Had Cora Meriwether Godwin died as she lived, raging against the betrayals and injustices of life, her passing would have been simply another closing of another circle, both a fading and a release, a last exhalation of being.
But when Cora Godwin drifted first to sleep and finally to her death in the midst of the most glorious mid-October anyone on Cape Cod could remember, the manner of her departure aroused the curiosity of her doctor, a tall splintery Scotsman named Ivan Hayward.
Passing by Cora’s house on his way to play golf with his wife of forty-two years, Hayward saw the ambulance in Cora’s driveway, pulled quickly in behind it and immediately took over from the paramedics in applying CPR procedures. After ten minutes of futile effort he declared Cora Godwin officially dead. Dr. Hayward had known the condition of Cora Godwin’s heart more intimately than anyone. There had been no hope.
But the nature of her passing puzzled Hayward from the start. And launched a chain of events whose first link extended thirty years into the past.
As June Leedale, Cora’s neighbour, related her story, first to Dr. Hayward and later to her husband Parker, Cora had been reclining on a cot on the side porch of her century-old house. In the early afternoon of that second Monday in October, her cot raised to a sitting position and an afghan robe over her legs, Cora Godwin accepted her daily dose of two potassium capsules from June Leedale. The capsules, administered three times daily, were part of Dr. Hayward’s prescribed treatment for Cora’s heart condition.
The elderly woman swallowed the two green-and-ivory capsules with a sip of herbal tea, smiled warmly at June and began working with her neighbour on a crossword puzzle. June read the clues aloud and counted the letters and, more often than not, Cora would identify the word without hesitation. Writing the word in the spaces, June Leedale marveled at the older woman’s quickness of mind, extensive vocabulary and deductive abilities, and they continued to share their tea as the afternoon burnished to gold.
Half an hour after taking her medication, Cora Godwin set her tea cup aside with a hand somewhat less steady than normal, commented on the profusion of zinnias spreading among her perennials, pulled the afghan to her neck and said, “Thank you, dear. I’m sorry but . . . I’ve suddenly grown quite weary.”
She lay back, closed her eyes and fell asleep almost instantly.
June Leedale was describing the scene to Dr. Hayward, the tall angular Scotsman bending slightly from the waist and gazing intently into her eyes, when June’s husband Parker arrived from his law office. The ambulance attendants had placed Cora’s body in their vehicle and were preparing to leave. A few neighbours stood at the edge of their property further down Miner’s Lane, as though fearing contagion if they approached closer.
“I had finished the crossword puzzle, we were doing crossword puzzles.” The words stumbled out of June Leedale’s mouth. When her husband stepped from his car, the doctor waited expectantly for Parker Leedale to place a comforting arm around his wife’s shoulders. He arched his eyebrows in surprise when Leedale’s only response was to wave pleasantly at a knot of curious neighbours.
“I went to my house and loaded the washer, took some things out of the freezer for dinner. I came back perhaps half an hour later and she was still sleeping. At least I thought she was. Then I started watching a blue jay natter at a squirrel,” June Leedale continued, her eyes red with tears. “It was comical to see the animals quarrel like that. Cora’s arm slipped off the cot and I thought she was awake. ‘Did you hear that, Cora?’ I asked her. ‘Did you hear those two go at it?’ And when she didn’t answer I looked at her and I could see . . . I could see her eyes were partially open and that she had stopped breathing. She had slipped away.”
“And how much time had passed since you gave her the medication?” Dr. Hayward asked gently.
“Two hours perhaps,” June Leedale replied. “Maybe a little more.”
“There was no other indication of trouble?” Hayward asked. “She just went to sleep?”
June Leedale nodded silently.
Parker Leedale began to speak but Hayward raised a hand to halt his words. “Was she in the habit of taking afternoon naps?” he asked June Leedale. His eyes were blue as a cold sea but his voice was soft and imploring.
June Leedale shook her head no in response.
“Her heart?” Parker Leedale asked Hayward.
The doctor nodded unconvincingly—his eyebrows had arched again—and he straightened to his full height, towering over the Leedales.
“Well, I guess it’s to be expected,” Parker Leedale said, watching the ambulance depart. “Where’re they taking her? Duncan’s? They taking her to Duncan’s funeral home?”
“I think so,” his wife said. “There won’t be an autopsy or anything, will there, Dr. Hayward?” she asked.
“I don’t believe there will,” Hayward replied in the Scottish lowland burr he still retained after almost forty years on the Cape.
“Don’t let Duncan’s embalm her and paint her up and all that,” Parker Leedale said. “I’d better call them, tell them she left instructions. Just basic cremation, that’s all she instructed. Nothing in the estate to cover a big funeral anyway.”
June Leedale began to speak, then hesitated as Hayward laid a hand gently on her arm. “You did all you could,” he murmured. “You were a good friend to her and that’s important.” He nodded again at her husband and walked distractedly back to his car.
“Somebody’ll have to contact her nephew,” Parker said, inspecting the front wheel of his car. Something about the tire seemed to annoy him and he kicked it with the toe of his shoe. “If they can find him.” He watched Hayward make a U-turn in Miner’s Lane and drive back toward town, following the ambulance.
“They’ll know where to reach him in Boston,” June Leedale said. “The police there should know.” She brought a handkerchief to her face and stumbled through a few words.
“What?” Parker Leedale demanded at the sound of her voice through the sobs.
“I said I’ll miss her,” his wife replied. She removed the handkerchief from her face and covered her eyes with her hand. “I’ll miss her.”
