“Okay…” she replied, setting the spoon down and staring at him.
“It’s a bit…difficult for me to talk about,” he sighed, putting his spoon down as well and staring at the table top.
Her eyes widened, then became shuttered, and she stared down at her cereal, deliberately nonchalant.
“Oh?” she said softly, trying to keep her voice from shaking.
“It’s about…things you’ve done in the past, and I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, but…” he trailed off.
“What?” her head snapped up and her eyes looked almost feverish.
Tim took a bite of his oatmeal and chewed slowly, avoiding her eyes. He swallowed, took a sip of his tea and stared at her.
“Okay, I’m just going to come out with it,” he sighed, wondering why on earth she was looking at him like some kind of cornered animal. “A woman came by the office today, and she asked me a really strange question.”
Susannah swallowed hard and seemed to pale a bit. “Really? About what?” she asked, her voice a much higher pitch than usual.
“She’s been having issues with her veterinarian. She has a cat who’s very ill, and the vet has just been giving her expensive supplements to keep the poor animal alive, and the cat is suffering,” he explained, drawing a puzzled look from his wife.
“She came by the mortuary to tell you about her cat?”
“Yes, but that’s not all,” Tim fiddled with the handle of his spoon.
“Okaaaaay,” Susannah seemed to be getting irritated, and wiped a light sheen of sweat from her upper lip.
“She wants to…needs to…put the cat out of its misery,” he blew out a breath.
Susannah frowned deeply, thoroughly befuddled.
“Timothy, is there something in this story that will explain how this woman and her cat is any business of ours?” she asked sharply, adrenalin flowing. “Why on earth did she come to a mortuary to tell you about her cat? That makes no sense,” she shook her head.
“Oh, right,” he blinked at her. “Well, yes, it kind of does make sense. She’s hoping that…she asked if…” he faltered.
“What? What did she ask? What did she want?” Susannah demanded, frustrated at her husband’s reticence.
“She wants us to kill the cat,” he said simply, a bit taken aback at the vehemence of his wife’s questions.
For a brief moment, it appeared as though there was a glint of excitement in Susannah’s eyes, but Tim was certain that he’d just imagined it. His wife was clearly just stressed out about something. Some time in her shop usually relaxed her – perhaps she’d sculpt something later.
“Oh,” she replied, raising her eyebrows. “Why does she want us to do it?”
“She thought that I might have access to chemicals that would make it more humane,” he shrugged, picking up his spoon again and digging into the congealing oatmeal.
“Do you?” Susannah was looking at him intently.
“I’m sure that I could come up with something, but I thought perhaps, since you grew up on a farm, you might know what to do.”
“Well, if she’s looking for a humane end to a family pet, anything that we used to do on the farm wouldn’t be an acceptable option for her. We used things like sledge hammers and large knives and…” she began.
Tim held up a hand, looking slightly green. “Okay, I understand…please,” he shook his head. “Don’t worry, I’ll figure something out.”
“People get so attached to animals,” his wife mused, returning to her breakfast. “It’s fast and easy the way that we used to do it.”
“Can we not discuss that during a meal?” Tim asked quietly. “Animals are innocent and it’s barbaric what some humans do to them.”
Susannah cocked her head to the side, chewing thoughtfully. “Okay,” she nodded. “I never realized that you were such an animal lover.”
Tim blinked at her from behind his thick lenses. “Animals don’t hurt people. They eat and sleep and look beautiful and just try to live their lives. People should be more like that,” he murmured, getting up from the table and taking his bowl with him.
Tim was a man of few words, and his wife stared at him in amazement after his assertions. He rarely spoke, and almost never showed emotion of any kind. His short monologue about animals was unusual to say the least.
“Should we get a pet?” she asked, trying not to shudder. Nurturing was definitely not her thing.
“No,” he replied on his way to the kitchen.
He didn’t turn around and she didn’t say another word, finishing her oatmeal in silence, alone.
