D. Gilles - Colder Than Death

I wasn’t sure if he was going to bury me alive or kill me first, but I knew that one way or another the grave I was digging was my own.

He made me dig at gunpoint. So I wouldn’t scream, he put duct tape over my mouth, not that I would have been able to utter even a peep, my throat was so dry. He had me stop digging at what seemed like three feet deep and two feet across. Too narrow for a coffin, but just right for a body.

I can’t remember how long it took because I was so petrified with fear that I lost all track of time. Had he said it took me four hours or thirty minutes, I would have believed him either way.

“Give me the shovel,” he said desperately, his breathing as heavy as my own.

I did, but no more than five seconds after I handed him the shovel, he raised it and swung it into my face. I fell into the hole, on my back. He hit me three more times in the head, twice over my left ear and once directly over my forehead. I tried to raise my arms to protect myself, but I was so weak from digging I couldn’t. My head ached and my left eye had swollen to a point where vision was impossible. Out of my right eye, if I squinted, I could see, barely.

It was somewhere in the middle of the night. The only light was from the moon, which was slowly being shrouded by smoky, fast-moving clouds. I was able to see him raise the gun and point it at me. His hand was shaking.

“I made a mistake with the girl,” he muttered. “Got lazy. Should’ve put her in the ground.” I heard the cock of the hammer. “Ground burial is always better. But digging a grave by hand is hard work.”

He steadied the gun with both hands. I prepared to die. He pulled the trigger. Once. Twice. Three times.

I heard no gunfire, only the deadened click of a pistol that had jammed. He mumbled something to himself, slapped the gun barrel twice, then pulled the trigger three more times. Again, silence. He threw the gun down. Within seconds, despite the darkness, I saw the three-inch long blade.

He stepped into the grave, straddled me and stuck the blade into my chest two times fast. He looked at me quizzically, no doubt trying to make sure I was dead. Roughly, he grabbed my jaw with his right hand, stared closely at me again for a few seconds, then stepped out of the hole and feverishly began shoveling dirt over me.

Almost at the precise instant that the first shovelful of cold, stony dirt smashed into my face, it started to drizzle. Another clump of dirt landed half in my hair and half on my brow. Some of it trickled into my eyes, causing me to blink in a fluttery motion.

I tried to keep my eyes shut, but a particle of some kind had found its way into the corner of my left eye and the irritation was driving me crazy. I wanted to lift one of my hands and rub my eye, but I wanted him to think I was dead, so I shut my eyes hoping that the particle would somehow settle or be dislodged by the liquid in my eye, which is what happened after about thirty seconds. By then, I was starting to drift off into what I thought would be death.

I waited for my life to begin passing before my eyes. But one thought kept running through my head: the fact that I was lying in this grave because of a murder.

I’d been head Funeral Director at Henderson’s Funeral Home for seven years and, including my apprenticeship, which began eight years before that, I’d dealt with every type of death imaginable from fatal illnesses to nasty falls to crashes involving vehicles ranging from lawn mowers to wheelchairs to garbage trucks.

But the one type of death I’d had no experience with was murder. As far as murder goes, it’s something else. Death I understood. But no matter how much I tried, I could never place murder in its proper context. And although I’d analyzed and thought it through from every angle, I never got to the point where I completely understood the taking of someone else’s life.

Death is natural, a completion. Murder is perverse, an interruption.

The dirt being shoveled onto me was becoming heavier, but despite the pain of the knife wounds, the blows from the shovel and the indescribable exhaustion I felt, as I waited to be suffocated by the crud that was working its way up my nose and into my mouth, I had enough presence of mind to conclude that he didn’t know I was still alive.

And as I wondered if anyone would find me in this unmarked grave, how it all began crashed unexpectedly into my mind.

The coffins get dusty.

Two times a week I go downstairs to the Selection Room and give them a once-over. A little Fantastic and an old Fruit of the Loom t-shirt do the trick. That’s where I was on the Sunday morning the phone call came. We had no bodies on view. No one was scheduled to come in to make arrangements. I was alone. Usually, there was at least one person around to talk with, but not that day.

Lew Henderson, owner of the Home, was in the middle of a month-long vacation in Florida. It was something he’d done every October since the death of his wife seven years before. Lew considered himself semi-retired after Karen died, but he came in every day to shoot the breeze, maybe go over the books, handle things if I needed time off, before heading to the golf course.

Clint Barnes, my assistant, was at ten o’clock Mass at St. Ann’s Catholic Church in Croybridge, the next town over, where he and his wife, Cookie, lived. Sunday was Clint’s day off unless we were swamped with several funerals at once.

Nolan Fowler, our primary embalmer and restoration man, was at a weekend Seminar in Cincinnati sponsored by the National Embalmers Society. He was due back on Monday. And our cosmetologist, Elaine Whurley, only came in when we had bodies. Elaine was a fifty-eight-year-old beautician who for years had moonlighted for us and DiGregorio’s, the other Funeral Home in Dankworth.

I’d worked my way through twelve of the sixteen coffins on display when the telephone across the hall in the Embalming Room rang. We don’t keep a phone in the Selection Room. The process of choosing a coffin is of such a delicate nature a ringing phone might be a jarring disruption. And I always turn off my iPhone when I’m giving a showing. I dropped the T-shirt onto the base of the coffin and trotted into the hallway.

I went straight to the cream-colored door with the word PRIVATE stenciled on it in two-inch thick chocolate brown letters, opened it and stepped into the clammy aroma of formaldehyde which hung in the air like the scent of new tires in a Sears Automotive Department. The telephone was on the wall. Taped beneath it was last year’s inspection certificate from the Ohio Board of Health.

“Henderson’s Funeral Home,” I said. “May I help you?”

“Who’ve I got?” said the deep-set male voice which I recognized instantly as belonging to Perry Cobb, Chief of Police of Dankworth. ”You ghouls all sound alike.”

“It’s Del,” I said, thinking so much for his perception.

Nolan, Lew, Clint and I sounded nothing alike.

Lew’s rich baritone made him sound like an announcer on a classical music program, which was in contrast to my modulated, soft-spoken greeting which, I was once told, made me come off like a priest answering the phone in a rectory. When Nolan took a call he would blurt an inappropriately cheerful “Henderson’s!” into the receiver as if it were happy hour at a bar. And Clint’s tentative voice had a disarmingly childlike quality.