Groot sidled up next to the coroner. “Every time I look at her I think she’s alive,” he said quietly.
“She’s not,” said Stan.
“It’s the smile,” said Lougher. “What’s she smiling about?”
“Risus Sardonicus,” said the coroner. “A spasm of the facial muscles after death. But this isn’t the usual grin. The eyebrows aren’t lifted, the mouth isn’t open, her teeth aren’t showing. Instead, she looks like she’s lost in a fond memory.”
“I thought she was mocking me,” said the cop.
“She’s got a secret,” said Groot.
“She’s certainly got something,” said Stan. He raised the camera and unlocked the bellows. “I’ll get a couple of shots of her in the water and a couple on the bank here when we pull her out.”
“I looked around a few hundred yards along the creek in either direction. Didn’t see anything. She probably washed down from Hekston. The creek’s deep enough since the flood,” said Groot as Stan snapped away.
Stan lowered the camera. “She’d have been in the water for quite a while,” he said. “I’m surprised she looks as good as she does. No noticeable bloating. What time did the kids find her?”
“About 5:30,” said Lougher.
“OK, Loaf, let’s get her out of there,” said Stan.
The officer leaned over and lifted an eight-foot wooden pole with pulleys and, running its length, a stiff cord with a small noose at the end. “I haven’t fished here since I was a kid,” said Lougher as he dangled the noose out above the young woman’s left foot.
“Be gentle,” warned Stan and handed them each a pair of gloves.
“Like a mother,” said the officer as he reeled the body in .
Groot joined them and they hoisted the dead girl onto the bank. They moved her with such ease it was as if she was simply sleeping. Her skin was as cold as ice and yet firm to the touch. She exuded an aroma of flowers.
“Roses,” said Groot.
“Wisteria,” said Lougher, who then sniffed again and changed his verdict to “lilac.”
Stan stared at her expression. Her face was undeniably beautiful but the smile now appeared more wistful than serene. A hint of loss had at some point crept into it. He set the camera down and got on his knees next to her. Moving her head carefully from side to side and lifting her shoulders, he looked for the pooling of blood—lividity—caused by the posture of a corpse in the water. There were no signs in the usual spots for a drowning victim. This meant the young woman had floated, flat on her back, most of the way from wherever she’d come, and yet rigor mortis hadn’t seemed to set in yet.
“Pretty recent?” asked Groot, lighting another cigarette.
“I can’t tell,” said Stan. “Could be. No wrinkling, no foaming, no trace of insects. When you guys get her to the hospital I’ll take a look at her and see. Most unusual, though,” he said, lifting the camera. He backed away and snapped a string of pictures.
Groot walked him halfway across the meadow.
“I’m going to the diner for breakfast,” said Stan. “I’ll be over to the hospital in about an hour or so.”
The detective nodded. “The body’ll be there. I’ll come for the lowdown when I get off this afternoon.”
“By the way,” said Stan before turning toward his car, “how’s your wife doing? Last I saw you, she wasn’t well.”
“Oh, yeah, it was just the flu. She told me the other day that she’s ready for me to retire,” he said, his fat face slowly forming a grin.
“What’d you tell her?”
“I laughed,” he said and laughed without making a sound.
#
Stan limped over the uneven ground back to his Chrysler. On his way to town, he recalled the summer’s flood—sudden, massive, and devastating. People had lost houses, cars, pets. He’d seen more than a couple of floaters, as Groot called them, that week in July, but none of them looked like this girl. As he drove along, he played Best Guess. Someone up in Hekston would I.D. her from the photos. The loom there had been hit the hardest with lay-offs and since the flood a bad spirit pervaded the place. Murder, suicide, an ill-fated accident, none of them would surprise him in the least. As he pulled to the curb outside the diner, he dismissed the foul play theory as preposterous. De Vries had always told him never to trust a best guess.
Stan sat in his usual seat at a table by the window that looked out on the corner of Ninevah and Oak. Bissie Clayton brought him his free coffee.
When he’d returned from Europe, the only one of twelve young men from the county to make it home alive, it was late winter, 1919. He was on crutches, still weak from the effects of the mustard gas, and the father he’d meant to please by enlisting in the Marines was dead. Junietta Poole, the girl he’d been going with, had run off to New York City with his cousin. His mother was losing her mind, and his older brother and sister had fled to Binghamton and Syracuse respectively. He couldn’t find work; who wanted an amputee? One day during that dark time, as he was passing the diner, Bissie came out onto the sidewalk and called to him.
