Northern Exposure

by Michael Kilian

  “I have to identify the body?”

  “That’s the idea, Mr. Showers. They’ll want you to confirm it’s her before they let you take it—her, I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s her, all right. They let me look through her personal effects. There wasn’t much, but there was a driver’s license. The lady in the ID photo is the same one as in the picture you gave me. No question. Only …”

  “Only what?”

  “Well, it’s her, man. And it’s a brand-new license. That’s what gives me the itch. She looks older in that ID photo, but not old enough. I mean, man, she doesn’t look anywhere near somebody almost forty years old. And with the kind of life she’s led, she ought to be showing a lot of miles.”

  “Felicity Stuart had very fine bones,” Showers said. “She had a very fine face. It doesn’t surprise me at all that she doesn’t look her years, that she is still beautiful.”

  None of them spoke another word until they were out of the mountains and finally in the oceanfront town of Santa Cruz. There was a slight breeze from off the water, but they were back in the heat. The sheriff’s office was a half-dozen blocks back from the town boardwalk, a big four-story building of California institutional style, hard by a creek called the San Lorenzo River. It housed courtrooms and the country morgue as well.

  After pulling into a parking space, Joyce killed the engine and started to get out.

  “No,” said Showers. “Please stay here. I’ll handle this.”

  “I’ve been dealing with these people, man. They’ve got some grim-faced fuzz in there.”

  “Mr. Joyce, I’ve dealt with police departments in a dozen countries. As for grim-faced fuzz, you ought to try the Emperor Bokassa’s police. Or Dr. Duvalier’s Ton Tons.” He touched Alixe’s bare shoulder. “Do you mind waiting?”

  “Whatever you wish, Toby,” she said.

  The policeman behind the counter was busy with some forms, and seemed unable or unwilling to quite comprehend what it was Showers was asking. Without looking up from his papers, he called to a sergeant sitting at a desk behind him.

  “My name is Dennis Showers. I called last night in the matter of Felicity Stuart. I’m a friend. She has no family any more. I’m here for her body, to take care of the funeral arrangements.” He took out his State Department ID and put it on the counter.

  The sergeant studied him a moment, glanced at the ID card, then reached for a clipboard, rummaging through some log sheets. “Right. Here’s your call. Okay, sir. Could you come this way?”

  “I understand there were some personal effects. Could I look at those please before, before … if there’s some chance it’s not her … I’d like to make sure before going into …”

  “Okay, sir. I’ll have to get them out of evidence records. You can wait in the lieutenant’s office here.”

  Showers felt imprisoned by the small chamber, oppressed by the institutional color of the walls, the grim efficiency of the furniture, the impersonality of the paperwork neatly arranged on the antispetically clean desk—crime, tragedy, and suffering dehumanized and quantified. He drummed his fingers on the desk top, careful not to touch any of the objects nearby.

  The sergeant entered with a thick manila envelope and shut the door behind him. He set it down squarely in front of Dennis and unwound the string that held fast the flap.

  “There was a private investigator in here yesterday looking at this,” he said.

  “My representative, a Mr. Joyce.”

  “He said he was on a missing persons case.”

  The sergeant completed his unwinding and then rested his hands.

  “Are you sure this could be the woman you’re looking for, sir? We made a thorough background check as part of the homicide investigation and, well, she doesn’t seem …”

  Showers looked at the name on the label on the envelope: “Stuart, Hope F.”

  “I think so. May I see the contents, please?”

  The sergeant’s hands remained motionless. He was wearing a large, masculine ring, perhaps a class ring. Policemen went to college in California.

  “He did us a favor, your man Joyce. There was another victim with the Stuart woman, a male white, named Guy Brown. We took his name off a social security card for the report, but then lost his effects. It turned out someone in evidence filed them behind hers in the ‘S’ drawer by mistake. We found them when we put hers back last night. He didn’t have much. That Social Security card, eighty dollars U.S. currency, a hotel key—some transient joint up in San Francisco. We sent a man up there this morning.”

