Life Is Short and Then You Die

by Kelley Armstrong

  They outnumbered Trigger. As soon as the dog turned from one vanquished bird to deal with another, the first headed back toward the kill. Not their kill. Buzzards didn’t kill, just did cleanup. That was their job in life, and they felt strongly about it. They were determined.

  But Trigger was determined, too, and finally—after much barking, nipping, and lunging—he managed to make all three birds take to the air simultaneously.

  “Good dog,” Pete said.

  Trigger threw an ecstatic glance at Pete, yipped happily, then turned tail and vanished behind the prickly pear.

  Pete was curious about Trigger’s find, but not curious enough to walk another forty yards. If you’ve seen one dead animal, you’ve seen them all. And it was hot, and he had too much left to do.

  Back to work.

  He hoped Trigger wouldn’t roll in whatever it was.

  * * *

  Pete worked all day, stopping periodically for water and once to eat. For a long time the buzzards circled, staying low, wobbling slightly as the wind hit their six-foot span of wings, looking like drunks driving home from a party. Maybe Pete imagined it, but he felt a fleeting drop in temperature each time their shadows passed over his face.

  Trigger came to visit Pete every now and then, yapping invitingly. Each time, the buzzards saw their chance and descended, vanishing from view behind the prickly pear.

  “I don’t want to see it,” Pete would say, and Trigger would give Pete a look of deep disappointment before darting back to shoo the vultures.

  Finally even Trigger’s enthusiasm waned, and he abandoned his find and fell asleep in the black rectangle of shade beneath the pickup.

  And on Pete worked, dragging large debris to the trailer, lifting medium debris into the truck bed, scraping small debris into black garbage bags. Sometimes, when he moved a blackened board, he caught a whiff of petroleum, or imagined it.

  Soot blackened his arms, his face. Ash rose, insinuating itself into his clothes, gluing itself to his sweaty skin. By the time Katie showed up, Pete would smell thoroughly of smoke and look like a man in a black-and-white movie, grayscale except for his bright blue eyes.

  Every so often Pete climbed up into the truck bed, boots ringing on the sun-soaked metal, and shifted things around. It felt like standing in an open oven, and afterward he had to take a break, sitting in the shade of the pickup, drinking water straight from the big camping thermos, eyeing the ruts in the yard left by emergency vehicles.

  The emergency was over for Mrs. Dean.

  Pete took some comfort in that.

  Apparently Jerry Dean didn’t. He looked worse every day, his face growing saggier, his eyes sadder, more bloodshot, more haunted. Like he wasn’t sleeping. Like he was drinking too much. Like he kept seeing his mother’s last moments. Probably—like Pete—he kept wondering who’d want to murder a harmless old woman.

  The police had no leads. Mrs. Dean had been a sweet, churchgoing, law-abiding lady.

  How she’d raised a two-bit loser like Jerry, Pete didn’t know. A small-time crook, a con artist. That’s why Mrs. Dean had always driven into town to watch Pete back when he was small, rather than taking him out to her place. Jerry lived with her off and on, and Jerry would deal with a crying toddler by offering him a joint.

  That also was why Pete had set a non-negotiable condition for this job: Jerry had to let Reverend Whitfield hold the cash until Pete finished. No way would he trust Jerry to pay him, otherwise.

  A big grasshopper landed on Pete’s arm, eyes bulging. It looked a little like Jerry Dean. As Pete shook it free, an engine purred in the distance. Pete knew it was too early for Katie, but all the same he turned expectantly toward the road. Just in case.

  A dark Camry loomed into sight, trailing a cloud of dust, and blew past without slowing. The driver didn’t even raise an index finger in greeting.

  “Yankee,” Pete muttered, by which he meant rude, arrogant city-boy ignoring local courtesies. You slowed down on a dirt road if you were passing someone, so you wouldn’t choke him with dust. And you waved, or at least raised a friendly finger. Acknowledging another person’s existence. Saying, Hey, you aren’t alone under the sun; we’re all in this life together.

  Pete shook his head, wiped grit from his eyes. Raised an unfriendly finger at the receding car. Went back to work.

