Under A Mask

I finally gave in. I just had to bring in the vase to replace the drooping flowers. I had watched them in anticipation for more than a week as they painted quite a contrast to the fresh tulips I had seen for the past year since I started working as a grave keeper at St. Catherine’s cemetery. This grave with the porcelain vase was in the upper right corner of the courtyard, one of thousands. Every Monday I would see the young man bring in fresh tulips to put in the vase by the tombstone, always three, always white. Now he hadn’t come in over two weeks and while I hated to break into an intimate rhythm between two people, drooping flowers at a grave create quite a nagging sense of abandonment.

I brought the vase into the office lounge, took out the flowers and started cleaning it. Oddly, while the inner sides were caked with dirt and leaves, the bottom was fairly clean. I was vigorously poking my bottle brush around when a bristle caught on the bottom. I tugged and heard a faint clink. Had I broken this beautiful vase? I shoved my hand down the neck and when I drew it out, it came with a fat wad of money. I stood there, vase, bottle brush, fat wad of money and a gaping mouth frozen in time. I closed the door and tried to steady my thoughts. Why had the man kept money in the vase? Was it stolen money? Was it intentionally hidden money? Was it a religious practice? I counted – twenty thousand dollars.

After catching my breath, I put the fresh flowers in, secured the money in my locker and returned the vase to the grave. I would keep the money safe for the young man lest someone else found it like I did.

Every day for the next two weeks, I looked for the man but he never came. I was growing uneasy and restless. Holding on to such a large sum of money brought up feelings of anxiety and I finally decided to track him down. I knew how he looked, his voice, his gait but I didn’t know his name or where he lived. I assumed his family name was likely the same as the person he visited but maybe not, nothing now seemed like it most likely should. I looked up Mr. Davidson’s record in the burial book and found that he had been buried three years ago. There was an address listed. With a million scenarios playing out in my mind, I mustered up enough courage to stash the cash deep into my saddle bag and find the house. The person who opened the door had not featured in any of the million scenarios I had imagined. She was a stout woman, a bit frazzled and not too pleased to be distracted by a stranger.

“Hi, my name is Bob. I am from St. Catherine’s cemetery. I wanted to inquire about the family of Mr. Davidson who died three years ago.”

“Mr. Davidson? Oh yes! Oh, his family? I have no idea. He used to live in this apartment and I was in the next one and we bought this one out after he died. I rarely saw anyone visit him and he never mentioned any family. In fact, us neighbors buried him and I don’t remember any relatives at the funeral. Why, is something wrong at the cemetery? I can’t really help his case anymore, you know. I did what I could by contributing to his funeral.”

It seemed to me that the woman spoke fast because over time she had come to the conclusion that speaking fast tended to make unpleasant situations pass quicker. I digested the information that was parted in less than 30 seconds but filled so much time and space, a person’s whole life in one breath. Completely unprepared to respond, I thanked her and made up an excuse for looking up Mr. Davidson. I couldn’t imagine who the young man might be if Mr. Davidson did not have close family. What a strange habit to visit a grave punctually every week and bring flowers if not a close family member. But how much even stranger to keep money stashed there.

Feeling more unsettled I made my way back to the cemetery office though it was my day off. I found Harold taking a break on his shift. Harold and I worked the same part of the cemetery on alternate days. Harold was usually the talkative one but that day I jumped right in uninvited, “This work of caring for someone’s life after death is probably one with the most questions and the least answers.”

“It sure does have its mystery. When I read the words on a tombstone, I try to imagine the person and I feel the longer I trim the grass around the grave the closer I get to understanding what the words really mean. Just recently, I was surprised when this young woman who used to come every week on Thursdays to replace flowers at a grave suddenly stopped and the last bunch went almost dead, and then two weeks ago I started seeing three fresh white tulips again like always. But now she has chosen one of my off days to visit and I never get to see her. Somehow the break in pattern threw me off quite a bit. Our lives get so subtly intertwined that…”

“Which grave, Harold?” I blurted out.

“You know the one in the top right corner of the courtyard with a porcelain vase and white tulips?”

I felt my mind, body and soul adopting three different notions of being. My mind was racing, my body felt conflicted between wanting to run both towards and away from this mystery. Mostly I felt my soul in a stupor.

