Come Little Children (7 page)

Peter grinned. “But there was never anything good. That’s why we started Robin-Hooding.”

“Robin-Hooding?”

“Taking food from removal calls.”

“Wait,” Camilla said, “you stole food from
removals
? From dead people’s houses?”

“It was Pete’s idea.”

“We put it in Ziplocs and slipped it out in the body bags. Forgot about that.”

“That’s absolutely deplorable,” Camilla said, trying to keep a straight face. “And clearly illegal.”

“It’s
awesome
,” Peter corrected. He turned around in his seat and handed Camilla a clipboard. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t do it too?”

“I don’t think so. Honestly, I don’t need anything but a piece of fruit right now. If we pass an apple tree, pull over. We can’t get in trouble for that.”

“Finally,” Lucas said, “someone with a head on her shoulders. Take notes, Pete.”

Camilla looked at the clipboard that Peter had given her. The word “INTAKE” was stamped in large font across the header with a series of boxes underneath it. Some of the fields were filled in, some were blank.

“A house call like this is pretty standard,” Lucas continued. “People pass away in strange places, and it usually takes two attendants to remove the body. The third person does the paperwork and deals with any difficult family members.”

“Difficult?”

“Sometimes it’s OK, sometimes it’s riot control. There’s nothing easy about seeing a relative get dragged out the front door, right? A lot of sore emotions make people act out.”

Camilla skimmed the details on the intake form. “The family shouldn’t be an issue today, should they?”

“What makes you say that?”

“This claims the neighbor in the basement suite phoned the police. An eighty-four-year-old woman living alone—assumedly widowed or never married—who’s been dead long enough for a neighbor to notice probably doesn’t have family checking in on a regular basis.”

“Good instinct.” Peter gave a quick closed-mouth smile in the van’s mirror.

“Just an insight,” she shrugged.

Peter looked away. Lucas started explaining something else, but Camilla wasn’t paying attention anymore. She was still watching Peter in the side mirror, noticing the way his hair bounced on his head as the van chugged along the gravel road. His cheekbones and jawline were prominent in the sunlight, and his chin was smooth and round, not cleft like his brother’s. For a second she imagined his skin and muscles melting away and admired his textbook skull.

“And behind the form there’s an anklet…” Lucas’s voice faded in and out. “We tag the bodies with our own numbers, even the ones from the hospital…”

Camilla’s eyes wandered down, curious about Peter’s other body parts. She took time to notice his narrow arms and spidery fingers, then his hips, then his legs…

She glanced up, and Peter was peeking back at her in the mirror. Their gazes darted away, and Lucas’s voice returned to full volume.

“Camilla? Hey?”

“Sorry?”

“What’s the house number?”

“Oh.” She looked down at the intake form. “Eighteen.”

The white van took a corner onto Stag Crescent and the numbers on the cottages counted down to their destination: forty, thirty-eight, thirty-six, thirty-four…

The streetlights on either side of the block died off as the sun peeked over the trees and triggered the automatic timers. Up ahead, however, there were two lights that did not go out with the others.

“Oh goddamn it,” Lucas said. “Not today.”

Camilla saw that the two lamps were actually the headlights of a police cruiser angled at house eighteen. A pair of rangers in tan uniforms were leaning against the hood, arms crossed, knees locked. Neither was saying a word to the other.

“Don’t start something,” Peter said.

“I won’t,” Lucas replied, pulling up to the curb and jamming the van into park. “But tell that to them.”

Peter, Lucas, and Camilla got out of the unmarked van and walked to the driveway.

“And here comes the parade.”

The officer who spoke was a tall chunk of gristle. His handlebar mustache alone must have weighed ten pounds. “Where’s Uncle Buck?”

“Uncle
Brutus
is busy,” Lucas lied. He took the clipboard out of Camilla’s hands and held it in front of the ranger. The ranger grabbed it in his beefy fingers and flipped lazily through the sheets.

“Sign it. Please.”

“Mick’s got the pen.” The gristly ranger passed the clipboard to his partner, a weaselly man with pencil whiskers as bad as the average teen-stache. Mick read the papers just as slowly, dragging out the process to give the Vincents a hard time.

