Come Little Children (8 page)

“OK,” Lucas coached, “we’ll hoist her straight into the kitchen. Remember, keep her hands against her chest. Ready? On the count of three: one…”

They each slid their gloves under the body and Camilla felt one of the old woman’s soggy arms. She wiggled her fingers in tighter for a better grip.

“Two…”

A swollen hand was next. She cradled it gently and braced herself for the final countdown.

“Three!”

Water ran off the corpse and crashed to the floor as the three of them struggled to lift the body evenly. Over the roar of the flood, there was a clear, crisp snap. Camilla felt the break happen in her left palm and cringed as a liquid thicker than water started pouring down her hands.

Another
crack
.

“Damn,” Peter grunted, “my wrist broke.”

“This side too.”

“Get her to the kitchen!” Lucas hollered.

More blood flooded out as they galloped down the hallway. Camilla shot a quick glance behind her and cringed again; the water on the floor was turning red, and she swore she could feel it rising up higher on her shoes. The comparison to Niagara Falls hadn’t been an exaggeration.

They took a hard corner into the kitchen and knocked over a telephone stand. As they shuffled toward the table with the body bag, Camilla felt her side of the old woman sink lower; she tried pulling up, but the chicken skin on Ms. Beaudry’s arm sunk in like wet dough and her hands were suddenly stuck in a soup of muscle and fat. When they lifted the body onto the table, her fingertips brushed the old woman’s ulna.

“Turn her over!”

They spun the woman face-up and laid her inside the lips of the body bag. Her ancient eyes were distant and her mouth was peeled back in a look of sad desperation, as if in her final moments she had pleaded with Death for a couple more days, or at least one more cigarette.

When they were finished nestling Ms. Beaudry into the bag, Lucas tugged the zipper closed and planted his blood-covered gloves on the kitchen table. Camilla noticed Peter glancing at his brother’s hands—the ring fingers were indeed longer than the index fingers.

“So,” Lucas grunted, wiping his forehead, “a little different from school?”

“A little,” Camilla said.

Below them, the floor was bright red. Blood was dripping off the edges of the kitchen table like a sacrificial slab, and the body bag was filling up past its opaque lining.

“Jesus,” Peter sniffed. “Looks like helter-skelter in here.”

Camilla snickered.

“It’s not funny,” Lucas shot back. “If the family sees this, they’ll need therapy. Let’s scrub down the table and get back to the house to call in a cleanup crew.”

Peter and Camilla wiped the grins off their faces while Lucas picked up the body bag and waded out of the room.

Camilla went to the kitchen and grabbed a tea towel, running it under the tap. As she rang out the water, she noticed a bowl of fruit sitting on the nearby counter. Her stomach let out one of its signature gurgles.

“Doesn’t anything ruin your appetite?” Peter asked, walking up behind her.

“Apparently not.”

“Then for the love of God, take one.” Peter grabbed a nectarine and held it in front of her face.

“Take wh—no! That’s exactly what I said I wouldn’t do.”

“Suit yourself.”

Peter walked away with the nectarine and disappeared back through the hallway. Camilla bit her lip. She couldn’t help but imagine him sinking his teeth into the delicious fruit and savoring the firm texture, the ambrosial juices, the perfectly sweet and sugary aftertaste...

She looked at the bowl again, tempted.

No! No, that’s why we’re in this mess in the first place—stupid Eve couldn’t control her stupid food cravings
.
Don’t take one
.

Camilla pulled herself away from the sink and mopped up the blood on the table. She chucked the towel in a garbage can, sighing, just as Peter came walking back in with their coats.

“Ready?”

She nodded, taking her blazer, and they left the kitchen together.

Outside, Lucas was already waiting in the van’s driver’s seat. Dotted between the house and the vehicle was a trail of blood that glistened like rubies on the cool autumn sidewalk.

As Peter and Camilla followed the trail, Camilla was suddenly aware that the two of them were being watched. She couldn’t make out any faces in the windows of the neighboring houses, but there was the overwhelming tingle of eyes on their backs as they stepped down the driveway in their blood-spattered clothes toward the idling vehicle. A shiver went up her spine that put the tips of her neck hairs on end, and she forced her arms into the sleeves of her blazer to try and block out the unwelcoming sensation.

