There was nothing like that sound to eliminate the tension in a room.
“Leave,” muttered Rafe. “Now.”
Grover looked to him, then back to Esme, then finally to his bottle.
“All right,” he said. “I know when to call it a night. My card’s on the table. I’ll be staying at the Days Inn over in Hicksville. Give my regards to your father-in-law. Lovely fellow.”
He waited for them to move out of his way.
They moved out of the way.
“Be seeing you,” he said, and winked, and left.
Rafe locked the door.
“What an ass,” he said.
“I liked him,” replied Lester, shuffling into the room. “Wait…where’s the bottle of wine he brought?”
“He took it with him.”
Lester frowned. “Took it with him? What an ass.”
His reason for socializing gone, the old man continued on his way to his room. Esme counted the seconds until she heard his door slam shut.
Then she turned to her husband. He hadn’t moved far from the door.
“Are you okay?” she asked him.
“I…”
She reached out to him.
But once again: an interruption. This time it was Rafe’s cell phone, vibrating in his pants pocket.
“If it’s a Florida area code,” said Esme, “don’t answer it.”
Rafe examined the screen. “Five-one-eight.”
“Upstate?” asked Esme.
Rafe nodded and pressed Talk. “Hello?”
Esme watched him as he listened. His parents, Lester and Eunice, had raised him in upstate New York. It was only luck that Rafe chose a graduate school in Washington, D.C. Otherwise, they would never have met.
Eight years.
“Who is it?” Esme whispered.
Rafe put up a hand to silence her. His face had gone pale. Whatever he was hearing was not good news.
She had accompanied him a few times to his old house. His childhood in upper-middle-class suburbia had been very different from hers on the streets of Boston. But opposites attracted, right?
Rafe spoke a bit to the person on the other line, thanked them and then hung up the phone. He looked even more rattled than he had in the car.
“Rafe, what is it?”
“Do you…remember that girl you met at my reunion…the one I took to the prom?”
Esme vaguely recalled the woman in question. She was a sales rep for a vacuum cleaner company. A bit heavy-set. Very pretty blue eyes.
“Lynette something, right?”
“Yes. Lynette Robinson. She… Anyway, that was my cousin Randy…on the phone. The police…they just identified the…remains of…Lynette’s body…in the basement of a torched house.”
3
The funeral was done in black and white.
The black, of course, was provided by the mourners. More than a hundred people came out to pay their respects. Half of them didn’t even know the deceased, but had read about the tragedy in the Sullivan County Democrat. The national press was there, too, at the outskirts of the cemetery, and even they had the good sense to wear dark colors.
The priest wore black, naturally. The grave diggers, who stood a few feet from the crowd, wore long black coats. When the time was right, they would operate the pulleys, which were painted brown to camouflage with the sod, and lower the coffin into the four-by-eight-by-three hole they’d shoveled this morning.
The weather provided the white, covering the soil and the grass and the hundreds of gravestones scattered about the cemetery. Almost an inch of pale accumulation lay fixed above the cold earth, with more to come.
Even snowflakes were eager to attend Lynette Robinson’s funeral.
As the priest, a youthful redheaded tenor, recited scripture, Esme’s mind wandered (as it was wont to do when in the presence of recited scripture). She thought back over the past two days, from Grover Kirk (who had had the audacity to phone her Thursday morning) to Lester’s long list of supplies he wanted them to get while upstate. She and Rafe had arrived at his old house in the early evening. Immediately, they opened all the windows to air out all the dust and mildew off forty-year-old linen upholstery. Lester had kept the kitchen faucet dripping so as to prevent his pipes from freezing, but Rafe descended into the cellar nonetheless to double-check.
Esme phoned Oyster Bay.
“Hello,” grumbled Lester on the other end. “Hi, Lester.”
After exchanging hollow pleasantries, Esme asked if he could put Sophie on the line. And she waited. A breeze wafted in through one of the open windows in the bedroom and tickled at the back of Esme’s neck.
Then, finally: “Hi, Mom!”
“Hey, baby. How was school?”
“Zack Portnoy wet his pants. There was a big puddle under his chair. The janitor had to come and clean it up and everything. It was gross.”
Esme grimaced. “I’m sure it was, sweetie. Did you