18 THE UNDERTAKER’S DAUGHTER

18

THE UNDERTAKER'S DAUGHTER

The previous year, one week after the July Fourth holiday and three weeks following José Nochelobo's death, Vida is sitting on the porch, reading Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain . Twilight is pending when the approaching growl of an engine causes her to look up from the page. A well-maintained vintage motorcycle, a Big Dog Bulldog Bagger, a touring bike with wide-swept fairing and large saddlebags, swings off the driveway and rolls to a stop on the lawn.

The biker puts down the kickstand, leaves her helmet on the Big Dog, and comes to the foot of the steps. She's twentysomething, a fresh-faced blonde with eyes the purple blue of polished fluorite. Vida has seen her before, but she can't remember when or where.

"I'm Anna Lagare. My father, Herbert, owns the funeral home. I'd have called ahead, but I don't know of any number for you."

"Hardly anyone does. Come on up."

When Anna Lagare is settled in the second rocking chair, she says, "It's beautiful here. All anyone might ever need."

"More than enough," Vida agrees. "It fills you up."

The visitor looks at the palms of her hands. They appear clean, yet she wipes the left across the right, the right across the left. She has a fey quality, as if she's been compelled to come here under a spell and waits now for her purpose to be revealed to her. After a hesitation, she says, "My dad prepared José Nochelobo's body."

"And ten years ago, he prepared my uncle's."

Anna Lagare is as direct as she is soft-spoken. "You didn't come to the viewing."

"No."

The visitor looks up from her hands. "Later, I saw you at the cemetery service when José ... when he was lowered."

"I could deal with the casket when it was closed."

Anna hugs herself, hands hidden between her arms and torso. "People say he was so happy, how it was between the two of you."

Vida puts her book aside on the small table between chairs.

Nodding as if they have just agreed about something, Anna focuses beyond the porch, on her motorcycle. The touring bike's saddlebags must be full, because a suitcase is strapped to the back half of the saddle. "You think everything's fine, moving along nice and comfortable, then something happens and you see the truth, and you don't even recognize where you are."

"What is it you don't recognize?"

"Kettleton, for one thing. It's not the same, is it?"

"No."

"It never will be again, will it?"

"No."

"It was never before a place that was first about money. Even if I felt safe here, it's not what I want anymore. I'm leaving. I have this friend in Texas, in this town that's not small but not so big, either. She says it's more the way things used to be."

Intuition has Vida on a high wire, balanced in a stasis between steps, eager to know but afraid to anticipate what might be coming. The past and future are gathered in this moment, the past to be explained, the future to form out of that explanation.

After a silence, Anna says, "There's nothing you can do about it. Nothing that wouldn't bring hell down on you."

"Do about what?"

"If I were you, I'd want to know, even if there was nothing I could do about it. Just to get on with life, I'd want to know. And so I wouldn't trust the wrong people, wouldn't unknowingly put my affairs in the hands of the people who did it."

"Who? Who did what?"

"Just so you understand, if you think you can do anything about it, you'll be crushed."

"Tell me, Anna."

"You're nothing to them. Promise me."

To get the woman to continue, Vida says, "I promise. I've already been crushed. I don't want any more."

"So then, you know my father is also the county coroner."

"Yes."

"He performed the autopsy on José Nochelobo."

"Yes."

"Except he didn't."

Wait without thought, Vida told herself, for you are not ready for thought.

"The EMTs brought the body at ten minutes until five that afternoon," Anna continues, "and Dad signed for it. I was preparing to help him. I don't do autopsies, but I'm a licensed mortician. While I was getting the instruments ready, he began examining the subject, starting with the neck injury. He always talks as he works, recording what he finds. Suddenly he went quiet and covered the corpse. The deceased. I'm sorry. José. Dad covered José and said he was too important to the town, too well thought of, for us to do anything but a careful postmortem. He wanted to find the EMTs who handled the body, talk to them. Dad said it had been a long day, he was too tired to do the job justice. He wheeled José into the cold-holding room and delayed the autopsy till morning."