It didn’t help.

The blazer did, however, feel slightly different as it grazed past her hips. A small lump was bumping against her leg, and when she reached in the left pocket and felt the soft, glossy skin of a nectarine, the corners of her mouth peaked into a tiny smile.

6

Autopsy

T
he Turner was filled to the brim with hot-pink liquid, its dial set to ten as it waited patiently to force the formaldehyde through a thick rubber tube into Ms. Beaudry’s neck. Maddock wiggled the tube around with his mousy little fingers while the old woman lay there like a Madame Tussauds exhibit, shiny and inanimate, deader than a wax Elvis Presley.

Camilla was at the second cleaning station, examining a different corpse—a man—who was ten years younger and a hundred pounds heavier than Ms. Beaudry.

“Jackets are the most difficult,” Moira said, holding out an overcoat. “Try this.”

Camilla took the coat and gripped the cadaver’s shoulders. His torso was bulky but manageable; she hoisted him up and wrangled his left arm into the appropriate sleeve, forcing it through the cotton fabric until it jammed around his elbow.

“Lift the arms up,” Moira directed. “Parallel. No, no.
Up
.”

Camilla huffed, tugging the fabric over the joints like a mother dressing an uncooperative child. The man’s limbs were now sticking straight above his head, a Frankenstein monster with tall, stiff arms and limp wrists.

“Lord. Have you never put on a coat? Straighten the arms there.”

Shut up!
Camilla thought, biting her tongue and continuing to fight the sleeves. Unfortunately, the more she wrestled, the more they constricted.

“I give up,” Moira announced, flicking her fingers in the air as if to absolve herself of the embarrassing situation, and stormed out of the room.

“Good,” Camilla muttered. “Go bother someone else.”

On the bright side, if there was such a thing, Moira’s melodramatic temperament was back with a vengeance. Her quiet terseness from the night before was in many ways more terrifying than her flamboyant insults and fly-swatting hands.
She was different last night
, Camilla thought, remembering the way Moira had hurried off with the wet child clutched to her side.
Something in her eyes
…
What was that? Shock? Hesitation? Whatever it was, she certainly pulled that poor boy out of the kitchen fast
.

Thankfully, as proof that the incident hadn’t been a figment of Camilla’s imagination, she had caught one more glimpse of the mysterious six-year-old since having let him into the house the night before. It was on the way back from the Beaudry call; there was a Jeep parked at the Vincents’ veranda, and Moira was outside speaking to a woman with gaunt, ghostly features and bloodshot eyes.

The six-year-old had been standing in between the two women, completely fine, bored if anything. He kept fidgeting with the buttons on his Toronto Blue Jays jersey, but drained as his mother looked, she kept her arms locked around his neck so tightly that the two of them may as well have been attached by umbilical cord again.

“Neither of you like baseball, do you?” Camilla had asked Peter and Lucas out of nowhere. Both said no, just as she’d
predicted. The boy’s jersey was too new, the jeans fit too well.
His mother must have brought them with her
.

It was feasible. No, it was better than feasible—it was likely—and it was an important piece of the puzzle that she could use to fit the previous night together in a way that made perfect sense. The boy had been dared by a group of friends to go for a swim in the Vincents’ pond, simple as that. His gang of accomplices had hoisted him over the iron fence, giggling most likely, as he stripped down to his underwear and went tearing across the yard to the edge of the water. But when he came back, soaked, his partners in crime had made off with his clothes and left him trapped in the yard by himself.

Little twats, leaving a poor kid hung out to dry like that
.

It was so obvious it hurt. Kids would be kids, and when little boys were too old to be guarded every second of the day and too young to be chasing around short skirts and ponytails, impish stunts like trespassing on haunted houses and graveyards and funeral homes was just in their nature.
No wonder he didn’t say anything when I opened the back door. I’d be scared shitless too if I had to knock on anyone’s door—let alone Moira Vincent’s—in my soaking wet undies
.

Camilla bit her lip and picked at her last streaks of nail polish.

