Chapter 5 - The Resurrection Ledger
By nine o'clock that morning, the driveway of Whitmore Funeral Services was filled with seven vehicles.
There were two state police cruisers with their blue lights flashing silently against the damp brick walls, an unmarked sedan from the State Attorney General’s office, two ambulances from the county hospital, and the Sheriff’s heavy 4x4 pickup truck.
The rain had started again—a cold, fine drizzle that smelled of the salt marsh and turn-of-the-century coal smoke.
I sat in the back of the second ambulance with a heavy grey wool blanket wrapped around my shoulders. A young paramedic had put my right arm in a sling, taped my ribs with three-inch white adhesive, and cleaned the gash above my eye with iodine that burned like fire.
My mother was sitting on a folding wooden chair near the garage doors, thirty feet away.
She refused to get into the ambulance. She refused the blanket. She sat straight-backed in her wet blue silk suit, holding a porcelain cup of black coffee that Miller had brought her from the office kitchen.
Standing in front of her were two men in dark grey raincoats: Assistant Attorney General Miller and State Police Captain Vance—the younger brother of the doctor who had signed sixty-four fraudulent death certificates.
"Mrs. Whitmore," Captain Vance was saying, his notebook open in his gloved hand. "We’ve pulled three bodies from the coal tunnel exit. One is... well, we haven't identified the male yet. He has no facial features consistent with..."
"It's Adrian," my mother said without looking up from her coffee cup. "His name was Adrian Whitmore. He was my husband’s nephew before I made the mistake of giving him my daughter’s hand and fifty percent of the voting shares."
"And the woman on the dock?"
"Vanessa Cross," my mother said. "She was listed on our payroll as an assistant embalmer. Her true job was managing the accounts in Providence."
Captain Vance looked toward the basement stairs where four state troopers were coming up carrying heavy steel evidence boxes.
"Mrs. Whitmore," he said, lowering his voice until it was almost lost in the sound of the rain on the garage roof. "My officers went down into the third cellar—the sea-cave under the foundation."
My mother took a slow sip of her coffee. "Did they?"
"They found eight iron shipping crates," Vance said. His face was white, his upper lip covered in a thin sheen of cold sweat that had nothing to do with the drizzle. "They... they opened Crate Number Three."
My mother didn't answer. She set her porcelain cup down on the small wooden folding table beside her chair with a sharp clack.
"There were five people inside, Mrs. Whitmore," Vance whispered, leaning down closer to her face. "All of them were... preserved. But not with formalin. The coroner says he’s never seen tissue in that condition. It looks like... like they were encased in some kind of salt-tallow polymer that kept them from..."
He stopped, unable to find the words.
"They are evidence, Captain," my mother said flatly. "Sixty-four counts of federal mail fraud, sixty-four counts of forgery, and eight counts of conspiracy to commit murder against state witnesses. You’ll find every name, every date, and every bank transaction in the green ledger sitting on the front seat of my daughter’s car."
Vance stared at her for five long seconds.
He knew what was in that ledger. He knew his brother’s name was on page fourteen, right beside a thirty-thousand-dollar transfer from an account in St. Thomas.
"And the... the iron box?" Vance asked, his voice shaking slightly. "The black one on the stone piers? My men said... they said the lock was broken from the inside. But there was nothing in it. Just some old canvas and dry straw."
My mother looked up at him. Her eyes were clear, blue, and utterly terrifying in their calm, ancient depth.
"My family has owned this cliff since 1712, Captain," she said softly. "Things come in with the tide. Things go out with the tide. If your officers found empty straw, then you should record it as an empty box and close the report."
Vance swallowed hard. His throat made a dry gulp sound.
He looked at her wet blue suit, her blue-black fingernails, her cold, unblinking grey eyes, and then he slowly pulled his pen from his pocket and made a single line through the bottom paragraph of his page.
"Empty iron container," he muttered, writing the words down with a hand that wasn't entirely steady. "No evidentiary value."
He closed his notebook with a sharp snap.
"The Attorney General will want your formal deposition at the courthouse in Newport on Tuesday, Mrs. Whitmore," he said, stepping back two paces. "Assuming... assuming you are healthy enough to travel."
"I shall be there at nine o'clock, Captain," my mother said. "I am always punctual."
Vance turned and walked quickly toward his sedan, shouting at his troopers to clear the driveway and load the evidence boxes into the rear van.
My mother stood up from her wooden chair.
She walked slowly across the gravel yard toward the ambulance, her wet shoes making a soft crunch-crunch-crunch in the wet stone.
She stopped beside the open rear doors and looked at me.
"How are the ribs, Clara?" she asked quietly.
"They hurt when I breathe," I said, trying to smile through my swollen lips. "The doctor says two weeks in a sling."
"Two weeks is too long," she said. "We have twenty-four funerals to organize by Friday."
I stared at her, my jaw dropping slightly. "Funerals? Mom... the state is going to seize the building. The business is—"
"The business is mine, Clara," she cut in, her voice taking on that sharp, iron ring that had kept Whitmore Funeral Services open through three depressions and two world wars. "The property is held in a 1692 land grant that pre-dates the State of Rhode Island. The Attorney General can seize Adrian’s shares, but he cannot touch the land or the chapel. We are opening the doors tomorrow at seven."
She reached into her coat pocket.
She pulled out a small, heavy object wrapped in a piece of oil-stained canvas and dropped it into my lap.
I unrolled the cloth with my left hand.
Inside was the brass master key to the sea-cave—the long, four-inch key with the square, three-toothed bit that opened the oak bulkhead door.
"What... what am I supposed to do with this?" I asked, looking up at her.
"You’re sixty-two percent shareholder now, Clara," my mother said softly, her pale face catching the grey light of the morning sun as the clouds finally began to part over the ocean. "And the third cellar needs to be swept before the high tide comes back tonight."
She turned and began walking back toward the grand stone steps of the funeral home, her head held high, her silver braid resting straight down her back like an iron rod.
I held the heavy brass key in my palm.
It was cold—cold as the salt-glazed bricks of the combustion bay, cold as the iron loading rails, cold as three hundred years of ocean silt.
And deep inside the foundation beneath my feet—forty feet down in the dark granite cave where the sea was slamming against the granite walls—I felt a low, rhythmic vibration rise through the tires of the ambulance, through the steel floorboards, straight up into my spine.
CLACK... CLACK... CLACK.
May you like
The sound of an iron lid being adjusted from the inside.
I closed my fingers over the cold brass teeth, pulled the wool blanket tighter around my shoulders, and watched my mother walk through the heavy front doors of the home to answer the ringing phone.
