I take a long breath in the hall, then, with a start, sense Jeremy behind me. “What are you, a goddamn puppy?”
He takes a step back. “How do you stay pissed for so long?”
“Holding a grudge is my superpower.”
“Mel. Please.”
I can guess. He wants to clear the air. To win me back or maybe get closure after I cut things off. I’m pissed I let things get this far, let him get close enough to think I owe him something. An even angrier part of me still finds him attractive—physically at least. Barb would tell me to go with that. Have my fun and put in earbuds when he opens his mouth. But I don’t need the grief right now, not with cops crawling around the Old Mortuary.
“All I’m asking is a chance to talk. It doesn’t have to be now. Just pick a time, meet me for coffee or a drink.”
There it is: the wheedle.
“If I say yes, will you back off?”
Before he can answer, Omar Duniway steps through the door into the foyer. “Kind of you to grace us with your presence, Miss Dulac.”
“It’s Ms. Dulac.”
“As you like.” His tone is friendly, but that just sets my nerves on edge.
Thin and worn, with skin weathered into deep, dendritic crevices, Omar Duniway is the skeletal counterpoint to Sheriff Turnbull. His neck is too narrow for his starched collar, and his standing purple veins look like they’re trying to leap from his flesh. His breath stinks of menthol cigarettes.
“Are you finished?”
“Almost. One question though.” He shows me his gray, narrow teeth. “Any idea who’s been using the oven?”
* * *
A sheltered breezeway runs between the house and the crematorium, screened from public view by privet hedges. The interior of the building is overheated by air boiling out of the crematory. I peer into the retort. “You opened this?”
Duniway nods. “I did.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t get a face full of exploding ash and molten bone.”
The chief deputy squeezes his lips together and steps back. I have to suppress a smile. At cremation temps, bone doesn’t burn or melt; it desiccates. Nor is opening the door particularly dangerous. As a matter of procedure, we take a peek at least once every burn. The primary flame shoots down at the center of the retort, and we often need to reposition the body with a bone rake to ensure complete cremation. Whoever started this cremation hadn’t bothered, just lit the fire and left. The result is an unfinished burn and a fuel gauge reading zero.
Jeremy examines the valves controlling airflow and the gas feed to the burner, and the gauges indicating temperature and fuel pressure. “How hard is it to work one of these things?”
“It’s not like preheating the oven to make cookies.” New cremation machines are computerized and automated—load the body container onto the conveyor belt, click a mouse button, and go grab a coffee. But this unit, a beast built to handle anything up to large animal cremations, dates back to the 1960s. If there ever was a user manual, it’s long gone. The procedure is documented only in memory now.
I don’t volunteer that Uncle Rémy has passed this knowledge on to me, one of many lessons he shared with infectious zeal.
Duniway clears his throat. “Did you have a cremation scheduled for today?”
“I doubt it.” Not likely, in fact, with everyone gone but me.
“You’re not sure?”
“No reason I should be.” My job is to perform removals and assist with everything from body prep to hosting events at the New Mortuary. I may live out here at the Old Mortuary, but I work in town. Though I’ve assisted a few times, cremations are Uncle Rémy’s responsibility. A sudden wave of uncertainty passes through me. They were his responsibility. But now, who knows? With everything else she has to deal with, Aunt Elodie might just decide she doesn’t have the bandwidth to continue the Melisende experiment. After the last two days, I’m not sure I’d blame her if she patted me on the back and said, “Sorry things didn’t work out.”
“Who would know?” Duniway says.
“Talk to Wanda.” If she had something on the books, in Uncle Rémy’s absence she might have called Quince. Though past seventy and technically retired, he still does the occasional odd job and maintenance—even a removal if I can’t. He’d once tried to rattle me by describing how he had to dismember some cowboy’s beloved roping horse in order to fit it inside the crematory.
“Do you know where Quince is?”
“Knowing him, fishing.”
“Where were you last night?”
“I stayed at the New Mortuary.”
“Anyone with you?”
Wanda doesn’t get in ’til nine, and I was out the door before then. “Nope.”
