Doris Lane

“Don’t worry about a thing. We take care of everything here at Happy Valley,” Marguerite Simonson assured the client. “All you will have to do, Mrs. Adamson, is come for visits between 10 and 4.”

“And flowers?”

“Why send them? We will plant Alfred’s little park beautifully and you will have a fine bench to sit on when you come. Remember, Mrs. Adamson, this is all coming from you, including the flowers we will plant.”

“Yes, of course, I see. Well, poor old Alfred’s not gone yet. When the time comes?”

“Here is my card again, Mrs. Adamson. Just phone us and we will come for Alfred. We take care of all concerns. The graveside ceremony, everything.”

“May I see that photo again, please?”

It was an 8×10 in a wide shot from slightly above and showing the hills in the distance. Sandy tree-lined roads traversed the long valley. The lots were the size possibly of the footprint of a small one-car garage, each lot encircled by wrought iron fencing. The many roads crisscrossed the large area, passed the lots, and ended in parking fields for visitors’ cars. The parking lots were tidily laid out beyond an eight-foot ivy-covered wall that enclosed the pet cemetery, which the Simonsons called the “Rest Area.”

In the center of each lot was a small structure made of wood and the size of a large doll’s house. There were windows and a front door and on the roof an ornamental pergola. The structures were similar in each lot, but painted different colors, trimmed in various ornamental detail, some lacy border, a touch of gee-gaw, a tiny front porch, perhaps a stained glass window. A small lawn surrounding each house was planted with flowers and shrubbery. At the front and rear of the lots were stone patios, four feet by seven feet, over which sat roomy wood benches for the contemplative comfort of the bereaved.

“Here,” Marguerite pointed, “you can just see it. On the plaque in the gate it will say ‘Alfred’s House – of the Adamson Family,’ with the date of his passing.”

“Lovely,” Mrs. Adamson said. “It’s just right. Oh, I know Alfred is a dog, Miss Simonson, and not a person, yet he’s brought such happiness to my family.”

“Of course,” Marguerite said. “Some people wouldn’t understand such feelings, but here at Happy Valley, we do.”

“I understand this was your family’s estate, Miss Simonson. You’ve done lovely work on the house, everyone says. Just beautiful.” Mrs. Adamson was too polite to say she had been inside the house once during a forced sale of Simonson possessions.

“Yes, our great-grandfather built the house,” Marguerite told her. “The Rest Area was the farmland then, of course.”

“Simonson’s Milk was delivered to our porch every morning,” Mrs. Adamson beamed, as if this shared past was important to Marguerite.

Marguerite smiled warmly, all the while wondering how many times she had to hear that sentence in the course of her work. When Mrs. Adamson was finally gone, Marguerite sat at the mahogany desk that had belonged to her great-grandfather, Arthur Simonson. She lit a cigarette and looked out the window at the sky and the hills that surrounded Happy Valley. She was only glad she was high up enough she didn’t have to look at the Rest Area itself unless she stood there at the window and purposely looked down. If she stared at the hillsides long enough, she sometimes saw shapes of cows grazing, cows long gone from Happy Valley.

The room she used as her office was Arthur Simonson’s old library, his books sold off during the Great Depression. The shelves now held models of Happy Valley pet houses; over 200 designs culled from 19th and early 20th century pattern books. There was room for 2000 gravesites at Happy Valley and it was important there be variety in the look of the houses. Her books and her brother’s were kept in his study, where they read together, so the shelves in here could be used to display little coffins and pet houses.

The families paid well in annual increments for the upkeep–that is, until the client herself died. Then the heirs generally stopped paying, unless there was a specific fund established by a will. Once the maintenance payments stopped coming, well, the property reverted to Happy Valley and Marguerite sold it all over again for the resting in peace of another dog or cat. Many pet graves, unbeknownst to their owners, held a good half-dozen skeletons of perfect strangers no longer identified on the plaque in the gate.

She made a note to Hobbs ordering Model 73 for the Adamson plot. Hobbs kept an inventory of two houses of each design. With one of Model 73 reserved, he would start building a replacement. The Hobbs family used to be dairy farmers for the Simonsons and still lived and worked in the same outbuildings at the other end of the Rest Area, which placed them about a mile away.

There was always, in every generation, a Hobbs trained as a carpenter. The elder Mr. Hobbs had a son and grandson working with him on the carpentry. Other Hobbses did mortuary work and burials, gardening, and odd work. All the Simonson coffins that lay in the burying ground on Happy Valley Hill, overlooking the pet cemetery, were Hobbs-made coffins, including Arthur Simonson’s. The Hobbses still built coffins for the Simonsons, just more of them and smaller, and, of course, they built the miniature houses from the pattern books.

