Judgment of the Grave (6 page)

“Well, you’ve got your Barre Gray. That’s a nice classic granite,” Bruce Whiting was saying. “And then if you like something a little darker, there are some nice granites out of Minnesota: St. Cloud Gray, Autumn Brown. Most of the real black ones come out of Africa: Flash Black, Nero Black.” He handed over the little blocks of granite to the woman. She was the one who’d be making the decision. He had known right away. Someone always took charge, came right out and said what he or she wanted. It was like death erased the need for the regular stuff couples did—all the “What do you want, honey?” “No, what do you want?”

It was their fifteen-year-old daughter they were buying the stone for. A car accident. The boyfriend, who had lived, hadn’t even been drinking. It had been a rainy night and he’d lost control on a well-traveled suburban road. Bruce remembered reading about the accident in the paper and wondering if he would see the parents. He always wondered about that when he read about a death in the paper. Would they scatter the ashes? Would there be a funeral? Would they even get a monument?

The mother was the one making the decisions here, despite being so distraught that she could barely speak.

“Did you have something in mind?” he asked finally after she had turned the granite samples over and over in her hands as though she couldn’t remember what they were for.

“She liked pink,” the mother said. “It was her favorite color.” A tear rolled from her eye to her check. Bruce watched it. Once, he had been able to feel a real sense of sympathy for the bereaved. Now, since Pres had been sick, he found that he was threatened by shows of emotion. He wanted to turn away from her, to leave her crying in the showroom. But with some effort, he was able to look her in the eye and say, “I’m sorry, I know this is hard. What about this one? It’s called Colonial Rose. I’ve always liked it. Very feminine, don’t you think? And you can do a rose or a lily on the face. What was her favorite flower?”

When they had gone, he went into the office and sat down at the desk to go through the mail. His father had been in already. The mail was spread out all over Bruce’s desk, a few bills opened and then discarded. It drove Bruce crazy, but he’d tried talking to George about it and George had just said he was too old to change his ways.

“I’ll be out of here soon enough,” he’d said in his fatalistic manner. “When I retire, you can do all the mail your own way and no one can stop you.” He’d looked at Bruce with his gray eyes that almost disappeared against his gray hair and grayish skin, then turned away, a slumped figure dressed in his usual uniform of baggy tweed trousers and a charcoal wool sweater.

Ever since George had announced that he was going to retire, he had seemed to shrink into himself. Over the summer he had spent more time in his vegetable garden than in the showroom, and Bruce wondered if the end of the growing season wasn’t the source of George’s recent depression.

There wasn’t much in the mail, a few bills that he put aside to pay and various advertisements that he threw out. He leaned back and looked at the mess on his desk. There were catalogs everywhere, his own sketches, scraps of paper with notes on them arranged in precise piles. Lauren was always trying to get him to clean it off, but he liked it the way it was. “This way, I know where everything is,” he always told her.

He was looking through a catalog of new laser-carved designs for monuments when she came into the office. His wife had her own desk on the other side of the showroom, where she answered the phone and did the accounts. She was wearing a pink wool skirt and a pink sweater and her curly blond hair looked shiny and clean. There was something about her that had always reminded him of Shirley Temple, something perky and sexy and young. Next to her, he was a shaggy, middle-aged giant, and on the rare occasions that he was forced to look at a picture of the two of them, he was always struck by how incongruous they were, Lauren’s tiny blond figure and his dark, overly tall one. And he was always struck by how lucky he was, which made him feel desperate and uneasy.

“Hi, hon,” she said, putting her hands on his shoulders and rubbing them. “Whatcha doin’?”

“Just looking at some new stuff. What do you think of this one?”

She leaned over him and studied the design. “Tacky,” she said. “How did it go with the car accident?”

“Okay. The mother was the one. I think I got ’em squared away.”

