by James Ponti
“It doesn’t matter what Dr. H is or isn’t doing,” she said, “because you are going upstairs and putting it back in my closet where you found it.”
“If I don’t have a jacket, it’ll be too cold in the morgue,” I pleaded.
She gave me that “condescending older sister” look. “Then I guess you won’t go.”
I thought about it for a moment before I flashed my “evil little sister” smirk and then said, “Okay. I guess I won’t. Maybe I’ll go swimming at Astoria Park instead. I can work on my butterfly stroke. It’s kind of awkward, and I splash a lot, but who cares if people stare. Besides, I can always ask for help. You know, from the boys you’ll be flirting with. Then the four of us girls can hang out.”
Both Salingers shot Beth a look, and I knew I had won.
“Fine,” Beth said curtly. “You can borrow it. But if you get so much as a drop of water on it, you’re buying me a new one.”
“Deal,” I said as we stepped into the lobby.
I only made it a few steps before Mrs. Papadakis decided she just had to butt in. She put a caring hand on my shoulder, like we had some sort of close relationship . . . which we don’t.
“Darling, it is not appropriate for a girl your age to visit the morgue. I know your mother—”
The mention of my mother was as far as she got.
Beth literally stepped between us and said, “Mrs. Papadakis, my mother thought you were a joke. I’m sure she wouldn’t want either one of us to take advice from you. So save yourself the trouble.”
Mrs. Papadakis’s eyes opened wide. “Well, aren’t you so very rude?”
“Really?” Beth said, not backing down. “Because I thought it wasn’t nearly as rude as a woman your age trying to bully my little sister into feeling bad about herself.”
Did I forget to mention that despite our many differences, my sister totally rocks?
Popsicles and Vanilla
Mornin’, Molly,” the security guard said as I entered the lobby of the morgue. Jamaican Bob was tall and thin and wore his dreadlocks pulled back in a ponytail. “You know, it’s a good thing you got here when you did,” he continued. “The building’s going to be jam-packed today.”
“Why is that?” I asked as I emptied my pockets into a plastic tray and walked through the metal detector.
“Haven’t you heard about the morgue?” he said with a booming laugh. “Everybody’s dying to get in.”
Bob always told the corniest jokes, but I had to laugh because he got such a kick out of them.
“Have a good day,” I said as I took my backpack from the X-ray machine.
“I will,” he answered with a big smile. “As long as I stay up here and away from that freezer of yours.”
Like a lot of the people in the building, Bob was freaked out by the freezer, which is what we called the body storage area, located three floors underground.
I guess it takes a while to get used to the idea of being surrounded by dead bodies.
Even when you do get used to it, there are two things you need to bring with you whenever you work in the morgue. The first is a jacket, because the bodies are refrigerated well below freezing. (If yours is not available, you can always steal your sister’s.)
The second is vanilla extract to fight the smell. My mom taught me this trick the first time I went to work with her. Now I always bring a bottle with me when I come to the morgue. I swipe a finger of it under my nose every hour or so. (Unfortunate side effect: Vanilla milk shakes now make me think of dead people.)
“Somebody got a new jacket,” Natalie said when I entered the lab.
“That’s because somebody spilled cadaver juice on my other one,” I reminded her.
“Oh yeah,” she answered with a sheepish grin. “Sorry about that.”
“I had to steal this one from my sister’s closet,” I explained. “If anything gets on it, I’m going to end up with the Popsicles.” (That’s what we call the dead bodies.)
Natalie is Dr. Hidalgo’s intern. Like me, she’s a student at MIST—the Metropolitan Institute of Science and Technology, a science magnet school that draws kids from all over New York City.
MIST is made up of two separate schools. The Lower School is for sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, while the Upper School is for ninth through twelfth. I’m in the Lower School and Natalie’s in the Upper. Normally, high schoolers don’t mingle with Lowbies, but since Nat and I were often the only living people in the room, we had gotten to know each other pretty well during the summer.
Natalie talks like a total science geek but looks like she belongs on the cover of a fashion magazine. Not only does she discuss everything from DNA sequencing to nanotechnology, but she does it with perfect hair, flawless skin, and the cutest clothes you ever saw.
