Chapter 4
Wrenlee
You can learn more about a supernatural incursion from four old people in a small town than from any book ever written, and the reason is that old people in a small town notice absolutely everything and are dying to be asked.
We started with the funeral director because Teodora said to.
"Start with the man who handles the bodies," she said, over coffee at six in the morning. "In my experience he's the only one in a town this size who isn't lying, because he's the only one who's already seen the punchline."
Fontaine Bissette has run the funeral home on Adair Street for thirty-one years and he is the calmest human being in this parish. He let us in the side door and poured us coffee out of a pot in the embalming prep room, which he does not appear to think is unusual.
"Wrenlee Thibodeaux."
"Mr. Bissette."
"You've come back."
"I have."
"Mm," he said, and that was the entire commentary, which is why I'd walk through fire for that man.
"We're asking about Sundays," Jonah said.
"I figured."
"You figured?"
"Son, I've been waiting nine days for somebody to come ask me about Sundays." He sat down and put his hands on his knees. "Y'all want it in order?"
"Please."
"Eight weeks back, I buried Cecile Rademacher. Ninety-one. Good service, big turnout, she'd earned it." He tapped a finger. "Three weeks after that, Miss Ida tells me there was a woman in the back pew at the Sunday service who nobody could place, and she's got Cecile's coat."
"Cecile's coat."
"Green wool with the mended cuff. I know the coat because I dressed her in it." He said it without a flicker. "So either somebody dug up a ninety-one-year-old woman for her coat, which is a great deal of trouble, or something's shopping."
Jonah went very still.
"How many?" I said.
"Since Easter?" Fontaine looked at the ceiling. "Six, that I'm sure of. Two I'd argue about."
"Six of your—"
"Six of my people," he said. "In the pews.
Sitting where they used to sit. That's what nobody wants to say out loud, Miss Wrenlee.
They don't stand at the back like a ghost story.
They sit in their own seats. Alton Vige sat in his own seat for the whole of the eleven o'clock service on the fifth of last month, and his widow sat two rows up and did not turn around, and I've decided not to have an opinion on why. "
"Six," Fontaine said. "That's the number I'd swear to. And I'll tell you the thing that's kept me up, since you're here and since nobody else has asked."
"Tell us."
"They're all mine." He looked at the ceiling. "Every one of the six was buried out of this house. Not out of Beulah Grove, not out of the Catholics in Bienville. Mine. Which means whatever's doing it has been through my book."
"Your book?"
"The register," he said. "Thirty-one years of it. Names, dates, coats, who cried."
"Who cried?"
"I write down who cried, Miss Wrenlee. It's a small town and it's useful."
The prep room was very cold.
"Does it do anything?" Jonah asked.
"It sings," Fontaine said. "That's all it's ever done. Sits, sings, leaves before the doors."
The pharmacist was less useful and took longer, which is the pharmacist's whole nature.
"I'm not saying anything's wrong."
"Nobody said anything's wrong, Terry."
"Because people come in here and they say things."
"What things?"
"Things, Wrenlee. I'm a pharmacist. I'm not a — " he waved a hand at the entire concept of the supernatural — "a booth."
"Terry."
"Sleep aids are up sixty percent," he said, all in a rush, like a man confessing. "Since Easter. Sixty percent, in a town with eleven hundred people, and it's all the same four streets. All the streets on the Sunday side."
Jonah said, "Which four?"
"Adair, Vachon, Fourth, and the length of Chapel."
I got the map out in the truck after and drew it, and all four of those streets run inside the east boundary within a mile of the line.
"They're not sleeping because they're closest," Jonah said.
"They're not sleeping because something's walking past their houses at night on its way to church," I said, "and their bodies know it and their heads don't."
We stopped at the cemetery on the way because Jonah wanted to and wouldn't say why until we were standing in it.
"Cecile Rademacher," he said.
Fontaine had told us the plot. It was undisturbed. Grass grown in, the sod knitted, eight weeks of settling exactly where you'd expect it.
"Nobody dug her up," I said.
"Nobody dug her up." He crouched and put his hand flat on the grass. "So it's not doing what I thought it was doing."
"What did you think it was doing?"
"Something I'd know how to hit."
"Ah."
"That's my whole professional range, Wrenlee. I've got one tool and I've been standing here for nine days waiting for the job to be shaped like a nail."
"And?"
He stood up and looked out over about four hundred graves, most of them people whose grandchildren I went to school with.
"And it's shaped like a congregation," he said.
