Come Little Children (18 page)

“Take off his clothes.”

Camilla undid Todd’s shirt while Peter removed his belt and pulled away the blood soaked jeans. In under a minute, the teenager was down to his underwear. The damage was much less than any of them expected; for so much blood, the only severe
penetration had happened where his kneecaps had cracked and come exploding out of his shins.

“Move.”

Peter and Camilla parted, allowing Moira to swoop in and strike her scalpel square on Todd’s chest. She slid the blade down with one precise swipe, then exchanged it for a handheld sternal saw.

The saw started up with a high-pitched
buzz
and the sound sprung off the cement walls, filling the den with its deafening metallic screech. Moira drove the saw at Todd’s chest and struck his rib cage. Laying on more pressure, she dug a straight line through his thick plate of bone until the whole length was scored, then the machine shut off and she started yanking the rib cage apart with her bare, liver-spotted hands.

The graphic dissection was far from new to Camilla, yet something about the darker atmosphere made it feel horribly, horribly wrong—almost murderous.

Moira reached for her scalpel again and lowered it inside the body, making a tiny incision somewhere within the thoracic cavity.

“What’s she doing now?” Camilla whispered to Peter.

“Cutting the heart.”

Moira lifted the bloody scalpel out of Todd’s chest and set it down with the other tools. She walked over to the cabinet and reached up to the top shelf, carefully retrieving a wooden box the size of a sewing kit, and placed it at the foot of the embalming table. Once again she brought out the gold chain from around her neck and produced the three keys, sliding the smallest inside the box’s keyhole.

The lid popped open.

Camilla squinted as Moira’s fingers dipped inside the box and selected something extremely small. Just as she was about to ask Peter what the object was, Moira turned to her and said, “Hold out your hand.”

Camilla lifted her hand obediently. Moira walked over and set the small object in the center of her palm.

Its surface was smooth and black, and it was shaped like a teardrop.

“A seed?” she asked, perplexed.

“An apple seed,” Peter said. “From the tree in our courtyard.”

“It is of the gravest importance,” Moira said, staring Camilla dead in the eye, “that you never touch one of these again.”

Moira plucked the seed out of Camilla’s palm and returned to the wooden table. This time Camilla’s curiosity moved her to the table too, leaning over to watch as Moira lowered the seed inside Todd’s chest and planted it in the incision in his heart.

“Help me stitch him up,” Moira said. “And don’t miss so much as a scratch.”

Camilla and Peter each picked up a needle and thread and started to sew the sixteen-year-old together again.

As the three of them worked, Moira took advantage of the silence. “There are three rules,” she said, clearing her throat. “
Three
, understand? Do I have your entire attention?”

Camilla nodded, although in reality her attention was split a thousand different ways.

“Rule one,” the old woman articulated slowly, “only
children
may be brought back.” She put extra emphasis on the word
children
and sniffed at Todd’s body, communicating snidely that teenagers, while apparently discouraged, technically counted as children as well. “Rule two: the cause of death must be natural.”

“Or accidental,” Peter added.

Moira shot Peter a look as if to scold him, but didn’t. “And rule three: if a child goes bad, it must be abolished.”

Abolished? As in killed?

Peter noticed the look on Camilla’s face. “It’s been twenty years since—”

“It’s still a rule,” Moira cut him off. She lowered her wrinkled nose in Camilla’s face. “Understand?”

Camilla nodded, but her bullshit meter was off the charts.
Never mind irrational, this family’s insane! I might have bought electroresuscitation or maybe biochemical rejuvenation, but apple seeds and superstitions? This is cadaver abuse!

Moira returned to the cabinet and brought back a bundle of heavy wire. She held it out for the two of them to take.

Run!
Camilla told herself.
Get out of here, get out now—right now—while you still have a chance! Except, God no—you killed him. You killed him you killed him YOU KILLED HIM! You’ll lose everything! Your job, your life, your mind. You’ll kill yourself next
.

Camilla swallowed a dry gulp and lifted her shaking hands, quietly taking the wire. Without so much as a peep or another dissident thought, she turned to the body and began to work.

