Authors: Nicholas Wolff
Where . . .
Where what, Margaret?
Where am I?
The buzzing cloud descended, and Ramona twisted down in her chair. Then popping sounds and a moan that droned in the background.
Ramona closed her eyes. The coppery taste seemed to coat her teeth and tongue.
Panting like a dog, Ramona then sat with her head just above her knees. She didn’t want to look. She’d just stared at the tiles of the floor and tried to listen for the frozen-yogurt machine. She willed it to kick in, to restart time.
Finally, the machine rattled to life with a jolt that Ramona felt in her chest, and she slowly inched her head up above the level of the window ledge.
Margaret was gone.
Remembering now, Ramona felt her body go cold. She closed her eyes, trying to banish the image of the hooded figure from her mind. After a moment, she opened her eyes, cupped her hands, and blew a warm breath onto her fingers, twice. Then she reached for the ignition and turned the key.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
E
ver since he’d thrown that cursed rope over the bridge, Chuck’s life had seemed to brighten. The Volvo had started right up when he’d turned the ignition. A small miracle. He’d called Stephanie on his cell and told her he’d had a minor accident and would be home after he dropped the Volvo at the mechanic’s. Her voice had edged up an octave, and she’d wanted to know the full details right there on the phone—was he hurt, were the police there, how badly was the car damaged?—but he told her he’d explain everything when he got home. Chuck had driven the Volvo to his mechanic’s and taken a taxi home, where he found Stephanie waiting at the door, tense with worry. He’d explained the whole incident as the result of slippery roads, and said that the damage was sure to be below their $1,000 deductible, so he hadn’t called Allstate. Nobody had been hurt, so he hadn’t notified the police, either. After twenty minutes of questions, the tension in her voice had finally dissipated and he’d gone to bed, pleading a headache.
Best of all, the voices hadn’t returned. His own voice had taken their place. “It’s okay, Chuck,” he’d told himself.
You’re a good person. Why shouldn’t there be one Chuck Godwin in this lousy goddamned world?
The mechanic had called early this morning and told him his car would take only an hour or two to fix, but it would be a day or two before he could do the repairs. Chuck had rented a car, a red Toyota, driven to Mary Reddington’s house, and parked just down the street. Then he’d marched up to her door—her
front
door—and knocked and gone inside and sat on her couch, done up in a bright floral pattern, and told her he’d never stopped wanting her. And, miracle of miracles, she hadn’t thrown him out into the cold January afternoon. No, she’d placed her hand on his cheek and then kissed him full on the lips.
They’d restarted their affair—or, to be more precise, re-
ignited
it—because he’d never known sexual desire like this. Twenty years ago, he’d had a couple rolls in the hay with the redheaded Mary, their midlife crises seeming to hit emergency levels on the very same crisp fall weekend. Back then, they’d snuck off from the committee at St. Adolphus that they’d been cochairing and gone to the Lucky Clover Motel for hours of debauchery. What was the committee? The lawn council or some ridiculous thing. Deciding which kind of shrubbery to plant beneath the pastor’s window. He’d sat there during the endless discussions about rosemary bushes versus rhododendrons and stared at Mary’s flame-red hair, her gem-like green eyes. They’d slept together four times, but then she’d stopped answering his calls. He’d confronted her at the church, and she’d confessed that his bouts of depression were the cause. Her mother had suffered from melancholia and it had nearly torn her family apart. She was very much afraid of his black moods.
But now all that was behind them. Chuck laughed to himself. His father had farmed three acres of good soil when he was alive, fancying himself some kind of homesteader, and he would have said that his son had lain fallow for forty years. Four decades of depression and bad sex with Stephanie. Well, no longer. He was roaring back to life.
Chuck felt charged up, almost superhuman. The pads of his fingers, the tiny ridges of his fingerprints, seemed to be alive with electricity at the memory of touching Mary’s skin. She was still so beautiful and, thank God, just as horny as he was. It felt good, yes, sir. He sat in the Volvo, looking at the long line of Willow Street
cut between the banks of hard white snow, the light on the whiteness soft and benevolent, the shaggy pines in the front yards and the tops of the mailboxes gleaming, and it was as if he were seeing these things for the first time.
