morning before she went to class, and she knew every monument. Her friends desperately wanted to give her an elaborate funerary sculpture like those she had so much admired—an enormous angel with spread wings, or perhaps Janie herself, jogging perpetually through Mount Hope in her running shoes, but all of them were struggling for financial survival.
She had not been a pretty girl, but she was a wholly beautiful person. She had no enemies, and all of her friends loved her. There was a crowd of students present in the cemetery when her coffin was lowered, along with Janie’s aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Kernley—who were devastated by grief—and the DuRosche maid, Mrs. Calding. There were no dry faces. A young minister said a final prayer and stepped back. Ed Cranston, the slender, bald guitar player from Alida’s party, twanged a few notes, and the students sang a farewell song that Ed had written.
Alida broke away suddenly. Jeff overtook her and put his arm around her, and the two of them walked off together. They followed a curving, descending road, and the fading conclusion of Ed’s song drifted after them.
From its founding in the 1838, Mount Hope Cemetery was considered a park for the living as well as a necropolis for the dead. It offered a lovely, rolling landscape, unusual geological features, and views of the Genesee River Valley, and families found it a delightful setting for picnics and outings. Janie and the students who were fond of jogging there were anticipated by residents of nineteenth century Rochester who thought it an attractive place for a stroll or a carriage ride.
The road Alida and Jeff were following dropped into a delightful dell. Against one of the steep hills surrounding it stood the Gothic chapel, which dated from the time of the Civil War. The smokestack of its crematorium looked excessively tall and charmingly ornate. Neither had been used for many years. The windows of the handsome old building were boarded up, and there was a padlock on the door. Nearby was an unused fountain. To the east, past the Moorish gazebo, was the original entrance gate to the cemetery with its elaborate Romanesque gate house.
The dell offered a picturesque history of fashions in dying. Heavy slabs of stone framed entrances to crypts that had been cut into the hillsides. There were free-standing mausoleums that looked like clumsy sheds except for their ornate stone construction. There were ranks of unadorned grave markers. Elaborate monuments were topped with handsome sculptures whose angels cried petrified tears, whose children were perpetually endowed with sweet innocence, or whose soldiers would never know defeat. Tall pillars and obelesques caught the eye and symbollically pointed the way to heaven. Rows of tombstones looked down from the surrounding hills. All of these memorials were designed to withstand the ravages of time, but some of them had aged badly—the erect slabs were tilted, the more substantial markers had taken on odd alignments, and here and there one had begun to crumble.
It had been a beautiful setting, lovingly fashioned with great care and expense to memorialize the dead. Now it was more than merely beautiful because the patina of age had enhanced each weathered structure and monument and because most of those who mourned these dead were dead themselves, survived only by the grief they left here frozen in stone.
Alida and Jeff seated themselves on the steep slope opposite the chapel and crematorium. Traffic noises from Mount Hope Avenue were muted; the place seemed utterly peaceful.
Alida sat looking straight ahead. “It is such a quiet place for Janie.”
“Wherever she is, she will quickly liven things up,” Jeff said.
Alida continued to stare straight ahead. “Jeff—why?”
Jeff shook his head. “What is there to say? It was a freak accident. She fell; probably that stone had been there for a hundred years without causing any trouble, and she just happened to hit it the worst way possible.”
Alida turned on him indignantly. “It was no accident. She was knocked down.” She looked at her hand. “Janie never saw my ring. I don’t want to be happy. I can’t be happy and not know why.” She turned to him. “Jeff—I’ve got to know why. The police aren’t doing a thing.”
Jeff Mardell, a stocky, good-looking man with a tumbling locke of hair his woman patients were going to love, got to his feet and helped her up. He felt Alida’s unhappiness intensely, and he hadn’t been able to think of a thing that could be done. It pained him to be made aware of this limitation on his powers of healing so early in his career. “If you’ve got to know why, then we’ve got to find out why,” he said.
He kissed her. Then the two of them walked slowly back toward Jeff’s car, arms around each other.
They drove to DuRosche Court and followed the mansion’s curving drive. “This is quite a shack,” Jeff said. “Who is Calvin DuRosche?”
“He comes from an old Rochester family. His ancestors were rich socialites long before Mr. Eastman thought of Kodaks.”
“It’s hard to imagine something like this being a private home. How would one family manage to fill it? It looks more like a public building.”
“At the time it was built, they probably had loads of servants. Now there are just a few people looking after Mr. DuRosche, but once a year they hire someone to clean and air the parts of the house that aren’t used. They hire someone to help with the grounds, too, whenever things get out of hand. Janie’s aunt is the housekeeper, and her uncle acts as caretaker. They’ve been here for years. Before Mr. DuRosche had his stroke, Mrs. Kernley was his cook.”
They walked up the steps to the stoop—there was a wheelchair ramp at one side—and Alida rang the bell. Mrs. Calding, the maid, was a friendly, motherly type, and she greeted them with a warm smile.
“Hello, Mrs. Calding,” Alida said. “This is Jeff Mardell, my fiance.”
“I saw you at the funeral,” Mrs. Calding said. “What a terrible thing. Come in, come in.”
She led them along a hallway and into a Victorian parlor that was tastefully furnished with antiques of a type people had been eager to throw out fifty years before—to their descendants’ grief. An exquisite old roll-top desk stood in one corner. It served Mrs. Kernley as an office where she kept her household accounts and records.
