly over a clutter of magazines, beer cans, and fast-food refuse. While urinating, he became aware of a strange new reality: He was not hung over. His head was clear and free of the familiar ache. His stomach was not threatening revolt. Tired though he was, he did not feel alcohol-sick, as he did on most mornings.

Then a dam burst in his head, and a torrent of memory surged into his consciousness. He saw his hand with a scalpel, poised above Lorna Trosper’s naked body, saw the blade slicing through her cold, clean flesh, the cherry-red blood welling out. He saw himself shoving a trocar into her innocent heart and heard the whine of the aspirator as it sucked. He smelled formaldehyde and humectants and sassafras and lavender—

My God!
Had he actually
done
it?

The rest came back to him in mental gobs, and he staggered out of the bathroom, clothed only in yellow-stained undershorts, a gawky little man with fish-white skin and wild, frightened eyes. In the dead, dark hours of the morning he had transported the embalmed corpse of Lorna Trosper to this very house on the forested edge of Greely’s Cove. In his tortured little mind, he had called it a homecoming.

Between the entrances of his bedroom and the kitchen stood a door that was peeling twenty layers of ancient paint. Beyond it was a narrow stairway to the second floor.

He pulled open the peeling door and trudged up the dusky, narrow stairway, dodging cobwebs. The stairs creaked and snapped under his meager weight. On the upper landing was a pair of doors, and beyond each a tiny bedroom. He halted at the top of the stairs, where dust and grime gritted against his bare soles. Until now he had never used the upstairs, because he had been too lazy to attack the clutter and filth that had accumulated there during past tenancies.

He went to the door on the right and shoved it slowly open, stirring the mingled smells of sassafras, lavender, and other perfumes that hung thick in the air. The corpse of Lorna Trosper, encircled in feeble sunlight that poured through a crusty window, lay on a dilapidated bed, still cocooned in the clean sheet that Mitch had expropriated from the Chapel of the Cove. With her golden hair splayed against the moth-eaten mattress and her satiny skin aglow, she looked every inch an angel.

Mitch’s breath caught. He had embalmed and prepared many corpses during his tenure at the chapel, but he had never before succeeded in creating beauty like
this.
The tiny bedroom itself—despite the garbage heaped against its dingy walls—seemed a chapel, the old bed an altar. The perfumes that emanated from Lorna defeated the stink of dirt and neglect. Gazing upon her, scarcely daring to breathe or swallow, Mitch again felt justified for having taken her as his own. True, he had stolen and deceived. He had cremated an empty casket and packed its less-than-human ashes into a small jug that old man Kronmiller would unwittingly sell to Lorna’s relatives as the real thing. He had stolen Lorna’s body and embalmed it without the family’s permission—itself a crime that could land him back in Walla Walla. But he was untroubled: No one would ever know what he had done. Lorna would be
his
—not forever, of course, because embalming is far from permanent, despite the crap that funeral directors give out to their clients. For a little while, at least, she would be his—until bacteria and insects started their hellish work in earnest.

He approached the bed and touched the cool white sheet that clothed her. He pulled it downward until an alabaster breast lay bare.

“I’m sorry that I couldn’t give you better than this,” he whispered. “I wish I could give you a castle. I wish—”

A small noise came from behind him, a tiny crack of ancient linoleum. He stopped breathing, eyes wide.
Just the old house settling
, he told himself. Old houses are full of tiny, unknowable sounds.

“I can’t give you much,” he said, gazing down again at Lorna’s sleeping face. “I can only give you myself. You’ll never know how much—”

The sound again—the creak-crack of brittle floorboards under shifting weight. A clammy chill enveloped his bare neck and shoulders, and he whirled around. His lungs heaved at what he saw, and his legs turned to ice water. Standing before him, smiling so tightly that all his perfect white teeth shone brightly, was a young boy, his huge hazel eyes gleaming with unnatural light.

Mitch choked on a clot of saliva, and he would have pissed himself had he not just emptied his bladder. He shook and shivered, and his hands flew reflexively to his crotch as he tried to hide his near-nakedness. His brain grabbled for any possible explanation of how this boy had gotten in, or who he was.

Who!

The recognition hit him. On rare occasions he had seen this boy around town, always in the shepherding company of his mother. Citizens had whispered behind their backs, clucking and shaking their heads, lamenting the fact that his mother had not put him away long ago. The boy was Jeremy Trosper. Lorna’s son.

Jeremy had a wicked, wicked grin. And a crazy, inhuman glint in his eye. Mitch Nistler’s world would come crashing down yet again, this time with brutal finality. Back to prison, for sure. With no chance of escape, because this little shit would go straight to the police, and—