Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 98, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 588 & 589, October 1991

The Girl Who Loved Graveyards by P. D. James

Only once had she asked about her father, and then she had known, as children do, that this was a subject which, for some mysterious adult reason, it was better not to talk about. She had been sitting at the kitchen table with her homework while her aunt was busy cooking supper. Looking up from her history book, she asked: “Where is Daddy buried?”

The frying pan clattered against the stove. The cooking fork dropped from her aunt’s hand. It took her a long time to pick it up, wash it, clean the grease from the floor. The child asked once again: “Where is Daddy buried?”

The kind of expert mystery fiction you have come to expect from the masterful and meticulous P. D. James...

She couldn’t remember anything about that day in the hot August of 1956 when they took her to live with her Aunt Gladys and Uncle Victor in the small house in east London, at 49 Alma Terrace. She knew that it was three days after her tenth birthday and that she was to be cared for by her only living relatives now that her father and grandmother were dead, killed by the influenza within a week of each other.

But those were just facts someone, at some time, had told her briefly. She could remember nothing of her previous life. Those first ten years were a void, unsubstantial as a dream that had faded but that had left on her mind a scar of unarticulated childish anxiety and fear. For her, memory and childhood both began with that moment when, waking in the small, unfamiliar bedroom with the kitten, Blackie, still curled up asleep on a towel at the foot of her bed, she had walked barefoot to the window and drawn back the curtain. And there, stretched before her, lay the cemetery, luminous and mysterious in the early-morning light, bounded by iron railings and separated from the rear of Alma Terrace only by a narrow path. It was to be another warm day, and over the serried rows of headstones lay a thin haze pierced by the occasional obelisk and by the wing tips of marble angels whose disembodied heads seemed to be floating on particles of shimmering light.

And as she watched, motionless in an absorbed enchantment, the mist began to rise and the whole cemetery was revealed to her, a miracle of stone and marble, bright grass and summer-laden trees, flower-bedecked graves and intersecting paths stretching as far as the eye could see. In the distance she could just make out the spire of a Victorian chapel, gleaming like the spire of some magical castle in a long-forgotten fairy tale. In those moments of growing wonder, she found herself shivering with delight, an emotion so rare that it stole through her thin body like a pain. And it was then, on the first morning of her new life, with the past a void and the future unknown and frightening, that she made the cemetery her own. Throughout her childhood and youth it was to remain a place of delight and mystery, her refuge and her solace.

It was a childhood without love, almost without affection. Her Uncle Victor was her father’s elder half-brother; that, too, she had been told. He and her aunt weren’t really her relations. Their small capacity for love was expended on each other, and even here it was less a positive emotion than a pact of mutual support and comfort against the threatening world that lay outside the trim curtains of their small, claustrophobic sitting room.

But they cared for her as dutifully as she cared for the cat Blackie. It was a fiction in the household that she adored Blackie, her own cat, brought with her when she arrived, her one link with the past, almost her only possession. Only she knew that she disliked and feared him. But she brushed and fed him with conscientious care, as she did everything, and in return he gave her a slavish allegiance, hardly ever leaving her side, slinking through the cemetery at her heels and turning back only when they reached the main gate. But he wasn’t her friend. She didn’t love him. He was a fellow conspirator, gazing at her through slits of azure light, relishing some secret knowledge that was her knowledge, too. He ate voraciously, yet he never grew fat. Instead, his sleek black body lengthened until, stretched in the sunlight along her windowsill, his sharp nose turned always to the cemetery, he looked as sinister and unnatural as a furred reptile.

It was lucky for her that there was a side gate to the cemetery from Alma Terrace and that she could take a shortcut to and from school across the graveyard, avoiding the dangers of the main road. On her first morning, her uncle had said doubtfully, “I suppose it’s all right. But it seems wrong, somehow, a child walking every day through rows of the dead.”

Her aunt had replied: “The dead can’t rise from their graves. They lie quiet. She’s safe enough from the dead.”

Her voice had been unnaturally gruff and loud. The words had sounded like an assertion, almost a defiance. But the child knew her aunt was right. She did feel safe with the dead — safe and at home.

The years in Alma Terrace slipped by, as bland and dull as her aunt’s blanc mange, a sensation rather than a taste. Was she happy? That was a question it had never occurred to her to ask. She wasn’t unpopular at school, being neither pretty nor intelligent enough to provoke much interest either from the children or the staff; an ordinary child, unusual only in that she was an orphan, but unable to capitalize even on that sentimental advantage. Perhaps she might have found friends — quiet, unenterprising children like her, who would respond to her unthreatening mediocrity — but something about her repelled their timid advances; her self-sufficiency, the bland, uncaring gaze, the refusal to give anything of herself even in casual friendship. She didn’t need friends. She had the graveyard and its occupants.

