Mr. Mercedes (Unnamed Trilogy #1)(87)

Janey hurries down an aisle between two ranks of folding chairs, looks briefly at her mother, then hurries back. Her lips are trembling.

“Uncle Henry can call cremation pagan if he wants to, but this open-coffin shit is the real pagan rite. She doesn’t look like my mother, she looks like a stuffed exhibit.”

“Then why—”

“It was the trade-off I made to shut Uncle Henry up about the cremation. God help us if he looks under the swag and sees the coffin’s pressed cardboard painted gray to look like metal. So it’ll . . . you know . . .”

“I know,” Hodges says, and gives her a one-armed hug.

The deceased woman’s friends trickle in, led by Althea Greene, Wharton’s nurse, and Mrs. Harris, who was her housekeeper. At twenty past ten or so (fashionably late, Hodges thinks), Aunt Charlotte arrives on her brother’s arm. Uncle Henry leads her down the aisle, looks briefly at the corpse, then stands back. Aunt Charlotte stares fixedly into the upturned face, then bends and kisses the dead lips. In a barely audible voice she says, “Oh, sis, oh, sis.” For the first time since he met her, Hodges feels something for her other than irritation.

There is some milling, some quiet talk, a few low outbursts of laughter. Janey makes the rounds, speaking to everyone (there aren’t more than a dozen, all of the sort Hodges’s daughter calls “goldie-oldies”), doing her due diligence. Uncle Henry joins her, and on the one occasion when Janey falters—she’s trying to comfort Mrs. Greene—he puts an arm around her shoulders. Hodges is glad to see it. Blood tells, he thinks. At times like this, it almost always does.

He’s the odd man out here, so he decides to get some air. He stands on the front step for a few moments, scanning the cars parked across the street, looking for a man sitting by himself in one of them. He sees no one, and realizes he hasn’t seen Holly the Mumbler, either.

He ambles around to the visitors’ parking lot and there she is, perched on the back step. She’s dressed in a singularly unbecoming shin-length brown dress. Her hair is put up in unbecoming clumps at the sides of her head. To Hodges she looks like Princess Leia after a year on the Karen Carpenter diet.

She sees his shadow on the pavement, gives a jerk, and hides something behind her hand. He comes closer, and the hidden object turns out to be a half-smoked cigarette. She gives him a narrow, worried look. Hodges thinks it’s the look of a dog that’s been beaten too many times with a newspaper for piddling under the kitchen table.

“Don’t tell my mother. She thinks I quit.”

“Your secret’s safe with me,” Hodges says, thinking that Holly is surely too old to worry about Mommy’s disapproval of what is probably her only bad habit. “Can I share your step?”

“Shouldn’t you be inside with Janey?” But she moves over to make room.

“Just taking a breather. With the exception of Janey herself, I don’t know any of those people.”

She looks him over with the bald curiosity of a child. “Are you and my cousin lovers?”

He’s embarrassed, not by the question but by the perverse fact that it makes him feel like laughing. He sort of wishes he’d just left her to smoke her illicit cigarette. “Well,” he says, “we’re good friends. Maybe we should leave it at that.”

She shrugs and shoots smoke from her nostrils. “It’s all right with me. I think a woman should have lovers if she wants them. I don’t, myself. Men don’t interest me. Not that I’m a lesbian. Don’t get that idea. I write poetry.”

“Yeah? Do you?”

“Yes.” And with no pause, as if it’s all the same thing: “My mother doesn’t like Janey.”

“Really?”

“She doesn’t think Janey should have gotten all that money from Olivia. She says it isn’t fair. It probably isn’t, but I don’t care, myself.”

She’s biting her lips in a way that gives Hodges an unsettling sense of déjà vu, and it takes only a second to realize why: Olivia Trelawney did the same thing during her police interviews. Blood tells. It almost always does.

“You haven’t been inside,” he says.

“No, and I’m not going, and she can’t make me. I’ve never seen a dead person, and I’m not going to start now. It would give me nightmares.”

She kills her cigarette on the side of the step, not rubbing it but plunging it out, stabbing it until the sparks fly and the filter splits. Her face is as pale as milk glass, she’s started to quiver (her knees are almost literally knocking), and if she doesn’t stop chewing her lower lip, it’s going to split open.

“This is the worst part,” she says, and she’s not mumbling now. In fact, if her voice doesn’t stop rising it will soon be a scream. “This is the worst part, this is the worst part, this is the worst part!”

He puts an arm around her vibrating shoulders. For a moment the vibration grows to a whole-body shake. He fully expects her to flee (perhaps lingering just long enough to call him a masher and slap his face). Then the shaking subsides and she actually puts her head on his shoulder. She’s breathing rapidly.

“You’re right,” he says. “This is the worst part. Tomorrow will be better.”

“Will the coffin be closed?”

“Yeah.” He’ll tell Janey it will have to be, unless she wants her cuz sitting out here with the hearses again.