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For Mom and Dad
CHAPTER ONE
July 17, 1989
Dr. James Mason was more comfortable with the dead than the living.
It was morbid, sure, but sitting alone in his office, James had to admit it was true. At no time had his distaste for the living been more palpable than this week. He was interviewing new techs, and the process was exhausting. The spelling errors on their applications were beyond atrocious—since when was “morgue” a difficult word? And the outfits that some of them wore to the interview? Well, they absolutely defied description. There was no question about it; the world was getting dumber, and he was getting older and less able to tolerate it.
He could have gone home. That was the reason he had the beeper that clung to the inside of his coat like a troublesome insect. James neither liked nor trusted the little machine, and so he preferred to stay in his office in the Cooper County morgue during peak hours—between two and six in the morning—and wait. A multicar accident on the causeway had consumed the bulk of the night. Now it was almost four-thirty, and he could catch up on some paperwork.
James caught a glance at his reflection in one of the stainless-steel refrigerators. Not bad for forty. His hair was now almost completely the color of burnished metal, except for his two short sideburns, which stubbornly retained the reddish auburn of his youth. His face was smooth, having not yet fallen victim to the relentless Florida sun. He still had a lot of good years left, James thought. It was a good thing too, because there was certainly nobody else in the office with half a brain, let alone the smarts and patience it took to do his job.
Buzz.
The sound of the intake door buzzer jolted James out of his chair to a standing position. He glanced at the police scanner, still humming and gurgling incoherently on his desk. Protocol mandated that the responding officers notify him in advance if he was needed so that he could prepare—call one of the techs for help or head for the crime scene himself in the beat-up blue van. He was always reminding the cops: the medical examiner had primary jurisdiction of the crime scene.
Buzz.
Showing up unannounced ranked high on James’s somewhat lengthy list of pet peeves. Ringing the buzzer twice was just rude. James stalked towards the garage door, punching the button to lift it with an angry closed fist.
With a chorus of squeaky protests, the door began its slow ascent, revealing the feet, pants, untucked shirt, and finally the blotchy face of Detective Floyd Rossi, squinting in the rain. James hated Rossi. He was one of those irritating people who was perpetually in a good mood for absolutely no reason. You would think a cop, of all people, would know better. Even at this ungodly hour, Rossi wore a clownish lopsided grin.
Frowning, James looked past him for a van, for a body.
All he saw was a little girl.
“Oh, Doc. Thank God,” Rossi began, ducking under the door before it was fully opened, accompanied by a cloud of bugs from the humid night. Without bothering to remove his shoes or even wipe his feet, he marched past James into the pristine autopsy suite, half leading and half dragging his small charge by one of the puffy sleeves of her bubble-gum-pink windbreaker.
“Detective—”
Rossi clamped his hands on James’s shoulders, and for one awful moment, James was sure he was going to hug him. Instead, he looked straight into his eyes and spoke.
“Doc, I really need you to watch her for a little while. Just a little bit.”
“Rossi, have you lost your mind? You want me to babysit? Here?”
“Listen, Doc. We found her about half an hour ago, outside Margie Belle’s mini-mart. Social services won’t be here until nine, and I would keep her with me, but I just got a call that there’s a”—here he paused and lowered his voice, eyes flickering towards the little girl, who remained expressionless—“body out on the water. I can’t take her with me.”
“What about the hospital?” James swept his eyes over the autopsy suite behind them. In the half-light, his spotless examining table and the rubber biohazard bins took on an otherworldly sheen. “Or the station? This is no place for kids.”
Rossi covered the little girl’s ears, his meaty hands framing the oval of her upturned face. “We think she may be related to the vic we found on the bayou. She may have witnessed something, and the killer’s in the wind. I can’t risk him finding her at the hospital. We’ve got every cop in the department down at the scene. The night shift dispatcher’s at the station by himself, but I’m afraid the perp might show up there too looking for her. I’ve got nowhere else to bring her. Please, Doc. She’s just a kid.”
For some inexplicable reason, James felt himself nodding.
“Thanks, Doc.” Rossi released the little girl from his grip and ruffled her hair, as if he were greeting a beloved pet. “Bye for now, sweetie.”
The girl shot Rossi a look of unbridled reproach, which James found immensely endearing.
Rossi frowned and rose to his full height. “She hasn’t said a word since we picked her up.”
“We’ll be fine,” James heard himself say, even returning Rossi’s silly thumbs-up sign. He hit the button for the garage and watched Rossi jog back to his cruiser.
The little girl turned her face up to James. Someone had brushed her dark hair into pigtails, and the humidity had curled them into two damp spirals. Someone had buttoned her jacket that morning, tucked her feet into white Velcro-strap sneakers with rosebuds emblazoned on the sides, even dotted her tiny half-moon fingernails with glittery polish. Someone loved this child, so why had she been left alone?
