Crackpot Palace

by Jeffrey Ford

  He began by rolling her onto her left side, per Groot’s note. What he found on the right buttock was a surprise—a mark of raised skin as if she’d been branded by a hot iron. The scar was old, no more than four inches around, some sort of symbol he couldn’t quite make out. It appeared to be an oval, filled with crosshatching, and there were five small projections; four round, one pointed. Holding her in place, he moved his position from nearer her head to down by her legs and from that new perspective the wound became clear. It was a crude rendering of a turtle. He rolled her completely onto her front and then fetched his pencil and pad. As he sketched the figure, he had the faintest inkling that he’d seen it somewhere before.

  He undertook a gross examination of the corpse, checking for bruising, cuts, or scrapes. As he worked methodically through his autopsy checklist, it slowly dawned on him that the preservation of Alina’s corpse was something quite remarkable. He’d read about other such cases. Religious history was littered with them. Incorruptible flesh, the scent of flowers. De Vries had shared his opinion on the matter. “Most of them are fakes,” he’d said. “And the ones that are real have been preserved intentionally by people or by the environment in which the cadaver was laid to rest. There’s nothing holy about it. They’re desiccated turds. End of story.”

  Considering the tenor of the times, a miracle didn’t sound as bad to Stan as it had to the doctor. Still, he wondered, if it was a bona fide miracle, what would it change? He couldn’t think of a single thing and continued with the examination. He checked the girl’s airway, which was clear; looked for insects or larvae but found none, which could obviously be due to the fact that she’d been in the water; collected a few willow leaves from her long hair; and drew some blood. Taking the vials to the work counter, he prepared three slides and used the rest to set up chemical tests for poisoning.

  Eye to the microscope, he looked for a number of things, but he was most interested to see if perhaps the blood held any freshwater organisms. He’d learned of the technique from de Vries, who’d said he’d heard of it from others, although it was not yet a widely known or approved test. “If the victim drowns,” he’d said, “their attempts to breathe, their gasping, will draw the water deeply into their lungs, all the way to the capillaries, where blood and oxygen meet and are exchanged. It’s possible that microscopic organisms from the river will have time to travel to distant locations in the body’s bloodstream before death steps in.”

  “Steps in,” thought Stan, and it struck him as to how often the doctor had ascribed human qualities to the final process. He adjusted the focus and peered into Alina’s blood. He pored over the slides for three-quarters of an hour, but they revealed nothing. The tests for toxins revealed nothing. Not only was he sure she’d not drowned, but it seemed that she’d never actually died. Instead, she was just dead.

  He considered cutting her open, but of late there were rumblings from the state about his lack of credentials as a forensic medical examiner. He wasn’t a doctor, and therefore not a medical examiner; nor did he have any official forensics education. What he did have was more than a decade working as an apprentice to de Vries, who had been a doctor and, although he had no special degree confirming it, had been considered a forensics expert.

  After retirement, de Vries had pulled strings with the governor’s office to have Stan appointed to the county coroner’s position, which gave him the legal right to investigate a death in any manner he saw fit, whether he was a doctor or not. Stan knew his tenure was out of the ordinary, and at times he felt pangs of guilt about it, but he was also certain he’d gotten a better education at de Vries’s side than he might have at a university. The days when de Vries’s name carried weight in the county or at the statehouse, though, were swiftly receding into the past. Dr. Rashner, the state medical examiner, would have to come over from Albany to take a look at Alina. Given the layoffs at the capital and the turgid manner in which things moved through the bureaucracy now, it could take a while. He didn’t like to think of the young woman stuck in a cold drawer in the basement of Midian General, but he also felt some relief at being able to foist the determination of cause of death off on Rashner. “It can be his miracle,” thought Stan. “I’ll be happy just to keep my job.”

