Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

  ‘What?’

  ‘Her arm. The joint is clean cut. Someone sliced it. It’s clean.’

  ‘What do you mean, you have her arm?’

  He seemed to think he’d done nothing strange. ‘I’ve got it. The police must have seen what I saw. Your brother must have. I mean, the cut on the arm is clean. The cut on the body must be clean too. There’s no way this was suicide.’

  I waved at him to stop. ‘You have Sheneel Greene’s arm? Where do you have it?’

  He gave me a pacifying look, as if I was unduly anxious. ‘It’s all right. I know how to do this. I’ve got it on ice. It’s—’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where’s her arm? Where do you have it?’

  For the first time, he looked uncertain. ‘In the car. In a cooler.’

  I stared at him. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

  EIGHT

  Johnny

  Lillian looked at me as if I was insane.

  ‘I packed it in ice,’ I said. ‘It’s OK – I know how to do this.’ When Percy brought me the arm, I’d taken the steps I’d learned to take so as to slow the breakdown of body tissues. In the VA counseling sessions that I’d attended, men who looked capable of snapping two-by-fours with their hands had talked of losing control of their bowels when they heard a knock on the door. Others reached for their guns and, in their mind’s eye, saw enemy soldiers crossing their backyards as clearly as they saw the trees and their children’s swing sets. They knew the real basis for all fear and they knew how to kill. Their bodies and minds were determined to do what they had to do, even if the main danger lay six thousand miles away.

  I’d never encountered the roadside bombs and snipers that caused those men’s particular psychopathologies. So, while loud noises startled me, I never hallucinated about coming under enemy fire. My own nightmares took me to below-deck spaces and subterranean rooms where I processed endless progressions of bodies as efficiently as an assembly line worker. Slam a hammer against a wall and I might or might not draw a gun. But show me a severed arm and I would pack it in ice as fast as the other guys would shoot a hole in their backyard fences.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ Lillian said. ‘You should have left the arm there. You should have called Daniel and let him handle it.’

  I said, ‘Unless Sheneel Greene killed herself by cutting off her arm, someone else killed her. Why are the police calling her death a suicide?’

  ‘You’re worrying me, Johnny.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll take the arm to Daniel. But why aren’t they calling this a murder?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She looked exhausted. ‘Daniel does this work all the time. The police have people who will explain what happened – people who, unlike you, know what they’re doing.’

  ‘Someone cut off the arm.’

  ‘I don’t know. Take it to Daniel. Tell him what you see. Let him decide.’

  ‘Fine.’

  She softened her voice. ‘After you give it to him, make an appointment. You need help. You slept outside again—’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘When I covered you with a sheet, you yelled as if you were on fire.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘At first I thought you were awake. You weren’t. You need to make an appointment.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. Then, as I stood to go, she added, ‘I love you.’

  ‘Yeah. I love you too.’ I started out the door, stopped. ‘First, come with me. I want to show you something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something on the arm.’

  ‘I believe you. If you say the arm looks like it was cut off, I trust you.’

  ‘Not that. Something else.’

  ‘I’m not going to look at Sheneel’s arm.’

  I stared at her.

  She shook her head. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Fine. You got a sheet of paper?’

  She peeled a clean sheet from the stack in her printer and gave me a pen. I drew a picture of a snake bending in a circle and closing its mouth on its own tail.

  She glanced at it but seemed unimpressed. ‘An Ouroboros,’ she said.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘It’s an Ouroboros – a snake biting its tail. The Greeks thought it symbolized the cycles of life – birth, living, death, rebirth. You see them here and there. The Egyptians used them. Coleridge liked them.’

  ‘Sheneel Greene had a tattoo of one on her wrist.’

  She shrugged. ‘I had a student who tattooed his legs with every cartoon animal you can think of. Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, Donald Duck, Jiminy Cricket. I asked him why, and he said he liked Disney. I had another who tattooed a barcode, like for a grocery store. I wouldn’t worry too much about a snake tattoo.’

