In Death's Shadow

CHAPTER SEVEN

Paul didn't want me to go to the funeral home alone. Or so he said. Then he smiled with sad cocker spaniel eyes, like a boy whose trip to Disney World was about to be spoiled by an airline strike. No way / was going to ruin his precious sailboat race!

"Go! Shoo! Scat!" I said, flapping my hand at him for emphasis.

I wanted, no, needed Paul to be on his way. In the two days that had passed since we learned of Valerie's death, he'd been smothering me with attention. You'd think he'd been assigned to suicide watch.

"Valerie was my friend, not yours," I reminded him.

He opened his mouth to protest, but I closed it with a kiss. If he said one more comforting, oh-so-understanding thing to me about Valerie, I knew I'd break down and start bawling again.

"Besides," I added a moment later, reaching up to ruffle his hair, "it'd be embarrassing to have you moping about the funeral home with a bumper sticker pasted to your forehead that says, 'I'd Rather Be Sailing.'"

After Paul had set off for the Annapolis Yacht Club, I put away my cheerful smile and dragged myself up to the bedroom. I stared into my closet-could have been minutes, could have been hours-grieving over Valerie, worrying about Miranda, and wondering about Brian.

No one could make me believe that Valerie had died of natural causes. But if I followed that thought to its logical conclusion…

I shivered. The husband was always suspect. But what could Brian's motive have been? Valerie's insurance money was long gone: the house, cruise, and car were proof of that. Besides, Valerie had died on Monday. Didn't Valerie tell me Brian would be out of town that day?

I sat down, hard, on the edge of the bed. I frowned. That meant Miranda…

Please, God, don't tell me Miranda found her mother's body! My eyes filled with tears for the third time since morning, and I scurried into the bathroom to splash cold water on my face. In mid-splash I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror and wished I hadn't. Puffy eyelids, bloodshot eyes with purplish pouches underneath. If I knew a makeup artist, I'd be using the emergency entrance.

My hair wasn't too bad, though. The week before the race, I'd had it cut in a wash-and-wear bob and highlighted, just for kicks. I fluffed it with my fingers. A wash and some mousse and I'd be ready to go.

If I ever figured out what I was going to wear.

Back at the closet, I pulled out a pants suit I hadn't worn since I quit the job in Washington, D.C. Charcoal gray. It matched my mood.

To keep my mind off the funeral home-Please, God, don't let there be an open casket-I rummaged through my jewelry drawer looking for something to brighten up my lapel. I have fifty boxes, I swear, marked AURORA GALLERY. I opened the one labeled CAT PIN and thought, not for the first time, that I should own stock in that store. If something happened to me, Aurora Gallery would have to declare Chapter 11.

I pinned on the cat and added a pink paisley scarf.

I plopped back down on the edge of the bed, checked my watch. Five o'clock. The family had been gathering at Kramer's for over an hour. Who would I know, besides Brian? And Miranda, of course, if someone thought to bring her along. I suddenly wished I hadn't been so eager to send Paul on his merry way. With Paul along, at least I'd have someone to talk to.

I rummaged in the closet, found the Ferragamos I used to wear with the gray suit, and slipped them on. They pinched. I switched to a pair of Easy Spirit pumps. Wrong color. I retrieved my Clark T-straps from under the bed and eased my feet into them. Ah, much more like it.

I could have procrastinated away another ten minutes-a hat, perhaps? I had half a dozen hat boxes-proper round ones, too-stacked on the top shelf of the closet, but I chided myself for being so ridiculous.

It's just that I have a problem with funeral homes. Especially funeral services in funeral homes. Like sending a loved one off to heaven from the lobby of a hotel. Before my mother died, she'd insisted on cremation. There'd been a service at St. Anne's-Book of Common Prayer, Rite One-with Bach and Mozart on organ and flute. Two days later, at sunset, we'd taken Mother's ashes out on Connie's sailboat and sprinkled them over the Chesapeake Bay. If you have to go, it doesn't get much better than that.

