The Glory Hand (23 page)

The ground resisted as they dug into it, stubborn and unyielding, as rock hard as the headstones poking up from the thistles and weeds. It seemed impossible that the ice cutters long ago could have carved deep enough into, this flinty soil, when the ground was frozen, to plant the dead here. The effort it took to dig the small hole drenched Iris and Cassie in sweat, but the surrounding gravestones somehow drove them to work with heightened urgency. Not until they had finished hacking at the earth, chipping away at it with their trowels as though it were a block of ice, did they stop to catch their breath.

Iris brushed away pebbles from the shallow grave. 'The worst thing that ever happened to me before this,' she said, 'was last year at school. I was a lab assistant in Biology. You know, the kid with the highest grades gets to feed the lab animals, clean their cages . . .' Cassie pretended to listen as she stared into the sky: gray clouds were rolling in from the horizon, the same gray as the granite slabs around them. 'The job was okay, I guess,' Iris continued, 'until the end of the year. Just before school was about to let out for the summer, Sister Garth - she's the nun who was the bio teacher - she told me she was going to some retreat for the summer and wouldn't be able to come in and feed the lab rats, so . . .' Iris took a deep breath. 'So she had me fill up this twenty-gallon aquarium with water. Then she gave me a pair of rubber gloves and told me to . . .'

Cassie looked at her blankly. 'What?'

'Drown them.' Iris glanced into the grave. 'She made it sound so practical, even merciful. But I wouldn't do it.'

'What did she do?'

'She put on the rubber gloves herself . . .'

'Jesus . . .'

'I mean, what could I say? She was the teacher. The first rat didn't put up a fight. It took her only about two minutes to kill it. But the others . . . God, after the first one, she couldn't even catch the others! I couldn't believe it . . . Here was this room with a crucifix on the wall, and this nun is running around trying to drown a bunch of rats!' She tried a nervous laugh and failed, then wiped obsessively at the dried blood on her fingers.

'When my mother died, there was hardly any blood at all,' Cassie said. 'Just one tiny red spot . . .' She touched her forehead. 'Like a Hindu holy mark.'

A dark speck bobbed along the sawtooth horizon of pines, barely visible against the trees, then shot up into the sky again, flying closer.

'What I could never figure out', Iris murmured, 'was how they knew. The rats, I mean. Rats are only dumb animals, right? But I swear, Cassie, every one of them knew what was about to happen to them . . . They
knew:
She sighed. 'That was the worst part.'

Cassie watched the black speck soaring in the sky, watched it until she could see what it was - the wings spread like dark blades, the hooked beak, the talons. A bird of prey. And the awareness swooped down on her with such suddenness that she blurted it out: 'My mother knew. The look on her face when she fell over the side of the dock ... It was as if she had . . .'

'What?'

Cassie faced Iris. 'As if she had
expected
it. As if she knew all along she was going to . . .die.'

As if to avoid intruding on Cassie's thoughts, Iris knelt down and nestled the kitten's body in its shoebox coffin, into the grave. 'The ancient Egyptians,' she said, 'I read somewhere that they used to bury all kinds of stuff in the pyramids. And cats . . . they believed cats were sacred. They used to mummify them, to sleep beside their dead masters.'

Cassie looked down at the cardboard box, remembering how perfect her mother had looked in her coffin of split pine. And yet something had been wrong then . . . something that only struck her now: her mother's hands, folded on her chest. . . Her mother's hands . . .

The ring . . . the silver ring in the shape of a hand that her mother had always worn . . . the ring Cassie had hated. It hadn't been on her mother's finger. Could it have slipped off in the fall from the scaffolding, the plunge into the water? Not likely. It had been too tight for her mother to remove, even using all her strength. Too tight for a mortician to remove without cutting off her finger.

Someone had taken it. But how?

And why?

C.H.-p

It must have been there. You just must not have seen it, like you didn't notice the nipple under Robin's arm.

Cassie helped Iris shovel dirt over the shoebox, trying to bury the unruly wisp of a memory that kept her mother's funeral from being neatly tucked away in her mind.

Leave mother's coffin shut,
she told herself,
Don't pry it open, or you'll never be able to close it again.

Cassie was surprised with herself. Instead of ridiculing Iris as she fashioned a crude cross of twigs and planted it on top of the grave, she was actually helping her. There was not a single stone cross among the slabs tumbled around them; maybe that was what compelled Cassie to do it. She looked up into the sky. The bird of prey was gone, leaving the gray clouds to merge together into a shroud.

Iris patted the mound of dirt and stood up, brushing off her knees. She tugged at the crucifix around her neck and murmured a prayer. And Cassie didn't tease her. Some-how, the thought of the missing ring, the final terrible knowledge in her mother's eyes . . . She threw a handful of earth on the grave, the pebbles thudding dully as they fell, and when Iris picked some daisies from among the weeds of the graveyard, Cassie helped her spread them over the dirt.

If Cassie had looked over her shoulder as she and Iris threaded their way back among the toppled headstones in the graveyard, she would have seen the creature that was watching them, silently, shrewdly. The black Manx, the mother cat, staring at them with demon-yellow eyes. Biding her time. Waiting for the gust of wind that knocked over the fragile cross of twigs.

If Cassie had looked back, she would have seen the mother cat creep silently towards the freshly dug grave and rake her claws across the dirt. Slowly. Patiently. Until the corpse of the kitten was unearthed.

If Cassie had been watching, she would have seen the Manx seize the kitten's blood-matted body in her jaws, and drag it into the woods.

But Cassie saw nothing. For she had turned away from the tombstones, as if expecting to read her own name on one of them. The foreboding, the certainty of doom - she
knew
now how those rats had felt. How her mother must have felt.

