Shadowfires

trembling. Although a hollow coldness
remained at the core of her, she stopped shivering.
    After dressing in one of the few somber outfits she owned-a
charcoal-gray suit with a pale gray blouse, slightly too heavy for a
hot summer day-she called Attison Brothers, a firm of prestigious
morticians. Having ascertained that they could see her immediately,
she drove directly to their imposing colonial-style funeral home in
Yorba Linda.
    She had never made funeral arrangements before, and she had never
imagined that there would be anything amusing about the experience.
But when she sat down with Paul Attison in his softly lighted, darkly
paneled, plushly carpeted, uncannily quiet office and listened to him
call himself a “grief counselor,” she saw dark humor in the
situation. The atmosphere was so meticulously somber and so self-
consciously reverent that it was stagy. His proffered sympathy was
oily yet ponderous, relentless and calculated, but surprisingly she
found herself playing along with him, responding to his condolences
and platitudes with clichés of her own. She felt as if she were an
actor trapped in a bad play by an incompetent playwright, forced to
deliver her wooden lines of dialogue because it was less embarrassing
to persevere to the end of the third act than to stalk off the stage
in the middle of the performance. In addition to identifying himself
as a grief counselor, Attison referred to a casket as an “eternal
bower.” A suit of burial clothes, in which the corpse would be
dressed, was called “the final raiments.” Attison said “preparations
for preservation” instead of “embalming,” and “resting place” instead
of “grave.”
    Although the experience was riddled with macabre humor, Rachael
was not able to laugh even when she left the funeral home after two
and a half hours and was alone in her car again. Ordinarily she had a
special fondness for black humor, for laughter that mocked the grim,
dark aspects of life. Not today. It was neither grief nor any kind of
sadness that kept her in a gray and humorless mood. Nor worry about
widowhood. Nor shock. Nor the morbid recognition of
Death's lurking presence in even the sunniest day. For a while, as she tended to other details of the funeral, and later, at home once more, as she called Eric's
friends and business associates to convey the news, she could not
quite understand the cause of her unremitting solemnity.
    Then, late in the afternoon, she could no longer fool herself. She
knew that her mental state resulted from fear. She tried to deny what
was coming, tried not to think about it, and she had some success at
not thinking, but in her heart she knew. She knew.
    She went through the house, making sure that all the doors and
windows were locked. She closed the blinds and drapes.
At five-thirty, Rachael put the telephone on
the answering machine. Reporters had begun to call, wanting a few
words with the widow of the Great Man, and she had no patience
whatsoever for media types.
    The house was a bit too cool, so she reset the air conditioner.
But for the susurrant sound of cold air coming through the wall vents
and the occasional single ring the telephone made before the machine
answered it, the house was as silent as Paul Attison's gloom-shrouded office.
    Today, deep silence was intolerable; it gave her the creeps. She
switched on the stereo, tuned to an FM station playing easy-listening
music. For a moment, she stood before the big speakers, eyes closed,
swaying as she listened to Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are.” Then
she turned up the volume so the music could be heard throughout the
house.
    In the kitchen, she cut a small piece of semisweet dark chocolate
from a bar and put it on a white saucer. She opened a split of fine,
dry champagne. She took the chocolate, the champagne, and a glass
into the master bathroom.
    On the radio, Sinatra was singing “Days of Wine and Roses.”
    Rachael drew a tub of water as hot as she could tolerate, added a
drizzle of jasmine-scented oil, and undressed. Just as she was about
to settle in to soak, the pulse of fear which had been beating
quietly within her suddenly began to throb hard and fast. She tried
to calm herself by closing her eyes and breathing deeply, tried
telling herself that she was being childish, but nothing worked.
    Naked, she went into the bedroom and got the.32-caliber pistol
from the top drawer of the nightstand. She checked the