Charlaine Harris - Grave Sight

I got back to the motel with no further incident. I had completed my self-assigned distance. I was walking around the parking lot outside my room, cooling down, trying hard to put the fear behind me. Stupid. I was stupid, stupid, stupid.

My brother came down the road, finishing up his own run. I hastily went to my own door and slid in the plastic card.

"No, you don't!" he called out. "You stay right there."

Shit. I kept my back to him.

He spun me around by one shoulder. He looked me up and down.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

He'd run into one of the lawmen.

"Yes," I said, trying not to sound sullen. "I'm fine. Who told you?"

"I saw Hollis Boxleitner," he said. "That where you were last night?"

I nodded, not meeting Tolliver's eyes.

"We have to get out of this place," he said. "We could go if they found out who did this."

"Maybe it would do some good if I could get to Helen's body," I said. "I might pick up something."

"Hollis said she got a phone call after we'd left her place that morning. The lawyer called her. Paul Edwards."

"What about?"

"Hollis didn't say. I don't guess he mentioned it last night?"

"No." I could feel my face heating up.

"But the sheriff still doesn't want us to go, because he still thinks we must know something."

"We could just leave anyway," I said. "There's no legal way he can keep us here, right?"

"I don't think so," Tolliver said. He'd been gripping my arms, and when he let go, I got that tingly feeling as blood rushed back through the veins and arteries. "But you know one bad word from law enforcement will mean we'll lose a lot of jobs."

That was true enough. The last time a chief of police had been dissatisfied with me—he'd been convinced I had some prior knowledge of the body's location, that I was in direct communication with the killer and out to feather my own nest—I'd had almost no income for six months. It had been a hard time, and I'd had enough hard times. I didn't want any more, ever.

"Your boyfriend'll give us a good word," Tolliver said teasingly, trying to lift my spirits.

I didn't even protest over Tolliver's use of the term "boyfriend." I knew he didn't believe that Hollis was anything to me. As usual, he was both right and wrong.

GLEASON and Sons Mortuary was a place of heavy carpeting and dark corners. It was picturesquely located in an old Victorian-style home, and it was landscaped outside and painted a serene blue inside, with stained-glass windows that must have cost a small fortune. The restored Victorian held the two viewing rooms, an office where the families could select—and pay—for caskets and other services, and a kitchen to brew the constant stream of coffee consumed by mourners. A low, discreet modern addition in the rear held the grimmer rooms where the actual functions of the funeral home were conducted.

Elijah Gleason showed us the more public part before we went to the modern addition. He was proud of his accomplishments as the third Gleason in the funeral business in Sarne, and I had respect for following an honorable tradition. He was a short, stout man in his late thirties with slicked thick black hair and a wide, thin-lipped mouth.

"This is my wife Laura," he said as we passed an open door. The woman inside waved. She had very short brown hair and a rounded figure. "She does my books in the winter, and in the summer she's Aunt Hattie at Aunt Hattie's Ice Cream Parlor." The woman smiled and nodded in an abstract way and returned her attention to the computer screen before her. From the coatrack in the corner hung a soft, flowered bonnet and a matching long apron. I hoped Aunt Hattie's was air conditioned.

"I guess your business is pretty constant, rather than seasonal," I said, for lack of some better response.

Elijah Gleason said, "You'd be surprised. We get at least two deaths a summer from the tourists. Of course, those are usually just getting the remains ready to send to their home mortuary, but it all adds up."

I could think of nothing to say to that, so I just nodded. I reminded myself to stay away from Sarne in the summer. It was somehow embarrassing to think of these people dressing up to imitate a past that was hotter, smellier, more ignorant, and chock-full of deaths that nowadays could be easily prevented. Women in childbirth, kids with polio, babies with conflicting Rh factors, men whose fingers turned septic after little accidents with a saw... I'd seen all these during my little outing at the cemetery. Most people didn't think about this aspect of living in the past when they tried to imagine how it must have been. They saw the absence of what they perceived as modern ills: abortion, homosexuality, television, divorce. They saw the past in terms of Friday evening fiddling with the neighbors on the front porch, shoofly pie, gospel singing, long happy marriages.

I saw sudden, needless death.

Soon enough we were in the new part of the funeral home, and the director was showing us Helen. Hollis had asked him to do it, after assuring Gleason I wouldn't faint or throw up at the sight of the body. I like funeral homes. I like the attempt to make death presentable and palatable. It's a cushion to life. It's like the pretty padded lining to the coffin. The dead sure don't care, but makes the living feel better.

The buzzing in my head steadily increased as we grew closer to the room with the closed door. It reached a high drone when I stepped into the bright white sterility of the modern embalming room.

"I haven't started on her yet," Elijah Gleason said. "I just got her back from the state crime lab. It'll take them months to finish the toxicology, they told me, they're hundreds of cases behind."

"Would you stay outside?" Tolliver asked. "It's just that my sister has a pretty startling reaction sometimes, and it might alarm you."

"Sorry," Gleason said firmly. "Helen's body's under my care, and I'm staying with her."

Well, I hadn't expected much different. I nodded, all my attention focused on the form on the tilted table. I held up a hand to ask the two men not to speak.

I approached Helen. From her neck down, she was covered by a sheet. Her hair had been brushed. The hum of her presence filled my head. Her soul was still there. That was very unexpected. I jerked with surprise. For the soul to linger three days after death, especially when the body had been found, was almost unprecedented. I knew I would get more information since she was still intact. But I felt full of pity. My neck muscles began to jerk, almost imperceptibly, because I wasn't trying to search for her, she was right in front of me. And she was intact.

The funeral home director was eyeing me with ill-concealed disgust. "She's there," I said very softly, and I saw Gleason's face go slack with horror. I glanced at Tolliver, and he nodded, understanding. "I'm just going to touch her," I explained to Gleason. "With respect."

I stared down at Helen's battered face, my neck and facial muscles relaxing finally. All the bruising made her look as if someone had painted her in shades of dark. Under the edge of the sheet, my fingertips made contact with the skin of her shoulder.

From a distance, I could hear myself gasp—a deep, throaty, alarmed sound. I could see the arm upraised, the arm that held a candlestick. I was crouching down, trying to avoid the blow. The arm was a man's, in a long sleeve. An overwhelming sense of betrayal and shock. The glimpse of the descending arm. Pain and disillusionment, bitterness, the hope of resurrection, a terrifying blend of final emotions. And then nothing, nothing, nothing.

"I know," I whispered. "You can go, now."

And the soul of Helen Hopkins left her body.

This had only happened to me once before. I hadn't known what to do then, had only stumbled on the presence of the dead person by accident. This is what leads to the stories of haunting. The soul wants some acknowledgment of its struggle; the agony involved in the death of the body, and the emotional turmoil of being killed, somehow adhere the soul to the body. If not addressed before burial, this adhesion leads to hauntings.