“Poor people.” It always amazed him that Lauren was still capable of sympathy after dealing with as many grieving families as she had over the years. She sat down in the chair across from him and leveled her blue eyes at him. “Did you talk to Cecily?”

He closed the catalog and swiveled his chair away. “I couldn’t. Pres has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow and this thing with the body in the woods…She was really upset when I called. I just couldn’t do it.”

“Pres told you what he was doing up there yet?”

“I don’t know. Just walking.” But he hadn’t answered her question. Pres hadn’t told him anything, hadn’t wanted to talk about it at all.

She got up, smoothed the front of her skirt, and leaned over to kiss his forehead. “Bruce, I love you and I know this is really hard with Pres and everything, but we’ve got to get this settled. Especially with…well, if we’re right, it could just be a really bad situation for everyone. And if we want to start branching out when your dad retires, she could make trouble about it. We’ve got to get those shares back.”

Bruce looked down at the desk. It was the fourth time they’d had this conversation that week and he repressed the desire to snap at her. She was right, of course. The stupidest thing he’d ever done had been to allow Cecily to claim a third of the shares of the monument company during the divorce. He’d been so guilty, willing to do anything to make her go away so he could be with Lauren, and she had been so angry, she’d wanted to do anything to hurt him. Asking for the shares had been her way of exerting her power, though she’d said it was because of Pres. And he supposed it was fair on some level. When they’d first gotten married, the monument company had been deeply in debt, two or three years from shutting down if he and George had continued on the path they’d been following. But Cecily had some money her father had invested for her, and she had put it all into the company. They’d expanded, gotten better lines, improved the whole look of the place. She had deserved something, but he knew he should have just bought her out.

“He won’t have anything else,” she’d said when she’d told him what she wanted. Bruce remembered feeling like he was going to cry and telling her that of course he would always provide for his son.

“But we don’t know that,” she’d countered. “You say that now, but when
she
”—she couldn’t say Lauren’s name—“has the baby, you may feel differently. This is the only way to make sure that Pres will be taken care of.”

He’d felt so guilty that he’d been more than happy to agree.

But Lauren was right. It had to be taken care of, sooner rather than later. They’d been to the bank and had talked about taking out a loan to buy her out. It would be difficult, but it could be done.

If she agreed, he reminded himself. If she agreed.

“Okay,” he said finally. “I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”

She caressed his cheek. “Where’s your dad?”

“I don’t know.” He shut down the computer and swiveled his chair around to face her. She gave him a sexy little grin and sat down on his lap. “You got any appointments?”

“Uh-uh,” he said, already kissing her neck. Her hair smelled of strawberries and vanilla.

“Good.” She opened her mouth a little to him and placed her right breast in his hand. They were practiced and it took only a few moments before he was unzipped, before her pink wool skirt was up around her waist. The desk chair creaked and in a few minutes it was all over. It was the way they always did it in the office, quickly, focused on him, worried that George would come in. If they thought about it, they both knew that that was part of the turn-on, that it reminded them of those early days when they could be together only at the office.

Bruce had known the first time he’d seen her. Not that he was going to fall in love with her, marry her, have two children with her. But he had known that he was going to sleep with her. It had surprised him, sitting across from her in the office during her interview, hearing about all the computer programs she knew, all the responsibilities she’d had at her previous jobs. He’d never cheated on Cecily before, though he’d thought about it, but somehow when he’d seen Lauren, he’d just known.

Now he lay his hot face against her neck, breathing hard. He loved her so fiercely, he sometimes felt guilty about Noah and Rory. Of course he loved his son and daughter too, but it was an easy kind of love, fun love, sweet love. The way he felt about Lauren, still after all this time, made him feel ashamed and scared sometimes. It was the way he felt about Pres, he realized with a start. If he was honest with himself, they were the two people he loved the most in the world.