“I don’t know much about children,” James admitted out loud. The girl regarded him blankly. “My sister has two kids,” he continued. “They’re younger than you, though.” James thought about his twin toddler nephews, with their constant earsplitting screams and perpetually runny noses. “I don’t know if you’d like them very much. I certainly don’t.”
He led the girl into the autopsy suite and gestured towards a stool, as though he were seating her in a fancy restaurant. She instantly turned to the glass jars of tools on the counter. He liked that she didn’t seem afraid of the place; just curious. James wasn’t sure what a kid this age knew about death. Nowadays, everyone believed in sugarcoating everything until kids reached a certain age, when they would be abruptly informed that there was no Santa Claus, bad things happened to good people, and everyone they knew, including themselves, was someday going to die. It was better—and surely less traumatic—to just be up-front from the get-go, James thought.
“Those are my tools,” he began in what he hoped was not too academic a tone. “I use them on my patients. When they come here, it’s my job to figure out why they died. Like a puzzle. Do you like puzzles?”
The girl nodded so vigorously that the pigtails bobbed up and down. She drew a breath, and James felt sure that she was going to speak, but she stay
ed silent.
“Well, then maybe you’d like to be a doctor someday.” James was beginning to get the hang of this one-sided conversation thing. In fact, he rather liked it.
“How about something to drink?” James had no idea what kids her age drank. Undoubtedly some sugary concoction. The morgue refrigerator yielded a sorry selection—some diabetic-friendly shakes from one of the techs, and his secretary’s six-pack of Tab. James tugged one of the sodas free of its plastic harness and opened the pull tab too quickly, sending a spray of soda across his eyeglasses. He turned to see the little girl staring at him with an amused expression, the corners of her mouth twisting into a tiny smile.
“Yeah, that’s funny, huh?” he said, removing the glasses and wiping them with the cuff of his shirt. “Here you go.” She took the can from him with both hands and returned to her perch.
The back closet was stacked high with unclaimed property from the deceased who had come through, ready to be boxed up for the evidence room. James wondered if there were some kids’ toys or games back there.
“I’ll be right back,” he told her, but when he turned on the light in the closet, there she was right at his heels, a solemn little soldier, grasping the leg of his pants in her fist. It was a small gesture, the kind of thing that kids probably did all the time, but James felt an odd tightness in his throat, and an unfamiliar warmth bloomed in his cheeks. He looked down at her, and she yawned.
“Are you tired?”
She nodded. He was an idiot. Of course she was tired; it was almost five in the morning. James steered her towards his office and pointed to the couch.
She shrugged off her windbreaker, clambered up on the couch, and curled into a ball, hugging her knees to her chest. The first few fingers of sunlight were beginning to poke through the blinds in front of them. James pressed the blinds closed and folded the small jacket over his chair.
And then he noticed it.
Underneath the tag inside the little jacket, printed in runny blue Magic Marker letters.
Aurora Atchison. The name hit him like a fist, the shock of it traveling the length of his spine.
“Aurora.”
He said it out loud without thinking. She bolted up and stared at him, her eyes somehow clearer now, as though she had finally been able to hoist herself out of a dream. She closed the distance between them quickly, scrambling into his lap, clutching the lapels of his lab coat, burrowing into the folds of his shirt. Soundlessly she clung to him, but the face she pressed against him was wet with tears.
“Aurora.” He whispered it like a prayer, over and over, rocking her gently back and forth.
Outside, the sound of sirens split the dawn, and James covered Aurora’s ears as Rossi had, protecting her against the terrifying crescendo, bearing the news closer and closer.
CHAPTER TWO
July 17, 2014
The police department’s booth at the Cooper’s Bayou Annual Founders’ Day Fair was occupied by the oldest beauty queen Detective Josh Hudson had ever seen.
Josh had volunteered for set-up duty, and the booth was supposed to be empty; but somehow he wasn’t surprised to see the elderly woman in a tiara, reclining barefoot in a plaid lawn chair in the center of the enclosed space. Coming across the unexpected just went with the territory around here.
He took a few steps closer to investigate. The woman’s shiny chartreuse satin gown was hiked up around her knees. A German shepherd sprawled on the burned grass at her feet, its velvety tan-and-black head pressed against her alabaster shins.
Josh slid the backpack from his shoulder, and the folder filled with photographs of missing people shifted in its depths.
He had planned on getting here early enough to post the pictures, culled from a daylong dig through the county case files. It was a long shot, but these fairs brought all kinds of people out from different places; you never knew who might have a key to finding someone who was lost. He dug out the fair map, sure he’d written down the incorrect stall number.
Nope, he was in the right place.
“Excuse me, ma’am. I think you may be in the wrong—”
“Hush!” The woman brought an index finger to her lips. The motion woke the dog, who exhaled loudly and settled back down without glancing in Josh’s direction. “Keep your voice down.” She motioned Josh closer.