  “May I see Miss Stuart’s effects, please.”

  The sergeant emptied the envelope carefully, straightening its plastic liner, displaying each item separately on the desk top. Then he leaned back and watched Showers examine them.

  Dennis showed interest in only two. The driver’s license was as Joyce described, recently issued, unquestionably hers. The photo shocked him. He had tormented himself trying to envision Felicity as she might look now. Here she was, staring out at him, her eyes and hair dark in the black-and-white print, her hair much longer and more unkempt than he had remembered, yet she was still striking, still as patrician. He held the license more closely. Joyce was right. She looked older than the girl he had last spoken to on the Braddock Wells village green, a fully adult woman, and yet, much too young, almost as young as Alixe Reston.

  The address on the license was in San Jose, on South Tenth Street, a neighborhood near the state university. He fingered the edge of the plastic. The lamination seemed unusually ragged, but then, he hadn’t seen a California driver’s license in years. Nothing about it appeared to have bothered the police.

  Next, he picked up a folded postcard. It was from Vancouver, a view of the English Bay beaches. There was no writing on it. He assumed she had bought it for herself.

  “Was there a ring?” Showers asked, glancing over the other items. “An old-fashioned ring, with a family crest?”

  The policeman ran his finger down the itemized list on the back of the envelope.

  “No, sir.”

  Showers sat back and took a deep breath. “I’m sure it’s her, Sergeant. I suppose we should attend to the rest of it now.”

  “It won’t take long, sir. There’ll be some papers to fill out afterwards.”

  “Of course.”

  As they moved along through the modern, polished corridors, Showers found his sensory perceptions intensifying. Their footsteps echoed. Doors seemed to close behind them with thundering slams. A far-off typewriter rattled like a machine gun. The sergeant’s voice snapped in Showers’ ear like the sound of crackling ice in sub-zero cold: He was being drawn away from all comfort and safety, away from the defenses of his mind, each step taking him deeper and deeper into some dangerous and terrifying place, beyond the reaches of any possible help or escape. He was bringing himself to a confrontation with death, with the actuality of death, the raw, ugly, and hopelessly irrevocable fact of death as it exists beyond the fancies of any philosophy or religion.

  But he must deal with it. He had found Felicity. He was at the end of the chase.

  He sought words, any words, to focus his thoughts less horribly, to carry him along. “I’m going to have her buried back in Westchester,” he said. “In New York State, where she was born.”

  “You’ll have to wait a couple of days before we can release the body. An autopsy’s been ordered on her.”

  “Is that necessary? The cause of death seems so apparent.”

  “This is a homicide. I don’t know why there’s been a delay. They did one on the man yesterday. I’m told he had a liver like a medicine ball.”

  “I don’t know anything about the man.”

  Showers knew about autopsies, the cranium sawed and removed like the top of a poached egg, the long zipperlike incision cut from chin to pelvis. He shuddered.

  They were at a door, a heavy gray door with a thick pane of glass. Showers could see an attendant in a
green scrub gown standing by a metal table on the other side. The sergeant put his hand on the handle, then paused.

  “Did your man Joyce tell you about the gunshot wounds?” he asked.

  “Only that they were severe.”

  “Her face looks like hamburger. Prepare yourself.”

  Anger and resentment mingled with Showers’ extreme nervousness. Why was this policeman being so brutal? Perhaps it was entirely well intentioned. Perhaps it was to help him to prepare.

  Showers stood shaking in the chill, closing his eyes as the attendant pulled out the long, heavy body drawer from its compartment in the wall. His memory gave him the image of Felicity in that long-ago autumn cornfield, and he wished it hadn’t. He opened his eyes just as the attendant pulled the green sheet back to the woman’s shoulders.

  He had feared he would gag, or cry, or even faint. To his surprise, he was in cold control of himself, the circuitry of his nervous system abruptly shut off. His body moved closer to the slab as though he were no part of it, as though he were a camera focused on the scene from a hundred miles away.