I can’t tell if they believe me. Jeremy does. At least, his expression suggests he wants me to think he does. But Duniway looks at me sidelong. “You must admit this is curious.”
I don’t have to admit anything. Inside the open retort, the partial burn has left a heap of ash, charred flesh, and heat-splintered bones—too much for any ordinary cremation. I stand mute, waiting for Duniway to state what I already know.
Inside are the cremated remains of the crossroad dead.
TWELVE
Crestview Assisted Living
I need a long, hot bath. I settle for a quick shower and clean clothes, and skip drying my hair. Deputy Roldán and the others are still working the scene at the outcrop when I blast through the crossroad a few minutes later. No one seems to care when I run the stop sign. Kendrick Pride’s hybrid is nowhere to be seen.
Shatter Hill to Crestview is nine miles as the surveillance drone flies, eleven by mortuary first call vehicle, the last four climbing twelve hundred feet through pine forest. Lost Brother Butte is to my left and five thousand feet higher, a looming presence from anywhere in the county. In the winter, Crestview serves as base camp for the cross-country and downhill skiers who can’t afford the Brother Drop Resort or Dryer Lake chalets. In the fall, hunters take over, while in spring and summer it’s campers and hikers. But for me, year-round, the mountain village is notable only for the body count. I do more removals from Crestview Assisted Living than the rest of the county combined.
They’ve put Uncle Rémy in a private room. Edna Crandall’s, I realize as I slip through the door. Stripped and sanitized, ready for a new tenant even as the previous one still chills in our fridge. Edna died of cancer, but I hope she didn’t also suffer from some undiagnosed contagious wasting disease.
Aunt Elodie smiles from an overstuffed wing chair in the corner. She’s been cross-stitching, but stows her embroidery in her craft bag when I come in.
“Welcome, honey.” Her eyes turn to Uncle Rémy, who dozes under a colorful afghan on the bed. “He’ll be asleep for a while. They just gave him something.”
The room is small but comfortable in its way. Her wing chair has a mate under the wide window. A painting of trout leaping in a mountain stream hangs over the bed. On the opposite wall, Gene Kelly dances on the flat screen TV, the sound muted. If not for the IV, blinking monitor, and urea-tinged air, we might be in a pleasant, if unassuming, hotel room.
I manage a strained smile. “He looks comfortable.” I feel like an idiot as soon as the words are out of my mouth.
Aunt Elodie, in contrast, looks haggard. Her salt-and-pepper hair, usually clean and well kempt, has a frizz more typical of my own head. Her clothes are wrinkled, and shadows ring her eyes. I want to find a bed and tuck her in, but—as always—she’s more worried about me than herself.
“You’ve had to deal with so much without any support.”
I drop into the empty chair. “I’m fine.”
“When the surgery got moved up, I should have asked Carrie to delay her vacation.”
Originally set for September, everyone had been grateful when a slot opened for Uncle Rémy’s hip replacement this week. With Carrie out, the timing wasn’t great, but Aunt Elodie didn’t expect to be gone long, and Swarthmore�
��s embalmer would help if a rush job came up. All I’d had to do was not fuck up for two or three days.
So much for that.
My fingers twist in my lap. Carrie wouldn’t have lost three bodies, that’s for damn certain. “I’m sorry, Aunt Elodie. I screwed everything up.”
“Oh, honey, no, no.” She reaches out for my tangled hands. “You’re not to blame.” A sharp, electric sensation leaps through me at her touch, but I resist pulling away. Aunt Elodie needs physical contact like most people need oxygen. I give her another tight smile and will myself to relax. Anxious for something else to focus on, I stare at the monitor at the head of Uncle Rémy’s bed. Heart rate, oxygen saturation. Both hover around ninety-five. I can’t remember if either value is good or bad.
“How long before he gets to come home?”