I sighed, gathered up my courage and my handbag, double-locked the front door, and wandered up Prince George to the intersection with Maryland Avenue. I turned left, killing a few more minutes by browsing the shop windows, still trying to work out in my head what I would say to Brian. I wanted to know how Valerie had died, for one thing. It seemed tactless to come right out and ask, but then, my friends will say I've never let a little thing like tact stand in my way.

For more than a century Kramer's Funeral Home had been tucked away on Cornhill Street, one of half a dozen seventeenth century streets that radiate out from State Circle like spokes. Once a grand Georgian mansion owned by a wealthy colonial tea merchant, the house had been enlarged over the years to accommodate Robert Kramer's ever-expanding services to the dead, dying, and bereaved.

I entered the lobby and looked around. A rich, red oriental carpet. A mahogany highboy. A highly polished table, perfectly round, supporting a vase containing an elaborate flower arrangement the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. I touched a lily. It was cool, slightly damp, and very real.

To my right, an ornate, carpeted staircase led up to the second floor, but a red velvet rope prevented anyone from actually venturing upstairs. I circumnavigated the table, looking for someone who could point me in the right direction, and then I saw it. One of those signboards on a tripod, black, with white snap-in letters that usually spell out things like Soup du Jour: Cream of Broccoli.

Today's special was Valerie Padgett Stone. Blue Room. With an arrow pointing to the right.

It was so bald, so matter-of-fact, so… final. I gulped for air, glancing around the entrance hall, looking for a place to sit down, but apparently Mr. Kramer didn't want me to sit down in his lobby because he'd provided no chairs. I breathed in, and out, then followed the arrow to a room that was, as the sign said, blue. Relentlessly so. Blue carpet. Blue chairs. Blue draperies. Blue walls. Even the Kleenex boxes were blue.

And in spite of the fact that the newspaper had requested no flowers, baskets of delphiniums, as deeply blue as the South Pacific Ocean and just as beautiful, were arranged against the far wall.

Among the flowers, on a stand in front of a blue and gold brocade curtain, sat Valerie's casket, made of rosewood and so highly polished that I could see in it the reflection of the blades of a ceiling fan as it rotated slowly overhead. I took another deep, steadying breath. The lid was open.

I froze in the doorway, dreading the next half hour.

"Welcome." The voice belonged to a tall guy loitering in the foyer immediately to my right. Because of his blond hair, I figured he was related to Brian. He extended his hand and I took it, covering his hand with both of my own. "I'm so, so sorry," I said. I didn't find out till later he was the funeral director's son.

"Have you seen Brian?" I asked.

Kramer, Jr. pointed.

Brian, dressed in a dark navy suit with a red and white polka-dotted tie, chatted practically forehead-to-forehead with a grandmotherly type wearing a pink A-line skirt, a matching sweater set, and a short strand of fat, Barbara Bush pearls. Her fingers dug deeply into his sleeve. I knew the type: she would prattle on forever.

"You might sign the guest book," Junior suggested. "While you wait."

Using a silver pen actually attached to the book by a chain-can't be too careful, those Kramers-I scrawled my name, and Paul's, on the top line of a new page. At least thirty people had signed the book before me; not a single name I recognized. They were scattered throughout the room now, sitting pensively on chairs, staring at their hands or the walls. Some were standing, clustered in groups of three or four, making small talk.

When I looked his way again, Brian was holding court next to the casket, talking to a young woman wearing a sleeveless dress with poppies splashed all over it. If I wanted to speak with him now, I'd have to go up there. Next to the body.

I hesitated, my hand clutching the back of a chair, the metal cold beneath my fingers. Now that I'd signed the guest book, perhaps I could slip away before anyone noticed me? Then Brian caught my eye, and I was doomed.

I weaved through the crowd to join him. "I'm so, so sorry, Brian," I said after he released me from a hug.

