Authors: Sarah Shaber
At the appropriate point, the minister instructed a very uncomfortable Bobby Hinton to throw earth on the coffin. "Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our sister departed, and we commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ."
"I need a cold beer," he said. "I didn't know this was going to get so intense!" He turned and walked quickly, very quickly, toward the parking lot and his car. He was followed by the minister and the president of the historical society. Simon heard the scraping of the old black woman's cane as she and her companion also left.
For some reason, neither Julia nor Simon moved. They watched silently as the grave was filled with dirt and the gravediggers smoothed the mound with the backs of their shovels. Simon helped them cover the grave with the flower arrangements that had come to the cemetery with the hearse. There were enough to cover the grave. The two biggest were from the Historic Preservation Society and Kenan College, but there were several from individuals. Simon wondered who would send flowers to the funeral of a woman who had been dead for seventy years.
The grave diggers piled their tools on a small wagon pulled by a converted golf cart and drove off. They were listening to old rock and roll from a boom box balanced on the dashboard. Simon could hear the beat of "Pretty Woman" reverberating long after the melody and vocals faded away down the road.
Simon and Julia looked out over the huge city of dead people. Old magnolias shaded its rolling hills from the hot, clear sun. The endless vista of markers was spotted with small Greek temples, little stone houses, and monoliths that gave the cemetery a skyline. Asymmetrical groups of gravestones were crisscrossed by paths that reminded Simon of streets and alleys in a neighborhood. Each plot was like a house with an address, inhabited by entire families and an occasional friend who had nowhere else to go. Simon had explored the graveyard many times, and he knew it even had its ghettos—the old black section and the Jewish corner. As in any southern cemetery worthy of the name, Confederate soldiers, both known and unknown, were proudly massed in troops and regiments, with their officers out front.
The cemetery was right smack in the middle of town, so the noise and bustle of daily life gave the impression that its residents were still somehow participating. Lawn mowers roared, dogs barked, traffic streamed by, and the band at the high school across the street was practicing for graduation.
"Do you have time to take a walk around?"
"Just for a few minutes. I work for the people, you know."
Simon led Julia toward the military section of the cemetery. They had to carefully pick their way around countless stones—not just headstones but also squared-off stones that surrounded plots and small markers without inscriptions that popped up in odd locations. They both tripped before Simon decided to get on a path.
They walked through the flower-draped marble arch that was the entrance to the Confederate cemetery. Simon was always fascinated by the sheer determination of the Daughters of the Confederacy to memorialize its unknown dead. It was a continuing process—many of the markers were new and the plantings around the graves were beautifully maintained.
Simon supposed that it had been a comfort to southern families in the 1860s to know that the son they never heard from again was being cared for by strangers not far from some bloody battlefield.
"This is incredible," Julia said. She walked down the rows, stopping to read each inscription. "I always assumed that people who died in battle were just sort of tossed into mass graves, if they were buried at all."
"Not at all," Simon said. "Of course, bodies couldn't be sent home in those days—no refrigeration. So they were buried locally, and families were always notified where the remains were, if at all possible. And locating and identifying remains from the Civil War, and other wars, too, was a process that went on for years. They're still bringing bones back from Vietnam."
Simon led Julia into a small marble replica of a Gothic church. It was about twenty feet square, and every possible surface of its walls was lined with tablets listing the local dead of past wars. There were hundreds and hundreds of names.
"Not only do survivors want to remember; they want some way to immortalize. So we have places like this, where people like you and me can wander around and read the names of people who are no longer remembered by anyone alive." So that just for a few seconds a beloved's name cast in cold metal might cross the consciousness of a breathing person, Simon thought.
Simon suddenly felt profoundly depressed. Standing in the cool shadows of the mausoleum surrounded by ghosts had overwhelmed the benefits of modern chemistry. He remembered that his parents were dead, his wife had left him, and he had no children. If he died tomorrow, how long would it be before his friends and family forgot him? How long before the only thing left of his life was an award-winning book on a library shelf ? And how long before that book was culled from the collection by a librarian making space for new books?
He remembered the words of Isaiah: "All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. . . . The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever."
Simon shot out of the little building, forcing himself out of the cool shadows into the hot sunshine. Astonished, Julia turned from reading a tablet dedicated to seven men who had died on a battleship in the Pacific as Simon abruptly vanished from her side. She saw him sit down outside on the base of a marble angel, which was just settling on a grave, its wings outstretched in landing. Simon was breathing as though he had run a mile very quickly.
The oddness of this behavior added to Julia's concern about her interest in Simon. He was not her type. He was shorter than she was, and he looked Jewish. He didn't own a suit, or he surely would have worn it to the funeral instead of the khaki pants and blue blazer he was wearing. His shirt and tie looked as if he'd ordered them from a catalog years ago. Every other time she had seen him, he was wearing blue jeans. To her, he seemed intelligent and personable, but she had heard he had emotional problems. He probably didn't make any more money than she did. And if he was so brilliant, why was he working at a small college when there were three major universities just a stone's throw away?
