Organize Your Corpses by Mary Jane Maffini

Author:Mary Jane Maffini
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.

Ask a friend to help you with those really unpleasant or scary jobs.

11

Finding Mr. Kanalakis was like taking a trip back in time in more ways than one. After a lot of false turns, Jack and I finally bumped along the dirt track to a log cabin in a clearing. The cabin could have been straight from a history book except for the dusty Ford van parked near the front door. Mr. Kanalakis emerged from the cabin as we got out of the car and blinked in the bright light. He’d been fresh out of university with a master’s in fine arts and the ink barely dry on his teaching diploma the semester he’d taught us art at St. Jude’s. We’d never seen anyone like him. Not just because he’d been a hunk, which he had been. But also because he was the size of a truck, with more enthusiasm and fun than the rest of the staff squared. He’d boom with laughter and the light fixtures would shake. Keeping order hadn’t been any kind of problem, not with those hamlike hands. We’d called him Hercules. “Herc! Herc! Herc!” had been a favorite refrain. The kids had loved him, while he lasted. Which was less than six months.

Now his ponytail was greying and his hairline had crept back a couple of inches. He must have been carrying an extra sixty pounds. But his wicked black eyes hadn’t changed. This was still a man to command attention.

“Looks like you got me,” he said. He still had that hint of the South about him; I never could put my finger on his origins.

I had trouble making eye contact. “I needed to talk to you. I didn’t know how you’d feel about that if you knew it was me.”

He shrugged one massive shrug and headed into the log cabin. Jack and I followed him. Jack was trying not to sniff the air too obviously. Me too. Turpentine, for sure. But perhaps an underlay of cannabis, unless I was mistaken. The walls were covered with dark brooding canvases, oozing menace and testosterone. I found my eyes drawn to them. Each had at least one dramatic slash of red.

Jack seemed riveted by the interior of the cabin. “Hand-hewn logs?” he said.

“Yep.” Mr. Kanalakis didn’t offer us any hospitality, not coffee, not cookies, not hash brownies.

“You heat by wood?” Jack said.

“Heat pump and passive solar for electricity. I’m off grid here. Produce more than I need.”

“Wow,” Jack said.

I just hoped it didn’t mean that Jack now needed an off-grid, passive-solar bike shop in an upscale part of Woodbridge, because that was going to take some effort.

I said, “I just want you to know that I’ve always been sorry for my part in what happened.”

“You were just kids.”

“I wanted to tell the principal it wasn’t true. Pepper was with me that afternoon, but her father would have beaten her black-and-blue if he found out she’d played hooky.”

“Yep. He’d sure done that enough times.”

“She was so frightened.”

He nodded. “I figured it out.

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