She had her favorites. She knew them all — when they had died, how old they had been, sometimes how they had died. She knew their names and learned their memorials by heart. They were more real to her than the living, those rows of dearly loved wives and mothers, respected tradesmen, lamented fathers, deeply mourned children.

The new graves hardly ever interested her, although she would watch the funerals from a distance and creep up later to read the mourning cards. What she liked best were the old, neglected oblongs of mounded earth or chipped stones, the tilted crosses, the carved words almost erased by time. It was around the names of the long dead that she wove her childish fantasies.

Even the seasons of the year she experienced in and through the cemetery. The gold and purple spears of the first crocuses thrusting through the hard earth. April with its tossing daffodils. The whole graveyard en fete in yellow and white as mourners dressed the graves for Easter. The smell of mown grass and the earthy tang of high summer, as if the dead were breathing the flower-scented air and exuding their own mysterious miasma. The glare of sunlight on stone and marble as the old women in their stained cotton dresses shuffled with their vases to fill them at the tap behind the chapel. Seeing the cemetery transformed by the first snow of winter, the marble angels grotesque in their high bonnets of glistening snow. Watching at her window for the thaw, hoping to catch that moment when the edifice would slip and the shrouded shapes become themselves again.

Only once had she asked about her father, and then she had known, as children do, that this was a subject which, for some mysterious adult reason, it was better not to talk about. She had been sitting at the kitchen table with her homework while her aunt was busy cooking supper. Looking up from her history book, she asked: “Where is Daddy buried?”

The frying pan clattered against the stove. The cooking fork dropped from her aunt’s hand. It took her a long time to pick it up, wash it, clean the grease from the floor. The child asked once again: “Where is Daddy buried?”

“Up north. At Creedon, outside Nottingham, with your mum and gran. Where else?”

“Can I go there? Can I visit him?”

“When you’re older, maybe. No sense, is there, hanging about graves? The dead aren’t there.”

“Who looks after them?”

“The graves? The cemetery people. Now get on with your homework.”

She hadn’t asked about her mother, the mother who died when she was born. That desertion had always seemed to her willful, a source of secret guilt. “You killed your mother.” Someone sometime had spoken those words to her, had laid on her that burden. She wouldn’t let herself think about her mother. But she knew that her father had stayed with her, had loved her, hadn’t wanted to die and leave her. Someday, secretly, she would find his grave. She would visit it, not once, but every week. She would tend it and plant flowers on it and clip the grass as the old ladies did in the cemetery. And if there wasn’t a stone, she would pay for one, bearing his name and an epitaph she would choose. She would have to wait until she was older, until she could leave school and go to work and save enough money. But one day she would find her father. She would have a grave of her own to visit and tend. There was a debt of love to be paid.

Four years after her arrival in Alma Terrace, her aunt’s only brother came to visit from Australia. Physically, he and his sister were alike, the same stolid, short-legged bodies, the same small eyes set in square, pudgy faces. But Uncle Ned had a brash assurance, a cheerful geniality that was so alien to his sister’s unconfident reserve that it was hard to believe they were siblings. For two weeks he dominated the little house with his strident, alien voice and assertive masculinity. There were unfamiliar treats, dinners in the West End, a show at Earl’s Court. He was kind to the child, tipping her lavishly, even walking through the cemetery with her one morning on his way to buy his racing paper. And it was that evening, coming silently down the stairs to supper, that she overheard disjointed scraps of conversation, adult talk, incomprehensible at the time but taken into her mind and stored there.

First the harsh boom of her uncle’s voice: “We were looking at this gravestone together, see. ‘Beloved husband and father. Taken from us suddenly on 14 March 1892.’ Something like that. Marble chips, cracked urn, bloody great angel pointing upward. You know the kind of thing. Then the kid turned to me. ‘Daddy’s death was sudden, too.’ That’s what she said. Came out with it cool as you please. Now what in God’s name made her say that? It gave me a turn, I can tell you. I didn’t know where to put my face. And what a place to choose, the bloody cemetery. I’ll say one thing for coming out to St. Kilda — you’ll get a better view, I can promise you that.”

