“Mel.” He smiles sheepishly. “How you holding up?” Exactly what he asked at the crossroad. Dude needs new material.
“Peachy.”
“You wanna maybe grab a beer? I’m off-duty.”
The vein in my temple pulses. I don’t reply.
“Another time then.” I expect him to step out of my way, but instead he looks at his shoes. He smells of leather and perspiration, strangely alluring in the confinement of the stairway. “Something else about that baby, huh?”
My lips compress, but he doesn’t notice.
“We still haven’t found the mother. Even checked with the schools. Barlow Con is out for summer, but that girls’ school up in Crestview is in session year-round. No go.” He inspects the cuticles on his right hand. “Could be there’s no one to claim her.”
An image of the figure at the crossroad flickers through my mind. “You think the mother’s dead?”
He shrugs. “Or the boy drove the infant out here to abandon her? Some Portland girl didn’t want to be a mom, and her boyfriend offered to take care of the problem.”
“He wouldn’t have to drive a hundred and fifty miles for that.” I can think of a dozen ways to dispose of a body that small without having to leave the house—the marvels of a little mortuary education. “Stupid.”
“Maybe he thought no one would find the body out here or connect it back to Portland if they did. He didn’t plan on getting plowed into by Zach Urban.”
“You think he was leaving the baby at the crossroad when he got hit?”
“Hard to say. All we know is the boy’s Subaru was stopped when Urban slammed into it at upwards of seventy-five miles an hour. We’re not sure what, if any, connection there is to the men in the Caddy, but it was stopped too. Whatever the situation, if not for the wreck, the coyotes might have found the infant before anyone else.”
“Huh.”
I start to move and Jeremy puts a hand on my forearm. I glare until he pulls back. He knows as well as anyone I don’t like to be touched. “You sure you don’t want to get a beer?”
“Depends. You gonna charge Landry MacElroy?”
Before he can make another excuse, I push past him down the stairs and make my escape.
SEVEN
Internet Mattress
That first drive from Portland to the gray stone edifice I would come to know as the Old Mortuary took us three hours. The original location of Bouton Funerary Service was built by Uncle Rémy’s great-great-grandfather, he explained, an 1890s replacement for an earlier wooden structure that had been more workshop and bunkhouse than funeral home. The long drive took us first up the forested slope of Mount Hood to a small village above the snow line, still busy with late-season skiers. From there, the two-lane highway turned south and dropped into a landscape I’d only ever seen on television. The tall firs gave way to a red-brown plain broken by sudden gorges, irrigated farmland, and a vast range dotted with grazing cattle. High desert, Uncle Rémy called it, dry compared to what I was probably used to, but rich and fertile for those who understood the land. Sparsely populated with strong people.
The woman who met us outside the Old Mortuary and opened my car door looked to be one of them. She was stout, with broad shoulders and short salt-and-pepper hair, dressed in a sky-blue polo shirt and tan pants. The afternoon was chilly, but she wasn’t wearing a jacket and didn’t seem to care. Like her husband, she didn’t try to touch me.
“Welcome,” she said. “I’m your Aunt Elodie.”
I’d never had an aunt or an uncle. My parents used to joke they’d broken a long tradition of only children on both sides of the family when they had me. Then Fitz died, and I guess it wasn’t so funny anymore.
“You must be exhausted,” Elodie went on. “Come, let me show you to your room.”
“You have a room, Mellie?”
Three days of weary travel had left my back sore and my head throbbing. The desert sky was high and gray and too bright. A dry breeze attacked my eyes. I blinked, then nodded.
With Uncle Rémy in our wake, Elodie led me up wide steps and through the oaken front door. Inside felt colder than out, dim and silent as a mausoleum. My eyes struggled to adjust. I felt like I was draped in shadows.
“We live on the second floor,” Elodie said. “Down here is all mortuary space, though empty and mostly unused now. We have the newer facility in town, as Uncle Rémy probably told you.” Upstairs, she pointed out a small family room and then a large kitchen with ceramic trivets on the walls and copper pans on hooks above the six-burner stove. The bedroom she and Rémy shared was adjacent to a sewing room she didn’t get to use as often as she liked.
