Framed tastefully in brick and Portland pilasters, Tillotson Funeral Home’s floodlit marquee beacons into the evening dark:
William Quinlan
Husband, Father, Veteran
Visitation 6 to 9 PM
Two hundred feet away, up the landscaped parking lot, Tillotson’s wide, double-winged, hip-roofed Georgian house is similarly lit. In the front foyer a grandfather clock begins to strike six.
As it does: In the visitation extension behind the main house, Peggy is alone at last. She stands before the buffet table, the caterers for casseroles and cold cuts just departed through the rear porte cochere, and her church-lady friends busy cleaning up out of sight in the Tillotson kitchen. They have chatteringly helped her with the Irish stew and the Irish potato soup, which steam now in their own special row of food warmers. Peggy thanks Mary the Holy Mother of God for this moment of quiet. Robert and Darla turn in at the marquee. Darla thinks of those very women — Peggy and her friends from church — and that very row of food warmers, with Peggy putting on her birth-name-is-Pegeen persona to make Irish food; and she thinks how much Peggy wanted her to be part of that project, the two of them bonding in the Quinlan family’s reconfiguration, with the church ladies as witness; and Darla thinks how she should probably feel guilty at having declined Peggy’s invitation but how, in fact, she does not. Not in the least. Robert focuses his thoughts on the Georgian house itself, built in 1922 by Horace Naylor in the Great Florida Land Boom, lost by Horace Naylor in 1926 in the Great Florida Land Bust, restored for the benefit of the dead and their kin by Howard Tillotson in 1934, and repeatedly expanded and modernized by two generations of Tillotsons to follow. Robert is, of course, a historian. And he happens to live in the middle of a city that sits in the middle of many of his interests. But even as he sees the personal excesses of the house’s speculator builder in the half dozen two-story Corinthian front columns, Robert recognizes that his mind is simply trying to avoid his father’s face as it waits for him in an open casket inside. A mile away, heading east on Apalachee Parkway, Jimmy is driving a rented Impala to the funeral home from a room in the downtown DoubleTree. Heather is beside him. Just before stepping out of their hotel room, Jimmy stopped Heather and suggested they simply close the door, have an ironic night of sex and HBO, and then go back to Canada; and Heather reminded Jimmy of the conclusion they’d struggled to together in Toronto, that he’s seeking closure not renewal and if things go badly they can escape at any time. Jimmy knows that conclusion was grossly oversimplified, but he can’t begin to say what the full truth is, except that even though it brought him here, it is now urging him to turn around and go home. They have been silent in the car. Heather lays her hand on Jimmy’s thigh. He puts his hand on top of hers. And they pass Bob, a dark and bundled figure striding along the sidewalk, also heading east, silhouetted against the neon of a liquor store. Sometime in the deep predawn dark of this morning Tallahassee turned cold, and it’s been cold all day long, and it is cold tonight, and Bob has a score to settle. So he pushes his aching knees and he accepts the radiating pain from knee to back to mouth, his remaining teeth throbbing with each step. He accepts this pain on the way to the Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel Church, accepts it because he wants to be waiting in the groundskeeper’s storage room when the nameless faceless coward returns. Bob has something more effective than a garden tool for him. Bob touches just below and to the side of his heart, touches his coat where, inside, his Glock waits.
Robert and Darla step between the center columns, past Cracker Barrel rockers deployed along the portico right and left, through the front doors, and into the hushed, condoling greeting of two black-suited Tillotsons tanned like winter corpses. One of them breaks off and leads Robert and Darla across the welcome foyer, past a spiral staircase, through a doorway, and into the visitation room foyer. Here they cross a dense Oriental rug toward an open double-wide doorway as William Quinlan floats brightly, unsettlingly out of the dark at Jimmy, who averts his eyes. He steadies himself in the empty lane ahead of him and then glances up the long, dim expanse of parking lot to the funeral home. There seem to be very few cars. He does not pull in but accelerates past.
“We’re too early,” he says. “I don’t want to be the center of attention.”
“That’ll be hard to avoid,” Heather says.
“Not in a crowd.”
“So we’ll take a little drive,” she says.
They rush on along the parkway as the accompanying Tillotson discreetly falls away and Robert and Darla step through the doors of the visitation room. They stop. Robert scans the place. It’s large and could be made larger. To the right, an accordion wall creates a doorway into a somewhat smaller, separated space, where trays of cold cuts and sides wait on a table whose other end, out of sight from Robert’s angle of vision, holds the Irish food before the tranquil-at-last gaze of Pegeen Quinlan. Informal settings of chairs and divans are arrayed all about, most of them facing to the left, where Robert has so far declined to look, though Darla’s head is already turned that way. The chairs and divans are empty but for two elderly women in hats on a chesterfield in the center of the floor. But it’s barely six o’clock. Kevin and his family are still on the way from the airport. Robert’s daughter Kimberly is arguing a case before the Connecticut supreme court in the morning. Peggy is nowhere visible, probably overseeing the food. That’s it for the immediate family, who are the only ones, by the protocol, you’d really expect to be here at the opening bell.