The Mountains Bow Down

by Sibella Giorello

  “Why is that man staring at us?” my mother asked.

  Because I asked him for a ride to the funeral home.

  “He must be waiting for somebody.” Three lies, in less than a minute. A new record.

  Claire trundled beside us. “Did that guy just roll a body bag down the gangplank?”

  “Gangway,” I said.

  “But I saw him. He shoved a body into that car, right? Last night I had a dream somebody died. I woke up this morning, knowing it would come true.”

  “What?!” my mother cried.

  “Nadine, I can see into the future. Especially when it comes to death.”

  “Don’t you need to get somewhere?” I gave Claire a frigid smile.

  “What d’ya think I came over for? Charlotte’s saving seats on the bus but some guy just whacked her with his cane. Your mother’s holding up our whole tour.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” My mother hurried, following Claire through the gray clouds of exhaust. Like people passing through a veil, all I could see was the yellow raincoat and my mom’s new pink tennis shoes. She was accustomed to high heels that pitched her forward like a ski jumper, and the tennis shoes gave her a flat-footed walk. When she climbed aboard the bus, she glanced back.

  My smile was ready, waiting. I waved.

  Once they were inside, I glanced back at the mortician, giving him a signal that it would just take one moment more.

  But the bus didn’t leave.

  Walking up and down the middle aisle, a tour guide handed out papers. As the moments stretched on, I unclipped my cell phone and tapped out the cell number Geert gave me, in case I had any more “stupid questions.”

  Here was one: “What’s the mortician’s cell number?” I asked.

  “He is with you,” Geert said.

  “I need to call him.”

  An incriminating silence followed and I walked to the edge of the pier. The harbor smelled of kelp, and calciferous barnacles clung to the wooden pylons. Water lapped against the pier, and I memorized the ten digits Geert offered, beginning with area code 907.

  I dialed the number. The Suburban’s window slid down and the mortician’s round face peered out.

  “You can’t just walk over here?” he said into the phone.

  The bus still hadn’t moved. And any moment some idea could pitch its tent inside my mother’s paranoid mind, prompting more terrified questions.

  “I’ll meet you at the funeral home,” I said. “Is it far?”

  I heard a low guttural sound in the phone.

  “You’re in Ketchikan,” the mortician said. “Nothing’s far.”

  Downtown Ketchikan looked as if organized landslides laid out the streets. On the mountain’s upper levels, wood-frame houses notched the mountainside while a commercial district descended in waves along winding and narrow streets that eventually dropped to a final row of storefronts hanging over the ocean on piers.

  Hurrying down Front Street, I followed the mortician’s directions. On my right, Deer Mountain loomed three thousand feet above town. I still had my rock hammer in my backpack, hoping to sample some local geology, and the mountain’s patient beauty seemed to mock my sudden change in plans. At Mission Street, I looked for St. John’s Episcopal, remembering it because it had the same name as my parents’ church back in Richmond. The resemblance stopped there. Even with the bright June sun shining on the lap siding, the building looked soggy. The graying boards testified to America’s heaviest annual rainfall, precipitation that was measured in feet, not inches, per year. Ten to twelve feet, on average. The other difference? A totem pole across the street.

  From Mission, I crossed a footbridge that became Creek Street. Water from the mountain rushed under the creosote-soaked boardwalk, pummeling the dark granite boulders and sending up a spray of mist that the morning sun turned into faint rainbows. Trotting across the boards, my steps sounded hollow. I passed a pretty Native girl standing in the doorway of a nineteenth-century wooden building. Her sequined dress didn’t quite reach her dimpled knees and the sound of rushing water drowned out her greeting. Back in the early 1900s, this boulevard was Ketchikan’s infamous Red Light District. The “houses of ill repute” had maintained a steady stream of miners and lumberjacks and merchants who got rich selling picks and shovels to fortune seekers. And now, in the era of Internet porn and MTV, a historic whorehouse seemed quaint.