“Do you sew?”
I shook my head, suddenly conscious of the weight of my own inadequacy.
At the end of the hall, Aunt Elodie opened a door onto a bright room with white plaster walls and buttery wainscoting. In one corner, a brass reading lamp overlooked a leather club chair beside a bookshelf. In another stood a vanity table with a mirror and cushioned seat. A tall armoire faced a four-poster bed set between two windows.
“The furniture is old, but the mattress is new. I ordered it off the internet.”
Somehow I dug deep and found my voice, tiny and broken and no louder than a squeaky shoe.
“Thank you, Aunt Elodie.”
For a second I thought I would have to say it again, loud enough to be heard. I didn’t know if I could.
But Aunt Elodie rewarded me with a smile. “We’ll leave you to get settled in. Perhaps you’d like a nap. I don’t imagine the train was too restful.” She pointed out a door in the opposite wall, my own bathroom, and said she’d picked up a few things for me to wear until we could go into town and shop. I didn’t want to ask how she knew my size, afraid I would sound ungrateful.
When she and Uncle Rémy left, I went into the bathroom—almost as big as my old studio apartment in Amherst. I found a robe hanging on the back of the door, secondhand or maybe even Aunt Elodie’s, but soft and clean. Too clean, I realized. My whole body felt like it was coated in grime.
Taking a bath in the claw-foot tub, as old and well used as everything else in the house, felt like too much of an extravagance. I took a quick shower instead, then slipped into pajamas I found in the armoire. When I crawled into bed, the new mattress swallowed me up. I slept like the dead for twelve hours.
* * *
When I woke, I sat up in a panic. I thought I was back in the hospital. But it was too quiet, too dark to be the hospital. The atmosphere felt heavy. I was somewhere far stranger, a room in the old funeral home belonging to my missing husband’s family.
“I don’t deserve this,” I said aloud.
No argument from Fitz.
I dressed in the predawn dark, grateful for the jeans, button-down shirt, and clean underwear Aunt Elodie had gotten for me. Then I slipped into the kitchen, afraid of disturbing anyone. A note on the counter told me to make myself at home, and there was a covered plate in the fridge. Chicken and pasta, the dinner I’d slept through the night before. I carried it to the table and ate it cold.
I felt restless, like I’d overslept and missed something important. I thought about the sewing room and wondered if I would have to make an accounting of myself.
“Well, what do you do, Mellie?”
Nothing. I had nothing to show for myself. Grandma Mae had encouraged me to leave Fitz and my old life behind. But after she died, my only accomplishment had been disappointing Helene.
To distract myself from the certainty I’d be a failure once they got to know me, I started leafing through a catalog left on the kitchen table.
Mortuary supplies.
As the kitchen filled with morning light, I found myself lost in everything from body fridges and embalming tables to urns and caskets. Reconstruction materials and cosmetics fell between sanitation supplies and transport cots, all with descriptions written in an upbeat tone that emphasized quality and performance—as if a biological waste sluice basin
was just part of a mortician’s jolly good time.
And yet, wasn’t this what I come all this way to do?
“Around the shop,” Elodie had said, “we’re all just undertakers.”
At the back of the catalog was a garments section. The first spread featured aprons, coveralls, and face masks, but after that came printed T-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs with morbidly humorous captions like, “Not Just Hot—Open Casket Hot!” and “I love the smell of embalming fluid in the morning.”
I actually laughed a little.
“Coffee?”
I started and looked up, saw Uncle Rémy in the kitchen doorway. He was dressed in boots, canvas pants, and a striped shirt with leather elbow patches. He smelled like the Pinaud aftershave Grandma Mae had kept around to remind her of my grandfather, a man who’d died before I was born.
“You like that stuff, huh?”
I glanced down at the catalog, then back up at him. Gave a little nod.
“I have a ball cap around here that says, ‘Last Responder.’” He smiled and made himself busy at the counter, filling the coffee maker and taking a pill from a prescription bottle in the cupboard. “Bad hip,” he said absently.
