He sat at the small table in the dining alcove of his small apartment, and tried to get his thinking back into a police track. In police work you couldn’t very often accept that strange happenings were just coincidence; last night the rather strange old man had prowled around the morgue, and this morning she was gone.
In police work also, on the other hand, you had to start with what was possible. In fact, the old man could not even have got into the building there last night. Someone had, though—or did Judy have the story garbled?
Still chewing toast, Joe picked up his phone, dialed a number in Homicide, and asked for Charley Snider.
“Charley? This is Joe Keogh. What is it, what’s the story?”
“Oh yeah, the story. I’ll give it to you straight, man. I know what this must be like for you.”
“Just tell me.”
“The thing is, she was there as of about ten P.M. last night. Everybody swears all was in order then, at least. Then, man, as of six-ten this A.M., when one of the junior pathologists decides he wants a preliminary look, she was just not there. Empty bin’s correctly labeled. All the paper work’s in order, as near as we can find out. No bodies were officially removed from the morgue in those eight hours. The only other funny thing is the lockers where the clothes and other personal effects of the, uh, customers are kept; somebody had been digging around in there, it looks like. No locks broken, but the stuff’s all scrambled, and we don’t know yet if Kate’s property is missing or not.”
“Family hadn’t claimed her things?”
“Not yet they hadn’t.”
“No signs of a break-in?”
“None we’ve discovered, it’s a big place. We got our men still swarming through there. We’re checking out everyone who was on duty there last night. So far’s we know, no weirdos among them.”
“That’s something.”
“Hey, man, one more thing. Remember, we found Kate’s Lancia in the pound? It had been towed away from that hydrant. Anyway someone left a big fat thumbprint right on the rearview mirror, angle seemed to show it was someone reaching from the right seat. It’s being checked out in Washington now.”
“It’s probably some garage man’s. No, it’s probably mine; I’ve ridden in that car a lot.”
“If you got any ideas we can try, I’d like to hear.”
“No, no ideas.” His suspicions of the old man, if they really were suspicions, had to settle into some kind of a sane pattern before he threw them out as a tip. An old friend of Clarissa’s, after all. “Thanks, Charley. I’m going over to the Southerlands’ for a while, in case you want to reach me.”
He sat there for a minute staring at the cradled phone, but seeing the old man. Then he took a jacket from the closet and went out the door.
* * *
Snow, gentle-falling, soft as white night, dimmed the scorch of day to muted gray for the old man, dulled for him the multicolored windows of stained glass that in bright sun would have been explosions of discomfort. He needed rest and sleep. Not, as yet, to the point where his survival was in question, so he stayed on his feet and active. Tomorrow, though, he was certainly going to have to sleep.
Besides dulling the sun, another eminently satisfactory effect of the snow was that it seemed to discourage visitors to Lockwood Cemetery. Or perhaps Americans were just not as enthusiastic as Europeans about visiting their dead. Anyway, during the whole morning he had heard no more than three or four vehicles whispering around the gravel roads of the cemetery, one of them a pickup truck with snowplow attached, that seemed to make but little progress in getting the drives clear.
Gently, but very insistently, the snow continued to fall. By two o’clock it lay ankle-deep on the broad lawns and weathered stones of the cemetery’s old section, and clung to the wrought-iron fences, obscuring the signs that warned about the guard dogs being loosed here after dusk. The snow and the dogs were all fine with the old man who stood looking out from inside the Southerland mausoleum, his eye to a small chink he had broken in one window of stained glass.
He supposed that this mausoleum was old and large, as such things went in this young country. It was a one-room house of marble no warmer and no colder than the snow, or than the bones it sheltered—or than the living but unbreathing flesh that it concealed today.
At intervals, when he grew weary of looking out, five or six long paces took the old man from one end of the cold room to the other. This included a slight detour around the empty sarcophagus and the decorative urns that had been planted in the middle of the space. Looking at them, he could see why Andrew had exiled them here, ugly decorations no one wanted to behold. The central sarcophagus was unoccupied; so far all internments had been in the vaults built into the thick outer walls. Southerlands and their kin who had died in the past seventy years or so were there, behind the waist-high doors of green-patinaed bronze.
Kate was lying just above one such door, on a wide marble ledge set below another stained-glass window. She had been lying there since just before the wintry dawn, curled up like a sleeper, wrapped in a sheet that revealed only her head.
Kate lay on her left side, facing the room, but with eyes closed. One arm tucked beneath her head, she had scarcely moved for hours. The coarse sheet wrapping her from toes to neck bore on one corner the stamped legend, PROPERTY OF COOK COUNTRY MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE. While she was not fully awake, she was not fully asleep either; which was one reason why the old man, finding himself thrust into the role of midwife for her new life, hesitated to leave her alone, even though other important matters demanded his attention.
This half-sleeping condition of Kate’s had him somewhat puzzled. No reason, he thought, why she should not be able to sleep the daylight hours away, in this her native sepulcher. In fact when he brought her here he had expected her to slip into a deep sleep at once.
He came back now from another squint out of the broken window, to stand motionlessly regarding her. His black topcoat was open, his dark hat set at a slightly jaunty angle, his dark glasses off, his hands behind his back.
Suddenly Kate’s eyes flew open. “I don’t know you,” she said, in dazed mistrustfulness. Her speech was newly awkward: sometimes she forgot to take a breath before she started talking, for breath was no longer a requirement of her life; sometimes she drew in too much air, and the end of a phrase was punctuated with a sharp puff of the surplus.
She had protested that he was a stranger enough times for him to have lost count. But if patience with her confusion was costing him an effort, he had not let that effort show as yet. “I am an old friend of the family, Kate,” he repeated, yet again. “Of your Grandmother Clarissa’s in particular. I have brought you here for your own protection.”
Kate moved her body substantially now for the first time in hours, rising on one elbow. “How did you bring me here?”
This question and answer too, they had been through several times before. “Think back, girl—what do you remember of our journey?”
Kate’s blue eyes looked into the distance. This time round she was going to manage to take the conversation at least one step farther than before. “There were doors, somewhere . . . in a couple of different places . . . and you told me that because it was after dark we needed no keys; we could slip through.”
“What else?”
“It seems to me that I can remember—flying. Like something in a dream.”