Penny Black by Susan Moody

Author:Susan Moody [Moody, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Women Sleuths
ISBN: 9781911266006
Google: j3iFjwEACAAJ
Amazon: 1911266004
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2016-02-16T08:00:00+00:00

11

BLUE-STRIPED canopy on frail white poles fluttered over the hole in the ground which waited to consume Marfa's flower-covered coffin. People stood around it. People in black. People in tears. People in hats and solemn ties. Senator George P. Lund, his handsome Viking head held in an attitude of stiff pain, had his arm round his wife's shoulders. Relatives were grouped nearby, staring alternately at the bereaved parents and the grave. Further back, a host of men with slim-legged women had gathered, acting famous in investment-banker suits and twenty-five-dollar hair-cuts. All of them looked as though they had been featured in Time magazine or Vogue. There were a lot of girls of Marfa's age, their faces appalled, and some young men, shaking their shoulders inside tweed sports jackets as though they didn't fit properly. It was raining.

Frank Bernard was not there. Nor Glory Davidson. Nicole Delage was, standing at the side of a man who looked like General de Gaulle without the ears. He had the troubled air of someone expecting the worst. He stood with his hands held forward, as though ready to catch his wife if, overcome by grief, she should fall fainting into the mud. Penny saw Pixie Casaubon too, in a green suede windbreaker. As a concession to the solemnity of the occasion, he wore a black scarf tied jauntily under one ear. Susie Lund stood at her mother's side. Her blonde hair, so like Marfa's, was scraped back over her ears and hidden under a black velvet beret. She seemed nervous and uneasy, particularly when her father tried to pull her forward to stand on the very edge of the grave. Behind her, a young man stood staring at the ground. His face was tanned, his hair sun-bleached. He was weeping. Penny stood a little apart, sharing an umbrella with Aaron Kimbell. She felt like someone from the Rent-A-Coon people. If George P. Lund recognized either of them, he gave no sign of it. They were too far away to hear much of what the white billowing clergyman said as he murmured over a book then stooped to pick up a handful of earth and drop it onto the coffin while the mortician's men lowered it slowly into the ground. Rain splashed through the trees. Rain drummed on the headstones.

The mourners began to drift away towards a fleet of waiting limousines. Choosing her moment, Penny moved forward and waited until the Senator was soberly shaking the hand of a colleague, then murmured her condolences to Marfa's mother. Mrs. Lund had always been pale and bloodless, as though the life had been drained out of her by her children and her husband. Beside George's ruddy good health, Marfa's beauty, she had seemed sickly and aetiolated. Now, behind her veil, she might have been in a trance. "Yes," she said on a sighing breath. "Yes. Yes." Penny guessed she was doped with sedatives.

Susie followed Penny as she walked back to Kimbell's side. Her father called something but she ignored him.

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