Body-Snatcher by C. B. Gilford

“Anton,” Mrs. Kopping said. “I want to reward you for your years of faithful service.” Then she told him where she’d hidden his wife’s body.

* * *

Anton Vandrak groveled in the dirt, literally and figuratively. And he cursed the day and the hour and the woman that had brought him to this place.

He halted his toil, sitting back on his heels, resting his agonied back, wiping perspiration from his face with both grimy sleeves. He surveyed his handiwork, not with pride, only with hatred and bitterness.

“I want a rose-bordered driveway,” Mrs. Harriet Kopping had decreed. “All the way from the gate, right up to the verandah, and around the circle. And all red roses, mind you, Anton. I want a solid wall of red roses on both sides of the drive. I’m going to give my house a new name, Rose Hill.”

He had groaned inwardly when he’d received the command. It was almost three hundred feet from the front gate at the street up to the house. Adding the keyhole circle, and figuring the bushes at four feet apart, it meant a hundred and sixty plants. A hundred and sixty holes to dig!

But he hadn’t grumbled aloud to Mrs. Kopping. He’d saved his resentment for Stella, when they were alone together in their apartment behind the kitchen area.

“A hundred and sixty holes to dig!” he’d shrieked at her.

“Sh!” Stella had said. “Mrs. Kopping will hear you.”

“Well, let her hear me.”

“Do you want to lose us our jobs?”

“Yes, I’d like to lose this job of mine, or it’ll be the death of me.”

Stella had turned on him then, with the kind of quick fury she could manage so easily. “Now don’t start complaining about your back. When I have this whole house to care for, and the cooking besides, and when all you have to do is to keep the outside neat...”

“Nine acres!”

“When you were farming, you had eighty.”

“I was a young man then.”

“But you had an old back right from the beginning. It was your poor suffering back that lost us the farm. Well, it won’t lose us this job. Now get your lazy carcass out there and dig.”

He had obeyed her, because at the time he had been able to think of no other alternative. He had gone out in the fresh dew of the morning with spade and fork. The truck from the nursery met him and deposited forty rose bushes, balled and sacked and ready for planting, on the lawn.

“I’ve ordered forty delivered each morning for four mornings,” Mrs. Kopping had said. “I expect you to complete the job in four days, Anton.”

And now it was the end of the first day. And more than a fourth of the job was finished. He’d not only dug forty holes, but he’d cultivated the earth so that now, along the whole left side of the drive, was a neat strip of freshly turned soil. For a hundred and sixty feet of that strip, and regularly at four-foot intervals beginning at the gate, the bare, thorny stumps of young rose bushes jutted out of their newly dug bed.

But his poor back was on fire. Punished muscles and nerves were in open, savage rebellion. As he struggled to rise from his knees, to straighten his curving spine, fresh waves of pain engulfed him with each movement. But because he wanted to walk, rather than crawl, he persisted till he got himself erect. And then the sweat on his brow was the cold kind, clammy, chilling, unpleasant, unlike the honest sweat of toil.

He began trudging up the drive past the already long line of bushes. And looking up, he saw what he knew he would see — Mrs. Kopping, sitting at a window watching him.

He had expected to see her there, because she almost always watched him, changing windows as he went from one side of the house to the other, or from front to back. She spent some time, of course, overseeing the management of the interior of the big white house. But she never read or watched television. She was just one of those old women whose greatest pleasure seems to come from looking out of windows. And her eyes were sharp. Anton Vandrak knew that she had personally checked his procedure on every one of those forty rose bushes.

Now as he looked up to meet her gaze, he saw her white head nod. That meant approval. He had done well, she was telling him. He could keep his job therefore, and for the next three days he could perform just exactly as he had performed today!

Curse her, he thought, and he lowered his eyes so that she might not detect the hatred in his face. Curse her! I don’t believe she is interested in roses or any of the other things I plant, or water, or trim. She’s interested only in having some human being cavorting out here for her entertainment and pleasure, doing something not because it needs to be done, but simply because she has ordered it done.