Creeping closer, she strained her ears vainly to catch the indistinct mutter of her aunt’s reply. Then came her uncle’s voice again: “That old bitch never forgave him for getting Helen pregnant. No one was good enough for her precious only daughter. And then when Helen died having the kid, she blamed him for that, too. Poor sod. Sidney bought a packet of trouble when he set eyes on that girl.”

Again the murmur of indistinguishable voices, the sound of her aunt’s footsteps moving from table to stove, the scrape of a chair. Then her Uncle Ned’s voice again: “Funny kid, isn’t she? Old-fashioned. Morbid, you might say. Seems to live in that boneyard, she and that damned cat. And the spitting image of her dad.

“It turned me up, I can tell you. Looking at me with his eyes and then coming out with it: ‘Daddy’s death was sudden, too.’ I’ll say it was! Helps having such an ordinary name, I suppose. People don’t catch on. How long ago? Four years? It seems longer.”

Only one part of this half heard, incomprehensible conversation had disturbed her. Uncle Ned was trying to persuade them to join him in Australia. She might be taken away from Alma Terrace, might never see the cemetery again, might have to wait for years before she could save enough money to return to England and find her father’s grave. And how could she visit it regularly, how could she tend and care for it, from the other side of the world? After Uncle Ned’s visit ended, it was months before she could see one of his rare letters with the Australian stamp drop through the letterbox without feeling the cold clutch of fear at her heart.

She needn’t have worried. It was October of 1966 before they left England, and they went alone. When they broke the news to her one Sunday morning at breakfast, it was apparent that they had never even considered taking her with them. Dutiful as ever, they had waited to make their decision until she had left school and was earning her living as a shorthand typist with a local firm of estate agents. Her future was assured. They had done all that conscience required of them. Hesitant and a little shamefaced, they justified their decision as if they believed that it was important to her. Her aunt’s arthritis was increasingly troublesome; they longed for the sun; Uncle Ned was their only close relation and none of them was getting any younger. Their plan, over which they had agonized for months in whispers behind closed doors, was to visit St. Kilda for six months and then, if they liked Australia, to apply to emigrate. The house in Alma Terrace was to be sold to pay the air fare. It was already on the market. But they had made provision for her.

When they told her what had been arranged, she had to bend her face low over her plate lest the flood of joy be too apparent. Mrs. Morgan, three doors down, would be glad to take her as a lodger if she didn’t mind having the small bedroom at the back overlooking the cemetery. In the surging tumult of relief, she hardly heard her aunt’s next words. Everyone knew how Mrs. Morgan was about cats. Blackie would have to be put to sleep. She was to move into 43 Alma Terrace on the afternoon of the day on which her aunt and uncle flew from Heathrow. Her two cases, holding all that she possessed in the world, were already packed. In her handbag she carefully stowed the meager official confirmations of her existence: her birth certificate, her medical card, her Post Office savings book showing the £103 painstakingly saved toward the cost of her father’s memorial. The next day she would begin her search. But first she took Blackie to the veterinarian to be destroyed. She had made a cat box and sat patiently in the waiting room with the box at her feet. The cat made no sound, and this patient resignation touched her, evoking for the first time a spasm of pity and affection. But there was nothing she could do to save him. They both knew it. But then it seemed he had always known what she was thinking, what was past and what was to come. There was something they shared, some knowledge, some common experience she couldn’t remember and he couldn’t express. Now, with his destruction, even that tenuous link with her first ten years would go forever.

When it was her turn to go into the surgery, she said, “I want him put to sleep.”

The veterinarian passed his strong, experienced hands over the sleek fur. “Are you sure? He seems healthy still. He’s old, of course, but in remarkably good condition.”

“I’m sure. I want him put to sleep.”

And she left him there without a glance or another word.

She had thought that she would be glad to be free of the pretense of loving him, free of those slitted, accusing eyes. But as she walked back to Alma Terrace, she found herself crying; tears, unbidden and unstoppable, ran like rain down her face.

There was no difficulty in getting a week’s leave from her job; she had been husbanding her holiday entitlement. Her work, as always, was up to date. She had calculated how much money she would need for her train and bus fares and for a week’s stay in modest hotels. Her plans had been made. They had been made for years.

