Five Days Post Mortem

by L. T. Vargus

  Her mind raced around the same loop over and over. She couldn’t stop thinking about her new bathwater theory, tumbling the potential ramifications in her thoughts, even if she wouldn’t know anything for certain until tomorrow morning. Her gut believed the hunch, though, and during those fleeting moments when she could keep her eyes closed, she could see it happening that way in her mind’s eye. Her instincts told her that it fit, that it was right.

  She’d had to call two different after-hours phone numbers at the medical examiner’s office before she finally got through to an actual human being. The woman’s voice was flat and atonal, but a bored-sounding secretary was still better than an answering machine.

  “Dr. Kole won’t be in until morning,” the woman had said.

  “I understand that, but I just have one quick question, and it’s very important.”

  Something in Darger’s tone must have been convincing, because eventually the woman agreed to call Dr. Kole at home. It was another twenty minutes before he returned Darger’s call.

  With the man himself on the line, she explained who she was and what case she was interested in.

  “OK, sure. Shannon Mead. What about her?”

  “The water in her lungs. Did you take a sample?”

  “That’s standard procedure.”

  “Was it tested?”

  “I’m sure you know that we take dozens of samples that are only tested if it’s deemed significant to the investigation.”

  “Is that a no, then?”

  An irritated sigh rustled over the line.

  “It’s just that I think in this case, testing the water might be significant.”

  Darger went over her theory, and the silence that greeted her when she’d finished had her worried Dr. Kole had hung up on her.

  “Hello?” she said, once the quiet had stretched into several seconds

  “I’m here.” Dr. Kole grumbled. “It’s an interesting hypothesis, that’s for sure.”

  There was another pause before the doctor spoke again, like he was still considering it.

  “I’ll test the water samples, but it will have to wait until morning. Your call interrupted a family dinner.”

  Darger punched the air in celebration and felt a sense of victory.

  “Right. My apologies. And thank you for taking time to speak with me. Please enjoy the rest of your evening.”

  But the triumphant feeling had faded. Hours later, lying awake in the dark, Darger only felt antsy. Her mind wanted to explore this new possibility, follow the varying paths of logic, but she knew it was unwise to get ahead of herself. Nothing had been confirmed. She had to wait.

  Waiting was not Violet Darger’s strong suit.

  She’d always been impatient. She walked up escalators and fidgeted in long lines and snuck peeks at Christmas gifts. She purposely arrived at the movies five minutes late so she wouldn’t have to sit through the previews. And she repeatedly burned her mouth on pizza even though she knew going in it was still too hot to eat.

  Even with her relationships, Darger could see now that she’d hurried several of them to a premature end. First with Luck and then with Owen. It was like she saw the end coming, maybe not soon, but at some point… so wasn’t it better to just get it over with already?

  Rip off the band-aid. Pull the plug. Get on with it.

  Part of her liked moving on, getting away from the drama, running back to her job and tuning the rest of the world out. It felt like here in Oregon, consulting, she could live between the worlds. She could get away from all her big decisions, put them off. Drop the world. And she liked that.

  Because all of those big turning points loomed just around the corner, waiting to leap out and shape the rest of her life. Would she go back to the FBI or not? Would she rekindle things with Owen or Luck? Would she find a way to appease her mother and spend more time with her, find a balance between the demands of her family and career?

  For now, she could get away from all of those people, relationships, choices. She didn’t have to pick, and she liked that. She could live in stasis indefinitely. She could worry about it later.

  Maybe the real core of her problem revolved around the notion that relationships always meant giving up some element of control, even the non-romantic ones. Her mother, for example, who was always griping at her about working too hard, like she should half-ass her job or something.

  Even Loshak had a tendency to boss her around, to dole out life lessons whether she wanted them or not. He’d been the one to suggest this hiatus from the Bureau in the first place.

  “Get some distance and figure out what you want. Because the FBI isn’t going to change. If you have the notion in your head that you’re the one to try to change it, let me correct your thinking. It’s too big and too stupid to change. All bureaucracies are. That’s a fact of life.”

  And she’d listened to him. And now she was here, squirming restlessly in an unfamiliar hotel bed, with her eyes wide open and gazing up at the textured ceiling.

  Waiting.

  Chapter 17

  The city is dead.

  It’s so late. So dark. So quiet.

  Your truck rumbles through the night. Engine growling out warnings. Tires swishing over wet blacktop. Headlights piercing the gloom.

  There are others out in the downtown area. Nocturnal creatures on the hunt, always looking for something. Hungry animals snuffling around at all hours. All the people who can find no satisfaction in the daytime, in the straight world. The junkies. The drunks. The whores. The thieves. The sick. The loathsome. They all come out after dark.

  But you encounter no other vehicles over the last six blocks of the journey. No pedestrians. No sign of movement apart from the shifting shades of the traffic lights.

  The city looks strange when it’s empty like this. Disturbing and stark. The puddles of red light spread over the vacant concrete, crawl up the brick and glass walls of the buildings. Apocalyptic.

