No Body

by Nancy Pickard

  After a few unspeakable moments of comprehension, I raised myself to a sitting position. When I realized I was hunched over—knees pulled to my chin, arms crossed, hands clutching my own shoulders—I forced my body to unravel until I could sit cross-legged with my neck straight and my hands resting in my lap, as if, by forcing my muscles to unclench, I might convince my mind to relax, like a yogi on a bed of nails. I heard a scream begin to rise from the base of my throat and took a deep, shuddering breath to stop it.

  The smell, like a damp, foul coldness, frightened me. The thought of what I might touch if I reached out my hands repelled me even more. Did they put bodies into coffins before locking them in vaults? Surely they did. But how many bodies, and what happened to them when the coffins decayed around them? Was I surrounded by rotting wood, rotting flesh, skeletons whose knotty, pitted surfaces crawled with . . . ?

  “Stop that,” I said aloud, to quell the creeping panic.

  Cautiously, I stretched out my left arm—wincing at the pain the movement produced in my scraped, banged elbow—and made a semicircle with it in space. Nothing presented itself to my touch, although I felt as if I were stirring the thick, fetid air like a spoon through spoiled batter. I performed the same act with my other arm, again touching nothing. Whatever or whoever was in there with me was out of reach, at least. I breathed a little easier, if not more deeply, and tried not to think of things imaginary and real that might creep up to touch me in the dark.

  The darkness was total. It was a black as deep as permanence, a black as all-encompassing as pain, a black as thick as fear, a black like the darkness in a child’s room when the bulb in the night-light burns out, a black like the darkness in a widow’s heart the day her husband dies, a black like a black hole, sucking me down, down into it.

  “What if you were blind?” I said it aloud, again to staunch the bleeding wound of panic, but the sound of my own terror echoed down long-forgotten, haunted corridors in my brain. “If you were blind, it would always be dark like this.”

  No, said the voice of panic, if you were blind, you would sense changes of light, there wouldn’t be this absolute, final, locked-in, eternal . . .

  “Surely, some blind persons live in complete darkness,” I argued in a loud, shaking voice I hardly recognized as my own. “And it doesn’t frighten them. They’re used to it, it’s no big deal to them.”

  They aren’t locked in a tomb, the voice of panic whispered.

  “But what is a tomb but a small room with a door, and anyway, he said he’d be back for me . . .”

  And you believe him? The voice of panic scoffed. There is no reason to think he will ever let you out, no logical reason at all. Even if he intends to, he is too high on drugs to remember what he has done with you. He will forget. Or he will be in a traffic accident and be killed, and nobody will ever know you are in here, and you will the a horrible, agonizing death of thirst and pain and starvation . . .

  “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”

  You think it never really happens, the voice of panic said, growing shrill in my head, but think of those young girls they shut up in caves in the Himalayas as sacrifices to gods, think about the people who have fallen down wells and nobody has ever found, think about the miners who are caught in rock slides and slowly suffocate to death, think about people whose cars slide off into rivers and they are locked inside and the water comes in, and think about little kids who get shut up in old refrigerators, and think about people who are kidnapped and locked in closets and nobody finds them until it is too late, and think about what it feels like when their oxygen begins to deplete and how those Irish hunger strikers went blind from starvation, and think about how you have always been slightly claustrophobic, how you can’t stand to walk into meat lockers or bank vaults and you don’t like walk-in closets or saunas, and how you begin to get a fluttery feeling at the bottom of your intestines and you begin to breathe faster, faster, and . . .

  “Think of Francie!” I said.

  I began to crawl on my hands and knees toward the door. My left hand struck something soft; at my touch, a foul smell filled the air, as if I had pressed something that released hideous gases. I drew back with a horrified scream and almost lost it. But then my right hand struck something solid. I felt the bottom edge of the door. By crawling on my hands up the door, I was able to stand, to lean against it, to try the handle . . . a handle? That’s odd, I managed to think. . . . Why would there be a handle on the inside of a burial vault?

  The door, which was not locked after all, swung open.

  Quickly, I stepped clear of the door, out into the rain, then forced myself to turn around and look back. It wasn’t a burial vault at all: my “tomb” of horror was only the maintenance shed that was built to look like a vault. Within, I saw bags of fertilizer—undoubtedly, the source of the decaying, musty smell. One of those bags was the “horrible” soft thing I had touched. I also glimpsed a sleeping bag and other grubby evidence of the Jackal’s having taken up residence there for the past week.

  “Fool,” I pronounced.

  But I didn’t have time to feel humiliated.

  Instead, I took off running again, toward the funeral home, this time in my stocking feet, and thinking of Francie with every pounding step.

  36

  From the memorial park, I ran to the crematory that was behind the mortuary, near the parking garage for the limousines. When I reached the cremation chamber, I jerked at the door so violently that when it opened, a cloud of fine dust wafted out at me. I crimped my lips shut against the probability that the dust was human ash.

