“What? We can’t possibly go see him until we move into our new offices and redecorate. And I want to push my old chair to my new office. It’s comfortable and it’s broken in.”
Edwards thought the colonel was joking, but didn’t know him well enough to be sure.
In any event, he ignored the comment and started toward the door.
Leatherwood and Smith followed close behind.
-34-
The people of Brady put a lot of planning into their project to turn the old Eden Correctional Facility from a prison into a shelter.
They got rid of all the bars, for one thing.
Those which couldn’t be removed were covered with sheetrock and turned into walls.
Doors were put on the front of each cell.
Not the kind of doors that had to be locked and unlocked electronically by a guard in the control center.
But rather the kind of door found on the front of every house in America. One with keys which allowed the occupant to come and go as he pleased, and to secure his belongings when he was away.
The cells were no longer to be called cells, but rather “cubicles” or “apartments,” by decree of Mayor Al.
They were still tiny. There wasn’t much they could do about that. Families were sometimes divided into two or three different cubicles.
It was cozy but comfortable.
The common area was still a common area, but was much more plush now. The painted gray floor was now carpeted, the folding chairs replaced with couches and recliners.
A large television played one DVD movie after another, twenty four hours a day.
Those who didn’t like what was playing could retire to their cubicle and watch something else on their own, albeit much smaller, TV.
There were other improvements as well which had greatly enhanced the standards of living and creature comforts among the Edenites.
They had a fully equipped kitchen they could use to cook their meals and a “microwave room” they could use to pop their popcorn and reheat their coffee.
All in all it wasn’t the best place to ride out a freeze they expected to last for three to four years.
But it beat the hell out of being outside.
They had indeed done a good job of planning and designing and renovating, sure.
But they missed something rather important.
They never planned for a mortuary.
Looking back it should have occurred to somebody. After all, Widow Swenson was pushing eighty years of age, although nobody knew for sure exactly how old she was because she wouldn’t share that bit of information.
And Walt Martinez, he had lung cancer and was no longer able to get his medicine. For him, it was just a matter of time. He hoped he made it to the thaw, because he said he wanted to feel the sun on his face one last time before he died.
But there were, of course, no guarantees of that happening.
Someone should have raised a hand and asked the question, “Hey, what if somebody dies while we’re in the prison? What do we do with the body? How do we bury him? How do we cremate him?
To their defense, all the planners had other things on their minds. Many other things, in fact.
So they could be forgiven for overlooking just one thing, even something as important as how to deal with death.
Perhaps subconsciously it was something they didn’t want to think about, so they just didn’t.
In any event, just a week after Marty and his team buried Charlotte’s friends beneath big piles of salt, Eden South had its own death to deal with.
It wasn’t Widow Swenson. And it wasn’t Walt Martinez.
No, it was someone nobody expected to be the first of them to go.
It was someone young and seemingly in good health.
Of course, when people use the term “good health” they are usually referring to a lack of visible health problems. Those which can be seen.
The mind, though, sometimes leaves no clues that it’s tormented.
In the week since the funeral at the mine, Bill Brady had been very moody.
He missed his nightly poker game not once, not twice, but three times.
Another time he stormed away after cursing his best friend and the game’s dealer for dealing him only “shit cards.”
He skipped several meals too. Said he just wasn’t hungry.
He did report to work on the three shifts he was scheduled to work the gate. That’s the way he was. He might be moody and testy and argumentative sometimes. But he was one of the most reliable men at Eden South.
It was the fourth shift, when he failed to report, that someone finally said, “It’s not like him to oversleep and miss work.”
Somebody went to wake him up and found him hanging in his cubicle.
On a writing pad, on the cubicle’s tiny desk, he’d scrawled in pencil two simple words: “I’m sorry.”
Only then did the other Edenites realize they’d missed some pretty blatant signs.
Depression is sometimes very hard to detect.
Listlessness, irritability, indifference are frequently signs of other things. Fatigue and illness come to mind.
But hindsight really is twenty-twenty.
The trouble was they’d done a good job of keeping the whole thing about Charlotte’s friends a secret.
The other two security guards who were questioned about it were sworn to secrecy. Mayor Al worried about the stress it would cause the other townsfolk if they learned four of their own were partly responsible for the deaths of seven innocents.
The four themselves told nobody.
Everyone else assumed, when they disappeared twice and went to visit their friends in the mine, that they were helping in the restocking process.
No one other than the six of them knew about the deaths of Charlotte’s friends. So no one knew the stress Bill Brady was under, the guilt he was feeling.
The depression he was suffering.
Now Bill Brady was in a better place. He no longer felt any depression. He no longer cried himself to sleep at night, all alone in his cell.
Now his death was somebody else’s problem.
