The crickets chirped louder. Something moved in the shrubs along the creek.
'I don’t want to talk about him,' she said, so low that Roby could barely hear her.
'This is important.'
'I don’t care. He’s dead.'
'I know. But he talked to me, told me what you folks ought to do.'
'Well, he told Momma, too. And Barnaby Clawson. And just about every damned body except us. The ones who have to decide.'
'He told me last night.'
Marlene had no answer for that. Her breath came fast and shallow, her eyes wide and wet with moonlight. 'Don’t talk like that.'
'He come to me, Marlene. While I was asleep.' A little lie, but he’d told worse. In truth, he hadn’t been asleep at all.
'Don’t tell me you’re one of those crazy people who dream about dead folks? I liked you better when you was just another guy trying to work his way inside my dress.'
'This ain’t about liking or not liking. It’s about doing what’s right.' Roby eased forward, his boots hushed in the grass.
'Marlene turned, tried to run, but was cornered by the fence and the underbrush. 'Get back, or I swear I’ll scream.'
He stopped a few feet from her. She could scream, but Buck and Sarah wouldn’t find them for at least two minutes. Plenty of time. 'I ain’t going to hurt you. I just want you to do one thing.'
'Sure you do. And I was ready to do it. Only now I don’t want to.'
Roby reached into his pocket and brought out the mashed and balled wad of sweet potato pie. He held out his fist, hoping his hand wasn’t shaking. 'Here.'
She was suspicious. 'What’s that?'
'For you.'
She looked at his hand as if he held a snake. 'What is it?'
'Eat this.'
'What are you talking about?'
'Eat it. It’s what your daddy wanted.' He used the past tense, to make it easier for her.
It’s what your daddy wants. Because he loved you, and you have to love him in return.
'I ain’t eating that. Whatever it is.'
'Pie. It’s good.'
She looked up the path, at the house that now probably seemed a hundred miles away. 'I’m sure it’s good. Because Beverly Parsons made it, right?'
Roby smiled, but the expression felt wrong on his face. He pressed his lips together. 'She made it special for you folks. Wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings, now. That wouldn’t be neighborly.'
'What about my feelings, Roby? You got no right to scare me out of my wits. You’re a real creep, you know that?'
'Eat up. It’s good for you.'
'No.' She eased deeper into the shadows, edging for an escape up the path.
'Your daddy wants it this way.'
'Leave me alone.'
'You won’t scream. You won’t, because then I’ll have to tell.'
'Tell what?'
'About Alfred’s fifteenth birthday present. Behind the barn.'
She said nothing. There was nothing she could say.
Roby held out the clod of pie.
'Nobody…' Her voice was like a wind over ice, brittle. 'Nobody saw.'
'Family secrets. We keep it in the family.'
'Nobody saw.'
'Somebody did. How do you think I found out?'
'Nobody saw.'
'Your daddy did. And he told me all about it. Last night.'
Her words were like notes played on the wet rim of a crystal glass, uneven and piercing. 'My daddy was dead last night.'
'I know.'
'My daddy was dead and nobody saw and you’re crazy and you and your pie can go to hell.' She sprang forward and slapped at his hand.
The pie flew from Roby’s open palm, parted some leaves in the underbrush, and landed in the creek with a liquid thunk. Marlene clawed her way past him, screeching. He looked at his empty palm under the moonlight, then watched her grow smaller and darker until she was nothing but a moving shadow. Then her figure was outlined in the light of the screen door. She went inside and the door to the kitchen slammed closed.
After a minute of listening to the creek, Roby walked to his truck, started it, and headed for Clawson’s Funeral Home.
VIII
The back room of Clawson’s was dim and still and clammy as a cellar. The room smelled like Barnaby, or maybe that was the other way around. Roby knew that death could get in you, worm its way through your pores, crawl down your throat and into your lungs, sneak into your eyes and inside your brain. Death could surround you and suffocate you. Death could stiffen you up. Death could swell you and then shrink you. Death could do it all, change your face, give you a tight grin, take you places, open doors.
But first, you had to shake its hand.
Jacob Ridgehorn looked good. One of Barnaby’s finest displays of talent. The cheeks were smooth and pink, the eyes closed peacefully, the lips full. Under the shop lights, his forehead shone with the faintest luster of wax. The sparse hair was combed into place, more neat than it had ever been in life.
Roby looked at the clock above the workbench, carefully ignoring the sharp tools, surgical saws, thread and glue and buttons and rubber bladders. Five-gallon plastic containers of chemicals lined the floor beneath the bench. A long stainless steel table stood in the middle of the room.
It was nearly midnight.
Roby listened to the rodents in the storage room and waited.
Jacob’s body spasmed when the clock’s thin hands both reached straight toward heaven.
'I tried,' Roby said.
Jacob’s mouth had parted as the skin tightened in death. Barnaby hadn’t gotten around to running a stitch through the inside of the corpse’s mouth yet. Roby was relieved that the dentures were in place. It made Jacob seem less dead somehow.
The thing that bothered him was he could never be sure if the dead person was really dead. Or if it was a ghost.
He’d have to ask Barnaby about that one day. Or the old man at the broken-down garage at the end of the world.
As if the old man would tell him anything.
But maybe Jacob would, the way he had the night before.
'I fed them the pie,' Roby said. 'You never tasted such a heavenly thing.'
Jacob twitched, maybe one corner of his mouth lifted in appreciation.
'It was good.'
No answer except the soft settling of cloth.
'You should have seen Alfred. He was a tricky one, all right. Had to get a little feisty with him.'