  While he was writing up his report at the counter in the autopsy room, he stopped, stuck on precisely the words he might use to describe her appearance. He needed to dispense with “remarkable” or “unusual” and instead stick to cold, clinical, physical descriptions. He turned and looked at Alina. Her body lay as he’d left it on completion of his examination, her head cocked to one side. She was staring at him. Her smile was the expression of an old friend, as if he’d made a foolish joke that was funnier for the inevitability of his foolishness than for the joke itself. He got off his stool, approached the table, and studied her pale lips. Her face was like a fine marble sculpture, and the moment he had that thought, he remembered de Vries teaching him how to make a death mask.

  The doctor had been a man primarily of the nineteenth century, but when he passed into the modernity of the twentieth, he smuggled, like plundered artifacts, old secrets and forgotten techniques. Before photography was widely available, when an unidentified corpse was discovered, the coroner or examiner would use plaster to capture the exact features of a victim in a mask to be used for possible identification after burial. The corpse that de Vries had used to demonstrate the craft belonged to Leon, the erstwhile hospital janitor, who’d been found dead in his apartment from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the heart. “We will memorialize Leon Chechik,” said the doctor, who’d been the dead man’s chess opponent for twenty years.

  Today, Stan worked quickly, as de Vries always had. “If there’s anything worth doing, it’s worth doing fast,” the old man liked to say. The recipe for the plaster, the steps of the procedure all came back to Stan in a rush. He worked as methodically as the grandfather clock, mixing the plaster, cutting strips of gauze. After covering her face entirely with Vaseline, he began to apply wet strips of bandage. He started beneath her chin and worked his way up, pressing the slippery cloth firmly to the contours of her jaw. As the plaster spread above the lips, he thought of her sinking into white water. Within an hour of starting, he reached her scalp. While the bandage covering dried, he called the hospital cafeteria and requested they send him two eggs.

  The next stage of the procedure was to cast a finer plaster mask from the bandage mold. The trick, as de Vries had told him, was to achieve just the right consistency of plaster. You wanted it to adhere to the inside of the crude mask without dripping or sloughing off. Stan remembered the doctor adding two eggs to the final mixture and referring to it as the “batter.” This was to be applied to the bandage mask with a tongue depressor, “Like you’re frosting a cake, but on the inside,” de Vries had said.

  Stan felt a sense of relief as he gently pried the cast off Alina’s face, but her smile, when it came into view, revealed her displeasure. “My apologies,” he said, but her expression scorned him as he applied Vaseline to the inside of the mask. Once the eggs were delivered and the batter was mixed, he turned away from her and went to work. “You want a mask, not a bust,” de Vries had said. “Keep the internal layer thin.” Stan followed every instruction and the end result was remarkable. He’d not only reproduced her looks, but even the smile was intact. Although whatever she’d actually felt was beyond him, at least in plaster she finally seemed at peace.

  By the time Detective Groot arrived, the corpse had been assigned to a drawer in the icebox, and Stan sat, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, in his small office, smoking a cigarette. He lifted his leg and pushed an empty seat toward the detective, standing in the doorway. Groot took off his coat and shoulder holster, draped them over the back of the chair, and sat down with arms folded.

  “Good day?” asked Stan.

  “Just some broke people fighting with each other. Everybody’s getting ground down. More of the same.”

  “I’
m not surprised.”

  “How’s the Mona Lisa?” Groot asked.

  Stan shook his head, and said, “It beats me. I don’t know what killed her. I’m pretty sure she didn’t drown. Another cardiopulmonary arrest, if you catch my drift.”

  “What’d she have in her stomach?” asked Groot.

  “I didn’t open her up. It’s a bad time politically for me to be playing doctor. I’m gonna call in Rashner and let him take a look.”

  “Understood,” said Groot. “But it’d be good to have something to go on. They’re gonna give me maybe two days to try to figure this out, and after that she goes into the lost and found with the rest of the unknowns and we let the devil figure it out.”

  “I know,” said Stan. “There’s really nothing. I took her prints, so you can check those, for what they’re worth. The turtle on her rear end looked to be done with a thin, heated piece of metal. That could be significant if you can find who made the brand or who did the branding.”