**
Shelby Myers came to the back door of the mortuary, carrying a blanketed bundle that looked like it might be a swaddled newborn, and quickly followed Tim down to his basement workroom.
“That’s her?” he nodded at the bundle in her arms.
“Yes,” was the tearful reply.
Shelby gently moved back a fold of the blanket, and Tim was regarded by two cloudy green eyes, peering out of a thin, furry face. Bootsie mewed weakly, and tears coursed down her owner’s cheeks at the pitiful sound. Tim focused on the poor suffering animal, while her owner took deep shuddering breaths.
“This won’t hurt her, will it?” she asked, clutching the suffering feline to her breast.
Tim shook his head. “No,” he said quietly. “She’ll fall into a deep sleep and never wake up.”
He’d done his homework and had discovered how certain over the counter medications could be used to sedate and stop organ function in animals without pain or distress. He had syringes that were typically used for preparing different cavities in the body for burial, and he had filled one with a special cocktail that would ensure that the cat didn’t suffer. She would fall into a deep sleep, and her organs would shut down without waking her.
“Okay,” Shelby nodded shakily, her lower lip trembling. “What…what do I need to do?”
“I’ve prepared a place that should be comfortable for her,” he gestured to a metal table where he’d made a nest of towels. “What would you like to do with the remains? I have a crematorium, if you’d like, I can…” he began, feeling distinctly uncomfortable broaching the subject while the sick cat wheezed from beneath her blanket.
“No,” the grieving young woman shook her head. “There’s no need for that. I’ll take her home and bury her in the yard. There’s a place beside my favorite rose bush,” her chin quivered and she moved toward the nest of towels, placing the blanket and Bootsie down in the midst of it.
The cat made another attempt at a meow, sounding like the faintest cry of a gate creaking to and fro in the wind. Tim took a breath and looked away for a moment, as Shelby leaned down, stroking the thin fur that stretched across the clearly visible row of ribs along the cat’s side, and giving her one last kiss on top of the head. She ran a finger under the furry chin one last time, and rested her hands on the cat’s back, while Tim moved to the table, syringe in hand.
“Ready?”
She nodded, tears running freely down her cheeks.
“Bye-bye sweet baby kitty,” she whispered, holding the fragile, sickly animal as best as she could while Tim found a vein.
Bootsie didn’t even have the strength to react to the slight prick of the needle, and she was so weak that the medicine began working almost immediately. Her breathing slowed, the labored breaths becoming few and far between, until at last, maybe two minutes after injection, they ceased altogether.
“I don’t feel her heartbeat anymore,” Shelby put her head down on the cold metal table, her hands tenderly wrapped around the small, still body.
“I’m so sorry,” Tim said, meaning it. He stepped back, allowing the young woman to grieve, and stood watching, arms folded.
After a few minutes, Shelby tried to take deep breaths to compose herself, but succeeded only in producing gasping hiccups and shudders. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and gathered up the blanket, which now contained a limp, life
less Bootsie.
“Thank you,” she managed to choke out, on her way out the door. “Thank you for helping me.”
Tim couldn’t speak, so he merely nodded, feeling faintly nauseated. He closed the door behind Shelby and leaned against it, wracked with the sudden onset of bone-jarring chills. He had no way of knowing that when his wife saw the crying young woman leave, through their kitchen window next door…she smiled. The killer’s husband had just taken his first life, and she was delighted.
CHAPTER 11
* * *
A Hairy Truth
Arlen Bemis strode into Tim’s basement workspace like he owned it, a toothpick clamped firmly between his teeth.
“Got a stiff for ya, Eckels. Need to come to the morgue to pick it up,” he announced, as Tim stared at him, makeup sponge in hand. He had a funeral tomorrow, and was putting the finishing touches on Almira Motley, who had passed peacefully in her sleep.
“Okay,” Tim nodded, going back to the task at hand.
