Mystic River

He'd given Ambrose Katie's date of birth and social security number, the kid filling it in with a gold pen on a form attached to a clipboard, and then saying in a velvet voice that was a younger version of his father's, "Good, good. Now, Mr. Marcus, will this be a traditional Catholic ceremony? A wake, a mass?"

"Yeah."

"I'd suggest we hold the wake on Wednesday, then."

Jimmy nodded. "The church has already been reserved for Thursday morning at nine."

"Nine o'clock," the boy said, and wrote that down. "Have you thought of a time for the wake?"

Jimmy said, "We'll do two. One between three and five. The other seven to nine."

"Seven to nine," the boy repeated as he wrote it down. "I see you brought photographs. Good, good."

Jimmy looked at the stack of framed photos on his lap: Katie at her graduation. Katie and her sisters on the beach. Katie and him at the opening of Cottage Market when she was eight. Katie with Eve and Diane. Katie, Annabeth, Jimmy, Nadine, and Sara at Six Flags. Katie's sixteenth birthday.

He put the stack on the chair beside him, felt a minor burning in his throat that went away when he swallowed.

"Have you thought about flowers?" Ambrose Reed said.

"I placed an order with Knopfler's this afternoon," he said.

"And the notice?"

Jimmy met the kid's eyes for the first time. "The notice?"

"Yes," the kid said, and looked down at his clipboard. "How the notice should read in the paper. We can take care of it if you'll just give me the basic information on how you'd like it to read. If you'd prefer donations in lieu of flowers, things like that."

Jimmy turned away from the kid's comforting eyes and looked down at the floor. Below them, somewhere in the basement of this white Victorian, Katie lay in the embalming room. She'd be naked before Bruce Reed and this boy and his two brothers as they went to work on her, cleaning her, touching her up, preserving her. Their cool, manicured hands would run over her body. They'd lift parts of it. They'd take her chin between thumb and index finger and turn it. They'd run combs through her hair.

He thought of his child naked and exposed with the color drained from her flesh as she waited to be touched one last time by these strangers? with care, possibly, but a callous care, a clinical one. And then satin cushions would be propped behind her head in the casket, and she'd be wheeled into the viewing room with a doll's frozen face and her favorite blue dress. She'd be peered at and prayed over and commented on and grieved, and then, ultimately, she'd be entombed. She would descend into a hole dug by men who hadn't known her either, and Jimmy could hear the dirt thudding distantly as if he were on the inside of the coffin with her.

And she would lie in the dark with the earth packed above her for six feet until it gave way to grass and open air she'd never see or feel or smell or sense. She would lie there for a thousand years, unable to hear the footfalls of the people who came to visit her headstone, unable to hear anything of the world she'd left because all that dirt was packed in between.

I'm going to kill him, Katie. Somehow, I'm going to find him before the police do, and I'm going to kill him. I'm going to put him in a hole a lot worse than the one you're going into. I'm going to leave them nothing to embalm. Nothing to mourn. I'm going to make him vanish as if he'd never lived, as if his name and everything he was, or thinks he is right now, was just a dream that passed through someone's mind in a blip and was forgotten before they woke up.

I'm going to find the man who put you on that table downstairs, and I'm going to erase him. And his loved ones? if he has any? will feel more anguish than yours do, Katie. Because they'll never have the certainty of knowing what happened to him.

And don't you worry whether I'm up to it, baby. Daddy's up to it. You never knew this, but Daddy's killed before. Daddy's done what needed to be done. And he can do it again.

He turned back to Bruce's son, who was still new enough at this to be unnerved by long pauses.

Jimmy said, "I'd like it to read 'Marcus, Katherine Juanita, dearly beloved daughter of James and Marita, deceased, stepdaughter of Annabeth, and sister to Sara and Nadine?'"

* * *

SEAN SAT on the back porch with Annabeth Marcus as she took tiny sips from a glass of white wine and smoked her cigarettes no more than halfway before she'd extinguish them, her face lit by the exposed bulb above them. It was a strong face, never pretty probably, but always striking. She was not unused to being stared at, Sean guessed, and yet she was probably oblivious as to why she was worth the trouble. She reminded Sean a bit of Jimmy's mother but without the air of resignation and defeat, and she reminded Sean of his own mother in her complete and effortless self-possession, reminded him of Jimmy, actually, in that way, as well. He could see Annabeth Marcus as being a fun woman, but never a frivolous one.

"So," she said to Sean as he lit a cigarette for her, "what are you doing with your evening after you're released from comforting me?"

"I'm not? "

She waved it away. "I appreciate it. So what're you doing?"

"Going to see my mother."

"Really?"

He nodded. "It's her birthday. Go celebrate it with her and the old man."

"Uh-huh," she said. "And how long have you been divorced?"

"It shows?"

"You wear it like a suit."

"Ah. Separated, actually, for a bit over a year."

"She live here?"

"Not anymore. She travels."

"You said that with acid. 'Travels.'"

"Did I?" He shrugged.

She held up a hand. "I hate to keep doing this to you? getting my mind off Katie at your expense. So you don't have to answer any of my questions. I'm just nosy, and you're an interesting guy."

He smiled. "No, I'm not. I'm actually very boring, Mrs. Marcus. You take away my job, and I disappear."

"Annabeth," she said. "Call me that, would you?"

"Sure."

"I find it hard to believe, Trooper Devine, that you're boring. You know what's odd, though?"

"What's that?"

She turned in her chair and looked at him. "You don't strike me as the kind of guy who'd give someone phantom tickets."

"Why's that?"

"It seems childish," she said. "You don't seem like a childish man."

Sean shrugged. In his experience, everyone was childish at one time or another. It's what you reverted to, particularly when the shit piled up.