Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

  Tonight, I got up, put on shorts and a sweatshirt, returned to the backyard, and lay on a lawn chair. The night air had cooled and the sweat inside the shirt beaded on my skin, but the chill felt better than the skin-crawling warmth of the bed. During my last tour of duty, I often went above deck at night and watched the same stars that I knew shined on Lillian as if I could triangulate our love. In the winter, when I missed her most, I looked for Orion, the brightest constellation in the sky, his hunter’s belt as tight over the Arabian Sea as along the Atlantic coast.

  Now, I fell asleep as the sun came up and the moon and stars disappeared, and when I awoke again in the mid-morning heat, a bed sheet covered me. Lillian had draped it over me before she left to teach her classes. Many mornings, the sweet chemical smell of the paper mills up the coast hung in the air, but this morning a breeze blew the vegetable scent of oak trees, camphors, and magnolias across the yard. Percy lay in the sun at the foot of the recliner. Three years ago, while driving home from class, Lillian had seen him tied to a post in an overgrown yard. His owner had left no water for him, and by his looks he’d gone short on food for a long time. Lillian approached cautiously, uncertain of his temper, but he never raised his head. So she knocked on the front door and, when no one answered, unchained the dog and carried him to the backseat of her car.

  That evening, the vet at the animal hospital said the dog was badly dehydrated and sick besides with who knew what. His kidneys were failing, other organs too, he said, and if we were humane, we would put him down. Lillian insisted on giving him a day and, after a day passed and his condition seemed no worse, another. A week later, the dog stood trembling on his own feet. After a second week, we took him home. At his three-month checkup, the vet found no organ damage, kidney or otherwise. Lillian wanted to call the dog Persistence. I said that was assholish. She said, ‘Percival?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, right.’ So we called him Percy.

  He followed me as I walked inside. Lillian had left the kitchen a mess, her breakfast half eaten on the counter. Next to her breakfast plate, she’d folded open the Metro section of the morning Times-Union to an article with the headline ‘Wetland Body Identified as Missing Student.’ The photograph showed a pale girl with white hair, not albino but close. Dread filled my belly as I read:

  The partially decomposed remains of a woman found yesterday afternoon on land abutting a Heckscher Drive clay pit have been identified as Sheneel P. Greene, 19, of Fernandina Beach. The Sheriff’s Office is calling the death an apparent suicide. Greene was reported missing by relatives on February 16. She was last seen riding a bicycle on Heckscher Drive in the Little Marsh Island neighborhood near where her body was discovered. Anyone with information on Sheneel Greene’s whereabouts in the days leading to February 16 should contact the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.

  Sweat broke inside my shirt.

  Partially decomposed remains. A body could decompose in many ways. Rig a roadside bomb and, in a flash of light and sound, you could decompose a body into the stuff shovels are made for. Expose a body for a couple of days on a North Florida wetlands during a warm February and the results would be just as terrible.

  She needs help. By the time Lillian said those words last night, Sheneel Greene was past helping.

  And what had I said to Lillian? It’s her right to disappear. I’d been stupid to say it. But did I believe it? Maybe. More so at night than in the morning.

  Lillian had covered me with a bed sheet as I’d slept on the lawn chair. Had she done that before or after she’d read the newspaper article? If before, then the gesture had nothing to do with Sheneel Greene’s death. If after, then either Lillian had forgiven me or she’d draped the sheet over me the way you drape a sheet over a dead man. One also could decompose while sleeping on a lawn chair.

  I called Lillian’s cell phone. It rang twice and jumped to voicemail. ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘I saw.’ I hung up. What else could I say?

  Sheneel Greene’s photograph stared at me from the newspaper. I’d seen hundreds of dead men’s stares – glassy-eyed, hard-eyed, bloodshot, bloody, milky, recessed deep into skulls from the force of an explosive concussion – and I’d stared back. Sheneel Greene’s slate-gray eyes were the eyes of a living girl in the photograph, but that made staring back no easier.

