Soames Funeral Home

Soames Funeral Home is both the practical center of Elizabeth Wharton’s funeral arrangements and the setting Brady Hartsfield chooses for an attempted attack on K. William Hodges. The contrast between the funeral’s ordinary work—transporting, viewing, and cremating the dead—and Brady’s calculation of where mourners will gather makes the building’s rear approach as consequential as its parlor.## Funeral arrangements and the family’s wishes After Elizabeth Wharton dies, K. William Hodges contacts Soames Funeral Home to coordinate the release of her body, making sure the hospital is ready to hand it over when the hearse arrives. The funeral home has handled another death familiar to him: Olivia Trelawney’s rites. That connection places Elizabeth’s arrangements within the wider aftermath of the Mercedes case, even as Hodges and Janey Patterson divide the immediate work of death: he deals with the funeral home, while Janey completes an obituary and calls her mother’s remaining friends.

Elizabeth’s body is taken to Soames Funeral Home in the city for cremation on Wednesday afternoon. The arrangements include a viewing on Tuesday and a brief, nondenominational service on Wednesday morning. Janey’s uncle objects that cremation is barbaric, but she answers that it was her mother’s wish. The funeral home is therefore not merely a place selected to receive the dead; it is where Elizabeth’s stated choice must be carried out amid the family’s competing ideas about how a death should be marked.## The Eternal Rest parlor At quarter to ten, Hodges and Janey enter the funeral home’s Eternal Rest parlor. Because Janey has insisted on hurrying, they are the first arrivals. The coffin is open at the top and covered below with a blue silk swag. Elizabeth wears a white dress patterned with blue florets that match the fabric; her eyes are closed, and her cheeks are rosy. The carefully composed presentation offers the visual conventions of a viewing, but it does not make the encounter easier for her daughter.

Janey moves quickly down the aisle between two rows of folding chairs, looks briefly at her mother, then hurries back with trembling lips. She privately rejects the open coffin as a pagan rite and says Elizabeth looks like a stuffed exhibit rather than her mother. The scene sets the funeral home’s formal display against the intimate reality of bereavement: the parlor arranges a body for public viewing, while Janey experiences that arrangement as estranging. Hodges promises to attend both the viewing and the memorial service, partly to support Janey and partly because he is still investigating the Mercedes case.## A funeral becomes an opportunity Brady plans to exploit the memorial service’s schedule. He rigs a disposable cell phone to a detonator powered by double-A batteries and places it in a shoebox of homemade explosive. He intends to leave the device in Hodges’s Toyota behind Soames Funeral Home at ten-twenty the next morning, when he expects the mourners to be inside, occupied with the service. His proposed explanation for being in the parking lot is that he thought he could cut through to a nearby street and bus stop; he has checked the route on MapQuest.

Brady’s plan depends on treating the funeral home as a predictable gathering place. He expects Hodges to be with Janey and assumes the mourners will be inside, leaving the car accessible outside. He means to use Thing Two to unlock the Toyota, place the shoebox behind the driver’s seat, lock the car again, and retreat to his own vehicle. He plans to wait until Hodges has driven to the next intersection, where Brady expects to be relatively safe from the blast. The funeral’s timetable and the parked car become parts of one planned sequence, with the attack designed to follow the service rather than interrupt it.## The approach to the rear drive At five past ten, Brady parks around the corner and feeds the meter until its green maximum-time flag appears. He takes a reusable Kroger carry-bag from the back seat; Thing Two rests inside on top of the Mephisto shoebox. He walks briskly past the funeral home, presenting himself as an ordinary person on a morning errand. Although the doors are shut and he sees no one outside, he knows Hodges might be elsewhere in the building, watching for suspicious visitors.

Brady turns back and enters the funeral-home drive without hesitation. Faint classical music reaches him, and he sees Hodges’s Toyota parked against the rear fence, facing outward for a quick departure after the gathering. The car confirms the opportunity Brady has been seeking, but the building’s rear approach also places the attempt within reach of the funeral’s actual proceedings: the mourners are inside, while the intended victim’s vehicle stands outside. Soames Funeral Home thus connects private grief to public danger not through any change in its funeral function, but through Brady’s decision to use its schedule, parking area, and gathering of mourners as cover for violence.