The Gravedigger’S Daughter Read Free Page A

were calloused, her nails discolored, though she wore work gloves on the job. The heavy safety goggles left a pale imprint on her face and dents on the sides of her nose.
    She was a married woman, why was this happening to her!
    Tignor had been crazy for her once. She didn’t want to think that time had passed.
    He had not liked her pregnant. Belly swollen big and tight as a drum. Pale blue veins visible in her flesh looking as if they might burst. Her ankles, feet swollen. Her breath short. The heat of her skin that was a strange sexual heat, a fever that repelled a man.
    She was tall, five feet eight. She weighed about 115 pounds. Pregnant with Niley, she’d weighed 140. Strong as a horse Tignor had said of her.
    The man behind her would be led to think Rebecca was a tough woman, she thought. The kind of woman to fight back.
    She wondered if he knew her, in some way. And so maybe he knew she was living alone with her son. Living in an old remote farmhouse in the country. But if he knew these facts, he might also know that Rebecca’s son was watched during weekdays by a neighbor; and if Rebecca was late picking him up, if Rebecca failed to appear, Mrs. Meltzer would guess that something had happened to her.
    But how long a time would pass, before Mrs. Meltzer called the police?
    The Meltzers were not likely to call the police if they could avoid it. Any more than Tignor would call the police. What they would do is go out looking for you. And not finding you, they’d decide what to do next.
    How long this would require: maybe hours.
    If she’d brought the bread knife from home. That morning. The towpath was a desolate place. If Tignor knew, his wife walking along the canal like a tramp. Sometimes there were derelicts hanging out in the railroad yard. Solitary fishermen at the bridge over the canal. Solitary men.
    If the canal wasn’t so beautiful, she wouldn’t be drawn to it. In the morning the sky was likely to be clear and so the surface of the canal appeared clear. When the sky was heavy and leaden with clouds, the surface of the canal appeared opaque. Like you could walk on it.
    How deep the canal was exactly, Rebecca didn’t know. But it was deep. Over a man’s head. Twenty feet? Couldn’t hope to save yourself by wading out. The banks were steep, you’d have to lift yourself soaking wet out of the water by the sheer strength of your arms and if somebody was kicking at you, you were doomed.
    She was a strong swimmer! Though since Niles, Jr. she had not swum. She feared discovering that her body had lost its girlish buoyancy, its youth. Ignominiously she would sink like a rock. She feared that truth-telling you confront in water over your head exerting your arms and legs to keep afloat.
    She turned abruptly and saw: the man in the panama hat, at about the same distance behind her. He wasn’t trying to catch up with her, at least. But he did seem to be following her. And watching her.
    “You! Better leave me alone.”
    Rebecca’s voice was sharp, high-pitched. It didn’t sound like her own voice at all.
    She turned back, and walked faster. Had he actually smiled ? Was he smiling at her ?
    A smile can be taunting. A smile like her own, deceased father’s smile. Mock-eager. Mock-tender.
    “Bastard. You have no right…”
    Rebecca remembered now, she’d seen this man the previous day.
    At the time she’d taken little notice. She’d been leaving the factory at the end of her shift, 5 P . M ., with a crowd of other workers. If she’d noticed the man in the panama hat, she’d have had no reason to suppose he was interested in her.
    Today, his following her, might be random. He couldn’t know her name�could he?
    Her mind worked swiftly, desperately. It was possible that the stranger had simply chosen a woman to follow at random. He’d been in the vicinity of the factory as a hunter awaits prey, alert to any possibility. Or, what was equally plausible: he had been waiting for someone else but she had not