A Stranger in My Grave (9 page)

He said it to get a rise out of her, preferring her hostility to her sudden, unexpected withdrawal, but she gave no indication that she'd heard him or even that he was there at all. Whatever corri­dor she was walking along, it wasn't this one and it wasn't with him. As far as she was concerned, he had already gone back to his office or was still up in the library looking at microfilm. He felt canceled, erased.

When they reached the front of the building, the carillon in the courthouse tower across the street was chiming four o'clock. The sound brought her to attention.

“I must hurry,” she said.

“Why?”

“The cemetery closes in an hour.”

He looked at her irritably. “Are you going to take some flow­ers to yourself?”

“All week,” she said, ignoring his question, “ever since Monday, I've been trying to gather up enough courage to go there. Then last night I had the same dream again, of the sea and the cliff and Prince and the tombstone with my name on it. I can't endure it any longer. I must satisfy myself that it's not there, it doesn't exist.”

“How will you go about it, just wander around reading off names?”

“That won't be necessary. I'm quite familiar with the place. I've visited it often with Jim and my mother—Jim's parents are buried there, and one of my mother's cousins. I know exactly what to look for, and where, because in all my dreams the tombstone is the same, a rough-hewn unpolished gray cross, about five feet high, and it's always in the same place, by the edge of the cliff, underneath the Moreton Bay fig tree. There's only one tree of that kind in the area. It's a famous sailor's landmark.”

Pinata didn't know what a Moreton Bay fig tree looked like, and he had never been a sailor or visited the cemetery, but he was willing to take her word. She seemed sure of her facts. He thought,
So she's familiar with the place, she's been there often. The dream didn't just come out of nowhere. The locale is real, perhaps even the tombstone is real.

“You'd better let me come along,” he said.

“Why? I'm not afraid anymore.”

“Oh, let's just say I'm curious.” He touched her sleeve very del­icately, as if he were directing a highly trained but nervous mare who would go to pieces under too much pressure. “My car's over on Piedra Street.”

8

Right from the beginning, she has been ashamed, not only of me but of herself, too. . . .

 

The iron gates
looked as though they had been made for giants to swing on. Bougainvillea concealed the twelve-foot steel fence, its fluttery crimson flowers looking innocent of the curved spikes lurking beneath the leaves, sharper than any barbed wire. Between the street and the fence, rows of silver dollar trees shook their money like demented gamblers.

The gray stone gatehouse resembled a miniature prison, with its barred windows and padlocked iron door. Both the door and the lock were rusted, as if the gatekeeper had long since vanished into another part of the cemetery. Century plants, huge enough to be approaching the end of their designated time, lined both sides of the road to the chapel, alternating with orange and blue birds of paradise that looked ready to sing or to fly away.

In contrast to the gatehouse, the chapel was decorated with vividly colored Mexican tiles, and organ music was pouring out of its open doors, loud and lively. Only one person was visible, the organist. He seemed to be playing to and for himself; perhaps a funeral had just taken place, and he had stayed on to practice or to drown out a persistent choir of ghosts.

There was a threat of darkness in the air, and a threat of fog. Daisy buttoned her jacket to the throat and put on her white gloves. They were pretty gloves, of nylon net and linen, but they looked to her now like the kind that were passed out to pall­bearers. She would have taken them off immediately and stuffed them back in her purse if she hadn't been afraid Pinata would observe the gesture and put his own interpretation on it. His interpretations were too quick and sure and, at least in one case, wrong. She thought,
I know no person called Juanita, only an old song we sang at home when I was a child. Nita, Juanita, ask thy soul if we should part. . . .

She began to hum it unconsciously, and Pinata, listening, rec­ognized the tune and wondered why it disturbed him. There was something about the words.
Nita, Juanita, ask thy soul if we should part....
Nita, that was it. Nita was the name of the waitress in the Velada Café, the one Fielding had “rescued” from her husband. It could be, and probably was, a coincidence. And even if it wasn't a coincidence, and Nita Donelli and Juanita Garcia were the same woman, it meant nothing more than that she had divorced Garcia and married Donelli. She was the kind of woman who would ordinarily seek employment in places like the Velada, and Fielding was the kind of man who frequented them. It seemed perfectly natural that their paths should cross. As for the fight with the woman's husband, that certainly hadn't been planned by Fielding. He'd told the police when he was arrested that she was a stranger to him, a lady in distress, and he'd gone to her assistance out of his respect for womanhood. It was the type of thing Fielding, at the euphoric level of the bottle, would say and do.

