"Lucky you took along Toby, the celebrated feline flatfoot. Love, Pat," he wired back three days later, by which time Mrs. Claribel Fabian Lake had been stowed in the Fabian vault in the Elm Hill cemetery.
For a while the body had made news. There had been a private funeral, for one thing, the first ever held in Elm Hill. And before that people talked because the body had been taken to St. Louis for embalming, and when it was brought back the coffin stood in the parlor under a blanket of orchids and gardenias, and, so far as anyone heard, was not opened. Ernest went to some trouble to explain to people that his cousin had a horror of being looked at after death. Which was all right, except that she had done plenty of looking herself, having been a great one to go to funerals, and people didn't like it. Funerals are rather communal in Elm Hill. To be told not to send flowers and that the funeral would be private made us feel snubbed.
(from The Golden Box, by Frances Crane)
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