The three morticians stitched for close to twenty minutes in total silence, and when they finished, Peter and Camilla moved the body back onto the stretcher and lifted it out of the basement. As they climbed the staircase again, Camilla had a gut feeling that she didn’t need to ask where they’d be going next, and when Peter punched open the back door just as a crack of lightning burst across the sky, she stared only at the black pond across the courtyard and knew that she had been right.

13

On the Edge of the Pond

A
fter dumping Todd’s body into the pond, Moira went inside to put a ham in the oven.

The rain was coming down in barrels now. Peter and Camilla, soaked to their bones, sat on the porch’s wicker bench and watched the raindrops patter the surface of the pond.

“How long is it supposed to take?”

“Depends.” Peter’s voice was as cold as it had been in the van. Since they had driven away from the printing warehouse a few hours ago, the two of them had barely spoken. Camilla hated the tension. It was like there were cables running through their words, pulling the dialogue so tight that even the silence between sentences seemed to hum.

“It needs moonlight,” he added. “So a couple more hours.”

“Oh. Of course. Moonlight.”

Peter shook his head. “A little late for skepticism.”

Camilla didn’t respond. She stared out at the massive tree across the courtyard and thought about the seed that Moira had placed in her hand. She hadn’t given it much consideration until then—and not that she was a believer yet, at least not until she saw it start to finish with her own two eyes—but there was definitely
something
off
about the garden’s grandest centerpiece. Apple trees were supposed to be short, stubby things compared to the commodious species in front of her, yet this husky beast with its two-ton branches and boulder-size knots was built like a solid oak, and the way its roots rippled up from the ground like dangerously unearthed electrical cables was unusual to say the least.

The hum droned back. Through it, raindrops continued smattering the surface of the pond, and occasionally other sounds emerged too. The kitchen oven opening and closing, a loose shutter thwacking the side of the house, the yard’s hydrangeas rustling in the wind. Still, that relentless hum buzzed on.

“Why’d you take off?” Peter asked suddenly. His voice was flat and quiet.

“I needed to know what was going on.”

“Then why didn’t you ask me?”

“He was running away,” she pushed back. “I made a split-second decision.”

“That’s—no.” Peter raked his fingers through his hair in frustration. “Just…”

“What?”

“Just…why wasn’t I your split-second decision?”

The sky rumbled above them.

Camilla looked over and saw the disappointment in Peter’s distant gaze. She could tell they weren’t just talking about Todd or the funeral home anymore.

“I would have told you,” he said dejectedly, leaning forward to rest his chin on his fist like Rodin’s
The Thinker
.

“Peter…it…” She drew out the words like painful slivers, massaging the diamond ring on her left hand as she tried to summon the words that would hurt the least. “It happened too fast.”

The thunder boomed again like a low timpani roll. Brilliant sheet lightning pulsated through the clouds, brightening entire sections of sky at once with blue, dampened light.

She didn’t know what else to say. It was the truth, but it wasn’t the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help her God. Did he really need to know that she hadn’t trusted his family—that Laura had lied to her in the hospital about what was going on—or that the only reason she put on the engagement ring was to see if he would save Todd? It didn’t matter anymore. The flop, the turn, and the river had all been dealt; the bluff was called and the cup was lifting off the liar’s dice. He trusted her. It was time to start trusting him.

“What changed your mind?”

She shrugged.

“Great,” he puffed, “so you’re still on the fence.”

“I’m wearing the ring, aren’t I?”

“Because it goes with your shoes?”

Actually, a silver band would go much nicer with carmine
. “No,” she said. “Because you were there. When I really needed you.”

She was surprised to hear the words spill out so easily. And yet it was exactly how she felt; even though she couldn’t pinpoint the precise moment when her feelings had switched, she knew that sometime between the warehouse and the wicker bench, she had gone from wearing the ring as a means to unlock the truth to wearing it as it was intended. Whatever secrets and insecurities she had left were molehills compared to the mountain Peter had climbed for her. She would conquer hers too, in time, but for now all she knew was that he was the one she wanted to be with.