Sighing, she releases my hands and sits back in her chair. Peaceful, I realize, was the wrong word for Uncle Rémy. Torpid is more like it. His skin is dry and translucent, his eyes sunken, and his lips cracked and dry. He’s asleep, but he doesn’t appear to be resting so much as crushed by the very atmosphere. I’ve washed decedents who looked more alive. The thought sends a shudder through me, and I turn back to Aunt Elodie. She’s watching Uncle Rémy, her gaze remote, as if she’s seeing a memory rather than the man himself.
I wish I knew what to say. I’m not used to caring about people. Helene, maybe. Geoffrey doesn’t count; despite our marriage, he was more distraction than object of devotion during our brief time together. Elodie and Rémy have become more like what my grandmother tried to be before she died: an island of security in a sea of indifference. But even with Grandma Mae, there had been distance. My parents, Cricket and Stedman, all but cut her off after Fitz died. I rarely saw her until I was old enough to make the forty-mile bus trip from Lowell to Framingham on my own. She had been wheelchair bound for as long as I could remember, and her declining health meant she could only handle an occasional overnight visit.
Aunt Elodie’s chair squeaks. “I heard about the baby.”
Of course she has. I draw a sharp breath but don’t say anything.
“That was very lucky.”
For the baby, maybe. “Yeah.”
“Had you and Geoffrey any plans to have children?”
My body stiffens again, but this time there’s no willing myself free of the tension. “I would make a terrible mother.”
“You don’t know that.”
I don’t want to argue with her. In her mind, Geoffrey and I were husband and wife, but in fact we were together almost no time at all. It was less than two years ago that he’d first arrived unexpectedly at his sister’s. I don’t know what he saw in me—maybe just a willing partner in excess. I was enrolled at UMass but mostly living with Helene in Holyoke. I skipped more classes than not. Helene was a second-year law student by then, busy and absent much of the time. Geoffrey and I spent our nights pub-crawling and our days in bed, first at Helene’s and then—when she kicked us out—in my shitty Amherst apartment.
He got the idea we should marry after Thanksgiving. Why I agreed I can only attribute to a growing anxiety that I was running out of options—with no one to blame but myself. The tiny inheritance from my grandmother that let me attend college, however fruitlessly, was almost gone. I had no job, no skills. As for Geoffrey, he spent like his own money would never end, and for all I knew it wouldn’t. Like everything else we did, he was the one who came up with the idea for our spontaneous trip to France. “We’ll stay until the cherries bloom,” he grandly proclaimed when we landed on a cold February morning.
I would see my first cherry blossom through the window of a Paris police station as I explained that my husband had gone out for croissants and never returned.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Aunt Elodie blinks, as if stirring from her own reverie. “What’s that, honey?”
“When can he come home?”
She takes a long time to answer.
“You never knew us when we were young. Rémy was so strong, so sure of himself. I don’t think I’ve ever known a man so forthright.” She looks at Uncle Rémy as if she’s going to cry. “Now I don’t know who’s going to be there the next time he wakes up.”
“Dementia. What a bite.”
It doesn’t seem possible. Not Uncle Rémy, so vital, so full of curiosity. A memory surfaces of one of our outings at the end of last summer. As we hiked the eastern rim of Shatter Hill, he told me about twin sisters, originally from Samuelton, who’d died within minutes of each other, one in California, the other in Georgia. “They’d chatted by phone earlier that day, and though they were elderly, both seemed in fine fettle.”
At the time, I’d been at Bouton Funerary Service four months and had settled into a routine that felt strangely normal. Get a call, drive out to pick up a decedent—still under Quince’s guidance, but that wouldn’t be for much longer.
When Uncle Rémy finished the story of the twins, now buried in Pioneer Cemetery, I said, “I was thinking I’d use that money to go to mortuary school.”
Neither of us had spoken of the check since that day in Portland, but his eyes lit up then, and I felt a rush of pleasure. He would be a source of constant support as I worked through the prerequisites, and wrote a letter of recommendation to accompany my mortuary sciences application. A month ago, when I got the acceptance letter, he said, “I’m proud of you, Melisende. You’ll be a credit to the program.”
I can’t stand the thought he might not be with me, with us, as I continue down a path I couldn’t have started without him.
