I reached for the car phone and thought of Denesa Steiner, for I was not who Marino had hoped he would be taking to the Peddler this night.
“Marino,” I told him quietly.
“Please be careful.”
“Don’t start in about red meat again.”
“That’s not what worries me most,” I said.
8
The cemetery behind Third Presbyterian Church was a rolling field of polished granite headstones behind a chain link fence choked with trees. When I arrived at 6:15, dawn bruised the horizon and I could see my breath. Ground spiders had put up their webbed awnings to begin the business of the day, and I respectfully stepped around them as Marino and I walked through wet grass toward Emily Steiner’s grave. She was buried in a corner close to woods where the lawn was pleasantly mingled with cornflowers, clover, and Queen Anne’s lace.
Her monument was a small marble angel, and to find it we simply followed the scraping noise of shovels digging dirt. A truck with a winch had been left running at the site, and its headlights illuminated the progress of two leathery old men in overalls. Shovels glinted, the surrounding grass bleached of color, and I smelled damp earth as it fell from steel blades to a mound at the foot of the grave. Marino turned on his flashlight, and the tombstone stood in sad relief against the morning, wings folded back and head bent in prayer. The epitaph carved in its base read: There is no other in the World– Mine was the only one
“Jeez. Got any idea what that means?” Marino said close to my ear.
“Maybe we can ask him,” I replied as I watched the approach of a startlingly large man with thick white hair. His long dark overcoat flowed around his ankles as he walked, giving the eerie impression from a distance that he was several inches off the ground. When he got to us, I saw he had a Black Watch scarf wrapped around his neck, black leather gloves on his huge hands, and rubbers pulled over his shoes. He was close to seven feet tall, with a torso the size of a barrel.
“I’m Lucias Ray,” he said, and enthusiastically shook our hands as we introduced ourselves.
“We were wondering about the significance of the epitaph,” I said.
“Mrs. Steiner sure did love her little girl. It’s just pitiful,” the funeral director said in a thick drawl that sounded more Georgian than North Carolinian.
“We have a whole book of verses you can look through when you’re deciding on what to have inscribed.”
“Then Emily’s mother got this from your book?” I asked.
“Well, to tell you the truth, no. I believe she said it’s Emily Dickinson.” The grave diggers had put down their shovels, and it was light enough now for me to see their faces, wet with sweat and as furrowed as a farmer’s fields. Heavy chain clanked as they unwound it from the winch’s drum. Then one of the men stepped down into the grave. He secured the chain to hooks on the sides of the concrete vault as Ray went on to tell us that more people had shown up for Emily Steiner’s funeral than he had ever heard of around here.
“They were outside the church, on the lawn, and it took close to two hours for all of them to walk past the casket to pay their respects.”
“Did you have an open casket?” Marino asked in surprise.
“No, sir.” Ray watched his men.
“Now, Mrs. Steiner wanted to, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I told her she was distraught and would thank me later for saying no. Why, her little girl wasn’t in any kind of shape for a thing like that. I knew a lot of folks would show up just to stare. Course, a lot of rubber neckers showed up anyway, seeing as how there was so much in the news.” The winch strained loudly and the truck’s diesel engine throbbed as the vault was slowly lifted from the earth. Soil rained down in chunks as the concrete burial chamber rocked higher in the air with each turn of the crank, and one of the men stood by like a member of a ground crew to direct with his hands. At almost the precise moment the vault was free of its grave and lowered to the grass, we were invaded by television crews with cameras mounted and reporters and photographers. They swarmed around the gaping wound in the earth and the vault so stained with red clay that it almost looked bloody.