Hearts of Sand(13)

“We’ve been very careful to make sure it’s well kept up. You can’t fault us for that,” Cordelia said.

Caroline could fault her sisters for a lot of things, and she did not exclude the fate of the house on Beach Drive.

“You two should have sold it,” she said.

“It was what Mother wanted,” Cordelia said. “We wouldn’t have kept it otherwise.”

“Whatever.”

“I’m not coming to a funeral,” Cordelia said. “I don’t care what you do with her body. I’m glad she’s dead. Maybe the FBI will take the taps off my phones.”

Caroline had wanted to say that she wasn’t going to hold any funeral, and that Cordelia had no proof that the FBI had ever tapped her phones. But Cordelia had hung up, and Caroline was left sitting at her own kitchen table, looking down at nails she had bitten to the quick.

Her other sister had called last week.

“Don’t listen to Cor,” Charlotte had said. “Of course we’ll have to bury her. It will make a bigger stink in the press if we don’t. And of course we’ll have to do something to keep the funeral from turning into an absolute zoo.”

“We can’t have her cremated at the moment,” Caroline had said, “and we can’t have her buried, because the medical examiner’s office still has the body. There has to be an autopsy, and if the two of you think I’m arranging and running a funeral neither of you have any intention of showing up to attend, you’re both crazy.”

“Of course I’ll attend,” Charlotte said. “Why wouldn’t I attend?”

“According to Cordelia, attending would ruin her life.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Charlotte said. “You’ve got to arrange the funeral. You’re the one that’s there.”

“Come back here and arrange it yourself.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Just get it done and we’ll come out and support you.”

“I’m not going to arrange the funeral,” Caroline said again.

By then Charlotte, too, was off the line, and Caroline was back at that same kitchen table, looking at the double ovens and the granite countertops, wanting to scream.

This morning she didn’t so much want to scream as want to melt. The phone had been busy the entire seven or eight days, and none of the messages had been what Caroline would call “supportive.” Most of them were from the women she knew from the organizations she participated in. The women from the League of Women Voters, the PTA and the Enrichment committee, the Food Pantry in Bridgeport and the Literacy Volunteers of America in Norwalk.

Caroline hadn’t realized that she knew so many women, or that she was as distant and antagonistic to them as she’d ever been to the girls she’d known at Miss Porter’s School.

Now it had been a week, or eight days, or whatever, and she was still sitting at that kitchen table, as if she’d never moved. The young officer from the police department was standing in front of her, holding his hat in his hand. She’d asked him to sit down, but he had refused. He had come with a big sheaf of papers he had put down on the table when he first came in.

He looked like he was squirming.

“We don’t want to be insensitive,” he said, clearing his throat for the fourth or fifth time. “We do have to follow procedure. We will be ready to release the body on this coming Thursday—”

“Why Thursday?”

“It’s because of the consultant we hired,” he said. “Just in case he wants to, you know, look things over himself.”

“This is this Gregor Demarkian person.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Is he a pathologist?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. But he will be here on Monday, and then we need to ask him what he needs. It’s for your own good as well as ours. If we don’t get this thing cleared up—”

“This thing hasn’t been cleared up for thirty years. What makes you think you’re going to clear it up now?”

“I think the point is to clear up the murder,” the officer said. “The thing is, we have to release the body to the next of kin. That’s the law. And you’re the next of kin. I’m sorry to intrude on what I know must be a difficult time.”

“Do they teach you to say things like that at the police academy?”

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind,” Caroline said.

“I’ll just be going,” the officer said.

“What happens if I won’t take the body?” Caroline said.

The officer stopped his slow backward crab walk to the door. He looked totally flabbergasted. “But you have to take the body,” he said. “You’re the next of kin. The next of kin always takes the body.”