  I called Lillian’s brother Daniel at the Sheriff’s Office. Seven years older than Lillian, he’d been a detective in the homicide unit as long as I’d known him. Lillian revered him, and he’d only done me good, helping me get the rental space on Philips Highway, and picking me up and taking me home one night after I got back, when I went into the woods alone with my SIG. But I’d heard stories about him, and, when he stood, he bent to the left from a couple of bullets that had splintered his ribs in circumstances that no one ever quite explained, and there had been a trial at which a lawyer proved that a couple of detectives had planted the gun they said was the defendant’s.

  When Daniel heard my voice on the line, he said, ‘Hey, Johnny. How’s tricks?’

  ‘You guys deal with suicides, right?’

  ‘Uh huh. And accidentals. You planning an event?’

  Seeing it every day either turned a person into a man like me or made a person funny. I said, ‘You know anything about Sheneel Greene?’

  He hesitated only a moment. ‘Sure. I took the call. What do you need?’

  ‘She was one of Lillian’s students.’

  ‘I know. Lillian phoned.’

  I said, ‘She asked me to look into her yesterday.’

  ‘The girl’s been dead a couple of days.’

  ‘What did you tell Lillian?’

  ‘Same as I’m telling you,’ he said.

  ‘How’d she take it?’

  ‘Hard. How well did she know the girl?’

  ‘Not well, I think. You’re sure it’s her?’

  ‘Lillian asked that too,’ he said. ‘She died face down in the dirt. Insects and animals got to the rest of her. Relatives came in and ID’d her.’

  ‘Lillian said she was estranged from her parents.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ he said, ‘but she’s got family all over this area. A half-dozen of them showed up to tell us it was her.’

  ‘Who found the body?’

  ‘Does this matter?’

  ‘Lillian asked me to look for her.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but she’s not missing anymore.’

  ‘Who found her?’

  ‘A guy who was looking at property by the clay pit.’

  ‘Does he have a name?’

  ‘He does. A private name unless he decides to make it public.’

  ‘How do you know it was suicide?’

  ‘A history of attempts. And her brother says she’d been depressed.’

  ‘How did she do it?’ I asked.

  ‘We don’t know yet. Probably pills. I’ve seen a lot of these, Johnny, and this is an easy one.’

  ‘The newspaper says you’re looking for people who saw her in the days leading to her death. Why are you doing that if it’s suicide?’

  ‘Loose ends. I’ll do telephone interviews, won’t bother asking them to come in. As I say, this is an easy one.’

  ‘Nothing’s easy,’ I said.

  ‘Can I give you some advice?’

  The last thing I wanted from him. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Get your own head together,’ he said. ‘Forget about Sheneel Greene. Take care of yourself and then do something nice for Lillian. Hell, take her to Key West or the islands for a weekend – start living your life again.’

  ‘Thanks, Daniel.’

  ‘Don’t take it wrong. I’m trying to help.’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘You’re a good man, Johnny.’

  ‘Could I come by and see the file?’ I asked.

  ‘I mean it. Drop this and pay attention to what matters. There’s nothing here but a dead sad girl.’

  ‘Would ten o’clock be OK?’

  ‘Why would you want to?’

  ‘For Lillia
n. I need to do this much.’

  ‘The file is confidential.’ But his words lacked conviction.

  ‘Ten o’clock?’ I asked.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You’re a good man too, Daniel.’

  When we hung up, Percy looked at me expectantly. ‘And you’re a good dog,’ I said, ‘as dogs go.’

  I dialed Lillian’s cell again and left a second message, telling her I was going to the Sheriff’s Office to look at Sheneel Greene’s police file.

  A minute later she called back. ‘It’s too late,’ she said.

  ‘It’s always been too late,’ I said. ‘But when did that stop me?’

  ‘You’re not making sense,’ she said.

  ‘No. I suppose not.’

