Gillian unfolded her napkin and spread it on her lap. She cleared her throat. "H-how long have you been gone?" she asked.
"A year," Mason said, slicing a knife through the cake. "A year today."
Where had she been all of this time? In the house? In one of the rooms upstairs?
A smell emanated from her, not a rotten smell, but something Gillian associated with funeral parlors.
Embalming fluid.
As her mind raced and then screeched to a stop, Mason continued to cut and serve the cake. He hummed as he scooped ice cream onto three plates and finally took a seat between Gillian and his sister.
"
Bon appétit
."
With a shaking hand, Gillian lifted the heavy silver fork. She sliced into the cake.
It was white cake with white frosting because Mason had told her that was his sister's favorite.
She raised the fork to her mouth. The bite of cake quivered there, just beyond her lips. She inhaled. The scent of embalming fluid filled her nostrils.
She dropped her fork with a clatter of metal on china and pushed from the table, getting to her feet and spinning around, her back to Mason and his dead sister. She gripped the edge of the sink, wondering if she was going to throw up, wondering if she had anything to throw up.
Had he killed her?
The question was caught in a loop in her head.
Had he killed her and preserved her to bring her out on special occasions? Did he have other bodies around? Was the fucking house full of bodies?
As she stood there, her mind reached a saturation point. A removed, out-of-body feeling came over her.
So what if she's dead?
What is death anyway?
Was the body sitting there any different from a leaf that had fallen from a tree and blown into the house?
Any different from a dry, faded flower? Any different from her own body, except that her own body had blood pumping through it?
"Aren't you going to join us?" Mason asked.
She could tell he was angry, but didn't want to show it in front of his sister. Which meant his sister, dead though she was, might still prove Gillian's ally.
Gillian turned around, her hands clenched together. She forced herself to look at the woman.
Not that bad, she told herself now that the initial shock was over.
Her hair, her light blond hair, shimmered softly in the candlelight. Just an empty vessel that had once held life, she told herself. "Your sister is beautiful," she whispered to Mason.
He nodded. Without getting up, he reached for Gillian, taking her hand, leading her in a semicircle back to her chair, where she sat down, lifted her fork, and took a bite of cake.
Outside, in the distance, she heard the sound of car tires moving over gravel. Mason jumped to his feet and ran to a living room window. A second later he was flying around the kitchen, blowing out candles.
Chapter 32
The true story of Josephine Von Bryant's life was one Mason cherished every bit as much as his adored fiction. One of his favorite ways to pass the time was to listen to his sister's tales.
"Start when you were ten years old," he used to beg her, because that was when she really began the search for her true self.
At ten, Josephine decided she wanted to dedicate her life to God. Their parents found her devotion frightening, so obsessed was she with living a humble existence. At one point, she shaved her head and slept on the hard floor. She starved herself, and when she couldn't find any stores that carried the hair shirts she'd heard and read about in catechism class, she bought a wool sweater from the church's store for the poor and wore it against her bare skin through summer and winter until her mother stripped it from her and burned it.
Her obsession with faith worried her parents so much that they removed her from Catholic school and put her in a private, all-girls institution. At first the other students made fun of her, calling her a freak to her face, but then she began developing signs of stigmata. The first spot started out as a blister on her palm. A week later, on the opposite side of her hand, blood began to ooze. Her classmates were fascinated, and soon Josephine had a group of faithful followers who couldn't get enough of her biblical stories of lust, suffering, and devotion.
Even though she scratched herself until she bled and kept the wounds from healing by continually picking and stabbing at them, Josephine convinced herself they were real.
By the time Josephine hit puberty, she'd grown bored with religion. Her psychologist helped her to realize it wasn't religion that had brought about her obsession with living a cloistered life, but a fear of men. She had no childhood memories of suffering at the hands of any man, so she could only guess that her fear was genetic. She became a lesbian for a while, but grew tired of that even more quickly than religion.
When their parents died unexpectedly, leaving Mason in her care, she suddenly found a new calling.
Mason.
She adored him.
Nine-year-old Mason came into her charge at a vulnerable time. He would watch her as she moved about a room, never letting his eyes waver, afraid she might leave and not come back. He would follow her to the bathroom and wait outside the door, sometimes curling up on the floor while she bathed.
Jo got a job with a traveling acting troupe, but after two years decided it wasn't the life for Mason. When an uncle died, leaving them an estate in Minnesota, they moved into the farmhouse a week after the paperwork was finished.
"This is it," Josephine said, standing in the front yard, looking up at the two-story house. "Our home."
Jo threw herself into their new life with the same enthusiasm she'd shown for religion, but no matter how hard she tried, she often lamented that it never seemed quite real to her.
Sometimes as she moved through her day, washing clothes, hanging them on the line to dry, baking pies, canning vegetables, she said she felt that she was living someone else's life. Not a bad life, by any means, she'd told Mason. Just not her life.
Was there a lack of sincerity in the way she approached things? she'd asked her brother. How did a person know when she had it right? She thought she had it right when she shaved her head and wore a wool sweater. Now she looked back on those days with embarrassment. She thought she had it right when she decided to become a lesbian. She and her partner went to gatherings where they spoke up for women's rights. She never wore a dress and didn't take any shit from anyone, especially a man.
