A Maidens Grave

noticed the car.
    The men were in a blue-gray sedan, as nondescript as could be. Two clean-shaven, clean-living, clean-conscienced young men, and they were tailing him.
    They had Federal Agent printed on their foreheads.
    Potter’s heart thudded. “Damn,” he muttered in his low baritone. Furious, he tugged at a jowl and then wrapped the green paper tighter around the flowers as if anticipating a high-speed chase. When he found the street he sought, however, and made the turn, he was doing seven cautious miles per hour. His wife’s bouquet rolled against his ample thigh.
    No, he didn’t speed. His strategy was to decide that he was mistaken, that the car contained two businessmen on their way to sell computers or printing services and that it would turn off on its own route soon.
    And leave me in peace.
    But the car didn’t do any such thing. The men maintained an innocuous distance, traveling at the identical, irritatingly slow speed of Potter’s Ford.
    He pulled into the familiar driveway and continued a lengthy distance, then rolled to a stop. Potter climbed out of his car quickly, cradling the flowers to his chest and waddling up the walk—defiantly, he hoped, daring the agents to stop him here.
    How had they found him?
    He’d been so clever. Parking the car three blocks from Linden’s apartment. Asking her not to answer the phone and to leave her machine off. The fifty-one-year-old woman, who’d be a Gypsy if she could have rearranged her genes (so different from Marian, despite their common blood), excitedly accepted his instructions. She was used to the inexplicable ways of her cousin-in-law. She believed his manner was somewhat dangerous, if not sinister, and he could hardly dissuade her of that, for so it was.
    The agents parked their car behind Potter’s and climbed out. He heard their footsteps on the gravel behind him.
    They didn’t hurry; they could find him anywhere, and they knew it. He could never get away.
    I’m yours, you self-confident sons of bitches.
    “Mr. Potter.”
    No, no, go away! Not today. Today is special. It’s my wedding anniversary. Twenty-three years. When you’re as old as I am you’ll understand.
    Leave. Me. Alone.
    “Mr. Potter?”
    The young men were interchangeable. He ignored one and thus he ignored both.
    He walked over the lawn toward his wife. Marian, he thought, I’m sorry for this. I’ve brought trouble with me. I am sorry.
    “Leave me alone,” he whispered. And suddenly, as if they’d heard, both men stopped, these two somber men, in dark suits, with pale complexions. Potter knelt and laid the flowers on the grave. He began to peel back the green paper but he could still see the young men in the corner of his eye and he paused, squeezing his eyes closed and pressing his hands to his face.
    He wasn’t praying. Arthur Potter never prayed. He used to. Occasionally. Although his livelihood entitled him to some secret, personal superstitions he’d stopped praying thirteen years ago, the day Marian the living became Marian the dead, passing away in front of his joined fingertips as he happened to be in the middle of an elaborate negotiation with the God he had, all his life, more or less believed existed. The address he’d been sending his offers to turned out to be empty as a rusted can. He was neither surprised nor disillusioned. Still, he gave up praying.
    Now, eyes closed, he lifted those same fingertips and gave a backhanded wave, warding off the indistinguishable men.
    And federal agents, yes, but God-fearing agents perhaps (many of them were), they kept their distance.
    No prayers, but he spoke some words to his bride, lying in the same place where she had lain for these long years. His lips moved. He received responses only because he knew her mind as well as his own. But the presence of the men in the matching suits kept intruding. Finally he rose slowly and looked at the marble flower etched into the granite above her tombstone. He’d ordered a rose but the flower looked like a chrysanthemum. Perhaps the stonecarver had been Japanese.
    There was no point in delaying any longer.
    “Mr. Potter?”
    He sighed and turned away from the grave.
    “I’m Special Agent McGovern. This is Special Agent Crowley.”
    “Yes.”
    “Sorry to trouble you, sir. Mind if we have a word?”
    McGovern added, “Maybe we could step to the car.”
    “What do you want?”
    “The car? Please.” No one says “please” quite the way an FBI agent does.
    Potter