by R. L. Perry
“What are you hoping to find in here?” Lance asked eventually.
I was still focused on visible food, but as I reached for the refrigerator door I admitted, “I’m not sure. It may be nothing. It may be something.”
“They obviously weren’t lacking for sweets,” Lance observed. “There’s no way they could have eaten all of this before it went stale.”
“Therein is the rub,” I noted, staring down into the bowels of the fridge at some rather sparse shelves. Surprisingly, outside of a half gallon of two percent milk, some non-dairy creamer, a crisper full of head lettuce, and some leftovers wrapped in foil, the fridge was virtually empty. I pulled samples from each of the leftovers, labeled them with a felt-tipped marker, and added them to my growing collection in the sample kit.
Lance had retreated into the living room. He was looking out the window.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Probably nothing,” he said. “Just thought I saw something.”
“What?”
“Probably a bird. Hey, but it’s still snowing. Really coming down now.”
I checked the time and went back to my labor. Closing the refrigerator door, I felt the first tinge of weariness tug at my eyelids. “Let me check the freezer,” I said.
Lance grunted.
I opened the freezer door up top and noted, once again, that the Carringtons seemed obsessed with their own product. Inside, nearly loaded to the brim, several bags of their company ice were stuffed into the guts and in the door. There was one opened bag and a small metallic scoop. I shoveled a few pieces of the ice into a vial and labeled it.
Lance had given up on window watching and had stepped into the kitchen again. He yawned. “Any chance we can get home soon? I’ve got an early start tomorrow, and so do you.”
“I’m about done,” I told him, closing the lid on the sample kit. “Blanch should be able to analyze these.”
Lance drew up next to me and glanced around the premises. He didn’t say much, but had a far-away look in his eyes. When he looked at me again, I could see that he was tired. He was wanting to say something, but needed a little coaxing.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
Lance smiled, his eyes drifting toward mine. I didn’t want to make him stay any longer. It was time to go home and take our respective places next to each other . . . and sleep.
“I’ve seen most everything over the years,” Lance said, “but I have to admit that these in-home visits creep me out. Kind of ghostly, don’t you think?”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I said matter-of-factly. “There’s only the living and the dead.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
As we padded back to the front door of the Carrington’s house, Lance paused long enough at the light switch to kiss me. “What’s that for?” I asked.
“For caring,” he said. “For going above and beyond the call of duty.”
“I’m the coroner,” I reminded him. “This doesn’t seem beyond my role.”
“I won’t ask the chief about that,” Lance said. “Something tells me he would not approve of us being in the house tonight.”
“I’ve got a death certificate to sign,” I added. “Why shouldn’t I be here? Nothing wrong with picking up a few selected pieces of Phil Carrington’s chemistry.”
“You have an answer for everything, don’t you?” Lance dropped his palm over the panel of light switches and shut the lights off in a sweep of his hand. The house went black and as I opened the front door a small shaft of light from the street illuminated the front steps. I was about to step over the threshold when Lance tugged on my shoulder and blurted, “Wait a minute!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Look,” he said, pointing to the porch, to the front steps.
I paused between the light and darkness and squinted at the evidence. There were fresh footprints in the snow—not ours—advancing and retreating along the concrete. “Somebody was just here,” I said. “Watching us.”
I pointed to the side of the house where, like scuff marks on a linoleum floor, a scurried set of prints had scattered the freshly fallen snow into long demarcations of exposed grass and garden mulch.
“I thought I heard something,” Lance told me. “You stay here.”
I returned the grip, my hand on Lance’s broad shoulder, and said, “Where are you going? Don’t leave me here.”
“Okay,” he said hurriedly. “Then you get in the patrol car and lock the doors. I’m just going around back . . . going to follow those prints and see where they lead.”
Lance could sense my growing fear, my breath cold and tremulous in the extremities of the night. No doubt it was below zero yet again, another deep freeze as December waned and headed toward the new year. “Please,” was all I could say.
“I won’t be long,” Lance said, feeling for his sidearm. “You get in the car.”
I scurried down the sidewalk, careful with my steps in the newly-fallen snow, equally cautious to preserve the other set of footprints, bounding over them, near them, like a child playing hopscotch with the wind. I opened the side door of the patrol car, slid in, and gave Lance a thumbs-up sign. My heart was restless as I watched Lance close the front door behind him, lock it, and then advance along the east side of the house like a hunter in search of some dangerous quarry. I tried to warm my face with my hands, blew circles of vapor across the inside of the windshield in order to open a portal to the outside world. I shivered, examined the horizon, stared up at the sky for what seemed like long minutes, the snow still falling across the landscape in delicate drifts and innuendoes.
Up the street, near a small clearing that led to an undeveloped pattern of vacant lots and abandoned cal-de-sacs, I noted a solitary coyote, emaciated and skittish, moving along the shadows, between the interplay of light and darkness. The animals were not uncommon, even in the city, and I had heard stories of their roaming and had, at times, even heard their high-pitched siren-calls of excitement or feeding in the recesses of the night, their ghastly sounds awakening me with a start. Once, I had even seen a coyote, not far from the funeral home, carrying a white furry bundle in its mouth—a kitten or puppy no doubt—retreating over the asphalt and across roads with its dinner even as a mother and her son, shocked and disbelieving, followed after it with sticks and brooms. But to no avail.