She would begin her search with the address on her birth certificate — Cranston House, Creedon, Nottingham, the house where she was born. The present owners might remember her father and her. If not, there would be neighbors or older inhabitants of the village who would be able to recall her father’s death, where he was buried. If that failed, she would try the local undertakers. It was, after all, only ten years ago. Someone would remember. Somewhere in Nottingham there would be a record of burials. She told Mrs. Morgan that she was taking a week’s holiday to visit her father’s old home, packed a holdall with necessities, and next morning caught the earliest possible train to Nottingham.

It was during the bus ride from Nottingham to Creedon that she felt the first stirrings of anxiety and mistrust. Until then, she had traveled in calm confidence, but strangely without excitement, as if this long-planned journey were as natural and inevitable as her daily walk to work, an inescapable pilgrimage ordained from that moment when a barefoot child in her white nightdress drew back her bedroom curtains and saw her kingdom spread beneath her. But now her mood changed. As the bus lurched through the suburbs, she found herself shifting in her seat as if mental unease were provoking physical discomfort. She had expected green countryside, small churches guarding neat, domestic graveyards patterned with yew trees. These were graveyards she had visited on holidays, had loved almost as much as she loved the one she had made her own. Surely it was in such bird-loud, sanctified peace that her father lay.

But Nottingham had spread out during the past ten years, and Creedon was now little more than an urban village separated from the city by a ribbon development of brash new houses, petrol stations, and parades of shops. Nothing was familiar, and yet she knew that she had traveled this road before and traveled it in anxiety and pain.

When, thirty minutes later, the bus stopped at its terminus at Creedon, she knew at once where she was. The Dog and Whistle still stood at one corner of the dusty, litter-strewn village green with the same bus shelter outside it. And at the sight of its graffiti-scrawled walls, memory returned as if nothing had ever been forgotten. Here her father used to leave her when he brought her to pay her regular Sunday visits to her grandmother. Here her grandmother’s elderly cook would be waiting for her. Here she would look back for a final wave and see her father patiently waiting for the bus to begin its return journey. Here she would be brought at 6:30, when he arrived to collect her. Cranston House was where her grandmother lived. She herself had been born there but it had never been her home.

She had no need to ask her way to the house. And when, five minutes later, she stood gazing up at it in appalled fascination, no need to read the name painted on the shabby, padlocked gate. It was a square-built home of dark brick standing in incongruous and spurious grandeur at the end of a country lane. It was smaller than she remembered, but it was still a dreadful house. How could she ever have forgotten those ornate overhanging gables, the high-pitched roof, the secretive oriel windows, the single forbidding turret at the east end?

There was an estate agent’s board wired to the gate; the house itself was empty. The paint on the front door was peeling, the lawns were overgrown, the boughs of the rhododendron bushes were broken and the gravel path was studded with weeds. There was no one here who could help her to find her father’s grave. But she knew that she had to visit, had to make herself pass again through that intimidating front door. There was something the house knew and had to tell her, something Blackie had known. She couldn’t escape her next step. She must find the estate agent’s office and get a permit to view.

She had missed the returning bus, and by the time the next one had reached Nottingham, it was after three. Although she had eaten nothing since her early breakfast, she was too driven now to be aware of hunger. But she knew that it would be a long day and that she ought to eat. She turned into a coffee bar and had a toasted cheese sandwich and a mug of coffee, grudging the few minutes it took to gulp them down. The coffee was hot and almost tasteless, but she realized as the hot liquid stung her throat how much she had needed it.

The girl at the cash desk was able to direct her to the house agent’s office, a ten minutes’ walk away. She was received by a sharp-featured young man in a pinstripe suit who, after one practiced glance at her old blue-tweed coat, the cheap holdall, and bag of synthetic leather, placed her precisely in his private category of client from whom little could be expected and to whom less needed to be given.

But he found the particulars for her, and his curiosity sharpened as she merely glanced at them and then folded the paper away in her bag. Her request to view that afternoon was received, as she had expected, with politeness but without enthusiasm. But this was familiar territory and she knew why. The house was unoccupied. She would have to be escorted. There was nothing in her respectable drabness to suggest that she was a likely purchaser. And when he briefly excused himself to consult a colleague and returned to say that he would drive her to Creedon at once, she knew the probable reason for that, too. The office wasn’t busy and it was time that someone from the firm checked up on the property.

Neither of them spoke during the drive. When they reached Creedon and he turned down the lane to the house, the apprehension she had felt on her first visit returned, only it was deeper and stronger. Now it was more than the memory of an old wretchedness. This was childhood misery and fear relived, and intensified by a dreadful adult foreboding.

