" Men in Black, the motion picture. All you need are the vintage shades."
"I missed that one."
"You miss a lot of them."
"And I don't miss them at all."
Matt paused outside the antebellum facade of white pillars.
"White is the Asian color of mourning."
"And it was the favored color in eighteenth-century France, I believe."
"So why are we in black?"
"It's always chic?"
Temple didn't own much black, but this long-skirted loose dress with its row of tiny buttons seemed appropriate for the occasion.
Low-volume music piped them into the proper viewing area. Spencerian script on a white card announced the name "Effinger" by the open double doors.
Inside, a scene both sweet and cloying overwhelmed them.
"Did we order piped-in perfume?" Matt asked.
"No way." Temple scrawled her name and Matt's in the ornate book.
No one else had signed in yet, but the day was young.
They advanced across the empty quicksand of too-thick plush carpet to the front, where the plain casket was bracketed by banks of flowers from floor to six feet high.
Unlike the usual large, showy funeral blossoms and wreaths, these were diminutive flowers that impressed by mass rather than bulk or size.
Rank on blue-purple rank of curlicued blossoms. Hothouse flowers forced into bloom afore time. Hyacinths breathing saccharine scent into the room, enough to overlay the sickly sweet odor of the dead.
"What is this?" Matt stopped dead in midroom.
"Let's see if there are any cards."
But Temple probed among the spear-shaped leaves to no avail. These flowers were truly anonymous, a legion of delegates from nowhere and no one.
"This is bizarre." Matt stopped before one of two padded kneelers set in front of the casket.
Temple knew he would never kneel here. "Hyacinths, right?"
"Hyacinths. Let's see who comes to visit them."
First they passed by the casket. Matt's hand tightened on Temple's forearm.
Effinger lay there, wearing the healthy tan of a department-store dummy, his features stapled into a sharpness they had never mustered in life.
He did look pasty in the black suit and yellow shirt against the gag-green-colored satin. Yet all that tawdry glory seemed to elevate him to the station of an effigy. A symbol more than a man. A murdered man.
Matt moved on, retreating to a rose brocade settee along one wall. "Now what?" he asked Temple.
"You should know."
"Not here. At visitations I attended, the Rosary Guild would come to tell the beads. Or I would read from the psalms. There were crowds of parishioners. Everyone knew everyone.
Everyone felt a personal loss. This is ... a mockery. No community. No religion. Only empty ceremony."
"And hyacinths by the hundreds. I wonder why?"
"I don't think I care, Temple. No one will come. This practical joker who says it with flowers won't show up. We won't learn anything, and Kinsella will have spent his money for nothing."
"Let's wait and see."
Waiting and seeing involved the next two hours.
Two nuns came in. They wore civilian dress except for the vestigial headdress: a shoulder-brushing navy veil with a starched white rim at the hairline.
They were heavyset and middle-aged, performing an act of charity by mourning the unknown dead who had no survivors.
After a glance Matt ignored them. He hated to see the good sisters waste their sincere prayers, but even they could not save Effinger. He knew that every soul was salvageable, by the lights of his religion. He just couldn't believe it in this case, his most clear crisis of faith since he had left the priesthood.
A few itinerants drifted in as the second hour ticked away. Street people looking for diversion, perhaps someone worse off than they were to shake their heads over.
Matt was always struck by street people's kinship with dust-bowl nomads. He had thought those starved, asymmetrical, suffering faces no longer existed outside of Depression era or postwar Europe photographs. He could hardly restrain himself from handing them cards with donations as they left, except that the poor have a dignity that cannot be violated in their few sanctuaries, and apparently funeral homes were one of them.
"Sad," Temple commented. "It's an event, like a wedding chapel ceremony. That's why Electra put the dressed-up soft sculptures in her pews. So many people in cities don't belong anywhere nowadays."
Matt nodded, checking the watch his mother had given him for Christmas. Somehow it was appropriate that it be here, ticking away Effinger's last moments as a physical body on this planet. He'd had about all that he could take, and his pierced side throbbed like a grandfather clock, pain and time swinging back and forth on the pump of his blood through taut veins.
"There's nothing to learn here," Matt mumbled to Temple, turning to go.
At the double doors they met Sam himself, who suggested softly that they adjourn to his office.
Once seated in comfort--and not a seat in the house was other than cushy--it was impossible for Matt and Temple to fidget, though they both felt like doing that, given the restless swings of their feet along the plush carpeting.
"Were all the arrangements satisfactory?"
"Completely," Matt said.
"Who sent all the hyacinths?" Temple asked.
"Is that what they were! We usually see gladioli and lilies, mums and roses. Funny you should ask. No card was found."
"But you have a record of the delivery service?"
"Well, that is odd. The flowers were found in the delivery area this morning. No, I guess we don't have a record of the delivery com-pany.
"But you folks aren't to worry about any of the details. Your anonymous donor showed up in person first thing this morning and paid for everything, in cash."
"Did he say anything?" Temple was shocked into asking. Why would Max personally inspect the visitation scene?
"She was very soft-spoken. Wore a hat with a true mourning veil, utterly impenetrable. And black leather gloves. Quite a dramatic figure."
Matt and Temple exchanged a long glance. Max's hoped-for visitor was a dramatic one.
After leaving the director's office they loitered restlessly in the foyer, about to conduct a hushed postmortem of speculation on the Lady in Black.
At that moment a black-suit-clad assistant rushed out of the viewing chamber.
"Thank heavens I caught you," he said. "There was a windfall among the offerings. I don't know where these all came from, but I had to find a stationery box to hold them."
Temple took the box, surprised when it weighed her arms down.
"Bingo," she said in a daze, staring into a mound of small square envelopes.
Matt pulled one off the top and opened it. Only the usual folded note card and inside ... he elevated a silver dollar like a glittering metal host.
"No note, just this."
"Silver dollars are ... collectibles these days, worth more than face value."
Matt shrugged and pulled out some other envelopes. Each one contained a silver dollar.
"Bizarre."
"Just like the veiled lady who came to pay the bill," Temple noted. "Veiled lady! Can you imagine anyone but a funeral director swallowing that?"
Matt chuckled. "They do thrive on ceremony."
"The Lady in Black has forestalled us," Temple observed as the last visitors plodded toward the exit.
"Yes. The veiled lady in black. Oh, no!"
Matt made himself focus on his surroundings and the unconsciously observed guests. The trio of nuns were just trailing out the double doors.
Trio?
Matt's memory counted wimples, pared-down contemporary wimples, but wimples nevertheless. Only two when they came in.
"Come on!" He grabbed Temple's black-knit-swathed arm at the wrist.
Outside, the sun blared like rock radio music but the temperature was only a steady sixty degrees. Two nuns were getting into an ancient Toyota compact.