by P. J. Vernon
“It’s standard operating procedure to say it every time, Nina,” he quipped as he snapped his mask in place. Once dressed, I followed him to a second door exactly the same as the first.
In the exam room, formaldehyde mixed with the biting scent of bleach, soaking the air in solvents. Two stainless steel platforms stood—one empty, one supporting a draped, man-sized heap. As pungent as the smells were, I clung to them. They’d be joined by something far worse soon.
He wheeled a stool next to the occupied table and motioned for me to take the second one on its far side.
“You ready, detective?” The surgical mask muffled his words.
Taking a deep breath, hot and damp behind my own mask, I nodded.
Pressing a button, he initiated a hydraulic lift that raised the table and permitted a more comfortable viewing posture. In a single, sweeping motion, he withdrew the drape down to Paul’s torso. I winced.
I’d seen a handful of decaying bodies, but nothing like this. Nothing that had festered in salt water for days. I cringed at the putrefaction. The mask, once a frustrating inconvenience, became my only way to blunt the rot.
Before me lay what remained of Paul Godfrey. The bloating had inflated him like a balloon and rendered facial recognition impossible. Covered by a waxy sheen, his bubbled face glossed beneath the lights and his translucent skin splotched blue in places.
I’d never admit it aloud, but the investigation had seemed surreal until that moment. Missing a body, I had been operating without fully grasping the horrible thing that had occurred. The heinous act someone had committed. Confronting the ugly truth would be good for me. It filled me with urgency. Gray’s face scrolled through my mind. Then Charlotte’s children.
Lives might depend on it.
“He looks,” I hesitated, “better than I expected, actually.” On the drive into downtown Charleston, I’d recalled scenes from Jaws, imagining that feeding sea creatures had carved the body into a cavernous husk before it washed ashore.
“It’s a consequence of the time of year,” the ME explained. “The water’s quite cold. Low temperatures inhibit the bacterial growth required to strip away the epidermal layers. Decomposers like crabs and sea lice can’t gain access to underlying tissue as quickly so the body remains intact longer.”
“I see,” I replied, swallowing the stomach acid inching up my throat.
“Formation of adipocere also helps,” he added, pointing to the glossy slime. “It’s a soap-like substance that forms from fat tissue underwater. It acts as a preservative.”
I gulped a second time before my mind returned to my task. At first, I’d wondered why he’d only pulled the drape halfway down. Modesty, I figured. Then I realized I only needed to see his upper body. His neck, specifically.
“This the injury that killed him?” I asked.
“A single puncture wound a few centimeters below the right ear.”
I leaned closer to the spot beneath Paul’s ear. The slivered hole was no wider than an inch.
“Likely,” he continued, “the blade was small, shorter than a switchblade—a pocket knife, perhaps—but at this location, it didn’t need to be any longer to inflict a mortal wound. He’s been dead for a week.”
“Christmas Eve or early Christmas morning, then?” I asked.
“A strong possibility. The strongest, in fact. Stabbed this way, his external carotid artery was likely severed. Exsanguination would’ve been rapid. He’d have been instantly incapacitated.”
After days of incessant rainfall, we’d still detected blood in the saw grass. There must have been buckets of it.
“No chance to fight back,” I said. My mind ticked through each of the people I’d interviewed. None of them displayed any injuries, which fit with the lack of a struggle.
“It’s difficult to say until I perform the autopsy, so don’t take my words for gospel,” he prefaced, “but there don’t appear to be defensive wounds. If the assailant was right handed, as most people are, the location suggests a frontal attack. In this case, the knife may have been thrust with a sideways motion.” He mimed the action with his right fist.
“And if he didn’t fight back, that means he may not have seen it coming,” I offered. This squared with the idea that there’d been a shared intimacy between Paul and his killer. Charlotte’s face came to mind.
Through the cap, he rubbed the top of his head. “That’s right. And as I said, a wound like this wouldn’t have permitted him to do much of anything after. I’m guessing his attacker knew this. No repeat stabbing. A one and done.”
