Cold Snap

by R. L. Perry

  “You always make it work,” Rose answered. We retreated to the chapel and cleaned up the last of the flowers—beautiful roses, pink lilies, a majestic spray of white carnations. “It’s too bad so many of these flowers go to waste. Would you mind if I found a secondary use for them?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “You have something in mind?”

  “I’d like to get these to the nursing homes,” she said. “Brighten some despair.”

  “Perfect,” I answered.

  For her age, Rose was still nimble, her fingers parting flower stems and rearranging them into new format. She had an eye for color and detail—an artistic flair. She also seemed preoccupied, deep in thought. I watched her, the way she created the new from the old, but realized she was thinking about other matters.

  “What’s on your mind?” I asked. “You seem deep in thought.”

  “Well,” she began. “I don’t know if I should say anything. But Milt and I had quite a little chat in the office before the funeral.”

  “Oh?” I reached for a blue orchid.

  “He was tight-lipped at first, very nervous about speaking, just staring at his coffee. I was asking about his family, his work . . . just small talk. But he didn’t have much to say about Sheila Carrington.”

  “I don’t think he knew her well,” I offered. “Phil was his friend and his boss. I think he knew Sheila by association.”

  “Yes,” Rose said, reaching for a tall sprig of baby’s breath, “but he seemed kind of distant. When I asked him about Phil Carrington, about doing his funeral in a few days, he seemed perplexed.”

  “It was a shock,” I reminded her. “He’d just learned about Phil a few minutes before he sat down for coffee.”

  “No,” Rose said. “It was more than that.”

  “How so?”

  “He seemed angered by his death. Like something sinister was afoot.”

  I pondered the idea. Sighed. “Everyone grieves in different ways,” I said. “As you know, anger is a part of grief. Death is quite a shock to the emotions. Could be he simply didn’t have the resources to process it all . . . seeing as how he was steadying himself to speak at Sheila’s funeral.”

  “You could be right,” Rose said. “But . . . ”

  “But what?”

  “He kept telling me how unfair it was. How Phil’s death was going to change everything. I think he was talking about the business.”

  “I guess things might be quite different at the ice company come Monday,” I said. “Or maybe he knows how much Phil is going to be missed.”

  “Perhaps,” Rose said. “Perhaps.”

  We were deep in the throes of making new flower arrangements from the cast offs. After twenty minutes, we’d created several nice displays and dropped them into vases. Rose seemed pleased. “These will bring a few smiles. I’ll run these by the home on my way out.”

  “You’re so thoughtful,” I said.

  I helped Rose load the vases into the back seat of her car, warming them first inside cardboard boxes. I checked the time. Lunch seemed like a good idea, but I still had some weight to lose and there would soon be new arrangements to make for Phil Carrington. That, and I wanted to be in the office when Blanch called back with her full forensic report.

  “See you tomorrow morning?” I asked before Rose departed.

  “I’ll be here at eight,” Rose told me. “You and Lance have a good night.”

  I nodded. But I wasn’t thinking about the night so much as Lance himself. Dealing in death, gratitude seemed to well up inside of me, all around me, and I felt overpowered by the prospects of my own life and those who loved me. And I realized, as Rose drove away toward the nursing home, that my hunger wasn’t so much for sustenance as it was for love, for all that Lance and I enjoyed, but also for the blessings of these new and old friendships that were attached to the long arc of my life. Lance was becoming the center of my thoughts, however—and I was grateful that we were, at last, charting a course toward the tangled web of marriage.

  Chapter Seventeen

  At precisely two p.m., Silvia called and told me she had found interesting information. I was sitting at my desk, parsing letter-head and envelopes, fingering a few remaining postage stamps and realizing I was going to have to make a run, soon, to the post office. The morning had slipped away in quiet interludes, Rose’s absence creating a newfound sense of solitude that unsettled me.

  “Nothing troubling about the Carringtons,” Silvia began. “But they did own the most successful ice factory in Indianapolis.”