  “Jesus,” said Groot. “A turtle on your ass. What does it mean? All I can think of is how the turtle beat the rabbit.”

  “That’s a tortoise and a hare.”

  “Same bunk,” said Groot. “Slow and steady wins the race.”

  “I took some more shots here you can use to look for an ID,” said Stan.

  “I’ll ask in town tomorrow morning and then go up to Hekston and see what I can find.”

  “You’ll find something.”

  “I was thinking about her all day,” said Groot. “I think she has to be a suicide.”

  “Why?” said Stan.

  The detective shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess I just can’t think of anything else.”

  “I came up with a name for her over my creamed chipped beef this morning,” said Stan. “Alina.”

  “Whoa,” said Groot in a near whisper. “Alina . . .”

  Stan laughed, but something in the way the detective winced made him decide not to reveal the death mask.

  The detective stood and slowly slipped on his holster and jacket. “I’ll let you know what I find.”

  “Good enough,” said Stan.

  Groot saluted and left, whistling “Moon Glow” on his way down the hall.

  Stan pulled into the driveway at dusk, exhausted from the exertions of the day and all the previous night. He gathered his bag, the camera, and a green cardboard box and headed for the porch. When he reached the front door, he found it unlocked. He entered the living room. There was a small blond woman wearing a sizable pair of glasses, sitting on the couch. On the low table in front of her was an ashtray, a pack of Camels, an open bottle of Old Overholt, and two tumblers, one a quarter full. Soft music came from the cabinet radio standing next to the staircase.

  “You started the party without me?” said Stan.

  “I had a realization today,” she said to him, leaving her shoes on the floor and curling her legs up under her flowered skirt. “Come here and I’ll describe it to you.” She patted the empty seat next to her on the sofa.

  “Oh yeah?” he said. He walked into the dining room and left his things on the table, draped his jacket over the back of a chair. “A realization, no less.”

  He sat down and put his arm around her. She sipped her drink. “A lot of people come to the library during the day who are out of work,” she said. “They have no place else to go, nothing to do. They come and, even if they haven’t read anything since grade school, they start reading again.”

  “Well, that’s good,” said Stan.

  “Sure,” she said, and shrugged Stan’s arm off to lean forward. She poured him a drink and handed it to him. She lit a cigarette, took a drag, and gave that to him. “But I noticed today that the people who don’t have anything to do but read, read differently than the ones who are still working.”

  “How?” asked Stan, giving her back the cigarette.

  “With a kind of desperation,” she said.

  “You mean, like it’s a chore?”

  “Worse than a chore,” she said. “I thought up a phrase for it this afternoon: infernal labor.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know what it boils down to in the end,” she said. “I have to think about it some more. I heard you were up by the creek this morning.”

  “News travels in Midian,” he said.

  “A young woman?” she asked.

  He nodded. “I can’t figure out what killed her. It’s the damnedest thing. She’s preserved somehow. Like a saint.”

  “Intriguing,” she said.

  “Intriguing but frustrating.” He stood up, went to the dining room, and returned with the green cardboard box. He set it on the table before her and sat down again. “Cynthia,” he said. “You may find this strange.”

  “Stranger than you?” she said.

  He reached forward and lifted the lid off the box.

  “What is it?” she asked, peering inside. A moment later, she said, “Oh, that is disturbing.”

  “It’s a death mask,” he said. “The young woman.”

  She took it in her two hands, and brought it up to stare at it face-to-face.

  “Smell it,” he said.

  She wrinkled her nose and looked at him.

  “Do it,” he said and nodded.

  She brought the thin plaster visage closer. “Like a garden,” she said and smiled.

  “And the smile?” asked Stan.

  Cynthia took a long look, holding the face at arm’s length. “Not always nice,” she said. She put the mask back in the box.

  “I haven’t seen that smile yet,” he said.

  “What ones have you seen?” she asked.

  He took up his drink and listened to the music.

  Later, just after midnight, Stan had a dream about the war, the shrapnel in his foot, the mustard gas poisoning of the wound, the amputation, the pain, and he woke to it, grunting.