“He’s had an autopsy, and doesn’t have any family that we can find, so it’s gonna be a pine box and no funeral type thing. When you’re done with whatever you do, let us know, and we’ll take him to the county cemetery,” the sheriff leaned back against a stainless steel sink.
“Okay,” Tim repeated, not bothering to look up.
“And, one last thing, Eckels…”
Tim stopped applying foundation and regarded the sheriff with profound annoyance, trying not to sigh.
“There are some…unique things about this body that don’t need to be public knowledge, you feel me?” Arlen raised a warning eyebrow.
Tim blinked at him blankly and pushed his glasses up his nose with the back of one gloved wrist. The sheriff looked irritated.
“His death is under investigation, but without family or friends around asking questions, it may not exactly be a high priority for us, and we don’t need to have folks thinking that there’s a dangerous killer on the loose. You get it that time?”
“Killer?”
“Look, just keep your mouth shut about any details regarding this stiff, got it?”
Tim nodded slowly. “Got it.”
“Good. I think it’s high time you figured out how things work around here, Eckels. You keep your mouth shut and your nose out of other folks’ business and you’ll do just fine.”
Bemis took the toothpick out of his mouth and flicked it into the sink. Tim fought the urge to wrinkle his nose in disgust.
“Yes, sheriff,” he gave the expected response.
“That’s more like it, Eckels. Good man,” half of Arlen Bemis’s mouth turned upward in a mocking smile. “Hurry up and get down there to get him. He’s taking up room in the fridge.”
Tim stared after the sheriff as he swaggered arrogantly toward the stairs, then went back to working on Almira’s youthful glow.
**
The county coroner, Leonard Kelson, a crusty old fart on the verge of retirement, looked like something from a vampire movie out of the sixties. His slicked-back, iron-gray hair revealed a widow’s peak that would have rivaled any horror movie villain’s, and his sagging jowls, pursed lips and neglected yellow teeth, made one wonder if he might just prefer his liver raw, with a nice dry wine. Timothy Eckels looked like a high-fashion model by comparison.
“Who the hell are you?” Kelson demanded, when Tim walked into his grey-walled office in the county building.
“I’m Timothy Eckels, I came to…” he began.
“Oh, you’re here to pick up the body. Bout damn time,” he groused. “What took you so friggin’ long? Thought I’d have been able to get out of this godforsaken place hours ago,” Lenny continued grumbling as he led Tim down into the bowels of the building, to the morgue.
The transfer from Lenny’s cold storage to Tim’s hearse was accomplished easily enough, and soon the mortician was on his way back to the comfort and solitude of his workroom. He brought the corpse to the basement on his own, wishing, not for the first time, that the elevator in the old Victorian had been automated, rather than hand-cranked. It wasn’t that he was uncomfortable riding down with the body, far from it, it was the fact that so much valuable time was lost standing there, lowering the rickety car to the basement. He never used the elevator unless he was bringing in a body, so it wasn’t an issue most of the time, but the very real possibility existed that he might one day get trapped in between floors with a rapidly warming corpse.
He laid out the body on the table to see what needed to be done to make it presentable. When the state paid for a burial, a mandatory one-hour viewing was required, just in case a friend or family member showed up out of the blue, and an open casket was preferred, if at all possible. The first obvious clue that this was no ordinary death, was a missing hand. The wound was clean, and looked as though it had been sliced through in one skillful swoop. The cause of death was apparently the slit carotid, which was also a clean, precise cut. That kind of precision was unusual in a homicide. Typically murderers slashed and hacked their way through skin, flesh and bone without any regard for technique. Further examination revealed that there was a patch of hair missing from the body, which looked like it had been pulled out post mortem. Tim’s trained eye searched the body for other clues as to what may have happened, and he wondered what evidence had been gathered from the young man’s corpse.