Josh slid his backpack from his shoulder and knelt at her feet. In a town like Cooper’s Bayou, nestled in the swampland south of Tampa, Florida, a tiny enclave of only two hundred residents, everybody knew everybody else, but this woman was a stranger. She had the tiny, fine-featured face of an old-fashioned doll, her eyebrows carefully penciled on, her lips outlined in a crimson bow shape. Above her tiara, her silver hair rose in a gravity-defiant funnel, to which several glittering butterfly clips clung for dear life.
She was sizing him up too; he could see that. Her rheumy eyes traveled the length of his T-shirt and alit on the badge clipped to his waist.
“You’re a policeman,” she breathed. It wasn’t relief in her voice, but something else, something halfway between surprise and mild amusement.
“Yes, ma’am. Here to set up our booth for the fair. I’m Detective Josh Hudson.” Josh flinched inwardly at the sound of it. Two years on the force, and the title still fit him like a bad pair of pants, clinging in all the wrong places. Detectives solved mysteries; they found lost people. Josh had spent the last two years chasing possums out of locals’ yards and letting people out of speeding tickets.
And he hadn’t yet found the one person he’d returned to Cooper’s Bayou to find.
The woman tipped back her head and laughed, a booming, unexpected guffaw that did not match her delicate frame. “Of all the hiding places—I chose the police fair booth. I wouldn’t make much of a criminal, would I? Lord mercy.” She adjusted the tiara. “And it seems I lost my manners along the way! I’m Iola.”
Josh grinned. There was something of his Tennessee grandmother in Miss Iola; genteel and headstrong. “And what, may I ask, are you hiding from, Miss Iola?”
“Oh, please don’t take me back there, Detective Hudson,” Miss Iola stammered. “I can’t go yet. I’m not ready yet.” The stark longing in her voice compelled Josh to take her hand in his own. Her skin was almost transparent, the blue patchwork of veins so close it seemed as though they might break the surface.
“You don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to.”
She squeezed his hand. “You don’t understand, Detective.”
“Tell me.”
“She’s a witch,” Miss Iola confided.
“Excuse me?”
“Trinity Patchett. She’s a witch.”
Josh suppressed a smile. Trinity Patchett was one of the fair’s administrators. Josh had worked with her on a police fund-raiser. A mean-looking brunette with a too-high ponytail, Trinity had a voice that could shatter glass and a leadership style that would make Stalin blush. He didn’t blame Iola for running away; he admired her for managing to escape.
“And what business did you have with Miss Trinity?”
“She’s in charge of the pageant this year. She’s bringing us all back, all the past winners. I thought it would be fun, but once I saw that she was going to be parading us around like a sideshow—I took off running. You should see these women, Detective. It isn’t right. And those unruly children in this year’s pageant! They raise them like wild animals. You never heard such a racket in your life.”
Josh fought to keep a straight face. “So you won the pageant when, last year? Year before?”
“Something like that,” she said with a wry smile. “I was born and raised in Cooper’s Bayou, but I haven’t been back here since. And what about you? I seem to recall some Hudsons living over by Bayou Triste. Is that your kin?”
“Yes, ma’am. My father’s family.” It was an important distinction in Josh’s mind. He searched Miss Iola’s face for signs that she knew something of his father, but she was spellbound by some other memory. �
�He followed my mama to Tennessee, where I was raised.”
“A man from Tennessee asked me to run away with him all those years ago.” Her fingers ghosted across Josh’s stubbled cheek. “He was a handsome fella, had those Windex-blue eyes like you.”
“And he let you out of his sight?”
Miss Iola turned her attention to the dog, patting his belly in concentric circles. It was a moment before she spoke again. “Not while he was alive. He passed on a few years back.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Iola.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “Time’s a funny thing. You think your world’s going to end when you lose somebody, but life just goes on. It’s cruel, in a way. I thought coming back here would be a way to move forward, but there’s nothing here for me. Nothing but memories.”
“I understand,” Josh said. And he did, in a way that she didn’t realize. He’d returned to Cooper’s Bayou for the same reason; trying to find a past he couldn’t fix.
“So, Detective Hudson, are you going to turn me in?”
There was no way he was going to, and she knew it. She was playing him like a fiddle.
“No, I’m not, Miss Iola. But if you’re going to stay for a bit, you can’t just sit there lounging in the sun with your dog. I’m going to have to put you to work.”
Miss Iola made a humphing noise. “My daddy was a shrimper. I’m not afraid of a little hard work. And this lovely creature isn’t my dog. He just took a liking to me, my little beau. Somebody’s probably looking for him too.”
Josh bent down and scratched the dog behind the ears. “Well, we’ll handle one mystery at a time. First, I need some help hanging these up.” He opened the manila folder and laid the photographs on the picnic table in front of them.
They were all shapes and sizes, the faces of the missing staring back at them from yellowed family snapshots, school photographs with blue-sky backgrounds, candid images of birthday parties and beaches. Some of them had been cut from group photos, so that an arm or shoulder reached out of frame. Some had been missing for longer than Josh had been alive.
The Evidence Room: A Mystery Page 1