  The large rubble was hard to maneuver, but Pete preferred it to the little pieces. A cracked plate bearing a child’s painted handprint. A large magnet. A blackened mousetrap, metal bar still in place, waiting to spring. A leather-bound Bible, damaged but still readable, which had been protected by the carcass of the couch.

  Big things on top, impersonal. Little things on the ground, heartbreaking. Broken, blackened, lost.

  It was sort of like archeology, Pete told himself, searching for a mental category that might ease the ache in his chest. He was a scientist excavating Mrs. Dean’s family history.

  “I want it all,” Jerry had said, blinking rapidly. Trying not to cry, Pete supposed, though he looked more frightened than sad. Pete got that. Grief felt a lot like fear, in his experience. Fear of the unknown, fear of being left alone, fear of how big the world was and how small and powerless you were.

  “Everything personal,” Jerry said. “Every little thing, no matter if it’s burned or broken. I want it all.”

  Weirdly, though, Jerry never more than half-glanced at the items Pete dutifully carried to him. Then, “You can take that on to the dump.”

  That, Pete didn’t get.

  “He can’t face it,” Pete’s mother said. She was unpacking a box of bras, looping one shoulder strap from each over her forearm so they dangled in a row, all different sizes and colors. “He thought he wanted mementos, but having the pain stirred up again…”

  That’s what Pete was doing. Reaching down with gloved hands, stirring up broken bits of pain. Bagging it, watching for sharp edges. Pulling down the tatters of yellow crime-scene tape, shoveling up mounds of cinders. Heaving everything into the trailer so he could drive it to the dump and watch it slide down the slope, joining other people’s painful pasts.

  There were worse jobs, he supposed, than hauling away unwanted memories.

  And orders were orders, so every day Pete salvaged keepsakes, laying them on the seat of the pickup like corpses at a funeral parlor. Jerry wouldn’t do them justice, so when Katie stopped by, Pete would show her, item by item, the remnants of Mrs. Dean’s life. A porcelain shepherdess, lightly scorched. A blackened fork. Mrs. Dean’s extra pair of eyeglasses, one lens broken.

  “That’s so sad,” Katie would say, eyes welling up, and somehow her tears unloosed the knot in Pete’s chest. Like the universe required a certain amount of pity for these small abandoned objects, and if Katie did the pitying, then Pete didn’t have to.

  “Jerry isn’t the only one who lost Mrs. Dean,” Pete’s mom said, when he told her about his private little memorial services. “We lost her, too. Especially you.”

  She was trying on a new style of bra, fastening it on top of her clothes. Pete was probably going to develop some weird boob aversion, thanks to his mom’s deBRA business. He’d have to go to therapy.

  “How did it start?” she said.

  “Huh?” Hot pink bra, tight over her white T-shirt. Like Superman with his underwear over his clothes. WonderBra Woman.

  She smiled at him. “I said, how did you happen to start showing Mrs. Dean’s things to Katie?”

  Pete had a sudden image of Katie meeting deBRA for the first time, and the back of his neck went hot.

  “Uh, I don’t know,” he said. “Just for something to say, I guess. She kept stopping by, acting lonely. She doesn’t know many people yet.” He sounded defensive, and he wasn’t sure why.

  “Just curious.” His mother turned sideways to the mirror, casting a critical eye at her bosom’s profile before raising her gaze to meet Pete’s eyes in the mirror. “Obviously she’s interested in you, not some dead woman she never even met. You get
that, right?”

  Pete looked away. “She’s just lonely,” he said again. “Can you take that thing off? Rob and Jared are coming over.”

  * * *

  Pete thought about that conversation as he sifted through the last layer of charred remains. How had it started, his daily memorial with Katie? He remembered being exhausted, the first time she’d stopped by. He’d been working under the blazing sun and had looked up—sweaty, filthy, dehydrated—to see a pretty girl standing in the driveway.

  “It’s such a shame,” she said. “A whole life, gone. All the things she treasured.” Then she’d given a little shake of her head. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m Katie. Someone said you go to Hamlin High? I start there this fall.”

  That was the beginning. Their first conversation, and before even telling him her name, Katie had gone straight to the heart of things. If they ever started dating, he’d tell her that.

