by R. L. Perry
Inside the top freezer, I noted that there were several bags of ice and a small silver scoop. There were bourbon glasses, and a couple of wine stems, positioned in a well-lit nook which served as the bar area. I made a mental note of the panorama, opened and closed a few other cupboard doors, and then turned my attention again to Sheila Carrington.
I nodded to Jones and Smith and they led the gurney down the hallway to the front door. We repositioned the sheet and secured it across the body before we stepped outside, the cold wind snapping at our faces like tiny whips, our fingers quickly losing sensation at the tips. We loaded the body quickly into the back of the hearse, just a slide and lock, and I said goodbye with a nod. Jones tipped a finger against his forehead in a mock salute to my authority and I watched the two hasten to the van, start the engine, and roll out of the driveway in a diesel trail of haste.
Then, without further ado, I slid into the hearse and began my trek across town. I had a body to deliver, an autopsy to supervise, and not enough hours in the day.
I knew that someone would be at the morgue when I arrived, but I did not relish the thought of bringing my gift. Christmas was a day for opening packages. But it seemed fiendish, even reprehensible, to have to open a human body on a day of new birth.
Chapter Four
With Corey vacationing in deep Florida, soaking up the blazing heat of a tropic sun, I did not have the satisfaction of my go-to forensics expert. Rather, I had to settle for Blanch—an old fixture at the lab who had long ago forsaken her peroxide roots for an honest spray of brittle, gray hair. Now in her sixties, Blanch had grown severe in her judgments and set in her ways, and she was the one pathologist at the morgue whom people avoided at all costs. Corey had warned me about her numerous times, and had made the point of advising me to steer clear of any autopsy where Blanch held the scalpel in her hands.
But here she was—scheduled on Christmas . . . and why not?
After I had called ahead and secured her services, I steeled myself in pleasant thoughts and brought the hearse around to the morgue entrance. I unloaded Sheila Carrington’s body on the gurney by myself, an easy enough measure on the spring-loaded wheels, and led the deceased toward the forensic lab doors. Blanch, her wild gray strands emphasizing a set of piercing blue eyes, met me at the door.
“I’m sorry, Blanch,” I said. “I would rather be home, too.”
“All in a day’s work, Mary,” she told me, her voice a quiver of nerves and unfiltered cigarettes. I was prepared for worse, but her response was more pleasant than I had anticipated.
I helped Blanch load the body onto the autopsy table and, after securing the perimeter of the room, we washed and suited up: masks, gloves, surgical garb. Blanch threw a switch and sent the exhaust into gear, its gentle winds extracting air from the room and replacing it with scented lilac. “You gonna take notes while I work?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, taking a step back and positioning my pen on a clipboard.
Blanch removed the sheet, peeled the rest of the clothing from Sheila Carrington’s body, and prepared to conduct the autopsy. “Female. Mid-fifties,” she said behind her mask. Blanch ran her fingers down the limbs, under the armpits, around the neck, the legs. All business, she was looking for any signs of wounds, any puncture marks, cuts, or abrasions. “No visible marks on the body,” she said. “Epidermis appears healthy. Slight discoloration around the neck, but could be makeup.”
I took notes, made my own shorthand marks in the margins that I could decipher later.
Blanch reached for her scalpel and I took another step back. She began in the usual procedure, cutting on either side of the torso just below the neck, a large dark V forming where the cuts met at the center of the breast-bone. And then a single line down the center of the abdomen all the way to the genitals. Dark ridges of blood formed at the lines, but Blanch worked them back as she peeled away the epidermis with her quick scalpel, her hands moving deftly, gracefully, to flay open the body, the breasts parting to the sides of the table and, once opened at the center, exposing all of the internal organs—stomach, liver, kidneys, bowels—in their bright pink glory.
As Blanch ran her fingertips across the organs, removing each one to examine it more closely, she made verbal notations which I scribbled hastily upon the clipboard.