They were at a loss as to what to do with his body.
-35-
“Well, we can’t leave him in here, obviously. The body will start decomposing within a couple of days and will stink up the joint within another couple.”
The others in the room all turned and stared at Tom Tuttle, who wasn’t exactly known for his sensitivity or compassion.
“What?” he asked. “It’s the truth. I’m sorry it ain’t all flowers and butterflies, but it’s the truth. That’s what happens when a body isn’t put into the ground or burned right away.”
“I know that, Tom,” Al said. “But he was a friend. We can’t just toss him out into the snow like he’s last week’s garbage.”
Marty offered, “Jeff, you’re our logistics guy. You’re the one who heads the crew that goes out into the prison yard to get food and supplies off the trailers when we need things.”
“Yeah. So?”
“So, do we have any trailers that are empty or almost empty?”
Jeff thought for a moment and said, “We have three of them I know of that are half empty, or close to it.”
“Think we can consolidate them? Take everything out of one trailer and put it into the others? So we can empty a trailer out completely?”
“Yeah, I suppose. We’d have to do it by hand because all three of them are in the third row of trailers. We can’t get the forklift back to them because we packed the trailers in so tight.”
“How many men and how much time do you think you’ll need?”
“Give me a full day. Four men at a time, switching out every hour with four others so nobody gets frostbite or pneumonia.”
“Think we can get that many volunteers?”
“I’ll do it,” Al said. “And if an old out of shape man like me can do it nobody else has an excuse not to.
“It
’s too late to start tonight. Jeff, ask around for volunteers and if you fall short let me and Marty know so we can lean on some people. Start about eight in the morning, and when the trailer is empty we’ll put Bill in it.
“It’ll be our mortuary trailer. His body will freeze solid and stay there until the thaw comes. Then we can either burn his body outside the walls where we won’t risk a fire.
“Or we can bury him in the city park once the ground softens. Has anybody ever talked to him about his burial preferences?”
“Hell, I don’t think any of us ever expected to lose him. He was healthier than any of us here.”
“He was my best friend and he never said whether he wanted to be cremated or buried someday. He did mention his parents were buried in a cemetery down around Galveston.”
“Well, I would take that to mean his family does traditional burials. We’ll plant him in the park when the world thaws out again.”
In the absence of body bags they wrapped his body in a white sheet, then again in a blue tarp.
They bound the tarp in duct tape, of all things.
As a last minute gesture Mayor Al took a thick black marker and wrote his name across the center of the tarp.
WILLIAM DAVID BRADY
Rest in Peace
Tom Tuttle, ever the smart aleck, commented, “Why’d you do that, Al?
“Are you afraid we’ll forget his darned name or something?”
“No,” the mayor solemnly said.
“But I think there’s a good chance he’ll be joined by at least one or two others in the back of that trailer.
“And it would be an awful shame to go to bury them and not be able to figure out which one was which.”
Jeff had no problem getting his volunteers and they actually made good time on the project.
Something about working in the frigid cold seems to make people work faster.
Moving faster not only gets the job done quicker, it also generates body heat.
He estimated a full day’s work, but they were finished just after lunchtime.
At two p.m. they placed Bill Brady’s body on a rolling cart and pushed him through the common area.
Every one of the townsfolk lined the path to pay their respects as he was rolled past on his final journey.
Many wished they’d known he was suffering so they could have helped him.
Or at least tried to.
Others regretted not being able to say a proper goodbye.
The thoughts of others were more selfish.
They wondered whether their own time would come, or the time of a loved one. And whether they’d suffer the same indignity of being placed into a deep freeze in the back of a truck for several years.
A human popsicle, as it were.
Mayor Al stayed back as Richard Sears led a makeshift honor guard.
He sidled up to the town judge, an old codger named Stuart Whimsey.
Al nudged him and said, “Hey Judge, can I talk to you a minute?”
“Sure, Al. What’s on your mind?”
“We probably should talk in private.”
That got the judge’s attention, for Mayor Al wasn’t one who could keep a secret for long. If he had something to talk about out of everyone else’s earshot, it must be something of supreme importance.
They ducked into one of the storage rooms.
“Something’s been bothering me for the last few days, Judge. A legal matter. Something I need to get your advice on.”
“Shoot.”
Al looked at the ground. What he was going to say pained him. And it wore on his conscience, as though he were betraying a friend’s trust.
He hemmed and hawed a bit, then blurted it out.
“Well damn it, Judge. I overlook a lot of things. I try to be a reasonable man. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. I really do.”
“Then quit jabbering and tell me what this is all about.”
“Some things can’t be overlooked. They just can’t.”
“What things, Al? Tell me now or I’m giving up on you and walking out that door.”