He hurried as fast as he could to get out of her sight. When he reached their quarters, Stella wasn’t there. She’d be putting Mrs. Kopping’s dinner on the table, so the mistress of the house could dine precisely at six. It didn’t matter when the people who’d actually been working got fed.

But this night he wouldn’t bother to complain. He was too weary, too full of pains, to want to eat anyway. He stretched wearily on his bed. I am tired, he thought, and will need to sleep tonight, but how can I sleep with these horrible aches in my back?

But without sleep — his thoughts continued — how can I put forty more rose bushes in the ground tomorrow? Then at the prospect of tomorrow his mind rebelled. No, he simply could not go on as he’d done today. No matter what the consequences, that was his decision.

He was still lying there about eight when Stella returned. “Mrs. Kopping is very pleased with the work you did today,” she said.

“I’m glad,” he said, “because it’s the last work I’ll do for her.” Stella came to the bed and glared down at him. She was getting fat, he noticed suddenly, but without great interest. Her face, always round and plain, was even rounder than it used to be. Life in the Kopping house somehow agreed with her.

“You’re talking nonsense,” she said. “If Mrs. Kopping wants roses, you’ll plant roses.”

“I am not taking orders from Mrs. Kopping any more.”

Stella hesitated for just a moment, perhaps shocked. But she rallied quickly. “What do you mean by that?”

“I am quitting this job. I am leaving this place.”

“Oh no...”

“Oh yes, Stella. Don’t argue. I’ve already decided. If I cannot get another job somewhere... an easier job... then that will have to be. If you are afraid what will become of us, you can stay here.”

She answered him with an obvious lack of wifely affection. “I wouldn’t mind that a bit, staying here and sending you off. But she wouldn’t let me do it. She wants a couple to run the place, and if you’d leave she’d find another couple, and I’d be out in the cold. So it’s either both of us or none of us, my lad, and we’ll have to stick together.”

“All I know is,” Anton said with great fatigue, “I am leaving. It’s been a soft life for you here, Stella. In the house all day, with all the new machines to help you. You’ve gotten fat with it. But I’ve worked hard... too hard. And today was the last.”

That was when her quick temper broke loose. First she hurled imprecations at him, all the unpleasant names she could put her tongue to. Then she hurled her person, fists flailing, nails clawing. And when he had managed to fling her off, she used the last weapon in her arsenal — the threat.

“I’ll have the police after you. It’s against the law in this country for a man to leave his wife and not support her...”

He was no expert on what the law did or didn’t say. But he caught the menace in Stella’s tone, and it made him pause. This sign of weakness only encouraged her.

“And if you think you can run away and hide somewhere, Anton, you’re mistaken. You’ve talked of leaving before, and once I told Mrs. Kopping about it. And do you know what she said? She said a man’s a dog who’d run away and leave his wife. And she’d spend her own money to hire detectives to go out and look for you. And when they found you, you’d be clapped in jail where you belong...”

Anton Vandrak was by nature a mild-mannered man, a man of the soil, patient, plodding, humble, not given to rebellion or violence. But Stella’s revelation goaded him to a sudden, white-hot fury.

That his wife should have discussed him with another woman... that they had understood his anguish and his desires... but should have plotted together to thwart him... to keep him in slavery here...

Such was the blinding power of his anger that he forgot his weariness and the pains in his back. But even in his righteous wrath, he at first intended only escape. He lurched to his feet and made for the door. “I am going now,” he said.

But Stella was fully as angry and desperate as he. She interrupted him, grabbing at his clothes, screaming repetitions of her threat into his ear.

Stung, hounded, beseiged, Anton Vandrak reacted with primitive passion. This time he did not merely try to fling her off. Rather, he counter-attacked. His muscular arms, the arms of a man who had labored physically all his life, turned aside her blows. His powerful hands, unwashed and ingrained with the dirt of decades, went by instinct to the most fatal area, Stella’s throat.

Possibly she managed one shriek of terror, but if so, it was lost amid the other sounds she was already making. And Anton’s great hands immediately choked off her breath. Now that he had her in this deadly grip, now that he held this ultimate power over her, all his hatred burst, as it were, from its containment deep in his heart and coursed through all his veins, screaming for vengeance down to the tips of his fingers.