Then we went to Miss Eulalie Sonnier, who is eighty-one years old and who I have loved since I was six, and who enjoyed every second of the following exchange more than anyone should enjoy anything.
"Well, look at what the tide brought."
"Miss Eulalie."
"Sit down, both of you. Jonah Pike, you've gotten enormous."
"Yes ma'am."
"Is that on purpose?"
"Somewhat."
"Mm." She poured tea nobody asked for. "You two getting married?"
"Miss Eulalie."
"I'm eighty-one. I don't have time for a runway."
"We're here about the church."
"I know what you're here about. Y'all have been all over town since Tuesday like a pair of door-to-door salesmen. Fontaine called me before your truck was out the alley."
"Then you know what we're going to ask."
"I do."
"Will you answer it?"
"No," she said, delighted, and drank her tea.
Jonah put his cup down. "Ma'am—"
"I'll answer a different question," she said. "Ask me about my sister."
"Your sister."
"Ask."
"Tell me about your sister," I said.
Miss Eulalie set her cup in the saucer and the enjoyment went out of her face like a light switched off, and what was under it was eighty-one years old and tired.
"Odette died in 1961," she said. "She was nineteen. She's been at the eleven o'clock service four times since Easter and I have not told one living soul, because the last time a woman in this town said she saw her dead sister at church they took her to Pineville and she came back with no teeth."
Nobody said anything.
"She's got her face," Miss Eulalie said. "It ain't right, though. She's got it on the way a girl wears her mother's coat."
"Have you spoken to her?"
"Once."
"What did you say?"
"I said, 'Odette, do you know me?'"
"And?"
"And she said yes," said Miss Eulalie. "And she was lying. And I know she was lying because Odette never once in her life answered a question that fast."
On the way to the truck Jonah said, "Six of Fontaine's people. One of Miss Eulalie's. That's seven we can name."
"Say the rest of it."
"All seven died inside the boundary."
"Yes."
"None of them died out past the line."
"No."
"So it's not taking them from out there," he said. "It's taking them from in here."
"That's what's been bothering me since the coat."
"Then how's it getting them out to put them back on?"
I stopped with my hand on the truck door.
"It isn't," I said. "That's the thing I keep walking past. It doesn't need to move them anywhere. It just needs the idea of them. The coat, the pew, the voice, the fourth verse — Jonah, it's not wearing bodies. It's wearing what the town remembers."
"That's worse."
"That's substantially worse, yes."
"Because you can't dig up a memory and check."
"And because there's no limit on it," I said. "There's eleven hundred people in this parish and four generations in the ground and every single one of them is a coat."
Teodora took the notes off me at the clubhouse and read them standing up, which is how she reads everything.
"It's not the King," she said.
Odalys looked over. "You're sure?"
"I'm as sure as I get." She put the pages down. "The Marrow King is a thing that bargains. Every account in this parish for ninety years is the same shape — it offers, you refuse or you don't, it keeps the terms. It's monstrous but it's a lawyer."
"And this isn't."
"This isn't offering anything. This is putting on a dead woman's face and sitting in her pew and getting it slightly wrong.
" Teodora tapped Miss Eulalie's page. "'She wears her face like a girl wears her mother's coat.
' That's the whole diagnosis right there.
That's not a possession. Possession is a driver in a car. "
"Then what is it?"
"It's tenanted," she said. "There's a difference and the difference matters. A driver takes the car where he wants. A tenant moves in, learns the neighbors' names, sits in the good chair, and waits for the lease to become permanent by nobody ever asking to see the paperwork."
Delphine said, "So what does a tenant want?"
"The same as any tenant. He wants the building." Teodora sat down and picked up her coffee. "In this case, I'd guess, the town."
Roach, from the doorway: "Can I say something?"
"No," said four women at once.
Bear went to church.
I need to record this properly because it has become the defining event of that man's life and he will not stop.
The plan was surveillance. We needed eyes in the eleven o'clock and we needed somebody nobody would look at twice, and Bear has not been in a church since 1994 and had opinions about it up until the moment he walked in.
Bear came out at ten past twelve with his eyes red.
I want to note that we had given that man one instruction, which was be inconspicuous, and that he had interpreted it by wearing a tie.
Bear owns one tie. It is maroon. It was purchased for a funeral in 2011 and it has the general dimensions of a boat ramp.
"Bear?"
"I'm fine."
"Are you crying?"
"I've got a thing in my eye. Both eyes. It's a bilateral thing."
"Bear."
"It was the singing," he said, furious about it. "Y'all didn't tell me they all sing at the same time."
"That's what a hymn is."
"Well nobody said."