  “You have to mention ice on a day like this?” I said, laughing into the phone.

  “I know,” Silvia answered, “but as far as businesses go, they were quite successful. I found out that the Carringtons belonged to the chamber of commerce, the Kiwanis club, and they were active in several philanthropies in the area, including animal rescue.”

  “They sound like solid people,” I said.

  “It wasn’t difficult to get at. Just a few phone calls, a few business journals, the newspaper archives. Does any of this seem to be of help?”

  “Difficult to say at this point,” I answered. “And if I’m looking for something, I don’t know yet what it is.”

  We were silent for a few moments, each of us wondering what we should ask, where we should lean in the conversation. And then Silvia was on to other matters of the heart. “So,” she asked, “how did Lance do this morning? Wasn’t he your escort to the cemetery?”

  “He’s a pro,” I answered. “Didn’t even get out of the squad car.”

  “Just another day at the office, huh?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You two need a real vacation. You need to go some place warm and inviting.”

  “Sounds too good to be true,” I said.

  Silvia was about to say more when my phone beeped and I noted I had another call coming in. “Gotta go,” I said. “Maybe talk later this afternoon?”

  “Later then,” Silvia said.

  I took the call and was relieved to discover that Blanch was on the incoming. “Mary? I thought I was going to get your voicemail.”

  “What’s the verdict?” I asked.

  “Interesting developments,” Blanch said, coughing. “Have you got time to run over here? This autopsy is best explained as show-and-tell.”

  “You found more?”

  “You might say that,” Blanch said. “I’ve completed the chemical analysis, but then I went back and checked for hardware.”

  “Hardware?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s amazing what you can find inside a torso if you use a metal detector.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I decided to drive the hearse to the forensic morgue in case I needed to return with the body of Phil Carrington. Pulling into the parking lot, I felt as if I were returning to the scene of a crime . . . but then realized it was actually the scene of Lance’s proposal. The sun was now high in the sky, a brilliant white wafer that offered no respite from the oppressive cold. Winter had settled hard over the landscape like a pall, a blanket of frigid air that would not rise.

  As I steadied myself to embrace the wind again, I thought of my friend, Corey, warming himself on tropical beaches, a sweating beer in hand, his face turned toward the horizon. He had handed the forensic lab over to Blanch, trading his scalpel and chemicals for a pot of heat and sand. A wave a jealously swept through me as braced myself to enter the lab, but I couldn’t help but wonder how Corey might approach the Carrington autopsies, or what he might add to the mix if he were here?

  I slumped out of the hearse, rigid against the air, and shuffled through the back door of the lab where, much to my delight, Blanch was waiting for me with a clipboard and a space heater, red hot and glowing in the corner. She was all business, eager to get at the meat of her findings. She led me to a computer desk in the corner, pulled a few notes onto the screen, and invited me to sit down. “You can decide how you want to complete the death cert
ificate,” she said. “I’m releasing the body into your care when we are done. There is no next of kin and the Carringtons’ lawyer wants you to handle the arrangements for Phil. I’ve got his number.” She handed me the number, written on the back of an envelope.

  “I’ll call the lawyer when we’re done,” I said. “This is such an odd turn of events.”

  “Never handled a husband and wife before?”

  “Not like this,” I told her. “It’s not uncommon for older couples to die within a few weeks or months of each other. The death of one can often lead to the rapid demise of the other. Grief has a powerful effect on the body. But the Carringtons were in their prime. So odd.”

  Blanch didn’t hesitate. She blazed ahead, pointing out the consistencies of her forensic work. “Well, maybe I can help shed some light,” she said. “I already told you on the phone . . . he and his wife both showed evidence of listeriosis. They had vomiting, dehydration. I also found traces of flu symptoms.”

  “He died from that?”

  “Doesn’t usually kill people,” Blanch stated. “Just an oddity. But the listeria, same as Sheila Carrington.”