They had come to a fork in the road at the top of the mesa which formed the main part of the cemetery. Pinata stopped the car and looked over at Daisy. “Have you heard from your father?”

“No. We turn right here. We're going to the west end.”

“The waitress your father got into a fight over was named Nita. Possibly Juanita.”

“I know that. My father told me when he phoned about the bail money. He also told me she was a stranger to him, a good- looking young woman who'd led a hard life—those were his words. Don't you believe him?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

“Well, then?”

Pinata shrugged. “Nothing. I just thought I'd mention it.”

“What a fool he is.” The contempt in her voice was softened by pity and sorrow. “What a fool. Will he
never
learn that you can't walk into a squalid little café and pick up waitresses without invit­ing disaster? He could have been seriously injured, even killed.”

“He's pretty tough.”

“Tough? My father?” She shook her head. “No, I wish he were. He's like a marshmallow.”

“Speaking from my own experience, some marshmallows can be very tough. Depends on their age.”

She changed the subject by pointing out of the window. “The fig tree is over there by the cliff. You can see the top of it from here. It's a very unusual specimen, the largest of its kind in this hemisphere, Jim says. He's taken dozens of pictures of it.”

Pinata started the car, keeping down to the posted limit of ten miles an hour although he felt like speeding through the place and out again, and to hell with Daisy baby and her fig tree. The rolling lawns, the green and growing things, made too disquieting a contrast to the dead buried beneath them. A cemetery shouldn't be like a park, he thought, but like a desert: all tans and grays, rock and sand, and cacti which looked alive briefly only once a year, at the time of the resurrection.

Most of the visitors had gone for the day. A young woman dressed in black was arranging a bouquet of gladioli above a bronze nameplate, while her two children, T-shirted and blue- jeaned, played hide-and-seek among the crypts and tombstones. A hundred yards farther on, four workmen in overalls were start­ing to fill in a freshly dug grave. The green cloth, intended to simulate grass, had been pulled away from the excavated mound of earth, and the workmen were stabbing at it listlessly with their shovels. An old man with white hair sat on a nearby bench and looked down at the falling earth, stupefied by grief.

“I'm glad you came along,” Daisy said suddenly. “I would have been frightened by myself or depressed.”

“Why? You've been here before.”

“It never affected me much. Whenever I came with Jim and my mother, it was more like taking part in a pageant, a ritual that meant nothing to me. How could it? I never even met Jim's par­ents or my mother's cousin. People can't seem dead to you unless they were once alive. It wasn't real, the flowers, the tears, the prayers.”

“Whose tears?”

“Mother cries easily.”

“Over a cousin so remote or so long dead that you hadn't even met her?”

Daisy leaned forward in the seat with a sigh of impatience or anxiety. “They were brought up together as children in Denver. Besides, the tears weren't really for her, I guess. They were for— oh, life in general.
Lacrimae rerum.
”

“Were you specifically invited to go on these excursions with your husband and mother?”

“Why? What's that got to do with anything?”

“I just wondered.”

“I was invited. Jim thought it proper for me to go along, and Mother used me to lean on. It isn't often she does. I suppose I—I rather enjoyed the feeling of being strong enough for anyone else to lean on, especially my mother.”

“Where are Jim's parents buried?”

“The west end.”

“Anywhere near where we're headed?”

“No.”

“You said your husband has taken many pictures of the fig tree?”

“Yes.”

“Were you with him on some of those occasions?”

“Yes.”

They were approaching the cliff, and the sound of breakers was like the roar of a great wind through a distant forest, rising and falling. As the roar increased, the fig tree came into full view: a huge green umbrella, twice as wide as it was tall. The glossy, leathery leaves showed cinnamon color on the undersides, as if they, too, like the lock and the iron door of the gatehouse, were rusting away in the sea air. The trunk and larger branches resem­bled gray marble shapes of subhuman figures entwined in static love. There were no graves directly under the tree because part of the vast root system grew above ground. The monuments began at the periphery—all shapes and sizes, angels, rectangles, crosses, columns, polished and unpolished, gray and white and black and pink—but only one of them exactly matched the description of the tombstone in Daisy's dream.

Pinata saw it as soon as he got out of the car: a rough-hewn gray stone cross about five feet high.

