“Well, Mr. Hardesty, you’ve been a great help. Thank you for your time and trouble.”
Hardesty shrugged. “It wasn’t anything.”
It was something, Tony thought. Something indeed. But I sure as hell don’t know what it means.
In the short hall outside the employees’ lounge, they went in different directions, but after a few steps Tony turned and said, “Mr. Hardesty?”
Hardesty stopped, looked back. “Yes?”
“Answer a personal question?”
“What is it?”
“What made you decide to do … this kind of work?”
“My favorite uncle was a funeral director.”
“I see.”
“He was a lot of fun. Especially with kids. He loved kids. I wanted to be like him,” Hardesty said. “You always had the feeling that Uncle Alex knew some enormous, terribly important secret. He did a lot of magic tricks for us kids, but it was more than that. I always thought that what he did for a living was very magical and mysterious, too, and that it was because of his work that he’d learned something nobody else knew.”
“Have you found his secret yet?”
“Yes,” Hardesty said. “I think maybe I have.”
“Can you tell me?”
“Sure. What Uncle Alex knew, and what I’ve come to learn, is that you’ve got to treat the dead with every bit as much concern and respect as you do the living. You can’t just put them out of mind, bury them and forget about them. The lessons they taught us when they were alive are still with us. All the things they did to us and for us are still in our minds, still shaping and changing us. And because of how they’ve affected us, we’ll have certain influences on people who will be alive long after we’re dead. So in a way, the dead never really die at all. They just go on and on. Uncle Alex’s secret was just this: The dead are people, too.”
Tony stared at him for a moment, not certain what he should say. But then the question came unbidden: “Are you a religious man, Mr. Hardesty?”
“I wasn’t when I started doing this work,” he said. “But I am now. I certainly am now.”
“Yes, I suppose you are.”
Outside, when Tony got behind the wheel of the Jeep and pulled the driver’s door shut, Hilary said, “Well? Did he embalm Frye?”
“Worse than that.”
“What’s worse than that?”
“You don’t want to know.”
He told her about the telephone call that Hardesty had received from the man claiming to be Bruno Frye.
“Ahhh,” she said softly. “Forget what I said about shared psychoses. This is proof!”
“Proof of what? That Frye’s alive? He can’t be alive. In addition to other things too disgusting to mention, he was embalmed. No one can sustain even a deep coma when his veins and arteries are full of embalming fluid instead of blood.”
“But at least that phone call is proof that something out of the ordinary is happening.”
“Not really,” Tony said.
“Can you take this to your captain?”
“There’s no point in doing that. To Harry Lubbock, it’ll look like nothing more sinister than a crank call, a hoax.”
“But the voice!”
“That won’t be enough to convince Harry.”
She sighed. “So what’s next?”
“We’ve got to do some heavy thinking,” Tony said. “We’ve got to examine the situation from every angle and see if there’s something we’ve missed.”
“Can we think at lunch?” she asked. “I’m starved.”
“Where do you want to eat?”
“Since we’re both rumpled and wrung out, I suggest some place dark and private.”
“A back booth at Casey’s Bar?”
“Perfect,” she said.
As he drove to Westwood, Tony thought about Hardesty and about how, in one way, the dead were not really dead at all.
***
Bruno Frye stretched out in the back of the Dodge van and tried to get some sleep.
The van was not the one in which he had driven to Los Angeles last week. That vehicle had been impounded by the police. By now it had been claimed by a representative of Joshua Rhinehart, who was executor of the Frye estate and responsible for the proper liquidation of its assets. This van wasn’t gray, like the first one, but dark blue with white accent lines. Frye had paid cash for it yesterday morning at a Dodge dealership on the outskirts of San Francisco. It was a handsome machine.