He knew what he was doing. He knew the facts of life and death well enough to realize what was meant when her face grew red, then purple, when her eyes bulged out of her fat face, when her speechless tongue groped out to lap up air that couldn’t be swallowed. He knew that he was killing her, and he wanted to do it.

Then, when it was over and he let her body fall out of his grip, he knew that she was dead, without having to feel for a pulse or listen for a heart beat. He simply stepped over the corpse, went back to his bed, and lay down for a few moments. For a man already tired from a hard day’s work, it had been a strength-sapping task, choking Stella. For her neck had been fat and her ample lungs had contained a large supply of reserve air. So the strangling had taken some time.

But as he lay there, his mind was active. More active than it had been for years. Not since he’d had the farm, with all its responsibility of figuring how to battle enemies like weather, insects, crop diseases — had his mind been prodded to such activity as this.

He had a new enemy now, and he was aware of it. Stella had said there were laws against a man’s leaving his wife. He knew that there were also laws, sterner laws, against a man’s killing his wife. And he knew that the law does not forgive or forget.

He did not want to go to prison or to give his own life for killing Stella. What would he have accomplished, only to have exchanged this prison for another? No, he wanted to gain something, to be ahead in the long run.

Go back to the farm maybe. He was a practical man. It had always made more sense to him to grow wheat rather than roses. And with the machinery one can use on a farm, perhaps he could work without straining his back. Yes, to be a farmer, not a gardener, that would be progress, a step ahead. And this time without having to provide for Stella.

Only he was not yet free of the burden. Stella’s presence, her voice, her appetite, her nasty humor — they were gone, to be sure. But her body remained, still a burden to him. He wouldn’t be free till he’d rid himself of that last part of Stella.

He thought, and the solution came quickly and easily. If there was no body, there was no murder.

He raised himself from the bed, his weariness suddenly gone. It wasn’t yet nine, and he couldn’t be sure that Mrs. Kopping would be in bed till ten at least. But there was other work to be done in the meantime.

He spent the next two hours packing the pair of suitcases and the trunk that he and Stella had come to this place with. The trunk could be sent for later. He filled it, locked it, and left it sitting in a corner. He put into one suitcase things he might need immediately, and into the other, similar things for Stella. He felt he was shrewd in this... just in case someone might search those suitcases.

By ten-thirty he had erased from the two little rooms all evidence of his and Stella’s occupancy. Then he turned out the lights, lifted Stella’s body to his shoulder. She’d been getting fat, but she’d been a short woman. With his mind ecstatic in his new freedom, his back did not complain of the weight.

He carried her down the drive to the last bush he’d planted that afternoon. He was forty-five years old. Four... five. He would bury Stella between the fourth and fifth rose bushes.

He was glad now that the earth was already turned over. And the well-kept soil was soft and grainy, not hard-packed. It was a matter only of minutes to dig the grave. Three feet by three feet. Curled up on her right side, Stella fitted into it neatly.

He did not stop for any formal leave-taking. He covered her up, replaced the tools, and went calmly to bed.


...And in the morning he went to see Mrs. Kopping. The old lady would be wanting her breakfast, and it would be just as well to break the bad news to her before she’d worked up too great a state of impatience.

He found her in the dining room, sitting at the bare table, reading the newspaper which this morning she seemed to have fetched for herself. But the fact that Stella had not brought her the paper and the fact that here was no sign of activity from the kitchen had not as yet disturbed her. She received Anton in frosty silence. She was a tall, spare, bony woman, austere, unhandsome. She looked this morning as she had always looked.

“Stella and I are leaving,” he announced quickly, a little nervously. “In fact, Stella has already left.”

Harriet Kopping did not interrupt him.

“We had a long talk last night and decided the work was too much for me here. I am sorry we cannot give notice. I am sorry I cannot plant any more rose bushes. Stella has already left on the early morning bus to the city. I am going to see to the trunk, and then I will catch another bus as soon as I can, and will meet Stella. She forgot her suitcase, and I will have to take both suitcases with me...”

