Chapter 7
Gerald recovered first, and what he did in the next ten seconds told Rosa everything she still needed to know.
He did not rush to the coffin. He did not call for help. He crossed the space between them and grabbed for the broken lid itself, both hands closing over the splintered wood as though he meant to force it shut again, to seal whatever was tapping back inside the dark before anyone else could see.
"She's hysterical," he said, loudly, to the room, to Camille, to Preston Wall standing frozen by the third row. "The maid is having some kind of breakdown, someone call security—"
"There's someone knocking!" Rosa shouted, and shoved his hands away from the lid with a strength that surprised her. "You can hear it, everyone can hear it, why are you trying to close it?"
That question landed in the room like a second axe blow. Rosa watched it land — watched Camille's face change, watched a young funeral attendant near the door freeze mid-step, watched even Preston Wall's careful lawyer's composure crack, just slightly, around the eyes.
"Somebody get an ambulance," Camille said, her voice shaking but rising, cutting through her brother-in-law's protests for the first time in three days. "Now. Gerald, get away from that coffin."
"Camille, be reasonable, the woman clearly needs medical attention herself, this is exactly the kind of—"
"I heard it too," said a voice from the third row — an older man Rosa didn't recognize, on his feet now, phone already at his ear calling emergency services despite the funeral home's hushed decorum falling to pieces around him. "I heard the tapping. I'm not imagining that."
Dr. Fenwick had gone the color of the coffin itself, backing slowly toward the side door he'd positioned himself near from the moment the service began, and it was that retreat, more than anything else, that finally seemed to convince the room.
"Simon," Camille said, turning on him with sudden, terrible clarity. "You signed the death certificate. You said her heart just stopped. If she's in there knocking on wood, what exactly did you sign your name to?"
Fenwick didn't answer. He reached the side door and pushed through it into the parking lot, and two mourners went after him — not to comfort him, Rosa understood, but to make sure he didn't get far.
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Gerald made one more attempt, lunging past Rosa toward the coffin's remaining intact half, and this time it was not Rosa who stopped him but three of the funeral home's own attendants, drawn by the chaos, who caught his arms and pulled him bodily backward while he shouted something about liability and family privacy that nobody in that room was interested in hearing anymore.
Rosa turned back to the coffin, hands still bleeding faintly from splinters, and began, with trembling fingers, to pull away the remaining broken pieces of the lid, working toward whatever was still, impossibly, tapping in the dark below.