  The mortuary sat at the end of the boardwalk. An old woodframe building painted a muddy-yellow agate was tucked so tightly against the mountainside that the upper floor had doors to different roads, matching up with the switchbacks carved into the mountainside. Under the second story eaves, the Suburban’s dented bumper was backed up to wide doors.

  A bell rang when I opened the door on the first floor. I smelled the unmistakable odor—Eau de Funeral Home. They all smelled like this, like rose petals marinating in formaldehyde. But the receptionist was something different. Green tie-dye shirt. Long white hair cascading over bony shoulders.

  She lowered the paperback she was reading—a murder mystery.

  I introduced myself.

  She smiled wickedly. “He’s dying to see you.”

  Before I could reply—if I could reply—she leaned back and threw her voice at the ceiling. “Bobby! She’s here about the body!”

  His reply was two stomps. The pendant light shimmered with dust.

  “Go right up.” She picked up her book.

  The stairs were narrow, beveled from wear, and I could see why the body was unloaded upstairs. The mortician waited at the second-floor landing, tying a rubber apron around his substantial girth. It was green. A plastic face shield was lifted to his sweating forehead. I changed my mind. Not a lamb. A crocodile.

  “What’d I tell you?” he said. “Nothing’s far in this stinkin’ town.”

  He lumbered down a paneled hallway, passing a room to our left that displayed caskets. Stacked three high along the wall, one was propped open in the room’s middle to display the benefits of eternal satin rest. The mortician shoved open a set of hinged double doors on our right, letting the flaps swing back on me.

  On a stainless steel table, the black body bag lay with thick nylon straps running under its lumpy contours. The straps were connected to a metal pulley system secured to an exposed I-beam on the ceiling. This, I presumed, was how he worked alone. Rolling carts, straps, pulleys. Even after rigor mortis set in, he could move a body by himself. Above a stainless steel sink hung a small certificate, a state license to embalm, while another document beside it gave him permission to perform autopsies. The stainless steel counter, four feet at best, displayed his tools. Clamps. Hooks. Scalpels. Nothing fancy. Once somebody died, finesse was wasted effort. Not that this particular mortician was concerned with finesse, ever.

  “If you’re planning to stay for the show,” he said, “I gotta get permission from the family. State law.”

  “No, thank you, I don’t need to observe the autopsy,” I said. For one, my presence would trigger suspicion in Milo Carpenter and I wanted the actor completely unprepared for any upcoming interviews. “I’m interested primarily in cause of death. You heard how she was found?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Finally something different.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The cruise ships send me newlyweds and nearly-deads. I get honeymooners who got drunk and fell overboard, or old folks who screwed up their medications for the last time. Sometimes a heart attack, since everybody wants to see Alaska before they kick the bucket. You might’ve noticed?”

  “Noticed what?”

  “Most of these passengers are one foot in the grave.”

  I had noticed a certain demographic. At thirty, I was among our ship’s youngest passengers.

  “Do you have much experience with suicides?” I asked.

  “Four this year.”

  “In Ketchikan?”

  He walked over to the sink, checking out the scalpels. “Teenagers. Boys. They watch that YouTube vide
o.”

  “What video?”

  “The one that shows how to wrap a cord around the neck for a sexual thrill. Autoerotic asphyxiation. Cuts off the oxygen while they’re masturbating.” He picked up a knife. “Problem is, the point of no return doesn’t take long, a minute or two and they pass out with the cord still around their neck. Last month I flew into a Native village. Place doesn’t even have one paved road. But they get the Internet. They have computers. One kid, one belt, and YouTube. And he was dead.”

  “That’s awful.”

  He shrugged and examined the scalpel’s triangular blade, like a hostess checking the cutlery for water spots.

  “Have you ever seen a jumper’s body?” I asked.

  “We don’t get much jumping in Ketchikan. With all the rain, we’re more head-in-the-gas-oven type people.”

  His smile was ghoulish and I suddenly wondered if I should stay for the autopsy. “Her body was hanging about twenty feet below the deck. There’s no ladder down there.”

  “I got it, she jumped.”

