by Callie Hart
I don’t feel guilty. I didn’t stick my fingers down my throat this time. It didn’t happen because I wanted to take control of the situation. It happened because the very prospect of having to see him again terrified me half to death. I’m shaking as I start walking. The county morgue is a good twenty-minute drive away from the center of Port Royal, but somehow the minutes and the miles sweep by without my notice and I eventually find myself back on Main Street.
I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know what I’m doing. I carry on walking until I find myself standing outside Willoughby’s, the hardware store Callan used to work at a very long time ago. Shane’s family used to run the place; I’m sure they still do. I head inside, not sure what I plan on accomplishing by seeing Shane after last night’s performance. I find him leaning against the counter, his forehead propped up against the support beam directly next to it. His eyes are closed, and for all the world it looks like he’s asleep.
I suddenly feel very silly. I shouldn’t be here. I should be at the morgue, screaming at UFO Girl until she agrees to release Malcolm’s body. I should be doing something about the fact that I need to get out of this godforsaken town. I’m about to turn around and walk out of the store when Shane opens his eyes and smiles at me, as if my presence was only to be expected.
“S’up, Cora,” he says. “I had this strange feeling I was gonna see you today.”
“You did?”
“Uhuh. Callan was on the phone first thing, freaking out because you vanished on him, and I thought, yeah. She’ll find her way over here at some point. No doubt about it.”
“He told you I went over there last night?”
Shane nods sagely.
“Damn, I hate him.”
“That’s the biggest lie I’ve ever heard come out of our mouth, girl. And I’ve heard you tell some whoppers.”
Years ago I might have been affronted, might have asked him what the hell he meant by that, but so much time has passed now that the lies I used to tell about why I had to be home every evening, why I couldn’t come to parties, about where the odd bruise came from…none of that seems to be relevant anymore, like the amount of time that has passed since I told them has made it all okay. I take his comment in stride.
“What did he say?” I ask.
Shane shoves away from his leaning perch, giving me an amused look. “You want to know what a guy said about you breaking into his house in the middle of the night and making yourself comfortable in his bed?”
“He didn’t give you details,” I say. “He would never do that. I mean about the vanishing part.”
“He was pissed.”
“Good.”
“And he said he was going to hunt you down today and kidnap you. And that he was going to force you to listen to him until all of this bullshit was sorted out.”
“It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”
Shane smirks. “You tell me. You guys looked like you wanted to claw each other’s faces off back at Friday’s, but from the sounds of things, the two of you were a little more accommodating in the wee hours of the morning.”
I chose to ignore that barb, too. “I was blindsided. And drunk. And sad. This place…how the hell have you stayed here for so long, Shane?”
Shane sighs. “I had a blast here when I was a kid. I spent the best years of my life jumping into creeks. Catching bull frogs. Climbing trees. I met the love of my life here. I got married here. I own my own business here. I’m about to have my first kid here. Why would I ever wanna leave?”
When he puts it like that, it makes me sound mad for ever wanting to run away. It’s wild how a roll of the dice and sheer luck can give you a totally different experience in life. It happens all the time. People are born in countries without basic human rights, oppressed, starving and murdered in their thousands under the cover of darkness, while others are born in Beverley Hills, spoiled beyond measure, knowing only excess and opportunity. In the microcosm that is Port Royal, being born two streets away from me meant that Shane had the most idyllic childhood possible. Meanwhile, I lost my mother, the woman who took her place, the guy I loved, my innocence and the larger part of everything good inside me.
Shane looks sorry for me. “You know…we were just kids, but you could have told me. You could have told any of us. You didn’t need to go through any of that stuff with your father on your own.”
I look back now and I know that he’s right. It was sheer madness that I didn’t confide in someone, but long-term abuse does strange things to the mind. Especially young, impressionable minds, who have only ever known that abuse. I nod, looking down at my shoes. I don’t even know what to say to that—anything I might tell him is completely pointless now, years after the fact.
“They won’t release his body,” I say. “Not until I ID him. And I can’t go home until I’ve buried him.”
“Why not? If you’re really this unhappy, you should just leave him in that cabinet in the morgue.” Shane brushes his hair back out of his face, deep lines forming on his forehead. “It’s not as if they’ll keep him there forever, Coralie. They’ll have to put him in the ground at some point.”
“If I don’t make sure he gets the funeral he wants, I don’t get my mother’s things,” I say tiredly. “He would never let me have them when I was younger. I wasn’t allowed to see them, touch them, go through them. Of all the mind games he would play, he knew that one hurt me the most. And he’s still playing it now, even after he’s dead. Still trying to control me, force me to do what he wants, bend me to his will.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. So…I have to decide whether I want Mom’s things, or if I want to forego the trauma of identifying his body.”
“Forgive me for saying so, but haven’t you lived without your momma’s things for the past twenty years, Cora? Would it be so bad if you never got them back?”
