She stared at him for several seconds, then gave a little shiver and wrapped her arms around her body. “I think you should come back to the house with me. I’m sure it’s going to rain any minute now.”
Chapter 14. The Devil’s Brother
The cottage wasn’t nearly as kitschy as Gurney had expected. Despite its storybook facade, the interior was rather restrained. The front door opened onto a modest entry hall. On the left he saw a sitting room with a fireplace and several traditional landscape prints on the walls. Through a doorway on the right, he glimpsed what appeared to be an office with a mahogany desk and a large painting of Willow Rest behind it. It reminded him of one of those sprawling nineteenth-century macroviews of a working farm or village. Straight ahead on the left was a staircase to an upper floor and on the right a door that presumably led to another room or two at the back of the house. It was where Paulette Purley had gone to make coffee after taking Gurney into the sitting room and steering him to a wing chair by the fireplace. On the mantel was a framed photograph of a lanky man with his arm around a younger Paulette. Her hair was a bit longer then, fluffed up as though caught in a breeze, and honey blond.
She reappeared with a tray on which there were two cups of black coffee, a small pitcher of milk, a sugar bowl, and two spoons. She placed the tray on a low table in front of the hearth and sat in a matching chair facing Gurney’s. Neither spoke as they added milk and sugar, took a first sip, then sat back in their chairs.
Paulette, he noted, was holding her cup in both hands, perhaps to steady it, perhaps to take a chill out of her fingers. Her lips were pressed together but making tiny nervous movements. “Now it can rain all it wants,” she said with a sudden smile, as though trying to dispel the tension with the sound of her own voice.
“I’m curious about this place,” said Gurney. “Willow Rest must have an interesting history.” It wasn’t a history he cared about. But he thought that getting her talking about something easy might provide a bridge to something more difficult.
For the next fifteen minutes she explained Emmerling Spalter’s philosophy, which struck Gurney as escapist nonsense, cannily packaged. Willow Rest was one’s final home, not a cemetery. Only the date of birth, not the date of death, was engraved on a marker, because once we are born we live forever. Willow Rest provided not gravesites but homesites, a piece of nature with grass and trees and flowers. Every property was scaled to accommodate a multigenerational family rather than an individual. The mailbox at each property was an encouragement to family members to leave cards and letters for their loved ones. (These were gathered once a week, burned in a little portable brazier at each site, and raked into the soil.) Paulette explained earnestly that Willow Rest was all about life, continuity, beauty, peace, and privacy. As far as Gurney could see, it was about everything except death. But he was not about to say that. He wanted her to keep talking.
Emmerling and Agnes Spalter had three children, two of whom died of pneumonia before they were out of their cribs. The survivor was Joseph. He married a woman named Mary Croake.
Joseph and Mary had two sons, Carl and Jonah.
The mention of these names, Gurney noticed, had an immediate effect on Paulette’s tone and expression, bringing back to her lips an almost imperceptible twitching.
“I’ve been told they were as different as two brothers could be,” he said encouragingly.
“Oh, yes! Black and white! Cain and Abel!” She fell silent, her eyes fixed in anger on some memory.
Gurney prompted her. “I imagine Carl could be a difficult person to work for.”
“Difficult?” A bitter one-syllable laugh erupted from her throat. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, seemed to reach a decision, and then the words came rushing out.
“Difficult? Let me explain something to you. Emmerling Spalter became a very wealthy man buying and selling large tracts of land in upstate New York. He passed his business, his money, and his talent for making it along to his son. Joe Spalter was a bigger, tougher version of his father. He wasn’t someone you’d want for an enemy. But he was rational. You could talk to him. In his hard-as-nails way, he was fair. Not nice, not generous. But fair. It was Joe who hired my husband as the Willow Rest resident manager. That was …” She looked lost for a moment or two. “Oh, my, time is becoming so difficult. That was fifteen years ago. Fifteen.” She looked at her coffee cup, seemed surprised that it was still in her hands, and laid it down carefully on the table.
“And Joe was Carl and Jonah’s father?” prompted Gurney.
She nodded. “Joe’s dark side all went to Carl, and everything that was decent and reasonable went to Jonah. They say there’s some good and bad in all of us, but not in the case of the Spalter brothers. Jonah and Carl. An angel and a devil. I believe Joe saw that, and the way he tied them together as a condition for inheriting the business was his attempt at solving the problem. Maybe hoping for some kind of balance. Of course, it didn’t work.”
Gurney sipped his coffee. “What happened?”
“After Joe passed away, they went from being opposites to being enemies. They couldn’t agree on anything. All Carl was interested in was money, money, money—and he didn’t care how they made it. Jonah found the situation unbearable, and that’s when he set up the Cyberspace Cathedral and disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“Pretty much. You could reach him through the Cathedral website, but he had no real address. There was a rumor that he was always on the move, living in a motor home, managing the Cathedral project and everything else in his life by computer. When he made an appearance here in Long Falls for his mother’s funeral, that was the first time anyone had seen him in three years. And even then, we didn’t know he was coming. I believe he wanted to make a total break from everything connected with Carl.” She paused. “He might even have been afraid of Carl.”
“Afraid?”
Paulette leaned forward and picked up her coffee, holding it again in both hands. She cleared her throat. “I don’t say this lightly. Carl Spalter had no conscience. If he wanted something, I don’t think there would be any limit to what he might do.”
“What’s the worst thing—”
“The worst thing he ever did? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. But I do know what he did to me—or what he tried to do to me.” Her eyes brightened with anger.
“Tell me.”
“My husband, Bob, and I had lived in this house for fifteen years, ever since he accepted his position here. The downstairs always served as the Willow Rest business office, and the little upstairs apartment went with the job. We moved in right after Bob was hired. It was our home. And, in a way, we both did his job. We did it together. We felt that it was more than a job; it was a commitment. A way of helping people through terrible times in their lives. It wasn’t just a way of making a living—it was our life.”
Tears were welling in her eyes. She blinked hard and went on. “Ten months ago, Bob had a massive coronary. In that hallway.” As she looked toward the doorway, she closed her eyes for a moment. “He was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.” She took a deep breath. “The day after his funeral, I received an email from Carl’s assistant at Spalter Realty. An email. Telling me that a cemetery management company—can you image such a thing?—a cemetery management company would be taking over responsibility for Willow Rest. And, for an efficient transition, it would be necessary for me to vacate the cottage within sixty days.”