  The sun hung over the city as I drove across the Mathews Bridge into downtown. Long rows of shipping containers lined a riverside industrial lot to the north. Just over the side of the bridge exit to the south, East Beaver Street dead-ended into the riverbank. If you got on the street and drove west, it hooked into old Route 90, and you could keep driving for seventeen hundred miles until you reached New Mexico. Since coming home, I’d felt the lure of that road, as I’d felt the lure of all avenues leading elsewhere.

  The Sheriff’s Office headquarters on Bay Street looked like a concrete bunker I once saw in an aerial photo of Basra – a low-rise slab with almost no glass but plenty of little terraces, and railings behind which a marksman could sight a target with little chance of getting hit by return fire. If the rumors were true, the architects designed the Sheriff’s building, which the city put up in the early 1970s, to withstand the revolution that the mayor was sure would come after the violence of the 1960s.

  I found my way to the homicide unit and asked for Daniel.

  He was sitting in a double cubicle with his partner, a little dark-haired woman whose nameplate said she was Denise Nuñez. Daniel was a big man with small feet. He was mostly bald but had a close-shaved moustache that probably broke department regulations, though homicide detectives got away with more than street cops and Daniel liked to push the limits. He wore a short-sleeved button-down shirt and a dark blue tie and, as usual, had a knowing grin as though he’d just heard a mean joke. But he was always polite. After introducing his partner to me, he asked if she would excuse us to talk in private, and, when she did, he removed a green binder from a shelf above his computer and set it on the desk. He gave me the knowing grin. ‘You’ve got five minutes. Then you can tell Lillian you did your best.’

  The file contained a transcript of the nine-one-one call reporting the discovery of Sheneel Greene’s body and named the man who discovered it as Peter Lisman.

  ‘You got a pen?’ I asked Daniel.

  He shook his head. ‘No notes.’

  The next pages included records from the responding officers, an interview with Peter Lisman, and more records from Daniel and Denise Nuñez. Lisman said he’d come to the Little Marsh Island neighborhood to look at a fifteen-acre plot of scrubland and swamp that stood between Heckscher Drive and the clay pit. A hundred and fifty feet from the road, he’d smelled what he thought was a dead deer or wild pig. Another twenty-five feet and he’d seen scraps of clothing and a single bloodied tennis shoe. He said he’d gone no closer but had called the police and retreated to the hot dry pavement of the road. The responding officers had followed Lisman’s path through the trees and then followed their noses the rest of the way to Sheneel Greene’s remains. They reported finding her face down in the sandy soil. Daniel and his partner arrived around the same time as the Crime Scene Unit technicians. The technicians found no blood spattering, which, since the weather had been dry, would have been present if Sheneel Greene had died from a gunshot or had been stabbed, and found no other body fluids. When the technicians gave Daniel permission, he rolled Sheneel Greene’s body on to what remained of her back and found, to everyone’s surprise, that her face remained intact.

  I looked up from the records to see if Daniel’s expression showed traces of the work he did. It showed none, and I wondered whether that made him strong or callous. ‘You done?’ he asked.

  I pulled a manila envelope of photographs from a file pocket. ‘Almost.’ I needed to look into the dead girl’s eyes.

  The first three photos showed the scene surrounding Sheneel Greene’s body. Orange evidence markers lay next to shreds of cloth from her T-shirt and shorts. Yellow markers lay next to crushed beer cans and a dirty Doritos bag. I pointed at the shreds of cloth. ‘Animals?’

  ‘Surprisingly few,’ Daniel said. ‘Sometimes, after a day or two, we find pieces of clothing a mile away.’

  I pointed at the yellow markers. ‘What’s this stuff?’

  ‘The neighbors say that kids party back there. We found beer cans, cigarettes, a condom.’

  ‘Is that why she picked the place?’

  ‘Could be.’

  The next picture was a shot taken after Daniel had turned the body on to its back: a shot of Sheneel Greene’s face from the shoulders up. I broke into a cold sweat. The girl was more beautiful in death than she had been in the living picture that appeared in the morning paper. A smear of dirty sand masked her chin and the red of her lips had purpled, but her cheeks looked smooth, her white hair parted neatly at her brow, and her eyes seemed to beckon. A black string was stretched over her forehead like a thin headband, and in the middle, where Indian women have bindis, the string held a dark square packet the size of a Band-Aid pad against her skin.

