Bodies and Sole (13 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

“I wonder if you could throw together a little something for
Cyril.”

Moira had been about to refuse. She was a cleaner, not a cook. But then Vera spoke the magic words.

“Lime Jello.”

Vera opened a cupboard door, and stacked inside it were dozens of boxes of lime Jello.

“He loves lime Jello.”

So did Moira.

She hardly ever ate it as a child, not because it was pricey or unhealthy. It was loaded with sugar, but no one worried about sugar then.

No, Moira's mother was mean, and very mean about anything that gave her husband and children pleasure. Disappointed in life, she wanted to be sure that they were disappointed, too.

Lime Jello.

Moira gazed up at the boxes of her favourite childhood treat. She lifted an arm and touched them delicately with her fingertips.

Vera nearly slammed Moira's fingers in the cupboard door when she closed it.

“Yes, well, I'd like you to make it for him. Keep a constant supply going. I can't keep up with it.”

It was as if she'd given Moira a gift. She made the first batch immediately, using a clear glass bowl, the better to see the beautiful colour of the jelly. The powder was white with a green tinge, bursting into emerald when she poured the boiling water onto it, and stirred it around.

There was hardly any room in the fridge for the Jello. It was bursting with bottled water. Vera was constantly “hydrating.” Moira was always having to pick up the plastic bottles around the house and recycle them. She cleared a space for the bowl of Jello and popped it in.

She came to check on it several times while she was cleaning. As it began to gel, it had a sloppy texture. After an hour or so, it had fully hardened, and she spooned some into a bowl, smiling as it jiggled into place.

And then she ate it. Took another bowlful. Wolfed that down. And another. And another. Until, finally, she was spooning it straight out of the big bowl into her mouth.

She ate it all.

When she saw what she had done, she was horrified. She looked around her as if someone might have been watching. But no, Vera was napping. She was a sound sleeper, Moira knew, and exact. Moira checked the clock. Still another hour. Time to make another batch of Jello. This one would never be missed.

Neither were the rest of them in the next days and weeks. Moira got in the habit of making up two boxes at a time, “hers” in a nice crystal bowl she'd found. The cut glass created prisms of green. The colour appealed to Moira as much as the taste and the amusing jiggle.

The jiggle. Perhaps that's what her mother had disliked. Food that jiggled. Food that was fun. Her mother's food was never fun. Tough meat. Grey gravy. Lumpy mashed potatoes. Moira's talent for baking light-as-air blueberry muffins had remained hidden until her mother passed away. In an uncharacteristic gesture of rebellion, Moira made and served the muffins at her mother's wake, a grim expression of satisfaction on her face.

There was a smile on her face now, as she held up the cut crystal bowl, enchanted by the green glimmerings created by the light cutting through the glass. Then she lowered it, and began to eat. Straight out of the bowl, another pleasure her mother had denied her. She never intended to eat it all, every time. She'd have just a bit. Stop. Just a bit more. Pause. A tiny bit more. In no time, it was all gone.

On this day, she'd miscalculated. Not the amount of Jello in the bowl. The amount of time Vera would be having her nap. As Moira was holding the bowl up to her face and licking the last bits of gel sticking to the glass, Vera walked in.

Moira looked up. Shock. Fear. Embarrassment.

Vera looked…well, Vera looked shocked, too. For a moment. Then her eyes performed a quick calculation. The result was apparently satisfactory, because she smiled.

“You like lime Jello, too.”

Moira brought the bowl down from her face. She stared into it and nodded, not wanting to meet Vera's eyes. She wasn't scared of Vera anymore. She'd become more relaxed. Nothing awful had happened, had it? She tried not to think of “the boys” upstairs. Let the village think they were elderly ex-husbands. She thought they were…well, she preferred not to think about what they were.

“You must have as much of it as you want. There's certainly plenty.” Vera looked sober. “I fear it will outlast him.”

“Oh, no, surely – ”

“Does he look like a well man to you?”

“Well, no, but – ”

“In fact, would you say he's looking very ill, more ill…?”

“Perhaps.” Moira drew the word out, as if in doubt.

But there was no doubt.

Cyril was very ill.

And getting worse all the time.

Cyril was so bad that he could hardly swallow Jello. It seemed to Moira that he didn't want to eat it. When she failed to get him to eat, she'd call on Vera and Vera would force it down him. Sometimes he choked on it, and sometimes, when Vera left, he spat it out of his mouth.