The hill cemetery was located across from Monument Square, climbing away from Lexington Road, the headstones perched along the rise like trees hanging on by their roots. The story went that the reason for its existence, only steps from the South Burying Ground on the other side of Main Street, was the superstitions of Concord’s earliest settlers. Believing that carrying a corpse across running water caused the soul to be carried away, the townspeople living on the far side of the Mill Dam that had run under Main Street refused to carry their dead to the South Burying Ground. So they had built their own.

There were a few well-known stones that Sweeney had seen before, but she didn’t stop to look at them again. Today she was looking for further evidence of the round-skull carver.

She started at the bottom of the hill, moving across the rows of stones and looking for the distinctive death’s-head. If she could find another stone that the round-skull carver had made for a prominent Concord resident, then she’d have a good chance of finding at least one of the names. This was always her favorite part. As she looked out across the stones, she saw only promise, only the stories that these stones had to tell. Once she waded in among them, she would confront the realities of her field, broken stones, stones that would never yield up a clue to their maker no matter how hard she tried, stones made long after the death date on the stone that hopelessly confused a time line. But for now she looked out across the little city of stone and smiled.

As she searched, she had fun browsing through them again, finding typical seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stones, a few wonderful death’s-heads complete with skulls and crossbones, and some winged death’s-heads. The classic death’s-head—a primitive, often grinning skull—was a common sight in seventeenth-century graveyards, and to contemporary minds it presented a macabre image of the consequences of the grave. But it was by no means a simple symbol, and Sweeney was interested in the various ways it had been used over the centuries.

Sweeney’s specialty was the funerary art of the Victorian world, and she thought it must be difficult to find a culture as obsessed with death as the Victorians had been. But there was no denying that the Puritans had also spent a lot of time and energy contemplating their final demise. Children were brought up on pithy little rhymes such as “Time cuts down all / Both Great and small” and “Youth forward slips / Death soonest nips.”

Puritan stonecutters had made good use of the skull or death’s-head on their stones, and it was a common sight in cemeteries filled during the eighteenth century. Over time, the death’s-head had evolved into the soul’s head, the moon-shaped faces, often winged, that were a common sight on eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century stones. And in the late 1700s, stonecutters had even started to carve actual portraits on their memorials.

But as time went on, she felt her hopes flag. She had climbed to the top of the hill and had finished with the stones from the 1740s and ’50s, when the round-skull carver seemed to have done most of his work, and still she’d found nothing.

She was looking along one of the back corner rows when she saw the distinctive death’s-head. It wasn’t one of the round-skull carver’s, but immediately she recognized the shape of the skull and the strange Medusa hair. She knelt down in front of it and cleared some dead grass away from the base. The stone wasn’t signed, but it had to be by Josiah Whiting. She knew it as certainly as if he had signed his name. Sweeney felt a little buzz of excitement as she checked the date on the stone. The Abner Fall stone in the South Burying Ground had been dated 1760. This one had been made sometime about 1773, when John Stiles, buried beneath it, had breathed his last.

In her notebook, Sweeney found the quick sketches she’d made of the Abner Fall stone and compared them with this one. The differences were startling. Between 1760 and 1773, Josiah Whiting had radically altered his distinctive Medusa head. This mask was elongated and the hair had a different feel to it. It rose above the head in a more frantic way, the strands thinner and longer. The skeletal face seemed more haunted and desperate, the eyes wild. Sweeney looked closely and found that the circles were smaller and the pinpoint pupils larger, which accounted for the look. Whereas the death’s-head on the Abner Fall stone had seemed peaceful and bland, this one looked to be in torment.

She studied the lettering and took measurements. Her initial instinct that the letters were precisely centered on the stone was borne out by her tape measure. Josiah Whiting had been a singularly exact stonecutter during a time when many gravestone makers had made up for their lack of planning by squeezing extra letters in at the end of a line or above the other letters. She felt a sense of respect for this craftsman who had worked so long ago.

Sweeney took a series of pictures of the stone in the midday light, made some notes, and was starting her search for more of Whiting’s work when she looked up to find Pres Whiting watching her from the back of the cemetery.