  ‘When I went to the clearing where Sheneel Greene’s body was found, an old man was crouching on the ground. He was scratching one of these snakes into the dirt with a stick.’

  Lillian stared at me. ‘Are you sure?’

  I forced a smile. ‘As opposed to I’m making it up?’

  ‘Why would he scratch an Ouroboros?’

  ‘That’s my point,’ I said.

  I drove downtown to the Sheriff’s Office. Lillian thought I was crazy, but I wasn’t. Or I was, but not in the way she thought I was. On my third night off the ship, I’d felt like tearing the skin off of my face, and I’d told her she wouldn’t understand because she hadn’t spent the months that I’d spent in that death factory. She’d asked me to tell her – to bring her in, so she could help carry the pain – but the idea of taking anyone, especially her, into that space horrified me. So, I’d told her nothing, and when I’d felt as if my skin no longer was my own and nothing would feel better than to rip it from my body, I’d kept my mouth shut and gone out to the woods alone or had crawled from bed in the night and lain in the backyard until sleep took me in her arms if she was in the mood. And then Lillian had insisted I talk to counselors – if not her, someone else needed to help – and I’d said, yes, of course. Of course she was right. I’d agreed that no man should bear such a burden alone. But I’d also known that some burdens can’t or shouldn’t be shared.

  I parked at a meter a block from the Sheriff’s Office and carried the cooler into the building, but stopped outside the security check with its package X-ray. I called Daniel on my cell phone and said, ‘I’m in the lobby and I’ve got a present for you.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Something of Sheneel Greene’s. Something you missed.’

  Five minutes later, he stepped through security and I opened the cooler for him. ‘Holy shit,’ he said, though his face remained impassive. If you’d been watching him from across the lobby, you never would have known. ‘Where’d you get this?’

  I told him about my drive to the Little Marsh Island site and about Percy dropping the arm beside me like a chew toy.

  ‘You had no business going out there,’ he said.

  I welcomed his anger. ‘You had no business missing the arm,’ I said, ‘and you had no business calling this a suicide. Suicides don’t look like this.’

  For a moment, I thought he would hit me. I would have welcomed that too. I felt like hitting back. But he said, ‘Come with me.’

  He took me back through the Homicide Room to his desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a manila envelope. He gave it to me and said, ‘See for yourself.’

  The envelope contained more photographs of Sheneel Greene’s body, unlike the ones I’d seen before, showing what was left of her torso and limbs below her shoulders. They were as terrible as anything I’d seen on the ship in the Arabian Sea. Animals, insects, and the heat had gotten to her, eating through her skin and consuming her insides. The elbow and most of the upper arm above the forearm that I’d found were gone, and something had chewed and ravaged the stump that remained. Nothing on her body showed evidence of a clean blade cut. Everything that rema
ined was the stuff of tooth and claw and the predators that come afterward.

  ‘This is what we have to work with,’ Daniel said.

  As terrible as the photographs were, I felt a certain peace in seeing them. This was the world I’d come to know. ‘Why didn’t you show me these pictures when I was here before?’

  Daniel scratched his head above his ear. ‘I was humoring you by letting you see the case file. Those are the pictures we show to the family so they can make an ID. Why would they want to see more? Why would you?’

  ‘I’ve seen as bad,’ I said.

  ‘I know. And I’ve seen what it’s done to you. This isn’t your business. You don’t belong here. You shouldn’t have gone to Little Marsh Island. You shouldn’t have touched the arm.’ He spoke calmly, but I felt the heat.

  ‘So what do you do now?’ I asked. ‘The cut on the arm is clean. Sheneel Greene didn’t do that to herself.’

  ‘Jesus, Johnny. Forensics will look at it. Until we say otherwise, it’s suicide.’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

  He closed his eyes, as if he was mustering patience. ‘Fine,’ he said, and picked up the green binder that he’d shown me a few hours earlier. He paged to the end, removed a plastic insert from the rings, and handed it to me. It held a photocopy of a handwritten letter signed by Sheneel Greene. ‘She left a note,’ Daniel said. ‘Her brother found it this morning.’

