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Skeleton Key(19)

By:Jane Haddam


Her machine began to beep again. Eve clamped the headset on her head and picked up.

“Road Maintenance Department. Can I help you?”

“There’s a telephone pole down on Capernaum Road? Are you kidding me?”

“Ask Rita. It’s Rita who would be kidding you.”

“Jesus. In the middle of the night like this. What would bring a telephone pole down in the middle of the night like this?”

“Wind, maybe.”

“There isn’t enough wind to blow over a matchstick. You’d need a major hurricane.”

“So maybe it’s been down for a long time and somebody just noticed it now.”

“Not likely. Half the world uses that damned road as a shortcut You sure Rita didn’t say anything about an accident, about some car knocking over a telephone pole on Capernaum Road?”

“Nope.”

“Jesus.”

“Craig?” Eve said. “Do you ever think that you’ve had enough of it? Your life, I mean. Do you ever think that you really have to change everything around right now?”

“I think that if I ever win the lottery I’m going to retire to Florida. Are you drunk or something?”

“No. No, just a little tired. I’m sorry.”

“You can tell Rita we’ll be out there in about twenty minutes.”

“She says the report says that the pole may be leaning into a set of power lines. You may need SNET as well as CL and P.”

“Right Shit. Just what I need when it’s right before Halloween.”

“Sorry.”

“Do you realize you apologize for everything?” Craig said. “You apologize for stuff you didn’t even do.”

“Sorry,” Eve said again—but there was nobody to hear her. The dial tone was buzzing in her ears again. She took the headset off again and pushed her chair away from the computer.

It wasn’t stupid, or drunk, to ask the kind of questions she was asking now. Eve was sure of it. Everybody had to ask those questions. The lucky ones asked while they were still in high school, when they had a world of time to do something about their dissatisfaction.

She got up and went into the living room. There was a fireplace there with a big mirror over the mantel, but nothing else except boxes of files and manuals, pushed up against the wall on the north side of the room. Eve went to the mirror and looked at herself. The image she got back was murky and inconclusive. She went out the front door that stood at one end of the living room and out onto the front stoop. With the door open, she would be able to hear the machine if it beeped.

What was it that people did that put realness in their lives? That was what she didn’t understand. How did people end up with families, or jobs they had for twenty years, or nice little niches in groups like the Friends of the Library or the Town Benevolent League? How did they start? To Eve, life was like a dust storm, pulled this way and that, with no particular direction.

There has to be something else besides this, she told herself—and then she realized that she was freezing. She was standing on the stoop in her light cotton shirt and polyester-made-to-look-like-cotton vest, and the air around her had that unyielding hardness that meant a major frost.

She turned around and went back into the house and closed the door behind her.

I’m forty-nine years old, she told herself, and I have to do something about it.





8


Because it was the Friday before Halloween, the noises out back had been awful all day, and even more awful once it got to be dark. Martin Chandling found himself having to go out back to take a look at least once every half hour. He wouldn’t have bothered, except that a couple of years ago they had had real trouble. That was when Jackey Hargrove had gone in with two of his friends and tipped over half a dozen gravestones and then tried to dig up a grave. It only went to prove that Jackey was just as stupid as everybody thought he was, because the grave he had tried to dig up had a cremated man in it, and if he had managed to get down to the box, all he would have found was a marble urn with a pile of ashes in it. Still, Martin thought, you had to be careful. There had been a couple of incidents in other parts of the state in recent years. Down in Danbury, there had been a real mess, complete with desecrations. All Martin needed now was to have one of his two-hundred-year-old skeletons pulled out of the ground and dragged into Washington Depot All he needed now was to have something come along and make him lose this job, which he had had as far back as he could remember, maybe as far back as time. Other people might have found it disturbing, living in a little house right next to the cemetery grounds, but Martin rather liked it. It was quiet, and cool, too, even in the summer, because of all the shade trees. He thought he would have felt differently about one of those new cemeteries, run by a corporation, with professional landscaping and paved roads between the graves. This cemetery went all the way back to 1697. One whole section of it, up in the back near the rotting wood building that had once been a church, was given over to the members of a single family. That was why this was called the Fairchild Family Cemetery, even though there were other people besides Fairchilds in it. Martin often wondered what it had been like for them, when they were still almost the only family here.