I finished his thought. “Then the killer waited for him to die and dragged his body to the marsh. They expected the rain and the seawater to do the rest.”
I imagined Paul, eyes wide and swirling with terror, as he fell to his knees in salty marsh water, putting together the impossible events that had transpired seconds before when a knife had plunged into his neck from out of nowhere. A faceless person stepping back to watch him bleed out from a distance, drinking in their work the way a painter or sculptor might.
In a morbid sort of way, Paul’s murder got me off the hook. Or rather, his quick death. Calling the Kings sooner about their abandoned rental wouldn’t have made a lick of difference, and Sheriff Burton would have to agree.
As I exhaled, I looked over Paul’s face as it was now. Or where his face had been, anyways. He built his entire life around impressing others, maintaining an image of success until he could secure it for himself. A fake-it-till-you-make-it syndrome of pathologic proportions. But this was the last impression he’d give anyone.
“Thank you for accommodating me, doctor,” I said, standing. “I’m anxious to read your report, but I think it’s clear this was no accident. Drowning or otherwise.”
As he drew the drape back over Paul’s body, he sighed. “No accident at all. But certainly not a professional job.”
Behind my mask, I bit my bottom lip. “Crimes of passion rarely are.”
I opened the door to let myself out of the stinking room. My next task would serve two purposes: consoling a grieving family and sussing out which one’s grief might not be so real.
36
Gray
The deal with the county prosecutor required local Alcoholics Anonymous attendance. The chapter I’d chosen met weekly in the theater classroom of Pickens High. Thoughts of Hattie, languidly sunning herself, hung heavy. And the blood. The hate. I was going to take her home with me.
Charlotte volunteered to drop me off in her new rental car. My fractured collarbone jolted as the car halted outside the gym, and I winced.
“Mamma will have to bring you to the rest,” she said as I stepped out of the passenger seat of the compact SUV. “Winter break’s over in a few days. I’ll need to be getting back to Raleigh with the boys.”
I offered her a nod of understanding and made for the school’s gym entrance. White-knuckling my handbag, my heart beat faster as I drew closer. I wanted to bottle up poor Hattie, shove her memory into a weighty trunk and drop it in the marsh. It wasn’t fair, but it was how I dealt: replace one pain with another.
Attending AA surpassed jail time, but the prospect of sharing anything panicked me. The value of openness had been neglected in the King household. Unsurprisingly. Breathing unevenly, I reminded myself I didn’t have to share if I didn’t want to. My attendance had been ordered, not my participation. A phantom scent of chardonnay tickled my nose.
Clutching a blue pen, I wrote my name on the sign-in sheet at the front of the room. Only those needing to prove they’d shown up bothered signing. The rest remained, well, anonymous. I’d scrawled Gray Godfrey, but reading it back made me queasy.
I’d grown to hate Paul and the name he gave me more with each passing day. The gaslighting. The affair. Annie. I hated him for everything he’d invited into our lives. I had a drinking problem, no denying it, but it paled in comparison to what he’d done.
In a rush of anger, I scratched out my last name. Hast
ily, I wrote King instead.
Regaining my composure, I searched for a seat. Chairs had been arranged in a semi-circle. Coffee and bagels sat on a folding table by the door. People of all sorts trickled in.
By the coffee dispenser, a middle-aged woman with cropped brown hair hummed as she filled her cup. She could’ve been a grade school teacher. Nothing about her suggested she struggled with anything. Certainly not drinking.
Next to her, an elderly man spread softened cream cheese across a bagel. He wore pressed chinos and a black cap designating him a veteran. He might’ve come straight from central casting, called for the role of Grandfather with Kind Eyes.
Despite my fears, seeing other people—what they did and did not look like—calmed me. I didn’t know I’d carried expectations about this meeting until then. I’d pictured myself as a weak creature, a sheep maybe, wandering into a den of hungry wolves. People hardened by years of drinking, probably to mask the pain of the horrible things they’d done. Crimes of all kinds. Maybe even murder.
