Grave Concern Read Online Free PDF Page B

Kate involuntarily gasped; then, thinking fast, immediately clapped a hand over her mouth.
    â€œI’m sorry, Mr. Marcotte,” she said in a muffled voice, and nodded at the jar of Christmas candies on her desk. “I think I’ve broken a tooth. Will you excuse me a minute?”
    Turning from Marcotte’s look of dismay, Kate retreated through the door that still read DARKROOM, PLEASE KEEP CLOSED .
    J.P.? Dead? Was this some kind of joke?

    Kate pressed into an unseen corner of the little room. She put her hands over her eyes, like a child counting for hide and seek. She did, in fact, count to twenty. Then thirty. Then forty. Tears pricked, but Kate would not relent. For Marcotte’s benefit, Kate pulled away from the wall and ran some water in the sink. She banged a couple of cabinet doors, as though in quest of Aspirin. She counted another ten before returning to the outer office, holding her cheek.
    â€œSorry about that, Mr. Marcotte,” she said, avoiding his gaze as she sat down. “Looks like I’ll have a date with the dentist when we’re done here.”
    â€œAs I was saying,” Mr. Marcotte went on, slowly. “J.P. left instructions for the ashes. They were not to be bury at the cemetery. ‘Too creepy,’ he says. Too creepy for a creep! Pis . He want to be bury in the bush, we shouldn’t put nothing there to mark it — the very most, initials cut in a tree. Also, they should not tell me — his father! — where he was.”
    There was a little silence.
    â€œThen I could never ‘ stomp all over ’him again,” Marcotte explained. “Whatever that mean, mon Dieu . Pis . I know it’s not by the law, but Rita and a couple of kids took the box into the forest somewhere out west there. You know, by the High Street. I’ll say it, for a very long time I don’t care where they went. They could throw him to the bear in the dump for all that mattered to me. But now I’m old. Rita’s gone. I like to know before I die. I’ve try to look, but the ground in there is rough, eh, and my bad knee … Too hard to walk for me. He — J.P. — he’s the only one left here now. The others, eh, all far away, busy with family, career. Won’t tell me nothing. And Rita, she took her secret under the ground.”
    Kate had long quit listening. She was focused on her yogic breathing, slowly, in and out, trying to keep it together until he mercifully stopped talking and left her alone. She thought of her yoga teacher and occasional lover back in the city — “Whatever you’re doing, whatever has happened,” he would say, “wherever you are in the world or in life, focus on the breathing . It all comes back to the breath .” A tall, chiselled bachelor of exquisite sensitivity — and not half J.P.’s vitality.
    â€œ … So what I want is you to find that grave. Can you do that, you?”
    Kate had always liked the French way of emphasis, by pronoun repetition. Still, he could say every word twice, a hundred times, and she would still struggle to believe what she was hearing. Had there been some cosmic reversal during her time away that had overthrown the comfy existence she’d known here? Had a new hellish order risen up in her absence, singling out Katherine J. Smithers of Pine Rapids for special tortures?
    Kate’s more rational side, the side still trudging through a day’s work a week before Christmas, recalled that some grave services indeed offered such searches as Marcotte was requesting, mainly aimed at genealogists looking for ancestral graves. So, the answer to Marcotte’s question — did Kate locate graves? — was no. She’d deliberately not included it in her business. Too time-consuming and frustrating, too poorly paid for the resources and effort consumed. And here was Marcotte demanding diversification — but not remotely in the way Kate had