  I read it. Sheneel apologized to someone named Alex – her brother, I guessed – and to someone she called Papa Crowe. She said something confused about missing them when she was gone. She said goodbye.

  I laid the note on the desk. ‘This makes no sense.’

  ‘The cliché, right? Suicide rarely does.’

  ‘How do you explain the clean cut?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t. I’ve never seen anything like it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it does. Like I said, we’ll give it to forensics. They’ll figure it out. Maybe it’ll turn out an animal can do that. Maybe something else.’

  ‘It’s a blade cut.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘and you don’t either.’ For him, our talk was over.

  I said, ‘When I went to Little Marsh Island, there was another man inside the crime tape.’

  ‘So?’

  I told him about the black man, the snake that he scratched into the dirt, and the matching snake tattoo on Sheneel Greene’s arm.

  Daniel shook his head. ‘Go home, Johnny,’ he said. ‘Or go to your office and sit in your chair. I don’t care. But leave me alone, OK? Let me do my work.’

  Outside, the early afternoon sun glinted from the hoods of cars and the white sidewalks. The bright heat made me light-headed, and I stopped in the shade of a crape myrtle tree. I breathed in deep, breathed out, and breathed in deeper, but the air felt thin and depleted of its necessary oxygen. Go home, Johnny. As if that was an option.

  I ducked back into the heat and moved down the sidewalk toward my car. I was exhausted, but my head buzzed with nervous energy as powerful and unsettling as an adrenaline burst. Lillian thought I needed help. She wanted me to make an appointment. If I called the VA hotline, they would schedule me as soon as they could. A sign I’d read in the counselors’ waiting room said, Prevention makes strong soldiers. Catch the problem early and you live to fight another day.

  I pulled out my cell phone. But instead of the VA, I called directory assistance and asked for the number of an Alex or Alexander Greene in Fernandina Beach.

  He picked up on the third ring.

  ‘Is this Sheneel Greene’s brother?’ I asked.

  ‘Who’s calling?’ he said.

  ‘That’s kind of complicated,’ I said. I explained that my wife had taught American Literature to Sheneel. ‘I run a little company that tracks missing people, mostly people who’ve forgotten to pay their bills. Also I do background searches.’

  ‘So what do you want?’

  ‘Could we meet? I’d like to talk with you.’

  ‘Sheneel isn’t missing.’

  ‘We can talk wherever you want. Your house. A park.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  I hesitated but said, ‘She didn’t kill herself.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ There was anger in his voice.

  ‘That’s why I want to meet. She—’

  ‘She wrote a note. I read it.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I don’t know what you want,’ he said, and he hung up.

  I waited thirty seconds and dialed again.

  He answered, ‘I’m calling the police.’

  ‘The police will say you’re right. They’ll say Sheneel killed herself. But I’m telling you you’re wrong and they’re wrong. Meet with me, listen to what I have to say, and if you don’t like it, you can call the police, though you won’t need to – I won’t bother you again.’

  For a quarter of a minute, he said nothing and I said nothing. Then he said, ‘Fine.’

  I drove up I-95, exited on to the old Buccaneer Trail highway, drove alongside flatbed trucks loaded with slash pine timber, past the little town of Yulee, through a mix of wetlands, woodland, and box-store commerce, and across the causeway to Amelia Island and the town of Fernandina. Amelia was the third in a tightly linked chain of barrier islands that ran up the North Florida and South Georgia coasts – Little Talbot, Big Talbot, Amelia, Cumberland, Jekyll, St Simons, Sapelo – places that long ago housed Spanish and English colonial forts and then slave plantations and, in the past hundred years, the mansions and vacation houses of whites who lived in developments that kept the names of the old plantations and who mostly ignored and, by ignoring, coexisted with the black population of slave descendants who’d settled in pockets on the island interiors away from the expensive seaside real estate.