When the coffee was ready, he brought me a cup. “Half-and-half in the fridge, if you take it that way.” I was pleased and a little surprised he thought I was up to the task of getting my own cream. He blew into his cup and took a sip, then said, “Up for a little walk?”
My first thought was that he wanted to trot me into the desert and bury me in a shallow grave. But if the Boutons wanted me dead, they could have just left me on the street in Boston. I shook off the thought and drank my coffee, black. When we both finished, I took my plate and our cups to the sink and washed up. Then I followed him downstairs. He had to loan me one of Aunt Elodie’s coats.
“Later, we’ll run into town and get you fixed up with some proper clothes.”
“You don’t need to do that,” I said. I had his ten thousand dollars in my pocket, after all.
“Don’t worry. We’ll put you to work.”
“I still don’t know what my job will be.”
“Oh, all kinds of things,” he said with a mischievous smile, “but we’ll start you slow.” He didn’t elaborate, and I let it go. There was time, I figured, and he seemed more interested in venturing out into the cool morning.
We headed down the long driveway, away from the house. The air was clear, with a crisp, earthy scent. I felt like I could see for miles, but almost at once my attention was pulled nearer. The gravel crunching under our feet startled a small, gray-brown bird that darted off, tail high.
“Sage thrasher,” Rémy said. “Lucky. We don’t see them much around here.”
We crossed the road, then stopped to allow him to knead his right hip. “Stiff in the mornings, but it’ll loosen up.” When we moved on, it was at a slower pace. He described things along the way: spiky ball cactus and tufts of wheatgrass, yellow woolly sunflowers and gnarled juniper. Once, he pointed to a bird circling overhead. “Golden eagle.” How he could tell, I had no idea. To me, it was a dark squiggle. A couple of times he kept me from stepping in old, dry cow manure, and then a short tower of oval, green-brown pellets steaming in the chilly air.
“We’re getting close.” When I asked to what, he said, “You’ll see.”
A hundred yards farther, we crested a short rise. Ahead, in a gray-green depression, a herd of animals looked up at us, their black faces inquisitive. They had ruddy brown backs, with white rumps and white flashes on their cheeks and necks. A black stripe ran up the snout to their foreheads, and their curved black horns grew up above their eyes a foot or more.
I took a sharp breath.
“They’re called pronghorns. A lot of folks think of them as antelopes, but they’re more closely related to giraffes.”
I felt like I was in the middle of a wildlife documentary. “They’re beautiful.”
We watched them graze for half an hour as Uncle Rémy described their behavior and habits. “This herd is mostly adult females, with a few juveniles. In the spring, the adult males break off to live alone and fight over who’s boss.” He said we’d see them from time to time working their way across the Shatter Hill plateau.
Slowly the pronghorns moved away. When they disappeared over the far rim of the depression, we took a wide loop on our way back to the Old Mortuary. Uncle Rémy wanted to show me a bobcat den.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was the start of my education in the life of the Oregon high desert, and of Barlow County. Under the guidance of Uncle Rémy, I would come to learn the difference between rabbitbrush and desert sage. He taught me to distinguish a vulture from an eagle in flight, and a turkey feather from a red-tailed hawk’s on the ground. Together, we watched prairie falcons catch cliff swallows on the wing and dug mouse skulls out of owl pellets. He told me about the Columbia River Flood Basalts, a deluge of lava that covered northern Oregon and southern Washington in spasms between fifteen and seventeen million years ago. The vertical rock columns along the lip of Shatter Hill were remains of the formation, which in places can be three thousand feet thick. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Aunt Elodie, we roamed the county from Trout Rot Creek to the irrigated plateau north of Dryer Lake. We spotted elk and mule deer in the Brother Drop National Forest. We watched chinook and steelhead return to the Palmer River and followed ancient wagon ruts the pioneer Sam Barlow himself may have once trodden.
“A hard man,” Uncle Rémy said. “Killed a fellow with an ax.”
Sadly, over time, our treks would grow shorter, even after Uncle Rémy took to using walking sticks. The pain in his hip could make him irritable, even forgetful. But he never stopped finding something new to show me.
