Secret Prey

next?’’
    ‘‘We go over and jack up the doctor.’’
    ‘‘You notice how I’m being the nice little housewife and sweetie pie? Get the coffee, girl-talk about hair, let it pass when you hint to the good sheriff that we’re up here for a little whoopee?’’
    ‘‘It’s making me nervous,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘The pressure’ll start to build. Sooner or later, you’ll explode.’’
    ‘‘That could happen,’’ she said.
    DR. STEPHEN LANDIS COULDN’T SEE THEM UNTIL THE end of his patient day, at four o’clock.
    ‘‘You can come right here to the clinic,’’ the nurse said. ‘‘Four o’clock sharp. He has some patient visits to make out in town, starting at four-thirty, so you’ll have about twenty minutes.’’
    ‘‘You mean, he actually goes out and visits people?’’ Marcy asked.
    ‘‘Of course.’’
    ‘‘Amazing.’’
    Back on the street, Lucas looked at his watch: an hour to kill. ‘‘Let’s go see the undertaker,’’ he said.
    THE UNDERTAKER WAS A ROLY-POLY YOUNG MAN INA plaid suit: he didn’t remember the case because he was too young. ‘‘Dad might remember, though,’’ he said. ‘‘He’s out in the garage . . .’’
    The senior undertaker was a pleasant fellow, dressed in cotton slacks and a V-necked wool sweater. He was in the back of the mortuary’s heated garage, hitting golf balls into a net off an Astroturf pad.
    ‘‘Yep, I remember Mr. Lamb,’’ he said, slipping his fiveiron back into his golf bag. ‘‘Actually, I don’t remember Mr. Lamb as well as I remember the daughter . . . the older one.’’
    ‘‘Audrey,’’ Sherrill said.
    ‘‘Don’t remember her name. Audrey could be right. I do remember that she handled all the arrangements. Her mother came along, of course, but it was Audrey who settled everything.’’
    ‘‘Cremation, I understand,’’ Lucas said.
    ‘‘Yes, it was. Quite a bit cheaper, you know. I applaud that, by the way. The family didn’t have a great deal of money, and with the breadwinner gone, they had to watch their nickels and dimes. The young woman marched right in the door, said we could forget about a big funeral, they didn’t have the money, and she wanted the body cremated. Period. No argument allowed.’’
    ‘‘Did she pick up the ashes?’’
    ‘‘Yup. In a cardboard box. She said they didn’t need an urn, they were planning to scatter them over the family farm.’’
    ‘‘Tough kid,’’ Lucas said.
    ‘‘That she was,’’ said the senior undertaker. ‘‘Never saw a tear from her, except once when the sheriff happened to come by while they were making the arrangements, and then she couldn’t stop bawling. That was the only time.’’ He took another iron out of his bag. ‘‘What do you know about the two-iron?’’
    ‘‘If only God can hit a one-iron, then it’d probably take a prophet to hit the two,’’ Sherrill said.
    The senior undertaker looked at her with interest. ‘‘You’re a golfer.’’
    ‘‘A little,’’ she said. ‘‘My husband was a two-handicap.’’
    ‘‘Was?’’
    ‘‘He died.’’
    ‘‘Ah. That will play hob with your handicap,’’ he said cheerfully. Then, ‘‘Do you think that young lady— Audrey?—do you think she might have killed her father?’’
    Lucas looked at Sherrill and then back at the senior undertaker. ‘‘Why would you ask?’’
    ‘‘Well, because you’re here, obviously. And because there was something very cold and unpleasant about that young girl. It crossed my mind when we were setting up the funeral arrangements that she cared less for her father than she might for a clod of dirt. When she came to pick up the ashes—and she drove herself, by the way, and she was too young to have a license, I’m sure—I watched her from the window when she went back to the car. She opened the car door and tossed the box in the backseat like you might toss an old rag. There was something in the way she did it. I thought at that very moment that the ashes might never make it to the family farm. That they might not make it further than the nearest ditch.’’
    ‘‘But she was bawling about it, you said.’’
    ‘‘Oh, and very conveniently, with the sheriff.’’ The senior undertaker shook his head. ‘‘You see a lot of very strange things in this business, but that has stuck in my mind as one of the strangest. No. Not strange. Frightening. I locked the doors for the next few weeks. I would dream that the little