Marguerite examined the portrait of Arthur Simonson that hung over the marble mantel. She wondered what her great-grandfather would think of the family business today. The dairy had never interested Arthur and it had gone on more or less without him. He made himself richer than his farmer ancestors ever dreamed in stocks and bonds. He moved his family out of the stone farmhouse and into this Queen Anne mansion he had built on a hillside at the other end of the valley from the dairy. He educated his sons at Yale and married off his daughters to stockbrokers. The Great Depression leveled them all.

It was his own wife who started the pet cemetery once Arthur had lost his fortune and turned to drink. Amelia Van Dam Simonson had been animal-crazy and long active in the local SPCA. Penniless except for a small income from the dairy, most of which was needed to support the farm, she had turned to her humane society connections to earn a living for her children and to pay for Arthur’s liquor bill. She finagled a contract from the society to bury deceased animals from their kennels and then another contract from the county to do the same for animals found dead along the county roads and run over by trains. Nothing fancy, just a plain cross over a small grave each time, but a modest living for her family; and the Hobbses, too, who performed the burials, when they weren’t milking cows and bottling the milk in the failing Simonson’s Milk plant on the highway.

Amelia and Arthur had a son named Arthur 2, who returned home once his wife died. Arthur 2 had a son named Arthur 3, who was Marguerite’s father. Arthurs 2 and 3 managed to expand the dairy business and restored to some extent the family fortunes, only to be undone by government policies. It was in the 1980s the cows left Happy Valley for good, fortunately accompanied by a fat check from Uncle Sam. Arthur 3 was not consoled by the money and wept for the cows that were missing from the hillsides. He took far less time to drink himself to death than had Arthur Simonson, the first.

Marguerite and her brother, Arthur 4, weren’t even school age when their father died. Before the funds came from the government, Marguerite’s mother was forced to sell the bottling plant on the highway, which today stood rusting after several owners and businesses failed there. It had made no sense to keep it, anyway, since dairy farming was now illegal in this part of New York State.

When Arthur 3 died, his wife, Mary Simonson Simonson, a distant cousin, was in for a surprise. While able to sell the bottling plant, which was in her husband’s name, the dairy itself was in the name of Amelia Van Dam Simonson, who was very much alive on the third floor of the Queen Anne house her husband had built with his riches. The old woman refused to sell the farmland just as she refused to turn over the government money. Mary Simonson Simonson was furious with Amelia and took herself off to Saratoga Springs to live, leaving Marguerite and Arthur 4 behind until she found a new father for them.

As it turned out, Mary’s new husband never wanted children and so they stayed where they were, rattling around in the 27-room mansion with their ancient great-grandmother at the top. Through thick and thin, some Hobbs women worked as house servants for the Simonsons, and they essentially raised Marguerite and Arthur 4. Mary sent support every month, the children were cared for and educated, but they never saw their mother again.

She had all her faculties and so retained control over the family’s finances. With the dairy business gone for good and expecting any time that Mary would come for her children, Amelia decided to spend the government money on improvements to the pet cemetery. She hired a landscape architect who laid out the ground to her specifications: Each roomy lot encircled by wrought iron fencing forged in the old blacksmith shop by a Hobbs, of course, and bordering a sandy, but tree-lined road, the whole surrounded by a concrete wall that eventually would be covered in ivy. The family no longer had county or SPCA contracts to bury animals, so Amelia would have Arthur 4 educated for the insurance business, specializing in life insurance for pets complete with burial in the lovely Happy Valley. The houses from the pattern books had been young Marguerite’s idea.

Amelia’s dream project took every cent she had and her insistence on the best materials and design work, including miles of wrought iron fencing, not to mention ceremonials for the pet burials, meant the cemetery barely broke even. The Hobbses grew vegetables, raised chickens, fished and hunted. Marguerite and Arthur 4 were allowed to trail along on the hunting trips with the Hobbses, so both became crack shots, a skill that would serve them well in the future. Meanwhile, nobody starved, but every other expense had to be met by the support payments to the children, which, once Mary died, continued to be sent by her second husband.

The great house suffered disrepair, with the second floor closed off entirely. There was talk about selling it and moving the family into the old Simonson homestead, but it would have meant turning out some of the Hobbses, and Amelia wouldn’t hear of it. Marguerite and Arthur 4 were moved up to rooms on the third floor. On the first floor, only the kitchen and dining room were used and run by one of the Mrs. Hobbs.

One by one rooms were emptied as heavy furniture, draperies, and art were sold off to meet expenses. Only Arthur Simonson’s library was left undisturbed and remained as a tribute to the family’s prosperous past. Sadly, the books were long gone since he had sold them himself when he first went broke. When Amelia finally died, Arthur 4 was away at Yale and Marguerite was left in charge.

