She didn’t answer, just stared up at the ceiling. Every so often she blinked. Otherwise, her hands on her chest, she looked as if she were laid out in death. He sat there, watching her uncomfortably, and in a while he got up to go downstairs and make the soup. He didn’t want to go away from her. All the same, he felt relieved.
Her voice stopped him at the door. “Don’t bring any milk.” The strength in it surprised him. He stood rigidly, his back to her, and looking out the open doorway he saw Sarah small and gray in the blackness of the hall. “What was wrong with it?” Claire asked behind him.
He waited and turned. “Poison.”
She kept staring at the ceiling. He didn’t move.
“Natural or what?”
“Do you mean was it put in the milk?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
He couldn’t understand it. She should have been half-unconscious.
“Kess,” he said. “Or some of his men.”
“Because of the article?”
“It looks that way.”
Slowly she turned her head to him. Her eyes had no whites.
“You killed Ethan.”
Out in the hall he heard Sarah stop breathing.
“No,” he said quietly. “It was Kess or some of his men.”
“No, you killed Ethan.”
The drug, he thought. It hadn’t done any good at all. It had maybe even made her worse.
“Please, Claire,” he said. “Sarah’s listening out in the hall. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
Her voice was even stronger. “I know you didn’t need to write those things. You knew what might happen if you did.”
“I didn’t write anything Kess didn’t say I could.”
“That’s not the way he wanted you to write them. You made a deal with him. Remember?”
He had to look away.
“Didn’t he warn you? Didn’t he say that if you treated him like all the others had”—she took a long breath—“and made him out to be some lunatic he was going to get you?”
He couldn’t answer.
“Didn’t he?”
“But he went into hiding. He was in so much trouble, who’d have thought he’d make good on his threat?”
“You killed my baby. I’m warning you myself now. Don’t go to sleep. You go to sleep and so help me God I’ll kill you.”
14
He spent the night downstairs in the living room. He tried to read but couldn’t. Trying to write was impossible. He kept thinking of the phone, and it finally rang at eleven. Even expecting it, he was frozen a second before he was up and hurrying down the hall to answer it. If Claire picked up her extension and the voice started rasping, that would be her limit.
The man on duty already had the reels turning on the tape recorder. “Who knows, maybe it’s nothing. It could be just your mother.”
“My mother’s been dead two years.” He picked up the phone, and it was one of Claire’s girl friends. That didn’t matter. He started shaking anyhow.
“I know it’s late,” the woman said, “but I need to ask Claire about—“
“She isn’t feeling well. She’ll call you back tomorrow.”
“I hope it isn’t serious.”
“She’ll call you back,” he said and hung up.
He couldn’t help wondering if she was the same woman who had been breathing on the phone to Webster. No, he told himself. That’s insane. You need to stop thinking like that. She’s Claire’s best friend.
But he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind. “You look awful,” Webster told him. He came at seven the next morning with a new man for the phone. But Webster didn’t look good either. His big-boned face was slack and pale, and his eyes were for the first time dull, and he looked like he had been up all night himself. He even wore the same gray suit, out of shape now.
“It was ethylene glycol,” Webster said. “And they didn’t get it from a plant nursery, they got it from a garage. Some kinds of antifreeze and windshield cleaners have it in them. It’s a little sweet, and if you’d swallowed some of it in the milk, you would maybe have noticed the taste just before it killed you. It only takes a drop or two. The trouble is, so many people buy antifreeze and windshield cleaner there’s no way to trace them all.”
“You came all the way over here at this hour just to tell me you can’t trace whoever bought the poison?”
“At least you know I’m being honest. If I tell you the worst, then you’ll know to believe me when I tell you something good.”
“So for God sake tell me something good.”
“Right now I haven’t anything. You were right, the FBI couldn’t help us much. The man who delivered the milk seems like he wasn’t involved, but we’re watching him anyhow. He left the milk around six, so there was plenty of time for somebody else to slip the poison into it. The autopsy’s finished. You can have your child’s body released to the undertaker.”