  Fernandina stood at the northern end of Amelia, and the Chamber of Commerce had turned it into a tourist destination, bricking the streets, encouraging businesses and restaurants to hang hand-painted signs with pictures of pirates and parrots, and sending municipal workers on to the white sand beaches early in the morning to rake the trash that had washed up overnight. But trash continued to wash up, and, next door to the seaside mansions, a paper mill fogged the air with thick chemical sweetness that even the ocean breeze couldn’t dissipate.

  Sheneel Greene had shared a little yellow single-story prefab with her brother on Gum Street on the inside of the island. Ragged grass clung to the sandy soil, and, except for a stunted palm in front of the house and a chain-link fence at the back, the yard was bare. A screened-in front porch mostly obscured the view into the house, and, inside the porch, someone had taped newspaper over the front window. I pulled on to the sandy shoulder and turned off the car. The sky was blue and hot, and the air smelled of cut grass and the paper mill.

  A light-skinned black man, who looked in his early twenties, answered my knock. He wore gray knee-length shorts, no shirt or shoes.

  ‘Is Alex Greene here?’ I asked.

  He narrowed his eyes. ‘You’re Johnny Bellefleur?’ I stared at him, and he read my confusion over his appearance. He said, ‘Long story. Come in.’

  A window air conditioner blew cool air into the living room. A brown couch with sagging cushions covered by a blanket and headed with a bed pillow, as if someone had been sleeping on it, was pulled against one wall. A skateboard leaned against another. A kitchen extended behind the living room, and a door led to a bedroom and another to a bathroom.

  The man pulled the blanket from the couch and said, ‘Sit if you want,’ and he got a chair for himself from the kitchen.

  His eyes looked hard and suspicious, like the eyes of teenaged kids I’d seen living in the park near the Sheriff’s Office downtown. I figured I had only one chance with him. ‘This morning, I went out to where they found your sister,’ I said. ‘I found something the police didn’t find. It was pretty bad. Someone did this to Sheneel.’

  ‘Do you know how many times she tried to
kill herself?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Three. You know who saved her? I did. The first time she swallowed, like, a hundred pills.’ He pointed at the floor by my feet. ‘I found her right there. The second time, I came home from work and found her asleep on the couch. I couldn’t wake her. They pumped her stomach. I don’t know what she took. The third time, she puked it out in the bathroom. I didn’t call the hospital.’ He stared at me as if challenging me to quarrel or to sympathize with him.

  ‘Someone cut her,’ I said. ‘Part of her. Her arm. Someone cut it off.’

  He flinched, but he said, ‘She wrote a note. I found it on her bed.’

  ‘I don’t understand that.’

  ‘It’s simple. She killed herself. She wrote a note and then she did it.’ His voice cracked, but his eyes stayed hard. ‘She went to a place where I couldn’t save her again.’

  I said, ‘I’m guessing the killer used a big knife, though it could have been a hatchet. The skin looks sliced. The bone—’

  ‘Don’t.’ His voice cracked again.

  ‘The bone looks butchered, not broken.’

  Then the hard-eyed man was crying. Tears streaked his face, and his chest heaved, though he remained in the chair as if it held him from an abyss. I let him cry. He cried for a long time. When he finished, he wiped his cheek with the back of his hand and said, ‘I don’t know what you want.’

  ‘To tell the truth, I don’t either.’ That wasn’t quite true. I wanted to make sense of a death – for Lillian, but more for me – in ways I hadn’t been able to do below deck on the hospital ship on the Arabian Sea.

  ‘Why are you here, then?’

  I shrugged. ‘To try to put the pieces together?’

  ‘What if the pieces don’t go together?’ he said.

  ‘Then we try to make sense of whatever is there.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘Sheneel left a note. She killed herself. That’s all.’

  ‘If you saw what I saw, you wouldn’t believe that.’

  He shook his head. ‘If you saw what I’ve seen for the last two years, you would.’

  I thought about that. ‘Did she write notes the other times?’