Our backgrounds are different in nearly every way. Natalie lives on the Upper West Side. She never flaunts it, but you can tell her family has serious money, with doormen in the lobby and park views from the terrace. Her parents are both surgeons, and everything about their life has a feeling of fabulous about it. She even owns a horse named Copernicus that she rides some weekends.
Despite our differences, we’d become real friends over the summer. Or at least I hoped we had. I’ve never been great at judging social situations. I wondered if the friendship would continue back at school or if it was just convenient since we’re both at the morgue.
“What’s on the schedule for our last day?” I asked.
“A surprise,” answered a voice from behind me.
I turned to see Dr. Hidalgo entering the room.
“We’re going on a field trip,” he continued, heading to his desk and grabbing his medical bag.
Natalie and I gave each other a “did he just say what I think he said” look. We never left the lab. Never. A field trip could mean only one thing.
“To a crime scene?” she asked, trying to mask her obvious excitement. “We’re going to a crime scene?”
“Yes.” He took a camera from a shelf and then slipped it into his bag. “We are going to a crime scene.”
“And you’re cool with us being there?” I asked. “Nightmare-wise?”
“I give you my no-nightmares guarantee,” he assured us as he held three fingers in the air like a Boy Scout taking an oath.
A few things you should know about Dr. H. First of all, he’s awesome. He’s been like family my whole life. Second, he has obsessive-compulsive disorder and is the neatest, most organized person I have ever met. He has wire-rimmed glasses and always wears a bow tie that matches his socks. He keeps his nails perfectly manicured and gets the same haircut from the same barber every other Thursday.
He has a way to do things, and that’s the way he always does them. My mom once told me that’s why he’s such a brilliant medical examiner. He’s so obsessive that he notices when any detail is out of place.
One example of his OCD is that whenever he leaves for a crime scene, he follows the exact same routine. First, he pulls a new legal pad from the supply cabinet and writes the case number, time, and location across the top three lines.
Next, he calls the staff secretary and gives her the same information, so that she can open an official file. Finally, he grabs his doctor’s bag and the keys to Coroner’s Van #3 and drives to the crime scene. He says he likes #3 because it has the best radio.
This time, however, he didn’t do any of those things. He just rushed out the door.
“It will be quicker if we walk,” he explained as we scrambled to stay with him in the maze of hallways that snake through the basement. “I know a shortcut.”
I thought I knew my way around the morgue pretty well, but I was ready to start leaving bread crumbs so we could find our way back, when he suddenly popped open a door and we stepped out onto First Avenue. I had no idea how we got there, but I couldn’t help noticing that his shortcut let us leave the building without anyone else knowing.
Dr. H didn’t say anything about where we were going or
what type of crime scene to expect. He just did his speed-walking thing while we tried to keep up. He spent most of the walk on the phone, arranging for someone to meet us. “This is it,” he announced as he came to a stop in front of an alley on Second Avenue.
If this was a crime scene, I was underwhelmed. There were no detectives looking for clues. There was no mob of people trying to figure out what had happened. There wasn’t even any of that yellow police tape. There was only a tall iron gate blocking off the alley.
“Someone should be here any minute to let us in,” he continued.
The sign at the top of the gate read NEW YORK MARBLE CEMETERY. INCORPORATED 1831.
Just then, Natalie noticed something stuck between the edge of the sign and the top of the gate. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing at it.
The sun was directly above us, so when we looked up, it was impossible to see clearly.
“Let’s find out,” Dr. H replied.
He grabbed a silver pointer from his bag, extending it until it was long enough to reach the sign. Then he put his arm through the bars and tapped at the object from behind so that it fell on our side of the gate.
“Got it,” I said as I went to catch it.
“You might not want—” was all he got out before it was too late.
I caught it, and when I looked down, I realized it was a severed human finger. So much for the no-nightmares guarantee.
“. . . to touch that,” he said, completing his sentence.
I tried not to gag as I hot-potatoed it over to him.
“Impressive catch, though,” he added. “Especially with the sun in your eyes.”
Without missing a beat, Natalie grabbed a bottle of hand sanitizer from her backpack and gave it to me.
“Thanks.”
“Left hand, ring finger,” Dr. Hidalgo concluded instantly.
