Grave Concern (17 page)

Rapid-fire clicking. “Mmmmm. No
Victor Victoria
. We have
Shakespeare in Love
, but it's out.”

“Oh.” Kate couldn't hide her disappointment.

“Would
She's the Man
help?”

Kate smiled. “You must be a mind reader.”

“I can hold it till six.”

“Don't you close at five-thirty?”

“If
Shakespeare in Love
comes in today, I'll hold that, too,” was all he said.

Enthusiasm welled up. “Yesss! I could just kiss you, Mr. Ho Lam Manager!” Kate said. “Figuratively speaking, that is.”

There was an unintelligible sound and then Leonard's newly cleared voice came back on the line. “Glad to hear you're feeling better. We'll see you later, then.”

“Abso-definitely,” said Kate.

Her new plan engendered such optimism, Kate was propelled that very afternoon to work “outside the home” for the first time since the accident. In consulting the customer database in her laptop, she noticed that three graves were overdue for general cleanup, flower replacement, and photos, while a fourth required a reading of the Twenty-third Psalm over the grave. Kate always looked forward to psalm-reading. A psalm could never be rushed. Or modernized. Kate refused to use those new versions, crushed into dry powder and reconstituted:

“The Lord is my shepherd; how can I lack anything? He gives me a resting-place where there is green pasture, leads me out to the cool water's brink, refreshed and content …”

No, no, no. Who could take that crap seriously? At funerals, when some smug minister started up on this kind of thing, Kate discreetly plugged her ears. In Kate's business, clients always received the very best:

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:

he leadeth me beside the still waters …”

In fact, Kate used her most stentorian tones, infusing the lines with such drama she often wound up misty-eyed and runny-nosed, compelled to stop on the drive back to town to dry her face and clean her glasses.

Before hitting the graveyard, Kate stopped at the office. Through a window, she could see that an order of flowers from Binary Blooms had been delivered in her absence to the bowling alley. At the moment, the lanes were closed, and the manager's door locked. The order, with its prominent logo of a floral bouquet composed entirely of ones and zeros, was sitting on his desk. But how to get at it? He worked full time elsewhere and wouldn't be around till evening, if at all. She could call up Bill Chambers, her landlord, but the less she saw of him, the better life generally remained. And she suspected Bill reciprocated her view of the relationship. Moreover, if Bill did take the trouble to come over, despite discomfort in her presence, he would still want to chew the fat, and Kate was restless to get to her clients and back to Ho Lam's by six. No, she would access the flowers some other way.

In an effort not to breathe hard and disturb the ribs, Kate made her way slowly around the building to her office door and opened up. She sat gingerly down at her desk to think. After a bit, she got up and wandered into the backroom, which invariably spurred the cognitive process. As she did so, a strange feeling crept over Kate. Undaunted, she plugged in the kettle and fished painfully about in the cupboard for the box of tea, all the while sensing
she was not alone
.

Kate woke up, and the first thing she saw was Orion's jewelled belt. Nothing else of the Hunter—head, feet, or sword — could be seen through the missing piece of roof.

J.P., too, was gone. Groggily, Kate appraised the situation, one slow deduction per star. Star One: she was lying, stiff and cold, on the floor of the Indian cabin at some freezing pre-dawn hour. Star Two: she'd slept for some length of time, which implied a source of warmth that was not her absent lover. Star Three: she and J.P. had come in through the roof because the door was boarded up; ergo, unless Superman turned up, she was trapped.

Kate tried a little movement, a roll to the side, but something weighed her down. The army coat. A long, long time ago she had lain atop this coat, and now it covered her, blanket-wise. In one motion, she sat up and pulled the heavy wool around the violent shivering, apparently her own.

The longer she sat, the harder Kate shook, from fear and cold. One thing was becoming clear: she would have to get moving or freeze. Clutching the coat's huge lapels across her chest, she stood up unsteadily in the blackness. She shuffled back and forth on blocks of ice that had once been her feet and became conscious of little noises she'd been hearing for some time. Mice or rats, probably. Behind her ears, the skin crawled up her scalp. But she wouldn't give in. No dread allowed, or who knew where it would end?

What with knee-bends, up and down, and a quick waltz around the invisible floor, in a little while the shivering abated a bit, and Kate's spirits rose. It occurred to her to put on J.P.'s coat properly, arms in sleeves. This she accomplished. Doing up the buttons with no finger-feeling proved troublesome nearly to tears, but the buttons were large and numbered just three, like Orion's belt. Having achieved this task, Kate found, inside the box construction, she could shrug shoulders to ears and barely lift the bottom hem. It reminded her of the time, as a little girl, she'd tried on a man's coat from the huge pile on her parents' bed, during a party at her house. Hearing the approach of voices, she'd fumbled with the buttons, trying to shuck the now-smothering weight off. She tried each button again, again, panic stiffening her small fingers, draining her resolve. Desperate, she'd yanked her arms out of the sleeves — to ripping sounds — and climbed out from underneath the coat like a snake sloughing its skin.

