Before Cain Strikes. Joshua Corin
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gone, the old man continued on his way to his room. Esme counted the seconds until she heard his door slam shut.
Then she turned to her husband. He hadn’t moved far from the door.
“Are you okay?” she asked him.
“I…”
She reached out to him.
But once again: an interruption. This time it was Rafe’s cell phone, vibrating in his pants pocket.
“If it’s a Florida area code,” said Esme, “don’t answer it.”
Rafe examined the screen. “Five-one-eight.”
“Upstate?” asked Esme.
Rafe nodded and pressed Talk. “Hello?”
Esme watched him as he listened. His parents, Lester and Eunice, had raised him in upstate New York. It was only luck that Rafe chose a graduate school in Washington, D.C. Otherwise, they would never have met.
Eight years.
“Who is it?” Esme whispered.
Rafe put up a hand to silence her. His face had gone pale. Whatever he was hearing was not good news.
She had accompanied him a few times to his old house. His childhood in upper-middle-class suburbia had been very different from hers on the streets of Boston. But opposites attracted, right?
Rafe spoke a bit to the person on the other line, thanked them and then hung up the phone. He looked even more rattled than he had in the car.
“Rafe, what is it?”
“Do you…remember that girl you met at my reunion…the one I took to the prom?”
Esme vaguely recalled the woman in question. She was a sales rep for a vacuum cleaner company. A bit heavy-set. Very pretty blue eyes.
“Lynette something, right?”
“Yes. Lynette Robinson. She… Anyway, that was my cousin Randy…on the phone. The police…they just identified the…remains of…Lynette’s body…in the basement of a torched house.”
3
The funeral was done in black and white.
The black, of course, was provided by the mourners. More than a hundred people came out to pay their respects. Half of them didn’t even know the deceased, but had read about the tragedy in the Sullivan County Democrat. The national press was there, too, at the outskirts of the cemetery, and even they had the good sense to wear dark colors.
The priest wore black, naturally. The grave diggers, who stood a few feet from the crowd, wore long black coats. When the time was right, they would operate the pulleys, which were painted brown to camouflage with the sod, and lower the coffin into the four-by-eight-by-three hole they’d shoveled this morning.
The weather provided the white, covering the soil and the grass and the hundreds of gravestones scattered about the cemetery. Almost an inch of pale accumulation lay fixed above the cold earth, with more to come.
Even snowflakes were eager to attend Lynette Robinson’s funeral.
As the priest, a youthful redheaded tenor, recited scripture, Esme’s mind wandered (as it was wont to do when in the presence of recited scripture). She thought back over the past two days, from Grover Kirk (who had had the audacity to phone her Thursday morning) to Lester’s long list of supplies he wanted them to get while upstate. She and Rafe had arrived at his old house in the early evening. Immediately, they opened all the windows to air out all the dust and mildew off forty-year-old linen upholstery. Lester had kept the kitchen faucet dripping so as to prevent his pipes from freezing, but Rafe descended into the cellar nonetheless to double-check.
Esme phoned Oyster Bay.
“Hello,” grumbled Lester on the other end. “Hi, Lester.”
After exchanging hollow pleasantries, Esme asked if he could put Sophie on the line. And she waited. A breeze wafted in through one of the open windows in the bedroom and tickled at the back of Esme’s neck.
Then, finally: “Hi, Mom!”
“Hey, baby. How was school?”
“Zack Portnoy wet his pants. There was a big puddle under his chair. The janitor had to come and clean it up and everything. It was gross.”
Esme grimaced. “I’m sure it was, sweetie. Did you learn anything today in class?”
“To clean up pee, you need to use ammonia.”
“Did you learn anything else?”
Silence.
“Sophie?”
“I’m thinking, I’m thinking! Oh, yeah—Mrs. Morrow wanted me to remind you that you’re shap…shap…uh…”
“Chaperoning?”
“For the science museum trip on Monday.”
“Are you excited to go see the science museum?”
“Uh-huh. Will I get to touch the electricity in the crystal ball?”
“That’s up to Mrs. Morrow. She might have a lot of activities planned.”
“Okay. Oh, Grandpa Les bought Chinese tonight and I bet him that I could put a whole egg roll in my mouth and I did.”
“Sweetie, that’s not a good idea,” said Esme, caught between a giggle and a groan. “You could have choked.”
“Nuh-uh, I had water and also, if I choked, I would just put my arms up and I’d be all better.”
Rafe stepped into the room, a pair of his father’s worn workman’s gloves in his left hand.
“Just promise me not to do it again, all right, Sophie?”
She’d said their daughter’s name to let Rafe know who she was talking to.
Rafe indicated, a little vehemently, that he wanted to talk to her, too.
“Okay, Sophie. I’m going to put Daddy on. I love you.”
“I love you, too, Mommy.”
As the priest genuflected and stepped away from the podium, Esme’s thoughts returned to the present, and the funeral, and all around her, amid the light snow, a concerto of sobs. She glanced over at her husband. Like many there, he wore dark sunglasses. They’d stopped at a Walgreens on the way to the service to pick them up and had run into Rafe’s cousin Randy, from the ne’er-do-well branch of the Stuart family tree. Randy walked with a cane—not to support any actual injury but to support his claim for disability. He used to work at the Pepsi factory on the outskirts of the city and a case had fallen near his foot, and near his foot became on his foot and there it was. At Walgreens he bought a pair of knock-off Ray-Bans and walked off with a box of M&M’s.
It was Randy who’d called Rafe and Esme about Lynette. Randy was drinking buddies with one of the deputies in the county sheriff’s office, and rumor, when lubricated with cheap Scotch, traveled easy and fast. Randy had never personally known Lynette, but he was there at the funeral nonetheless, standing a few feet behind Esme and Rafe. He would be at the reception, too, with his cane, and would probably attempt to parlay his “disability” and his “grief” into a one-night stand.
The two grave diggers winched the coffin into the ground. Lynette’s immediate family was seated up front—both parents, two pairs of grandparents, three brothers and a sister. They had the best view. Not for the first time, Esme longed (in the event of her untimely death) to be cremated.
The coffin reached its resting place four feet below topsoil. This cued the crowd of mourners to slowly, quietly disperse. Esme followed Rafe back to his Prius. A thin coat of snow outlined the carlike shapes in the cemetery parking lot. Were it not for the chirp of Rafe’s electronic