“Sign,” Lucas grunted.

Mick looked up, snickered, then lazily scrawled his signature on the intake form and held it out to Camilla. Camilla grabbed the board, but Mick didn’t let go.

“You just start with these loony tunes?”

Lucas yanked the clipboard from both of them and stood in Mick’s face. “Crawl into your car and get out of here.”

The first officer, a juggernaut compared to even Lucas, straightened up and puffed out his chest. “What was that, Vincent?”

“You heard me.”

Peter put a hand on Lucas’s shoulder, and Lucas shook it off. The bulky officer stared him down, both of their fists clenching and unclenching at their sides.

Mick snickered and popped open his car door. “Come on,” he called. “Their dinner’s getting cold.”

The larger cop sneered, continuing to stare Lucas down, and backed up to the police car. As he opened the passenger door, his partner turned to Camilla and said, “Watch yourself around these freaks.”

Lucas fidgeted. The cops slid inside the car and revved out of the driveway, taking off down Stag Crescent.

“Two minutes,” Lucas said, his hands still clenched. He walked to the house and ducked through the front door.

“Where’s he going?”

“He likes being the first one into the house,” Peter replied, kicking a few loose rocks off the sidewalk.

“Oh,” Camilla said. Silence filled the air, broken only by the distant taps of the morning woodpeckers. Finally her curiosity got the better of her. “Why?”

“He says you never know what you’re walking into. Aggressive pets, aggressive people. This time it’s probably just to blow off some steam.”

Camilla looked at the exterior walls of the house, wishing she could X-ray them to see what Lucas was up to inside.

“He’s protective,” she said. Although it came out sounding like a statement, she had meant it more as a question. The unspoken “why?” hung in the air between them like a nagging mosquito.

“Luke’s always been like that. At least since dad’s been gone, I guess.”

“How did he die?”

Peter narrowed his eyelids, seemingly trying to remember if he had told Camilla that his father had passed away. Camilla sensed the quick detachment and second-guessed how tactless the question had been.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Your family’s so close, I just assumed it wasn’t divorce.”

“No, you’re right,” Peter replied. “He died when I was six. Luke was ten. Car accident.”

Without warning, Camilla reached forward and took Peter’s right hand in her own. He twitched and his mouth slid open for a second, but then he closed it when she started feeling the curves and the lengths of his fingertips.

“Do you remember crying a lot?”

“What?”

“When your dad died. Did you or your brother cry?”

Peter eyed up Camilla as she examined his fingers. The look on his face said:
God, she’s bizarre
.

“Yeah. I did. He didn’t, at least not that I saw. But I think he just wanted to be ‘the man’ for mom and the rest of us.”

“Perhaps.” Camilla frowned. She held Peter’s fingers up to his eye level and added, “But see how your index finger is longer than your ring finger? Short ring fingers in men are linked to lower prenatal levels of testosterone. Men with less testosterone grieve with tears; men with more testosterone—presumably your brother—mourn in more discreet ways.”

“You’re saying I cried when my dad died because I have a short ring finger?”

“No. I’m saying your brother didn’t cry because
he
probably has a
long
ring finger. The emotions of men with high testosterone move like—like tectonic plates. The aftershocks go on for years afterward, so in their minds they try to find ways to honor the memories rather than mourn them. They’ll take over their dad’s roles. Build something with his tools, fix up the old car.”

“I don’t know. Luke is a terrible mechanic.”

“Maybe.” Camilla shrugged. “But what about removal calls? Was your dad usually the first person to enter the house too?”

Peter looked at her with a blank expression. His pupils moved up and down, attempting to size her up. “I think I’ll have to start calling you Dr. Lecter.”

“OK, Clarice.”

They held eye contact for another second and then burst in laughter.

Suddenly there were three loud
thwacks
behind them, and they turned to see Lucas rapping on the front room window.
Bring boots!
he mouthed, pointing down at his feet.

Peter’s hand recoiled and Camilla’s fell to her dress pants. He went back to the van and pulled a few supplies from a plastic box, then slapped them on the gurney and unlocked its wheels to roll it out. As Camilla watched him maneuver the table up the driveway, her joke still a funny memory instead of a lame line
that she would overthink later that night, a random footnote from one of her psychology textbooks popped into her head.