Now Kate stumble-danced through her log prison, waiting for light and hope. She buried her nose in the coat's collar and sniffed. The smell of J.P. was unmistakable, and sexy. At one point her fingers found — how had they not before? — a worn fabric edge, the lip of a pocket. She felt the other side. Yes! Two enormous pockets, slung from hip to thigh on either side. She plunged her numb hands in.

“Who's there — ooooww!” Kate spun around to face the intruder. Too fast. Pain shot through her from head to toe.

Bill Chambers walked out from behind a fifties-era metal shelving unit Kate had bought from the town library when it closed for lack of funds.

“Easy, there. Just me,” he said, a tad sheepishly, Kate thought. “Checking your circuit box. Had some electrical trouble in the building. We're checking every office.”

“God
damn
it, Bill,” Kate backed toward the wall and steadied herself, holding her side. “Why didn't you tell me you were in here? You scared me half to death.”

“Ah, Kate! Didn't hear you come in. Don't bother about me — I'll be gone in a flash.”

Bill lied better than Greta, but not much. Kate, clinging to the wall, did nothing but breathe and stare blankly, until Bill said, “Go on. I'm done now. Everything in order. Glad to see you up and around. Ribs all healed, I hope?”

With this, he made a beeline for the door, which only confirmed his guilt. Bill Chambers would rather hang around and bend any ear alive than do almost anything else. Whole working mornings of Kate's had evaporated in the ephemeral stream of consciousness that was Bill's conversational style.

Now it was her turn to detain him. “Uh, Bill.”

His hand was on the door handle. “Yup.”

“There's been a delivery, of my flowers, to the bowling office. Could you let me in?”

Bill walked around the building ahead of her, loudly jingling a massive ring of keys. He opened the door and stood with his hand on the knob, forcing Kate to edge agonizingly past him to retrieve the flowers.

“Anything else you need now? Happy to help.”

The look on Bill's florid face so obviously indicated the opposite that Kate was tempted to concoct some further request. But no. She had no mental energy to spare. She had to focus. Places to go and things to do. Dead people to see.

“No thanks, Bill. By the way, I'll be back in the office now on my regular days.”

“Good … good,” Bill said. “Very glad to hear it.”

At
the graveyard, Kate opened her car trunk to reveal the rubble of ages. Oh, man, there must be a special form of entropy beyond known laws of physics that came into effect when people worked out of their cars. Come the first pain-free day, she would organize this mess. Meanwhile, she located trowels and grass clippers, plastic bags, and the usual assortment of stuff she would use on what she now thought of as “her” graves. She was just closing the lid on a lively straw hat, conscious for the first time of an ongoing racket — some rowdy crow up in the trees — when
it
appeared. The Thing. In the corner of her eye. A movement in the bush, on the north side, as before.

Not too distant from J.P.'s forest grave
. Kate dropped her armload of paraphernalia on the trunk and began mashing the heels of her hands against her temples, sticking out her elbows like the rabbit ears people once had on their TVs. In her neighbourhood, growing up, when a kid said something incredible, the others pretended to change channels like this. Oookay, not such a good idea. She'd heard a crackling sound. Her ribs or a branch in the woods? Gingerly, Kate lowered her arms. Breathed. Yoga wisdom:
Breathe into the pain
. Right.

Well, whatever the Thing was, it was long gone, this elusive master of deception. The question was, was it or wasn't it … em
bodied?
Still, the channel-changing must have had some effect, because Kate's spook factor fell off sharply. Her powers of logic kicked in. Trepidation would get no one anywhere. And the other approach, standing around with big guns and bravado, was likewise of little use.

What was needed to tackle the problem was Logic. A certain cold calculation. Whatever this thing was — that she and others found so hateful or creepy — obviously thought the same of them. Like her landlord, Bill Chambers, caught red-handed, IT likely was as afraid of her as she of it. Which didn't mean it wasn't up to no good.

Kate picked up the junk from the back of the car and walked over to her first plot. As she clipped and trimmed, polished stone and arranged the somewhat peaked “fresh” flowers, she noticed someone at the opposite corner of the graveyard near the road. A woman in a dark jacket. Bobbing, irregularly, up and down. Kate pondered this for a while, but conjured little explanation, other than possible religious ritual, overzealous genuflection, perhaps. In any case, she must not allow herself to be distracted. There were still her other graves to finish, and, of course, Ho Lam's to get to by six.