He has a valid point. “It’s not even about her things any more. They’re just books. Shoes. Dresses. Things I don’t need to survive. But if I let him win this, how do I survive that? There won’t be a round two somewhere later on down the track. There won’t be another time for me to stand up to him. He’ll be nothing more than a corpse, rotting in the ground, and I’ll be stuck with the knowledge that I let him get the better of me one last time.”
Shane walks around the counter and places his arm over my shoulders. “Then it seems to me you know exactly what you need to do,” he says.
“Yeah. Perhaps. But not today, though. I just don’t have it in me.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CALLAN
Patience
NOW
I am not a patient man. I don’t like waiting for things, never have, and yet I’ve been waiting for Coralie for well over half my adult life. I watch her walk out of Willoughby’s, head bowed low, eyes fixed on the sidewalk in front of her, and I have to fight to remain patient a little while longer. Running across the street to talk to her, to simply have her look me in the eye, to be close to me, is all well and good. But what will it accomplish?
She obviously panicked this morning. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have upped and left before I woke up. It would be ill advised on my part if I started chasing her around the streets of Port Royal at this juncture, when she needs some space to process. I let her go. The whole time she walks away, I’m itching inside, unnerved by the prospect that she could just get on a plane back to LA at any moment, and I’ll be right back where I started, miles away from her and still turned inside out because of it.
Shane comes out of Willoughby’s not long after Coralie’s figure has disappeared from view. He makes a direct beeline for me—unlike Coralie, he must have seen me leaning against the huge live oak we used to scramble up when we were kids.
“All you need is a trench coat and a pair of binoculars and you’ll really have the look down pat,” he tells me.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re really channeling your i
nner stalker right now. That’s what that means.” Shane hands me a beer, and then takes a deep pull from his own bottle. I’ve forgotten what it’s like here, commonplace for people to stand on street corners, gossiping while they get slowly drunker and drunker. I take a swig, staring off into the distance, a carbon copy of Shane.
He squints at me out of the corner of his eye. “If Coralie’s dad hid her mom’s stuff from her, where do you think that stuff might be right now?” he asks.
“I have no clue. How’s he gonna give it back to her? He’s dead.”
“Well, his lawyer would tell her where it was, right?”
“Yeah.” I think about this. “Then surely the lawyer would have it, right?”
Shane nods. Drinks his beer. “I’m gonna close the store for the afternoon. I think we should go pay Ezra Mendel a visit.
******
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that with you, gentlemen. I’m sorry, but I’m only here to ensure the wishes of my client are carried out.” Ezra’s got this look in his eye. He knows Shane and I are probably not the types of guy to vacate his pokey little office with that kind of a response. Shane’s a fucking teddy bear, but he’s also a pretty decent actor. He played Peter Pan in the school production three years in a row because every other kid at Port Royal High was terrible. Right now, he looks like a villain out of a Guy Ritchie movie.
I’m the one that steps up, though. “Your client is dead, Ezra. We’re standing in front of you, very much alive, very pissed off, asking for you to do us a favor. Why don’t you just do us a solid and give us what we want.”
Ezra wags a finger at me, a nervous smile playing over his face. “You can’t just threaten me, gentlemen. I know how both of you are. As soon as you leave here, I’ll be calling the sheriff, you can count on that.”
I turn to Shane, feigning confusion. “I don’t get it. He keeps calling us gentlemen. I’ve never been accused of that before. Have you?”
Shane shakes his head. “Nope. Psycho maybe. Lunatic. Never gentleman, though.”
I swung by the house and collected the baseball bat before we headed over to Mendel’s law firm, and the old guy is eyeing it now like it’s a coiled snake, ready to strike. In fairness to him, I am spinning it over in my hands like I’m considering using it any second now. “Oh, don’t mind me. I was just saying to my friend here how it would be a lot of fun to go smash a few balls. After we’re done here, of course.” I look down at his crotch, making sure he knows exactly which balls I’m referring to, though. Ezra glances at the phone on his desk, panic written all over his face, but Shane and me are a wall of muscle standing between him and his lifeline. There’s no way he’s making any calls without going through us first, and, well…that’s just not happening.
“I would be breaking so many laws if I gave you Mr. Taylor’s possessions without his permission,” Ezra says. “I don’t have the right to do that.”
“And Mr. Taylor didn’t have the right to physically abuse his daughter for seventeen years. Not much to be done about that now, though, is there? I’d say the redistribution of a few boxes of clothes is fair turnaround, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know where you heard that, Mr. Cross, but—”
“Callan. Call me Callan. We’re all friends here, right?” I slap the bat against my palm.
“Yes, of course. Callan. I knew Malcolm Taylor for a number of years. I assure you, while he may have been a fairly stern man, I really don’t think he would have raised a hand to his daught—”
I can’t even bear to hear him finish his sentence. I raise the bat above my head and bring it crashing down onto his desk. The room is filled with the sound of splintering wood and cracking plastic. Feels like my blood is thumping through my veins, too much pressure in my head as I try and calm myself down. “If you know what’s good for you,” I grit out, “you won’t say another word about Malcolm Taylor. Now where the fuck are Coralie’s things?”
