Clara looked in the direction the wind had snatched the drawing, off into the cemetery and the field beyond. The sun was setting, but there might still be a chance to find it. In her thin maternity blouse and skirt, she stepped out onto the grass and started climbing the hill. She didn’t know where she was going, except that she had the feeling that whoever had left this for her had come this way, a faint scent of cordite on the breeze. In this stage of her pregnancy, Clara had never smelled so keenly what the world had to offer.
Below her the town lay still. She realized she was repeating Seth’s journey from a few days ago, heading for the country, for shelter, a hiding place. She was sweating in the muggy air from the walk, her feet aching from the hard ground. She’d walked far enough to reach a deep slough filled with tall, waving grasses. On the other side of the slough stood the waiting corn, the field where Seth killed himself. It had to be it. The cornfield ringed round by woods.
Before she knew what she was doing, she’d taken a few steps into the slough. The thick grasses were high as her waist and alive in the wind, stalks bending with each gust. The seed heads of the grass ticked and frayed in the wind. The corn beckoned to her, but she didn’t have the courage to enter. As her eyes scanned it, she saw something that took her breath away.
A figure in a long coat stepped out of the field at that very moment. The boy. Dark hair. The same haggard coat hanging down near his shoes. The vision she had seen that afternoon he came to her door and rang the bell. Seth Fallon.
Her heart pushed up in her throat, and her breathing shallowed. He just walked out of the corn, from the place where he had ended himself, his eyes finding her right away. She stepped back, away from the slough of waving grasses, her blood gone cold.
Impossible. You are dead. You put a shotgun into your mouth and pulled the trigger. They found your body. Maybe a hundred yards separated her, but the figure clearly wore Seth’s coat, his face a dark smear. He wasn’t watching Clara, however. He stood surveying the town, the same spread of valley she had taken in moments before.
Impossible. The morning of the shooting she climbed the stairs after hearing the gun. I saw you cross the graveyard and vanish. I heard screaming down the street. And all I did was press my back to the wall and sink to the floor, knowing without seeing what had happened. How could I have known? Why won’t you leave me alone even now?
Inside her the child twisted and tumbled. A throbbing at the end of her fingers. She was soaked with icy sweat.
Then the figure turned around and vanished into the corn. Clara hurried home, past the cemetery, shivering all over. She was not supposed to have seen what she just saw. You’ve come back for me, my student. You’ve come back and you’re not going to let me sleep, are you? You are restless because you should be in your grave. There was too much she didn’t know. Why? What could the dead ask of her?
SWADDLING
Nolan’s Funeral Home was on the other side of town, not far from the nursing home and the big concrete walls that protected the downtown from the river during spring floods. Grizz passed through town itself, his vision focused on the road ahead, ignoring those few who came out of the post office or corner store to witness his rust-pitted Ford rumbling past and wonder over his errand.
The funeral home itself was an ornate, plum-colored plantation-style house with white pillars on the veranda. He shut off his truck, walked right up onto the porch, and stepped into the foyer without bothering to ring the bell. A young man in a three-piece suit and vest was seated behind a polished desk going over some papers alone. He had orange short-cropped hair, a spray of freckles across his face. “Can I help you?” he asked.
He was not someone Grizz knew, likely an apprentice Nolan was training, someone from another town. “Where is he?” he asked.
“Who?”
“I’m looking for my son’s body.”
A door opened behind the young man, and Nolan himself stepped out. He wore the same dark suit as his assistant, a kerchief tucked in