“Hi,” she called out. He was wearing the Red Sox cap and a woolen sweater that looked a little too hot for the day. “What a coincidence.”

He came closer, clutching his backpack and looking a bit afraid. “No,” he said nervously. “It’s not a coincidence. You said you were going to come to the cemetery, so I was checking for you.”

“Oh. Well, I’m glad you found me. How are you?”

“All right.” He stood awkwardly, looking around him at the stones.

“So, what have you been up to since yesterday?” she asked.

“Oh, just, like, school.” He blushed a little.

“Yeah? Isn’t today Tuesday? It’s been a while since I was in school, but I remember we usually went on Tuesdays.”

“Well…” He looked around the cemetery as though he was looking for someone. “I don’t know. It’s just that I get so bored there. I would rather learn stuff out here.”

Sweeney, who remembered feeling the same way, had to refrain from telling him that he probably was learning more out here than he was in there.

“I found another Josiah Whiting stone. I was just about to start looking around for more. Do you want to help me?”

He brightened up at that and followed her up and down the rows of stones as she looked for something that reminded her of the carver.

“Here we go,” she said as she stopped in front of a smaller stone with the characteristically skinny shoulders and a variation of the Medusa death mask.

“Annie Gooding,” Pres read out loud. “She was born in 1761 and she died in 1774.”

“It’s later,” Sweeney said after a moment, trying to figure out if he’d realized she was only thirteen. “His style has evolved over time.”

“That man looks crazy,” Pres said.

“He does. He looks really crazy.” She took some photographs and made a few notes.

“Why do they put them on gravestones?” Pres asked. “Those skulls.”

“It started out as a pretty straightforward Puritan symbol for death,” Sweeney told him. “The Puritans used gravestones as a way of warning the living about the horrors of the grave. The idea was that you should live a saintly life, or you’d end up nothing more than a bag of bones. Of course, there was kind of a theological problem there, because they also believed that whether or not you were saved was preordained and you actually had nothing to do with it.”

“I feel like that’s how all religions are,” Pres said. “My gramma makes me go to church with her sometimes. They’re always talking about stuff that doesn’t make any sense to me. Like, you should do certain things because it’s the right thing to do, but then if you don’t do them, God will always forgive you. I don’t get that. Why would you do good things if God will always forgive you if you don’t?” He reached up to take off the hat and scratched his head. He looked rounder today, like someone had blown him up like a balloon.

“You’re not the only one,” Sweeney said. “The Puritans did change, though, because of people like you who asked questions and pointed out things that didn’t make sense. By the time Josiah Whiting was making his stones, the church had loosened up a little, started opening up to the idea that everyone could be saved. A lot of carvers started using different symbols, more human-looking heads and more angels. They started putting wings on the death’s-head, to signify the idea of life after death.” She watched him. “What’s a stone you really like here?”

He led her over to a big 1740s headstone featuring a little portrait of a woman at the top. She was surrounded by twining vines of ivy and flowers. Her name, according to the carved letters beneath the portrait, was Anne Thomas. Beneath her name and the dates of her life were the words “Piety and love she gave / To all who knew her / The judgment of the grave She’ll face / and find her true reward.”

“What do you like about it?” Sweeney asked him.

He traced a finger over the carved lines of the woman’s face, the primitive likeness nonetheless suggesting femininity. “It’s pretty sophisticated,” he said. “For 1740. Look at her hair. And it’s cool that you can see what she looked like. A lot of stones, it’s just the name, you know. But you don’t really know what they were like. My dad makes a lot of stones that have pictures on them. It’s pretty cool. They use lasers, or you can put, like, a real picture behind a piece of Plexiglas. I’d like to have my picture on my gravestone. So people can see who I was, you know?”

