The Cold Lamp

The last mourners left Front Street Funeral Home at a quarter past eight, stamping sleet off their boots on the porch mat and saying the things people said on porches in November: that Harold had looked like himself, that the flowers were nice, that it was a shame about the weather for Saturday. Mara held the door for each of them and agreed with all of it. Harold had looked like himself. That was the job. The weather was nobody's job, though people in Sable Harbor liked to hand it to the funeral home anyway, as if the business that put on the coffee could also do something about the lake.

When the lot was empty Mara turned off the porch light, collected the guest book from its stand, and counted the signatures out of habit. Sixty-one. Harold Vane had run the hardware store for forty years and loaned half the county a ladder at one time or another. Sixty-one was a good number for a Tuesday in sleet.

The chapel smelled of carnations and radiator dust. Mara straightened the rows of folding chairs, pinched a wilted lily out of the standing spray, and carried the leftover cookies into the office, where the desk held what it had held all week: the county's contribution to her life.

It was a three-ring binder, blue, swollen with forms. The clerk from the courthouse had driven it over on Monday afternoon and set it down on the blotter with the air of someone putting down a casserole dish that was too hot. "Coroner's manual," she had said. "Death certificate procedure, the inquest statute, the phone tree for the state lab. Your predecessor left notes in the back. Not many." Then, at the door, kindly: "Congratulations. Really. Nobody else filed."

Nobody else had filed. That was the whole story of the election, and Mara had heard it told a dozen ways since the first Tuesday of the month. The old coroner had retired to Arizona with his wife and his emphysema. The ballot line had sat empty through August. Somebody at the co-op had said, out loud, near the register, that the funeral director already did half the work, so why not, and by September the idea had gone around town like a cold. Mara had filed on the last day, mostly so the line wouldn't stay blank. Two thousand, one hundred and six people had voted for the only name printed there. A few hundred had written in Mickey Mouse.

The swearing-in had taken four minutes in the county clerk's office on Friday. Judge Aho had read the oath off an index card, Mara had repeated it with one hand on a Bible that belonged to the courthouse and smelled like the courthouse, and afterward the judge had shaken hands and said, "Most years you'll sign forty certificates for old folks who died in their beds. Now and then you'll get one that doesn't sit right. Those are the ones that make the job." Then he had gone to lunch. The certificate of election was still in its manila envelope on the filing cabinet, waiting for a frame Mara had not gotten around to buying.

Next to the binder sat a square white envelope that had not been there at lunch.

Mara slit it with the letter opener. Inside was a card with a loon on the front, and inside the card, in green felt-tip, in a neat hand that leaned backward as if it were bracing against a wind, a note:

Coroner — Best news this county's had in a while. You already know how to be kind to people on the worst day of their lives. The rest is paperwork, and paperwork can be learned. Call me any hour. — Ev

Ev Maki had been sheriff of Tamarack County for thirty-two years, which was most of Mara's life. He had retired two winters ago to a house on Pike Lake Road and a boat he rarely put in the water, and he still turned up at every visitation Front Street held, shook every hand, and ate two of whatever cookie was offered. People said his name the way they said the name of a good snowplow driver. Mara propped the card against the lamp, where the green ink caught the light.

The binder waited. The clock over the embalming-room door said eight-forty.

Mara pulled the chair in and opened the binder to the back, where the clerk had said the notes would be.

There were eleven pages, handwritten on yellow legal paper and three-hole-punched a little crooked. The old coroner's handwriting was small and square and had gotten shakier toward the end. Most of it was practical. State lab courier comes Tues/Thurs; call by 10 the day before. Dr. Nair in the regional office is good — don't waste her time, don't make her guess. Deputies will want you to sign fast. You don't have to. There was a list of phone numbers with three crossed out. There was a note about the county's two body bags, which were kept in the sheriff's garage and were, according to the note, both the wrong size, don't ask.

Near the bottom of the last page, in a slightly different pen, he had written: Manner of death is four words: natural, accident, suicide, homicide. Fifth one is "undetermined." Don't be ashamed to use it. Better a blank than a lie with a county seal on it.

Mara read that twice. It was, somehow, the most useful sentence in the binder.

The rest of the pages were the statute on inquests, photocopied from a book so old the margins had gone brown. A coroner could call one when the manner of a death was in real doubt: six citizens in the township hall, witnesses sworn, the coroner laying out what was known, the jury ruling on how a person had died and, if it came to that, at whose hand. The last inquest in Tamarack County, according to a penciled note in the margin, had been in 1987. Someone had drawn a small, tired star beside the date.

Mara closed the binder, and her left hand stayed flat on the cover for a moment, as if it might open again on its own.

Upstairs in the apartment over the funeral home, Mara set the county cell phone on the nightstand beside her own. It was a cheap black flip-model the clerk had also delivered, with a strip of masking tape on the back that said CORONER in marker. It had not rung once in the four days Mara had owned it.

Sleet ticked at the window. Out past the breakwall the lake was doing what it did in November, which was throw itself at the harbor in long gray sheets and pull back to try again. Mara lay awake for a while listening to it and thinking about the lighthouse out on Lindqvist Point, which had not been lit in thirty years but which everyone in the county still called the Cold Lamp, as if it might be warmed up again someday. Arne Lindqvist had bought the station from the government after they shut the light off and turned the keeper's quarters into a little inn. His cook made a whitefish chowder people drove forty miles for. Mara had eaten it twice, both times after funerals. Then she slept.

The county phone rang at 7:15.

Mara found it by feel, flipped it open, and said, "Front Street," before remembering that this was the other phone.

For a second there was only wind on the line, a big wind, the kind that came off open water. Then a woman's voice, low and very flat, the voice of someone who had already cried or who had decided not to.

"This is Joanie Bright. Out at the Cold Lamp." A breath. "I called the sheriff. Then I thought, you're the coroner now." Another breath, shorter. "It's Arne. At the bottom of the stairs."

Mara sat up. The window had gone the color of dishwater. Somewhere under the wind, faintly, came the sound of a screen door banging, over and over, on a hinge that nobody had latched.

"I'm coming," Mara said. "Don't move him. I'm coming now."