19 NEWS OF THE DEAD

19

NEWS OF THE DEAD

Here in this dismal July, with José not yet gone a full month, as Vida stands on her porch with Anna Lagare, she can't help but think that, if the manifestation of the albino mountain lion is an omen of death impending, the warning has come too late. José is in his grave, and no massive rock will be rolled from it, nor will a fiercely radiant celestial being announce a resurrection.

The big cat's body is sleek, her legs muscular, face flat, ears cupped alertly. Her long tail has thick fur and is heavy and serves to balance her when she's stalking, running, leaping, climbing. Her sharp, hooked claws are retracted into her soft, padded paws, but they can spring forth and gut her prey in an instant, though her kind tend to kill with one well-aimed bite of their powerful jaws. Her glossy white fur seems luminescent in the gathering twilight.

Vida's uncle taught her much about mountain lions and cats in general, that she might have the proper respect for them. She does not worship Nature itself or any creature in it, as the Egyptians, four thousand years earlier, worshipped a cat goddess among other deities. In that far place and time, when a house cat died, the family members sheared off their hair to express their grief. They usually mummified the cat, and often mummified mice to entomb with it, so that it might have food in the next life.

Vida is in such awe of the massive albino creature that she understands how people can attribute supernatural powers to such a being, especially in a time when they feel the institutions they rely on are failing them. It's human and sane to want peace and to yearn for transcendence in this world of war and insistent nihilism.

"She's just a mountain lion," Anna says. "For all the stories about her, she's just a mountain lion."

From the tone in which that statement is made, Vida concludes that Anna won't feel safe until she is on the road. In fact, she might suspect that even the sweet town in Texas might not be far enough to ensure her safety from the forces at work in Kettleton. Whether she wants to or not, she sees before her an omen.

The great beast proceeds to the center of the lawn and peers along the path toward Uncle Ogden's grave. Following a hesitation, with no further interest in this property, she continues northward, into meadow that has not been mowed. As the previously coral-and-gold sky now likens itself to a blazing furnace, as the summer-paled grass appears to burn with a fire that fails to consume it, Azrael doesn't just recede into the distance but seems to deliquesce into the twilight, a shape of white mist that evaporates into the gloom.

Vida returns to the realization that occurred to her after she concluded that the bottle-throwing kids were enlisted in the assault on José whether they knew it or not. "Did he really break his neck?"

Still looking after the vanished mountain lion, Anna says, "When I saw the puncture wound, I didn't examine him any further. The EMT who got to him first said his neck was at an impossible angle, but that's just something he said."

"Possibly something he was paid to say."

"Possibly. A heart attack wouldn't be right for a man as young as José. Nobody would believe suicide. Any accident—a fall down the cellar stairs, a house fire—would be suspicious. But if an accident occurred in front of a thousand witnesses, who would question it?"

Vida gives voice to her latest insight: "If it was murder, they needed the fall to hide the truth. If a nerve toxin killed him, they had to be sure he didn't simply drop to the stage, but took a more dramatic tumble. When the dart hit him, someone on the stage must have put a hand on his back, pretending to steady him, but shoving him toward the stairs. The dime-size bruise could be dismissed as a consequence of the fall—unless someone looked too close."

Anna continues to stare at the forest that received the lion into its boughed and ferny gloom.

"Will you be all right?" Vida asks.

"I don't like myself right now—being scared. But it would be worse to stay here and pretend things are like they always were."

"If your father didn't perform the postmortem, then he must have falsified the autopsy report."

"When I found the puncture, I went down the hall to his office. Door was closed. I heard him on the phone, arguing with someone. He sounded more afraid than angry. He kept saying Aubrey this and Aubrey that. Only man I know by that name is Aubrey Norland."

As the crimson light retreats and the sky darkles, the air is no colder, but Vida is chilled. "José's attorney."

"My father wanted Norland to forge some document showing José specified cremation. My father was part of this vicious business, but he hadn't thought what might happen. Now he began to wonder how long a nerve toxin might be detectable in the flesh of the deceased. Weeks? Months? Years? From what I heard, Aubrey Norland refused the request and assured my father that no one would exhume the body."

