Libby
Libby stood against the yellow-striped papered walls in the Greenwood parlor. The scent of flowers suffocated her as bouquets sat on every end table, shelf, and flat surface. A mirror on the opposite wall was also covered in black crepe to comply with the customary superstition that the deceased’s spirit might be trapped in the looking glass for eternity. The piano was closed to forbid music or revelry. Gauzy crepe draped the south corner of the room. Nestled in its swooping embrace was the casket of Deacon Harrison Greenwood.
They’d arrived earlier than other invited guests. A special message in their funeral invitation had been penned by Deacon Greenwood’s widow to Libby’s mother, head of the Martha Washington Ladies’ Society, and therefore a logical first choice for support—regardless of emotional intimacy or friendship.
Standing sentinel over his dead father was Elijah. His lean body encased in a black suit, his dark brown hair tamed with some sort of fancy pomade, and his eyes steeled with emotional fortitude.
Libby’s mother moved toward the casket, her black dress brushing across the Oriental wool carpet, but Libby didn’t follow. Black. Mourning. It was all so dark. No wonder people avoided talk of death, and cemeteries, and Memento Mori, the photographs taken after the loved one had passed. It was morbid and unsettling.
Glancing at the ornate mantel clock, Libby noted it had been stopped as was customary, and in this case it was halted at the approximate time of Deacon Greenwood’s death. Libby blinked away the image of the stilled clock hands. The time she’d discovered Deacon Greenwood was hardly the exact time he’d passed.
She wrapped her arms around herself, squelching a shudder. Doctor Penchan had concluded death by asphyxiation brought on by Deacon Greenwood’s own hand. The police had questioned her, digging for answers as to why she’d been at the Greenwood home so early in the morning with Calvin. A puddle of nervous anxiety, Libby had done exactly what Paul instructed her not to do. She’d told the police everything.
“Do you have the obituary?” they asked her.
“No,” she’d answered. Elijah did.
The undisguised look of disgust hurt more than she wished to admit. They believed it a ploy. A story. One of the officers even said as much.
“Why were you at the Greenwood home?” They insisted on a more plausible answer, one that didn’t reek of Mitch Sheffield’s attempt to monopolize on a dead man’s escape from the earth.
“I told you,” she said.
“It wouldn’t have anything to do with your infatuation with Elijah Greenwood, would it?”
Libby had sealed her lips in that moment. She couldn’t help it if the town knew she’d danced in Elijah’s shadow since she was young. Rumors long abounded that Libby Sheffield had put off matrimony in hopes Elijah would take notice—more than he already had. Even Elijah knew this. But Elijah also knew why Libby had such devotion. Neither of them would ever explain.
The police wrote off her presence, and nothing was mentioned of the obituary again. Everything pointed toward a desperate man making an escape from the world.
How did one pay respects to the family of a man who’d taken his own life? Especially when you were the only one in the room who believed, in fact, that he’d been murdered instead? Libby’s gaze darted around the room, the voices murmuring behind gloved hands positioned over mouths to discreetly converse becoming distant echoes. She blinked. The room spun, like being on a carousel. Slow, methodical, her eyes skimming the faces. What if Deacon Greenwood’s killer stood here, posing as a grieving friend while reveling in the deacon’s potential condemnation to Hell?
Libby blinked furiously, a strong buzzing whirring in her ears, her heart colliding with her rib cage with a force far too great for her to remain standing for long. A deep breath, inhaling through her nose and letting out through her mouth. Her own gloved hand clutched her throat, willing herself to remain upright.
She focused on her mother, who was embracing Mrs. Greenwood. Their hold was stiff and formal, that of two acquaintances who respected the hierarchy of their small town, and even appearances. What a sad waste. In a moment such as this, a grieving widow needed a dear friend, not one who led the church’s women’s club.
“Libby.”
His dark tone jolted Libby from her attempt to avoid a dead faint. Never mind that. She was struggling to breathe now for other reasons altogether. Libby met Elijah’s somber eyes.
“Come” was all he said. He took her gloved hand and held it between his even as he led her to stand over his dead father. Libby restrained herself from pulling away, from making a scene. Elijah hadn’t released her hand, and she was very aware of the warmth that emanated from his grasp. She reminded herself once again it was not a hand held out of affection but a grip that insinuated much more.
Libby focused on Deacon Greenwood as was proper, though she didn’t miss the close proximity of Elijah’s chest to her shoulder. The older man looked made of wax, and after a few days his body was already beginning to sink into itself. Flowers bordered his casket to mask the odor of death and finality.
“I’m so sorry.” The platitude came from her heart, but it carried the same molded sound of everyone else’s sympathy.
“Are you?” Elijah muttered as he surveyed his father’s face, the gray hair combed away from his strong forehead, and the straight nose Libby recalled wrinkling when he smiled.
“Of course!” Libby cast Elijah a wary sideways glance. He had to know she didn’t kill his father or write that morbid, plagiarized obituary. Nor did she have the strength to haul the dead weight of a body by rope over rafters some feet over her head.
“Yes. You’re sorry.” Resignation seeped into Elijah’s voice. “You’re always . . . sorry.”
And she was. She always had been. Libby fixated on the dead man. Being alone, reading, hiding away from anything dysfunctional was her pastime of choice. Calvin was her only friend. Now she had been thrust into Deacon Greenwood’s death with a force that was entirely unwelcome.
“I cannot believe my father would—” Elijah swallowed hard, his sentence left unfinished. “But the obituary you entrusted me with? I cannot fathom the implications of . . .” His words trailed away, as if reminding himself she was not his personal confidante. She never had been.
Words filtered from Elijah’s mouth, and Libby leaned toward him to hear them.
“‘Thrilling to think, poor child of sin! It was the dead that groaned within.’”
“Pardon?” Libby’s voice notched upward a pitch.
Elijah started, and their eyes met, locking in a mutual bewilderment. Her, for horror that Elijah whispered Poe with the finesse of a devoted reader, and he for the apparent shock that he’d spoken aloud.
Libby said nothing but watched as Elijah’s eyes darkened, only to sense that old familiar pang as the haunted hollowness returned to them.
“My father—he’d written it on a piece of paper. They found it beneath his feet, kicked under the straw. But it was written in his hand. It was his signature that sealed it.”
Libby couldn’t tear her eyes from Elijah’s. Searching, aching to understand the conundrum that was the mysteriously sad and morose person she’d known since childhood. Known him in a comradery of silence. Known him as her hero and the man who would never love her, could never love her until she told the truth—her truth.
By whoever’s hand Deacon Greenwood had died, his last and final penned words sucked the breath from Libby. The shared knowing in Elijah’s eyes was neither accusation nor empathy. It was resigned. They both knew. Oh, how they knew! Sin had a wicked way of creeping into one’s soul and tainting its edges with the inevitable groan that one carried with them, with their secrets, into the grave.