Marguerite looked around her great-grandfather’s library, remembering as a child she would sneak in here in the warm seasons and play house beneath the white dust covers that ghosted the room to protect the only family furniture that remained. She and Arthur 4 would hold tea parties and pretend they were under a garden tent. Looking up at the carved ceiling, she thought of the streamers of peeling paint that once hung from it adding much to the spookiness of her childhood playroom. But all the refurbishment of her family home her new wealth could accomplish could not replace what was gone. Oh, the house had been completely refurnished, of course, but here in this room was the only real stuff, Marguerite felt.

It was almost 5:30 and the sun was setting behind Happy Valley Hill. Marguerite went to the drinks table and placed a bottle of bourbon and two crystal glasses on a silver tray for herself and Arthur 4. Her brother, Marguerite was relieved to know, had not inherited the alcoholism that plagued the men of the Simonson family. But he had not been tested, as yet, since first Amelia and then Marguerite had seen to it the family business was sound. It was a marvel, people thought, how the two women had brought the family at the end of the dairy industry into prosperity through pet burials.

Marguerite knew better, but she let the world think what it would. She never socialized, nor did Arthur 4. They were so close in age they had even been in the same classes at the local schools. They were separated only when he was away at college. When he graduated, Marguerite presented him with her ideas for the family business. Arthur 4 liked the business plan, having already developed important contacts through his Yale classmates. He took it on himself to get the agreement to the plan of the elder Mr. Hobbs. Once the necessary excavation and masonry work was done, the pet cemetery would maintain the place and the rest would be clear profit.

Neither wanted to marry or introduce strangers into their home on a social basis. They preferred to spend their time together. Knowing they were the last of their line, Marguerite and Arthur 4 established education funds for the younger Hobbses since there was no future for that loyal family with the Simonsons. There was so much money coming in now they could afford to be generous, but both acknowledged they were buying silence, as well.

Marguerite and Arthur 4 lived comfortably. They had gradually brought the house back to its original shape as profits rapidly outpaced expenses. They ate and drank and dressed well, but traveled only on business.

“Where is it,” she asked as they settled over their drinks. Arthur 4 had spent the day in New York settling a last minute contract.

“Just in Albany, no need to spend the night.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Marguerite said. “I hate to be away overnight.”

“I could do it,” Arthur 4 assured her.

“Oh, no, you did the last one.”

“I feel strangely about this one. I voted for him.”

“This is business, Arthur 4, not politics. It’s just as well I go and do it.”

“Hobbs is ready, I’m sure,” he said.

Brother and sister took their drinks and stepped out onto the stone balcony that overlooked the pet cemetery. In the distance, through a telescope that had belonged to Arthur 2 and had somehow escaped sale, they saw the rear gate open for a truck that took one of the sandy roads to the Adamson lot. Two men got out of the truck carrying tools. The men entered the lot, left the tools on the ground, and moved the bench out of the way. Pressing a lever at either end of the stone patio, they raised the entire pavement off to the side, showing the stonework to be all of a piece, a false ceiling of sorts to an 18 foot excavation now holding four human bodies and being readied to receive another.

The men went back to the truck for heavy-gauge black plastic and laid it along the dirt at the bottom. When the deceased arrived, they would lay in the body, wrapped in the plastic and well-taped, cover it with dirt from the back of the truck, and close up the hole with the stone patio floor. They would replace the bench and Mrs. Adamson would never be the wiser as she visited poor old Alfred at rest beneath his stylish pet house.

The hearse needed its headlights on as it traveled alongside the cemetery wall to the Simonson house. Darkness had fallen quickly. The hearse stood waiting outside while Marguerite finished her drink. She would drive her own car and the Hobbses would follow.

“I’ll be home in time for dinner,” she told Arthur 4, as she screwed the silencer onto her gun and placed it in her soft leather shoulder bag. Outside they said good evening to the Hobbses and Albert 4 saw his sister to her car.

“Here’s the map, although you know the hotel. We’ve had dinner there, oysters, I think. The fundraiser is ending early, but the subject will be detained for a half hour or so, and will be alone when he comes out to the parking lot. You’ve got the photo of the license plate?”

“Yes, I’ve got it,” Marguerite said.

True to her word, she was back in time for dinner. The subject, a New York State assemblyman, would be embalmed and buried in the Adamson lot and the bench back in place by daybreak. Marguerite and Arthur 4 had an after dinner drink in his study and he phoned the client to report the work was done, the contract fulfilled.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” he said into the phone. “We take care of everything here at Happy Valley.”