Elodie’s joints pop as she gets to her feet and moves to the edge of his bed. She strokes Rémy’s forehead. “They make him walk, you know. I know it seems too soon, but the doctor says it’s necessary for his recovery.” A faint, anxious smile twists her lips. “I go with him, of course, and try to be encouraging. But even a few steps down the hall wears him out.”
“I’ll walk with him next time.”
“I appreciate that.”
She gives Rémy one last caress, then returns to her chair. Her shoulders slump as she sits. When she looks up, her face is grave. An unexpected chill sweeps through me.
“Melisende, honey, I’m afraid the county has suspended you from performing contract removals until the investigation into what happened to those bodies is complete.”
All the air bleeds out of me. Yet, despite the gut punch, I’m not surprised. I almost ask who made the decision—Chief Deputy Duniway, Sheriff Turnbull?—but it doesn’t matter. What matters is I’ve become a burden at a time when Aunt Elodie is crushed with worry for Uncle Rémy.
Unsure what to say, I finally manage a monotone “I understand.”
“You’ll continue with our private clients, but Fire and Rescue will handle county removals for the time being.” I nod, but she’s not finished. “And after what’s happened, Edna Crandall’s family decided Swarthmore would work better for them.”
Out in the hall a woman calls for someone to come hug their grandmother. The piercing voice reminds me of Cricket’s.
“This is all my fault.”
Elodie’s hand snakes back into my own. I’ve become too numb to flinch. “Honey, don’t think that.”
What I’m thinking is how we can ill afford to lose the business, especially now.
“I’m sorry.” In the corner of my eye, Uncle Rémy’s monitor ticks away: ninety-four … ninety-five … ninety-three. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“It’s okay. We’ll get through this.” She smiles unconvincingly. “But I do need you to do something.”
“Of course, Aunt Elodie.”
“Swarthmore is sending their driver. Someone has to get Edna ready for transport.”
I want to apologize again, a hundred times over. I know she’ll just shush me. “When is he coming?”
“Not till four.” She glances at her watch. “You’ve got time, but—”
“I should go.” I rise heavily to my feet.
“Rémy will be sad he missed you.”
I let her hug me, wishing I could be sure that was true.
PART TWO
Rubble
He was right.
We was wrong.
But we strung him up.
And now he’s gone.
—Epitaph of George Johnson, hanged 1882
Boot Hill Cemetery
Tombstone, Arizona
THIRTEEN
Iced Coffee
Late Friday afternoon, I’m in Cuppa Jo, gazing out the broad front window at Memorial Park. Demographically, Barlow County tilts hard toward one foot in the grave, yet no one has called for a removal in the three days since Edna Crandall. If Fire and Rescue made any calls, they took the remains to Swarthmore. My phone rests on the table, silent. An hour or a day ago, I called Helene, left another message. One of many. “It’s been a long week. I hope you’re okay.”
Nothing from her either.
From where I sit, I can see from the Barlow Building to Dailie’s Grille, including the Whistle Pig on the other side of the park. Outside, the locals are inured to the merciless sun. Now midway through my second summer in the high desert, I’ve come to prefer the dry heat to the crushing humidity of New England in July myself. Campers and kayakers from farther afield wear hats and carry water bottles.
As the fluorescents buzz overhead, a black Ford Excursion with tinted windows drives past, making my undertaker sense tingle. Oversized SUVs are hardly a rare sight around here, but this one is too clean for an off-roader or a working vehicle.
Unless the work is transporting the dead.
“Who we losing this time, Mellie?”
I’ve been here three hours, occupying myself with the view outside and in, and with a copy of this week’s edition of the Samuelton Ledger someone left on the table. The story about the crash doesn’t mention me by name, but the one about the bodies does. Explains why customers glance my way with wary curiosity. Only the owner, Joanne, has anything to say to me. The baby, she’s heard, is doing well, and has been released from the hospital and placed with a foster family. “That’s good,” I’d managed to respond, my voice flat. Since then, Joanne has left me to stew in my juices.
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