At first he didn’t know what Webster was talking about. Then he realized. A funeral. He had so little accepted Ethan’s death that he hadn’t even thought there would be a funeral.
“What is it?” Webster said. “What’s the matter?”
He shook his head and phoned the church as soon as Webster left.
“I’m sorry,” the housekeeper said. “The fathers are all out saying Masses now. The rectory hours aren’t until nine.”
So he waited and smoked from the new pack of cigarettes that Webster had given him before he left. They tasted like musty cotton batting, hard to draw on, and he wouldn’t have trusted them if he had not already without thinking smoked the others Webster had given him the day before.
“You take some slivers from this plastic. You slip them into your target’s cigarette. The fumes are so lethal, one drag later and he’s dead.”
He had used that in his article, making certain not to mention the kind of plastic. But what was the difference? he thought emptily. Christ, wasn’t there anything that couldn’t be used to kill someone?
The priest said there was an opening for a funeral in two days. He looked in the phone book for undertakers, but there was no listing.
See
FUNERAL DIRECTORS, it said. Sure. Of course, he told himself. That’s what I need. A damned director. His instinct was to pick the first name on the list and be done with it. But he kept thinking of Kess and how the first name on the list was obvious, so he slid down to the next from the last. He knew it wouldn’t take long for Kess or his men to find out which undertaker he was using, but at least this way he wasn’t helping them any to set up some kind of trap.
“There’s been an extensive autopsy,” he told the man on the phone. “I’m not sure if my son can lie in open state.”
The voice was warm and smooth, like a minister on the radio. “If that is what you’d like, sir, we’ll do our best to arrange it.”
He thought a moment. “Yes. My wife will want that. I can’t come down to pick out a casket or anything. Please give him the very best you have.”
The voice was puzzled. “Certainly, sir. Whatever you wish.”
“I can’t go over to the hospital and sign the release papers either. You’ll need to bring them here for me to sign before you can get the body.”
The voice was twice as puzzled. “Well, yes, certainly, sir. May I say that we all of us sympathize with you in your time of mourning.”
“Whatever you want. Go on and say it.”
15
An hour later a priest showed up at the front door. He was stooped and wrinkled. His hair was thin and white like spider’s silk, his black suit specked here and there with dust. He said he was the pastor, but he had never seen him before and he had never heard Claire mention a priest like this either, so they sat in a triangle in the living room, the two of them and the detective from the phone.
The priest apologized for coming around so unexpectedly. He obviously didn’t want to talk about what he’d come for. “It’s a small matter, I’m sure,” he said, fidgeting on the sofa. “But we really should discuss it. You can’t imagine how I dislike bothering you in your grief.” His voice was hushed and unsettling, as if he were straining to whisper in the vestibule before Mass.
“What is it?” He still wasn’t sure this was really a priest. He thought of calling the church to make sure. The detective had his hand near his shoulder holster under his jacket.
Again the reluctance. “I hardly think it’s anything serious, I’m sure it isn’t, but you see, I was checking through our records as a matter of course, and—well—you are Roman Catholic, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And your family?”
“Yes.”
“Do you attend Mass regularly?”
“My wife and daughter go every Sunday.”
“Yourself?”
“I haven’t gone in ten years.”
“Not even to make your Easter duty?”
“That’s right.”
The priest looked out the front window for a moment. He cleared his throat. “May I ask why you don’t attend?”
“They changed the Mass into English, and then they brought in the guitars.”
“A few of us very much regret those changes as well. In spite of them, you should have completed your Easter duty so that you could remain in the Church and try to save your soul. You don’t believe, is that it?”
“That’s right.” He sounded like he was in confession.
“Not in the Church?”
“Not in God. Excuse me, Father, but what is it you want to say?”
“Perhaps I already understand. After I checked through our records, I phoned the other parishes, and I learned from the courthouse that your child was born here—but I find no record of his baptism.”
