Chapter 6
Ezekiel
It was just before dawn, way before the town woke up as I stood alone in the preparation room at the funeral home. The vibe was cold and sterile. The medical examiner had just dropped off the body of Judge Samson Whitmore, who was the cousin of Senator Theodore Whitmore, who recently passed away.
Two deaths, same family just days apart. Just like Senator Whitmore, Judge Whitmore was someone who was very important to our town. He was someone that was very connected with people and in some cases that could be a great thing or a very terrible thing.
The Judge’s official cause of death was listed as a heart attack on his paperwork…
but my examination would confirm its validity.
As I began to prepare his body, at first sight, everything seemed to be the typical, classic case of sudden heart failure.
But, upon further examination, I soon discovered that the diagnosis of a heart attack was another lie, another story and another secret.
The real focus was who benefited from his death and what was he a part of that caused his untimely demise.
If I had to guess, I would say he inherited his late cousin’s, Senator Theodore’s Whitmore’s indiscretions.
Death was natural and it wasn’t easy for most to deal with, but I could consume myself in it and not be fazed, it was the lies surrounding the deaths that make them intriguingly interesting to me.
According to the M.E.’s paperwork, the Judge was laying on the sofa in his office at the time of his death.
He was fully clothed in business attire, including his judge’s robe.
As I removed his clothes, I noticed a bulge on the inside of his robe.
When I investigated it closely, I discovered it was a key. On one side of the key there was a W engraved on it and the other side, Box 24, was engraved on it. From the location of the key, it had to be something that the Judge didn’t want to be found because it gave secret compartment.
Once he was completely naked, I began my examination and that’s when I noticed bruising in places that wouldn’t be consistent with a heart attack.
His shoulder, arm and wrist were bruised.
Three of his fingers were broken, some of his nails were torn and then the needle mark that was almost hidden on his jugular was like a blaring neon sign to me cause I knew what to look for.
Yeah, the paperwork said heart attack, but the body disagreed and told a different story. The one thing about the dead was that they didn’t hide evidence, didn’t lie and didn’t argue. That’s why I preferred working with the dead instead of the living.
Whoever was the cause of this death definitely wanted the town to think that he died of a heart attack in his sleep, but I saw the truth… I always did. And if I had to guess who was responsible, I probably would guess correctly. Since I took over as undertaker I’d prepared hundreds of bodies.
Matriarchs, patriarchs, teachers, infants, politicians, murderers, you name it and they all ended up looking the same to me.
Except for the ones that came in with stories to tell…
those are the most intriguing ones. Those were the ones I lived and breathed to work on, I even dreamed of them at night.
I knew what to look for and every time a new body showed up to the funeral home, I beamed with excitement, got a rush and thirst that not even sex could quench until after I finished preparing the body.
There was no one better than me when it came to preparing the dead, I craved it and what I always found to be the most tantalizing thing was that even though the dead didn’t talk, they always had a way of telling the truth better than the living did.
I didn’t trust the living, but I could always put my trust in the dead.
I knew everything about the deceased and it was ultimately up to me to either keep their secrets or tell what should be known. Depending on the story they told, most of the time I had to keep their secrets tucked tight to preserve my family name.
I took pride in keeping their secrets, it gave me power within our bloodline that no other Dubois possessed or could take from me. After cleaning his body off, I put him away in the freezer, until it was time for embalming. Once done, I headed to the undertaker secret office in the basement.
Sitting down at the large desk, I unlocked the middle drawer and pulled out the official record keeper’s journal.
It was a sacred book that was passed down to me as a private form of record keeping for all the dead bodies that were touched by past secret keepers.
Its spine was cracked more than when I first inherited it, the leather was ancient and it was many generations old.
Before opening it, I grabbed a pen and wrote: Judge Samson Whitmore. Official cause of death: Cardiac arrest Examination: Defensive trauma bruising. Injection site: left side jugular. Truth withheld. Another name, another lie…another secret.