“Damn it, Judge. Several nights ago, after we came back from the mine, Marty dropped Bill Brady and me off and then took off again with Richard. They said they were going to check out a couple of Walmart trailers down the road.”
“I remember. So?”
“So, they didn’t really go to check out any trailers. They went to kill people.”
“What? To kill who?”
“To kill some men who took over the orphanage a few miles south of town. They killed a bunch of people and sent others out in the cold to die. Those were the women who died on the San Angelo highway.”
The old judge was stunned.
“They both came back undamaged. Weren’t the worse for wear. I guess they won whatever gun battle they started. I don’t see a problem with it.”
“That’s just it, Judge. They didn’t have a gun battle. It wasn’t a fair fight. Marty wasn’t very free with the details, but Richard gave me the basics.
“They found a tanker full of gasoline and used it to blow up the building, with the men inside.”
“What are you asking me, Al?”
“I’m asking you that as the mayor of Eden, and as the only county judge we have left, do you and I have a moral duty to charge them both with murder?”
Judge Whimsey thought hard before answering.
And when he did answer, he spoke with some sadness.
“I suppose we don’t really have a choice.”
-36-
If the mood of all the people in the mine could be summed up in a single word, that word might be anguished.
Their hearts were all breaking.
They’d put out a great effort, they really had.
They’d gone a lot farther than anyone would have asked of them. Far more than Frank himself would have asked of them.
But they had no choice.
The search for Frank had to be called off.
A heavy snowfall which started at noon the previous day and kept up all night had dumped a full thirteen inches of snow on the entire region.
When Hannah woke up the following morning and went to the control center she started crying almost uncontrollably.
Mark had gone to the kitchen to fetch both of them a cup of coffee to drink as they went over the search plans for the day ahead.
Most people can hear their name being called in a crowded auditorium. It’s just something the human brain is trained to manage.
A mother can hear her child cry out in a crowd because she’s used to listening to the child’s voice.
A husband, when hearing his wife cry, can identify it as uniquely his wife’s even among all others in a room full of wailing women.
As he added powdered creamer to Hannah’s coffee he heard her crying and was off like a flash.
The coffee was left behind.
One cannot run with two steaming cups of coffee.
“Honey, what’s the matter?”
She didn’t speak. She couldn’t speak. She merely pointed.
At monitor number seven, on the wall over the security desk.
The camera assigned to monitor seven was fixed, mounted to the face of the mine directly above the overhead door.
It had only one purpose. It was aimed at a spot forty feet from the mine’s door, where a lonely yellow post was planted in the ground.
On the post was an old fashioned thermometer with a huge dial face, which told the people in the mine what the outside temperature was at any given time.
Also, on the side of the pole facing the camera, were gravitated marks which reflected the distance off the ground, in three inch increments.
The first mark read three inches, but couldn’t be seen because it was buried beneath the snow.
The same was true of the six inch mark.
And similar marks for nine, twelve, fifteen and eighteen.
The top of the snow pack rested just below the b
lack mark with the number twenty one above it.
The roads were now officially impassable.
Mark wrapped his arms around her and she buried her face in his shoulder.
The search was over.
Marty had warned them that once the snow pack went over eighteen inches they’d have to park the trucks.
“The bumpers are eighteen inches off the ground,” he explained.
Hannah hadn’t understood and asked him to elaborate.
“When the snow is higher than the bottom of the bumper the truck will no longer just drive over the top of it. The bumper will push the snow until it accumulates into a big pile in front of the truck. It’ll bog the truck down and bring it to a standstill.
“Without snow plows to clear the roads for us we won’t be able to drive more than a few hundred yards.”
Nobody wanted to stop searching for Frank, although all knew it was a possibility. And truth be known they should have called off the search days before. They’d slid off the road several times and endangered even more lives.
Frank once told Hannah one of the Marine Corps’ credos is they never leave a man behind.
Never.
And it was that knowledge which broke her heart the most.
No matter how irrational the feeling, she couldn’t shake it.
She felt they were abandoning him.
She felt they were leaving him behind.
-37-
In Plainview, Texas, Frank Woodard had no idea the grief Hannah and the others were going through.
He didn’t know Hannah, one of his best friends in the world, would cry herself to sleep that night and every other night for weeks.
He had no idea she would become sullen and moody and would make Mark’s life a living hell. That he’d walk on eggshells for weeks, afraid to say the wrong thing and either set her crying again or get yelled at.
Hannah wasn’t a moody woman by nature.
But she loved Frank. He was almost a second father to her.
He was always there for her. Always offering her a shoulder to cry on. An ally when she needed one. He played her foil and her clown when she needed someone to debate or to laugh at.
Final Dawn: Book 12: Where Could He Be? Page 12