41 41REMEMBERING THE CURIOUS QUESTIONS ASKED BY THE child who had wanted to know why she was taking pictures at Nuala’s grave, Maggie stopped at a florist’s and bought an assortment of fall flowers to place on the graves she intended to inspect.
As before, once she passed the entrance to St. Mary’s, the welcoming statue of the angel and the meticulously kept plots seemed to impart a sense of peace and immortality. Veering to the left, she drove up the winding incline that led to Nuala’s grave.
As she stepped from the car, she sensed that a workman weeding the gravel path nearby was watching her. She had heard of people being mugged in cemeteries, but the thought passed quickly. There were other workmen in the area as well.
But given the fact there was someone so close by, she was glad she had thought to pick up the flowers; she would rather not seem to be examining the grave. Squatting down next to the plot, she selected a half dozen of the flowers and laid them one by one at the base of the tombstone.
The flowers Greta Shipley had placed there on Tuesday had been removed, and Maggie quickly consulted the snapshot she was holding to see exactly where she had detected the glint of some metal-like object.
It was fortunate she had brought the picture, she realized, because the object she was looking for had sunk more deeply into the moist earth and easily could have been missed. But it was there.
She looked swiftly to the side and realized she had the workman’s undivided attention. Kneeling forward, she bowed her head and crossed herself, then let her folded hands drop to the ground. Still in the posture of prayer, her fingers touching the sod, she dug around the object and freed it.
She waited for a moment. When she glanced around again, the workman had his back turned to her. With one motion, she yanked the object up and hastily concealed it between her joined palms. As she did this, she heard a muffled ringing sound.
A bell? she thought. Why in God’s name would anyone bury a bell on Nuala’s grave? Certain that the workman had heard the sound as well, she got up and walked quickly back to her car.
She laid the bell down on top of the remaining flowers. Not wanting to stay another minute under the scrutiny of the watchful maintenance worker, she drove slowly in the direction of the second grave she wanted to visit. She parked in the nearby cul-de-sac, then looked around. There was no one nearby.
Opening the car window, she carefully picked up the bell and held it outside. After brushing off the loose earth that clung to it, she turned it around in her hand, examining it, her fingers holding the clapper to keep it from pealing.
The bell was about three inches high, and surprisingly heavy, not unlike an old-fashioned miniature school bell, except for the decorative garland of flowers bordering the base. The clapper was heavy too, she noticed. When allowed to hang freely, it no doubt could make quite a sound.
Maggie closed the car window, held the bell near the floor of the car and swung it. A melancholy but nevertheless clear ringing sound resounded through the car.
A Stone for Danny Fisher, she thought. That was the title of one of the books that had been in her father’s library. She remembered that as a child she had asked him what the title meant, and he had explained that it was a tradition in the Jewish faith that anyone stopping by the grave of a friend or relative would place a stone there as a sign of the visit.
Could this bell signify something like that? Maggie wondered. Feeling vaguely as though she were doing something amiss in taking the bell, she slid it out of sight under the seat of the car. Then she selected another half-dozen flowers, and with the appropriate photograph in hand, went to revisit the grave of another of Greta Shipley’s friends.
* * *
Her last stop was at Mrs. Rhinelander’s grave; it had been the photograph of this grave that most clearly seemed to show a gap in the sod near the base of the tombstone. As Maggie arranged the remaining flowers on the damp grass, her fingers sought and found the indented area.
* * *
Maggie needed to think, and she was not ready to go back to the house where there might be interruptions. Instead she drove into the center of town and found a luncheonette, where she ordered a toasted blueberry muffin and coffee.
I was hungry, she admitted to herself as the crusty muffin and strong coffee helped to dissipate the all-encompassing uneasiness she had experienced in the cemeteries.
Another memory of Nuala flashed into her mind. When Maggie was ten, Porgie, her roguish miniature poodle, had jumped on Nuala as she lay dozing on the couch. She had let out a shriek, and when Maggie went running in, Nuala had laughed and said, “Sorry, honey. I don’t know why I’m so jumpy. Someone must be walking on my grave.”
Then, because Maggie had been at an age when she wanted to know everything, Nuala had had to explain that the expression was an old Irish saying meaning that someone was walking over the spot where you would someday be buried.
There had to be a simple explanation for what she had found today, Maggie reasoned. Of the six burial plots she had visited, four, including Nuala’s, had bells at the base of the tombstone, each exactly like the others in weight and size. It appeared as well that one had been removed from the ground near Mrs. Rhinelander’s tombstone. So that meant only one of Greta Shipley’s friends had not received this odd tribute—if, indeed, that was what it was.
As she drained the last of the coffee and shook her head, refusing the waitress’s smiling offer of a refill, a name popped into Maggie’s mind: Mrs. Bainbridge!
Like Greta Shipley, she had been at Latham Manor since it opened. She must have known all those women too, Maggie realized.
Back in her car, Maggie called Letitia Bainbridge on the cellular phone. She was in her apartment.
“Come right over,” she told Maggie. “I’d love to see you. I’ve been a bit blue this morning.”
“I’m on my way,” Maggie replied.
When she replaced the phone in its cradle, she reached under the seat for the bell she had taken from Nuala’s grave. Then she put it in her shoulder bag.
She shuddered involuntarily as she pulled away from the curb. The metal had felt cold and clammy to her touch.