  Today’s finds weren’t impressive. A mousetrap, a magnet. The shattered remains of a glass jar, insides coated with a yellowy-brown crust. Mustard, maybe.

  Nothing interesting.

  Pete was seeing the debris now, he realized, through Katie’s eyes instead of Mrs. Dean’s. Thinking of it as show-and-tell, as a way to hold Katie’s attention, a way to spin out a few more minutes with her. Was that wrong? Or did it only mean he was getting used to the fact of Mrs. Dean’s death?

  Mrs. Dean wouldn’t expect him to get all weepy over a broken jar. She wouldn’t expect or even want any weepiness from him at all. Boys were boys, she used to say.

  Still, he felt a little guilty.

  He turned a piece of crusted glass over in his hand. Maybe it had been a candle, most of the wax now melted away. That was more likely than mustard in the living room. Though perhaps Mrs. Dean had been sitting in her armchair having a snack—she loved summer sausage with brown mustard—when someone walked in, whacked her on the head, sloshed gasoline, lit a match.

  It could have happened that way. The investigators knew Mrs. Dean had suffered a blow to the head, and they knew she’d breathed smoke, which meant she’d still been alive when the fire started. They didn’t know if she’d been conscious. They didn’t know if she’d been afraid, or if she’d felt the fire licking at her arms, her legs, her face.

  Gently, Pete swept the broken glass and the mousetrap into a trash bag, along with an armful of unidentifiable small charred things.

  Then he was done. Except for a thin layer of gray ash, the concrete slab lay bare. He still needed to collect the strip of roof out back, but that was all.

  Pete could hardly believe it; he’d finally finished laying Mrs. Dean and her house to rest.

  Reaching out, he touched the redbrick chimney. His finish line.

  Pete would go away and live his life, but that chimney would stand for decades, marking Mrs. Dean’s death.

  Something caught his eye. Inside the fireplace, toward the back of the grate meant for wood, sat a small steel box, dented, blackened with smoke.

  Weird.

  Pete picked it up, shook it, heard something inside rattle. He pried it open and a photograph fell out onto the hearth. A Polaroid snapshot.

  A pornographic Polaroid snapshot.

  Pete felt his face go hot.

  There was a woman, and there was a man. Despite what they were doing together, they didn’t look like they belonged together. The woman was young; the man was not. He was looking straight at the camera, bright-eyed and grinning, as if his favorite football team had won the playoffs. His face was vaguely familiar; it reminded Pete of television ads. Maybe the guy was a businessman, or somebody running for office, or the president of the local college. Whoever he was, Pete would lay odds that the woman in the photo was not his wife.

  Pete tucked the photo carefully back into the box and closed the lid. Then he turned the box over in his gloved hands. A magnetic strip ran down the back, twin to the one Pete had found on the floor.

  Experimentally, he raised the box into the chimney, pressed it flat against the inside wall. The magnet grabbed, attaching itself to the metal chimney liner, and held briefly before sliding slowly down, juddering, to land crookedly on the grate.

  The heat had loosened the glue holding the magnets to the box, Pete figured. Other than that, it was a darn fine hiding place.

  Pete grimaced. It was this photo—not mementos of Mrs. Dean—that Jerry had wanted found.

  Adultery. Pornography. Mrs. Dean would have been horrified.

  Gingerly Pete picked up the box, the same way he’d pick up a dead rat, and carried it to his truck. He set it on the floorboard, slid it under the passenger seat as far away as it would go.

  Then he clicked his tongue, rousing Trigger from his nap.

  “I’m going to pull the truck around,” he told the dog. “Got to get that piece of roof, and then we’re done.”

  Done with the house, anyway. Not with Jerry Dean.

  What did Jerry expect? That Pete would find that photo, hand it over to Jerry? No way.

  Pete would take the photo to the police. Sign a statement. Testify in court, if need be. Because Pete could just picture it—Jerry, somehow obtaining an incriminating photograph. Blackmailing the man. The man arguing, cajoling, threatening. Following Jerry. Figuring out—somehow—that the photo was somewhere in this house.

  Burning the house down, and Mrs. Dean with it.