Yet Vera said he loved lime Jello.

Moira couldn't imagine a person not loving it.

Hy was getting a macabre enjoyment out of her postings. She was nowhere nearer finding out just what Vera Gloom had stashed away in her upstairs bedrooms, but she was getting a twisted kick out of researching cadavers.

Hy's FB Status: For hundreds of years in the Far East, medicines were made out of mummies. Today, in the modern west, doctors are plumping up wealthy clients' cheeks with collagen-busting confections made from cadavers.
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Comments: Drop dead good looks?

Hy leaned back, smiling. Obviously Vera Gloom had not taken part in deathly cosmetic surgery. Her face was like a prune. Or as if she were sucking on vinegar. Probably, thought Hy, from her continual expressions of disapproval and distaste.

All through July, it rained. No one was out on a ride-on.

All through July, Hy thought about what she'd seen, or thought she'd seen, at the Sullivan house.

There was no way she could convince Jamieson to make an official visit. She'd tried over and over again.

They were going through the same old argument one day at Ian's.

“The remains belong to the family,” Jamieson insisted. “It's their decision as to what to do with them.”

Anything but cremation, she thought privately. That's how her own parents had died. Cremation. Before the fact. They'd burned to death. In a fire Jamieson had accidentally started.

“What if I decided to engage in some home-made cryonics and had grandma in the freezer downstairs?”

Jamieson looked at her sharply.

“Do you?”

Hy grinned. Sometimes Jamieson had simply no sense of humour at all.

“Yes. And grandpa. Abel, too, in case you've been looking for him.”

“I doubt that would be legal.”

“Probably not.” Ian was in his usual position, on a stool in front of his computer, a beautiful brand new iMac.

“However…” He turned to look at the two women. “There was a case in France, more than a decade ago, in which a court ruled a couple had to come out of the fridge in the basement and be buried or cremated. The old fella had just died, but the wife had been down there almost twenty years. The son was fighting their right to stay where they were.”

“And?” Hy walked over and stroked Jasmine's head. The parrot was where she usually was when Ian was on the computer. On his shoulder.

“He lost. The government lawyer said they could hardly rest in peace if anyone could go and have a peek anytime.”

“Maybe that's what they wanted.” Hy grinned and chucked Jasmine under the beak. Jasmine nibbled her fingers. Hy let her, briefly. Finger nibbling was a crapshoot with Jasmine. Even with someone she liked, it could turn ugly.

“Our religions demand and have rituals for, respect for the dead, but what is done to a body is a tangle of legalities. For instance – ” Ian scrolled down and clicked a couple of times.

“In the US, for example, sex with a dead body…”

“Ian!” Hy moved back, away from him, away from the screen. Jamieson just stood there, waiting.

“…sex with a dead body isn't rape. In most states. Unless…” He held up a finger, “…you thought the body was alive while you were doing it.”

“That's just gross and disgusting, Ian.” Hy coaxed Jasmine onto her arm and slumped down on the couch, stroking the bird on the head.

“Maybe, but it's the truth. Doing it with a former person is actually only illegal in sixteen states.”

“Well, I don't think we're talking about doing it with the dead.” Hy scrunched up her face. “Are we?”

“So it seems that what's done with human remains may not be a matter of law, or laws, laid down.” Jamieson had begun to pace, hands locked behind her. “It's precedent – dealing with each case as it comes up.”

“Precisely.”

Hy jumped in. “If there are stuffed humans in Vera's house, do we have a case?”

Ian shrugged. “You tell me.”

“I don't even know that there are bodies.” Jamieson's tone was dismissive.

“I told you there were.”

“Seen through a window, under stress.”

“I told you what I saw. Human bodies. Not moving. Dead. Definitely dead.”

Jamieson sighed. “You seem more certain of that now than you did then.”

“I've given it a lot of thought.”

“I'd call it selective memory. And, anyway, what do you expect me to do? Go knock on the door and say, ‘Excuse me, Mrs. Gloom, I'd like to search the house. Someone says she saw two dead bodies upstairs. She was peeking into your house from your ladder'?”

“Yes. Something like that.”

Jamieson shrugged.

“Sorry. Have to have more to go on.”

“Well, figure out something.” Hy grinned. “I'm deadly curious.”