But that had all been playing at life, experimenting and experiencing what it meant to be human. It hadn't been who she was.
Then she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
This, she told Mason. This is real.
Their last year together was spent reading a translation of the entire seven-volume set of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, because that was something Jo had always promised herself she would do. They spent evenings listening to music and just talking quietly.
But there came a time when Jo was much too blunt, when she came right out and told Mason that she wouldn't always be there for him, that she would be leaving one day and he would never see her again. They had to make plans.
Her biggest concern was that he'd be lonely. "You need to meet girls," she would say to him as she lay in bed at night with Mason in a chair nearby. "When I'm gone, you need to get busy. Find someone. There's somebody out there for you. Somebody who will love and adore you. But you won't find her here, sitting at home or piddling around with your roses. You've got to go out and find her. Promise me you'll do that? Promise me you won't just hide here, being sad?"
He wouldn't listen. Anytime she brought up the subject of her impending death, he shut out her blunt and awful words. "We can move," he told her. "We can go somewhere else. I know you've never liked it here. I know those women in town have been mean to you."
"Moving won't change anything," she said sadly. "Mason, I'm dying."
He refused to believe her. He was twenty-seven, but he reverted back to his childhood.
Jo enlisted the help of a hospice, but they knew only about death; they didn't know about helping the living. She contacted the local church. It wasn't Catholic, but she didn't think that mattered. The minister came to visit. Mason kicked him out, telling him to get the hell off their property.
Her doctor had ordered plenty of heavy-duty drugs to keep the pain at bay. Those drugs eventually sent her into a sleep from which she never awakened. . . .
Someone else may have thought she was just sleeping, but as soon as Mason saw her, he knew something was wrong. The essence he knew of as Jo wasn't there.
He didn't call anybody for two days.
He kept thinking maybe something would happen. Maybe he would step into the bedroom and she'd be sitting there, smiling at him. He kept vigil. Several times throughout the day he would leave the room, then return in order to give her the chance to come back, to start over.
She never woke up.
He didn't know a body could go bad so quickly.
She began to smell. He heard a buzzing at the window near the bed, and when he pulled back the curtain he saw what had to be thousands of flies clustered on the glass, piled up where the wooden frame met metal, trying to squeeze in the small cracks.
They were the shiny kind of flies, fat-bodied black ones he associated with the dead rabbits and squirrels he sometimes came across. Behind him, he heard more buzzing. He swung around. The sheet that covered Jo seemed to be moving. He lifted it. A rotten smell hit him in the face. At the same time, a cloud of flies swarmed him, going for his mouth and nose. He ran from the room, picked up the phone, and dialed 911.
It would end up being one of those calls paramedics talked about over beers whenever stories were being shared.
All they knew as they headed for the secluded farmhouse was that the patient was an elderly woman who was thought to be dead.
The smell hit them before they reached the door. Hands held to their mouths weren't enough. They had to retreat and pull out carbon filter masks.
The door was covered with flies. They opened it, shaking them loose. A black cloud unfurled and then immediately settled back down, sticking to the flesh, biting.
Inside the house a man stood wringing his hands, his eyes red. "She's in there," he said, pointing to a room off the living room. "I think she might be dead."
The paramedics looked at each other but didn't say anything. In the bedroom they glanced at the body, which had passed out of rigor long ago. "I ain't driving back with that in the van," one said to the other. "We'll never get the smell outta there."
In the ambulance, they put in a call to the coroner's office, which sent a plain truck with a topper—the vehicle used for the stinky cases. Without lingering, they whisked the body away to the mortuary, where it was pumped with four times the recommended amount of embalming fluid.
The mortician had a bad habit of shorting his clients when it came to such things, but in this case cheating wasn't even an option.
Laid out in the casket, her cheeks rosy, wearing a dress with a brooch at the throat, she waited. She didn't have many visitors, and the ones who came did so out of morbid curiosity.
Mason stayed with her morning and night until the mortician had to pry him away, telling him it was time to let her go, time to bury her.
"NO!" Mason had screamed. "NO!"
When Sheriff David Vance got the call telling him a grave at Poplar Grove Cemetery had been vandalized, he immediately thought of a group of kids that had gone around last year, digging up old graves and carrying bones around with them in their backpacks. They hadn't meant any harm. They'd just been inquisitive.
But when David reached the cemetery and saw that an entire body had been stolen, he dismissed his earlier assessment and recalled the story told to him by Harvey Blake, the local mortician.
He called him. "Harvey, you remember that kid you were telling me about last year? The one who didn't want to bury his sister?"
"Yeah."
"What was her name?" he asked, staring at the headstone.
"Von Bryant. Josephine Von Bryant."
"You remember the kid's name?"
"Uh . . . Mason. Mason, that's it."
"Thanks, Harvey." After hanging up, David asked the first officer on the scene if the crime lab was on its way.
"Should be here any minute."
"I'm going to let you handle it from this end," he said. "I've got a stop to make."
It was a small county, and he'd heard about the woman and kid who had moved in years ago. People said they were strange, but that's how it was in rural settings. Nobody liked anybody new. He felt sorry for outsiders who moved into the area. They always came excited about the beauty. Almost every one of them left within a few years, moving back to where they came from or to a place with influx and a higher population. The Von Bryants stayed on.