The house agent parked his Morris on the grassy verge, and as she looked up at the blind windows she was seized by a spasm of terror so acute that momentarily she was unable to speak or move. She was aware of the man’s holding open the door for her, of the smell of beer on his breath, of his face, uncomfortably close, bending on her a look of exasperated patience. She wanted to say that she had changed her mind, that the house was totally wrong for her, that there would be no point in viewing it, that she would wait for him in the car. But she willed herself to rise from the warm seat and scrambled out under his supercilious eyes. She waited in silence as he unlocked the padlock and swung open the gate.

They passed together between the neglected lawns and the spreading rhododendron bushes toward the front door. And suddenly the feet shuffling on the gravel beside her were different feet and she knew that she was walking with her father as she had walked in childhood. She had only to stretch out her hand to feel the grasp of his fingers. Her companion was saying something about the house, but she didn’t hear. The meaningless chatter faded and she heard a different voice, her father’s voice, heard for the first time in over ten years:

“It won’t be for always, darling. Just until I’ve found a job. And I’ll visit you every Sunday for lunch. Afterward we’ll be able to go for a walk together, just the two of us. Grannie has promised that. And I’ll buy you a kitten. I’m sure Grannie won’t mind when she sees him. A black kitten. You’ve always wanted a black kitten. What shall we call him? Little Blackie? He’ll remind you of me. And then when I’ve found a job, I’ll be able to rent a little house and we’ll be together again. I’ll look after you, my darling. We’ll look after each other.”

She dared not look up lest she see again those desperately pleading eyes begging her to understand, to make things easy for him, not to despise him. She knew now that she ought to have helped him, to have told him that she understood, that she didn’t mind living with Grannie for a month or so, that everything would be all right. But she hadn’t managed so adult a response. She remembered tears, desperately clinging to his coat, her grandmother’s old cook, tight-lipped, pulling her away from him and bearing her up to bed. And the last memory was of watching him from her room above the porch, of his drooping, defeated figure making its way down the lane to the bus stop.

As they reached the front door, she looked up. The window was still there. Of course it was. She knew every room in this dark house.

The garden was bathed in a mellow October sunlight, yet the hall struck cold and dim. The heavy mahogany staircase led up from gloom to a darkness which hung above them like a weight. The estate agent felt along the wall for the light switch. She didn’t wait. She felt again the huge brass doorknob that her childish fingers had hardly encompassed and moved unerringly into the drawing room.

The smell of the room was different. Then there had been a scent of violets overlaid with furniture polish. Now the air smelled cold and musty. She stood in the darkness, shivering but perfectly calm. It seemed to her that she had passed through a barrier of fear as a tortured victim might pass through a pain barrier into a kind of peace. She felt a shoulder brush against her as the man went across to the window and swung open the heavy curtains.

He said, “The last owners have left it partly furnished. Looks better that way. Easier to get offers if the place looks lived in.”

“Has there been an offer?”

“Not yet. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Bit on the large side for a modern family. Then, too, there’s the murder. Ten years ago, but people still talk. There’ve been four owners since, and none of them stayed long. It’s bound to affect the price. No good thinking you can hush up murder.”

His voice was carefully nonchalant but his gaze never left her face. Walking to the empty firegrate, he stretched one arm along the mantelpiece and followed her with his eyes as she moved trancelike about the room. She heard herself asking: “What murder?”

“A sixty-four-year-old woman. Battered to death by her son-in-law. The old cook came in from the back kitchen and found him with the poker in his hand. Come to think of it, it could have been one like that.”

He nodded at the collection of brass fire irons resting against the fender. He said, “It happened right where you’re standing now. She was sitting in that very chair.”

She said in a voice so gruff and harsh that she hardly recognized it: “It wasn’t this chair. It was bigger. Her chair had an embroidered seat and back and there were armrests edged with crochet and the feet were like lions’ claws.”

His gaze sharpened. Then he laughed warily. The watchful eyes grew puzzled, then the look changed into something else. Could it have been contempt?

“So you know about it. You’re one of those.”

“One of those?”

“You aren’t really in the market for a place. Couldn’t afford one this size, anyway. You just want a thrill, want to see where it happened. You get all sorts in this game and I can usually tell. I can give you all the gory details you’re interested in. Not that there was much gore. The skull was smashed, but most of the bleeding was internal. They say there was just a trickle falling down her forehead and dripping onto her hands.”