"Sorry," Simon said. "I just felt a little claustrophobic."
"It's okay," Julia said.
"Listen, do you like baseball?"
"I'll pick you up at six-thirty. We can eat there."
Great, Julia thought. Hot dogs. Maybe she should rethink this.
Simon was intensely relieved. He hadn't asked anyone on a date since graduate school, and it was easier than he had expected. The baseball game was a good idea, too. They could talk, yet they'd still have something to do if they ran out of conversation. He hoped she really did like baseball.
"My God!" he said. "I am an idiot!"
Julia began to wonder if she should think of a way out of their baseball date. "The people who came to the funeral!" he said.
"What on earth are you talking about? And you're hurting my hand."
Simon released her. "Sorry" he said. "But remember, Julia, what Sergeant Gates said when we were talking in his office? That in a modern-day homicide investigation, the next step would be to see who came to the victim's funeral? He said it again at the reception."
"Sure," Julia said. "That's because the people closest to the victim, who might know something, are likely to be there. Sometimes the perpetrator is, too. But he was just joking."
"How old would Anne Bloodworth be if she had lived? She was nineteen when she died in 1926. She would be eighty-nine years old now. There are surely some people alive in Raleigh who knew her."
"Come on, Simon!"
"Why not? The story about the funeral was in all the papers. Anyone who wanted to could just come on out to the gravesite. That woman was all dressed up, and she deliberately sat right there on that bench for the whole service. Then she left with everybody else."
"You know, you could be right."
"And then there are the flowers."
"The flowers?"
"It's possible," Julia said.
"I am an idiot,” Simon said. "Come on." "Where are we going?"
"Back to the grave site to get the names of who sent flowers and the florists. I'm going to try to find these people and see what they remember about what happened on April ninth, 1926."
ALL THE WAY HOME, SIMON TRIED TO FIGURE A WAY TO GET IN touch with the old black woman whom he had seen at Anne Bloodworth's funeral. The only thing he could think of was to advertise in the paper. "Will the two black women who watched Anne Bloodworth's funeral at Oakwood Cemetery on Tuesday please get in touch with Dr. Simon Shaw of Kenan College. You may hear something to your advantage." Who could resist such a Holmesian offer?
Simon parked his car at his house and walked to campus. He had fifteen minutes until class started and he wanted to work off the nervous energy he had built up since realizing that he had some new leads in his research into Anne Bloodworth's death. He and Julia had scrambled over the grave, looking at the cards on the flowers. He had five names, all women, from two different florists. He would contact the florists tomorrow and try to pry the addresses and phone numbers of their clients out of them.
About a block from campus, Simon forced his conscious mind to put Anne Bloodworth aside and think instead about North Carolina Colonial history. If he wasn't careful, his students were not going to get their money's worth, and he didn't need to give Alex Andrus any more ammunition just now.
Simon got home after class around six o'clock. Despite his hearty lunch, he was starving. Close inspection of his refrigerator and pantry revealed that his cupboard was bare except for cat food and raisin bran. Neither appealed to him just then, so he decided to venture out to the local Yuppie grocery store for gourmet takeout from the deli.
As Simon backed his Thunderbird out of his driveway, he closed all the windows. There had been a carjacking at the shopping center recently, and he didn't want to tempt any potential car thieves while he was in the grocery store.
Driving the narrow streets of Cameron Park was always a challenge. Residents insisted on parking their cars in the street instead of conveniently in driveways or alleys, so there was often room for just one car to pass. Everyone very politely took turns letting one another by at the narrow spots. Children on their way to and from the local elementary school had a way of darting out of side streets without warning. Naturally, the college kids taking shortcuts through the neighborhood drove much too fast and didn't pay attention to children or to the width of the streets.
The repair trucks that visited frequently to patch up the neighborhood's ancient utility lines always created traffic havoc. Simon came upon a big city truck parked on the diagonal as he went around the corner. There was no warning flag or sign, and Simon had to brake quickly to avoid hitting the traffic cones that blocked off the street. Two uniformed men with a serious jackhammer were breaking up the roadway while the street flooded with water. Simon swore under his breath, turned into a driveway, and headed in the opposite direction. A two-block trip had just turned into a ten-block detour around the neighborhood.
As he pulled to the side of the street to let a minivan loaded with children pass, Simon felt curiously light-headed, and his head began to ache. This was ridiculous. How could he be that hungry after having two helpings of the buffet at the funeral?
Simon pulled out into the street again, just in time to miss a dog darting across the street and fetching up on a curb two inches from a newly planted red maple. Now his heart was pounding as well as his head. What the hell was going on here? He was just going to the grocery store, and he had narrowly missed having two accidents. Well, he had read that most accidents happen less than a mile from home. Make that two blocks, in his case. This just reinforced his determination to walk or to ride his bike more.
There were no other vehicles in sight, so Simon left his car on the curb for a minute to collect himself. His heartbeat slowed down, but his head still hurt. He backed carefully off the curb, avoiding the bright red tricycle behind him. He set off again, driving less than fifteen miles an hour now.