  I must have paled, because Daniel said, ‘I know you’ve seen a lot of bad stuff, Johnny. But I’ve seen the worst of the worst. And you know what? The world’s still OK. Sure, there’s ugliness, but, overall, we’ve got it pretty good. You should remember that.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, and pointed at the pad bound to the girl’s forehead. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Weird, isn’t it?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We’ve seen it a couple of times on suicides in the past but only on backwater blacks. It’s Geechee.’

  ‘It’s what?’

  ‘Geechee. Or Gullah. They’re a bunch of descendants of slaves who lived on the barrier islands. You still find them in Fernandina and the islands around there. They talk their own language and make their own medicines.’

  ‘And they put Band-Aids on their heads when they kill themselves?’

  ‘It’s leaves. They come from Indian shot plants. Flowers. You see them in their gardens. They do it for a bad head. If someone’s acting crazy or depressed, or they’ve got a migraine, they put the leaves on their foreheads. They claim it works.’

  ‘It didn’t work for Sheneel Greene.’

  ‘Guess not.’

  ‘How did a white girl get the leaves?’

  ‘Fernandina’s a small place. The Gullah still keep pretty much to themselves, but they’ve mixed a little over the years and you see them around. Anyway, you know how kids are. Rich suburban white boys dress ghetto. Rich suburban white girls put their hair in dreads.’

  ‘Sheneel Greene comes from money?’

  He looked impatient. ‘The point is—’

  ‘Yeah, I get the point.’ I flipped to the final photo. It showed the tattered remains of Sheneel Greene’s T-shirt, stripped from her body and spread on a white evidence table. Across the shreds, a single word appeared: Ngafa. ‘What’s that mean?’ I asked Daniel.

  He shrugged. ‘It might be Gullah too.’

  I slipped the photos back into the envelope and closed the file.

  He eyed me uncertainly. ‘Does that take care of it? You see what you needed to see?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Good. Then go to your office. Do your work. Or blow off the day and go to the beach. Go fishing. Do something you like to do. But stop treating the world like a piñata now, will you?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ I said.

  ‘Whacking at it won’t do you any good, and it definitely won’t do Lillian any good either.’

  I thanked him
and left him at his desk. As I walked out of the police building, sunlight, glinting off the hood of an SUV parked at the curb, blinded me.

  I blinked through it and got into my car. Stop treating the world like a piñata. A good thought, but I felt as if I was the one taking the whacks.

  The sun had warmed the inside of the car, but I left the windows up and the engine and air conditioning off. I dialed Lillian’s number on my cell phone. When she picked up, I said, ‘I saw her. Pictures of her. I saw the reports.’

  She remained angry. ‘So?’

  ‘That’s all.’ When she said nothing, I asked, ‘What does Ngafa mean?’

  ‘Bad spirit,’ she said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Sheneel Greene told me.’

  ‘Is it Gullah?’

  ‘I don’t know what it is.’ Her voice was cold.

  ‘You shouldn’t treat me this way.’ Sweat from my forehead stung my eyes.

  ‘How do you want me to treat you?’

  ‘I couldn’t have done anything for her. It was already too late last night.’

  ‘You don’t get it,’ she said.

  ‘She was already dead. What more is there to get?’

  ‘You refused to help before you knew.’

  ‘Jesus, Lillian. What difference would it have made?’

  ‘I would think of you differently, that’s all.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ I said, ‘don’t ever,’ and hung up. My eyes were wet – with the sting of perspiration, with tears, I don’t know what. I sat in the heat and listened to the sound of my own breathing and the hard pulsing of my heart.

  When I got home, I put Percy on a leash and climbed back into the car. ‘Road trip,’ I said. Now I was talking with a dog.