Chuck didn’t feel guilty about Stephanie. What his wife wanted was his mind, his conversation, his comforting presence. She’d been chronically undersexed her whole life. She sure didn’t know what she was missing. So his liaison with Mary was a guiltless affair, the best kind.
He was headed back to her house now in his little rented Toyota. They’d agreed that they couldn’t wait another day to see each other again. Who had time for patience when you were in your midsixties?
Yes, it had done him a world of good, tossing that rope over the bridge. He’d get up tomorrow morning, call in sick to his assistant, and spend the entire day cleaning out the basement of all the accumulated trash that Stephanie had stuffed down there. He was going to put a nice Rockler table saw in the corner, get back to woodworking. The high whine of a quality table saw was something he’d always loved. Just thinking about it seemed to boost his testosterone levels.
Chuck Godwin began to sing as he sat in the car. The only song he could think of was “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” The double entendre didn’t register with him. It was just a beautiful, beautiful song.
“Joyful and triumphant,” he sang in a passable voice. Chuck felt alive, alive and grateful.
At 6:40 on Tuesday evening, Elizabeth Dyer was sitting at her desk at the Northam morgue, slowly drinking a Diet Dr Pepper and reading
Us
magazine. The morgue was in the basement of the county administration building, and the place suited her. It was
cold, and she liked that. The corpses, too, were cold and silent, and after ten years of working here, she felt as much kinship with them as with anyone walking above.
Elizabeth had allotted a full hour to read the magazine cover to cover. She began at the back, as she always did. There a trio of snarky critics picked photos of the worst-dressed celebrities of the week and ripped into their fashion choices. She studied them for a while (Nicole Kidman didn’t look
that
bad, she thought—
I mean they obviously just wanted to include her
), then paged ahead to the ads for awful products that she would never buy. Still, she liked to imagine being the kind of person who was confident and carefree enough to order spandex corsets without worrying about people finding out.
Then the really meaty stories: the cheating boyfriends, pregnancy scandals, and drug addictions that were slowly being revealed in the lives of American starlets. These Elizabeth read thoroughly, no matter if she liked the person or not. The idea that many of these beautiful people were sliding toward disaster despite their money and their fame appealed to her.
“Gosh,
her
?” she said, studying a full-page photo of an aging actress who’d apparently gotten hooked on meth. Elizabeth’s laugh was cut short when she heard a noise from the outside room. The cavernous storage room here had originally been a cellar for the county offices before it was turned into the sleek modern facility for the processing of bodies. It was big and its ceiling was arched like a medieval wine cellar. Between the stone walls and the stainless steel equipment, sound traveled well.
Elizabeth stood up with uncertainty. It had been a low metallic sound, almost a screech. Her brow furrowed, and she came around the desk and walked to her door. She held the handle, her chin down, listening. Then she slowly pulled the door open.
The room was empty, just as she’d left it when she walked in this afternoon. She was the only one on duty today, besides
Jimmy Stearns and Claude, and they were out on a call. As Elizabeth stood in her open doorway, a metal echo vibrated in the air.
She listened. Nothing else. The echo slowly seemed to shrink away behind the tables—blue and glinting in the overhead lights. She frowned and dropped her eyes back to the page she’d been reading.
That sound again. Elizabeth Dyer made a face, placed the magazine down on its spread-out feature on the latest breakup of the 2010 Bachelor, got up from her desk chair, and strode toward her door.
“Jimmy?” she called out as she pulled it open. “Claude?” Jimmy Stearns was the mortuary assistant, along with his partner, Claude Roke. Even in Northam, with its cratered economy, Claude represented the last scrapings of the barrel. He was a slob and a drunk who owed his job to the fact that his great-uncle was a county commissioner, and one in favor of nepotism even for the grungiest of his relatives.
But Jimmy Stearns, tall, with sad blue eyes and a pathological shyness, she liked. He was considerate. And he did as he was told.
Claude and Jimmy had taken the van out on a run forty minutes ago, and Elizabeth didn’t expect them back for another half hour. She hadn’t heard the van pull up.
