At Ease with the Dead by Walter Satterthwait Page B

intended to return them to David Bedford, the man in charge of the dig at Canyon de Chelly.”
    â€œBut according to Daniel Begay,” I said, “Bedford and your father had an argument about your father taking the remains. Why would that be, if your father planned to bring them back?”
    â€œWell, never having met David Bedford, I wouldn’t know for certain. But I suspect there’s a very simple explanation. Bedford was an archaeologist, and a good one, I gather. No archaeologist wants to see his puzzle piece get hauled away, off somewhere where he can’t keep an eye on it. It might be damaged. Lost. Destroyed.” She sipped at her sherry. “And in fact the remains were lost.”
    â€œStolen when your father was killed.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI know it’s probably painful,” I said, “but do you think you can remember anything about his death?”
    She shook her head. “There’s no pain. Not now. Not for a long while. There was at the time, yes. It was I who found the body.”
    I sipped at my tea. “Do you remember anything about that day? What the circumstances were?”
    â€œOf course,” she said. “It was a Saturday morning. September the eighth, Nineteen twenty-five.” She pursed her lips slightly. “You know, I think I’d enjoy a cigarette. Lisa?”
    Lisa frowned. “The doctor said no.”
    â€œThe doctor is forever saying no. He sounds like the virgin in a melodrama. A cigarette, dear.”
    Lisa reached into the pocket of her vest, slipped out a packet of Marlboros and a Bic lighter. She crossed the room, handed them to her grandmother, then put her hands, arms akimbo, on her hips. “You know they’re no good for you in the long run.”
    Alice said, “In the long run, as Mr. Keynes once pointed out, we’re all dead.” She took a cigarette from the pack, put it in her mouth, snapped the lighter aflame, lighted the cigarette. She sucked in the smoke, held it for a moment, blew it slowly out. She smiled up at Lisa, then handed her the pack and the Bic.
    â€œYou’re an evil old woman,” Lisa said.
    â€œThank you, dear.” She turned to me. “September the eighth, Nineteen twenty-five.”
    â€œRight.” I watched Lisa Wright walk back to her chair, and I began to wish that I were five years younger.
    â€œI woke up at seven o’clock,” said Alice. Drily, dispassionately, taking an occasional puff from her Marlboro, she recounted the events of that day.
    Coming out into the hallway she had seen that the door to her mother’s room was still closed. The door to her father’s room was open—her parents slept separately—and she came downstairs thinking she’d find him at breakfast, in the kitchen.
    He wasn’t and the house was silent. She wandered back into his study and it was there she found him, sprawled face down across the floor, wearing the clothes he had worn the night before.
    â€œI thought at first he was asleep,” she said, taking a final drag on the cigarette, then carefully stubbing it out in the ashtray on the teakwood table. “At that age you’ve heard of death, certainly, but you don’t expect actually to meet it. And your own immortality extends itself to everyone close to you. Even when I saw the blood, I didn’t know, didn’t understand, what it was.”
    There had been, she said, quite a lot of blood, black and clotted, along the floor.
    She tried to wake up her father, discovered she couldn’t, then at last noticed the depression at the back of his skull. She ran upstairs to her mother’s room, woke her up. Her mother had come quickly downstairs, examined the body, and telephoned the police. They arrived, a plainclothes detective and three uniformed officers, soon after.
    â€œWhat did the police decide?” I asked her.
    â€œThat my father had walked in on a burglary and that