Brian turned to his companion. "Corinne, this is Hannah Ives, one of Valerie's friends."

Corinne offered me a wan smile and a limp hand before flouncing off to join a group of other twenty-somethings huddled behind the lectern. They looked disgustingly fit, like the aerobics instructors they probably were.

Brian rested his hands on my shoulders and studied me with dry, bloodshot eyes. "Why did she have to go and die on me, Hannah?" His voice broke and he croaked, "What am I going to do?"

"I know how hard it is," I said. "I lost my mother a couple of years ago and a day doesn't go by that I don't think about her. Sometimes I hear a joke and I pick up the phone to tell her because I know she'd laugh her head off…" My voice trailed off. "It gets easier to bear, over time, but the pain never goes away, Brian. I miss my mother terribly."

A huge tear rolled down Brian's cheek.

"Oh, damn! I didn't mean to upset you." I snatched three tissues out of a nearby box and handed them to Brian, who used all three to blow his nose.

"I wasn't there," he said, crumpling the tissues into a ball. He turned to his wife, lying motionless in her casket, and in a voice that was barely audible managed to choke out, "I wasn't there for you, darling. I wasn't there when you needed me."

Under the circumstances, there was no way I could avoid looking at Valerie, too.

Even in death Valerie was beautiful. She was dressed all in white: in satins, seed pearls, and lace. I cringed. It must have been her wedding gown. Her hands, as beautifully manicured as they had been in life, were folded at her waist, and between her fingers was twined a long golden chain with an engraved, heart-shaped locket on the end of it. I knew, without opening it, that the locket held pictures of Brian and Miranda, face-to-face, unaging, for all eternity.

I stared at Valerie's cheeks: plump, flushed, warm. Logically, I knew they weren't. Logically, I knew that if I worked up the nerve to touch her-as some of the other mourners had done-Valerie would feel cold as stone. Stone. I swallowed hard. This was hardly the time for puns.

Still, I couldn't persuade myself that Valerie was dead. She looked peacefully asleep, eyes closed, cheeks flushed, just as she had during our hospital stay.

Awake, Valerie had always been vibrant, bouncy… so, so… there was no other word for it, so alive. I found myself staring at Valerie's chest, willing it to rise and fall and feeling astonished when it didn't.

I was standing with Brian, praying silently, when I became aware of the music, wafting in from speakers carefully camouflaged within the decorative hexagonals of the wainscoting. Mozart, I thought, then a jarring segue into "You Light Up My Life." After a bit, electronic violins swooped and soared into "On Eagle's Wings." How Valerie and I would have laughed over that!

I reached out and took Brian's hand, squeezed it. "What killed her, Brian?"

"Her heart just stopped," he whispered.

"Her heart?" I couldn't believe it. "But Brian," I said, turning to look at him, "she trained. She could run a mile in nothing flat. How could a heart as healthy as that simply stop?"

"It was the chemo," he said, simply. "All those drugs, most of them experimental. They said it could weaken her heart. It was a known risk."

I remembered the consent form the hospital made me sign before starting my own chemotherapy, the catalog of warnings about side effects that ranged from aggravated hangnails to death. I nodded. "Oh. Yes. I see."

But I didn't see. How many people did I know of who were actually killed by their chemotherapy? Not very many.

And if chemo didn't kill her, who did?

Not Brian, surely. He was no longer the beneficiary of Valerie's life insurance policy, I reminded myself. Whoever bought it was.

Whoever bought it. A frisson spawned of pure, cold evil shuddered up my spine.

"Brian, can I ask you something?"

Next to me, I thought I felt Brian stiffen, but his answer was disarmingly casual. "Sure. Shoot."