  “Look carefully at her neck.”

  His dark eyes shifted to the body bag.

  “The rope was thin nylon,” I continued. “A jump from that height should’ve done major damage to the neck and throat. At the very least, the rope would’ve sliced into her windpipe.”

  “I hear she’s famous.”

  “The husband’s famous. Milo Carpenter, the actor.”

  He nodded, picking up his rubber gloves. “Sure you don’t want to stay?”

  I thought of Milo’s face from this morning, when we stood near the body. He showed fear. But fear of what, discovery? If he knew I suspected something, he’d probably lawyer-up. After that we’d learn nothing. “No, thank you. How long will your exam take?”

  “Depends.”

  “On?”

  “On what I see,” he said. “Go wait in the chapel.”

  Another set of narrow stairs led to the third-floor chapel. The narthex had a front door that opened to a mountain road curved like an S and I tried to imagine how this worked. The bereaved came in on the first floor, the dead were embalmed on the second floor, and all of them were driven up the mountain in order to walk into the chapel on the third floor.

  And it got weirder inside the chapel, whose entry was a pair of louvered pine panels, like saloon doors from a western movie. The sunlight that streamed through amber stained glass windows barely illuminated the room. Everywhere was dark wood, almost black. The floor, the wall, the peaked ceiling. And the straight-backed pews, rows of dark wood, resembled open coffins. Above them, tarnished brass sconces held white candles gummed with dust.

  This place felt haunted.

  I was turning to leave when my cell phone rang.

  Allen McLeod. Calling from Seattle.

  “The Alaska office wants us to take it,” he said.

  I dropped into a pew. “May I ask why?”

  “Nobody’s available. It’s that simple. Our closest office is Juneau, and that’s just a resident agency with two guys covering all of southeastern Alaska. They’re both working urgent cases. And Anchorage can’t spare anybody either. So if this thing turns into a case, Raleigh, it’s yours.”

  Resident agencies were FBI outposts in the hinterlands, where agents handled everything from mail delivery to mail fraud to murder.

  “They don’t have anybody?” I asked.

  “The SAC”—Special Agent in Charge—“pointed out that you’re already on the ship. Plus it left from Seattle, and it’ll return here too. Technically, he can make the argument that the case would belong to this office.”

  I could smell dust in the chapel air and the acidic scent of old stained wood. When I didn’t reply, McLeod said, “Look on the bright side, Raleigh. Maybe she killed herself. Anything from the coroner?”

  I told him what Geert explained to me: Nautical law dictated that a cruise ship go to the first port with a funeral home. In this case, Ketchikan. If the death was deemed suspicious, the body went to that state’s medical examiner. In Alaska, that meant Anchorage. “I’m waiting to hear if the mortician agrees this looks suspicious.”

  “Okay, if it’s not suspicious,” McLeod said brightly, “you can go back to your vacation.”

  Dread buckled down on my neck. “Yes, sir.”

  “I see you’ve still got that ‘sir’ habit.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m—”

  “From the South, I know. But whenever you call me ‘sir,’ I feel like a country pumpkin.”

  Mentally inserting “bumpkin” for “pumpkin,” I promised to call when the mortician finished the examination.

  Closing the phone, I walked down the chapel’s middle aisle, fingering dust on the candles, taking in the place’s muted amber glow. And I tried to kick self-pity to the curb. My last vacation was six years ago, the summer before my father was murdered. We went rock hunting in North Carolina, searching Pressley Mine for sapphires. Now here was Alaska, every geologist’s dream, and I was stuck in some funeral home lifted from the Twilight Zone, awaiting a verdict whose conclusion I already knew: her death was suspicious. The issue was jurisdiction: I had none.

