Black Evening (39 page)

Abruptly you realize the terrible irony of your words. Bastards?
All
of these murdered children were bastards. You spin toward the grass, the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Falling, you hug the rain-soaked earth, the drenched lush leaves of grass. "Poor babies!"

"You can't prove a thing," Chief Kitrick growls. "All you've got are suppositions. After fifty years, there won't be anything left of those babies. They've long since rotted and turned into — "

"Grass," you moan, tears scalding your face. "The beautiful grass."

"The doctor who delivered the babies is dead. The Gunthers — my father kept track of them — died as well. In agony, if that satisfies your need for justice. Orval got stomach cancer. Eve died from alcoholism."

"And now they burn in hell," June murmurs.

"I was raised to be… I'm a
Jew
," you moan and suddenly understand the significance of your pronouncement. No matter the circumstances of your birth, you
are
a Jew, totally, completely. "I don't believe in hell. But I wish… Oh, God, how I wish…"

"The only proof you have," Chief Kitrick says, "is this old woman, a Catholic who goes every afternoon to pray in a ruined synagogue. She's nuts. You're a lawyer. You know her testimony wouldn't be accepted in court. It's over, Weinberg. It ended fifty years ago."

"No! It never ended! The grass keeps growing!" You feel the chill wet earth. You try to embrace your brother or your sister and quiver with the understanding that
all
of these children are your brothers and sisters. "God have mercy on them!"

 

What do you think has become of the children?

They are alive and well somewhere,

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.

 

"Luckier?" You embrace the grass. "
Luckier
?"

Through the rain-soaked earth, you think you hear babies crying and raise your face toward the furious storm. Swallowing rain, tasting the salt of your tears, you recite the kaddish prayers. You mourn Mary Duncan, Simon and Esther Weinberg, your brother or your sister, all these children.

And yourself.

"Deliver us from evil," June Engle murmurs. "Pray for us sinners. Now and at the hour of our death."

 

Back in 1970, just after I finished graduate school at Penn State, I took a weekend off and drove with a close friend to his home near Pittsburgh. On an August afternoon, we went to a compound that some friends of his father had built in the mountains. It had a swimming hole, a barbecue pit, a bunk house, and… I still see it vividly: a shrine. Its contents haunted me until finally, twenty-two years later, I had to write about it. Again the theme is grief, a subject I returned to often after Mart's death. "The Shrine" was nominated by the Horror Writers Association as the best novella of 1992.

 

 

Grady was in the mausoleum when the beep from his pager disrupted his sobbing.

The mausoleum was spacious and bright, with shiny marble slabs that concealed the niches into which coffins had been placed. In an alcove near the tall, wide windows that flanked the main entrance, glinting squares of glass permitted mourners to stare within much smaller niches and view the bronze urns that contained the ashes of their loved ones. Plastic, bronze-colored letters and numbers that formed the names of the deceased as well as their birth and death dates were glued upon the squares of glass, and it was toward two of those panes, toward the urns behind them, that Grady directed his attention, although his vision was blurred by tears.

He'd chosen cremation for his wife and ten-year-old son, partly because they'd already been burned — in a fiery car crash with a drunken driver — but more because he couldn't bear the thought of his cherished wife and child decomposing in a coffin in a niche in the mausoleum or, worse, outside in the cemetery, beneath the ground, where rain or the deep cold of winter would make him cringe because of their discomfort, even though the remaining rational part of Grady's mind acknowledged that it didn't matter to his fiercely missed family, who now felt nothing because they were dead.

But it mattered to
him
, just as it mattered that each Monday afternoon he made a ritual of driving out here to the mausoleum, of sitting on a padded bench across from the wall of glassed-in urns, and of talking to Helen and John about what had happened to him since the previous Monday, about how he prayed that they were happy, and most of all, about how much he missed them.