There were, even here, up close and personal, vestiges of the wild—and I knew that no place, no matter how tame or domestic, was ever far from the bestial and the savage. Even in society, the dangers walked among us—and many had human faces.
I thought of these things as Lance continued to make his way around the house, perhaps across fences and other yards, in search of God-knows-what. I wondered how far he would walk in the dark, or how long I would wait, until his safe return.
After a few minutes, I cast up a silent prayer and pressed my nose to the glass, smoothed a new portal in the window with the warmed palm of my hand. But there was no sign of Lance, and the only sound I could hear was my own breathing and the gentle hush of the snow falling on snow and on the roof of the patrol car.
I tugged at my scarf, then reached into my coat pocket to check the time on my cell phone. Midnight. The witching-hour. I drew in another breath.
Inside the car I felt trapped, the snow now nearly covering the glass completely. My only vantage point was the tiny portal where, with my own breath and body warmth, I continued to keep vigil over the dot of landscape visible to my sight.
I pressed my face to the glass. A gentle wind stirred the snow along the curb. The coyote disappeared.
And as I was about to open the car door, suddenly I gasped.
Someone was tapping on the glass.
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was Lance.
I opened the door and hugged him. “What’s wrong?” he said. “Did I frighten you?” I didn’t feel the cold, nothing but the warmth of his body, his uniform and muscle propping me up as the snow stirred arou
nd our feet.
“You scared me to death,” I said. “I thought . . . “
“I’m sorry,” Lance said. “I circled around the house, then cut through a neighbor’s yard. I angled back across the street. But it’s too cold to search much longer.”
I held him tightly.
“Let’s get out of the cold,” he said. “We can talk as we drive back home.”
He helped me into the car, shut the door, and in a moment he was at my side again behind the wheel, the engine purring and sputtering the initial hints of warmth across our arms and legs. We sat in the driveway for a couple of minutes, silent as sleepy children, and waited for our faces to warm before Lance threw the car in gear and backed out of the driveway.
“So?” I asked as we headed out of the Carringtons’ sub-division. “Did you see anyone?”
“No,” Lance answered. “But . . . “
“But what?”
“There were plenty of footprints. I know someone was watching us when we were inside the house.”
“Did you follow them to see where they led?”
“For a few hundred feet . . . out the back gate in the yard. But then the footprints trailed off across that open field over there.” Lance pointed to the undeveloped cal-de-sacs, the vacant roads.
“Are they a man’s or a woman’s footprint?”
“Couldn’t say,” Lance answered. “Smaller boot size, but prints in the snow look pretty much the same.”
“I saw a coyote over there just a few minutes ago,” I said as we exited onto the road and headed for home. “It looked thin. Very hungry.”
“Maybe he’ll have a nice meal tonight,” Lance said. “Whoever was watching us certainly isn’t afraid of the cold. It would be easy to get frostbite on a night like this.”
I didn’t say much as Lance drove through the night, my eyes heavy. Still, I didn’t want for Lance to fall asleep at the wheel. He needed my energy. I considered our options. “Why don’t we sleep at your house tonight?” I said. “It’s closer . . . and we could both use some extra sleep.”
Lance nodded in agreement. “Okay,” he said. “But I’m not making breakfast.”
The wipers on the patrol car had turned the snow to mush on the warm windshield but I could see that the precipitation was no match for the sub-zero temperature. Whatever melted would soon turn to ice. Any exposed skin could freeze. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the peeping Tom.
As we neared Lance’s house, I pondered a few theories in my mind, then asked Lance one question. “Do you think the Carringtons had enemies?”
Lance didn’t take his eyes off of the road. “You seem to think there’s probable cause to look for foul play in their house,” he said. “I hope you didn’t keep me up tonight just because you enjoy looking at stale fruitcakes and Christmas cookies.”
I gave an awkward laugh. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just trying to pinpoint the source of their illnesses. I’m not sure it’s foul play . . . but it’s suspicious at least.”
Lance had a way of making me feel supported, even when he spoke his mind. “I don’t like the idea of you being the coroner, getting involved in these things, Mary. It’s one thing to pick up a body at the hospital morgue but quite another to conduct your own investigation so you can fill out a death certificate.”
I crossed my arms across my seat belt, pondered what Lance was telling me. But for some reason I was not afraid. In fact, these unexpected twists felt more like an out-of-body experience than reality—as if I were looking at myself from the vantage point of an omnipotent narrator, describing the scenes as I travelled along. Perhaps it was a self-preservation technique, a way of guarding my sanity, but I knew my father had experienced his work in much the same way. He had always told my mother that he didn’t touch corpses, but felt as if somebody else was doing the work and not himself. “Mary,” he used to tell me, “you have to stay one step removed from the tragedy, from death itself. You can touch it, but that doesn’t mean you have to let it in the door. Always take a step back . . . work from a distance. And you’ll be a great mortician.”
