Jack is dead. Finally.
I can’t bring myself to go inside St. Philip’s Church for his funeral. Clenching the steering wheel, I close my eyes and imagine leaving the air-conditioned car to join the
steady stream of mourners trudging through the muggy heat. Only visualization combats the constant anxiety, a condition I blame on the dead man inside.
Fiddling with my hair, I ignore the mirror. I don’t want to see the fine lines on my forehead and the faint crow’s feet that sprouted three years ago at thirty-five. I tuck an errant curl behind my ear as I fight the memories of his world swirling in my head.
A sharp rapping on the car window jolts me, and I slam my knee into the steering column. A woman from my church peers at me through the window.
“M. L. Danforth, what are you doing in that car? Get out here and get in the cool church before you fry your brains.”
I grin, pointing to my cell phone as if on a call. The lady bobs her head as she turns and marches toward the church’s front doors.
My black sheath dress, freshly highlighted blonde hair, and pleasant Charleston-honed demeanor are ready even if my heart and soul are not. Releasing my seat belt, I straighten the top of my dress and open the car door, ensuring my modest heels are solid on the cobble-stoned pavement before I stand.
My stomach continues its familiar flip-flopping. I haven’t felt this nervous since my first oral argument ten years ago. But this isn’t just nerves. Trepidation wraps around me like the thick Lowcountry humidity of Charleston.
I am opening a padlocked door to my past that should remain fully bolted.
Jack Marshall, the dead man, was my employer at fourteen. He progressed a year later to mentor and with a slow, careful seduction, by age seventeen, after the risk of statutory rape had passed, was my lover. Mama would have keeled over dead then if she’d known that the well-regarded Christian man she held in such high esteem seduced her precious daughter. At least now the sonofabitch is dead, although I refuse to believe it until I see him prone in that casket.
Jack’s wife, Victoria, teeters by my car on too-tall pumps. Her thin form is topped with a tiny black fascinator perched to one side, black netting covering her face. A stab of vicious hatred hits deep in my chest. The lawyer part of me insists I be here, even though the rest of me is fighting it. Because he was such a giant in the community, I cannot skip his funeral without raising more than a few eyebrows.
Pushing my shoulders back, I mentally don my lawyer armor—the attitude and confidence that carries me through the terrors of equity courtroom interactions, conferences with vapid clients I loathe, and the long, dreary docket calls where I am one of the few women in a room full of men. I take a deep breath to quell the ever-present nausea and follow the crowd into the sanctuary.
The leaded glass windows that light the building’s main cathedral are in full glory, and the standing vases of long-stemmed white roses at the end of each pew catch the streams of colored light. Jack’s funeral should have been at the tiny church on Wadmalaw Island, where he grew up, not here. This is all Victoria’s doing.
And Jack hated roses.
In the middle of the entry, I am struck with a vivid memory, and I stop, causing the woman behind me to hiss under her breath when she bumps into me. Snapshots of daffodils and narcissus flood my mind. At nineteen, Jack painted me naked in a field of them.
A wave of disgust floats up my throat.
I shift to the side of the entrance to sign the guest book, then change my mind and drop the pen back into its holder. Thatwitch will know soon enough that I am here. There is no reason to make it a permanent record. The church fills quickly as I walk down the center aisle, taking the first open seat. The mourners talk in low voices, and the antique pipe organ exudes soft tones that float to the massive arched ceiling.
Victoria sits in the first row, her black hair streaked with gray pulled into a chignon, the feathers in her ridiculous fascinator bouncing like a dancing rooster. Seated to one side is her daughter, a young woman with dark blonde hair whose name I can’t remember. On the other side is her son, Brad. Displayed on an easel as if surveying his domain is a framed headshot of a smiling, happy Jack.
I glare at his photograph. Twenty years of anger twist in my soul, desperate to be free like a genie escaping a bottle, followed by a hurtful pang in my heart. I remember all those mornings working side by side as his office assistant, followed by the illicit afternoons filled with heat and lust. He was a grown man teaching me, a young girl, of sex and love.
And I hate him for it.
The music stops, and a junior minister appears at the front. I guess Victoria couldn’t afford the big guns. I tune him out, surrendering to the scenes running through my mind until the congregation’s laughter snaps me out of it. My stomach rolls from the cloying odor of funeral flowers. I pray for the massive organ pipes to begin their music again, stopping the man in front of me, whose words reveal he never knew Jack.
I shift forward in the pew to leave, but the church is packed. Walking out now will brand me as a pariah in a world where everyone loved Jack. He basked in that hero worship, especially from the women. Yet I knew the real Jack. The righteous, irreproachable Victoria would be mortified. Her husband was a hot-blooded artist boy-man inside, with blasphemous questions about God and a penchant for the deviant—and the father of the child I’d been forced to give up for adoption.
Yet all I can think of now is how Jack, instead of apologizing to me for his errant first kiss, turned from me and apologized to God. It is all I can do not to grasp one of those ridiculous vases of roses and throw it against the wall.
As the attendant moves down the aisle, he reaches my row. The people next to me stand to go either toward the casket and the receiving line or toward the exit. I look at Jack’s photo again and freeze.
I cannot do this.
Collapsing onto the pew, my legs block the people behind me. Mutters float over my head as mourners jostle past me out of the pew. After several more rows file past the casket and head toward Victoria, I finally get the courage to join them. I need to finish this.
At the casket, I lean forward to look carefully at Jack’s face. Something isn’t quite right. I pull back in disgust at the odor of stage makeup, moth-balled clothing, and chemicals that cloak the body. His face has been molded back into shape as if he were a victim of a horrific car accident instead of a heart attack.
I stand there, uncaring of the whispers floating around me. A surge of hatred rises in me like a boiling pot, the likes of which I’ve never felt. Before I can stop myself, I hack up spit and let it fly. It lands on Jack’s cheek and runs down his face, exposing the pallid skin underneath and leaving a half-inch trail of ghostly white in the undertaker’s makeup.
My words are loud and crisp as if I’m standing before a judge in a Charleston County courtroom.
“I hope you rot in hell, Jack.”