I had expected bandannaed biker-gang types. Hell’s Angels or something. Maybe tattooed women with voices broken by cigarettes. Gaunt skin and skull-like faces. Everyone sunken and husky and dank. But these folks weren’t anything like that. In fact, the only person here who’d committed any sort of crime that I could personally attest to was … me.
The woman who could have been a teacher offered me a warm grin as she took a seat next to me. She introduced herself as Barbara.
“Gray,” I replied, taking her hand. She noticed mine was trembling, and I snatched it back.
“First time at a meeting? You don’t have a thing in the world to worry about. Don’t you dare say a word, either. Not if you don’t want to.”
“Thank you,” I whispered, unclenching my jaw.
It occurred to me that she must have known exactly how I felt, but that shouldn’t have been surprising. She was like me, after all. An alcoholic. All these perfectly normal people chatting with each other and finding their favorite chairs were like me. For the first time in a very, very long time, I relaxed. My chest loosened at the thought that maybe, just maybe, I was right where I should be.
“I see you didn’t get anything to eat or drink,” Barbara said, pointing to my empty lap. “First meeting’s always tough. You feel like every pair of eyeballs is looking right at you. Will you let me fetch you something?”
Now that she mentioned it, I did feel a slight pang of hunger.
“A bagel,” I answered. “If you don’t mind, I could go for half a bagel with a bit of cream cheese.”
“You got it, darling,” she replied, leaving her seat for the front.
The woman made no mention of who I was, though it was unlikely that she’d failed to recognize me, either from my family or the past week’s news. My name and my photograph had been splashed across the Elizabeth Gazette as intrigue surrounding Paul’s case grew.
Then it dawned on me. This was Alcoholics Anonymous. Even if she did know who I was, she’d never say so. I decided Barbara was right. At least right now—in this very moment—I had nothing to worry about.
As the meeting commenced, first with a prayer and a recitation, the floor was opened for sharing. A rustle in the next seat, and Barbara stood.
“My name’s Barbara, and I’m an alcoholic,” she told the room.
“Hi, Barbara,” the room repeated back in unison.
Every face was turned our way. I shifted uneasily being so close to the center of attention. Thankfully, I’d finished my bagel before she raised her hand to share.
Barbara fished a coin from her left pocket. A gold or bronze piece about the size of a half-dollar.
“This,” she started, “is my ten-year coin.” A round of applause tore through the space. Oddly thunderous given the crowd size. “Most of you know what these coins say on them, but I’m gonna read it aloud for those who don’t. It says ‘To Thine Own Self Be True.’”
She paused and silence covered the room. It took a moment, but I soon realized why. Barbara’s eyes had welled up with tears like gutters in a rainstorm. Taking a worn tissue from her other pocket, she dabbed at them.
“You know, I got this coin six months ago. Six months and fourteen days to be exact.” She chuckled then lowered her voice. “About one month ago, however, my first husband passed away. A twisted bowel. But I’d lost him once already to drinking. It’d been over a decade, but his mother still barred me from his funeral.”
She paused for a moment, collecting herself. “It infuriated me at first. Didn’t she see I’d gotten better? That what’s done is done, and it’s today that counts? And tomorrow? In my anger, I experienced cravings. Intense cravings. To fight them, I held onto this coin so tight the letters engraved in my palm.”
My stomach knotted. I couldn’t imagine how anyone, much less family, could deny Barbara. But she said it had been ten years. The woman standing next to me now wasn’t the same one from back then. What had this benign woman been capable of in the past? She must’ve done terrible things to have been turned away from a funeral.
My thoughts darted to my own behavior. The terrible thing I’d done, drunkenly behind the wheel of an SUV. If I had harmed anyone with Charlotte’s car, I’d have killed myself by now.
Barbara pressed on, “I didn’t break. And if I didn’t break then, it gives me hope that I might not break in the future. But the fact that my addiction crept up on me ten years out reminded me to take nothing for granted. To never fool myself into thinking that time has made me invulnerable.” She balled her hand into a fist around the coin. “To thine own self be true.”
