Beyond the Grave

by R. W. Wallace

  The keys in her hand make a noise when she points in the direction of the metro, and it seems to remind her of what she was doing before the verbal diarrhea started. She shoves one of the keys in the lock and turns it quickly.

  “You on your way out?” she asks with a huge smile that shows off a line of perfectly white teeth. “I kind of have to run or I’ll be late for work.” She starts walking down the hallway.

  Emeline figures she might as well keep the woman company and so she follows her down the hallway and down the two flights of stairs. The other woman might have shorter legs but she practices something between a skip and a run and Emeline has to hurry to keep up.

  “I’m Amina, by the way. I’ve lived here for three years now. And I’m always late so I don’t think I’ve ever not run down these stairs. Are you from Toulouse?”

  She pauses long enough for Emeline to answer. “No, I’m from Paris. I’m here for work.”

  Amina stops on the second-to-last step and turns to face Emeline. “A Parisienne?” She breathes a theatrical sigh. “Ah, well, I’ll try not to hold it against you.”

  Emeline smiles. “How magnanimous of you.”

  “Yes, I know.” Amina flashes that gleaming smile again, and then she’s off toward the building’s front door. “Anyway, I really gotta run. I hope we’ll get the chance to get to know each other better sometime!”

  Emeline waves a goodbye and watches as Amina runs down the sidewalk and disappears around the corner in the direction of the metro.

  Making new friends wasn’t part of the plan for her stay in Toulouse. But now the opportunity has presented itself, she realizes it’s exactly what she’ll need if the job takes as long as she’s starting to think it will. She can’t spend all her time thinking of nothing but work—that way lies madness.

  A smiling and talkative neighbor might be exactly what she needs.

  Nine

  Being stuck in a cemetery for thirty years can get very boring. At first, you panic at being dead and a ghost, and go through all the stages of grief. Then you try everything you can to get out of the cemetery, only to discover that the other ghost is right, there is no way out. Then you explore the cemetery itself, partly looking for clues on how to get out, partly trying to keep yourself occupied.

  Well, the cemetery had nothing on this room in the city morgue. I am bored. Out of my mind.

  And it’s only been a night.

  I’m torn between hoping we’ll be kept here for a long time so we’ll have more time to participate in the investigation into our own deaths, and hoping we’ll be sent home to our graves very quickly so that we won’t be going in circles in here for too long.

  “We should try to tell the coroner to bring some books or something,” Clothilde says from her perch on one of the cabinets. She started out on the bench but as she got increasingly bored, she moved to a higher seating arrangement. “This place should have better amenities for ghosts. I’m sure we’re not the first ones to come through.”

  True enough. I’m lying on air next to my own skeleton, pretending there’s a table here, staring into my own empty eye sockets, looking for answers.

  Seriously, staying here for too long will not be good for my sanity.

  “Be my guest,” I tell Clothilde, waving at the man standing over her dead body, scalpel in hand.

  Clothilde grunts in reply.

  The man was here all yesterday afternoon and evening and came in quite early this morning. He’s working hard—but has no affinity for ghosts at all. We’ve tried talking to him and touching him, telling him to talk to himself while he works, or make notes in a place that we can see, so that we can learn what he learns, but to no avail. The man is impossible to influence.

  So we’ve given up on accompanying him while he works and we’re now trying to find other ways to pass the time.

  So far, we’re not very successful.

  At nine o’clock sharp, Captain Evian and Lieutenant Doubira return.

  I jump up from my morbid slumber and Clothilde glides down from the cabinets to stand next to me. “Finally!” she says with feeling. “You wouldn’t believe how much I missed you guys.”

  Evian smiles and looks to the side—right at us. Except she sees through us, of course, then frowns, and turns to face the coroner.

  “In the same way that he’s totally shut off,” I say, pointing at the coroner, “I think she’s rather open to communication. That’s not the first time she’s reacted when we talk, and we’re not even standing particularly close.”

  Clothilde walks over to stand behind Evian, goes up on tiptoe, and blows on the captain’s neck.

  Evian shivers and runs a hand over her neck, like she is swatting away a mosquito.

  Clothilde returns to stand next to me with a big grin. “I do believe you’re right. Could be useful!”

  I fold my arms over my chest and try not to let the hope take too much of a hold. “Unless we’re sent back to the cemetery never to see her again.”

  Clothilde slaps the back of my head. I can’t feel it but still throw her an annoyed glance.

  “Positive energy, Robert,” she says. “Otherwise there’s no hope for us, be it here or in the cemetery.”

  I push the mental chatter away and focus on Evian, who is shaking hands with the coroner and settles next to the empty workbench along the wall, at parade rest as always.

  “I got your message this morning,” she says. “You already have a preliminary report?”

  “Yes,” the coroner says. “I will need a couple more days before my analysis is complete, but I believe I have some elements that may help you continue your investigation.”

  “I appreciate that,” Evian says, genuine sincerity in her voice.

  The coroner points to my skeleton. “Monsieur X is indeed male. He was probably in his mid-thirties when he died, which was about thirty years ago. I’d say within a year or so of Mademoiselle Humbert’s death.”

