In that room laid the body of a dead child she had inexplicably dreamed she killed. Beyond anything else Adele knew she didn’t want to go into that room or see that child.
But she also knew she had no choice.
She absently brushed away the indistinguishable voices that instantly buzzed in her ear like a swarm of gnats. It was a legion of familiar ghosts that always seemed to follow her wherever she went, so much so their intrusion was more bothersome than worrisome. Instead she turned her focus toward the end of the hall where the other janitor turned out of sight, giving Adele a golden opportunity to explore what lay beyond the door she was inching cautiously towards in spite of herself.
With a deep breath she pushed the door open. Even the air inside the room was as still and cold as death, which was appropriate, but it wasn’t making her job any easier. Death and mortality were topics best shoved under a rug somewhere, a distant reality that wouldn’t come any sooner or any slower with any examination. Like many, Adele couldn’t stand cemeteries, she couldn’t deal with funerals; she just hated the finality of it all. It was a ticking clock that just got louder whenever she had to think about it – and thanks to this new case that was all she could think about.
No wonder she couldn’t sleep.
She gulped hard as she shut the door behind her, eyeballing the endless vaults on the other end of the room. She squared her shoulders and headed toward the two vaults that had name tags.
She stopped short when she read “Maldonado” on the outside of one of the vaults. She fought back the images flashing through her mind – the forest floor, the dead dog, the frightened child. Surely she was just imagining things. Surely it hadn’t been more than just coincidence. Surely Dr. Ashcroft was right and she was just taking her work home with her.
Surely, she reiterated to herself as she tried to gulp down her rising apprehension.
Her shaking hands clasped the handle of the drawer and it slid slowly out in front of her. The light from the other room glinted off of the metal slab. The covered body on it seemed so small, too small.
Adele eased down the dark cloth, revealing all that remained of Lily Maldonado. Her hair was dark and leaves and residual sprigs still poked from her scalp. Adele fought the urge to pick them out, and forced herself instead to look at the child’s face. Her shaking fingers angled her phone to capture a picture, cataloging yet another piece of the puzzle.
Lily’s skin was so pale, almost incandescent. Adele instantly recognized the hue; she’d seen it in herself through her lifelong battle of anemia. Only this was worse. There were no fluids left in this girl. Adele’s brow knit as she tried to remember the file. Had she been embalmed? Was there an autopsy already?
Adele stared so intently into Lily’s face that she couldn’t help herself but move closer to the drawer. Was this the face from her dreams? Had she even seen the face in her dreams? It was all so fuzzy now. She closed her eyes and tried to recapture the details of her nightmare. It had seemed so real just the night before. With time, as always, it had become a jumble of broken fragments, like the jagged edges of shattered mirrors. Only disjointed bits and pieces remained. With a frustrated sigh Adele opened her eyes to stare back into the face of the dead child.
Her phone clattered to the floor as she gasped out loud. Lily’s eyes were open, and they now stared into hers. A scream lodged somewhere in Adele’s throat as the tiny bones in Lily’s neck cracked when she turned inexplicably toward Adele, revealing the gaping wound on the other side of her neck.
“They’re coming for me,” croaked the tiny lifeless body, as if pleased or comforted by the idea.
Adele stumbled backward, moving right over the handle of the other vault causing it to pop open. Metal screeched against metal, sliding open the drawer with another covered body. Adele lost her footing and fell face first toward the rigid, cold corpse. She could have sworn she heard the little girl laugh from the other drawer. With a strangled cry Adele scrambled toward the door without looking back.
She didn’t stop running until she exploded through the front door of the building and hit the night air. Her hair spilled around her shoulders as she ripped off her cap and turned and stared back up at the building, specifically the darkened windows on the second floor.
She reached into her pocket for her phone, and then realized too late it was still on the floor up in the examination room. She cursed under her breath. As much as she wanted to run as far as she could get, she knew she couldn’t leave the phone. Her shaking hands stuffed her hair back under her cap rather unsuccessfully before she headed back into the building.
She thought her heart would beat a hole in her chest as she rounded the corner to the examination room. Shadows danced in the darkness and played tricks on her eyes, which were already primed to see things she couldn’t explain, like a talking dead child. With another cautious glance each way she hit the light, and sucked in a breath at what she saw.
The doors to both vaults were closed, and her phone was nowhere to be found.
Had she already been found out?
Or had the little girl snagged her phone before she slid back into the dark recesses of her vault?
Adele shook her head. That was crazy. And she knew crazy.
With an audible gulp, Adele reached for the handle. If she had remembered any prayers from her childhood, she might have thought to recite them. But her mind was churning with one frightening scenario after the other as she pulled open the vault once more.
Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw.
The slab was empty.
She would have checked the vault again to see if Lily’s name was still on the outside, but one piece of evidence lay upon the formless blanket to prove that she had the right chamber.
It was her phone, in exactly the same spot the dead child once laid.
Her legs shook so badly she felt like they would buckle underneath her as she grabbed her phone. The minute she powered it on, the photo came to rest on a very still, very dead little girl whose eyes were definitely closed.