Daisy saw it, too. She said, with a look of terrible surprise, “It's there. It's—real.”

He felt less surprise than she did. Everything in the dream was turning out to be real. He glanced toward the edge of the cliff as if he almost expected the dog Prince to come running up from the beach and start to howl.

Daisy had stepped out of the car and was leaning against the hood of the engine for support or warmth.

“I can't see any name on it at this distance,” Pinata said. “Let's go over and examine it.”

“I'm afraid.”

“There's nothing to be afraid of, Mrs. Harker. What's obviously happened is that you've seen this particular stone in this particu­lar location on one of your visits here. For some reason it impressed and interested you, you remembered it, and it cropped up in your dreams.”

“Why should it have impressed me?”

“For one thing, it's a handsome and expensive piece of work. Or it might have reminded you of the old rugged cross in the hymn. But instead of standing here theorizing, why don't we go over and check the facts?”

“Facts?”

“Surely the important fact,” Pinata said dryly, “is whose name is on it.”

For a moment he thought she was going to turn and run for the exit gates. Instead, she straightened up, with a shake of her head, and stepped over the small lantana hedge onto the graveled path that wound around the periphery of the fig tree. She began walking toward the gray cross very quickly, as though she were putting her trust in momentum to keep her going if fear should try to stop her.

She had almost reached her destination when she stumbled and fell forward on her knees. He caught up with her and helped her to her feet. There were grass stains on the front of her skirt, and prickly little pellets of burr clover.

“It's not mine,” she said in a whisper. “Thank God it's not mine.”

A small rectangular area in the center of the cross had been cut and polished to hold the inscription:

 

carlos theodore camilla

1907-1955

 

Pinata was sure from her reaction that the name meant nothing to her beyond the fact that it was not her own. She was looking relieved and a little embarrassed, like a child who's had the lights turned on and recognized the bogeyman for what it was, a dis­carded coat, a blowing curtain. Even with the lights on, there was one small bogeyman left that she apparently hadn't noticed yet—the year of Camilla's death. Perhaps from where she stood she couldn't discern the numbers; he suspected from her actions in the newspaper library that she was nearsighted and either didn't know it or didn't want to admit it.

He stepped directly in front of the tombstone to hide the inscription in case she came any closer. It made him feel uneasy, standing on this stranger's coffin, right where his face would be, or had been. Carlos Camilla. What kind of face had he once had? Dark, certainly. It was a Mexican name. Few Mexicans were buried in this cemetery, both because it was too expensive and because the ground was not consecrated by their church. Fewer still had such elaborate monuments.

“I feel guilty,” Daisy said, “at being so glad that it's his and not mine. But I can't help it.”

“No need to feel guilty.”

“It must have happened just as you said it did. I saw the tomb­stone, and for some reason it stuck in my memory—perhaps it was the name on it.
Camilla
, it's a very pretty name. What does it mean, a camellia?”

“No, it means a stretcher, a little bed.”

“Oh. It doesn't sound so pretty when you know what it means.”

“That's true of a lot of things.”

Fog had started to drift in from the sea. It moved in aimless wisps across the lawns and hung like tatters of chiffon among the leather leaves of the fig tree. Pinata wondered how quietly Camilla was resting, with the roots of the vast tree growing inex­orably toward his little bed.

“They'll be closing the gates soon,” he said. “We'd better leave.”

“All right.”

She turned toward the car. He waited for her to take a few steps before he moved away from the tombstone, feeling a little ashamed of himself for the deception. He didn't know it wasn't a deception until they were back inside the car and Daisy said sud­denly, “Camilla died in 1955.”

“So did a lot of other people.”

“I'd like to find out the exact date, just out of curiosity. They must keep records of some kind on the premises—there's an office marked ‘Superintendent' just behind the chapel, and a care­taker's cottage over on the east side.”

“I was hoping you intended to drop this whole business.”

“Why should I? Nothing's really changed, if you'll think about it.”

He thought about it. Nothing had really changed, least of all Daisy baby's mind.

The
superintendent's office was closed for the day, but there were lights burning in the caretaker's cottage. Through the living-room window Pinata could see a stout elderly man in suspenders watching a TV program: two cowboys were shooting freely at each other from behind two rocks. Both the cowboys and the rocks appeared exactly the same as the ones Pinata remembered from his boyhood.