When the Day of Evil Comes (9 page)

Next question—the jewelry. I intended to make progress on that one by the end of the day. I was hoping Lurch would shed some light on the likelihood of my mother’s ring being stolen the day of the funeral, as Silverstein had suggested. Perhaps whoever took it had simply returned it out of guilt.

That didn’t explain the rest of the gifts that day at Barton Springs, however. All wrapped identically to the ring. Was the whole thing an elaborate ruse to distract from the ring’s return? That didn’t make any sense to me. The gifts had been carefully chosen and did, in fact, match the desires of their recipients. John Mulvaney had indeed expressed a desire for a new Day-timer, for instance. He’d reminded me of that the night he came to my house.

John Mulvaney. Another mess of unresolved questions. Who had written on his calendar, copying my handwriting precisely, suggesting we meet for supper? And how had he
ended up with such a twisted version of that rather odd event?

The latter question was the only one so far I could answer. The man was an oddball. A misfit. Completely unable to process normal social cues. It would be natural for him to miss the boat entirely on what had transpired that night.

Moving on to the flies. What was that about? Odd as that battle had been, I was willing to chalk it up to bizarre coincidence. Maybe I had flies in my house. Maybe there was a little fly maternity ward somewhere that I didn’t know about, turning out big fat flies one by one.

The boiled eggs? I’d never studied the presence of smells in dreams, but it had to be a fairly common phenomenon. That one would be easy to research.

Erik Zocci. This was the kicker. Why would anyone make such a dreadful accusation against me, using the name of a former patient? A former dead patient. A former dead patient who had committed suicide.

And what was the suicide about? Had this boy been so haunted by the Peter Terry-like figure that he’d thrown himself off a twelfth-floor balcony? Surely there was more to it than that.

I resolved to do some digging to find out what had been going on in Erik Zocci’s life.

As I pondered this last item, I realized it was the one that was pressing the hardest on me.

As horrifying as suicide is, it is usually explainable, at least in hindsight. You could almost always retrace the steps of the person and find the path that led him to that terrible decision. It’s harder to spot in present time, of course. But often perfectly clear after the fact.

That’s one reason suicide is such a cruel choice. It leaves the survivors with nothing but the certainty and guilt of hindsight.

I’d never had a patient commit suicide on my watch. The
guilt I felt—though this young man had been in my care only briefly, a full year before he took his own life—was profound. Somehow, ludicrous as it looks in the light of day, I felt I should have prevented it. That I’d missed something toxic in this boy that had eaten him from the inside.

I felt like the physician who misses the tumor on the X-ray, only to find out a year later that the patient had succumbed to a treatable but virulent strain of cancer.

What had I missed? Why had this boy, haunted by Peter Terry, sought me out? Why had he abruptly ended therapy? Was he frustrated with me at the time because he felt I wasn’t helping him? Had I failed to listen to him? Had I dismissed something important? Had I been careless? Frivolous with his pain?

As I pulled off 1-35 onto the Hillsboro exit, I reached for my map, relieved to have something else to do with my mind. Erik Zocci, I knew, would haunt me as Peter Terry had haunted him. And my guilt would drive me until I either absolved myself of blame or made peace with my mistake. Neither would be possible until I found out what had happened to the boy.

Until then, I shoved my denial into place as I threw my truck into park and set a foot on the hot pavement of the Sutter Funeral Home parking lot.

Sutter Funeral Home was Proud to Be Family Owned and Operated. Since 1928, the sign said. Poor timing to start a business, surely I wondered how the funeral home business had survived the ’29 crash and the Depression of the ’30s. But then death didn’t respond to fluctuations in the economy. People were going to die either way.

Small town funeral homes are familiar territory for me. My mother’s side of the family, prolific and gnarled farm folk, had died off one by one in the past couple of decades. Great Aunt so-and-so had “passed,” my mother would say reverently, and we
would all converge on some dinky Texas town.

A country funeral, usually in an unair-conditioned building, would be sparsely attended by surviving friends who would proclaim how very sad they were she was gone and how proud they were to have known her. Then we would spend the afternoon eating tuna casserole, three bean salad, and angel food cake, supplied by local Christian women.