Adele shook her head again, trying to rid the images from her mind. Had someone been messing with her? Or had she hallucinated the whole thing? Both seemed as reasonable a theory as any to why Lily was now gone.
Dead children don’t just get up and walk away, even if they do try to hold a conversation with the closest lunatic who happened to be standing nearby.
Adele punched the speed dial button on the phone and held it to her ear, trying to ignore how badly her hand was shaking.
“I need you to page Dr. Ashcroft.” A pause. “Yes, I know it’s midnight. It’s an emergency.” Another pause. Adele grew impatient. “Just tell him it’s Adele Lumas. Lumas!” she snapped. Her teeth chattered so badly she had to clinch her jaw tight to spell out her name. “Tell him I’ve had another episode.”
As she held on the line she closed the vault with a slam, and made a hasty retreat from the building.
Rain misted down on the Church of the Holy Sacrament that dreary fall morning that followed Adele’s harrowing, and understandably sleepless, night. The sky was positively gray, as if the sun itself could not face their sad gathering. Adele stood on the steps, oblivious to the rain, reluctant to go in behind a steady stream of downtrodden mourners. No day was as sad as the one where one must bid a final farewell to a child. Adele wouldn’t have come at all had her questions not been met with more questions. It was no longer just business. The dreams had made it all too personal. Now she had to know.
It drove her to attend this funeral, just the like funeral before that, and the others before that. Her feet carried her in, but as usual her resolve carried her on.
She slipped into the back pew unnoticed just in time to see the young, grief-stricken mother, Marisol Maldonado, crumple before a full canvas photo of Lily that stood at the foot of the altar. The child looked so full of life it was hard to find any similarity between that child and the one that lay on the slab at the morgue. The wail
of a devastation resonated through the large sanctuary and danced all over Adele’s already frayed nerves.
Another woman, who looked like so many of the older gypsies of the town, instantly knelt at Marisol’s side. Adele wiped a tear away as Father Michael Pierce took the podium. He wore his twenty-five years well underneath the ornate white vestment that he had once told her represented the hope of resurrection for the dead. It was a message of hope, but when his dark eyes scanned the crowd, lighting briefly on her face, he looked as helpless as she felt.
“What can you say to a mother who has lost her child?” he began as he glanced toward Marisol. His deep, rich voice was soothing, like a blanket chasing the chill of sadness away. “You can say ‘I’m sorry,’ but the words fall short of what you want to say. You want to say that it’s all a bad dream.”
Adele gave an absent nod. It should have all been a very bad dream and nothing else. Nothing like this.
Michael’s voice cracked with emotion. “What do you say to the person staring back to you from the mirror as he grapples with the kind of contradictions that arise in one’s faith? That no loving God could allow the death of a child, nor condemn a parent to the living hell that follows.”
He paused as his gaze lit upon the parishioners one by one. “But it is not God’s love or lack thereof that suggests in any way we are spared from the harsh realities of life. Rather, we are given something far more precious. We’re given the assurance of faith – faith that love lives on. That death is not the end of things, but yet a new beginning to something so much greater than any of us can imagine.”
Adele could bear it no longer. She slipped out of the pew and quickly through the door, nearly mowing down a man with long, wild hair in the process. Both she and the latecomer stared at each other for a moment, before she finally brushed past him to get out of the sanctuary that had become far too claustrophobic – as it always had been.
Once outside she gulped the fresh air, as if to push the nameless and persistent sorrow way far down in a place she’d locked away a long time ago, determined never to revisit. It seemed a never-ending battle. She leaned back up against the stone exterior of the huge church and gasped for breath. Something on the street caught her eye. It was the hearse, and in the back sat a tiny black coffin.
Without any conscious thought, Adele walked directly to the sleek black car that crouched at the curb. The driver barely tossed her a glance because he was far too absorbed in a book. Adele used the distraction to her favor and sneaked around to the back. A praying woman would have prayed here, but Adele was far more interested in why the coffin sat out here rather than in the church in front of hundreds of mourners who had clearly loved her.
Was the pain too much for the poor family to bear? Or was this coffin as empty as the mortuary slab from the night before? This was a question that suddenly required an answer, and there was only one way to do it.
She opened the door.
The voices returned to whisper in her ear, the same familiar voices that had haunted Adele her entire life. She ignored them as she always had and moved closer in to find out how to unlatch the lid. The voices grew louder, tired of being ignored, and this time it grated on Adele’s seriously strung-out nerves. Adele tried to ignore the clamor, leaning closer and closer to the hard cold box. Just as her hand touched the lid, a bony hand grabbed her elbow and wrenched her back.
For a moment, and she didn’t know why, she thought it was the long haired stranger from the church who had grabbed her.
“What are you doing?” hissed the old gypsy woman from the funeral. Her black eyes burned holes into Adele’s startled face.
“I was just going to…” Adele trailed off. What was she just going to do? Just going to make sure the girl was really inside the coffin? That she was really dead, not sitting up and talking? Even a crazy old gypsy woman wouldn’t buy that.
