Laura lay with her eyes closed, and her arms folded across her chest. She wore a conservative blue suit he did not recognize. Her long brown hair was out of her eyes. It was his Laura and it was not: her repose, he realized, was what was unnatural. Laura was always such a restless sleeper.
Audrey placed her sprig of summer violets on Laura’s chest. Then she worked her mouth for a moment and spat, hard, onto Laura’s dead face.
The spit caught Laura on the cheek, and began to drip down toward her ear.
Audrey was already walking toward the door. Shadow hurried after her.
“Audrey?” he said.
“Shadow? Did you escape? Or did they let you out?”
He wondered if she were taking tranquilizers. Her voice was distant and detached.
“Let me out yesterday. I’m a free man,” said Shadow. “What the hell was that all about?”
She stopped in the dark corridor. “The violets? They were always her favorite flower. When we were girls we used to pick them together.”
“Not the violets.”
“Oh, that,” she said. She wiped a speck of something invisible from the corner of her mouth. “Well, I would have thought that was obvious.”
“Not to me, Audrey.”
“They didn’t tell you?” Her voice was calm, emotionless. “Your wife died with my husband’s cock in her mouth, Shadow.”
He went back in to the funeral home. Someone had already wiped away the spit.
After lunch—Shadow ate at the Burger King—was the burial. Laura’s cream-colored coffin was interred in the small nondenominational cemetery on the edge of town: unfenced, a hilly woodland meadow filled with black granite and white marble headstones.
He rode to the cemetery in the Wendell’s hearse, with Laura’s mother. Mrs. McCabe seemed to feel that Laura’s death was Shadow’s fault. “If you’d been here,” she said, “this would never have happened. I don’t know why she married you. I told her. Time and again, I told her. But they don’t listen to their mothers, do they?” She stopped, looked more closely at Shadow’s face. “Have you been fighting?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Barbarian,” she said, then she set her mouth, raised her head so her chins quivered, and stared straight ahead of her.
To Shadow’s surprise Audrey Burton was also at the funeral, standing toward the back. The short service ended, the casket was lowered into the cold ground. The people went away.
Shadow did not leave. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, shivering, staring at the hole in the ground.
Above him the sky was iron gray, featureless and flat as a mirror. It continued to snow, erratically, in ghostlike tumbling flakes.
There was something he wanted to say to Laura, and he was prepared to wait until he knew what it was. The world slowly began to lose light and color. Shadow’s feet were going numb, while his hands and face hurt from the cold. He burrowed his hands into his pockets for warmth, and his fingers closed about the gold coin.
He walked over to the grave.
“This is for you,” he said.
Several shovels of earth had been emptied onto the casket, but the hole was far from full. He threw the gold coin into the grave with Laura, then he pushed more earth into the hole, to hide the coin from acquisitive grave diggers. He brushed the earth from his hands and said, “Good night, Laura.” Then he said, “I’m sorry.” He turned his face toward the lights of the town, and began to walk back into Eagle Point.
His motel was a good two miles away, but after spending three years in prison he was relishing the idea that he could simply walk and walk, forever if need be. He could keep walking north, and wind up in Alaska, or head south, to Mexico and beyond. He could walk to Patagonia, or to Tierra del Fuego.
A car drew up beside him. The window hummed down.
“You want a lift, Shadow?” asked Audrey Burton.
“No,” he said. “And not from you.”
He continued to walk. Audrey drove beside him at three miles an hour. Snowflakes danced in the beams of her headlights.