Logically, that scenario made sense. It covered the main points perfectly: the missing clothes, the boy’s reason for being in the backyard, his all-around bashfulness. But something about it still didn’t sit right. It was too tidy, almost. Too clean for something that had seemed so viscerally amiss. After all, she hadn’t actually
seen
or
heard
any other children that night. There was the subject of the towels too, which were already stacked in the cupboard.
Like someone was expecting him
. And what about Moira’s
reaction? Not surprised, but…worried. Worried, perhaps, that someone had seen something they weren’t supposed to see…

No!
Camilla shot a gust of breath through her nostrils.
Don’t be an idiot; they’re not hiding anything. The funeral home had nothing to do with it
.

She shook her head and forced the recrimination away.
Mystery or no mystery—prankster kids or…or whatever—there’s one thing I’m absolutely positive about: this goddamn corpse’s goddamn coat is not going on
.

Camilla’s arm was still wrapped around the cadaver’s waist, keeping it upright, while their faces were so close that their noses were almost touching. The smell was pungent—a whiff of flesh and Clorox masked by a faint puff of cinnamon-scented fabric freshener. Craning her head away, she let out a sudden giggle. The tableau looked and felt surprisingly like a scene from the only high school dance that she had ever went to: there was clumsy Mike Ferris again, his ogre limbs swaying to the wrong beat of the music as he tried to lean in and lip-rape her with his worming tongue, his breath drenched with the cinnamon Scope that the hockey team had chugged to get their cheap Walmart buzz.

Maddock looked up from a bowl of plaster and shot Camilla the stink eye. She cleared her throat and wiped her smile away.

Eva Braun could be back any second, I need to get this coat on
.

Her eyes scanned the room and spotted a pair of shears hanging on the far wall.

Perfect
.

She lowered Frankenstein’s monster onto the gurney again and waited until Maddock went back to whisking his bowl of plaster before making her way across the room. Just as she
reached up and grabbed the shears off their peg, Maddock called out, “Bring that jar, will you?”

Camilla glanced back and saw the chief embalmer aiming his spatula at a glass jar of tongue depressors. They reminded her of oversized popsicle sticks, like the ones she used to get from Dandy’s Corner Store when her mom would take her for Fudgsicles in the summer. She picked up the jar and carried it over to Maddock’s work station, setting it down beside Ms. Beaudry’s right hand.

Except Ms. Beaudry’s hand wasn’t attached to Ms. Beaudry’s body anymore. Neither of her hands were. They were lying like hunks of butcher’s meat a few inches from each of her severed wrists.

Maddock opened the jar and picked out two depressors. He lifted Ms. Beaudry’s arm—gently guiding the old woman’s corpse up as he did so—and then with one violent stab, he drove a popsicle stick directly into the stump where her left wrist used to be. Next he picked up the corresponding hand and popped it on the other end of the depressor, then seized his spatula and started slathering plaster around the gaps in the skin. His eyes were electric, like a kid on Christmas morning with a new Play-Doh playset.

Camilla smirked.
Tongue depressors for limb attachments. Genius
.

As Maddock continued reconstructing Ms. Beaudry, Camilla went back to her gurney, shears in hand.
Time for a shortcut
. She stuck the fabric in between the open blades and clamped down. Just as the shears made a loud
snip!
up the back of the coat, the embalming room doors burst open and Lucas came barreling in with another gurney.

“Make way!”

The smell that accompanied Lucas was much sharper than Ms. Beaudry’s watered-down flesh or Mike Ferris’s cinnamon breath. It was rancid death, a sack of curdled organs that made Camilla gag as soon as it hit her nostrils. Maddock didn’t flinch; his olfactory bulb must have burned out long ago.

“Sorry,” Lucas grunted as he heaved the body bag onto a table. “No coffee breaks today.”

“Or lunch,” Moira’s voice filled the room as she strode inside. “The Beaudrys just pulled in. We’ll need a table empty in five and Mr. Yule dressed by half past.”

“What happened here?” Maddock motioned at the new arrival.

“Suicide.”

“Pills?”

“Rat poison.” Moira set down the autopsy report. She dipped a hand into her blouse and withdrew a tin of Vicks VapoRub. “From his cellblock.”

She spun the lid off the tin and dabbed a finger in the jelly, then smeared a streak above her upper lip and tossed the rub to Lucas, who did the same. Lucas tossed it to Camilla—who hurriedly copycatted—and as soon as the cream touched her skin, her sinus passages flew open with the sharp rush of cold, mentholated air.