Read Afraid of the Dark Online
Authors: James Grippando
J
ack’s voice cracked for the third time. Lengthy eulogies were inappropriate at a Jewish funeral on a Friday afternoon, but delivery of even a short one was painful.
“Neil Goderich was my mentor and my friend,” Jack said, fighting back tears. “And he was the kindest soul I’ve ever met.”
The entire memorial service was kept short, as it was the wish of the Goderich family to bury Neil before sundown on Friday, rather than hold the body over until after the Sabbath. Jack was the only gentile among the pallbearers, so the family provided him a yarmulke. The casket was a simple wooden box adorned only with the Star of David. The procession stopped seven times, in accordance with Jewish custom, each stop symbolizing the liberation from the vanity of this world and transfer to the world without vanity.
An easy transition for Neil, a man of remarkable humility.
By the time they reached the burial plot, the sun was low in a cloudless blue sky. A slight chill in the air forced Neil’s widow to drape a sweater over her shoulders, another layer of black atop her traditional black dress. About twenty other mourners gathered at graveside. Among them was Theo Knight, who was forever indebted to “Mr. Goodwrench ” for mentoring Jack through a case that could have ended with Theo in the electric chair. A rabbi, the only speaker at the cemetery, led prayers in Hebrew and in English. As the casket was lowered slowly into the grave, one verse from Psalm 91, in particular, caught Jack’s attention:
“Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night, nor of the arrow that flieth by day; Of the pestilence that walketh in darkness . . .”
Terror by night . . . darkness . . . The Dark.
Jack shook off thoughts of how Neil might have died—and who could have murdered him.
One by one, the mourners stepped forward for
k’vurah
. Jack followed Neil’s brother. He took the shovel from the pile of dirt. Using the back of the shovel—a showing of how hard it is to bury a loved one—Jack pitched a scoop of earth onto the wooden casket below. It landed somewhere in the darkness with a hollow
clump
. Jack hadn’t expected it, couldn’t even really explain it, but that sound triggered a flood of memories, and it sounded like so many things—all at once. It was like Jack’s eager knock on the door when he showed up at Neil’s office for his first interview out of law school. Like the bang of a gavel when Jack tried his first case with Neil at his side. Like the clop of Neil’s vintage Earth Shoes, which he’d resoled a half-dozen times since the 1970s.
“Good-bye, my friend,” Jack whispered through the lump in his throat.
I
t was after dark when Jack reached the Sunny Gardens Nursing Home.
Grandpa Swyteck was in bed, staring at the television on the credenza, as Jack entered the room. The other bed was empty, and a nurse was emptying drawers and bagging up the roommate’s belongings. Jack didn’t have to ask what that meant, not in a place where most residents were eighty-five or older. Just twenty-four hours earlier, Jack would have bet his car that the next funeral in his life was going to be his grandfather’s.
Life’s weird.
The Goderich family returned to the house after the internment. Shivah—the period of mourning when visitors would stop by to express their condolences—would not begin until after the Sabbath. Although Neil’s widow had invited Jack to join them for Shabbat eve dinner, he sensed that it was best to leave the family to itself. As much as Jack didn’t want to be alone, he didn’t feel like stopping by Cy’s Place to watch Theo work. He wished Andie were back, but he hadn’t heard from her, which surely meant that, wherever she was, news of Neil’s death had not yet reached her.
“You can take a break,” Jack told the hired bodyguard. Theo had kept his promise and found serious muscle to sit with Grandpa after the threat. This guy had to be six feet eight, Jack estimated as he watched him leave the room.
“Hi, Grandpa,” said Jack.
The older man gazed in Jack’s direction, showing little reaction at first. Truthfully, Jack barely recognized
him
anymore. He’d shed twenty-five pounds in the nursing home, and it showed in his face. Jack had always known his grandfather as having long wisps of silver hair, but now a buzz cut was necessary to keep him from yanking it out in fits of confusion. Breathing through his nose was too much effort anymore, so his mouth was constantly agape. Finally, the recognition flashed on Grandpa’s face.