They'd been dead for a year now, and a year was supposed to be a long time, but he couldn't believe the speed with which it had gone. His pain remained as great as the day he'd been told they were dead, his emptiness as extreme. Friends at first had been understanding, but after three months, and especially after six, most of those friends had begun to show polite impatience, making well-intentioned speeches about the need for Grady to put the past behind him, to adjust to his loss, to rebuild his life. So Grady had hidden his emotions and pretended to take their advice, his burden made greater by social necessity. The fact was, he came to realize, that no one who hadn't suffered what he had could possibly understand that three months or six months or a year meant nothing.

Grady's weekly visits to the mausoleum became a secret, their half-hour concealed within his Monday routine. Sometimes he brought his wife and son flowers and sometimes an emblem of the season: a pumpkin at Halloween, a Styrofoam snowball in winter, or a fresh maple leaf in the spring. But on this occasion, just after the Fourth of July weekend, he'd brought a miniature flag, and unable to control the strangled sound of his voice, he explained to Helen and John about the splendor of the fireworks that he'd witnessed and that they'd used to enjoy while eating hot dogs at the city's annual picnic in the sloped, wooded park near the river on Independence Day.

"If only you could have seen the skyrockets," Grady murmured. "I don't know how to describe… Their colors were so…"

The beep from the pager on his gunbelt interrupted his halting monologue. He frowned.

The pager was one of many innovations that he'd introduced to the police force he commanded. After all, his officers frequently had to leave their squad cars, responding to an assignment or merely sitting in a restaurant on a coffee break, but while away from their radios, they needed to know whether headquarters was desperate to contact them.

Its persistent beep made Grady stiffen. He wiped his tears, braced his shoulders, said goodbye to his wife and son, and stood with effort, reluctantly leaving the mausoleum, locking its door behind him. That was important. Helen and John, their remains, needed to be protected, and the cemetery's caretaker had been as inventive as Grady had been about the pager, arranging for every mourner to have a key, so that only those who had a right could enter.

Outside, the July afternoon was bright, hot, humid, and horribly reminiscent of the sultry afternoon a year ago when Grady had come here, accompanied by friends and a priest, to inter the precious urns.

He shook his head to clear his mind and stifle his tortured emotions, then approached the black-and-white cruiser, where he leaned inside to grab the two-way radio microphone.

"Grady here, Dinah. What's the problem?" He released the transmit button on the microphone.

Dinah's staccato response surprised him. "Public-service dispatch."

Grady frowned. "On my way. Five minutes."

Uneasy, he drove from the cemetery. "Public-service dispatch" meant that whatever Dinah needed to tell him was so sensitive that she didn't want a civilian with a police-band radio to overhear the conversation. Grady would have to use a telephone to get in touch with her. After parking at a gas station across from the cemetery, he entered a booth beside an ice machine, thrust coins in the telephone's slot, and jabbed numbers.

"Bosworth police," Dinah said.

"Dinah, it's me. What's so important that — "

"You're not going to like this," the deep-voiced female dispatcher said.

"It's never good news when you page me. Public-service dispatch?
Why
?"

"We've got a combination one-eighty-seven and ten-fifty-six."

Grady winced. Those numbers meant a murder-suicide. "You're right." His voice dropped. "I don't like it."

"It gets worse. It's not in our jurisdiction. The state police are handling it, but they want you on the scene."

"I don't understand. Why would that be worse if it isn't in our jurisdiction?"

"Chief, I…"

"Say it."

"I don't want to."

"Say it, Dinah."

"… You know the victims."

For a moment, Grady had trouble breathing. He clutched the phone harder. "Who?"

"Brian and Betsy Roth."

Shit, Grady thought. Shit. Shit. Shit. Brian and Betsy had been the friends he'd depended upon after all his other friends had distanced themselves when his grief persisted.

Now one of
them
had killed the other?

And after that, the executioner had committed
suicide
?

Grady's pulse sped, making his mind swirl. "Who did what to…"

The husky-throated female dispatcher said, "Brian did. A forty-five semiautomatic."

Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ, Grady thought.