My journal entry was short and to the point because the truth was something that was deserved to be known, but in a town like Magnolia Graves, secrets are what it was built on.
I started flipping through the previous pages and passed by pages that listed, Samuel Whitmore, the late father of Senator Theodore Whitmore, Miriam Vale, the matriarch of one of the oldest families in our town’s untimely death, and then I stopped on the page that contained my aunt, Vivienne Baptiste’s name.
The information recorded under my aunt’s name had to be a few paragraphs long, but I wasn’t looking to read it over.
That part of the book always triggered me in deep ways because I was already familiar with the lies that surrounded her death.
I not only witnessed her death, but I had to take part in it because as a child, what August and Bishop told me to do, I had no choice.
All of those deaths were recorded by the previous undertakers…the funeral home’s past secret keepers. The empty pages were just waiting to be filled with more death cause sooner or later everybody ended up in the journal.
By the time I left the funeral home it was early morning.
The sky was bright and clear and as I looked out toward the cemetery one of the magnolia trees caught my eye.
The blooms on that particular tree were red.
Most people would’ve seen that tree and thought that it was a unique, and beautiful sight.
But the people around here looked at red blooms as something completely different.
Red magnolias in our town meant that those buried near them weren’t finished talking and they all were buried carrying secrets that should’ve been known. I made a mental note to visit the cemetery later, then headed to my Denali so that I could handle some business at the church.
As I stood alone inside the sanctuary in Saint Mercy all I could think about was that secrets lived way longer than people did here.
They lived longer than marriages, friendships and they out-lived most graves.
The sunlight had started filtering through the stained-glass windows and covered the sanctuary floor in patterns of sapphire, crimson and golden hues.
The church was very quiet and that’s because it was empty, just how I liked it.
No sermons, prayers or tourists present pretending that they cared, just memories and silence.
I looked over at the Dubois pew that sat at the front of the church and thought about all of the six generations of my family that had occupied the same row over the past decades.
The same seats…the same power. People mostly found comfort in that sort of tradition, some even desired it, but I found warning in it.
My phone started vibrating in my pocket and I didn’t need to look at it to know who it was. The fact that Seraphine was calling me instead of texting me, her usual way of contact, told me everything I needed to know.
“Talk to me. And keep it short. I’m busy.”
“Well, damn. Hello to you too. I gotta tell you something and I believe you gonna want to make time fah this.”
“Continue.”
“Well, something big done happened," Seraphine sighed, "I met Noa."
Of course she did, I thought as I closed my eyes briefly. It seemed like everybody was interested in meeting Ms. Noa before the week was out but no one was more interested in meeting her in the flesh than I was.
"And?"
Seraphine chuckled softly. "Why you puttin’ on like you don't already know."
She was right, I already knew, which was why I didn’t say anything.
I just didn’t know all the details, and I wanted to hear them from her.
There weren’t very many places in Magnolia Graves where information of all sorts didn’t arrive once things happened in town and Magnolia & Pine wasn’t one of those places.
Just like the coffee that was brewed there, so was all the town’s gossip.
So, for Seraphine to be calling me about Noa, was a call that I’d been expecting to get.
“Just wait til you see her…” Her voice changed to a sadder, much softer tone that was filled with compassion. “Brace yourself cause she looks just like Celeste.”
For a brief second, I couldn’t breathe. Although I saw her when she first got to town, it was from a distance, not up close and personal.
So, I really didn’t get to see the small details she possessed, but I wasn’t surprised to hear it, yet I didn’t really want to hear that.
Hearing her being compared to her mom put me in the headspace of the night Celeste left town.
It reminded me of who Celeste was to me.
She was a very important and one of the few people who saw me for who I was really…
before they tarnished me back when I was innocent.
The night she left I was a very young boy, only nine years old at the time, yet it was one of the nights that broke me and shaped me into the man that I am today.
I still remember the last thing Celeste said to me.