She yanked the door open. The room appeared to be normal. The metal shone blue in the emergency lighting that always kept the place half lit unless she hit the main switches. The body lockers were to the left, twenty of them, rarely all filled except during natural disasters or the last flu epidemic.
Then she noticed one of them was ajar.
From where she stood, Elizabeth could see an extra inch of black space between the locker door and the steel housing. Elizabeth began to walk over, the tapping of her feet echoing under the thick arched ceiling.
She came up to the locker. Number 12B. A faint exhalation
came from the one-inch gap between the opened door and the locker frame, air from the interior cooling system that kept the bodies from putrefying. The lockers were kept at a steady 35.6 degrees at all times, the smell of decomposition wafted away by the air purifiers connected to steel pipes running up the side of the building and venting above the roof. You rarely smelled death in the morgue, unless there was a body on the examining table. You could have twenty bodies in the lockers after a casino bus accident out on 95 and still have a very nice wine-and-cheese party in here. If she had anyone to invite, that is . . .
The lights above her flickered once, then again. She looked up and saw that one of the fluorescents in the fixture above her was dying. She’d have to get Jimmy to replace it. The blinking threw the tables and the saws and utensils into grotesque shadows, ballooning and then shrinking back. There was only one other light on, near the big stainless steel sinks next to her office door.
Elizabeth Dyer liked the dead,
preferred
them to most living people. But right now, she began to feel uneasy.
The light suddenly sputtered out and the shadows expanded. Elizabeth spotted something out of the corner of her eye, just over her shoulder. Her heart went cold. The air continued hissing out of the open locker; it was as if someone were standing behind her, moving along as she walked. She felt dread course through her, and her heart began to beat violently.
“Who’s there?” she said in a low voice.
The light flicked back to life, and Elizabeth turned, her hand rising up to push the thing away.
A black plastic coat hung on one of the poles next to the examination table.
Claude. She was going to ream him several new orifices. He was supposed to collect the examination coats at the end of each day, but this one he’d left hanging on its hook. The lazy bastard.
Her heartbeat slowly returned to normal.
But how did the locker get open?
She stared for a moment at 12B, the whisper of wind coming through the gap.
She was reaching to pull it open fully when she heard the van’s engine growling near the middle window. She looked up and saw a shadow fall across the glass, and then the engine cut and two male voices struck up a conversation.
They were back. Claude and Jimmy.
Their voices gave her a little jolt of adrenaline. Afraid in her own workplace? Seeing ghosts in the corners? She didn’t want them seeing her spooked. She shoved 12B completely shut, the
chunk
sound ringing in the room and hanging there.
Elizabeth strode back to her office and shut the door. She sat down at her desk and picked up
Us
magazine again. Despite her dim view of humanity, despite her loneliness and the fact that she had no friends who she could call and gossip about what Catherine Zeta-Jones was wearing—a green-and-black suit that she thought was
hideous
—she liked to save the beautiful pictures in the front of the magazine for last. It was like a little journey she took every week, from the public humiliations of the back pages through the ads for lonely people who sought salvation in a celebrity magazine, through the drug binges and sad dramas of the middle, until you finally stopped reading and just looked at gorgeous women splashing through the surf in St. Barts or the South of France.
Elizabeth Dyer liked to end there. Gave you some hope.
Jimmy Stearns, the morgue assistant, knocked sharply on Elizabeth Dyer’s door and watched a shape—warped by the frosted, uneven glass—rise from the desk.
Elizabeth pulled the door open.
“Everything okay?” Jimmy said.
“Yes, Jimmy. Thank you.”
“Claude heard a loud noise, like a door slamming.”
Elizabeth’s thin lips worked. “Everything’s fine,” she snapped. “Why don’t you tell Claude to worry about his duties? Like taking care of that coat.”
Jimmy followed the woman’s spindly finger and spotted the coat. “I’ll get it.”
“No, Jimmy, it’s Claude’s job. Please let him do it.”
“I’d rather just get it done,” he said quietly. “Anyway, we got the body from the old folks’ home. Dr. Hobart’s in the parking lot. He’s going to do the autopsy on Walter Prescott now. He asked if the body was ready.”