He stopped. He had expected her to give some evidence of anger, or at least of surprise. But she sat there silently, hearing him out, almost smiling. Yes, she was smiling!

So he stood there for a moment, silent himself, puzzled over her reaction, uneasy, suspicious. It was not like Mrs. Kopping to smile at any time, much less at a time when there was reason for her to be angry.

“Are you quite finished with your story, Anton?” she asked finally. She sat like a queen in judgment, her silvery hair like a crown.

“Yes, I am finished,” he stammered.

“Then I shall tell you what really happened,” she said. “You seem to have forgotten that, although I am an old woman, I have sharp eyes and ears. You quarreled with your wife last night, and you killed her.”

Instantly he was keyed to this new and unexpected threat. And he was calm at first. “Yes, we quarreled,” he admitted. “Stella did not want to leave here, but I convinced her. She is a good wife really. She decided to do the best thing for her husband’s health. She took the early morning bus to the city...”

“You buried your wife between the fourth and fifth rose bushes.”

For a moment his brain would not accept what his ears had heard. This could not be. He knew it could not be. He had buried Stella in the dark, and there had been no one there to see him. Yet...

“She has taken the early bus...”

“She is dead.”

“No...”

“Come now, Anton, there is no use in lying.”

He said nothing for a long moment. His mind accepted and rejected a dozen different replies and defenses. He was still reasonably calm. The best course, he decided, was to try to find out what this old woman intended to do about her information.

“Well now, we understand each other,” she said, guessing at his decision. “I am simply not as stupid as you must have thought me. I heard your quarrel. I heard the loud voices. And then I heard the voices suddenly stop. This is not natural. I waited patiently, because I was very curious. I could not sleep. I saw you bury Stella. Of course my eyesight is not so good that I could see from my window that you buried her between the fourth and fifth bushes. I discovered the exact spot by investigating after you had gone back to bed.”

He saw now how stupid he had been, how stupid he had thought this old lady to be. No, she was not stupid — but he was.

“You may be wondering now, Anton, what I intend to do. I wondered myself at first, but I’ve had all night to think about it. I don’t believe I shall call the police, Anton. That would stir up quite a hubbub, and I should lose my very good gardener. Fortunately I’m not plagued with too tender a conscience. So I shall not mind having a gardener who has murdered his wife.”

Instinctively he fought against the net which he could see was closing around him. “But I do not want to stay here...”

“You shall stay here and be my gardener, Anton. That is the price of my silence.”

He no longer felt calm. His mind groped out desperately for a weapon to counter hers. A thought struck him, and he blurted it out. “I’ll move the body... I’ll dispose of the body... I’ll take it with me in the trunk... then you can’t prove...”

Her smile grew wider, more tolerant, more superior, and again it was her smile that halted his flow of words. “Yes, Anton, you reason correctly. I would have no hold on you if I could not prove that you had murdered your wife. And to prove a murder, one must have a body. Again must I ask you, do you imagine I am stupid? I have already thought of this. And I have foreseen the possibility you just mentioned. You could dispose of the body some time. I would have no proof of murder, and I would have no hold on you. I have taken care of that problem, Anton.”

He stared unbelievingly. He was a helpless listener now.

“Stella’s body is no longer between the fourth and fifth bushes. I have moved it.”

“Where?”

“That I will not tell you.”

But his mind would not accept this last revelation. “You took her out of the ground? You picked her up and moved her? She wasn’t a small woman.”

For the first time in his life he looked hard and searchingly at Harriet Kopping’s physical features. She was not a small woman either. Could she really have uncovered Stella’s body, lifted it out of the grave, carried it somewhere?

“I will go and see,” he said.

Not waiting for her usual permission to leave, he hurried from the dining room, went outside, got his spade from the tool shed. He was no longer calm. He was both angry and frightened. Before he started to dig, he had to count over and over again to make sure he had the right spot. Between the fourth and fifth bushes.

Then he shoveled fast, with greater speed than he had shoveled last night with his hands fresh from Stella’s throat. The already several times loosened dirt yielded easily. And he did not have to go down very far before the bitter truth became all too apparent. The body was not there.