  I exchange a glance with Clothilde. So far, he’s got everything right.

  “He was 1.82 meters, was Caucasian, white, brown hair. Broke his leg at some point but it’s probably irrelevant because it happened while he was a teenager.”

  My eyebrows rise. I’m impressed. “Skiing accident,” I explain to Clothilde.

  “Shoulders have both been displaced at least once, and he’s had a broken middle finger on the right hand and a broken nose.”

  I touch my nose in memory. “Nose was from a stupid bar fight while I was a student, but the rest were in the line of duty.”

  Evian speaks up. “Sounds like he’s had a rather eventful life.”

  The coroner casts a quick glance at my skeleton. “I’d say an athlete or someone with a physically dangerous job.”

  Clothilde moves closer to Evian, her eyes intent. When the coroner makes his remark, she leans in to whisper in Evian’s ear, “He was a police officer.”

  “Like a police officer,” Evian says immediately.

  The coroner stops talking, his mouth still open, and Malik turns in surprise. Clothilde sends me a thumbs-up.

  The slightest hint of color appears on Evian’s cheeks—she’s embarrassed she interrupted the other man, and with another assumption, no less.

  “Or a firefighter,” she adds belatedly. “Or any kind of construction work, really.”

  “All of those theories would be valid,” the coroner says. He pauses for a moment, waiting to see if Evian has anything else to add. When she stays quiet, he continues his report.

  “He probably died of a gunshot.”

  Clothilde’s eyes find mine and I see the question in them. I never knew how I’d been killed. I don’t even know for sure that I was killed, I’ve just always assumed. But I could have died of natural causes, for all I knew. Now this guy can tell simply from looking at my skeleton that I was shot?

&
nbsp; “How do you know?” Evian asks. Her question is polite, in no way insinuating that the coroner could be wrong, but like me, she must think it to be a bit of a long shot.

  The coroner points to a spot on my skeleton’s torso. “The bullet’s still there.”

  “What?” Clothilde yells. “How did we not see that? You’ve been staring at that thing for almost twenty hours.”

  “In my defense, it was dark for at least eight of those,” I say, but my voice is weak. I lean over to look at the spot the man is pointing at and now that I know what I’m looking for, I spot the bullet.

  It’s as black as the dirt on the table and it’s lodged in the juncture between my spine and my fifth rib. If I was shot from the front, the bullet probably went through the heart before stopping there.

  “Well, that’s one question answered,” Clothilde murmurs.

  I move away as Evian comes closer to observe the same thing I did. “Shot through the heart?” she asks and I shiver at the echo of my own thought.

  “If the person shooting was a little taller than him and shooting from shoulder height, yes,” the coroner answers. When no other questions ensue, he continues his report. “I’ll need to run a more thorough analysis but so far I see no proof of any clothing. It appears he was buried naked.”

  “Looks like I’ll be going through old missing persons’ reports,” Evian says as she straightens and resumes parade rest. “If he was shot, then buried naked in an unmarked grave, I think we can assume the burial wasn’t done by anybody who cared about him.”

  On a certain level, I already knew this—after all, nobody bothered with a headstone and I’ve never had a single visitor—but it still shakes me. Did my family search for me when I disappeared? Did my friends? My colleagues?

  Did my disappearance cause pain to people I care about? Or did it hardly make an impact because nobody cared?

  It bothers me that I don’t have answers to those questions.

  The coroner puts a hand on my skull—the one belonging to the skeleton on the table, not ghost me—in what I think is affection. “That’s all I have on Monsieur X at the moment.”

  Evian nods, clearly curious about who I was and how I ended up on this table, but accepting that she’ll have to wait for the rest.

  “Now, to Mademoiselle Humbert,” the coroner says and moves to stand next to her body. “Clothilde.” Somehow, since he’s been impervious to our attempts at communication, I’ve assumed he’s not empathetic. The catch in his voice as he says Clothilde’s name says otherwise.

  “Clothilde had a rough time of it,” he says. “First of all, she was raped before she died.”

  Ten

  Clothilde’s jaw juts out and she folds her arms over her chest when the coroner makes his statement. She stands right next to Evian, staring across her own mummified body at the man who claims she’d been raped before she was killed. Malik has taken up position next to the coroner.

  We had our suspicions about the rape, honestly. After all, the reason we are here right now is that two young girls came through our cemetery as ghosts and while investigating their murders, we discovered that they appeared to have been killed by the same people who killed Clothilde. The two girls had been raped, so it stood to reason that Clothilde might have, too.

  Still, getting the confirmation can’t feel good.

  Clothilde’s eyes roam her own corpse. “I thought they cleaned bodies before funerals.”

  I look to the coroner to see if he picks up on Clothilde’s remark, but of course he doesn’t.

  “You found DNA? Or were there torn tissues?” With Evian, it’s difficult to tell if she picks up on our conversation or if she’s just doing good police work. I’m tempted to say it’s a little bit of both.

  “DNA,” the coroner answers and my non-existent heart rate doubles.

  Could it really be that simple? A sample of DNA and we find Clothilde’s killer after all these years?