Anna moves to the head of the porch steps, beyond which the land—and more than the land—is fast fading into darkness. Though she has a friend and a destination in Texas, she looks lost.

"Your dad is well respected," Vida says. "On the town council. President of the local Better Business Bureau. Why would he involve himself in something as terrible as this?"

"He's made a nice living, doing what his father did before him, but he's never happy. He's distant, keeps himself to himself, so I don't really know him. But one thing I do know is he always wanted something more, bigger, better. Maybe he didn't even know what that was, but as the years went by, especially after Mom died, he wanted it with growing desperation. Suddenly Kettleton isn't a backwater anymore. It becomes a center of action, an ocean of money washing up around it. Some saw how they could scoop up buckets of it. This kind of money doesn't just buy cooperation. It buys souls."

Vida says, "José never accused any of them of being bought, never so much as implied it. He based his case entirely on facts."

"Yeah, but to some people, the truth is a gun to their heads."

"I'm so sorry," Vida says. "This isn't easy for you."

"Whatever else he's been," Anna says, "he was my dad. But now."

"I'm sorry," Vida says again, at a loss for words.

"I can't look at him anymore."

Anna descends the porch steps, and Vida follows her to the motorcycle. "How many people were involved in this?"

"I don't know. And you don't want to know. Just stay away from Aubrey Norland. I felt I had to warn you. In fact, stay away from town, like you did before José. Make your life here."

Vida persists. "The boys who threw the bottles weren't charged with even just a misdemeanor."

"If charges had been brought, even as juveniles, there would be a court proceeding. They couldn't risk an investigation, testimony under oath, none of that. So it had to be that this was just boys being boys, didn't mean to hurt anyone, basically good kids, sorry as hell for the prank they pulled, no reason to ruin their lives."

As Anna pulls on her helmet, Vida says, "Seems the district attorney must be one of them, maybe the sheriff."

"There's no way of knowing. It's not everyone in Kettleton. It's a small group. But no way to know who's corrupt, who isn't."

Vida persists. "At the graveside service, somebody said one of those boys is Morgan Slyke. He lives with his parents on Long Valley Road, ten or twelve miles from town. Goes to Long Valley High."

Reflected in the face shield of the helmet, the last crimson light in the sky masks this woman's face and confers on her a new and less lovely identity, as though she isn't just a mortician but instead some blood-smeared Presence that has come from the far shore of a river where gondolas carry passengers in only one direction and gondoliers like her pole their way back to this world alone.

"Yeah. And another of those boys, Damon Orbach, is the son of Perry Orbach, largest landowner in the county. Don't be stupid, Vida. Nothing you do will bring José back. With billions of dollars on the line, there's no justice except the kind that can be bought."

Vida says, "Truth can't be repressed forever. It'll come out."

"But if it does, most people will still believe what isn't true, because the truth is heavy to carry compared to the lightness of a lie." Anna reaches into a pocket of her jacket. "I don't know what this means." She withdraws a folded slip of white paper. "I considered not giving this to you. I came here only to warn you not to trust anyone. I don't want to inspire you to do anything foolish. But it was in the pocket of the shirt José was wearing that day. It was his ... and he was yours ... and so."

Vida unfolds the five-by-six-inch piece of notepad paper and reads the eight words, which are not in José's handwriting: " ... two moon sun spirit below the smoking river." She looks up at her visitor, whose face is still invisible behind the reflected sunset. "What does this mean?"

Anna says, "I've asked around. Discreetly. Rings no bells for anyone. Maybe it doesn't mean anything."

"No. It means something," Vida says, for the words hearken back to some enigmatic advice she was given a long time ago.

"Maybe it would be better if you decided it doesn't."

The bloody light slides off the face shield as Anna Lagare swings aboard the motorcycle, yet still she seems to have no face. As she starts the engine, all that's visible within the helmet are two pale crescents that partly define sockets that seem eyeless.

As she drives away, a single headlight guides her along the dirt lane, across the meadow, away into a world gone wrong.