  Inside, there was a large gray furnace with a small, closed door at eye level. I opened the door and looked into the fiery chamber. Inside, a wood coffin was burning. I could only pray it didn’t contain anybody unscheduled. My fingers, when I lifted them from the door, came away with a thin, grayish white coating of ash. Shuddering, I blew on them, floating ash into the small room, then scraped my fingers roughly against my suit, like Lady Macbeth rubbing out the telltale spot of death. Feeling nauseated with dread and distaste, I abandoned the crematorium, letting its door slam behind me. The rain that rinsed my face felt coldly, promisingly alive.

  But it was with a growing and dreadful feeling of certainty about where to find Francie that I raced to the back door of the funeral home, this time heading for the delivery area where ambulances dropped off bodies, and where the morgue was located. If any door remained open, surely it would be this one.

  I pulled on it, feeling unutterable relief when it came open easily to my touch. The relief turned quickly to apprehension, however, as I realized how carefully I must proceed from that point on. If the door was still open, it meant somebody was still on the premises, and I didn’t know who, besides the Jackal, to be afraid of.

  Quietly, I stepped into the delivery area and closed the door behind me. Someone had left the lights on, so for once, I wasn’t fumbling in the dark. There were no living persons, besides me, in the delivery area—only a single coffin and a metal gurney with a body under a sheet. The murderer had almost succeeded in hiding Sylvia Davis’s body, forever, in a coffin. Mightn’t he try it one more time, figuring he would be luckier this time with Francie?

  Nearly sick with dread, I padded quickly over to the gurney, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind me. I held my breath and pulled back the sheet: a naked old man lay there. His whiskers stood out on his bloodless skin like creosote posts; his eyelashes curled down over his cheek like a baby’s. I re-covered him with the sheet and turned next to the coffin. It took a moment of studying to figure out how to unlock and open it, but finally I lifted the lid on its silent hinges: the coffin was empty.

  But there was a black phone on the wall beside it.

  Thank God. I reached for it to call the police.

  A sudden clattering crash from inside the morgue froze my breath in my mouth, my heart in my chest, and my hand on the receiver. Silence followed the crash, which had sounded like metal strik
ing the tile floor or wall.

  I withdrew my hand from the phone and walked silently toward the morgue door, then flattened myself against the wall beside it to wait and listen. But I heard nothing, only a silence full of bloody and terrifying apparitions. Everything horrible that I could imagine in those moments I did imagine; every nightmare I had ever feared took breath and lived behind that closed morgue door. An image of Francie’s face came to me—a gray face, slack and dead. And still, there was no further sound from behind the door.

  If whatever was in there didn’t come out soon, I would have to open that door and look inside. I counted five deep breaths, and then I slid my back along the wall toward the door and reached for the handle. I placed my hand on it, but before I could exert any pressure, it turned in my hand, shooting a lightning bolt of terror up my arm and into my brain. Somehow, I managed not to scream.

  I snaked my hand back to my chest, and waited.

  The door opened slowly; then Beryl Kamiski came out of the morgue, her head bent, walking like someone with an incalculable weight on her shoulders. Once through the door, she looked slowly to the left, then to the right, and saw me.

  “Oh, my God!” she screamed, obviously and equally startled out of her wits. Her hands flew to her heart, her mouth. “Oh, Jenny, oh, you scared me so. Oh, we have to call the police right now. Please, please help me. Jack Smith just tried to kill me. Please . . .”

  She staggered toward me, then turned away, then back, as if she were disoriented, confused, unable to know what to do next. Over and over, she moaned, “God, oh God, oh my God. Help me, help me. Oh my God.”

  I remained pasted to the wall at first, then I inched toward the door again until I could see inside. The Jackal lay on the white tile floor beside an overturned gurney. His arms and legs were spread-eagled, and a silver embalming needle stuck out of the middle of his chest. A river of red ran from his heart, over the white tile, into a drain in the floor.

  “You killed him,” I said, dumbfounded.

  “Oh God.” She moaned. “He was high on something, and crazy, and he was going to kill me, I don’t know why. I think he killed poor Sylvia, and Muriel. Please, help me. Call the police, Jenny, please do it.”

  I stared at her.

  “Why, Beryl?”

  “Why?” She looked stupefied. “Because he’s dead, Jenny, can’t you see? Because we have to tell them he killed poor Sylvia and Muriel.”

  “No, I mean, why was he going to kill you, Beryl?”

  “Because he was crazy!” She gaped at me as if I were the crazy one. “What’s the matter with you? Somebody just tried to kill me and you stand there asking questions. Please, Jenny, call the police.”

  I backed over to the black phone and picked up the receiver. Its severed cord dangled uselessly from my hand. It would not have done me much good, a few minutes earlier, anyway.

  “Look, look what he did,” she moaned.

  In order to find a working telephone, I would have to leave her alone.

  “All right.” I hung up the broken phone and walked toward her. “Come with me.”

  “No!” She screamed it as if in a panic, then said more quietly, “I have to sit down, I simply have to.”