Hy's FB Status: You don't want to hide grandma in the freezer. When you take her out, she might crack. She's three-quarters water.
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Comments: Does that make grandma a stiff drink?

Finn and Dot strolled the beach for several hours a day in spite of the rainy summer weather. On the rare nice day, they would walk out to the end of the rocks spilling from the cape at Macks' shore and do Tai Chi, facing the water and the sunrise or sunset.

They made a handsome sight – he with his long spider appendages, and she with her willowy form, meeting him motion for motion and stretch for stretch. They performed the moves like a slow ballet, tall black figure beside tall black figure, black from the roots to the tips of their hair.

They were in tune with the universe, but not entirely with the shore, though they thought they were.

Day after day, they did not find the skull. It was eluding them, so clever were its secret places, its playing on the tide. It was a game of hide and seek they didn't know they were part of. One day the skull lay, eyes up to the sky, exposed on the bare stretch of sand between the incoming tide and the high water mark. Granted, it looked like a grubby soccer ball, a bit deflated, but that's not why they didn't see it. They raced right past it, Dot accidentally kicking it, as she tore along trying to keep up with Finn. She stumbled, and he came back to help her, and in the kiss that followed, their thoughts were far from finding a treasure on the beach, even such a treasure as this.

The blow from Dot's foot sent the skull skittering into a cluster of sandstone, where it lodged beside a decaying piece of white-and-grey buoy, becoming just another piece of broken-up fishermen's junk on the beach.

It had been hidden for half a century. Why would it give itself up now? Why seek notoriety, long after it had been cleaned of every scrap of flesh, drained of every feeling, every emotion, every engagement with the physical world?

The skull had long ago given up everything – its entire body and organs, clothes, boat, house, all its possessions.

Well, not quite all, and maybe that's why it was nursing these last private moments, guarding the last thing belonging to the cranium.

The last possession and the manner of his death.

Not by drowning.

No, not by drowning.

As the hole in his head, even after all this time, made clear.

Shot. Swallowed by the sea. In that order.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“I think I've found what you may have seen at Gloom's.”

“Serious?”

“Yup.”

Hy raced up to Ian's right after he called. She was in such a rush, she didn't bother to put on a rain jacket. She was halfway there when the skies opened. She burst into Ian's kitchen, dripping all over the floor.

He went upstairs and grabbed a sweatshirt and sweatpants for her. She ducked into the bathroom and changed, struggling to drag the dry clothes over her wet skin, cursing with impatience.

Ian had stumbled on a site while researching what happens to dead bodies. As soon as he opened it, he knew that this was what Hy had been describing. He was rewarded by the look on her face when she saw what was on the screen.

“Oh my God.” She very nearly crossed herself.

She had to sit down.

“This is too bizarre,” she said.

“Pretty strange.” Ian reached over and clicked on a series of images.

“That's it,” she said.

“What you saw?”

“I'm sure it's what I saw. These are what I saw.”

“I've heard of this, but I've never seen it. Never been tempted to look, until now.”

“I'm tempted.” Hy looked up, an appeal in her eyes.

“No. Hy. No.”

“Oh c'mon, Ian. I have to see. To be sure. If I'm sure, I won't let up on Jamieson. I'll make her do something about it…them. And if this is what they are, she should.”

“I dunno, Hy, they may be perfectly legal. All of these are. For medical purposes, the literature says, although these appear to be an exhibit, a show. But legal, Hy, I should think, to be out in the public like that.”

“I don't care. There's something that's not right there. I'm going to find out. Are you with me?”

Ian sighed.

“I am. You know I am. How can I resist?”

“A mystery?”

“Yeah.” He was silent for a moment. “A mystery.”

What he really couldn't resist was her request for him to help. It had been a while since she'd done that. And he couldn't resist his need to protect her from herself.

Moira wasn't feeling well. She mentioned it at the Women's Institute meeting and there were a few snickers.

But she couldn't be pregnant. She and Frank hadn't gone that far.

She also had what Frank called “the runs.” She wished he wouldn't call it that. She didn't like to think of herself as someone who had those.

But she did.

She also had headaches. She was dizzy.

Was it something she'd eaten?

Moira wasn't going to let nausea get in the way of her third attempt to marry Frank. She refused this time to have church vows. She was superstitious. The first time, they almost landed her married to the wrong man.