  No wonder Jerry looked awful. He knew who’d killed his mother. And he knew it was his fault.

  Pete drove around behind the disintegrating tractor shed, as close as possible to the fallen section of roof. He grabbed it, dragged it, wedged it into the trailer. The wind rattled the shed’s corrugated siding, threatening to blow the whole thing down on top of Pete’s truck. The sun blazed cheerily down; Trigger whined hopefully, head cocked.

  But why did Jerry want the photo? Not for more blackmail; he’d be too frightened now for that. Maybe Jerry planned to give the photo to the man in it. Make nice.

  Tough. No way would Pete let him hand that photo over, not after Mrs. Dean had died because of it. Jerry should have known that.

  Maybe Jerry did.

  Maybe Jerry expected Pete to take the photo to the police. Pete would like to think Jerry had that much decency left. For Mrs. Dean’s sake.

  Trigger ran toward the clump of cactus, came back. Made pleading noises.

  “All right,” Pete said to the dog. “If it means that much to you.”

  He almost felt compelled to go. The vultures had seemed, all day, a bad omen.

  Pete followed the dog into the pasture, catching the scent of death as he drew near the clump of prickly pear. It was more potent than he’d expected. Usually things didn’t stink for long, thanks to the hot dry wind. Maybe it wasn’t a raccoon or possum, but something bigger. A bobcat or coyote. A deer.

  Pete rounded the stand of cactus, careful not to brush against its sharp needles.

  He spun away, staggered a few yards. Threw up.

  Jerry Dean. At least Pete thought so, based on the missing arm, but he couldn’t be sure. The scavengers had been busy.

  Trigger wagged his tail, gazing up at Pete hopefully.

  “Awesome, Trigger,” Pete croaked. “Good dog.”

  Trigger did a happy dance, spinning around Pete’s ankles. It was so wrong, so inappropriate, but the dog didn’t know that.

  Pete looked again at the corpse, squinting, as if a slantwise glance might mute the horror. It had been buried, judging from the hole beside it. Buried, then dug up and dragged out of its shallow grave by feral hogs. Four-legged buzzards, folks called them. Somebody hadn’t known to bury the body deep.

  Killed. Buried. Dug up. Eaten by feral hogs. Eaten by buzzards.

  Pete gagged again and turned away.

  He needed the police.

  “Let’s go,” he said to Trigger, starting for the truck.

  He was thinking about how far he’d have to go before he’d get a phone signal, thinking about being low on gas, thinkin
g it was good he’d get paid even though Jerry was dead. He felt a little mercenary, thinking about money right then. But feeling mercenary beat feeling sick, and disgusted, and frightened.

  Halfway to his truck, Pete realized Trigger wasn’t following. Instead, he’d sat down by the body. Guarding it. Wanting to show off, now that Pete had finally noticed it and praised him.

  “Trigger!” Pete said.

  Trigger settled himself more firmly.

  In the distance, an engine whined. Katie, finally?

  Pete’s truck was out of sight of the road, hidden by the tractor shed; she wouldn’t know he was there. For a moment he considered staying put, letting her drive on past.

  But he’d sure like to see someone alive. Someone normal. Someone clean.

  He didn’t have to tell her about the body or even the photo; he could protect her from that. Just see her before he went to give his statement to the police and got pulled into the investigation, the trial, the whole sordid business. Just five minutes with Katie before it all descended.

  Breaking into a jog, he rounded the peach tree just as the dark Camry from earlier turned into the driveway.

  Pete dropped flat, out of sight behind the low line of the foundation. He felt foolish, but he also felt afraid. The Camry might have nothing to do with anything, but then again …

  He couldn’t get to his truck without being seen, but he might make it to the chimney.

  A soft creak told him the Camry’s door was opening. “Didn’t think that blasted kid would ever finish,” a man’s voice said.

  Pete crawled forward on his elbows across the dirt and dead grass, not daring to glance up. When he reached the fireplace, he pressed hard against it, the chimney rising high above him. He hoped Trigger was inclined to stay put and stay quiet.

  Another creak. Another voice. “That kid did all the heavy lifting. You ought to be thanking him, not complaining. Look at this—you won’t even get your hands dirty.”