The puzzling directions Grady received took him not to Brian and Betsy's home, where he'd assumed the killings would have occurred, but instead through and past the outskirts of Bosworth into the mountains west of town. Pennsylvania mountains: low, thickly wooded, rounded at their peaks. Between them, primitive roads led into hidden hollows. In a turmoil, confused, Grady wouldn't have known which lane to take if it hadn't been for the state-police car blocking one entrance. A square-jawed trooper dropped his cigarette, crushed it into the gravel with his shoe, and narrowed his eyes when Grady stopped his cruiser.

"I'm looking for Lieutenant Clauson," Grady said.

When the trooper heard Grady's name, he straightened. "And the lieutenant's waiting for
you
." With remarkable efficiency for so large a man, the trooper backed his car from the entrance to the lane, allowing Grady to drive his own car up the narrow draw.

Leaves brushed against Grady's side window. Just before the first sharp curve, Grady glanced toward his rearview mirror and saw the state-police car again block the entrance. At once, he jerked the steering wheel, veering left. Then, behind as well as ahead, he saw only forest.

The lane tilted ever more upward. It kept forcing Grady to zigzag and increased his anxiety as branches scraped the top of his car in addition to his windows. The dense shadows of the forest made him feel trapped.

Brian shot Betsy?

And then shot
himself
?

No!

Why?

I needed them.

I depended on…

I loved them!

What on earth had made them come out here? Why had they been in the woods?

The lane became level, straightened, and suddenly brought Grady from the forest to a sun-bathed plateau between two mountains, where an open gate in a chainlink fence revealed a spacious compound: several cinderblock buildings of various sizes on the left, a barbecue pit adjacent to them, and a swimming pool on the right.

Grady parked behind three state-police cars, an ambulance, a blue station wagon marked MEDICAL EXAMINER, and a red Jeep Cherokee that Grady recognized as belonging to Brian and Betsy. Several state troopers, along with two ambulance attendants and an overweight man in a gray suit, formed a cluster at the near rim of the swimming pool, their backs to Grady. But as Grady opened his door, one of the troopers turned, studied him, glanced back toward the rim of the pool, again studied Grady, and with a somber expression, approached him.

Lieutenant Clauson. Middle forties. Tall. Pronounced nose and cheekbones. Trim — Clauson's doctor had ordered him to lose weight, Grady remembered. Short, receding, sandy hair. On occasion, Clauson and Grady had worked together when a crime was committed in one jurisdiction and a suspect was apprehended in the other.

"Ben."

"Jeff."

"Did your dispatcher explain?" Clauson looked uneasy.

Grady nodded, grim. "Brian shot Betsy and then himself. Why the hell would he — "

"That's what we were hoping you could tell us."

Grady shivered despite the afternoon heat. "How would
I
know?"

"You and the Roths were friends. I hate to ask you to do this. Do you think you can… Would you…"

"Look at the bodies?"

"Yes." Clauson furrowed his brow, more uneasy. "If you wouldn't mind."

"Jeff, just because my wife and son died, I can still do my job. Even though Brian and Betsy were friends of mine, I can do whatever's necessary. I'm ready to help."

"I figured."

"Then why did you have to ask?"

"Because you're involved."

"What?"

"First things first," Clauson said. "You look at the bodies. I show you what your friend Brian had in his hand, clutched around the grip of the forty-five. And then we talk."

The stench of decay pinched Grady's nostrils. A waist-high wooden fence enclosed the swimming pool. Grady followed Clauson through an opening onto a concrete strip that bordered the pool. One of the policemen was taking photographs of something on the concrete while the overweight man in the gray suit suggested various angles. When the other policemen saw Clauson and Grady arrive, they parted to give them room, and Grady saw the bodies.

The shock made him sick. His friends lay facedown on the concrete, redwood deck chairs behind them, their heads toward the pool. Or what was left of their heads. The .45-caliber bullets had done massive damage. Behind Betsy's right ear and Brian's, the impact wound was a thick, black clot of blood. On the opposite side, at the top of each brow near the temple, the exit wound was a gaping hole from which blood, brain, bone, and hair had spattered the concrete. A repugnant swarm of flies buzzed over the gore. The .45 was next to Brian's right hand.