  Will she move on so soon?

  The coroner doesn’t leave me time to ponder. “The body was cleaned and embalmed before burial but they mostly focus on the exterior. I found a relatively large sample of semen. We’ll have a DNA profile quite soon.”

  Malik seems to be holding his breath as he stares wide-eyed at his superior. “Do you think we’ll find a match? On a thirty-year-old death?”

  “Thirty-year-old murder,” Clothilde and Evian say in unison.

  Clothilde turns to study Evian’s profile with a satisfied half-smile on her lips and Evian shivers and runs a hand over her neck.

  “I want you to run that DNA against a specific profile,” Evian says to the coroner.

  The man’s eyebrows shoot up. “You have a suspect on a case this old?”

  Evian nods but her eyes are distant as she looks at the mummified corpse on the table in front of her. “A sixty-year-old police officer who will soon be on trial for six recent rapes and murders.”

  “Six,” the coroner repeats.

  “Probably more, but we only have DNA evidence for those six,” Evian says. Her gaze comes back into focus and she fixes the other man with a firm glare. “No talking to anyone about this.”

  The coroner lifts his chin. “I would never.” He’s offended by Evian’s assumption that he’d talk about confidential information outside of work. Good.

  “Do you have any way of knowing if she had any medication or poisoning in her system when she died?” Malik asks his first question without conferring with Evian and it’s a good one.

  I nod at the young man in approval even though he can’t see it, and I see the gesture mirrored on Evian.

  The coroner shoves his hands into the pockets of his white lab coat. “I’ve managed to get some samples from the better preserved parts, so it’s possible. The samples are on their way to the laboratory as we speak. I should have some preliminary results by the end of the day.”

  He looks between the two police officers. “You have reason to believe she was poisoned?”

  Evian’s gaze is focused on Clothilde’s sunken face. “All the others were.”

  Silence settles as all three alive persons in the room stare at Clothilde’s corpse. I prefer to stare at the real Clothilde—the ghost—trying to figure out how she’s feeling about all this.

  “You think it’s the same guy who killed Manon and Lise?” I ask her.

  “It’s the same guy who did the rape,” Clothilde answers. She’s keeping her eyes on Evian, studying her closely, looking for…something. “I don’t know who did the actual killing. The poisoning was done by Laurent Lambert. He’s still at large.”

  Laurent Lambert. The lawyer with a name so generic it doesn’t even feel real. The man who we know poisoned Lise and who had a meeting with Manon on the day she died and remembered nothing about.

  The man who rented the hotel room that Clothilde died in.

  “It would still be helpful to know if he was the one to rape you,” I say softly. “Everybody will know this has been going on for a long time.”

  Clothilde nods, her eyes still on Evian.

  “Maybe it will help you to move on,” I say.

  Clothilde finally tears her eyes away from Evian and meets my gaze. “We already knew I was killed by the same people as Lise and Manon. We suspected I’d been raped. Catching the rapist was enough for them to move on but for me it’s not. Laurent Lambert needs to pay.”

  The anger in her midnight voice makes me take a step back. Her eyes are black and her curly hair moves around her head like there’s a wind playing with it. There’s a calm about her that makes all my cop’s reflexes go on high alert.

  I know she has carried around a lot of anger since her death but I’ve often put a lot of it down to her being stuck as a moody teenager.

  I’m starting to realize just how angry she is. And that it’s justified.

 
Keeping eye contact, I nod. “He will pay, Clothilde. We’ll make sure of it.” I nod in the direction of Evian. “She’ll make sure of it.”

  Clothilde stares at Evian again, to the point where the captain throws a nervous glance around the room—that woman is very attuned to otherworldly activities—and finally nods, mostly to herself, I think.

  “She seems good,” Clothilde says. “She seems good, right?”

  “She does,” I agree.

  “Good.” She lets out a frustrated sigh and I relax slightly now that the midnight voice is gone. “God, I wish I could come with her during the investigation.”

  “You and me both,” I tell her. “I’m guessing we have another day here, max, before we’re sent back to the cemetery.”

  “I don’t want to go back.” She juts out her jaw and frowns down at her own dead body as if it has done her a great injustice. Which, to be fair, it sort of has.

  She slides closer to Evian and leans in to whisper straight into her ear. “You should take the bodies with you during your investigation. I’m sure they’d be really helpful.”

  I can tell that Evian is bothered because she does a whole-body shiver so I do my best to keep my laughter in. That wouldn’t help her understand what she’s feeling at all. I can just picture it, the investigator dragging two corpses around everywhere she goes, arguing that it will help her solve the case.

  “We need to come with you,” Clothilde continues in her creepy whisper. “We can help you solve the case. We’re so bored in that cemetery.”

  Evian shakes her shoulder, clearly trying to shake Clothilde off even though she doesn’t realize it. “All right, Doubira, I think we’ve seen enough here for today.”

  Doubira’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise but to his credit, he doesn’t say anything.

  “You’ll send me the complete report when you’re done?” Evian asks the coroner. “What you’ve told us so far has been very helpful.”