Shadowfires Read Free Page A

my client, Rachael, so I'm aware that he
was… a difficult man.”
    “Yes.”
    “He gave you no reason to grieve.”
    “It still seems wrong to feel… so little. Nothing.”
    “He wasn't just a difficult man, Rachael. He was also a fool for not recognizing what a jewel he had in you and for not doing whatever was necessary to make you want to stay with him.”
    “You're a dear.”
    “It's true. If it weren't very true, I wouldn't speak of a client like this, not even when he was… deceased.”
    The van, bearing the corpse, pulled away from the accident scene.
Paradoxically, there was a cold, wintry quality to the way the summer
sun glimmered in the white paint and in the polished chrome bumpers,
making it appear as if Eric were being borne away in a vehicle carved
from ice.
    Herb walked with her, through the gathered onlookers, past his
office building, to her red 560 SL. He said, “I could have someone
drive Eric's car back to his house, put it in the garage, and leave the keys at your place.”
    “That would be helpful,” she said.
    When Rachael was behind the wheel, belted in, Herb leaned down to
the window and said, “We'll have to talk soon about the estate.”
    “In a few days,” she said.
    “And the company.”
    “Things will run themselves for a few days, won't they?”
    “Certainly. It's Monday, so shall we say you'll come see me Friday
morning? That gives you four days to… adjust.”
    “All right.”
    “ Ten o'clock?”
    “Fine.”
    “You sure you're okay?”
    “Yes,” she said, and she drove home without incident, though she
felt as though she were dreaming.
    She lived in a quaint three-bedroom bungalow in Placentia. The
neighborhood was solidly middle-class and friendly, and the house had
loads of charm: French windows, window seats, coffered ceilings, a
used-brick fireplace, and more. She'd made the down payment and moved a year ago, when she left Eric. Her house was far different from the place in Villa Park, which was set on an acre of manicured grounds and which boasted every luxury; however, she liked her cozy bungalow better than his Spanish-modern mansion, not merely because the scale seemed more human here but also because the Placentia house was not tainted by countless bad memories as was the house in Villa Park.
    She took off her bloodstained blue sundress. She washed her hands
and face, brushed her hair, and reapplied what little makeup she
wore. Gradually the mundane task of grooming herself had a calming
effect. Her hands stopped trembling. Although a hollow coldness
remained at the core of her, she stopped shivering.
    After dressing in one of the few somber outfits she owned-a
charcoal-gray suit with a pale gray blouse, slightly too heavy for a
hot summer day-she called Attison Brothers, a firm of prestigious
morticians. Having ascertained that they could see her immediately,
she drove directly to their imposing colonial-style funeral home in
Yorba Linda.
    She had never made funeral arrangements before, and she had never
imagined that there would be anything amusing about the experience.
But when she sat down with Paul Attison in his softly lighted, darkly
paneled, plushly carpeted, uncannily quiet office and listened to him
call himself a “grief counselor,” she saw dark humor in the
situation. The atmosphere was so meticulously somber and so self-
consciously reverent that it was stagy. His proffered sympathy was
oily yet ponderous, relentless and calculated, but surprisingly she
found herself playing along with him, responding to his condolences
and platitudes with clichés of her own. She felt as if she were an
actor trapped in a bad play by an incompetent playwright, forced to
deliver her wooden lines of dialogue because it was less embarrassing
to persevere to the end of the third act than to stalk off the stage
in the middle of the performance. In addition to identifying himself
as a grief counselor, Attison referred to a casket as an “eternal
bower.” A suit of burial