I didn’t know if Lance could understand such things, but if our love was for real I knew he would want to try. I had to help him. “I’m not as involved as you might think,” I said eventually, just yards from Lance’s driveway. “I don’t have to be inside the house . . . if you know what I mean.”
Lance squinted at the lit dashboard, reduced the heat. “I think you’re telling me you can remain emotionally and personally uninvolved.”
“Yes.”
“You’d make a great cop,” Lance said, winking at me as he edged the patrol car into his snow-littered driveway.
“Then you know what I’m talking about,” I answered.
“Yes,” Lance said. “I think I do.” He leaned over and kissed me.
We parked, exited the patrol car, and walked arm-in-arm up the freshly-covered sidewalk into the house, the sample kit tucked under my arm. Our hearts weren’t lusting after anything but sleep and, as soon as we hit the threshold of Lance’s bedroom, we both lunged and crumpled onto the bed, shoes on the floor but clothes on. I peeked at the red face of the alarm clock as Lance set it for an early morning wake-up, just hours away. It was a quarter past one.
We kissed one last time.
And then it was all either of us remembered at the close of a very long day.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Indiana winters are primal beasts—fierce and unrelenting. And one must have a mind of winter, a greater capacity for pain and endurance, in order to defeat December without over-indulging on sugar and sleep. But when the alarm clock sounded in the darkness, awakening us with its piercing scream, it seemed as if I were awakening from a dream deeper than death. Lance moaned beside me as he pawed at the clock and eventually ripped it from its socket. I stood on weak legs and wrinkled clothes and headed for the shower.
Nothing seemed real as I stepped into the water and steamed my eyes open. I shook my head, loosening the memory of the previous night and availing myself to the new day’s schedule—full and eager to ply open my mind. I considered all that needed to be done to prep for Phil Carrington’s funeral, drew back for a moment in the confidence of Rose’s competency, and then stepped out of the shower as Lance was stepping in—our paths crossing, as they always did, in the most unusual opportunities.
We scarcely recognized one another as I toweled off, scurried back into the bedroom, and began ironing my clothing for another go-round. I finished with a flourish, dressed, and then noticed Lance’s wrinkled uniform hanging over the back of a chair. I ironed for him as well, drew a new pair of underwear from the drawer, and placed his clothing on the bed . . . after I had made it up. I continued to fluff my wet hair, applied basic makeup at the dresser mirror, and even tidied up Lance’s pile of shoes.
Nothing had prepared me for the domestic patterns I seemed to be adopting into my life. Our togetherness, our unity, was slowly coming together, and I could see the same happening to Lance: the way he prepared dinners for me, his small but considerate acts of gratitude and kindness at home, painting woodwork, fixing plumbing, the times he had used his off days to mow the yard or trim hedges. All of this, and he still loved me.
I turned as Lance exited the bathroom, still drying off with the towel, a toothbrush in his mouth. My heart leapt and my lungs grew heavy at the whole sight of him. But all I could manage to ask was, “Can you drive me to the funeral home?” That, and a quick lung for a morning kiss and an aftertaste of mint.
Lance didn’t answer, but I could tell by his haste that he had not forgotten me. I sat on the edge of the bed, watching him, wanting him as he pulled on his uniform and cinched his belt, checked his sidearm, his stature tall and polished as he headed for the front door. I grabbed the sample kit where I had left it on the nightstand next to the bed.
There would be no light for a couple of hours, the dawn coming on slowly now, the days lengthening bit-by-bit post-equinox . . .
but still December. Lance held my arm as we exited the house and he escorted me to the patrol car and waited until I buckled in. Nothing had changed in the night, and it was as if we had merely departed from the Carringtons house, slept along the side of the road, and found ourselves, once more, inside the patrol car. The engine turned slowly at first, then found its spark in the extreme cold and ignited. Lance raced the pistons until we felt a tiny flush of warmth from the vents and then backed down the driveway.
“I’m sorry,” I said as we began our slow drive to the west.
“What’s to be sorry for?”
“For this pattern,” I admitted. “Always rushing from one thing to the next.”
“I’m used to it,” Lance answered. “Coffee?”
“You can get some,” I told him. “I’m sure Rose will have a pot on at the funeral home for me when I get there. I don’t want to disappoint her.”
Up the block, Lance pulled into a Starbucks and ordered at the window. Verona. Black. And when the barista noticed he was a cop on duty, she didn’t charge him. “Thanks for all you do,” she told Lance at the window when she handed him his coffee.
“And thanks to you,” Lance said. We drove away, smiling at the unexpected warmth on a frigid morning.
We made good time without the lights flashing and Lance angled the patrol car into the funeral home parking lot and leaned in for yet another kiss. “I love you,” he said, holding my hands in his until the last possible moment.
I returned the warmth and then struggled out of the patrol car and into the comfortable light of my surroundings. Rose, as expected, had already filled the funeral home with the aroma of coffee and I could see by her preparations that she had taken care of a few flowers and had straightened the chairs for Phil Carrington’s funeral. She had set out the candy dishes and even sprinkled some ice-melt on the front walk. What did I do before Rose Edgewater?