  You park in the alley running between her building and a high-rise tower of offices. Tuck your truck in the shadows along a dumpster and still its engine. It coughs a little as the rumble dies out.

  And then the quiet is overwhelming. Makes your skin crawl. And you hesitate for a moment with your hands on the steering wheel, electricity thrumming in your palms. Jaw muscles clenching over and over. Rhythmic spasms you feel in your cheeks.

  Eventually you will yourself to exit the vehicle. Step out into the night. The hair on the back of your neck tingling all the while. Spittle flushing your mouth and squishing loudly when you swallow it.

  The air is thicker here. Dank. Catches in your throat, in your nostrils, cool and wet and heavy.

  You walk up a set of cement stairs to the big front door of the place, pulse glugging in your neck hot and fast. The bricks of the building look orange with the streetlights glowing on them, the color of the push-up popsicles you ate as a kid.

  And now an arched double-door stands between you and the place you need to be. Dark stained wood. Beveled details. Ornate. About eight feet tall with a big window cut out of each side.

  Yellow light spills through the glass to light you up. Makes you feel exposed. Vulnerable.

  And you fumble with the keys on the key ring you swiped from her place. Her keys.

  Try one in the deadbolt. No love.

  Your eyes keep flicking inside the building as you work through keys, part of you sure that someone will appear there next to the mailboxes just inside the door. A witness to your presence. Someone who will see your face.

  But no one shows. On the fifth key, the door swings open, and you cross the threshold, arms and legs now trembling from the adrenaline.

  The air is dry inside. Warm. A little stuffy. It smells like caramelized onions.

  You don’t dally in the common area. You climb the steps two at a time, light on your feet, soundless and quick, gaining confidence now.

  On the fourth floor, you make a left, glide down the hall, find her room numbe
r, 4H. You wrote it on the palm of your hand earlier with a sharpie to be sure. No confusion.

  Now another door stands in your path, but this one is not so tall, not so intimidating as the first. It’s painted dark green, the color of the seaweed wound around a sushi roll, and the gold letters mounted above the peephole glitter a little in the hallway light.

  You crack it open on the second key. A wedge of darkness pouring into the opening, somehow looking like black smoke to you in this moment.

  You step inside, ease the door shut behind you. And you wait now for your eyes to adjust to the dark inside. No lights. No evidence. Nothing that could be seen from outside.

  In time, form emerges in the void. Shapes and contours congeal in the darkness. Solidify. Become real.

  You move through the living room, round the corner to the bathroom. Slow and steady. Fingertips grazing along the wall beside you.

  The bathroom is deep within the unit, far from any window. That makes it darker than the rest — a black hung up around you like a thick loam — but it also means you can turn on the light without consequence.

  Your hand reaches for the light switch. And for just a second, you picture the tub vacant. The body gone. Like the dead thing just got up and walked away.

  But the light hits. Blinding. Awful. And even through squinted eyes you can see the shape of it.

  The body remains where you left it, face down in a powder blue bathtub. Hair all spread out in the water in the couple inches of water you drowned her in.

  And then you see the other person in the room. Your double.

  The face in the mirror stares back at you. You look upon this nocturnal creature, not unlike all the other hungry animals out there tonight. Ugly. Restless.

  And you see the desperation in the eyes. The deflated balloons for cheeks. Fleshy bulges so saggy they look like they’ll fall off any day now. Just peel away from the skull and flop to the ground.

  You rest your hands on the edge of the sink and lean in close to see every pore in the swollen face. Every little hair in the eyelashes. Those strange whorls in the irises of the eyes.

  In ancient times, they thought of mirrors as bewitching pools, as powerful conduits, as strange portals to distant dimensions. They thought mirrors were magic.

  And maybe that’s true in a way.

  Maybe it makes more sense for there to be two of you in this room. Facing each other. Looking at each other. The protagonist and the antagonist of this story. The hero and the villain. Both.

  Finally there’s someone for you to talk to, right? Someone to spill all of this internal monologue onto, this tidal wave of words perpetually crashing in your head. The only person fit for the job. The one you’re always talking to anyway.

  You.

  You.

  You.

  You’re looking at you. The only person you really know, and the only one who knows you. The perfect match, or so you suppose.

  The absurdity of it makes you smile. Both of you flashing those yellow teeth, crinkling your eyes at each other. An inside joke.

  You blink a few times. Ease back from the glass. At last your attention turns back to the corpse in the tub. The soggy thing. It doesn’t smell yet, at least.

  You know from experience that the body will be all stiff now. Rigor mortis tightening the muscles into something hard, something more akin to wood than meat. Knotty lumber stretched over a skeleton.

  And you know it will be difficult to move her. That you’ll have to wrap her in blankets and try to be discrete.

  The stiffness means carrying her would be impossible. You can’t sling her dead weight over your shoulder like you would with a limp body. There’s no way to help distribute the weight. She’s a big awkward statue more or less. Your arms alone couldn’t bear her down three flights of stairs.

  Could you drag her? Down three flights of stairs?