My family would inevitably beat it out of there as soon as possible, hoping that great aunt so-and-so was too busy playing poker in heaven with Elvis to notice.

So when I stepped into the parlor of Sutter Funeral Home, I knew what to expect. Somber lighting. Musty carpet—in this case, a dirty nursing-home shade of green—and doors leading to viewing parlors named after pastoral scenes from Scripture. Thankfully, the faint spitting sound of window unit air conditioners accompanied the cheesy organ hymnal music playing softly over hidden speakers. At least it would not be wretchedly hot.

The smell of dust and mold took me back to the March afternoon my father and I had breathed this same air while planning the details of Mother’s funeral. I felt a chill snake between my shoulder blades.

“Can I help you?”

I turned to see a handsome man of maybe twenty-eight, turned out in a nicely tailored black suit. Definitely not Lurch.

“I’m looking for …” Rats. I couldn’t come up with anything other than Lurch. What was the man’s real name? Not Sutter. It was something else. Tchaikovsky? Dostoevsky? All I could come up with were Slavic remnants of my liberal arts education.

“Mr. Shykovsky?” the young man asked pleasantly.

“That’s it,” I said, pointing at him. “Shykovsky. Mr. Shykovsky. Is he in? I have an appointment.”

“I’m Mr. Shykovsky,” he said.

“No you’re not,” I blurted.

“I could show you my driver’s license,” he offered, amused.

“No, no. I don’t mean that. I mean, you’re not the man I’m supposed to meet. He’s older. Sort of … shorter. Black hair, sort of gray … sort of …” I cut myself off as I gestured with my arms. I didn’t want to say fat. “Hefty?”

“Pear-shaped?”

“Yes! That’s the guy. Is he here?”

“No, he’s down the road a bit.”

Down the road a bit. What was this, a Hee-Haw skit?

“When will he be back?”

“I’m afraid he’s not coming back.”

“Did he retire?”

“He died. We buried him three months ago.”

“Oh.” People kept dying on me. I thought I’d talked to the man yesterday. Was this another bizarre dead-people-talking-on-the-phone incident?

“Are you Dylan?” the man asked.

“Yes.” Suddenly my brain cleared. “Are you the one I talked to?”

“The same.” He shook my hand. “David Shykovsky. I’m sorry about the confusion. I didn’t know you were asking for my father.”

“I didn’t know he’d died. I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “He lived to eighty and died of a heart attack in his sleep. Ate bacon and eggs every day of his life. Couldn’t ask for a better ending.”

“He was eighty? He looked so much younger.”

“Yeah.” He smiled, showing me a beautiful set of white teeth. “We liked to say he was well-preserved.”

Hey. This was a likable guy. And he was cute. And looked
like he had a muscle or two under that nicely cut suit.

“Why don’t you come on back?” he was saying. “I pulled the file for you already.”

I followed him down a long carpeted hallway, past viewing parlors named “Green Pastures,” “Still Waters,” and “Restoration.” Apparently no one had died in Hillsboro in the last day or two, because the rooms were empty.

We turned left at the end of the hall (avoiding the casket room, thankfully) and entered his office. He offered me a seat opposite his desk and leaned back into his leather chair. The man was a hunter. Stuffed trophy heads covered each wall, and a bobcat, teeth bared, poised in mid-leap behind his chair. It was unsettling. I kept wanting to tell him to duck.

“They’re not mine,” he said.

“What?”

“The dead animals. They belonged to my father.”

“They’re spooky,” I said. “Why don’t you get rid of them?”

He grinned. “It’s hard to spook a mortician.” He slid a manila file across the desk to me. My mother’s name and death date were on the tab. March 15. The Ides of March.

I raised my eyes, questioning silently. He gestured that I should go ahead and open it.

I hadn’t anticipated feeling so much emotion. But as I turned the cover, I swear I felt my mother’s presence in that room. My eyes got wet.

David handed me a tissue from the box on his desk—a tool of the trade for us both, apparently—and left the room.

The information was clinical and dry There was a copy of her birth certificate, a copy of her death certificate, a copy of her burial certificate. Lots of certificates were required to die, apparently.