  Stepping through the translucent beams of dusty sunlight, I glanced at my watch. My heart tightened. I hated this feeling. This pity for myself. Willing myself not to check the time again, I stared at the cavernous pulpit. After several excruciating minutes, I sat down and picked up a hymnal from the bench. I fluttered the pages, feeling the soft, almost slippery pages. They had the atmospheric damp of books stored in wet basements. After several more minutes, I grabbed the Bible next to it, impatiently fluttering again until I saw the words. They had no phonetic resemblance to English. I flipped to the front and saw that it was a translation into Tlingit, the local Native language. The book of John read, Dikée Ankáwoo doo Yéet dàt John-ch kawshixidee Yoox’utúnk. Searching for other passages, I found a small scrap of paper in the book of Habakkuk. The crude handwriting flowed with divine wisdom.

  Sometimes We gots to Wate, it said.

  Not a bad summary of Habakkuk, I decided. And a fair comment on my own circumstances. But self-pity told me I’d been waiting forever. Waiting for my mother to get well. Waiting for justice for my father. Waiting for love.

  I shook off the next thought—did I really love DeMott, or did I love the idea of settling down?

  The saloon doors swung open and dust motes exploded through the amber sunlight. The mortician strode down the aisle wearing rubber boots and his apron. The doors squeaked back and forth behind him, making him seem like some demented gunslinger.

  “She had a face-lift,” he said, as though uncovering the real crime. “I found scars behind her ears. It wasn’t a bad lift. Somebody also cauterized the capillaries around her eyes, you know, lasering off her bags.”

  To emphasize his findings, he pointed to the shiny pouches beneath his own eyes. Avaricious eyes.

  “So we can rule out the idea she killed herself over wrinkles.”

  “How do you know she didn’t lower herself down there? She could’ve hung there until it was lights-out.”

  “Climbing down there would require superhuman upper-body strength. And she’s not a small woman.”

  “One hundred seventy-two pounds.”

  “At night, on the open sea.”

  He wagged his head, as if still not ready to concede suicide. “Stick your head in some rope, hang a minute, you’re about done. That’s what those teenagers don’t realize, going for the cheap sex thrill. Not that there’s another kind in Ketchikan.”

  “What about her neck?” I said, trying again. “How much damage did you see?”

  “Not much,” he agreed.

  “That doesn’t strike you as suspicious?”

  “But I’m supposed to say if it’s possible she killed herself. The answer is, yeah, it’s possible.”

  “Possible is not the same as likely.” I felt my temper rising. The man was both morbid and obstinate. “And it isn’t probable ei
ther. What I’m asking is, after what you saw, is it probable she killed herself?”

  “I don’t want to be in the middle of this.”

  “The middle of what? She’s dead.”

  “But famous.”

  “The husband’s famous,” I clarified, hoping to encourage his spine.

  “Okay, whatever. It means they’ll run something about it on television, one of those shows about celebrity deaths. And they’ll make me look like an idiot, some hick mortician in Ketchikan. What do you think people do around here when it rains all year? They watch TV. I’ll be the biggest joke in town.”

  I restrained the urge to tell him he probably was already. “You’re saying the exam was inconclusive?”

  “No. I’m saying I got second thoughts. Let the medical examiner in Anchorage go on the line. Let him deal with the reporters.” He pointed to the floor. “I just put her in a shipping container. If the weather holds, a plane can get her out today.”

  On the one hand, I agreed with his decision; I’d rather have an ME’s ruling. But the greatest enemy for solving any crime was time. And this invertebrate was wasting time, all but admitting Judy Carpenter’s death was highly suspicious—but he didn’t want the responsibility of saying it. He would still collect his pickup fee from the cruise line, and I suspected he might call the Enquirer later, to find out how much they paid for an anonymous description of her cosmetic surgery.

  “How long does that take, sending the body to the MEA?”

  “A day to fly it up there, then it goes to the morgue. A real morgue, like what you got in the lower forty-eight.”

  Five days remained on the cruise. Five days to figure out what happened to this woman and who did it. But with the body transport, it left four days. Two thousand passengers, and a husband who was an actor. A man paid to pretend.

  “Once her body gets to the medical examiner, how long then?”

  “Then it’s get in line.” He shrugged. “All those tourists want to see Alaska before they die, so the morgue’s a busy place.”