“You’re the boy from the war,” she said. “Lowell.”
Stan stopped and nodded.
“Whenever you want, come and see me for coffee and a meal. Don’t be shy,” she said.
He thanked her, but it was weeks before he took her up on it. He waited till he was desperate for a decent meal. Bissie was good as her word. Before he left Clayton’s that day, she slid a piece of paper along the counter to him. On it was a name and address. “Go see this fella. He wants to talk to you about a job,” she said. Even after he started working for de Vries, and was able to pay for his meals at the diner, Bissie never charged him for coffee. The doctor liked to recount a story about Bissie from when she was much younger and a stranger had tried to rob the cash register when her back was turned. “She beat him into the emergency ward at Midian General with a skillet,” he’d said. “Two more whacks and I’d have been doing an autopsy on him.”
“Lowell,” she said. “You’re here early for Saturday.” She took a seat across from him and set the pot down on the table. There was a jar between them holding dried chrysanthemums. A fly, like Groot’s birthmark, bothered the window glass. She filled the seat and then some, her forearms like James Braddock’s, her sparse white hair trapped in a spiral by bobby pins. On the days she made soup, she wore a hair net.
“There was a body up in the creek,” he said. “Not for general knowledge, you understand. Off the record.”
“I already heard,” she said. “A girl?”
Stan nodded.
“I heard she looked like an angel.”
“Not knowing what an angel looks like, it would be difficult for me to corroborate that,” he said and sipped his coffee.
Bissie laughed. “You’re a wise ass,” she said.
“Actually, there was something... interesting about her.”
She stood and smoothed her apron. “You should be that interested in the live ones,” she said, and walked back toward the counter where two out-of-towners in hunting gear waited for her. “The usual?” she called back over her shoulder.
“Yeah,” said Stan.
The plate of creamed chipped beef came, a steaming cloud of froth on toast. He ate it three times a week and knew it would eventually kill him, but Bissie made it even better than they had in the service. He washed it down with the coffee, which, though free, wasn’t good but was hot, and tried to determine from memory how old the young woman in the pool had been. He surmised late twenties, but she could have been younger. With that smile, the bright eyes, her beauty, he could, at the very edges of his imagination, picture her walking, laughing, sleeping. Then something strange occurred that had never happened before, her name came to him out of the blue—Alina.
#
The coroner’s official offices were next to the morgue, in the basement of Midian General Hospital. One of the rooms, no bigger than a large closet, held a desk with a lamp, a chair, and t
wo filing cabinets. Three times larger was the autopsy room with a table and counters and as many of the latest tools, testing equipment, and paraphernalia as de Vries had been able to wheedle out of the county, state, and federal governments. He’d done pretty well by the office until the Depression hit, had even gotten Stan a salary as his assistant although the work load for the entire county was light. Keeping up with the advancements in forensics went right out the window, though, once the “dirty thirties” rolled in. When the county threatened to eliminate the assistant position, de Vries retired and handed the reins over to Stan. Not long after, he died.
A portrait of the old man hung above the coroner’s desk. It was Stan’s habit, before every autopsy, to sit for a minute with his mentor. Occasionally, de Vries’s voice would sound in his head, usually no more than a line or two and always something he’d actually said when he was living.
“What of Alina?” Stan thought as he studied the portrait—the pointed white beard and thick eyebrows, the shelf of a forehead and a smile like the doctor was chewing a cricket with his right molar.
“Don’t name the dead,” Stan heard the doctor say. “They have their own names. They’re not pets.”
He found her laid on her back on the table in the autopsy room. At first glance, the body looked as fresh as when they’d pulled it from the creek. On the counter lay a note penciled in Groot’s terrible handwriting—right buttock. As Stan pulled on gloves and set out his instruments, he noticed the faint scent of flowers. Then he turned to her and saw her smile. It appeared not to have physically changed one iota but now it conveyed something wholly different, a deep sense of irony he’d not detected before. He was certain that if she could, she’d be shaking her head in disapproval. Loaf had said he thought she was mocking him, and now Stan understood why.
He began by rolling her on 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 phials 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 blood stream 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 poured 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 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 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 State House, 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 lay-offs at the capitol and the turgid manner of the way 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 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 19th century, but when he passed into the modernity of the 20th, 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 ice box, 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.”
OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Page 14