Two vehicles had rolled up to the curb when Pax arrived. The first had been the undertaker’s recent-model Ford hearse, whose stylish, bulbous curves made it look like something out of a fairy tale. The second car was a pristine 1948 Tucker Torpedo in gleaming candy-apple red. The two gigantic men who’d climbed out looked like Irish brothers, both with orange hair and freckles, andnoses that had been broken more than once. It had surprised Malcolm that they had stayed outside, but it surprised him even more that now—when their employer might actually need them—Pax seemed to have forgotten they were there. Otherwise, why ask a grieving son to heft his mother’s remains?
In a way, though, Malcolm was glad to have the task. There hadn’t been anything he could do for Maggie at the end, but he could do this. He could fulfill her final wish, including carrying her weight.
On the count of three, Pax and Malcolm lifted the canvas sack containing Maggie’s remains and carried it to the open crate the Irish brothers had brought inside. There’d be no fancy casket—Maggie had apparently stipulated that in her instructions to the undertaker. She’d thought it would be a waste.
“Okay. I’ve got this part,” Pax said.
He took a small hammer from the kit he’d brought and began pounding nails into the lid to keep it in place. With the hammered echoes in the room, Malcolm took one final glance around. His mother had been dying for a long time, but the pain and chaos had come hard and fast on the heels of her actual departure.
He looked at his mother’s deathbed, once the safest place on earth, where her children could hide from thunderstorms and recover from fevers. Malcolm’s oldest sibling, Jennie, liked to say their mother snored like an elephant with a broken trunk, and she wasn’t wrong. But now it had been transformed, empty of all but the slight impression of the woman who’d spent thousands of nights upon it. It would always be her deathbed.
He thought of Jennie again, wondering where she was, wishing for a knock at the door and the return of his prodigal sister. He’d have given anything for her company today. For all his faults, at least Elias sent an occasional letter.
He called on Maggie’s birthday, Malcolm reminded himself. Given the cost of a telephone call from Buffalo, New York, to Elkhart, Indiana, that wasn’t nothing.
“Malcolm.”
He glanced at Paxson Keates. “Sorry. I feel like I’m asleep on my feet.”
“You can sleep on the train,” Pax said. “Give me a hand. It’s not as heavy as it looks.”
Malcolm looked at the crate and then back at the undertaker. “You mind me asking what those two redheaded bruisers are for?”
“The Hannigans.”
“What’d you bring them for? You’ve been here more than an hour and all they’ve done is smoke cigarettes and grind them out on the curb.”
“They serve a purpose,” Pax said, blue eyes twinkling. “Besides, I didn’t hire those boys. Maggie did.”
They both looked at the crate that now hid the corpse of Maggie Wise, almost as if they expected her to chime in. Malcolm felt he should say something more, but he hadn’t slept at all, and grief had sunk its claws into him.
You can sleep on the train, Pax had said. He had his doubts.
Confused and tired and wondering how much of the path ahead of him had already been plotted out by his mother, he strode to the door and opened it. Out in the corridor, Violet looked up. She’d been so quiet in her preparations—or he’d been so focused on his own—that he hadn’t heard her finish her packing. She sat on her battered brown suitcase and leaned against the wall, her feet propped on Malcolm’s scuffed traveling case, which wasn’t much more than a valise.
“You’re ready?” Violet asked. “The train leaves at quarter past ten.”
“When’s a train through Elkhart ever left on time?”
Violet stood. “It sounded to me like it’s not the sort of thing you can leave to chance.”
In the bedroom, Pax cleared his throat. “Mrs. Wise is correct. Let’s move along.”
Malcolm didn’t appreciate being chided by the undertaker.Outside a war, he wasn’t going to take orders from anyone. Nevertheless, they had a point, so he went in and hefted his end of the crate, and together, he and the undertaker carried it out into the hallway and down the stairs. Violet managed her suitcase with the shoulder strap of Malcolm’s valise around her neck, fit to strangle her if she stumbled.
At the door, Pax rested the crate on his hip while he turned the knob, and they all stepped into the morning light. Wisps of clouds striped the sky. The air felt crisp and smelled like snow might soon arrive. This time of year, it was impossible to predict when a storm might sneak down from the north.
“Here they come,” said one of the Hannigan brothers, flicking his cigarette to the pavement without bothering to stub it out.
His brother followed suit. The men moved in tandem, on alert, glancing around in a way that reminded Malcolm of Korea. He could see in the way they held themselves, in the straightness of their spines and the swivel of their heads, that they knew what it meant to be on guard.
“Joe, get the tailgate,” said the brother whose cigarette still dangled from his lips.
Malcolm and Pax hustled the crate across the ragged lawn. Violet shuffled in their wake with the luggage. When Joe Hannigan opened the tailgate, they slid the crate into the back of the hearse and Violet put their bags in beside it, as if Maggie Wise’s corpse was just another piece of luggage.
The space beneath the willow tree was vacant.
Malcolm had peeked out the window several times this morning and found no sign of the man in the raven mask. The weeping branches swayed in the cold wind, but the morning light shone through, leaving no shadows to hide last night’s visitor.