  The face was so thoroughly destroyed it lacked the humanness to induce horror.

  “I know this is difficult, sir. Look at the hairline, at the forehead, the ears, the chin, anything you might remember.”

  The hair was the same auburn, a little lighter than he had remembered, than was evident in the license photo, but the same fine texture. The chin was delicately pointed, as he remembered. The neck was long and slender, as it had been those many pleasant times when he had stroked it. The shoulders were feminine and trim, finely boned, as always.

  “I think that’s her.”

  There had been no ring in the personal affects. Felicity would have killed to keep that ring.

  “I’m pretty sure. It has to be her.”

  The strangely young face on the driver’s license. Felicity had never had a driver’s license when he knew her and she had said she never wanted one. Her father had died in an auto crash. She didn’t drive and never wanted to.

  “Yes. It’s her.”

  The driver’s license said she was five foot eight. Felicity was five foot six. He was precisely six inches taller than she.

  He turned, and then hesitated.

  “Okay,” said the police sergeant.

  Felicity Stuart. Hope F. Stuart. She hated the name Hope.

  “Wait!” Showers said. “I want to look again. Let me see the entire body.”

  The sergeant’s eyes made another quick study of Dennis Showers, stranger from Washington, D. C. Then he nodded to the attendant.

  There were needle marks on the arms, but Showers ignored those. He was drawn to the woman’s large breasts, the width of her hips and waist. There was no mole, no appendectomy scar.

  He looked away, feeling at once quite giddy. “I’m sorry. I was wrong.”

  “What?”

  “I was wrong. I’ve no idea who she might be or what has happened here, but that woman is not Felicity Stuart.”

  It was another twenty minutes before he escaped the police station and returned to the car and the mid-morning heat. Both Alixe and Joyce were standing out on the parking-lot pavement.

  “Let’s get away from here,” Showers said, opening the rear door of the car. “I want to go somewhere where I can think.”

  “Did you make the ID?” Joyce asked.

  “No.”

  “You were in there so long,” Alixe said. “Didn’t they let you see her?”

  “It’s not Felicity.”

  “Oh, Toby!”

  “There’s something terribly wrong here. And I guess terribly right. Felicity’s still alive. I mean, she may be alive. They have her driver’s license, but I think it’s a forgery. I’m very confused.”

  “I knew this was going to be a weird one,” Joyce said, starting the engine.

  “Take us back to the boardwalk,” Alixe said. “To that long pier.”

  Joyce, like a dutiful chauffeur, drove off in the desired direction.

  “They asked me a lot of questions,” Showers said. “After I told them it wasn’t Felicity. They asked about Felicity, where she might be, how long it had been since I saw her last. They didn’t seem very happy with my answers. They didn’t understand what we’re doing here.”

  “Man, I don’t understand what we’re doing here.”

  “I suppose it does sound crazy, to someone with a logical mind like a policeman.”

  “You should have just told them you read about the murder in the papers and came out for the body because you knew she had no next of kin.”

  “Perhaps, though I don’t see the need to add my own deceit to whatever is going on here.”

  “Mr. Showers, you sure do like to make things hard for yourself. They’ve got Murder One on their hands, a whole string of unsolved killings. Anything oddball is going to get them all excited, and this little expedition of ours is definitely oddball. I’m surprised they didn’t have you in there for another hour.”

  “They told me they might want to talk to me again. They asked where I was staying.”

  “Did you tell them?”

  “Of course. I said I’d be glad to help them any way I could, although I’d probably be leaving tomorrow.”

  “Will we be?” Alixe asked.

  “We could be back in Washington tonight, man.”

  “We could. I really don’t know what we should do. I don’t want to give this up now. Not yet. I feel as though we’ve crossed a threshold here, that we’re much closer to her. I want to find out why that woman was using Felicity’s name, using her identity. Damn it, I want to find Felicity!”