  “You mentioned he might have been dead before he drove off the highway. What makes you think that was the case?”

  “Well, “Blanch stated, “he certainly died of head injuries, trauma to the body . . . but he was a very sick man besides. In fact, I don’t see how he was able to function. His body contained a cocktail of illnesses. His constitution must have been strong.”

  “I’d seen him when he came in to plan his wife’s funeral. He looked like death warmed over. I was hoping he would get some medical help when he left the funeral home.”

  “Maybe that’s where he was going,” Blanch answered. “But he had bigger problems, too.”

  “Yes, you mentioned you’d discovered something else. What happened to Phil Carrington?”

  “Well, I went back and looked at my notes on Sheila Carrington. I started looking for other connections. I figured they must have either been exposed to the same environment or have been in proximity to the same factors.” Blanch held up an unlit cigarette. She tossed me a smile, shook her head. “I was thinking about the listeria, the vomiting, the dehydration symptoms. But it seemed to me that something else was in the mix, too. I went back and examined the stomach.”

  Blanch rose, took a few steps toward a stainless steel cart. She picked up a plastic vial and, like a maraca, jiggled a rhythm with some hard small granules that were inside. “I found these in the stomach and in the bile using a metal detector,” she said. She held the vial up to the light.

  They were tiny granules, bits of sandy material, blood-red and glistening. “Blood clots?” I asked, inching away.

  “No,” Blanch said. “I wasn’t sure myself until I completed the elemental analysis.”

  I gathered my courage and lifted the vial from Blanch’s grip, studied the granules more closely in the light. Each was a tiny, crimson grain. “They look like they are covered in blood, but they’re not. Some type of red stone?”

  “Cinnabar,” Blanch said. “Shavings, actually.”

  “Cinnabar?”

  “I had not heard of it either . . . until now. It’s a sulfide mineral, sometimes called cinnabarite. One of those minerals that was mined heavily at one time, until scientists realized the dangers of handling it.”

  “Why is it red?” I asked.

  “Because it contains mercury,” Blanch said. “Cinnabar is essentially the solid form from which mercury is extracted.”

  I gingerly placed the vial in Blanch’s hand, an unlit cigarette now dangling from her lower lip.

  “Poisoning?”

  “Looks like,” Blanch confirmed.

  “How long?”

  “Hard to say.” Blanch tugged at another cart and rolled her laptop computer closer. She poked at a few keys, sifted through several brightly-colored screens and columns of numbers and notations. In a few seconds she settled upon a page of her report and perused it quickly. “I looked back through my notes on Sheila Carrington and I see that I did extract some small clots from her stomach, too. I’d bet even money she had these cinnabars also. I just overlooked them. Cinnabar, as you can see, is vermillion.” Blanch coughed. “I think people in ancient times even powdered this stuff and used it in apothecary remedies. Sometimes it was called Dragon’s Blood. They thought it gave strength and prolonged life.”

  “But it’s actually deadly,” I sighed.

  “Deadly enough,” Blanch added.

  “I was the last person to see these people,” I told Blanch. “I knew Phil was very sick.”

  “He was more than sick,” Blanch added. “He was dying.”

  Blanch seemed eager for a smoke. Her apron, still splattered around the edges with tiny rivulets of chemicals and blood, pulled me back to the realization that I was in a morgue. Glancing through the glass of the sterile lab, I noted a body on the slab, covered in a sheet. From the heft and length of it I knew it was the body of Phil Carrington. I could also tell that Blanch had already stitched together the incisions, readied the body for my embalming work.

  I studied the computer screen for a few more minutes while Blanch excused herself and stepped outside for a smoke—another set of ironies that filled me with a renewed sense of purpose. I wasn’t sure how to work with listeria and a rare bird disease, but mercury poisoning confirmed that I was handling more than the funeral arrangements. There was now a sense of duty.

  While Blanch was outside lighting up, I pulled my cell phone out of my purse and retrieved the phone number that Blanch had given me. I wanted to talk to the Carrington’s lawyer.