“Jack, how are you?”
Jack smiled. It was hit-and-miss with Grandpa, some good days and some bad days. Nighttime was generally tougher than daylight. Sunset was worst of all—sundowner syndrome, they called it.
The nurse kept busy packing, but she glanced over and said, “We didn’t have a good sunset at all today. Lots of confusion. But he seems to be coming back a little. You can give it a try. He may have a few good minutes left for you tonight.”
Jack held his tongue. He knew she was trying to be helpful, and he was fully aware that his grandfather’s condition was irreversible. But it still bothered him the way so many people felt free to talk about his grandfather’s condition right in front of the man, as if he were already gone.
Jack reached through the bedside restraining bars and took his grandfather’s hand. Grandpa’s gaze slowly rolled in Jack’s direction. A little smile creased his lips, and he raised a crooked finger, pointing at Jack’s head.
“You see?” said Grandpa. “I told you.”
Jack was confused, but then it hit him. He’d been in such a daze that he was still wearing the yarmulke from Neil’s funeral, completely unaware of it.
“I wore it out of respect for a friend,” said Jack as he removed it. “We buried Neil today.”
“Neil who?”
It saddened Jack that his grandfather didn’t remember. “Neil Goderich.”
“Goderich? That sounds about as Jewish as Petrak.”
“The original family name was Goldsmith. They changed it to hide from the Nazis.”
Grandpa nodded—as if he truly understood—and it had Jack’s mind working overtime. For more than a week, Jack had been thinking about his conversation with Grandpa’s lady friend—specifically, Ruth’s mention of how the stage play about Pio Nono and Edgardo Mortara had deeply affected Jack’s grandfather. Then, in Washington, Neil had explained his own family name change, which prompted Jack to do some research on Jews who had fought to survive by hiding their Jewishness from the Nazis. Sometimes a name change was just the start. Some Jewish children were sent to live with gentile families. In the saddest cases, young children whose parents were taken away to die in concentration camps grew up in non-Jewish homes without knowing that they were Jewish. As the Greatest Generation passed, deathbeds and nursing homes had a way of letting those secrets loose.
Jack presumed that his grandfather still had relatives named Petrak in the Czech Republic. He was starting to wonder if he had lost other relatives on his great-grandmother’s side—perhaps those who hadn’t changed their name to Petrak to survive the war.
“Grandpa?” asked Jack.
His eyes were closed. Jack was about to nudge him, but his cell rang. Not even the Carrie Underwood ringtone that Andie had programmed into Jack’s phone was enough to get a reaction from Grandpa. The caller ID said
PRIVATE
, and Jack had a feeling that it was Andie. He was right.
“I’m so sorry,” said Andie. “I just heard about Neil.”
Jack rose and went to the other side of the room, away from Grandpa, to bring Andie up to speed. He hit the highlights quickly, ending with the double murder of Neil and his new client—and how it was no coincidence that they were on a mission to unravel one of the threads that seemed to lead all the way back to a secret detention facility in Prague.
“I’m coming home,” said Andie.
“How long can you stay?”
“I’m putting in a request for at least a week. Longer, if I can swing it.”
That was good news on one level, but it gave Jack pause. “Honey, I want to see you, and I’m definitely down in the dumps. But I don’t want your career to take a hit over this.”
“Don’t you understand how dangerous this has become? Your client and your partner are dead: first Jamal Wakefield, now Neil. Has it occurred to you that someone out there might think that the third one’s the charm?”
It had, especially after the threat against his grandfather, but Jack didn’t want to go there.
“Harry!” Grandpa shouted, calling for Jack’s father. “Harry, where are you?”
Jack asked Andie to hold on, went to the bedside, and spoke in a soothing tone. “Harry is not here, Grandpa.”
“Harry!” he shouted.
The nurse muttered under her breath about his “combativeness,” and she grabbed him hard by the wrists. Jack reached over and grabbed hers. She didn’t seem to like it, either.
“Grandpa, it’s okay,” Jack said as he stroked his head. Grandpa settled down, but he continued to mumble about Pio Nono and his curious obsession with Pope Pius IX.
