Read Online Mad Season by Nancy Means Wright - Free Book Online Page A

that.” She didn’t want Belle cremated, and she refused an autopsy. So the coroner had backed off: he’d known Belle personally, wanted Marie’s vote, an election coming up. Anyway, the coroner admitted, even an autopsy couldn’t prove exactly how a wound had been inflicted.
    They had to have the funeral the next day, then, Colm’s father said, looking doubtful, stroking back his several white hairs—”I mean, with no embalming?” and Marie agreed. Already there was that waxy look, the corneas cloudy, the body frozen, face and neck going greenish red; in thirty hours the rot would set in. Colm was relieved about the embalming, to tell the truth. He didn’t think he could do that, not on Belle. Pumping in that stuff, like needling in crack or something.
    Marie insisted on thick makeup: she’d do it herself to hide the bruises, though nothing could hide the distortion on Belle’s forehead where the blow had landed. There were still tiny red marks— Colm couldn’t think what put them there: precise as ellipsis points in a print machine or the prongs in a pitchfork, but too close together for that. His father photographed her, though; it seemed gross, but you never knew.
    Marie wanted the oak coffin, the copper lining—the most expensive at fifteen hundred dollars. When Colm suggested the pine—his dad out of the room to take a leak, he did it every hour these days—she zipped up her lips like a small purse.
    “I’ll pay for it out of my savings,” she said, her eyebrows shoved into a V, her pointed chin risen like a martyr’s. “I was saving for new carpeting. Harold knows how much I want it, but he can’t find work, though he’s got a lead. I won’t have linoleum like Mother put up with.”
    “The pine lasts just as long,” Colm suggested. He was getting a double message here: she wanted the best but she didn’t.
    The black eyes blazed at him. “The oak,” she said.
    “They’re discounted now,” he said quickly, “I’d forgotten.” His father would have to accept it—jeez, he’d pay the difference himself. “You can take as long as you need to pay,” he offered, and she nodded, chin up.
    Neither of them, he realized after Marie had gone, her slim hips grinding inside a brown vinyl skirt, had mentioned the word murder. Pulling the lids down over the opaque eyes, he sensed something cold pass through him. It wasn’t just the mortuary. It was something more. He couldn’t put a finger on it.
    “S’funny,” his father said, coming back in the room, his pants open, he’d forgot to zip. He touched his groin: “I got some pressure down here, I don’t like it. She take the oak?”
    Colm nodded. “You’d better see Dr. Collier. But zip up first or he’ll think you’re advertising.”
    “Oh, shit,” said his father, zipping.
    * * * *
    When she died, Ruth told Colm after the wake, she wanted to be cremated, and he said he’d been thinking the same thing. There were only the bones left, like shells picked clean on a beach. The dead could rise again, if that’s what you believed, out of the ashes.
    He’d give her a discount, he said, and winked. They were leaving the funeral home together. The wake was still going on, Belle in an open casket wearing makeup she’d rub off at once if she could see; Harold holding on to Marie like he couldn’t stand up by himself. Lucien visibly absent—he wasn’t to know yet, Marie said, in spite of Ruth’s protest.
    Ruth couldn’t weep. Her initial shock, the sense of loss, had gone to anger. A life snuffed out over money! There was to be a funeral of course, full Mass—she’d see that Lucien got there. It would be well enough attended, like the wake. Half the people had come, most likely, out of curiosity.
    “How can you live in a mortuary?” she asked Colm. “I know about your father. He looked frail tonight, though he had the old chin lift. Like a director glad his play was going well but afraid someone would blow it in the last