P. Parrish - An Unquiet Grave

“You don’t have someone to do that for you?” Louis asked.

“What, cook?” Rodney gave an odd grimace. “Mother fired the cook this week. She fired the maid, too. This has been. . an ongoing problem. She has always hated having strangers in the house.” Rodney went back to stirring. “Besides, I like to cook. It may be the only thing I really do well.”

Louis slid onto a stool at the island. Rodney was, he realized now, if not drunk, then already well on his way. But maybe that wasn’t all bad. When Rodney had shown up at Phillip’s house, he had been sober and that had given him an edgy, threatening aura. But this man. .

Louis had the feeling this was a man who became someone else when he drank, a man who could be manipulated to say things he didn’t want to say.

“It smells good,” Louis said.

Rodney pointed the wooden spoon at him, winked, and turned back to his stirring.

“Look, DeFoe,” Louis said, “I want to ask you a question.”

“And I will try my best to answer it. And please, if you are going to sit in my kitchen, I think you can call me Rodney.”

“You loved your sister a lot, didn’t you?” Louis said.

The spoon stopped for a moment; then Rodney resumed stirring. He didn’t answer.

“I didn’t think you did,” Louis went on. “But then I found this visitors’ log from Hidden Lake. Looks like you went to see your sister pretty regularly.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. Couple times a year but every spring for sure. April, in particular, regular as clockwork. Just like the groundhog.”

“February, dear boy. The rodent appears in February.”

“In fact it was so regular you even showed up after she was dead.”

Rodney turned to stare at him. “Excuse me?”

Louis pulled a paper from his coat pocket. “This is the visitors’ log. You went to see Claudia in April 1972.”

Rodney just stood there, the spoon dripping on the tiles. Louis leaned over and spread the paper open on the butcher-block surface. Rodney peered down at it. Louis poked at the line with Rodney’s name.

Rodney looked up at Louis. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a glass of wine?”

Louis tapped the paper again.

Rodney let out a huge sigh. “I was in Europe when I heard. I was not. .” He paused, shaking his head. “My lifestyle had put me in the position of not having to face my problems. I had an infinite variety of pharmaceuticals at my disposal. And I tried them all.”

He set the spoon down and picked up his wineglass. “By the time I emerged from my stupor and came home, it was spring. It was time to go see her. And I did.”

“You went to the cemetery?” Louis asked.

Rodney nodded. “I looked at that little stone thing in the grass and I had the feeling that my sister had somehow slipped away while my back was turned.” He took another drink of wine. “I went in to the hospital. I don’t know, maybe I thought I could find out what happened to her. But it was too late.”

Louis picked up the visitors’ log, folded it, and put it in his pocket.

“Why didn’t you pick up her remains when Hidden Lake called about relocating her?” Louis asked.

Rodney turned back to his stew. “Are you a religious man?” he asked.

“What?”

“Are you religious?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Once, when I was in my thirties,” Rodney said, “I ended up in Goa, India, this beautiful place with beaches, palm trees, great hotels, discos. Everything a dissipated trust fund baby could want.”

He paused to shake in some pepper. “I met this woman there, an Indian woman. She tried to teach me about Hinduism, tried to get me to change my evil ways, I suppose. It worked, to a point. I stopped putting shit up my nose.”

Louis was trying to decide how far to let this wander when Rodney spoke again. “Now what does this have to do with my poor dead sister Claudia, you are asking yourself?”

“Yeah, in fact, I was.”

“Well, while I was busy burning out my sinuses, something happened in my brain. Some of the religious stuff just sort of. . stuck there.” Rodney gave him an odd smile. “When I finally dragged my sorry ass home, I began to study it. Now, all these years later, I guess you could call me a born-again Hindu.”

“I thought you were Catholic,” Louis said.

“Mother is Catholic. I gave it up for Lent.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” Louis said.

“I’m getting to it,” Rodney said, not turning around. “Well, the thing is, Hindus have a rather different take on death. They believe that the body is unimportant, that the soul lives on to inhabit a new body.”

“Reincarnation,” Louis said.

Rodney nodded. “They also believe that when a loved one dies, if you grieve too much or too long, the negative energy keeps the soul from making its transition.”

When Rodney turned back around, his watery eyes took a second or two to focus on Louis. “My sister’s soul is gone. Neither she nor I have any use for her body,” he said.

Louis stared hard at him for a long time. “You know something, Rodney?” he said, standing up. “That’s the biggest crock of shit I’ve heard in years.”

The barest smile came to Rodney’s lips. “Well, then, perhaps you’ll believe a simpler truth. Mother would not allow it. It’s that Catholic thing, you know.”

Rodney moved to pick up his wineglass but knocked it over. It fell to the tile floor, shattering. He shrugged and brushed the shards away with his velvet slipper. He swayed as he went to the cabinet and pulled down a new glass.

“Time for us to take a little trip to the cellar,” Rodney said, turning to Louis. “Come with me, why don’t you?”

Louis didn’t want to go, but he didn’t want Rodney falling down the steps. He followed him through a pantry and down a narrow stairway.

At the bottom, Louis paused. It was a large basement, with stone walls and a smooth concrete floor. It was dimly lit, very clean, and Louis could see the gargantuan bulk of an old furnace in the corner. There was one door in another corner, and Rodney led him to it.

Rodney held up a hand. “This is where I keep her,” he whispered.

“What?”

Rodney pulled open the door.

Louis felt a rush of cool air, and his eyes picked up the glint of something, but it was too dark to make anything out.

A light came on. Wine. . racks of bottles, floor to ceiling. Louis looked back. Rodney was standing at the doorway, his hand on a switch, a huge grin on his face.

“You should see your face,” Rodney said. “You were so hoping she was in there, like that detective in Psycho , you really thought you were going to find that I was hiding away some decaying corpse.”

Rodney was laughing as he moved past Louis into the wine cellar.

“Eeny, meeny, miney, mo, catch a Medoc by the toe,” Rodney said, his finger traveling across the nearest row and stopping. He slipped a dusty bottle off the shelves and produced a corkscrew from his pocket. Holding the bottle between his knees, Rodney uncorked it, brought the bottle up to his mouth, and took a long drink.

Louis turned away, his eyes wandering out over the basement. Even down here, he could feel it. There was a disquieting aura about every part of this ugly old house, like nothing was in balance.

“I hate this house.”

Louis turned. Rodney had come up behind him. He was leaning against the door of the wine cellar, gripping the bottle.

“It is a hateful house,” Rodney said thickly.

Louis moved aside and Rodney came out into the basement. He stood there, swaying slightly, his eyes coming back to Louis but not really focusing on him.

“This is where it happened,” he said, pointing at the concrete floor. “Right here. This is where my father shot himself.”