Yet for a few minutes longer his numbed brain would not accept the plain fact. His spade dug deeper, striking the hard-packed, underlying subsoil, then finally an impregnable layer of rock. He stopped then, sweating, panting, staring incredulously at the empty hole and the mound of earth beside it that was big as the mound a regular grave digger produces when he digs an ordinary grave. But Stella’s grave had been a shallow one! He had gone down to rock, but Stella was not there.

He stood there for a long time, leaning on his spade. His weariness of last night did not match the utter exhaustion he felt now. He wanted to lie down in that empty hole, to ask that the dirt be laid over him.

Slowly, only ever so slowly, the ebb of life, the stubborn, senseless desire of every man to go on living, flowed back into him. His simple brain began once again to grasp toward survival. He threw down the spade and marched back toward the house, emotion helping to numb his fatigue.

He found Harriet Kopping still in the dining room, awaiting him. Her smile was ugly, confident, superior. “Did you find Stella?” she asked him.

“No...”

“It was a waste of good digging, wasn’t it?”

“But I will find her... because I will make you tell me where she is.”

Mrs. Kopping’s still-black brows raised half an inch, making her narrow face look longer. “Do you dare to threaten me, Anton?”

“You may have been strong enough to move Stella, but I am stronger than you.”

“Of course you are.”

“Then I will make you tell me?”

“Before you touch me, Anton, let me assure you of one fact. You can kill me before I would tell you where Stella’s body is. And do you think you can kill me with the same freedom as you killed Stella? Do you think that Harriet Kopping’s death could pass unnoticed? Do you imagine that a person of my prominence and importance would not be instantly missed in this town? Yes, you could kill me, Anton, and then run away. A rich old woman dead and her gardener disappeared. How long do you think it would take the police to catch up with you?”

She spoke calmly and incisively, and he realized that what she said was true. He could not kill her as simply as he had killed Stella. He could not even hurt her or threaten to hurt her.

“I will search for Stella everywhere. You must have buried her somewhere else. I will dig...”

“One moment, Anton. I realize that since possession of Stella’s body means everything in our little game, you would naturally search for it. And to a certain extent I cannot prevent you from doing that. But I will allow you to search... to dig in my lawn... only under two conditions. First of all, you must do it on your own time. Six days a week, eight hours a day, you must continue to work for me, following my instructions. Secondly, when in your free time you do search, you must not damage or deface my property. I intend to preserve the beautiful lawn I have now, the beautiful lawn which is so important to me that I will tolerate the presence of a murderer here simply because he is an excellent gardener. Do you understand, Anton?”

He nodded dumbly.

“If you loaf on the job I hire you to do, if you mar the looks of my lovely lawn, trying to find Stella, then I shall call the police and tell them exactly where she is.”

The bitter pill of defeat was in his mouth now, its size choking him, its taste galling him. Yet he had to swallow it.

His surrender must have been visible on his face, because Harriet Kopping said: “Our second load of rose bushes must have arrived by now. You had better get to work, Anton, if you expect to finish by dark.”

He shuffled blindly, obediently, toward the exit. But she stopped him with her last admonition. “And don’t forget, Anton, to fill up that hole you just dug between the fourth and fifth bushes. I want my lawn to look like a lawn, not like a cemetery...”


...If his life before Stella’s death had been filled with backbreaking labor, now it was overflowing. Mrs. Kopping hired another housekeeper, whom she allowed to occupy a bedroom up on the second floor, while Anton kept his old quarters. And the new housekeeper was more efficient than Stella had been — which fact seemed to allow Mrs. Kopping to have more time than ever to plan projects for her nine acres of lawn.

The one hundred and sixty rose bushes got planted on schedule, of course, without time-out for corpse-hunting. And they were followed in unending succession by beds and banks and borders of rhododendrons, azaleas, lilies, bluebells, buttercups, ivies, geraniums, periwinkle, wisteria, nasturtiums, chrysanthemums, zinnias, marigold, delphiniums, asters, snapdragons, heliotropes, larkspur, nignonette, poppies, pansies, peonies, sweet william, foxgloves, forget-me-nots. Slowly but surely, with each inch paid for by Anton Vandrak’s sweat and Anton Vandrak’s agony, the immense green carpet of lawn was rolled back, engulfed, overwhelmed, by the oncoming, ceaseless tide of flowers. Rose Hill was being gradually transformed into a vast garden of stems and leaves and petals, an enormous sea of colors and fragrances.

