The Old Route

"That's his idea," I said again, more quietly. "The more of you there are, the better the show."

Nobody spoke. In the doorway of my mother's office, Dunleavy stood with his hat pushed back and his big hand on the frame, looking at me, and behind him the hearse ticked and sighed under the lamp like a patient beast. Mr. Pell, the funeral director, was hovering at the foot of the loading ramp with his clipboard clutched to his chest and the stricken look of a man who has wandered into someone else's dream.

"You were there this afternoon," I said. "At the bank. You had eight people. You had a van, an earpiece, a plan. And the man walked through the one door nobody was watching. Under the bridge you had twelve, and he sent a motorcycle." I took a breath. "He doesn't care how many you bring, Frank. He's counting."

"Counting what?"

"Everything. Where they stand. What they say. What they do when something goes wrong."

Dunleavy looked at me for a long time. His face in the yellow light was the face of a man who has been handed a heavy suitcase and told to carry it a mile.

Then he looked at my daughter.

June had not moved from her place beside the desk. She stood with her hand on the cassette recorder and her chin up, small and straight in her sneakers and her too-big coat. I thought she would speak. I saw her mouth begin to shape the words, and then close. She had said her part, I think, an hour before, under a bridge. Now she only looked at him with her great dark eyes and waited, as she had waited all her life, to be believed.

"What would you do?" he said to her.

"Fewer," said June.

"How few?"

"Two. Women. Plain clothes." She said it as though she had worked it out. "Not close. Not in the open. Far enough that he can't tell. And no cars, none you can see, nothing with antennas." She swallowed. "And only one radio. One. With everyone else on a different channel, and no one speaking unless they have to."

"He'll still hear."

"Then he'll hear almost nothing."

Dunleavy rubbed his jaw. The toothpick moved from one side of his mouth to the other. I could see him weighing it, the whole thing, the way a man weighs two sacks of grain that he is afraid are both bad.

"Half," he said at last.

"What?"

"I'll give you half." He let out a long breath. "I'll give you two women within a hundred yards of her. I'll give you a van, a small one, across the road, with the girl, and Tran, and the new man from the Second District, because I want a cop in it who's got twenty years. I'll pull the rest back to the ring road, a mile out, on call. No dogs. No glass. No men in the trees." He looked at me. "But I'm putting a wire on you. And I want you to understand that I'll bring the whole damned hill down the second you drop your hand."

"That's fair."

"It isn't fair. It's what I've got." He set his hat on his head. "Mr. Pell. How would you like to give a lady a ride?"

…

I have been in a hearse exactly once in my life, and I do not recommend it.

It is not what you would think. It is not gloomy. It is a quiet, thickly upholstered, beautifully sprung automobile with a floor like a ballroom and a smell of lilies and leather polish and, faintly, formaldehyde. Mr. Pell had given me the seat beside the driver, with an apologetic cough, because the alternative was the rear, where a gray metal rack stood empty on its rollers with a velvet pall folded over it. We drove with the windows cracked an inch. Mr. Pell held the wheel at ten and two. He did not speak for eleven blocks.

"I'm so sorry," he said at last. "For your loss. I understand it was your father."

"It was a long time ago."

"The old section," said Mr. Pell, in a voice of faint, scholarly distress. "I did think it very strange. We don't open those anymore. The ground's unstable. There are sinkholes." He cleared his throat. "I rather thought it might be a mistake. But the family sounded so certain."

"The family?"

"A gentleman. On the telephone. Very polite." He frowned through the windshield. "He said you'd be along at half past six, and that you were to be given every consideration."

I looked at him.

"What did he sound like?"

"Like a very nice man," said Mr. Pell.

We drove.

…

The sun had gone. It had gone down while we were in the annex, with nobody watching, into a long bruise of clouds along the lake, and the last light lingered in the west like a stain on a plate. The sky was a deep clean violet, with one star. The streetlamps had come on along the ridge road and made little amber puddles in the dusk. Beside the road, the iron fence of Greywood ran on and on, black and spiked, with the trees behind it standing up against the sky in great dark clouds.

I had put on a borrowed coat. I had my flowers, white chrysanthemums, three dollars, from a gas station on Lorain, in a cone of green paper. I had in my left ear a bead of plastic as small as a grain of rice. I carried it all with the dreamy stiffness of a woman going to a play.

At the corner, a small white van was parked on the verge. It was a delivery van, rusty, with a faded sign on the side that said MILLER'S FLORIST, FRESH CUT, WE DELIVER. Dunleavy had stolen it, I think, from a funeral home. The windows were dark. I saw a flicker in the rear, the blue glow of a screen.

