Malcolm sat back. “Maggie… Mom. This is crazy.”
Her eyes widened, and she focused on him, keenly alert for the last time in her life. Truly seeing him for what would be the last time. “This isn’t some whim. It’s important in a way most folks couldn’t imagine. You’ve gotta be quick, and careful, and ready to fight. There are people who’ll try to stop you.”
Malcolm thought of the raven, out beneath the willow tree.
“People… andthings,” she rasped.
He’d had enough. “Okay, what in God’s name does that mean?”
Her gray pallor had blanched nearly to white. “Nothing godly, son. Not this trip.”
“Maggie—”
She shushed him. Her body and voice were so weak now that it came out like a tiny whistle. “Ring up Paxson when I’m…”
Paxson Keates. The old man who owned the funeral parlor on Church Street. Malcolm had no idea his mother even knew Paxson Keates, but she had always been a bottomless well of secrets, and now they were spilling out.
“I’ll call him,” Malcolm vowed. “What else?”
But there was nothing else. She hadn’t left her mortal shell quite yet, though her eyes were closed. These might not have been her last words, but the supply was running low.
Malcolm felt a rising bitterness toward his siblings. Jennie and Elias should have been here with him. With their mother. It had been over a year since either of them had crossed the threshold. He understood—she made them all feel both loved and discarded, sometimes in the same breath.
“Ah, Maggie,” he whispered, “what am I going to do without you?”
He sat with her for another quarter hour, listening to the rasping of her breath, before he allowed his thoughts to return to her final request. Maine, of all places, and in two days? She insisted it wasn’t simply a whim, that it was important in some larger sense, but Maggie was a narcissist, which meant anything having to do with herself always seemed important to her. For Malcolm, it felt like some kind of morbid prank.
Or it would have, if not for the other strange things that had happened over the course of his life as the son of Maggie Wise. Not the least of which was the tall man in the raven mask who even now stood across the street, waiting for his mother to die.
You don’t have to be here for what comes next, the raven had said.
But that wasn’t true. Jennie and Elias didn’t care enough to be at their mother’s bedside, which left it to him to fulfill her final wish, no matter how crazy it seemed. Because even if he sometimes hated her, he loved her, too. And because if he let himself accept the ominous tone in her voice when she insisted on the importance of this task, it scared him a little.
Malcolm would bury Maggie in Shediak. If the man in the mask tried to interfere, he would show that son of a bitch the error of his ways. He had fought for his life along the Nakdong River and made it home with just a few scars. One asshole in a Halloween mask wasn’t going to give him much trouble.
4
The traveling case lay open on top of Malcolm’s bed. He stood beside his bureau, staring at the open drawers. What would he wear to bury his mother? In the next room, Maggie’s heart continued to beat, and he fought the urge to go in there and try to wake her—she would have an opinion about proper mourning clothes. If there was one thing Maggie never lacked, it was opinions.
Those days are over, he thought. Gone would be the pressure of being Maggie Wise’s son, the expectations she had placed upon all her children. The army had given Malcolm a temporary respite, but of the three of them, he was the one still here. The one who could live up to Maggie’s standards, or so he told himself.
He laughed softly at the idea that going to war in Korea had been easier than being home in Elkhart. The smile remained on his face as he slid a pair of folded shirts from a drawer.
Muffled music came through the wall from Maggie’s bedroom. Malcolm hadn’t wanted to leave her alone, but she’d waved him wordlessly away—she wanted him to get ready to travel. Maggie had often said music was the only company she ever needed, and the velvety voice drifting from the next room belonged to Billie Holiday. “I’ll Be Seeing You” was a haunting tune, full of longing and regret. A number of crooners had recorded it, including Sinatra and Bing Crosby, but the Billie Holiday version was Maggie’s favorite.
His mother lay dying, listening to her favorite song, and just across the road, a stranger wanted Malcolm to abandon her.
Not a chance in hell.
The curtains billowed. When the gust deflated, he lay the folded shirts on top of other clothes he’d placed in his traveling case and went to the window. He had no view of the street from here, but he suspected the man he thought of asthe ravenremained there, watching.
He surprised himself by not caring. His mother had set him a task and he meant to fulfill it. Whatever this guy wanted, he wasn’t going to get it. Maggie Wise would be dead and unable to pay her debts.
Debts. Shit.
They’d discussed the idea that the raven might be a bill collector, but those guys weren’t out knocking on doors in the predawn hours unless they were leg breakers for some loan shark, and nobody in this house would have gotten involved with people like that. Distracted by grief, he hadn’t considered that there were other members of the family.
Goddamn Elias.Malcolm sniffed derisively.That must be it.