Vida waits. The shadows are growing longer, the air cooler, the sky a deeper blue in the east.

Anna's hands appear from under her arms and slide slowly from her shoulders to her elbows to her shoulders, up and down, up and down, as though she's cold and trying to warm herself. Her attention remains on the bike. Clearly, this woman doesn't want to be here. She is eager to hit the road. In spite of her youth, however, she seems to lack the modern mindset that would allow her to start a new life by leaving her current one as a participant in a lie.

"My father's not a medical examiner, just the coroner, but he follows the rules of evidence. I never touch the ... the subject of an autopsy. Except to help my father turn over the person on the table. But this was José. I mean, my senior year, he was my history teacher, before he was principal. All the kids liked him. I had, you know, a bit of a crush on him. He was so young, gone so suddenly. It was shocking, and my father's behavior was odd, and it was José —so when I was alone, I went into the cold-holding room and pulled back the shroud."

Anna needs a moment.

Vida waits.

"I looked at his face," Anna continues. "I turned his head, like my father had turned it, and I saw what my father must have seen. The wound."

Vida repeats, "The wound." Those two words have a taste like when she has sucked on a paper cut.

"It must have been an air rifle," Anna says. "Not a pellet gun. It was a puncture wound, like from a needle."

"A hypodermic needle?"

"Yeah. The wound had self-sealed. It could easily have been overlooked, except that the impact had enough velocity to rupture capillaries, which immediately bled into surrounding tissue. There was a bruise as big as a dime, with a little dot at the center."

This news implies a conspiracy so grotesque that Vida might not believe it if the messenger were anyone other than this soft-voiced woman whose distress is evident but tightly controlled. At the same time, in the deepest turning of the nautilus that is her mind, she has suspected his death wasn't the freak accident it had seemed to be. José was charismatic, an effective organizer, a born leader, with the hard truth on his side—and therefore a threat to certain powerful individuals. "You're saying a tranquilizer dart, like they use with wild animals."

"Like that but different. If they meant to kill him, it won't have been a tranquilizer. A toxin of some kind, maybe a fast-acting nerve agent."

"Do you hear yourself?"

Anna meets Vida's eyes. "Yeah. And I scare myself. I know so little, and yet I know too much."

"If there was a hypodermic dart, does your father have it?"

"Probably not. It penetrated the muscles that surround the cervical vertebrae. José probably lost the use of his legs in a paraplegic spasm. The dart maybe came loose when he fell. Came loose, was trampled, broken, swept aside in the chaos."

"Or snatched up and pocketed by someone in the know," Vida says. "By another speaker on the stage."

"Anything is possible now," Anna says, and it seems that her fluorite eyes are growing less blue, becoming a darker purple.

No longer able to sit still, Vida thrusts up from the rocking chair. She has nowhere to go. She stands by the railing, staring toward her uncle's gravestone. "I was there. I didn't hear a shot."

"An air rifle is very quiet."

"Where was the shooter?"

"Had to be behind José. But if it was someone on the steps, others would have seen who did it."

Vida agrees. "So it was someone in the courthouse."

"It wasn't anyone from Kettleton," Anna says. "With an adapted air rifle of that kind, one shot so precisely placed—the shooter had to be a professional and one hell of a marksman."

Another thought occurs to Vida. "The shot was timed to make it appear that José lost his balance when he was hit by the bottles of water those kids threw. They were part of it. Or were used without knowing they were being used."

That realization leads to another more terrible. Before Vida can voice it, her visitor rises from the rocking chair. "Oh, God."

As darkness slowly suffuses the eastern sky, as sunset paints the waning day coral pink and gamboge gold, the white mountain lion, she whom they call Azrael, comes out of the tall grass to the south and pauses on the driveway to assess the meadow, the house, and the women on the porch.