Freud believed that the most poignant loss of a man’s life was the loss of his father
.

She couldn’t empathize, but she did feel sympathy for the two brothers. They weren’t like the other Vincents. They were caring and protective, and their father had almost certainly been a blend of both to cancel out the callousness of their relatives.

The house had belonged to a chain smoker. Beyond the obvious stench fuming from the chairs and couches, the windows were coated in cloudy layers of smog and there were more ashtrays lying around than drink coasters. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that (1) the person was old—no one under sixty-five uses drink coasters—and (2) if this homeowner
hadn’t
died of smoking, she was likely nearing the end of the tracks on the old cancer train anyway.

Camilla stepped off the welcome mat and sunk half an inch. The carpet was soggy.

“Put these on.” Peter handed over a set of plastic booties. They were similar to the ones used in hospitals, except the material was thicker and they were a lot taller around the ankles.

Camilla fanned out the booties and slid them over her shoes, pulling them up to her shins.
This is attractive
.

She stood up straight again. Baggy men’s blazer, no makeup, plastic Peter Pan booties. She couldn’t remember if she had ever felt uglier.

“Did you think it would be more glamorous?” Peter asked, stifling a laugh.

“One more word, I swear, and I’ll slip these booties over your head—”

“Little help here!” Lucas shouted from deeper in the house.

Peter and Camilla tromped over the living room carpet, following a trail of ashtrays like carcinogenic breadcrumbs through a dining area and around the table into the smoker’s kitchen. The water sloshed to an inch and a half around their soles, then two.

Finally they turned a corner and met Ms. Beaudry.

She was facedown in the water at an awkward angle. Her wrists were bent underneath her bathrobe, no doubt in an attempt to break her fall, and her white hair floated around her head like strands of ghostly seaweed.

Lucas was standing in the doorway to a bathroom.

“She started running a bath and came out for something. Collapsed here and never got up.”

Camilla examined the way the woman’s hands were twisted underneath her body. They were close to her chest, probably having clawed at it during a heart attack.

“This is a lot of water,” she said. “Why didn’t the people in the basement suite know sooner?”

“Gone for the weekend,” Lucas replied. “Came home this morning to find the place flooded. Doubt the Beaudrys know yet, but at least they live here in Nolan. I’ll get Laura to phone when we’re back.”

“And how
do
we get her back?”

“That’s the hard part.” He frowned. “See her hands? How they’re purple, and the veins are popping out? That’s where the blood’s built up. All that water and pressure probably broke down the skin pretty bad.”

“She’s as fragile as a water balloon,” Peter said. “If we’re not careful, her hands can snap and we’ll be caught in Niagara Falls.”

The image of blood gushing out of the old woman’s wrists was a little graphic, even for Camilla. She gulped and crossed her arms, tucking her own wrists into her armpits.

“Peter, go lay the body bag on the kitchen table,” Lucas directed. “We’ll have to carry her down the hall and lift her up, hopefully without too much of a mess.”

Peter disappeared around the corner and came back a minute later, nodding that they were ready to go. The three of them slipped off their blazers and slung them over a closet door.

As the men started unbuttoning their cuffs and rolling up their sleeves, Camilla noticed the skin on Peter’s arms: there was black lettering inked from both of his wrists up to the base of his elbows. The tattoos were thick and vivid, but the florid calligraphy and Peter’s quick movements made it too hard for her to read what they said.

Peel back a layer, and there’s something else
.

“Gloves.”

Camilla turned to see Lucas holding out a pair of rubber gloves. She took them and pulled them halfway to her shoulders.

Peter laughed. “You look like a mad scientist.”

“My concern for style died with the slip-on booties.”

The three of them formed a triangle around Ms. Beaudry’s body—Camilla at the right shoulder, Peter at the left, and Lucas at her feet. Together they crouched down, maintaining eye contact, and dipped their hands into the bathwater.

The water was immediately cold and unpleasant. The rubber gloves were a good guard against germs but a shitty one for grossness; it felt like old dishwater with bits of food floating between their fingers.