She went online to find out how they could write their own vows. She didn't find anything she liked. It was all too flowery, too unlike her. What Frank was like never entered her mind. Moira shared that with other brides: the wedding wasn't about him.

People looked all misty-eyed when she said she and Frank were writing their own vows. Everyone except Hy. She sneered. She couldn't help it. She couldn't imagine what Moira could possibly write. Moira didn't see the sneer. Hy had turned away from her to hide it. The two were in the hall, setting it up for the wedding the following weekend.

Third time lucky, Hy thought as she shifted a chair into place.

A swell of nausea gripped Moira. It started as a cramp, surged through her stomach and gripped her intestines. She doubled up.

Hy put a hand on her shoulder.

“Moira, what's wrong?”

Moira said nothing. Her face was distorted.
Was it going to go up? Or down?

Hy could hear Moira's intestines grumbling. Gently, she tried to guide her to the bathroom. Moira could only shuffle along, nursing her pain with arms wrapped around her belly.

Hy left her at the bathroom door, and returned to the chairs. She hoped their vows weren't lengthy. People never wanted to sit in these hard wooden school chairs for long.

A groan came from the bathroom.

If there were any vows.

Surely Moira's wedding was not going to be sabotaged a third time?

The groan, it turned out, was one of relief. But Moira knew it wouldn't be for long. The sick feeling would start welling up again in her intestines and come out one end or the other. What was wrong with her?

Lime Jello?

The idea had been in the back of her mind. It was the only thing new in her diet, and the only thing not made in her own clean kitchen. But she had made it herself. Straight out of the sealed box. She kept coming back to that.

So what could possibly be wrong with it? Wrong with her?

www.theshores200.com

The last time the Sullivan house was inhabited it was uninhabitable. The Fitzpatricks pitched a tent in winter in the kitchen and lived with rats and mice in desperate poverty. There were two deaths, but the story did have a happy ending – the discovery of a family treasure. The family left quickly after that.

At one time, it would have been more difficult to convince Ian to break into a house, but he was happy Hy had asked him. His compliance had closed the distance between them, put them back on easy terms with one another.

And his scientific curiosity was aroused. To see one of those things in the flesh. Did it count as flesh?

They waited until Vera went to town. Tuesday was her town day, when she visited the fellow who parked his truck in the centre of Winterside and sold fresh fish out of the back. She'd be a few hours. The causeway was still under construction, and the old river ferry only took eight cars at a time. Tuesday was a popular day, because of the fish guy, so it created what passed for a traffic jam.

Vera would certainly be gone long enough for Hy and Ian to have a good look around the house's twenty-four rooms.

But both outside doors were locked.

“She's got something to hide.” Hy took one more try at turning the doorknob.

“She's from away.”

“So are we.” Hy and Ian had soon adopted the Red Island habit of leaving their doors unlocked, but Vera obviously had not.

“There – the kitchen windows. Sliders. Just like mine. I can get in there.”

“But that would be break and enter.”

“So would going through the door.”

“Not if it was unlocked.”

Hy had grabbed onto the window ledge.

“Help me up.”

Ian knit his two hands together and she stepped into them. He hoisted her up, face turning red with the effort.

“Hurry up.” His voice was breathless.

“Going as fast as I can.”

She managed to slide an opening large enough to squeeze through. Jumped down on the other side. Ran to the door to let Ian in.

Even though they now had good reason to believe no one was in the house besides them, they tiptoed. In silence, as if someone might hear them.

Hy hadn't seen the place since the Fitzpatricks had lived there when it was practically a condemned building.

The old wood floors shone with paste wax. The windows beamed light onto the beautiful wood wainscoting, milled work on the doors and around the windows and up the staircase.

“Wow.” Hy gazed up at the ceiling, painted cream like the walls. “Perfectly restored.”

“Cost a bucket of money to do this.”

“Sssh.” Hy went suddenly quiet. “What's that?” Ian listened, and after a moment, heard it, too. Laboured breathing coming from the front room.

Hy eased open the door. There was no response from the bed, just the rattly breathing and demi-snores.

Hy closed the door carefully.

“So we're not alone, but he's right out of it. Maybe she drugs him when she leaves him alone.”

“Better be quiet, anyway.”

They crept up the stairs. There were a series of doors down either side of the long, broad hallway. Some open. Some closed.