* * *
The next day, Aunt Elodie took me to Samuelton and the New Mortuary for the first time. I was anxious to start work. The check, the room with its old furniture and new mattress, the clothes, and the train ticket—they all weighed on me, debts I wanted to repay. Hell, I’d have worked for free, though over dinner the night before, Aunt Elodie had dismissed the idea. I’d be doing a job, and I’d receive a salary.
“It’s not much,” she admitted. “A starter’s wage, less a bit for room and board.”
That was fine with me. Left unmentioned was the escape that big check gave me—gave us all—if things didn’t work out.
But as we pulled into the parking lot outside the one-story stucco building with its meticulous landscaping, a tremor of anxiety swept through me.
Aunt Elodie turned off the engine and looked at me, her eyes kind. “You don’t have to worry. No remains today. Not till you’re ready.”
“It’s not that.” I wasn’t worried about seeing or even handling the dead, even if the only body I’d ever really seen was my grandmother’s. Though I still missed her, Grandma Mae had suffered a long, painful decline, and her death had been a mercy in the end. What remained behind when she finally passed seemed no more the person she’d been than her clothes or the furniture in her tiny apartment.
“What is it?”
A question. Two questions, really—though one led to the other. Before I went inside, I needed to understand how I came to be here and who I was expected to be.
I’d asked Uncle Rémy the first before we left Portland. He told me to ask Elodie. But after we arrived, I’d put it off. First I told myself it didn’t matter; then I told myself the question might only make them rethink the decision to bring me here in the first place. They’d offered me a place, a job, a chance.
I should be grateful.
But sitting in the car outside the New Mortuary, I suddenly felt like everything was happening too fast—as if after a long journey I’d hit the end of the road and fallen off a cliff. I was about to meet strangers, people with whom I lacked even the tenuous connection I had to Rémy and Elodie. They had no reason to accept me.
“We can go home, honey,” Elodie said quietly, misunderstanding my hesitation. “We�
��ll try again tomorrow.”
I shook my head. My tongue felt thick and dry. “What made you call me?”
Her eyes grew distant, then she pulled the keys out of the ignition. I thought she was going to get out without answering, but she only fiddled with the keys in her lap before dropping them in her purse.
“We got an email from Geoffrey’s family, asking if we’d heard from him. We didn’t even know he was missing.” Her lips formed a thin line, and I wondered if she was thinking of Geoffrey’s parents. I’d only met them one time, after he’d disappeared. The encounter hadn’t gone well. “Once we’d heard the whole story, and learned of your situation, well …”
Her voice trailed off, as though she didn’t want to raise the specter of my abandonment in Paris, or my involuntary hospitalization after my return. That was fine. I didn’t either.
“You don’t even know me,” I said.
“We know Geoffrey,” she said, as if that settled things.
At least someone did.
I looked at the white stucco building, felt as if it was looking back. I wondered what the other people who worked at the mortuary would think. Aunt Elodie had shared their names over dinner: Carrie Dell, the embalmer. Wanda Iniguez, funeral planning specialist and office manager. Quince Kinsrow, body transport and general assistant—the man I’d be replacing. That was its own source of anxiety, but Aunt Elodie assured me Quince had been ready to retire for a while.
“Are you going to tell them about me, about my … situation?”
“Nobody’s business, unless you want it to be.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Long-lost niece then, twice removed or however it goes.” She gave me a conspiratorial smile. “Anyone asks, we’ll say you found us online.”
As if I could order a new family, a new life, like an internet mattress. I didn’t mention I didn’t have the first clue how to find a long-lost relative online. In the end it didn’t matter.
No one ever asked.
EIGHT
Town Common
For all the space of the Oregon High Desert, Samuelton proper is tucked into a glen between two long spurs of Lost Brother Butte. Anchoring the small downtown is the grandiosely named Town Common, a nine-square-block business district smaller than the campus on College Ridge. The compact area is home to restaurants, pubs, touristy shops, and the Barlow Building, all surrounding Memorial Park, center square of Town Common.
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