My Sister's Grave (Tracy Crosswhite, #1)(20)
She introduced herself to the woman seated at a desk in the lobby and declined a seat or a cup of coffee. The lighting inside the building seemed brighter than she remembered, and the walls and carpeting a lighter color too. The smell, however, had not changed. It smelled like incense, an odor Tracy had come to associate with death.
“Tracy?” Darren Thorenson approached in a dark suit and tie, arm outstretched. He took her hand. “It’s good to see you, though I’m sorry about the circumstances.”
“Thanks for taking care of all the arrangements, Darren.” In addition to cremating Sarah’s remains, Thorenson had notified the cemetery workers and obtained a minister for the service. Tracy hadn’t wanted a service, but she also wasn’t about to dig a hole in the middle of the night and unceremoniously dump her sister in the ground.
“Not a problem.” He led her into what had been his father’s office when Tracy and her mother made the arrangements for her father’s funeral and when Tracy had returned after her mother had died of cancer. Darren took the seat behind the desk. A portrait of his father, younger-looking than Tracy recalled, hung on the wall beside a family photograph. Darren had married Abby Becker, his high school sweetheart. They apparently had three kids. He looked like his father. Heavyset, Darren combed his hair back off his forehead, which accentuated his bulbous nose and thick, black-framed glasses, like the kind Dan O’Leary had worn as a kid.
“You’ve redecorated,” Tracy said.
“Slowly,” he said. “It took some time to convince Dad that reverent didn’t have to mean bleak.”
“How is your father?”
“He still threatens to come out of retirement from time to time. When he does, we stick a golf club in his hand. Abby said to pass along her condolences.”
“Did you have any problems with the plot?”
Cedar Grove Cemetery had existed longer than the town, though no one knew the date of the first burial since its earliest graves were unmarked. Volunteers tended to the upkeep, pulling weeds and mowing the grass. If someone died, they dug the grave. They worked for free, the unspoken understanding being that someday someone would repay the favor. Because of limited space, the City Council had to approve every burial. Cedar Grove residency was mandatory. Sarah had died a Cedar Grove resident, so that wasn’t the issue. Tracy had requested that her sister be buried with their parents, though technically her parents were in a two-person plot.
“Not a bit.” Darren said. “It’s all taken care of.”
“I guess we better get your paperwork taken care of.”
“That’s all done too.”
“Then I’ll just write you a check.”
“It’s all good, Tracy.”
“Darren, please, I can’t ask that of you.”
“You didn’t ask it of me.” He smiled, but it had a sad quality to it. “I’m not going to take your money, Tracy. You and your family, you’ve been through enough.”
“I don’t know what to say. I appreciate this. I really do.”
“I know you do. We all lost Sarah that day. Things were never the same around here. It was like she belonged to the whole town. I guess we all did back then.”
Tracy had heard others say similar things—that Cedar Grove hadn’t died when Christian Mattioli had closed the mine and much of the population had moved away. Cedar Grove had died the day Sarah disappeared. After Sarah, people no longer left their front doors unlocked or let their kids roam freely on foot and bicycle. After Sarah, they did not let their children walk to school or wait for the bus unaccompanied by an adult. After Sarah, people weren’t so friendly or welcoming to strangers.
“He’s still in jail?” Thorenson asked.
“Yeah, he’s still in jail.”
“I hope he rots there.”
Tracy considered her watch.
Darren stood. “You ready?”
She wasn’t, but she nodded anyway. He led her into the adjoining chapel, the rows of chairs empty. The room had been unable to accommodate the crowd for her father’s wake. A crucifix hung on the front wall. Below it, on a marble pedestal, was a gold-plated container the size of a jewelry box. Tracy stepped closer and read the engraving on the plate.
Sarah Lynne Crosswhite
The Kid
“I hope it’s okay,” Darren said. “That’s how we all remember her, the kid following you all over town.” Tracy wiped a tear away with a tissue. “I’m glad you’re going to be able to put Sarah to rest and put this behind you,” Darren continued. “I’m glad for all of us.”
The cars parked bumper to bumper on the one-way road leading into the cemetery were more than Tracy had anticipated, and she suspected she knew who was responsible for getting the word out, and why. Finlay Armstrong stood in the road directing traffic, rain sheeting off the clear poncho that protected his uniform and dripping from the brim of his hat. Tracy lowered her window as she pulled to a stop.
“Don’t worry about parking. You can leave it in the road,” Finlay said.
Darren Thorenson, who’d followed Tracy in his own car, opened a large golf umbrella to shield her from the rain as she stepped from the car, and they walked up the hill toward a white awning covering her mother and father’s plot at the top of a knoll overlooking Cedar Grove. Thirty to forty people sat in white folding chairs beneath the canopy. Another twenty stood outside its perimeter beneath umbrellas. Those people seated stood when Tracy stepped beneath the cover. She took a moment to acknowledge the familiar faces. They’d aged, but she recognized friends of her parents, adults who had once been kids that she and Sarah had gone to school with, and teachers who’d become Tracy’s colleagues when she’d returned briefly to teach chemistry at Cedar Grove High. Sunnie Witherspoon was there, as was Marybeth Ferguson, one of Sarah’s best friends. Vance Clark and Roy Calloway stood outside the tent. So did Kins, Andrew Laub, and Vic Fazzio, who had all driven up from Seattle and brought Tracy some semblance of reality. Being back in Cedar Grove was still surreal. It felt as if she’d become stuck in a twenty-year time warp, things both familiar and foreign. She couldn’t equate what she was seeing with what she remembered. This was not 1993. Far from it.