Parker Leedale grunted and climbed into his car. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Reverend Willoughby came by just before you arrived.” June Leedale slipped into the passenger seat and stared straight ahead as her husband started the car and guided it the hundred yards from Cora Godwin’s house across Miner’s Lane to their home. “He didn’t stay. He saw the ambulance go past St. Luke’s and heard the siren stop nearby, so he drove up to see if he was needed. Something told him it might be Cora. . . .”
“Come on, June, what’re you so upset about?” her husband said. “The woman was over eighty years old, for God’s sake. That’s a decent age. Hell, I should live so long.”
June Leedale gathered strength to speak again as her husband drove down the laneway alongside their house. “Anyway, Reverend Willoughby says Cora made arrangements for a funeral service. A few weeks ago. At St. Luke’s . . .”
“A service? At St. Luke’s? Who the hell’s gonna show up?” Parker Leedale snorted. “She managed to piss off nearly everybody in town except you and me.”
“Reverend Willoughby said she wanted us there, you and me. And Mike and Bunny,” June Leedale added, leaving the car and trotting quickly behind her husband. “And the Stevensons.”
“Ellie and Blake? Cora couldn’t stand either of them.”
“That’s what I thought too, but we’re all on the list she gave Reverend Willoughby. And her nephew. She wanted him to attend.”
Parker Leedale swung the front door of their house open and stared back at his wife in disbelief. “The guy she’s never stopped talking about since Terry died? Nobody knows where the hell he is. Who’s supposed to track him down? Me? The hell,” he muttered, turning to precede his wife into the house. “Morton can find him. Let the town absorb the long distance charges. No reason for us to.”
“She always wanted him to visit her,” his wife said. “She was just too proud to ask.”
“And he never came, did he?” her husband demanded. “Did the son of a bitch ever come? Like hell he did. She hasn’t seen him for ten, fifteen years, I’ll bet. Only reason he’ll show up now is to get his hands on her estate.”
“You don’t know that,” June Leedale said. “He might have come sooner. If he’d known how sick she was. Besides, I think she wanted to talk to him about something. Something that was bothering her. Remember I told you she mentioned it to Bunny and me a couple of weeks ago? Something about Terry?”
“Terry’s been dead twenty-five years.”
“It’d been bothering her. That’s what she told us, and she wanted her nephew to know about it—”
“Probably getting senile, thinking Terry was still alive. Confused him with her nephew, I’ll bet.” Parker Leedale settled himself on the floral-patterned sofa next to the telephone table. “I remember him, her nephew, as a kid. Spent a couple of summers here, stayed right over there in that house with the Godwins. Kept to himself most of the time. A loner. Kind who never gave a damn about anybody else. That’s what made him a cop, I’ll bet. Son of a gun couldn’t get along with ordinary people.”
He lifted the receiver and dialed a number. “Morton?” he said when a voice answered. “Parker Leedale. Listen, Cora Godwin died this afternoon. Yeah, that was her. Her heart finally gave out. Look, you don’t know where we can reach her nephew, the ex-cop, do you?” A pause. “McGuire. His name’s McGuire.”
Ivan Hayward called his wife from Duncan’s Funeral Home and apologized for the delay in their golf game. “You owe me a dinner out tonight then,” she laughed. He agreed, replaced the telephone receiver and turned to face Blendell Duncan, owner of the largest funeral service in Compton.
One of Blendell Duncan’s hands stroked his black Vandyke beard uneasily. The other hand held a death certificate signed by Ivan Hayward. It was highly unusual for a doctor to accompany a body to the funeral home, and Blendell Duncan was unaccustomed to unusual events. His profession depended upon total predictability and purpose. “It’s to be a cremation, I understand,” Duncan said. “No complications?”
“I don’t know,” Ivan Hayward replied.
Blendell blinked, frowned, looked away. Complications worried him. His entire life had been spent avoiding complications. “Will you be sending her to Orleans?” Blendell asked. Orleans was the site of the morgue, its attendant autopsy suite all stainless steel and white enamel, an inhuman place. Blendell caught himself in speculation, a rare event. Why would an autopsy be required on an eighty-year-old woman with a history of heart trouble who died peacefully in her sleep?
While Blendell watched patiently, Ivan Hayward stared down at his brown-and-white saddle golf shoes and weighed his suspicions. Holding the body for an autopsy would require a police report, substantial expense to the county and unnecessary delay. And the results, Hayward knew, were already apparent: Her heart had failed.
But it was the manner in which it failed that disturbed the doctor.
At that point, Hayward made a decision he would later regret, though its logic was inescapable in the coolness of the mortuary embalming room. If he were unwilling to deploy the limited resources of the county to determine the exact cause of Cora Godwin’s death, he could at least satisfy his own conscience. It would be a halfway decision, he admitted. And like any halfway decision regarding death, it would strand the facts midway between mystery and resolution.
“I want to retrieve something from my car,” Hayward said pleasantly to Blendell Duncan. “Then I wonder if you would leave me with her for a moment.”
Duncan, his hands behind his back, lowered his head briefly and smiled. The smile lit his face, but neither warmth nor humour shone through; it was as though a switch had been thrown somewhere within him. “I’ll be in my office,” he replied, pleased that the doctor had made a decision, banishing uncertainty.
Ivan Hayward waited for the undertaker to leave the embalming room. Then the doctor walked briskly through an anteroom and down a long corridor to the wide entry doors through which Cora Godwin’s body had been wheeled just moments earlier. Swinging them open, he strode across the parking lot directly to his car, returning a minute later to approach the body of Cora Godwin, a syringe in one hand and a rare look of concern in his eyes.