For a while Anton labored with a grim determination and a goal of his own. If eventually he were to dig up every grain of soil on the premises, he would inevitably discover Stella’s second grave. So he worked overtime on the projects Mrs. Kopping assigned to him — not six days a week, but seven — not eight hours a day, but twelve. The fiery pain in his back grew hotter every day, but the more he suffered, it seemed, the stronger his determination became.

Gradually, however, certain doubts began to assail him. Mrs. Kopping had kept him busy every daylight moment on new projects, on turning over turf in new areas. But Stella couldn’t have been buried under virgin grass without the grass having been disturbed in some way. She was somewhere then where the earth had already been cultivated at the time of her death. So he tried to remember what places those were, such as the rose border along the drive. And he tried to find a few spare minutes every day to search those old areas. Mrs. Kopping, however, was a difficult task-mistress. His spare time was almost non-existent.

Then there came other doubts. If Mrs. Kopping had been physically capable of moving Stella’s corpse once, she could have done it twice. He could therefore have searched a certain area, only to have Mrs. Kopping move the corpse to that area the very night following the day he had searched it.

The next doubt which occurred to him was still worse. He had long cherished the certainty that Stella had been buried a second time, that Mrs. Kopping had dug another hole in the ground. Then quite suddenly one day he realized that the corpse might be hidden somewhere in the house. He sensed the relative impossibility of this, of course, because he knew that dead bodies rotted and smelled, and that a dead body couldn’t be kept in the house very long. But the notion nagged him anyway, so that he tried whenever he could — and never very successfully — to elude Mrs. Kopping and the housekeeper, and roam through some of the rooms. Sniff as he might though, and imagine as he might, no telltale odor ever reached his nostrils.

The final doubt was the worst of all. It came to him one night in his bed, when he was so weary and pain-racked that the slightest movement shot bolts of agony through his torso. Yet when this doubt came to him, he sat suddenly upright in the bed, a scream involuntarily escaping his lips, a scream both of physical pain and of mental shock.

Suppose that somehow Mrs. Kopping had destroyed Stella’s corpse. Suppose it no longer existed anywhere!

If that were true, she’d been bluffing all this time. She had no evidence against him, no bonds to harness him like a dumb beast to these nine acres of hell. To have suffered all this for nothing!

Could she have destroyed or disposed of the body? His tortured mind raced through a hundred fantastic schemes for doing away with a human corpse, but without any of them seeming logically possible. Yet he could not banish this doubt any more than the others. It remained with him, like a plague of fire-ants, nibbling at his quivering flesh, eating him alive.

He did not know how much time passed. He measured days from dawn to dusk, from the morning when he dragged his unwilling body to the yoke of the shovel and the spade, to the evening when he crawled back to his bed, seeking oblivion in a sound sleep which he could never attain. He had no measurements for weeks or months. The years, of course, ticked off on nature’s clock of awakening plants, of green things growing, budding, flowering, then finally withering, dying, carcasses returning to the soil.

And the years notched themselves too on his own carcass, once upright and sturdy, but now bending ever lower and lower, it too succumbing to the magnetic attraction of the earth for the dust it has lent to life. The pain in his back was now a permanent fact of his existence, like eating or breathing. It was still pain, yet he could not have done without it, for it was his only companion, another self, so overwhelmingly ever-present that it could make him forget his own self — the Anton Vandrak who had committed murder.

So his pain had a merciful aspect too, blotting out his conscience as it did. Does a wrong-doer need to know that what he is suffering is punishment for the thing to be punishment? Not so Anton Vandrak at least. His feeling could scarcely be termed remorse. He wanted Stella back, yes — but not the live Stella. He was a man with a great yearning for a corpse.