As she took her seat to a chorus of clapping and whistling, the words replayed in my head. I was true to no one. Most of all, I was untrue to myself. Perhaps honesty made for a good starting place.
And not just any sort of honesty, but honesty with myself. I’d buried and suppressed and denied and pretended daily. The drinking. Paul and his affair. His money problems, too. He thought he’d hidden that, but I knew. I’m a drunk, not stupid.
And Matthew. I carried him around like a festering wound. I’d never confronted it, never allowed it to heal. Instead, I scratched and picked at it. Unbandaged, it collected dirt and grew inflamed. A thought crossed my mind: What if my wounds were on the outside? I shuddered to think of what they might look like.
It was time to be honest with myself. To be true. And it started today.
As I leaned back in my seat, a movement in the corner of my eye caught my attention. Someone was frantically waving their hand in front of the door’s square window.
Charlotte?
What was she doing here? The clock suspended at the front of the room said it’d only been thirty minutes. I told her the meeting lasted at least an hour.
A creeping unease spread inside me, and I broke out in a cold sweat. The window and the distance blurred her face, but she waved me over. Beckoning me to leave.
My pulse quickened, and I stood shakily. The man who was sharing paused as I gathered my things and slung my purse over my shoulder. I offered him an apologetic nod and did my best not to meet Barbara’s eyes as I slid out of our row.
As I neared the door, Charlotte took on sharper features. She looked as though she had no blood in her face, but her eyes burned. I gently turned the handle and stepped outside, careful to shut it quietly behind me.
“What’s going on?” I asked, straining to whisper. It was a question I knew I didn’t want answered.
“We’ve got to go. Now.” Her voice snapped like a dry twig. Something had happened. Something very serious. “Mamma’s waiting for us at the door. Cora’s got the car pulled around.”
Some dark corner of me—shadowy and wet—knew exactly what this was about. Disregarding the coin’s proverb, I sought to squash the dread, struggling in vain to shove it back down into whatever abyss it had crawled out from.
Squeezing my arm with a vise-like grip, Charlotte practically dragged me through a dim hallway flanke
d with lockers. My broken collar bone throbbed, and I stumbled once, twice.
Charlotte choked. “The police—they came to the house.”
The agnostic in me began to pray. Please, God. Don’t let it be this. Please, please, God. Useless.
As we turned the corner, I sensed my nightmare shudder and shake, unleashing itself from the cage deep within my mind one flimsy bolt at a time. Then Charlotte breathed life into it fully.
“They’ve found Paul.”
* * *
It was as if I’d detached. Like I floated above myself, looking down. Only then did events become clearer. Sharper. Strangely, even the pain in my collar bone had dulled.
Ahead, I spotted Mamma standing inside the gym door. Enormous sunglasses, round and black, obscured nearly half her face.
Through the window behind her, I detected movement. Blurry movement and a melding of voices. Shouting as to make none of them discernible. Somehow, Charlotte tightened her grip further. I didn’t know she possessed that sort of strength. Nothing about her bony stature suggested she did.
“This way,” Mamma barked as Charlotte passed me off to her. “They followed us from the house. Police in this town seem to leak like damn faucets. Cora’s got the car already running.” She took a deep breath as though preparing to go to battle and pushed open the door to the outside.
Who’s they?
As we crossed the threshold to the parking lot, lights flickered from every direction. Photographers’ flashbulbs burst, making me squint even in daylight. The strobing made me feel like I was moving in slow-motion.
“Mrs. Godfrey! Mrs. Godfrey!”
“Do you have a comment—”
“Are you aware of the circumstances—”
Ahead, the family car took shape, but everything else blurred like a dream. Defined details—the school, the parking lot, the gathered crowd of reporters—became abstract and swirled together. The whole world melted.
“Mrs. Godfrey!”
“—Paul’s body!”
“Any comment? Any idea what—”
“—Mrs. Godfrey! Gray!”