Iris had been right. Knowing was the worst part.

Chapter 19

'But you've
got
to!'

'Honey, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.'

From where she stood at the phone in the corner of the lodge, Cassie could hear the laughter outside, see the sudden tight embraces in the sunlight as daughters ran into their mothers' arms.

'There's nothing I can do.'

'But you promised.' She heard herself whining like a little girl, and she didn't try to hide it. She had been waiting for her father since dawn. 'You've got to come . . .'

'Christ, what a terrible connection . . .' Clay's voice was faded in and out, but when the static ebbed for a brief moment, she could hear the excitement in it. 'Sweetheart, I know how much you wanted me to come ... I couldn't wait to see you dance. But what can I say? This is the one thing on earth that could possibly keep me away.'

The stuffed animal heads were staring at her from the walls, as if they knew the reason she needed him, as if they knew it had absolutely nothing to do with the dancing now. She wanted to tell him that it was much more urgent than that, but it was also much harder to talk about, and it left her fumbling for words. 'Why can't you? Why can't you come?'

A pause, then, 'They think they've found your mother's murderer.'

She could say nothing, but turned her eyes away from the mothers and daughters embracing on the lawn.

'I think it's finally over, Cassie. The director is handling it personally, flying out to see to the indictment today.

Apparently some kind of extremist group ... in California. The Director said I could come along. They've got the suspect in custody, Cassie.'

'But you said you'd come and . . .'

'I owe her this, Cassie I owe it to myself. And to you. But most of all for Ann. You see that, don't you?'

But Cassie couldn't see. She couldn't forgive him for this, Not ever.

She's dead and I'm alive. She doesn't need you anymor. but I need you. Right now.

He was waiting for a response from her, she knew, a few words to diminish his guilt. But other words were stirring inside her, forming on her lips: 'Dad . . .'

The static was getting worse.

'Dad!'

Was he speaking to her? Was he still there?

'Cassie?'

And then the iine went dead.

Cassie flinched, and ratttled the phone hook, but it did no good. The receiver felt terribly heavy as she slid it back on its hook. The stuffed animal heads glaring down at her -they reminded her of things dead but not buried. She rushed outside.

The breeze was blowing in mounting gusts, flapping a sign between the two firs sheltering the main lodge: 'Welcome - Daughters of Casmaran.' Crepe paper streamers fluttered in the breeze off the lake, writing frantic shadow-messages on the lawn. Mothers and daughters gathered around the punchbowl to the sound of laughter. The wind whipped Cassie's hair in her face, blinding her, roaring in her ears like the ocean of static that had drowned her father.

'For a second, Jake, I thought you'd hung up on me. Barbara's voice faded in and out. The phone had gone deac for thirty seconds, and then clicked mysteriously back to life.

'What can I say? This is in the middle of nowhere. The phone lines up here are fucked.'

'Then maybe that's why I didn't hear you right a minute ago when you said you didn't want me to come.'

He hesitated. 'I'm too busy.'

'Jake
. . .' Even over the bad connection of the pay phone, even over the clang of the cash register and the country-and-western drone of the jukebox at Murdock's General Store, Jake could hear his wife sigh. 'But you said it was going badly. Maybe I could help.'

'Everything's changed. It's okay now.'

Barbara's voice was cautious.
Are you sure?'

The dusty room felt stifling hot all of a sudden, even though the Copenhagen Chewing Tobacco thermometer on the wall read only seventy-live. 'I'm fine,' he managed.

'You don't sound fine.'

Damn, she knew him well. He wiped the sweat from his brow and glanced at the grizzled grocer behind the tarnished cash register. Murdock was staring back at him warily, as if suspecting his only customer was planning to rob the place.

Jake tried to think. He hadn't slept for . . . how long? Thirty-six hours? Sleep had been impossible since he'd heard the music. The music in the woods had been like some strange upper that had kept his heart racing, made booze or grass superfluous. Barbara's silence was heavy with suspicion. He could picture her tugging on her long brown hair, biting on a nail, trying not to let her fear get the better of her.

'You haven't met someone, have you? I mean, we're not dealing with a midlife crisis fling?'

'Come
on
, Barbara.' But it feels like it, he wanted to say. The giddy, crazy excitement, the need for secrecy, and the willingness to betray the world were the same he had felt when he had first met Barbara. He had been faithful to her until now. Now he was cheating on her, having an affair, though not the way she would have imagined. The passion he felt for his music was suddenly much greater than any he had ever felt for her. The only reason he had interrupted his frenzy of work to drive all the way here and phone her was because he knew if he didn't, she would show up on his doorstep tomorrow, when he least wanted her.

'But I miss you . . .' She said it as if that would overrule all his objections.

'I miss you, too.' He knew he was both lying to her and himself. He cradled the receiver in the crook of his neck and leaned against the wall, scanning the old phone num-bers scratched in the knotty pine, as if trying to read a scrip for a role he could no longer play.

He didn't miss her. He felt greedy to be left alone with the music, alone with what it had awakened in him.

'You'll be my sweet Texas rose
. . .' The country-and-western tune on the jukebox clashed with the- melodies in his mind, infuriating him.

'Well, what can I say? I'm glad it's going so well, Jake. I can't wait to hear it.' Her unconvincing tone confirmed that she thought the worst, that she suspected he had worked all summer and come up with nothing. That she feared his elation came because he had chosen a simple, drastic solution, the same that he had chosen that night when they had pumped twenty-five valium out of his stomach at Belle vue.

A long pause. Finally, 'When are you coming home?'

'When?' He repeated the word slowly, stalling. He hadn't thought beyond tonight, tonight when he prayed the music - the inspiration - would come again. It had to come again.

'I love you.' Barbara's words were smothered in static.