“Liver healthy, no signs of disease.”
“Kidneys . . . good.”
“Intestines—small and large—no signs of tumor or obstruction. But . . .”
She had not yet examined the stomach and was considering reaching for the large rib cutters so she could open the chest cavity and examine the lungs and heart. I was prepared to turn away during the pruning of the ribs—a procedure that always set my nerves on edge, like fingernails raked across a chalkboard. But Blanch hesitated as she placed the stomach on the tray.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’m going to run a culture,” she said. “This doesn’t look right.”
“The stomach?”
“Yes. And maybe the intestines. We’ll see.”
I scribbled my notes on the clipboard, wondered what further revelations the exploration would conclude. The exhaust fan was whirring overhead. I found myself breathing in the shallow air.
When Blanch cut into the stomach, I had to turn away lest I lose the contents of my own. The contents, thick as bile, flowed out into the containment pouch. “Well, this is something,” Blanch said. “Looks like bacterial infection. Probably quite painful.”
“She was vomiting,” I whispered under my mask.
“I can see why,” Blanch stated matter-of-factly. “It’s in the intestines, too.”
“You have more?”
“I’ll run a culture to make sure,” Blanch said. “But I think this woman just joined the one-percent club.”
Chapter Five
I kept my gaze fastened over Blanch’s right shoulder as she finished the autopsy, her final examination of the lungs and heart, and then her exploration of the cranium. Sheila Carrington had every part intact, but something small and sinister had invaded her body and brought about her demise.
I completed my notes, exited the forensics room and peeled off the surgical garb, and then scrubbed my hands at the sink for long minutes as if ridding myself of fear and death itself. “It’s Christmas day,” I told Blanch as we hunched over the sinks, “but could I press you to have the culture report back to me by tomorrow morning?”
Blanch wiped gray strands of hair from her high forehead and blew tiny soap bubbles into the air as she scrubbed her face with her open palms. “I suppose this is necessary. What else do I have to do?”
I was about to point out that Blanch and I were kindred spirits—women who had learned how to handle death with an acumen and expertise that would bring most men to their knees. Like an old schoolmarm, Blanch had endured in the classroom of the departed, learning her trade by fits and starts, her arms greased to the elbows inside the abdominal cavities. She was like an old sailor, a whaler of sorts, gone deep into the bowels of giant beasts, but in her case, a most learned explorer of the human frame. The large questions had long ago been answered, all vision and outcomes observed at the macro level. But now we needed the forensic experts, like Blanch, to search the miniscule, the micro, in order to obtain our truths.
“Blanch,” I said, as I slipped on my overcoat. “It’s getting very cold outside. And I’d like to bring you some Christmas cheer. What can I get for you?” I considered my question the first gift of the season—one truly offered with no strings attached.
She brightened under the light of the offer but still, in the end, backed away into the shadows of isolation. “That’s nice of you,” Blanch said. “But I’d better get at that culture. If you need the report by morning, I’d better keep my nose to the grindstone.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish it could be otherwise.”
Blanch gave me a wink and stepped out of the room, leaving me with an empty gurney and a double-pa
rked hearse. I pushed the gurney to the door and availed myself again to the elements, the frigid air momentarily taking the breath from my lungs as I worked the gurney toward the back of the car. Even in the bright light of morning the temperature was descending, a plague sinister or pervasive—like a hoard of locusts—moving across the land.
After loading the gurney I scurried into the hearse and slammed the door. I started the engine, prayed there would be some vestigial heat still lingering in the vents. I reached into my purse and took out my cell phone, hoping against hope that Lance might have left a text message or a voice mail. But the screen, empty, flashed its depressing news as I lingered in the front seat, the steering wheel cold to the touch, and considered my next move.
Peering at the rooftops, I noted that wisps of hot air were rising like ghosts across the Christmas landscape, and if not for the memory of my brief morning with Lance, the day would have seemed like any other. But the morning was all but finished now, my plate suddenly filled with reports and notations, with blood and guts and a funeral to manage.