A ball of fur streaked past them, nearly tripping Hy.

“Damn Whacky! Must've got in the kitchen window. Stupid me. Left it open.” She chased after the feline, but it outwitted her – scurrying into one of the rooms and sliding under the bed. Hy knelt to the floor, swept her arms under the bed. Got clawed. She whipped out her arms and put the bleeding hand to her mouth.

She came up from the floor by the side of the bed and saw the body.

Not stuffed.

Much creepier than that.

She went white.

Human.

Dead.

Preserved in plastic.

“There.” Triumph in her voice, aimed at Ian, who had slipped in behind her. There on the bed was an old man, propped up on pillows. He was wearing silk pyjamas and a wine velvet robe.

Perfectly normal.

Except he was dead.

And you could see right though him in places.

“Plasticized,” said Ian, in a whisper.

He strode forward to inspect more closely.

“Fixed in formaldehyde, dehydrated, bathed in acetone, filled with plastic – polymer, epoxy – cured with heat or ultraviolet light…and, voil
à
, a perfectly preserved cadaver.”

He shook his head, admiration in his eyes. “I've heard of this, but never seen it.”

“I wish I hadn't.” Hy backed away. “It's creepy. You can see his leg muscles…”

“What there is of them. These are used for medical display. There are a couple of shows – one in New York – that exist under the guise of being educational. Well, you saw the website at my house.”

“Creepier now.” Hy shuddered.

“This one, with his leg muscles showing, must be an example of a couch potato.” Hy pulled out her cellphone, held it up and took several photographs.

“For the record.” Maybe this would help convince Jamieson, if she dared to show them to her.

“An odd sort of immortality. Perfect for our plastic times.” Admiration continued to shine in Ian's eyes.

As they left the room, Hy couldn't find Whacky anywhere. She looked under the bed again, behind the curtains, but there was no feline to be found.

In the next room was one of the bodies Hy had seen from the ladder – another old guy, with a pipe in his mouth, sitting by the fireplace, reading a book. His brain was exposed on one side. On the other, his hair was gingery and tousled. She took more photographs.

In the final room, a man was standing at an easel, arm aloft and hand holding a paint brush. The water colour on the easel was half-done. His hands revealed spidery webs of blood vessels.

“The guy who waved at me.”

“Don't you have to work quickly on a water colour?” Ian peered over the corpse's shoulder at the painting.

Hy grinned in spite of herself. She took a photograph.

“Jamieson could see him without coming in the house.” Hy looked out the window to see where the best viewpoint would be from below.

“Why bring Jamieson into it?”

“Surely this isn't legal. You can't do this to people, can you?”

“I believe it's perfectly legal. Done for the right reasons. In the right circumstances. You saw on the site. All above board.”

“Then how about how these men died? Three in a row. She's a serial widow.”

“Well…”

They looked in every one of the rooms on that floor and the next. Nothing in any of them.

“Guess it's just the three,” said Ian, with a grin.

On the way down the hall, they were silent, not knowing what to think, what to say. Until Hy remembered the cat.

“We've got to find her. We can't leave her in here.”

They opened and closed doors, called “kitty, kitty, kitty,” but Whacky didn't show.

“Where's Jamieson when we need her?” Hy was thinking about her purring talents.

“Jamieson? How could she help? I thought she didn't like cats.”

“Long story.”

“She may have got out the same way she got in. By the open window.”

Hy nodded. You're probably right.”

“There you go.” Ian pointed and leaned down to pick a piece of gingery fluff off the floor. He handed it to Hy. It was rough, a bit like soft steel wool.

She screwed up her face.

“What is it?”

“Hair.”

“That's not cat hair.”

“No, it's not.”

The man reading the book. Ginger hair. Tousled – by the cat?

“Yech!” Hy made a motion to drop it, but Ian closed his hand around hers.

“Hang on to it. If you think there's been foul play, a forensic analysis of that might prove it for you.” He let go of her hand. Reluctantly. It had been pleasant to hold it, no matter what it contained.

She looked down at her hand. Opened it. Stuffed the hair in her pocket. Maybe she would do something with it. Or convince Jamieson to do something with it.

On their way out, Hy set down her cellphone and closed the kitchen window. Just as she did, Whacky bounded up and streaked through the opening.

“Two birds with one stone,” she murmured.