  She wanted me to leave her there, I thought. Why? Suddenly, a memory of Muriel Rudolph’s body came to my mind; I saw her clearly, in her bathrobe—which a woman might have left on, rather than change, if her early-morning surprise visitor was . . . another woman. And what was it the Jackal had said to me? . . . Something about getting some money together so we could leave?

  I was stunned by a sudden avalanche of understanding.

  “He tried to blackmail you, too, didn’t he?”

  She had turned away from me to walk toward a bench on the far side of the delivery area, but now she turned back around to face me. “What did you say, Jenny?”

  “The Jackal tried to blackmail you, too, and so you killed him.” My words came out slowly, but with increasing firmness, as I sorted them into order, as hesitancy evolved into conviction. “It was you who handled John Rudolph’s prearrangement plan. Sylvia told the Jackal about the differences between the way Rudolph’s funeral was supposed to be and how it really was, didn’t she? They were pals, she told him lots of juicy things. And he figured it out, maybe when Muriel died? He’s been living here on the grounds all week, and tonight, he saw your car still in the parking lot, and he saw his chance to comer you. He tried to blackmail you over the murders, didn’t he? And he was going to take the money and come back for me, and . . .”

  “You’re crazy, too,” she said, wide-eyed.

  “You might have paid him,” I surmised, “but it takes a lot of money to live the good life you love, and to buy pretty cars for your pretty boy. As you said, sometimes it’s hard to keep them happy, isn’t it? He’s lazy, Beryl, too lazy to be a good enough salesperson to dress the way he does, to drive the car he does. When did you finally decide to kill Sylvia? When she called you from his house, when you thought he’d slept with her?”

  “You’re out of your mind.” She was shaking her head, as if in wonder at my stupidity, but at the same time, she was taking small, casually slow steps in my direction. I backed closer to the morgue door. When I had hung up the phone I had relinquished my only weapon. But I had figured out a way to get my hands on another one . . . if only my timing was better than it had been thus far this day.

  “Where’s Francie?” I asked her.

  This time she didn’t bother to reply but just kept coming toward me. I let her seem to force me backward into the morgue. Just inside the door, she reached over to a table and picked up a length of rubber tubing which she drew taut in her fists. Still, she kept coming, and I kept backing, until I felt the Jackal’s body against the heels of my feet. I didn’t try to suppress the shudder that ran visibly over my face and body, leaving it to her to interpret it as a shiver of fear.

  She smiled, and said easily, conversationally:

  “John was always bragging to Sylvia about the fine funeral he was going to have one day.” She approached to within a couple of feet of me. “That’s how she knew. But when she asked me about it, after he died, I said, don’t worry about it, honey, I’ll take care of it. But I knew eventually she’d tell Spitt, she was so damned conscientious.” The cunning, knowing smile abruptly vanished, turned into a sneer, the warm, vibrant voice turned whiny, in cruel imitation. “At the party, she was crying to me about how much she missed him, about how she didn’t get to say good-bye to him, and she was crying about how he was even going to be buried in the wrong coffin, and why hadn’t I fixed that, like I said I would? And then she calls me from Russell’s, from Russell’s!—and she’s crying on my shoulder like she always did, whining about how nobody loves her, and how much she misses John, and I say, let’s go to the funeral home, honey, let’s say us a private little good-bye to John. And while she’s standing there looking at him, I came up behind her, and I said, “Good-bye, honey . . .”

  I ducked, a split second before she lunged at me. I jerked the trocar out of the Jackal’s chest, but then my feet, in their torn, wet stockings, slipped on the bloody floor, and I fell on my back on top of his body. Beryl lunged down at me, aiming the rubber tubing for my exposed throat. With all the strength I could manage from that position, I swung the trocar at her like a baseball bat.

  It cracked solidly against her skull.

  Her eyes rolled back in her head, the tubing fell onto my face, and she collapsed, falling on me, too, pinning me between her body and the Jackal’s.

  I worked myself free from their embrace, hoping I hadn’t killed her. She would never have told me where Francie was, but maybe she would tell the police.

  Once I had regained my feet, I started to leave the morgue to find a phone. It was then that I noticed the single bronze coffin at the back of the morgue.

  I ran to it and unsealed it: there was Francie inside.

  Like Beryl, she had been struck on the head; like Beryl’s, h
er eyes were closed, but she was still breathing. I had guessed right about that much: Beryl had stored her in an empty coffin until it was safe to come back to kill her, which she might have done if the Jackal, and then I, hadn’t interrupted her.

  As gently as possible, I dragged Francie out of the coffin. I didn’t give a damn about tampering with evidence. Once I got her laid out on the floor, I closed the coffin again. If the cops asked me—if Geof asked me—I would tell them that’s where I found her, on the floor. With any luck, my mother’s old friend would never have to know in what horrible place she had spent an hour of her life, and she would never have to suffer terrible nightmares of being locked in a small, dark, smothering vault. I covered her with a sheet to keep her warm, then kissed her forehead.

  Before I left the morgue, I removed my panty hose, twisted them into a tight, wet rope, and used them to bind Beryl Kaminski’s hands to her feet.