I was still sitting in the hearse, revving the engine to jumpstart the heater core, when I noticed the patrol car heading in my direction. Although the IPD cars all looked alike, I knew immediately that Lance was behind the wheel, and when he pulled into the parking lot at the morgue, I began to cry.
He parked, studied me for what seemed like long minutes through the glass, and then he opened his door and moved slowly toward me across the asphalt. He was not in uniform, still unkempt and layered in last night’s memories, his face sallow and worried. But he appeared taller than ever, broad-shouldered and carried forward by a determination that gave me pause.
I rolled down the window in the hearse, feeling at last the first pangs of heat emanating from the vents, and the only thing I could think to say to him was, “Why aren’t you wearing a coat?” I tried to brush away my tears.
Lance didn’t answer. He didn’t smile. But when he edged up to my window he said, “I knew I’d find you here. I’ve been miserable all morning worrying about you.”
“Where were you?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” he answered, his words fluttering from his mouth in vaporous rings. “I just wanted to do this right. I was hoping to have this talk before you were called away this morning.”
“What talk?” I asked. “What’s this about?”
Lance sighed, and my heart grew heavy thinking that he was on the verge of breaking up with me. Now I couldn’t hide my tears. “As I was trying to say this morning—”
“—Lance, don’t!”
“No,” he said. “Let me finish. Let me say it before I forget. If we’re going to be in this together we have to have each other’s backs. If we’re partners, we have to protect and defend. And I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a mess. You’re the most beautiful gift I’ve ever had handed to me. And the thought of spending another day without you is tearing me up.”
I was stunned. And as Lance knelt there on the frigid pavement, his hands draped over the rim of the window with his puppy dog eyes watering in the wind, I leaned out and kissed him. He reached across the transom where the temperatures, and our lives, mingled . . . and handed me the small box that he had wrapped earlier in the morning.
“I didn’t want to do this here at the morgue,” he said, “but if this is where we are going to spend our lives, then so be it.”
I unwrapped the box. Opened it. Inside was a gorgeous diamond ring—a stone worthy in size and beauty to the love we had found.
“Will you marry me, Mary Christmas?” he asked, smiling all the way.
He was wiping away my tears, some of them, I think, freezing to his fingertips as I said eagerly, “I will.”
Chapter Six
Sometimes we experience moments that we hope could last forever. And at other times, the moments we love pass away quickly in crimson sunsets or scroll past us like high, vaporous clouds. Other experiences blaze in our memories with beauty and wonder across the horizon of our years. But Lance and I knew that we were different. We cherished the moments as they came, knowing full well that even the most promising of days could suddenly end in disaster. This realization was, however, the one great adventure we shared together—a journey we now cherished as the promise of better days to come. We both knew that, living so closely in the crucible of death and dying, that our love was more immediate, more responsive . . . a treasure we cherished more than life itself. Ours was stronger than most and we would guard each other with a desperate passion.
So while it was still Christmas, we didn’t want the day to end.
“Let’s celebrate,” Lance told me before we left the morgue. “Let’s get our act together and have a nice dinner at your place.”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s.”
“Invite the crew,” Lance said. I knew the short list.
“Just give me an hour to get ready,” I told Lance. “I’ve got to drop the hearse off at the funeral home. I’ll make some calls. You can start getting things ready on the home front.”
The plan sounded stodgy but Lance agreed. And, as we parted at the morgue, he leaned in and gave me yet another memorable kiss, his warmer hands wrapping my face, holding me close. But even then, I could feel him beginning to tremble in the encroaching freeze.
The streets were still so quiet, ice cold and barren, as I pulled out of the parking lot, my heart so full I thought it might explode. I wondered how I should break the news to David and Silvia, but then decided that Lance and I would do it together.