  “What is it?” said Cynthia.

  Stan rolled to a sitting position at the edge of the bed. “It’s the goddamn foot,” he said. “Two nights in a row.”

  “Is there something you can take for it?” she asked.

  “I’ll get it,” he said. “Just go back to sleep.” He lifted himself onto his good foot and then slowly brought the ivory one to the floor. Ever so gently, he applied pressure until it could bear his weight without making him scream. He hobbled to the doorway, grabbed his robe, and went for his bag. “Two nights in a row,” he said and downed three pills at once with a shot of Old Overholt. Then he picked up the mask and the cigarettes. In his study, he listened to the wind and the clock. The ghostly ache was far worse than usual. Cynthia had asked him earlier why he’d made the mask, and he hadn’t been able to answer. Now, groggy and high, he found all kinds of answers.

  At dawn Cynthia helped Stan from his study to the bed. He lay his head on the pillows, and she spread the blanket over him. He could barely keep his eyes open to say good-bye. She was already wearing her coat and hat before he managed to get the word out. She kissed him and, as always when she stayed overnight, left early, not wanting to be seen by the neighbors as she made her way up the street.

  Flat on his back, staring at the ceiling like a body in the pool at Hek’s Creek, Stan remembered the last time he’d asked her to marry him. A month earlier, in the library, just after closing. He was helping her in the stacks. She was squatting down, arranging a bottom row while he reshelved books from a cart next to him. He said simply, “Will you marry me?” It was his second try in as many years.

  She laughed and stood up. “You’re sweet,” she said. She drew closer to him and put her arms around his waist. He kissed her. She hugged him and stepped away, bringing her hands up in front of her. “No,” she said.

  “A peculiar woman” was how de Vries had described her. Stan’s relationship with the librarian had begun in the last year of the doctor’s life. The old man had ticked off the reasons for his negative assessment—her clock garden, her voluminous reading, her insisten
ce on being heard. “A good heart, but peculiar,” he’d said. “And not all that good-looking.”

  As for her part, Cynthia said of de Vries, “He has a brilliant mind and a ponderous ego.”

  At the time, Stan had pretended not to understand either of them, but now he wondered as he drifted into a swiftly moving dream of the summer flood.

  Five hours later, the phone rang and its persistence pulled him from the depths. As he lifted the receiver next to the bed, he checked the alarm clock. It was 11:15 A.M.

  Bleary, rubbing his eyes, he propped himself on his elbow and said, “Lowell.”

  “Coroner,” said Groot.

  “Yes, Detective,” said Stan.

  “I’m in a pay phone at the Rexall in Hekston.”

  Stan was about to ask why, but the events of the previous day came back to him. “Did you find something?” he asked.

  “Are you busy today?” asked Groot.

  “What have you got?”

  “I want you to come up here and identify a body.”

  “A dead one?”

  “Not exactly. Meet me at the Windemere bar down by the river, next to the factory. Veersland Street.”

  “It’ll take me about an hour to get there.”

  “Twelve thirty. I’ll be way in the back in a booth,” said Groot and hung up.

  Stan replaced the receiver and fell back into the bed and the lingering scent of Cynthia’s perfume. Now that he was fully awake, he discovered he was nauseated from the whiskey and pills. He lay still for five minutes but eventually rolled out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. Twenty minutes later, he’d puked, showered, and shaved. Staring into the mirror, he rinsed the razor and took in his weary eyes and pale complexion. The ghost of a pain was making him old.

  He dressed in the brown suit, the mustard tie, the gold bee clip, gathered his bag and the camera, and stepped out the front door into a brisk, blustery day. He got in the old Chrysler and headed north, out of town. Soon the blocks of houses became pasture. The cows gave way to fields of dry cornstalks, which gave way to nothing but deep woods on either side of the cracked highway. Leaves tumbled and blew and the brooding clouds moved swiftly, suddenly revealing beams of sunlight and just as quickly swallowing them.