  You close your eyes, and your imagination whirs to life. Playing movies in your head. You picture her blanket-wrapped skull thudding down step after step, bone hammering against wood. Thump. Thump. Thump. How many stairs would it be? 45? Perhaps 60? 90? And you see the peepholes up and down the hallway all going dim, the neighbors rushing to see what’s causing all the noise.

  Not good.

  You lick your lips. Have to think.

  There are only so many ways to get out of this place.

  There’s one thing you could do, you think. Still risky, but not so bad as the steps.

  You pry the petrified corpse out of the water, tinted pink from the blood. Hook one hand under a crooked elbow and the other under the hip on the opposite side. Turning her as you lift. Plopping her on the bathmat.

  Christ. Heavy. Even this second plan will provide its difficulties.

  Her face looks bloated. Maggoty white beneath the strands of sopping hair. The texture grotesque. Marshmallow soft.

  Even just a few hours in water can inflict so much change upon flesh. A metamorphosis that’s hard to believe when you see it close up.

  And you strip her bare. Peel the clothes off those stiff limbs, forcing the joints the best you can. You don’t know why. It’s just the way it has to be.

  She lies before you. Naked. Dead.

  And it occurs to you in a flash that you could do anything to her now. Anything.

  No one would ever know. No one would ever see.

  Anything.

  You could get a knife from the kitchen and carve her up. Dismember, decapitate, disembowel her. Stretch her guts around this apartment like rubber bands.

  You could touch her wherever you liked. Fuck her. Though, looking at the maggoty flesh, this one does not appeal to you even a little.

  You could even cook her and eat her. Slice off something or other and fry it up.

  Anything. Anything you wish.

  And even though you want none of these things, there is a sublime feeling attached to these observations. An overwhelming feeling that is somehow mystical. A sense of incredible awe — religious awe — tinged with horror.

  Because none of the rules are real. None of them. It’s all pretend.

  Society creates all of these rules, etches its order onto nature, onto chaos. But it’s not real.

  And what you feel here isn’t power. You wield power over her, yes, but that is not the source of this spiritual feeling.

  Freedom is.

  Your freedom here is utterly absolute. Society cannot touch it. No one can. Not all the king’s horses nor all the king’s men.

  That’s the arresting truth in this moment, and something about it is both sacred and terrifying. Awful and beautiful.

  You flick the little metal switch beneath the faucet, and the water in the bathtub lurches, begins to spiral down the drain with a slurping sound.

  Sucked down that metallic portal in the porcelain. Transferred to some other place far, far away.

  You track out of the bathroom’s glow. Feel around in the half-light to find blankets in the closet in the hall.

  And now you kneel on the linoleum. Swaddle the rigid thing like a baby doll. Cover that bloated face with a green and black striped afghan, the milky flesh tone still visible through the little holes in the knit pattern.

  A second blanket blocks her out for good, and there is a relief in that somehow. Just covering the body instantly eases some tension in your shoulders, in the muscles just beneath your sternum, makes it a touch easier to breathe.

  And maybe that’s why we bury the deceased, you think. Put them someplace out of sight, out of mind.

  They’re like collapsing stars, the dead. Imploding things that threaten to suck us into their gravity fields. Swallow us up.

  The dead body becomes the physical manifestation of the dying of the light. We have to plant them in the dirt as a way of keeping their strange darkness at bay.

  You scoop her under the arms and drag her out into the dark of the living room, eventually lifting and propping her up on the couch.

  And you rest a moment. The strain
of just those few seconds of work beading perspiration on your brow and top lip, constricting your breath enough that now you need a moment to get it back.

  When you’re ready, you move to the window hung above the couch where the body lies. You feel around for a latch for what feels like a long time, fingers finally finding the hooked metal piece and sliding it aside.

  Now the window comes open, and a slice of that thick night air comes whooshing into the apartment, into your face. Cool and damp. Heavy like a wet blanket.

  You poke your head out. Look down at the world three floors below.

  This side of the building faces the alley where your truck is parked, though you can barely see the vehicle at the moment. It’s dark. All swathed in shadows.

  Straight down from your vantage point, you find that bushes run just along the building. Boxwoods shaped into a clipped box. A row that traces along the perimeter of the brick structure like a moat. And that’s good, you think. That’ll work just fine.

  You lift the body again. Arms shaking as you elevate it to the window frame and balance the center mass the best you can on the sill.

  Again your head dips, eyes descending to that row of bushes below. They’ll break the fall, maybe. Prevent the loud thud, at least a little.

  Something about all of this reminds you of watching TV as a kid, some curly-haired late night host dropping a watermelon off the roof of his studio, watching it belly flop and explode against the asphalt below.

  You don’t think the corpse will burst like that. The rigor would seem to work in your favor. The rigid thing might break here and there — crack like concrete — but it will mostly keep together, mostly stay within the confines of the blankets.

  Or so you hope.

  You take a breath and hold it. Heartbeat picking up speed. Stomach knotting and untying over and over.

  It’s better to be quick about this, you know. You’re reasonably concealed in the darkness, but you should get out of the window as soon as you can.

  Still, you need to give this a second. Let your nerves catch up.

  When it feels right, you give the body a little shove.