“I’m impressed. I don’t think I knew the difference between a sophisticated 1740 stone and a not-so-sophisticated one until I was in graduate school,” Sweeney told him. But that wasn’t strictly true. Part of the reason she’d gotten interested in gravestones as an adolescent was that she had liked comparing them, seeing how they were different in different eras.

“Yeah, well, I told you. I like hanging around cemeteries.”

Sweeney took out her camera and handed it over to him. “Take a picture of it for me?” He nodded and carefully focused the camera on the stone, pressing the shutter with intense concentration and then handing the camera back to her.

“This is great,” she told Pres, going back to the second Whiting stone. “I want to get some photos before the light changes. I think I’m going to try to find out more about your ancestor. Maybe write my paper about him. I’m not finding that much about the other guy I was working on, and I think there might be something really interesting here. The death’s-heads change so much. You said he was a Revolutionary War hero? Right?”

“I guess so. My grampa thinks so, anyway. When he dresses up at reenactments, he’s always pretending he’s Josiah.”

“Is there anyone in town who knows about him? Anyone I could interview?”

“My mom,” he said. “She knows about all that kind of historical stuff. She has a bunch of letters in her museum that my grampa gave her. And my dad and my grampa know about him. My grampa especially.”

“I’ll have to talk to them.”

Pres thought for a minute. Then he said, “Kids used to say there was a ghost. In the woods near my grandparents’ house.” He colored suddenly and Sweeney wondered why the association embarrassed him. “They said maybe it was Josiah Whiting.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I don’t really believe in ghosts, but kids said they heard things sometimes. At night.” He took a little notebook and pen out of his backpack and tapped the pen nervously against the spiral binding.

“What did they hear?”

“A guy screaming. Like he was in pain.”

He opened up the notebook and jotted something down in it.

“What’s that?” Sweeney asked him. “Your journal?”

He closed it and put it back in the backpack as though he was afraid she was going to take it. “No. Just a kind of record book. I write down when things happen.”

Sweeney asked, “Why?”

“Just so, you know. People will know what I did.”

He had used the past tense and it took her a minute to realize what he meant. It was to be a posthumous legacy, that little book. She felt her throat constrict and she had to stand up and pretend to inspect a gravestone behind him so that he wouldn’t see her face.

He read over something he’d written, then shut the book and looked up at her. “Are your parents married still?”

Sweeney sat down, trying to figure out how to explain it to him. “No,” she said finally. “Actually they never got married. But we all lived together until I was five and then they split up. My dad died when I was thirteen, but my mom’s still alive, although I don’t see her a lot. How old were you when your parents got divorced?”

“Eight,” he said. “I knew they were going to, though. They used to fight a lot and it seemed like my dad didn’t like being around her anyway. He decided to live with Lauren instead.”

“Do you get along with her? My dad never got remarried, but he had this one girlfriend I hated. She was always telling me to go to my room and leave them alone. I was so happy when my dad broke up with her.”

“Lauren’s nice. And I like Rory and Noah. That’s my sister and brother. But my mom hates her, and I can’t really talk about her at home.”

“Adults can be real pains in the neck,” Sweeney said, but he didn’t smile.

They sat in companionable silence, looking out across the stones.

“What did the police want to know from you?” she asked after a few minutes.

He seemed surprised she would ask. “I don’t know. They just kept asking the same questions over and over and over. Did I touch him? What did he look like when I got there? I kept telling them, but it was like they didn’t even listen.”

“Me too,” Sweeney said. “I got tired of saying the same thing over and over. They asked me if you went into the clubhouse before I got there.”

Pres leaned back and stared up at the canopy of trees and didn’t say anything.

Above them, the trees blazed.

“Pres,” Sweeney said, “did you go into the clubhouse? When you found the guy?”

He turned to look at her.

“I didn’t tell the police that I saw you. I’m not even sure I did see you. If you tell me, I promise I won’t tell them unless it’s really important.”

“Maybe I did. I might tell you later,” he said, looking up earnestly at her. “I don’t know. I don’t want to tell you now.”