“That’s the idea,” Peter said. He looked over and studied her, curled up on the other end of the bench hugging her own
legs, and held out his hand. “I trust you, you trust me. With anything. Promise?”

She looked at the hand, pausing only for a second, and then reached out and grasped it. Peter slid across the bench and wrapped his arms around her body, warming her as she rested her head in the crook of his neck and breathed easier. Slowly the tension washed away with the rain.

As Camilla lay there, exhausted but unable to nap, her eyes fell on the enormous tree again. It appeared scorched from a distance. The roots, the bark, the leaves. Black, all of it, like a charcoal silhouette against the horizon, rocking—somehow grinning—like a patient stalker watching from the shadows.

A gust of wind rustled the tree’s branches, and a shiver ran up her spine. As she pulled the collar of her dress higher on her neck, Peter brought her in tighter. “I can’t read your mind,” he said, tapping her forehead. “Just ask.”

“All right.” She drew in a long breath.
Where to start?
She settled on the first question to fully form itself on her tongue: “When did you find out about…you know?”

“I was pretty little.” He sniffled. “Ten, maybe. But they were strict about it before then, like don’t go downstairs or don’t eat anything you find outside. I grew up thinking apples were worse than amphetamines.”

“And when they told you—or showed you, or whatever—what did you think?”

“It actually made sense. Probably like what you’re thinking right now, I guess. There’s the initial disbelief, but then all of the little stuff adds up: the looks we’d get around town, the reason I was homeschooled, the family traditions, like picking the fruit in the spring and burning everything but the seeds.”

“Burning them?”

“When you’re dealing with something like this, you can’t be too careful.”

“What happens if you eat them?” Her forbidden questions were starting to flow faster now, like booze from a wood barrel being axed open during prohibition.

“The only person I remember eating them was grandma. She swore a couple bites cured her headaches and cooled off the arthritis in her hands.” Peter paused, then chuckled. “She also hated doctors and took horse steroids instead of chemotherapy when she got lung cancer…so she’s probably not the best example. Nah, poor woman. Granny never quite had both oars in the water.”

A branch of lightning burst high above the courtyard and Camilla saw the memory of a bright, whitewashed building flash before her eyes. Its emerald lawn was neatly trimmed, and the sign outside read “Avalon Park” in friendly white-and-green stenciling, then in smaller italics below it: “
Caring People, Compassionate Care
.”

The memory was so vivid she could still smell the lilacs.

As a young couple strolled by, the man’s voice wafted the trigger phrase by her ears: “Never had both oars in the water, poor biddy.”

Camilla refocused on the white building, which appeared in crisp, high-definition. There was nothing hazy about this place. On the surface it seemed so halcyon—“A white house fit for the President!” the brochure boasted—but behind the sugar-sweet lilac bushes and the cheerful welcome sign, she was already picking apart the darker details that she’d learned to see since her first visit there when she was twelve years old.

Bars behind the curtains.

Keypads on the doors.

The outline of a steel baton down the side of the receptionist’s right pant leg.

She looked up at the windows of Avalon Park’s second floor staterooms and trained her attention on the third room from the left. There was nothing there.

She kept her gaze fixated on the glassy gap in the whitewashed walls, staring harder and harder, until her eyes were nothing but narrow slits…

And suddenly she saw her: the woman with the blank face staring out of the window.

Lightning flashed with an explosive
blam
of thunder. All at once the building was gone. No more emerald turf, no more welcome sign. Camilla blinked back to the Vincents’ porch, breathing heavier, with the memory of Avalon Park’s second floor stateroom—and its ghostly occupant—seared into her brain.

Mom
.

She jammed her fingers in the crooks of her eyeballs and attempted to rub out what she had just seen.

“Hey,” Peter said, “still there?”

“Y-Yeah,” she stuttered, trying to repress the flashback and catch up with the conversation. “So…so you think this fruit is a medical breakthrough—”

“I wouldn’t—”

“But you’re keeping it from the rest of the world because…?”