There was a receipt for the casket, a detail of her funeral
expenses, an order form for the headstone, on which had been written “delivered and installed.” A sheet of detailed funeral instructions were written in my handwriting. We had specified daisies instead of roses. My mom had always been more of a daisy chick.

I wiped my eyes and turned the pages until I found the description of her clothing and was surprised to see a Polaroid of her in her casket, paper-clipped to the description.

She was so pretty. My mother’s hair was red. True red. And her skin, freckled and translucent in life, was lovely in this photograph. With her green eyes closed, she could have been asleep if she’d been in her jammies. Instead, she wore the blue suit my father remembered. A blue suit she never liked, by the way. Powder blue with a white blouse. The suit was the giveaway. It made the whole image seem artificial and waxy. I made a note to specify somewhere that I be buried in a really great set of flannel pajamas.

My eyes moved to her hands. I’d almost forgotten why I came. They were folded at her waist. There it was. 1.2-carat diamond and platinum band. It was so much part of her hand that it belonged there.

David returned with a glass of ice and popped the top on a Dr. Pepper. I listened to the pleasant sound of fizzy liquid trickling over ice as he poured it for me.

“You okay?” he asked.

I took a sip. “I guess everyone gets emotional in your office, huh?”

“Most everyone. Did you find what you need?”

“Sort of. Do you have some time for me to ask you a few questions?”

“Sure.” He leaned back in his chair, the bobcat springing at him over his shoulder. He looked so … unsuspecting sitting there.

“My mother was buried in her wedding ring.” I slid the picture across the desk and pointed at it. I read the description of her burial attire from the file, ending with “one ring, platinum with diamond (wedding) on left ring finger.”

He nodded.

I reached in my purse and took out the little velvet pouch, emptying it into my hand. I handed the ring to him.

He looked at it and compared it to the picture, then looked up at me. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. It was returned to me recently.”

“Are you sure it’s the same ring?”

“I spoke with the jeweler that made it. It’s the same one.”

“Was someone trying to sell it back to you?” he asked.

“No. It was, boxed and wrapped. Someone clearly wanted me to have it back.”

I waited for the news to settle.

“We had one incident,” he said, rising from his chair and leaving the room. He came back with a file a few minutes later, saying “It must have been twenty years ago. A woman had been buried with a piece of jewelry, I think it was a pin or something, and someone later tried to sell it back to the family.” He thumbed through the file until he found what he wanted and returned to the desk reading a newspaper clipping.

“Shirley Jean Lucas. It was a ruby and diamond brooch. Very valuable. It had been on the Titanic with her or something. Some big deal. There was a newspaper article about her and the pin before she died.” He scanned the article. “They caught the guy Juan Ramon Rodriguez. An illegal immigrant that had gotten a job digging graves at the cemetery. They determined he’d pried open the casket before closing the grave.”

“So it is possible,” I said. “Someone might have stolen it out of the casket at some point.”

“It’s possible. It’s very rare, but it does happen.”

“Who would have opportunity other than the grave digger?”

“The mortician,” he said, “who in this case was my father. I think we can safely rule him out. Possibly the driver of the hearse. Usually there are two or three people from the funeral home staff on duty at a funeral, including the mortician. Probably in March of that year it would have been Everett Reed and Buddy Harriman.” He reached for my mother’s file and scanned the pages.

“Yep. They were both there.” He looked up at me. “They were with my father for years. They both retired when he died.”

“Do you think either of them would have done it?”

He shook his head. “Absolutely not. These were reliable men, longtime associates of my father’s. There are firm ethics in this business, obviously. Believe me, even in a small town shop like ours, there’s ample opportunity to steal. There’s a fortune in jewelry planted in the ground out there south of town. You have to have people working with you that you can trust. And besides, if that were going on, something would have come out over the years.”

“But who would know if anyone was stealing? Once they’re buried, no one would know.”

“True, but I’ve known these men all my life. Trust me, they’re not the type. It’s possible a grave digger or someone could have done it.”

“And how could I find out who the grave digger was?”

“You could talk to-Stan Harland over at the cemetery, but chances are you’re on a wild goose chase. Nobody exactly chooses grave digging as a career, you know? Those folks are hourly wage workers who come and go. It takes half an hour to train them to operate the backhoe and they’re hired. Know what I mean? Could have been anyone.”