The Best of Sisters in Crime (39 page)

Martha patted
Mrs. Bonachek’s scaly hands. Not to worry. We would take care of everything.
And we did. Put off from our spring tea by the sudden change in the weather, we
diverted our considerable social energy to the memorial services.

I found a nice
wooden box of adequate size in the doctor’s storeroom and painted it white.
Martha went up to the attic and brought down her beautiful pink silk gown and
an old feather pillow. She didn’t even wince as she ran her sewing shears up
the delicate hand-turned seams. I wept. She hugged me and talked about God’s
will being done and Mrs. Bonachek’s peasant strength. I was thinking about the
spoiled dress.

We worked half
the night. We padded the inside of the box with feathers and lined it with pink
silk. We made a tiny dress and bonnet to match. The doctor had talked the
county into letting us have a plot in the cemetery. It was such a little bit of
ground, they couldn’t refuse.

We contacted the
parish priest, but he didn’t want to perform the services. The county cemetery
wasn’t consecrated and he didn’t know the Bonacheks. We only hoped it wasn’t a
rabbi that was needed because there wasn’t one for miles. Martha reasoned that
heaven was heaven and the Methodist preacher would have to do, since he was
willing.

By the following
afternoon everything was ready. The snow had turned to slush but our spirits
weren’t dampened. We set off, wearing prim navy-blue because Martha said it was
more appropriate for a child’s funeral than somber black.

When the doctor
drove us up to the small house, the entire Bonachek family, scrubbed and
brushed, turned out to greet us.

Janos smiled for
the first time I could remember. He fingered a frayed necktie that hung below
his twine belt. He looked very awkward, but I knew he felt elegant. Everyone,
even Boya, wore some sort of shoes. It was a gala, if solemn event.

Mr. Bonachek, a
scrawny, pale-faced man, relieved us of the makeshift coffin and led us into
the single bedroom. The baby, wrapped in a scrap of calico, lay on the dresser.
I unfolded the little silk dress on the bed while Martha shooed Mr. Bonachek
out of the room.

“We should wash
her,” Martha said. A catch in her voice showed that her courage was failing.
She began to unwrap the tiny creature. It was then I recognized the calico—Mrs.
Bonachek’s faded apron.

I thought of the
nine sons lined up in the next room and Mrs. Bonachek sitting in the field with
her apron spread on the cold ground beside her. Mrs. Bonachek who was rich in
sons.

I needed to know
how many babies, how many girls, had died before this little one wrapped in the
apron. Janos would tell me, Janos who had been so matter-of-fact about the
routine business of death. I hadn’t the courage at that moment to ask him.

Martha was
working hard to maintain her composure. She had the baby dressed and gently
laid her in the coffin. The baby was beautiful, her porcelain face framed in soft
pink silk. I couldn’t bear to see her in the box, like a shop-window doll.

I wanted to talk
with Martha about the nagging suspicion that was taking shape in my mind. I
hesitated too long.

Janos appeared
at the door and I didn’t want him to hear what I had to say. Actually, his face
was so thin and expectant that it suddenly occurred to me that we hadn’t
brought any food for a proper wake.

“Janos,” Martha
whispered. “Tell your mother she may come in now.”

Janos led his
mother only as far as the threshold when she stopped stubbornly. I went to her,
put my arm around her and impelled her to come closer to the coffin. When she
resisted, I pushed. I was desperate to see some normal emotion from her. If she
had none, what hope was there for Janos?

Finally, she shuddered
and reached out a hand to touch the baby’s cheek. She said something in her
native language. I could understand neither the words nor the tone. It could
have been a prayer, it could have been a curse.

When I let her
go, she turned and looked at me. For the barest instant there was a flicker in
her eyes that showed neither fear nor guilt about what I might have seen the
afternoon before. I was disquieted because, for the length of that small
glimmer, she was beautiful. I saw who she might have become at another time, in
a different place. When the tears at last came to my eyes, they were for her
and not for the baby.