When I arrived at the funeral home, I switched out the cars and made a quick sashay through the rooms to make sure the furnace was working. I checked to see that Rose had unplugged the coffee pot. I turned out the lights.
Sitting down at my desk, I called Silvia first. She answered, as she always does, right away. “You’re still planning on Christmas, I hope.”
“What’s happened?” Silva asked. “You’re calling from the funeral home, aren’t you?”
“Long story,” I said. “Short conclusion. I was called out early this morning to pick up a body.”
“Happens every year,” she said. “I’ve grown accustomed to your afternoon Christmas parties.”
“Just come over,” I said. “We’ll celebrate.”
David was much the same. He was nonplussed when I called, but eager to bring me the latest edition of the newspaper, some doughnuts, and a thermos of hot coffee. “It’s a little late in the day for that now, David,” I said. “Just bring yourself. You know the routine.”
“I’ll be there,” he said. “Just promise me you won’t pick up the phone when Jack the Ripper calls.”
“Promise.”
I hung up, draped my scarf more tightly around my neck; the cold seeming to penetrate the walls. And it was getting colder. I hoped Lance would have a blazing fire waiting for me in the fireplace when I returned, candles lit, lights up. I wanted the full warmth of the day and all of the love of my friends.
Then, as I was about to leave for home, I thought of Rose Edgewater. We had become fast friends and I couldn’t bear the thought of her being alone on Christmas afternoon. Sooner or later, she would have to be exposed to my gang of four—and I thought she might as well join the crew. I dialed her number and was elated when she answered.
“Rose,” I said right off, “we’re having a party at my house. I’m driving over now to pick you up. I won’t take no for an answer.”
“Then I won’t say no,” Rose told me. “I won’t even put on any makeup.”
“All the better.”
“I have no gifts,” Rose said. “But I could bring some peanut butter fudge. I made a batch late last night.”
“That’s enough,” I said. “A sweet treat would be perfect.”
Rose was quiet for a few seconds and then said, “Thank you, Mary. I hope I’m not intruding.”
“Never,” I said. “So, I’ll be by in
a few minutes. Bundle up. It’s cold outside.”
And, with the plans complete, I gathered up my things and headed out the front door, the cold air socking me in the face, stinging my eyes. It was the coldest Christmas I could remember on the outside. But inside there was a warmth gathering that I knew would bring us all closer together. Nothing, I thought, could put a damper on that. Not even death.
Chapter Seven
It was a Christmas afternoon to remember. Gifts under the tree. Good friends gathered around the hearth. A beautiful fire that Lance had prepared. Everyone laughing about everything and no one paying attention to anything—not even my engagement ring. But Lance and I had planned it that way.
As the afternoon wore on, each of us a little tipsy on sweet red wine, we were all discovering how much we had in common. Silvia and David were growing to appreciate Lance, and Rose was the life of the party.
“Where did you find this jewel?” David asked at one point as he lifted a glass to Rose.
“I didn’t find her,” I admitted. “She found me. She just walked into the funeral home and right into my life.”
“I’m sorry,” Rose said, hoisting another glass of her own. “I can be a little intrusive. But if I drink this next glass, you’ll never get rid of me. You’ll have to carry me home.”
Lance was even loosening up. Dressed in casual blue flannel and khakis, he was even more handsome than he was in uniform. As he put another log on the fire, he waxed philosophical, holding my friends spellbound with his thought. “You know, Mary needs a lot of help. And if I haven’t said it before, I want to thank each of you for looking out for her. Her life would be a miserable wreck if not for you.”
Perhaps it was the wine speaking, but I had never seen Lance so accommodating toward my friends, so appreciative. But then, he was going to have to get used to “us”. Warts and all.
David was next to speak. He was sitting in the corner recliner—my father’s favorite chair—tennis racket in lap, wrapping paper strewn around his feet. “You’ve saved Mary’s hide more often than we have, Lance,” David said. “At least you try to talk some sense into her.”