My daughter's face was in the window.

I did not wave. I had promised. I let my eyes slide over her, and past, and on, and saw her small white hand lift to the glass and press there, flat, for a single second, like a leaf.

Behind her was a larger shape.

He leaned forward as we passed, a big man in a dark uniform, to look out at the hearse. A heavy pale face. A pair of rimless glasses that caught the lamp. He raised two fingers to his brow, in a lazy courteous salute, and smiled.

"That'll be Officer Pruitt," said Mr. Pell, with a kind of relief, as if grateful to be able to name something. "I think they said the new man. He shook my hand earlier. A very firm grip. He smelled of soap."

…

Dunleavy had told me where the two women would be. He had said it in the annex, quickly, ticking it off on his thick fingers, as a man recites a recipe. The tall one, Detective Brandt, with the braid, would be in the lodge garden, in a black coat, pretending to tend a grave. The short one, Officer Yoon, would walk a small brown dog along the outer path, a hundred yards back, and stop whenever I stopped. They would not look at me. They would not speak. If I touched my left ear twice, they would run.

"And if you don't touch it?" I had asked.

"Then they're a woman and a dog," said Dunleavy, "and I'm an old fool."

They set me down at the west gate.

It was a black iron arch with a stone lintel and a single word picked out in brass: REST. The hearse hissed to a stop and Mr. Pell hurried round to open my door with an air of mournful ceremony, as if I were the widow. I stepped out onto the gravel. It was cold. The wind had a taste of snow.

"I'll wait," said Mr. Pell. "For as long as you need."

"You don't have to."

"It's no trouble. It's—" His hands twisted on the clipboard. "I should like to. If you don't mind."

"Thank you."

He bowed. He actually bowed. And then he turned and went back to the hearse and got in, and sat there with his hands folded, a small black figure in a long black car, like something carved on a tomb.

The gate was open.

A little brick lodge stood beside it, the caretaker's hut, with a single bulb burning in a window. It gave off a weak yellow glow, the color of weak tea. The door was shut. In the glass hung a card in a tilted hand: BACK IN 10 MIN. I looked at it for a long moment. The window beyond was empty. I could see a chair, a desk, a mug on a blotter with a ring of dried coffee, a calendar on the wall that said October.

Nobody here, I thought. There's never anybody here.

And then I saw the car.

…

It stood at the foot of a flight of stone steps, to the left of the gate, where a service road ran off into the trees. It was a sedan, low and dark and long, parked quite correctly against the curb with its wheels turned in. It had its lights off. The engine was off, too; I could tell by the absence of any thread of warmth above the hood. Nobody sat in it. The windows were black glass.

I knew the make. I could not have said how. It was the shape of a car I had seen on Chester Avenue, at dawn, from the back seat of a bus.

I walked slowly toward it, because there was nothing else to do.

The license plate was packed, thick as plaster, with a smooth gray crust of mud. Not splashed. Applied. It had been smeared on in a careful even coat, with the flat of a hand, and left to dry. It covered every letter. It covered the registration sticker in the corner. In a faint stripe along the bottom, where the paint had been rubbed, I could see the print of four fingers.

"Frank," I whispered.

"I see it." His voice was in my ear, flat, low, composed, a thread of sound that seemed to come from the inside of my own head. "Unit three, we have a vehicle at the west gate. Black sedan, no plate. I want a make and a number on the registration by the hour. Quietly. Don't touch it."

"Is it his?"

"I don't know. It might be a hundred cars. It's mud."

"It's the car."

"Maren." He let a second pass. "Take a breath."

I took one. It smelled of wet earth and cut stone, and, very faintly, from somewhere out among the trees, of woodsmoke.

"You're doing well," said Dunleavy. "Go on. Take the old route. Walk it as she walked it. Don't stop for the car and don't look at it. We'll have a team on it in ten minutes. If anything happens to you, if you so much as turn your ankle, I will be there in forty seconds."

I looked up the path. It ran away from me into the dusk, pale and winding, up between the black walnuts and the leaning stones. At the turning stood the first of the monuments, a family vault with an iron door and a wreath of dead roses.

I put my foot on the gravel.

"Don't hurry," said Dunleavy.

I stopped.

It was only two words. They were quite gentle, quite ordinary, the kind of thing a man says to a child at the edge of a pool. But I heard in them what I had not heard in an hour, the faint dry rattle of a man trying not to be afraid. And beneath my ribs, the thing that had lain still all that day, coiled and quiet as a sleeping animal, turned over, and lifted its head, and began to run.