“Did she ever say anything to you?” “Did she ever come with a man?”

Harold looked at me strangely as he answered my questions. “You have gone completely pale, Bob. What’s going on?”

I faked calm to no one’s belief and said “Nothing, I just know someone else who does a similar thing. A man who comes in on Mondays, your day off.”

With the information I could get from Harold, which was negligible, and having fended off his questions, I went home and tried to track down Mr. Davidson’s lineage online but to no avail. I scavenged the local news sites, not sure what I was looking for. What would be good search words for two people who on the surface seemed disconnected but were deeply connected by one shared activity of religiously visiting a grave, and who had just disappeared into thin air. I had briefly greeted the man once or twice and I had always had the impression that this was a private activity of his own. Harold being friendlier had spoken to the woman more often and she had seemed reserved to him and also given the vibe of solitude in her visits. The man was probably in his mid 30s while she at most of university age. I stared at the saddle bag with the twenty thousand dollars that I had brought home with me. It was an ominous object in my living room.

I turned back to my computer and searched the obituary section, the missing people section and the crime section. It was not inspiring to read all the heinous human actions and wonder if it could relate to the quiet man who I had seen every week for the past year. After scanning multiple stories, one made me pause.

“Man kills woman over blackmail”. The man, a teacher, had assaulted his student multiple times till she recorded one interaction and threatened to expose him unless he paid for her silence. The man murdered her when the demands grew bigger and was now in police custody. They had found a little black book in his house with dates and dollar amounts listed. The last entry was for five Mondays ago with an amount of twenty thousand dollars.

I snatched my own little black book out of my bag and looked up the date. I had a habit of keeping a record of my days’ events in it. ‘Cleared the weeds’, ‘dug up two graves’, ‘took intakes of upcoming funerals’, ‘passed man with tulips and tried to chat but he seemed to be in a hurry’ etc. I scanned through all the future dates and I had not mentioned him again. My memory also recalled last seeing him that Monday. And then there had been exactly twenty thousand dollars in the vase.

I snatched my bag and took a cab to the police station. My heart was in my throat. Did it make sense that the two events could be related? Was it possible that it was just a huge coincidence? If they were the same people, I resented having unknowingly been brought into their mess. I reached the police station and stood there trying to control my feelings of dread, fear, anger and a whole slew of emotions that were overwhelming me. Something was stopping me from going in, I felt something was incomplete and I couldn’t understand it. I took the cab back to the cemetery. The evening shift had started that neither I nor Harold ever worked. I decided to walk around the whole cemetery beyond just the section we both worked.

I counted one, two, three…. up to 11 porcelain vases with white tulips. In the sections of the cemetery that I rarely paid attention to, there were 10 more vases that looked like the one I had been obsessing over. I wrote down the graves they were at in my little black notebook but I didn’t have the courage to check the bottoms. I barely had the courage to finish my walk around the cemetery, too afraid to grasp what I had just stumbled upon.

This time I didn’t hesitate to enter the police station. They first heard me in humor. Porcelain vases are not so uncommon at graves. But then twenty thousand dollars at the bottom of one was squarely very uncommon. They brought in the vases and sure enough they all had false bottoms, some with money, some empty. They asked me to identify the man held in prison for the murder and, though I still hoped otherwise, it was the quiet young man I had seen every week for the past one year. I felt betrayed.

Over the next few months, the police tracked down a large blackmail facilitating operation. They carried out the whole process of extorting money from the victim without the client ever falling under any suspicion. The money was exchanged through vases at graves that nobody visited. The man and the girl had the most frequent exchange arrangement because he couldn’t afford big sums together. When she demanded a sum as large as twenty thousand dollars, he scraped it up somehow but it put him over the edge and he decided to end his suffering. I had been watching a criminal. A man who had been ruined by the deviousness of his own victim. Not only was I coming to terms with having personally witnessed so much evil under a mask of the rawest human emotions, grief and remembrance, but also on a scale of a giant coldblooded racquet. I engaged with the police as much as they needed but I wanted distance to reduce the bitter taste in my mouth.

At the end of the investigation, they called me in to say that they had successfully busted the whole operation that spanned multiple avenues beyond St. Catherine’s. The city wanted to thank me with a reward of twenty thousand dollars.

I keep it as emergency money stashed in a vase at the bottom of my closet.