The mortician fixated on the wrist and how evenly the skin there had been cleaved. It reminded him of something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but try as he might, nothing came to him when he tried to recall it, so he eventually gave up, examining the rest of the body. The fingernails on the remaining hand had been cut, and he gathered that the cranky coroner had done that, in hopes of finding some DNA evidence. Tim was more than disturbed that the sheriff didn’t seem to be taking this particular homicide seriously, but had already more than figured out that there was nothing he could do about it. On that point, Arlen Bemis had been quite clear.
**
Because Almira Motley had been a well-respected member of the community, much like Tim’s beloved Gram, he took his time making preparations for her funeral, and then went to work on Jorge Hernandez, finishing up after the dinner hour had long passed. His stomach growled, and when he trudged to the cozy cottage next door, he was surprised to see a light shining under the door to the basement. Susannah had seemed a bit stressed lately, so he assumed that she was working out her angst by crafting another sculpture. He never disturbed her when she was working in the basement. It was her realm, and he left her to it.
Tim was halfway through his dinner of leftover meatloaf and mashed potatoes when his wife came up the stairs from the basement, looking much happier than she had in a while. Her hands were shriveled slightly from wearing nitrile gloves for an extended period of time, so he knew that she’d been working on a project, which always seemed to lift her mood.
“Oh! Is it dinner time?” Susannah glanced at her watch surprised to see how late it had gotten. “I’m sorry, Timothy. I was working on a project and the time just got away from me.”
“It’s okay,” he blinked at her, swallowing a bite of her delicious meatloaf. “I just got home, and this food looked so good that I heated it up. I didn’t know that you hadn’t eaten, or I would’ve made more.”
“Don’t you worry about it, Timmy,” she kissed the top of his head in a rare show of affection on her way to the fridge. “I’ll just fix some for myself and join you.”
“That would be nice,” he replied, staring at his plate.
He hated it when people called him Timmy. He had very few memories of his mother, but the one that stood out was her screaming “Timmy” at him when he was just a toddler, before she went away and his Gram came to rescue him.
Susannah heated up her food, a huge portion of it, and settled herself across the table from her husband. He watched as she tore into the food with delight, and something on the sleeve of her blouse caught his eye. He chewed his bite of meatloaf slowly
, staring.
She washed a huge bite of mashed potatoes down with a gulp of ice cold milk and put down her glass, noticing her husband’s gaze. She followed it and then looked back up at him.
“What?” she asked, sounding the tiniest bit defensive.
“There’s a hair,” he observed, trying not to grimace.
Stray hairs, particularly around food, were a source of discomfort for him, and this one was particularly offensive because it was short, black, and wavy. His wife’s hair was long and blonde. Not only was there a hair near food, but it was a stranger’s hair.
She looked down slowly and grasped the hair in between her thumb and forefinger, taking it to the trash.
“No big deal,” she shrugged. “It’s gone now,” she dismissed her husband, who was still staring at her, not eating. “What?” she demanded, as he continued to blink at her from across the table.
“Your hair is blonde,” he said quietly.
“What are you trying to say, Timothy?” her eyes narrowed.
Suddenly his appetite was gone, and he put down his fork, not only unable to eat another bite, but feeling the food that he had consumed rising in his throat a bit.
“That hair wasn’t blonde.”
Susannah glared at him, reminding him somehow of his mother. “Are you accusing me of something, Timothy?” she asked, teeth clenched, nostrils flaring.
“I…I don’t…it’s just,” he faltered, feeling oddly helpless in the face of her anger.
“Well, are you?” she demanded, slamming her fork down on the table, causing him to wince. “How dare you, Timothy Eckels?” she challenged, eyes spitting fire.
In that moment, the universe came into sharp focus for Tim. He’d been treated like this before, the cold shudders that he felt in his soul brought back memories that he didn’t know he had. Time slowed down, and he felt quite certain that he could feel the blood thrumming through his veins. The cold look on her face, the hatred in her eyes, he’d been in this place before, and he refused to go back.
The Quiet Type Page 6