Ezra Mendel swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing wildly in his throat. Shane laughs under his breath, eyes wide, like he can’t believe what I’ve just done. “Jesus Christ, Cal,” he whispers.
“I’m about to really lose my shit, Ezra. Willful destruction of property isn’t really something I care about on my rap sheet. At this point I probably don’t care about assault chargers either. Am I making myself clear?”
Ezra stumbles over his own feet as he sidesteps around us, fumbling the top drawer of his desk. “Yes. Yeah, of course. Here. Here, take this.” He holds out a key to Shane, flinching as far away from me as humanly possible in the process. “There’s a lock up downstairs. The boxes are labeled.”
“Thank you, Ezra. That wasn’t so hard now, was it?” We leave him there, hugging the wall, white as a sheet.
Shane shoves me in the shoulder as I open the lock up down on street level. “You know he’s serious about calling the cops,” he says.
“He’s not calling anybody. His pride won’t let him.” Inside the lock up, we find what we’re looking for and load the boxes into Shane’s pick up. “You mind stopping at the county morgue on the way back?” I ask. Shane pauses, giving me a wary look.
“Why? You can’t go smashing up the morgue, Callan. That’s a government building. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to smash anything else. I’m just gonna have a quiet word with them.”
“Fuck.” Shane looks like he’s about to have a nervous breakdown. “You know, if you get me arrested, Tina is going to castrate you. And then she’s going to castrate me, and I like my junk, man.”
“The thought had occurred to me, yes. I promise, no one is getting arrested.”
Despite that I leave Shane in the car at the morgue. If these guys don’t give me what I want, I might be tempted to cause a scene after all, and I really don’t want to excite the wrath of his pregnant wife. Threatening people with baseball bats and shouting at morgue clerks was not how I envisioned today going when I woke up earlier, blissed out as fuck, still thinking that Coralie was in bed beside me. As I push open the door to the morgue, a stunned looking girl in her early twenties looks up at me, blinking through her coke bottle glasses like she’s just been busted watching porn.
“Uh, can I help you?”
“Yeah. I need to identify the body of Malcolm Taylor.”
She stares at me blankly. “Are you a family member?”
“Nope.”
“Then I’m really sorry, sir, but—”
“How long do you want to sit on that frozen meatsicle back there…” I scan her weird UFO t-shirt, trying to find a name badge. There isn’t one.
“Raynor,” she says.
“Raynor.”
“We legally have to hold an unclaimed body for sixty days before we can release it for burial.”
“Right. So do you want me coming in here every day for two months, harassing you, asking you the same question, morning, noon and night? Because that’s what’s going to happen.”
“Uh…I don’t…”
“Raynor, what happens if there’s a power cut here? What happens to all of the bodies?”
“We have a back up generator that keeps everything cool,” she says slowly.
“And what if that fails? Who comes in first thing in the morning to find an inch of decaying, liquefied human flesh on the floor? And how badly would that smell in the height of summer?”
Raynor rocks back from behind her desk, horror pulling her features in five different directions. “That would be very, very bad,” she says.
“Then perhaps you write down on your forms that I’m Malcolm Taylor’s son, and you take me through to see his shriveled up, frosty blue carcass before I go looking for a fuse box.”
Poor, poor Raynor. She looks stumped. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
“Sure you can. You’re in charge of paperwork, right?”
She nods.
“Then it’s a simple matter of crossing some fake Is and dotting some fa
ke Ts.” I plaster on my most charming, most asshole-ish smile—the one I know women go for, for some weird, masochistic reason—and a tiny smile flutters over Raynor’s face in response. God, I have no idea how girls can stare down the barrel of a loaded gun and still bat their eyelashes like they’re blind to the danger they find themselves in.
“Uhhh…Okaaaay, but I mean, I really shouldn’t. This could get me into a lot of trouble.”
“I won’t breathe a word of it to anyone, Ray Ray, I swear.”
She seems to forget that all of three seconds ago I was implying that I would turn the morgue’s current residents into goop if I didn’t get my way. Instead, she hands over some paperwork for me fill out while she calls down to the morgue technicians, asking them to prepare Coralie’s dad for a viewing.
I have to wait twenty minutes before a guy in a paper gown appears through the double doors behind Raynor and gestures for me to follow him.
The room I’m led into is cold and sterile. There’s nothing in here bar a metal gurney, complete with the lumpy shape of an expired body on top of it, which is covered with a pale blue paper sheet. The guy who led me down here clears his throat and folds his rubber-gloved hands in front of him. He’s wearing safety goggles, like he occasionally gets splattered in the face as he carries out his work.
“Let me know whenever you’re ready,” he says.
I stick my hands in my pockets. “Yep. I’m ready.” I smile tightly at him, rocking on the balls of my feet.
“Are you sure you don’t need a moment to collect your thoughts? This can be a traumatic experience for some people, especially if they’re not quite sure what to expect.”
“Nope. I got it. Deathly palor. Blue lips. Waxy complexion. Let’s get this show on the road.”