"Losing Valerie so suddenly like that reminds me that time is precious. I want to make the most of every minute I've got." I paused, waiting for Brian to finish shaking hands with a tweedy couple in their mid-seventies. "I've been thinking," I said after the couple had moved on. "I've got a life insurance policy. Not as much as Valerie's, I suppose, but it's gotta be worth something. Maybe I should do what you and Valerie did? Cash it in? Take a cruise?"

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. With that… what did you call it, viatical thing?"

"Viatical. That's right."

"Who did you work with on that, Brian?"

Brian patted his breast pocket. "I've got his card… whoops, wrong suit." He flashed me a crooked grin. "The guy's Jablonsky. First name, Gilbert. Has an office up in Glen Burnie."

"Thanks," I said. "Maybe I'll look him up."

"You do that," said Brian. "The man's a prince."

I strongly doubted that any princes lived in Glen Burnie, Maryland, a five-mile-long corridor of chain stores, fast food restaurants, and car dealerships, punctuated by traffic lights at every single intersection.

"It was really worth it," Brian added thoughtfully.

"Cashing in her policy?"

"No, I mean the chemo. It was hard on Valerie, for sure, but it gave us another year together. Didn't it?"

"I'm sure Valerie never regretted it," I said, thinking of Miranda. I was one hundred percent sure about Miranda. Although the Stone marriage seemed strong, at least on the surface, Valerie had never discussed her relationship with Brian, so how she might have felt about her husband in the privacy of her own home was another thing altogether.

I squeezed his hand. "Where's Miranda now?"

"Kat is bringing her."

"Kat?"

"Katherine. Valerie's mom."

"From New Jersey? I read that in the paper."

Brian nodded. "Valerie's father is a judge up there." He dropped my hand and turned to face the others. "What am I going to say to all these people, Hannah? Tell me, what am I going to say?"

I touched his shoulder with the palm of my hand, letting it rest there for several seconds, feeling the soft, damp wool. "Let them do the talking. You just nod and say, 'Thank you.' Nobody expects any eloquent speeches from you, Brian."

Brian nodded. "Kat's been a godsend. She wants Miranda to stay with them for a few weeks. They've got ponies-" Brian paused, looking puzzled, as if trying to remember who he was and what he was doing there.

"I think that's a fine idea," I said. I'd never met Valerie's parents, of course, but unless they had just been let out on parole or were dabbling in satanic cults, Miranda might feel more secure with them than batting around a big empty house with a father who was, to put it mildly, distracted.

"There they are now," Brian said.

Valerie's parents-a handsome couple of the "I'm running for political office and you're not" persuasion-swept into the room and were immediately surrounded by a gaggle of sympathizers. The Honorable Judge was a handshaker. Mrs. Padgett nodded and smiled, nodded and smiled, like a bobble-head doll. A professional multi-tasker, she somehow managed to control a purse strap that wanted to slip off her shoulder, a wayward strand of auburn hair that, in spite of all the hair spray, tumbled over an eyebrow, as well as a squirming Miranda, whose right hand she kept firmly clamped in her own.

"But I have to go!" Miranda wailed.

Valerie's mother bent down and without disturbing her perma-grin, warned, in a hoarse whisper that somehow carried clear across the room, "Not now, Miranda."

Miranda's legs turned to cooked spaghetti. She hung, suspended, an uncooperative lump on the end of her grandmother's silk-clad arm.

I smiled, almost feeling sorry for the woman. "Looks like your mother-in-law has her hands full."

"Yeah," said Brian. "Guess I better go bail her out. Excuse me, will you?"

I laid a hand on his arm. "No. I'll go. You have other things to do."

Brian flashed a grateful smile and tipped an imaginary hat. "Thanks, Hannah. Later." He turned to trade a low-five with a middle-aged hunk who'd been hovering nervously at his elbow for a minute or two. The guy bulged uncomfortably in his churchgoing suit as if he couldn't wait to get home and trade it in for jeans and a T-shirt. I left Brian and the bodybuilder to trade fitness tips, and went to introduce myself to Valerie's mother.