Almighty God, you sent your only Son
to
rescue us from the slavery of sin and to give us the freedom only your sons and daughters enjoy. We now pray for this child who will have to face the world with
its
temptations and fight the devil in all his cunning. Your Son died and rose again to save us. By His victory over sin and death, bring this child out of the power of darkness, strengthen him with
the
grace
of Christ, and watch over him at every step in life’s journey. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
He saw now what was coming, and he knew what it was going to do to Claire. He didn’t know how he could tell her. Principle, he thought. The things I have done for principle. “Yes,” he said quietly. “The baby was not baptized.” He was sure now that this was a priest. Not even Kess or his men would have thought of this.
“My dear man, was there a just reason?”
“The baby was very sick for the first two months, and we couldn’t take the chance of going outside with him.”
“But surely—how old did you say he was on the phone? four months? five?—surely by then he was well enough to be taken to the church.”
“I didn’t want him baptized,” he answered, “because I wasn’t sure I wanted him raised Catholic.”
“Baptism has no denomination. It admits anyone to the possibility of Christian salvation, regardless of sect.”
“If you believe.”
“But it wasn’t yours to bargain disbelief against the welfare of his soul. Are you absolutely certain that no one baptized the child? A nurse at the hospital perhaps? Or your wife when the child was sick? It doesn’t require a priest. Anyone can do it, and with ordinary water.”
I
baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
“No,” he said. “I’m sure no one did it.”
“This is very difficult.”
“Go on. I know what you’re going to say anyhow.”
The priest’s words were formal, a refuge into the language of pronouncement. “Canon law forbids a funeral Mass for your child. It also forbids his burial in consecrated ground. Since the child had not yet reached the age of reason, he could not have committed any sin, and therefore he is not liable to the damnation of hell. He will repose in the state of limbo, free from the pain of the eternal fire, subject only to the great frustration of never being allowed to participate in the beatific vision of God’s glory.”
16
So they went that night with two detectives to the funeral home. He had told Claire everything by then, expecting her to accuse him again, to scream and hit him, at least do something, but she had not reacted at all. She had been silent all the hours before, and she had not spoken after, and it was as if she were alone somewhere back in her mind, unaware of anything around her. One detective went in the car with them; the other drove behind to watch for anyone following. At the funeral home, the two of them got out first to scan the darkened tree-lined street before they said it seemed all right to go in.
The place was soft rugs and muffled voices. There were rich red, thickly gathered drapes on all the walls. Rose light filtered through them, and from every wall an electric organ played muted minor chords that went on smoothly, never ending. Funeral Muzak, he thought, feeling suffocated.
He did not like having Sarah along, but he would have worried leaving her away from him, even with the guard that stayed behind to watch the house, so he brought some books for her to read, and cookies and milk from a grocery store on the way, certain these at least were safe to eat, and he asked an attendant for a place apart where she could take them.
“But I want to see Ethan. Why can’t I see Ethan?” Sarah asked.
“Because he won’t be like when you knew him.”
The electric organ played on thinly.
“He’ll look different?”
“No, but he won’t be the same.”
She mulled that over. “He’ll look like a doll?”
The image struck him horribly. “Does that idea bother you?”
“No,” she answered. “I guess not.”
“Then that’s what he’ll look like.”
She was still mulling it over as the attendant led her away. One detective immediately followed, soft across the rug. The other looked in all the rooms, glancing repeatedly toward the front door.
Almost at once the undertaker silently appeared. It seemed his shoes barely touched the rug. His suit was black, perfectly fitting broadcloth. He was tall; his face was thin and gray and pursed with consolation—and like the priest, there was a question of whether Kess had gotten to him. He looked toward the detective watching the front door. Then he held out his hand.
“Our deepest sympathies.” The undertaker’s handshake was soft and dry. “Your son is this way. I hope our arrangements have been to your liking.”