“I was just going to say goodbye.”
The old gypsy eyed Adele head to foot. “The people who want to say goodbye are in the church. Them I know. You, I do not.”
“My name is Adele Lumas,” Adele began, but the gypsy was quick to cut her off.
“I may not know who you are but I know what you are.” The gypsy released her elbow and shut the door. “The girl was alive and is now dead. There is no story here.”
If only it were that simple. “She was murdered,” Adele stated unnecessarily. “If the parents would just talk to me maybe we could prevent it from happening again.”
“Only one person can stop it,” the gypsy responded and slammed the door of the hearse shut, “when the time is right.” With that she turned on her heel and stalked away, just in time to blend with the other mourners who emerged from the church.
Adele stood helplessly on the sidelines.
A little later Adele opened the confessional booth, stepped inside, and knelt down.
The window slid open. “You stayed longer this time,” Father Michael chuckled. “Keep that up and people will start to think you’ve converted.”
“You know me better than that,” she smiled. No truer words could be spoken. No one knew her like Michael Pierce. He knew her favorite guilty pleasure was a Doris Day movie marathon on a rainy afternoon. He knew that she didn’t like chocolate unless it was dark chocolate with dried fruit and nuts, specifically walnuts and blueberries.
He knew that she took her coffee so strong and black it better resembled sludge. He knew her favorite color was purple and she hummed old Carpenters songs when she was stressed. In fact there was only one thing about her he didn’t know, and she had no intention telling him. Not now. Not ever.
“Did you find out what you wanted to know, Addie?” he queried softly, his warm, deep voice familiar and comforting, like a favorite old pair of slippers.
“As usual a church leaves me with more questions than answers. Like why Lily wasn’t even brought into the sanctuary.”
Michael stiffened as he looked away, which was her first clue that he was hiding something. “It was the family’s decision, Addie. Sometimes it happens.”
“Seems bizarre,” she answered back. “No public viewing, no open casket – those things I can understand. But simply not bringing the body into a church? Doesn’t make sense. What could have happened to their child that would make a devout religious family do something like that?”
“Nice try, Addie.” She wasn’t above using their friendship to make her story. The frustrating part was he was above letting her.
She gave him a half-hearted grin. “Can’t blame a girl for trying. Occupational hazard.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Is there more to it than that?”
“No,” she was quick to answer. Much too quick. “What would there be?”
He didn’t answer and neither did she. It was all he needed to know.
Michael Pierce thought about her the rest of the evening. But that wasn’t unusual. She had been on his mind since he met her in school over fifteen years before.
It was PE class in the fifth grade. They were performing some fitness test and he could tell the pale, striking girl next to him was in trouble as they took off to run the requisite mile.
She was highly unusual, with a streak of white hair dancing down the middle of her pitch black hair. Over the years it would just get worse, back then it just looked like someone had taken a piece of chalk and divided the hair on her scalp into a perfect part.
As they reached the far end of the track he saw her waver a bit and then collapse to her knees. Even though he knew he could beat the record if he ran back and left her behind, something in him just couldn’t do it. She looked helpless as she knelt there, her standard PE uniform clinging uncomfortably to her lingering baby pudge. She ducked her head so that her long hair covered the mortified flush in her cheeks. It touched his heart. So he trotted back. He knelt beside her, she put an arm around his shoulders and they walked the rest of the way together, coming in dead last.
If pressed, Michael would adm
it he fell in love with her that day. He was blown away by her contradictory nature – how she leaned against him for strength and yet he felt how powerful she really was as she struggled for each step with her head held high. She looked at him with such faith and yet so much fear that it took his breath away. Her eyes were much darker then and even as a mere boy he knew he could have stared into them forever.
At the time he knew she was the most unusual person he'd ever met. It would take many years later for him to realize that it had been love at first sight, but unfortunately he made this observation just a little too late. By the time they were teens she’d gone to an emotional place he could never quite follow.
When it became painfully clear they would never have a future together, Michael turned to the church for comfort and sanctuary. Soon it became his calling. If he couldn’t have the woman he loved, he’d instead spend his life in the service of others, safely preserved by the altar in case she ever changed her mind. His commitment to the priesthood was his mother’s dying wish, and he was happy he could give her that before she passed away and left him orphaned at the beginning of his adulthood.
Ironically, as he rose to prominence within the church Adele allowed herself to get closer to him. In fact, in the last decade he had become the closest person to her. Their friendship had solidified in ways that made them more than friends, but just shy of lovers. He spent every day since the age of 15 praying for the serenity to accept it. She may not have loved him the way he wanted her to, but he knew she loved him the only way she knew how.
Yet on this night, just like every night of his adult life, he couldn’t help but think of her as he snuggled under his covers. He wondered what she was doing at that moment, and why they couldn’t be doing it together. He thought of those violet eyes, that stark hair… her full curves he had only enjoyed courtesy of chaste hugs spaced much too far apart for his liking. He wanted to touch her every day, the simple reassurance that she was real, and in a very important way she belonged only to him.
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