  Joyce pulled up next to the boardwalk. As it was a weekday morning, it was relatively uncrowded. They could hear carnival sounds further down the street.

  “You two take your stroll,” he said. “I’m going to go back to the cop house and see if I can find out what’s coming down.”

  “We’ll go out to the end of the pier,” Alixe said.

  The wharf ran a half mile into Monterey Bay. It was an elaborate commercial enterprise, lined with gift shops, souvenir stands, fish markets, charter boat booths, an aquarium, and a restaurant, with gulls wheeling incessantly overhead, chiding each other with calls of “scree, scree!” Showers and Alixe walked until the sound of the rolling, breaking surf was far behind them, until the carnival sounds were gone, yet the pier continued on. Auto traffic was permitted on it, and twice they had to move out of the way of a slowly passing vehicle. Each time she came quite close to him, their bodies touching. Finally, he put his arm around her, feeling at once ridiculously old and foolishly young. She leaned her head against his, and sighed, happily, the breeze teasing his face with her hair, filling his nostrils with the scent of her warm, clean body. His mind had shut out all thoughts of the police station and the grotesque minutes he had passed in it.

  With the sun high now, great sweeps of the bay and sea were bright with dancing, silver glitter. Showers steered Alixe to the side of the pier that looked onto the eastern shore of the bay, a horizon of thin yellow beach, gray cliff, and brown and green mountains. His arm left her shoulder, reluctantly, as he leaned forward over the wooden railing.

  “On the other side of that headland there is a little beach town called Capitola. It used to be quite delightful, a very European, south of France sort of place, for California. It couldn’t have changed very much. It’s set among the cliffs, and there wasn’t much room for it to grow.”

  “Tell me about her, Toby.”

  He was startled. “About who? Felicity?”

  “No. About the girl you were in love with here. The one who seems to have caused you so much pain.”

  He stared down at the water a moment, then said: “You’re uncomfortably perceptive.”

  “Did you want to marry her?”

  “I thought so at the time. I met her the first week I was at language school, at a party in Carmel. She was just a college girl, a senior at San Jose State, a
mid-sixties California sorority girl. White tennis shoes, very tan, very pretty. But much more than that. She was a loving, very caring person, a wonderfully gentle person, with a passion for animals, an extraordinary passion for animals. We came upon an accident involving a horse trailer one night. The police kept shooting the poor beast without killing it. She was hysterical for days.”

  A gull swooped near, turned slowing into the breeze, then dove away, skimming the ocean surface.

  “We were together constantly for all the six months I was here. Then I was posted to Africa, to the Congo. There was fighting there. I was wounded in an incident, and hospitalized. They gave me three months’ convalescent leave, and I spent it here. She had graduated by then, and was living in a little house in Pacific Grove, just across the bay. I stayed with her, without making love to her, although we came very close several times. I spent every day of that leave trying to persuade her to marry me. She didn’t even indulge me with the possibility of a maybe. She kept saying no, and, the week before I was to leave, took me down by the ocean and hugged me and looked up into my eyes and, as gently and kindly and fondly as humanly possible told me that she was not in love with me. She said she was very sorry about that and that it had made her cry, but it was so. She said she could not marry until she was in love.”

  “It occurred to me later that that wasn’t the reason. She was the quintessential Californian, don’t you know? This was her whole life. The only foreign land of any interest to her was Mexico, and the rest of the United States might as well not have existed. Marrying me would have meant traipsing all over the most forbidding reaches of the world, horrible, insecure, unprotected life for her. It would have meant Westchester. God, how Stephanie would have been unhappy in Westchester.”

  “You could have stayed here, Toby.”

  “Perhaps, but I had a great deal I needed to accomplish for myself, and I couldn’t do that here. And even married to Stephanie I probably would have been miserable. It wasn’t that she wasn’t bright; she was very intelligent. But she was Californian. She had no deep or complicated interests; only feelings. She was content just to sit in the sunshine. At the age of twenty-three she was happy playing with her kitten all day in the garden.”