It came out so pat that she knew he had told it all before, he enjoyed telling it, this small recital of horror to titillate his clients and relieve the boredom of his day. She wished she weren’t so cold. If only she could get warm again, her voice wouldn’t sound so strange. She said through her dry lips: “And the kitten. Tell me about the kitten.”

“Now, that was something! That was a touch of horror. The kitten was on her lap, licking up the blood. But then, you know, don’t you. You’ve heard all about it.”

“Yes,” she lied. “I heard all about it.” But she had done more than that. She knew. She had seen it. She had been there.

And then the outline of the chair before her altered. An amorphous black shape swam before her eyes; then it took form and substance. Her grandmother was sitting there, squat as a toad, dressed in her Sunday black for morning service, gloved and hatted, prayerbook in her lap. She saw again the glob of phlegm at the corner of the mouth, the thread of broken veins at the side of the sharp nose. The grandmother was waiting to inspect her grandchild before church, turning on her again that look of querulous discontent. The witch was sitting there. The witch who hated her and her daddy, who had told her that he was useless and feckless and no better than her mother’s murderer. The witch who was planning to keep her from her daddy forever. And then she saw something else. The poker was there, too, just as she remembered it, the long rod of polished brass with its heavy knob.

She seized it now as she had seized it then, and with a high scream of hatred and terror brought it down on her grandmother’s head. Again and again she struck, hearing the brass thudding against the leather, blow on splitting blow. And still she screamed. The room rang with the terror of it. But it was only when the frenzy passed and the dreadful noise stopped that she knew from the pain in her throat that the screaming had been hers.

She stood shaking, gasping for breath. Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead and she felt the stinging drops seeping into her eyes. Looking up, she was aware of the estate man’s eyes, wide with terror, staring into hers, of a muttered curse, of footsteps running to the door. And then the poker slid from her moist hands and she heard it thud softly on the rug.

He had been right: there was no blood. Only the grotesque hat knocked forward over the dead face. But while she watched, a sluggish line of deep red rolled from under the brim, zigzagged down the forehead, trickled along the creases of the cheeks, and began to drop steadily onto the gloved hands. And then she heard a soft mew. A ball of black fur crept from behind the chair and the ghost of Blackie, azure eyes frantic, leaped, as he had leaped ten years earlier, delicately into that unmoving lap.

She looked at her hands. Where were the gloves, the white-cotton gloves that the witch had always insisted must be worn to church? But these hands, no longer the hands of a nine-year-old child, were naked. And the chair was empty. There was nothing but the split leather, the burst of horsehair stuffing, a faint smell of violets fading on the quiet air.

She walked out the front door without closing it behind her as she had left it then. She walked as she had walked then, gloved and unsullied, down the gravel path between the rhododendrons, through the ironwork gate, and up the lane toward the church. The bell had only just started ringing; she would be in good time. In the distance she had glimpsed her father climbing a stile from the water meadow into the lane. So he must have set out early after breakfast and had walked to Creedon.

And why so early? Had he needed that long walk to settle something in his mind? Had it been a pathetic attempt to propitiate the witch by coming with them to church? Or — blessed thought — had he come to take her away, to see that her few belongings were packed and ready by the time the service was over? Yes, that was what she had thought at the time. She remembered it now, that fountain of hope soaring and dancing into glorious certainty. When she got home, all would be ready. They would stand there together and defy the witch, would tell her that they were leaving together, the two of them and Blackie, that she would never see them again. At the end of the road, she looked back and saw for the last time the beloved ghost, crossing the lane to the house toward that fatally open door.

And after that? The vision was fading now. She could remember nothing of the service except a blaze of red and blue shifting like a kaleidoscope, then fusing into stained-glass window, the Good Shepherd gathering a lamb to his bosom. And afterward? Surely there had been strangers waiting on the porch, grave, concerned faces, whispers and sidelong glances, a woman in some kind of uniform, an official car. And after that, nothing. Memory was a blank.

But now at last she knew where her father was buried. And she knew why she would never be able to visit him, never make that pious pilgrimage to the place where he lay because of her, the shameful place where she had put him. There could be no flowers, no obelisk, no loving message carved in marble for those who lay in quicklime behind a prison wall. And then, unbidden, came the final memory. She saw again the open church door, the trickle of congregation filing in, inquiring faces turning toward her as she arrived alone in the vestibule. She heard again that high, childish voice speaking the words that more than any others had slipped the rope of hemp over his shrouded head.

“Granny? She isn’t very well. She told me to come on my own. No, there’s nothing to worry about. She’s quite all right. Daddy’s with her.”