Andie’s voice was on the phone. “Jack, is everything okay?”
“Yes. Just a little confusion, that’s all.”
Jack glanced at the nurse, and she seemed to take his cue that gentle was better, even if it did take a little more time than grabbing an octogenarian like a steer and strapping him to the bed. Jack stepped aside but stayed in the room to keep an eye on things.
“Listen to me,” said Andie. “I’m coming home as soon as I can. Hopefully this weekend. But promise me that you are not going to take this into your own hands. You have to let the police do their work.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t say ‘sure.’ I want you to promise that you
won’t
.”
Jack struggled for a response. As the future Mrs. Swyteck, Andie was perfectly within her rights to reel him in, and her concern wasn’t at all out of line. There was just one problem. Neil was gone. And he was never coming back.
It was personal now.
“I promise you,” said Jack, “that I will never make you a promise that I can’t keep.”
C
huck Mays woke early on Sunday, skipped breakfast, and drove to the cemetery. Vince and Sam rode along, the dog in the backseat with his snout out the window. The Maserati handled the curves along the tree-lined highway with ease, and the way Sam was breathing in another perfect south Florida morning almost made Chuck jealous. It was Chuck’s intention to express his condolences to Neil Goderich’s widow at some point. But not today. In fact, he was nowhere near Miami Beach, where Neil had been buried two days earlier. Charlotte Jane Memorial Park was in Coconut Grove. It was McKenna’s final resting place.
Sunday would have been her nineteenth birthday.
Chuck parked on Franklin Avenue and followed the sidewalk around the corner to the main entrance. Older than the city of Miami itself, and situated on a few silent acres in West Coconut Grove, Charlotte Jane Memorial Park was in some ways the departed soul of a neighborhood that was rich in history and plagued by crime. Multimillion-dollar estates lay between the bay to the east and, to the west, the old Grove ghetto, where gunfights in run-down bars and package stores were all too common, and the “have-nots” tried not to get caught in the crossfire. After dark, street corners on Grand Avenue could service just about anyone’s bad habit, from gangs with their random hits to doctors and lawyers who ventured out into the night in deference to their addictions. But within Charlotte Jane’s iron gates rested the early settlers who sailed across the Florida Straits from the Bahamas. Shada’s family was from the islands, and she had chosen this historic cemetery for McKenna. Chuck was ashamed to admit it, but he had been too distraught to make such decisions. The fact that it was within a stone’s throw of south Florida’s oldest African-American Baptist church hadn’t fazed his wife. Shada’s father was Muslim, but religion had never been important in her life.
Chuck stood beneath the arching ironwork at the entrance gate and drew a breath. Even by Coconut Grove standards, Charlotte Jane was a unique burial ground. As was the old Bahamian way, bodies rested aboveground in tombs that looked like stone caskets. Tombs were so close together that visitors barely had enough room to step between them. Some were their original stone color, but others were painted white or silver and looked brilliant in the Florida sun. Many were in disrepair, however, either deteriorating with age or the target of vandals. Spanish moss hung from sprawling oak limbs like dusty old spiderwebs from a chandelier, and the overall impression was more one of haunted than hallowed ground. Chuck was fine with it. McKenna probably would have found it cool that Michael Jackson had filmed part of his famous
Thriller
video here—or at least that was the Miami lore.
“You okay?” asked Vince.
“I guess so.”
A large sign at the entrance warned him to lock his car and take his valuables with him. He hadn’t bothered. Visiting his daughter’s grave made it impossible to give a hoot about petty theft.
“Damn it,” said Vince.
Chuck turned and saw his friend sitting on a tomb and rubbing his shin. Vince’s guide dog had a sorry look on his face.
“What happened?” asked Chuck.
“Either I tripped over a tomb or a dead guy jumped out and kicked me in the shin. What do you think happened?”
Chuck gave him a minute, but he didn’t dare help him up. He knew how much Vince hated that.