Janos and Boya
carried the coffin out to the bare front room and set it on the table. The
preacher arrived and he gave his best two-dollar service even though there
would be no payment. He spoke to the little group, the Bonacheks, Martha, the
doctor and I, as if we were a full congregation. I don’t remember what he said.
I wasn’t listening. I traced the pattern of the cheap, worn linoleum floor with
my eyes and silently damned the poverty of the place and the cold that seeped
in under the door.

We were a small,
depressed-looking procession, walking down the muddy road to the county
cemetery at the edge of town, singing along to hymns only the preacher seemed
to know. At the gravesite, the preacher prayed for the sinless soul and
consigned her to the earth. It didn’t seem to bother him that his principal
mourners didn’t understand a word he said.

Somehow, the
doctor dissuaded Martha from inviting all of the Bonacheks home for supper—she,
too, had belatedly thought about food.

As we walked
back from the cemetery, I managed to separate the doctor from the group. I told
him what was on my mind, what I had seen in the fields the day before. She had
left her bundled apron at the end of a furrow and gone back to her work. I
could not keep that guilty knowledge to myself.

The doctor wasn’t
as shocked as I expected him to be. But he was a man of worldly experience and
I was merely a dairyman’s daughter—the oldest child, the only girl in a family
of five boys.

As the afternoon
progressed, the air grew colder, threatening more snow. To this day, whenever I
am very cold, I think of that afternoon. Janos, of course, fills that memory.

I think the
little ceremony by strangers was a sort of coming out for him. He was suddenly
not only a man of the community, but of the world beyond the road that ran
between his farm and the schoolhouse, out where mountains and oceans were a
possibility. It had been a revelation.

Janos called out
to me and I stopped to wait for him, watching him run. He seemed incredibly
small, outlined against the flat horizon. He was golden, and oddly ebullient.

Pale sunlight
glinted off his bright head as he struggled through the slush on the road. Mud
flew off his big boots in thick gobs and I thought his skinny legs would break
with the weight of it. He seemed not to notice—mud was simply a part of the
season’s change, a harbinger of warmer days.

When he caught
up, Janos was panting and red in the face. He looked like a wise little old man
for whom life held no secrets. As always, he held himself with a stiff dignity
that I imagine suited him quite well when he was draped in his judge’s robes.

Too breathless
to speak, he placed in my hand a fresh blue crocus he had plucked from the
slush.

“Very pretty,” I
said, moved by his gesture. I looked into his smiling face and found courage. “What
was the prayer your mother said for the baby?”

He shrugged and
struggled for breath. Then he reached out and touched the delicate flower that
was already turning brown from the warmth of my hand.

“No prayer,” he
said. “It’s what she says. ‘Know peace. Your sisters in heaven wait to embrace
you.’”

I put my hand on
his shoulder and looked up at the heavy, gathering clouds. “If it’s snowing
tomorrow,” I said, “which books shall I bring?”

Back to table of
contents

Margaret Maron has two
major series characters to satisfy her fans. Sigrid Harald is an unsentimental,
compassionate NYPD detective who appears in eight novels, including
Corpus Christmas,
nominated for an Agatha, an
Anthony, and an American Mystery Award. In 1993,
Bootlegger’s Daughter
introduced Judge Deborah Knott, and
went on to win an Edgar, an Agatha, an Anthony, and a Macavity, the first time
a single novel has earned all four awards.
Shooting at Loons
was an Agatha and Anthony nominee;
Up Jumps the Devil
won an Agatha. The fifth in the
series,
Killer Market,
for
which Margaret was given the Key to the City of High Point, N.C.
Shoveling Smoke,
a short story collection, will be
out soon.

In “Lieutenant Harald and
the Impossible Gun,” a whole kindergarten class comes under suspicion when
Sigrid Harald focuses on the little details of a case.