Physically, Catherine Padgett was a hard-edged, more shop-worn version of her daughter, but there the resemblance ended. Mrs. Padgett, as it turned out, was more than willing to allow me, a perfect stranger, to take Miranda off her hands. With a vague, distracted smile she probably reserved for loyal retainers, she passed the little girl over to me, then immediately resumed the conversation I'd so rudely interrupted. I'd never met Ellen Moyer, the mayor of Annapolis, but I recognized her from pictures in the paper.

So don't introduce me to the mayor, you insensitive clod! I'm just the nanny. I sent a half-hearted curse in Mrs. Padgett's direction-May lipstick stains defile your teeth-then turned my attention to her granddaughter, my knees popping audibly above the strains of "My Heart Will Go On" as I knelt on the carpet next to the child.

"Hi, Miss Miranda. Do you remember me?" I didn't want her to think I was some creepy stranger.

"Yeth. You're Mrs. Hannah."

"That's right. I came to your house one day and your mommy and your daddy and you and me all went running in the rain!"

Miranda nodded sagely.

"So, why don't I call you Miranda and you can call me Hannah, just like friends."

"Okay."

Switching into grandmother mode, I asked, "Do you need to go potty, Miranda?"

Miranda nodded, her ponytails bouncing like springs.

Kramer, Jr. pointed us in the direction of the ladies' room which, when we found it, was decorated in soft peach tones, a welcome relief from the relentless sea of blue. Miranda and I discovered that one of the two stalls was already occupied by a pair of slim ankles in bright red, high-heeled sandals.

I ushered Miranda into the other.

To my surprise, Miranda was wearing disposable pull-ups.

"Mommy's gonna buy me big girl panties," Miranda chirped as I boosted her up onto the commode.

"Wow," I said, trying to sound impressed. After two weeks of potty training, Chloe, at three, had already reached that milestone. I suspected she could have nailed it in two days flat, but Emily was bribing her with M &Ms, so the little scamp had drawn it out, milking the training for all the M &Ms she could get.

Miranda sat primly on the toilet, producing nothing but the tap-tap-tap of her patent leather heels against the porcelain. "Don't watch me," she said.

"Okay." I pulled the stall door toward me and held it closed while Miranda tinkled, waiting for the telltale rumble of toilet paper spinning off the roll. From the stall next door came an unmistakable sound. The owner of the red shoes was quietly retching.

"You okay in there?" I asked.

"Fucking clams!"

"Is there anything I can do?"

The red shoes turned, heels facing out, and a bright floral hem floated down, gently covering them. I knew the next sound, too: the dry heaves.

When I'm sick to my stomach, nothing feels better than a cool washcloth across my forehead. I was heading for the paper towel dispenser when I noticed Miranda had hopped off the toilet seat and was crouching on all fours, peering under the partition into the adjoining cubicle. "That lady's throwing up,” Miranda crowed.

"Go away!" the lady whimpered.

I tried again. "Are you sure there's nothing I can do?"

"Just get that damn kid out of here and leave me the fuck alone!"

I grabbed Miranda's arm and eased her gently to her feet. "C'mon, Miranda. The lady wants some privacy."

With one chubby hand Miranda tugged at her pull-ups. "What does fuck mean, Mrs. Hannah?"

I bent to help Miranda with her panties. "It's a very, very bad word."

Miranda smiled up at me slyly. "My mommy says I should never say fuck. Only bad people say fuck."

"Your mommy is right, Miranda," I said, fighting the urge to giggle. Whatever explanation Valerie had given her daughter, the child was clearly seeking a second opinion.

"Is that lady bad?" Miranda asked, pointing toward the occupied stall.

"No, the lady's not bad. She's just not feeling very well."

"My mommy gives me ginger ale," Miranda offered helpfully.

"Maybe somebody will give the lady ginger ale, too, Miranda," I said. But, I thought, it sure as hell ain't gonna be me.