“Sorry,” Vince said, rising. “I didn’t mean to snap at you like a royal smart-ass. Especially here. Today of all days.”
“Forget it,” said Chuck. He turned and continued toward the north end of the cemetery. Sam followed, and Vince was right behind his guide dog.
McKenna was buried beneath two large oak trees in one of the oldest sections of the cemetery. Hers was among relatively few tombs from the twenty-first century. The cemetery had been essentially full for years. Space came available only as the oldest tombs, holding bodies unknown, disintegrated. But it wasn’t just the new tombs that were decorated with flowers. Even Mrs. Blackshear, “Asleep in Jesus” since 1927, had a vase filled with plastic carnations. It was a touching gesture, even if by a stranger, but it saddened Chuck to wonder who might visit McKenna in eighty, ninety, or a hundred years.
And then he froze: A hundred yards ahead, between two oak trees, someone was at McKenna’s grave.
“What’s wrong?” asked Vince, sensing his vibe.
“Wait here,” said Chuck.
He started toward the grave, moving quickly between the tombs—much faster than he could have with Vince following behind him. The going was getting tougher, however, as he moved into the oldest part of the cemetery. Tombs were so crowded together that he had to put one foot directly in front of the other to walk between them. He was about fifty yards away when he noticed that it was a woman at McKenna’s grave. She was on her knees, clearing away weeds around the marker. But she wasn’t dressed like a maintenance worker. Her head was covered by a large scarf, hijab style.
Chuck picked up the pace until he was almost at a jog, but with his eyes riveted on the woman who was wearing the hijab scarf, he tripped and knocked over a porcelain vase. It crashed into pieces against the concrete base of a tomb.
The woman at McKenna’s grave looked up. Just thirty yards separated them, and Chuck’s gaze cut like a laser over the ragged rows of tombs. The scarf covered her hair, but she wore no veil or sunglasses. She stared back at him for a moment—and then she sprang to her feet and ran.
“Stop!” Chuck shouted. He started after her, but the tight spaces between tombs made it impossible to gather speed. The north end of the cemetery had no fence, and the woman was getting away.
“Wait!” Chuck shouted, but the gap between them was widening. Meaning no disrespect to the dead, Chuck hopped up on a tomb and ran at full speed, leaping from one to the next the way superheroes leaped from building to building. The woman was doing the same, but she was much lighter on her feet. Chuck was losing ground.
Come on, Mays, faster!
He picked up the pace, but the older crypts were spaced so irregularly that it was hard to hit his stride. He hopped from a white tomb to a silver one, and then to a crumbling marker for a pioneer unknown. He was keeping one eye on the woman, who was pulling away, when he caught sight of trouble. Vandals had destroyed the next tomb in his path. The lid was a pile of rocks, and the empty tomb lay open. Chuck reached for another gear and soared right over the battered tomb. He landed hard—all 240 pounds of him—on the next tomb over. It was a century old, however, and it couldn’t support his weight. Chuck crashed through the lid like a human cannonball. He was almost up to his knees in a smashed tomb, but the pain made the horror of it almost irrelevant.
“My leg!”
Chuck pulled himself out, rolled onto the adjacent tomb, and lay on his back. Surely the woman in the hijab scarf was long gone, and even if she weren’t, giving chase was out of the question. His only hope was that he hadn’t destroyed his ankle. He was staring up at the sky, trying to bring the pain under control, when he heard Vince approaching with his guide dog.
“I heard you yelling at someone,” said Vince, “and then a crash. What happened?”
Chuck groaned, then fed Vince his own line: “Either I tripped over a tomb or a dead guy jumped out and kicked me in the shin.”
“I’m serious,” said Vince. “Were you chasing after someone?”
Chuck was winded from the chase and needed to catch his breath. He listened for a car engine or other sound of the woman’s getaway, but the streets around the cemetery were quiet, and he was still trying to understand what had just happened.
“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” said Chuck.
“I already think you’re crazy.”
Chuck would have laughed under any other circumstances. Instead, he sat up, scratched his head in disbelief, and said, “I think I just saw Shada.”