The calendar
said late September, but summer
hung on in the
city like a visiting uncle who’d overstayed his welcome and sat out on the
front stoop in a smelly sweatshirt, scratching his belly and smoking a cheap
cigar all day. The unseasonable heat had blanketed New York for so long that
the air felt stale and grimy, as if every wino in the city had breathed it
before, replacing oxygen with cheap muscatel and sewer fumes. Even the trees
along the street and scattered through dozens of vest pocket parks drooped
beneath a sun that held in check the cleansing autumn storms that should strip
away wilted, half-turned leaves and leave the clean grace of bare limbs.

In the
air-conditioned coolness of her office, Lieutenant Sigrid Harald looked up from
a report she was typing to see Detective Tildon standing in the open doorway.

“Could we talk
to you a minute, Lieutenant?” His normally cheerful round face wore a look of
serious worry. Behind him, equally solemn, stood a younger uniformed patrolman
of similar height and the same sandy-colored hair.

Sigrid pushed
the typing stand aside, swung her chair back around to face them and motioned
to the chairs in front of her neatly ordered desk. Tildon hesitated a moment
before electing to close the door. “Lieutenant, this is my cousin. Officer
James Boyle.”

As he named his
cousin’s current Brooklyn posting, the woman acknowledged the introduction with
a formal nod.

“Glad to meet
you, ma’am,” said Boyle, but his heart had sunk at first glance. Tillie had
made the lieutenant sound like Wonder Woman and here she was, thin,
mid-thirties probably, taller than average, with a long neck and a wide
unsmiling mouth. Her thick dark hair was skinned back into a utilitarian knot
without even a stray wisp to soften the strong lines of her face.

Boyle was
irresistibly reminded of Sister Paula Immaculata, his third grade teacher.
Where Sister Paula had worn a long dark habit, Lieutenant Harald wore an
equally concealing pantsuit of a shapeless cut which did nothing to flatter.
Similar, too, was the way she sat motionless, her slender ringless fingers
lightly laced on the desk before her as her wide gray eyes studied him
dispassionately. Thus had Sister Paula Immaculata sat and weighed his tales of
why he hadn’t handed in his arithmetic homework or who had thrown the first
punch in that kickball fracas at recess.

“What can I do
for you?” asked Lieutenant Harald in her low cool voice; and for the first time
since Tillie had proposed coming, Boyle felt hopeful. He remembered now that
Sister Paula Immaculata had always known when he was telling the truth.

“A man named Ray
Macken was shot last night,” said Tildon, “and Jimmy—I mean, Officer Boyle
thinks he’s going to be charged with it.”

“Not think,
Tillie.
Know!
said Boyle. “My
sergeant gave me the name of a lawyer to get in touch with. A guy who
specializes in cases of police shootings.”

“And did you
shoot this Ray Macken?” she asked mildly.

“Ma’am, I’ve
never fired a gun at all except on the pistol range; but they’ve got the .38
that killed Ray and it has my fingerprints on it.”

“Your own piece?”

“No, ma’am, but
it was locked up tight in a property cabinet at the station house and everybody
says I had the only key.”

Sigrid Harald
lifted an eyebrow. “Explain,” she said, leaning back in her chair.

The uniformed
Boyle looked helplessly at his plainclothes older cousin. His professional
training faltered before such intensely personal involvement, as if he simply
didn’t know where to begin. Sigrid almost smiled as Detective Charles
Tildon—Tillie the Toiler to his coworkers—took over with one of his inevitable
thick yellow legal pads.

To compensate
for his lack of imagination, a lack he was humbly aware of, Tillie followed the
book to the letter and was scrupulous about detail. His reports could be a
superior’s despair, but Sigrid knew that if any vital clues were present at the
scene of any crime or had been elicited in a witness’s interview, they would
appear somewhere in his meticulous notes; and she preferred his thorough
plodding to the breezier hotshots in the department who were sloppy about
detail and who bordered on insubordination when required to take her orders.