  I entered the number that Blanch had written on the envelope. But when the lawyer answered the telephone, I knew the voice immediately. It was Milt.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Milt,” I said, “This is Mary Christmas.”

  “I thought you’d be calling, Mary,” he said. “But I sure do hate the reasons.”

  I wanted to tread lightly on our relationship, but I didn’t have any choice but to proceed. “So, Milt . . . I want to thank you for the excellent job you did with Sheila’s funeral. I had no idea you were the Carringtons’ lawyer.”

  “Thank you,” Milt said. “Actually, I’m the company lawyer. I’ve been handling their business affairs as well as personal. But I wasn’t expecting to be handling two funerals at the same time.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s why I’m calling. I understand you want me to handle Phil’s funeral. I’m sure you will want to handle the eulogy. But I think we should meet to work out the arrangements.”

  Milt sighed. “Yes, they didn’t have any family,” he said momentarily. There was a longer hesitation. “But I’m not sure what to make of the company now. Even from a legal perspective, this is difficult to navigate.”

  “Are you also their power of attorney?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, hesitantly. “I’ve always done what they have asked of me. I guess this just another piece of the job.”

  “You’re in a tough spot,” I said, “But I assume you want to give me authorization to take Phil’s body from the morgue.”

  “Yes,” Milt added. “There’s no one else. Please . . . make the arrangements. Same as Sheila.”

  “I’ll take his body, then,” I said. “I’m at the morgue now. Could we also set a time to talk about Phil’s arrangements?”

  Milt sighed. “Well, I’ve got to work in the office today. Lots of accounts to settle up, papers to sign. You understand.”

  “I can drop by your office,” I added quickly. “Just a few minutes are all we will need. I can bring brochures. You can make the decisions for the funeral since you are their power of attorney.”

  “I guess that will work,” Milt said. “Some time later this afternoon?”

  “I’ll call when I’m on my way,” I told him.

  We said goodbye and when I looked up, Blanch had returned, the aroma of fresh cigarettes wafti
ng into the room behind her. She coughed and sidled up next to the computer screen again. “I guess you have enough information now. You can make out the death certificate?” she asked.

  I jotted the last of my notes and then realized why I had come to the morgue. “I just talked to the lawyer,” I said. “I think we are set. I might as well take the body off your hands.”

  Blanch blushed. “Good Lord,” she said. “I nearly forgot.” She led me around the corner into the morgue where the body of Phil Carrington lay in state like a marble statue. I wheeled a gurney next to the body and, working side by side with Blanch, proceeded to move him toward the hearse. But all the while, as I was shifting death from one location to another, my mind was still scrolling around in the forensic report. I wondered what else I might discover by the time I had moved the body to its final resting place.

  Chapter Twenty

  I made haste to get Phil Carrington’s body back to the funeral home. I changed into my protective gear, completed the embalming, and checked the time, relieved to find that I still had some daylight to work with. But fortunately it was a quick trip to Milt’s law office—a shingle I had seen posted outside a commercial store-front that was adjoined on either side by a big box grocery and a hardware store. It was obvious that Milt wasn’t a high-profile lawyer—but then, most weren’t. He was one of hundreds of lawyers in the city who siphoned a living from small claims and injuries—or, in his case, by finding a niche with a company, handling their legal affairs and business needs.

  Milt seemed even taller in the confines of his small office, and as I perused the book shelves I noted that his literature consisted primarily of thin pamphlets and legal journals that had, like the lawyer himself, sat idle among other illustrious volumes that were rarely opened. There were also piles of CDs and videos, brick-a-brack on the shelves, and several yellowing awards and diplomas on the walls. The paneling in the office suggested that little money had been invested over the years in upkeep and maintenance, and certainly not in keeping appearances current or up-to-date with interior decorating trends. The office, in fact, offered more in the appearance of a museum than a law firm.