But although Anton aged, it did not seem that Harriet Kopping did. She went on watching him from her upper windows, a slave-driver with an invisible whip in her hand. She remained erect, her eyes bright and sharp-seeing, her attitude as basically inscrutable as ever.

And as the years marched on, she watched the accompanying march of the flowers, conquering the greensward, pushing the grass toward final extinction. She did not relent for one day, one hour. Always she had plans for new flowers. She must have realized, of course, that each new bed, border, and bank multiplied her gardener’s work, for each new plant had to be carefully tended, trimmed, watered, weeded. Nine acres of flowers need infinitely more care than nine acres of grass.

Nine acres of flowers! Yes, one day it happened. And it was an early summer day, with all the flowers in riotous bloom. A rainbow, a jungle of colors, the breeze audible with the movements of thousands of fragile petals, the air steamy with their multitude of fragrances. All except for one tiny space. The last little patch of level green, right beneath Harriet Kopping’s bedroom window.

“I want another red rose bush right there,” she instructed Anton.

He had long ago ceased to argue against her commands. In fact, he was only dimly aware that this was the last of the grass, or that when he folded this final bush into the earth that except for the space which the house and the driveway occupied, he had turned over every last square inch of Harriet Kopping’s nine acres.

But the lady herself was exquisitely aware of the occasion. She celebrated it by having a heart attack.

The housekeeper phoned for the doctor, and the doctor came. Shortly afterward a nurse followed, and several deliveries from the pharmacy. But in the midst of all the hubbub, the mistress of the house asked to see Anton Vandrak.

He was admitted to her bedroom — for the first time in his life. And according to her insistent instructions, he was alone with her. He found her very quiet, very pale, almost completely recumbent, her head raised by only one pillow. Yet he was so accustomed to her mastery over him that she was to him just as awesome as ever.

“Anton,” she began, “we have some unfinished business, you and I.”

“I have planted the rose bush,” he said, not understanding.

“But have you found Stella?”

Stella? Of late he had thought of Stella very seldom. But now he remembered her. His wife, whom he had hated and had murdered.

“No,” he said, “I haven’t found her.”

“Do you still want to know where she is?”

He hesitated. He wasn’t sure. For a time it had seemed that his whole life had been devoted to finding Stella. Now he was no longer sure. What did it matter now?

“I want to tell you,” Mrs. Kopping said. “I want to reward you for your years of faithful service.”

He listened passively, unaware of any emotion, pleasant or unpleasant.

“You should be proud, Anton. I think you have made it up to her. Never has any man so cared for, so beautified, his dear wife’s final resting place. There is no cemetery in the world, Anton, as lovely as the one which Stella has all to herself. She lies under a living monument of flowers.”

“She is buried in the yard then?” He asked it calmly.

“She has always been buried in the yard, Anton. You put her there with your own loving hands.”

He did not understand. But for the first time he felt a quickening of the old interest, a resurgence — perhaps only a memory — of his former desperation.

“But you moved her,” he argued.

“No, Anton. How could I move an object as heavy as Stella? I’m a frail old woman. I was a frail old woman then.”

He blinked his tired eyes, concentrating on the problem. “I opened the grave I had dug... between the fourth and fifth bushes. And she wasn’t there.”

“You dug in the wrong place, Anton. You dug between what were really originally the fifth and sixth bushes. You see, all I dug up and removed was one rose bush, the first in the line. I brought it into the house here and burned it in the fireplace.”

He nodded, comprehending only vaguely. He was a stupid old man, he realized. He had always been stupid.

He waited now for Mrs. Kopping to give him further instructions. Now that there was no more space to plant new flowers, should he just go on tending the old ones? But Mrs. Kopping didn’t tell him. In fact, she didn’t say anything more. Her eyes were closed. Perhaps, he thought, she’d fallen asleep.

So he left the room quietly, went back downstairs, and outside again. The pain in his back was severe today. But that mustn’t stop him from working. He had his job to do. He sank to his knees wincing at the stabs of fresh pain, and grasped his trowel. The roses needed tending. He’d been neglecting these old plants by the driveway.

As he worked with the trowel, his mind somehow refused to forget Stella. She seemed very close to him.

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