I was impressed. “You can tell that without the other fingers to go by?”
He held it up for us to see. “The wedding ring kind of helps.”
Sure enough, there was a gold band around the base of the finger. I stared at the finger for a moment. Something about it seemed wrong. Then I realized what it was. There was no blood.
Dr. Hidalgo slipped the ring off the finger and checked the inside for an inscription. “Amor Fidelis, Cornelius,” he read aloud. “Faithful love . . . Cornelius. Not a name you hear every day.”
Once again, Dr. Hidalgo broke standard procedure. Rather than putting the finger into an official evidence bag and then labeling it, he slipped it and the ring into a plain plastic baggie and then dropped it into his doctor’s bag.
A few minutes later, the caretaker of the cemetery arrived to unlock the gate for us. He told us he had to rush back to the office and asked Dr. Hidalgo if he could lock up when we left.
That meant we were all alone.
The cemetery looked like a small park. A tall stone wall wrapped around the edge. The only way in or out was through the gated alley.
“Look for anything out of the ordinary,” Dr. H said as we began to spread out and scour the grounds.
“How’s this for out of the ordinary?” I offered. “This cemetery doesn’t seem to have any tombstones or graves.”
“That’s because a law was passed in the early 1800s that banned earthen graves in Manhattan,” he explained. “The fear was that yellow fever would pass from the dead bodies into the soil and make its way back among the living.”
“Then where are the bodies?” Natalie asked.
“They’re in underground death chambers,” he said.
“Death what?” I asked as I stopped in my tracks and processed yet another image for my sleepless nights.
“Marble rooms where they could place the corpses underground without having to worry about their decay contaminating the soil. Think of them as studio apartments for the afterlife. There’s another cemetery just like it around the corner.”
“And how is this a crime scene?” Natalie asked.
“Last night the police received a dozen phone calls complaining about loud noises coming from here.”
“The crime is loud noises?” I asked.
“You saw how hard it was to get in.” He motioned back to the alley. “Those gates are unlocked only one Sunday a month. Don’t you wonder what was causing all the commotion?”
“Not particularly,” I answered, getting a little spooked. Severed fingers, death chambers, and scary noises. As far as field trips went, this rated well below the Museum of Natural History. (But it was still better than our class visit to the wastewater treatment plant.)
“This is where the death house was,” said Dr. H, coming to a stop. “A shed where the bodies were stored until they were buried. Kind of like the nineteenth-century version of our freezer at work.”
“And you know all of this because . . . ?” I asked.
“Are you kidding?” he replied. “I’m a New York City medical examiner. I learn this stuff for fun.”
Natalie and I both laughed, which made Dr. H laugh too. Then he noticed something.
“Check this out,” he said, kneeling down.
A large square of grass looked like it had been pulled up and laid back down. It didn’t stand out from a distance, but up close it was impossible to miss.
Dr. Hidalgo snapped a picture. Then he peeled back the corner of the grass to reveal a large stone slab. “It’s a fieldstone cap,” he said as he took another photograph. “Someone must have gone down into this entry shaft to reach one of the vaults.”
I began to get a sinking feeling that he was expecting us to do the same.
“Look at this,” he said with a smile. “They were in a hurry and didn’t put the cap all the way back. We can slide it open.”
“Lucky us,” I said, trying to force a laugh.
Dr. H sat down, ignoring the threat of grass stains on his perfectly pressed pants, wedged himself into the ground, and started pushing the slab with his feet. It was a strain, but after a minute or so, he managed to move it far enough to reveal a dark shaft in the ground.
“You’re not going down there, are you?” I asked.
“No,” he said, to my momentary relief. “I’m much too big to fit in there. It’s going to have to be one of you two.”
“Seriously?” I said. “What about your no-nightmares guarantee?”
“I’ll go, Dr. H,” Natalie volunteered. “Molly’s too scared to do something like that.”
Instead of feeling relieved, I felt challenged. “I didn’t say anything about being scared,” I corrected. “Just let me think about it for a second.”
I sat on the edge of the shaft and dangled my legs through the opening. “Okay, now I’ve thought about it. I’m in.”
Dr. H and Natalie shared a smile.
“I’m very proud of you,” he said as he handed me a small flashlight.
Natalie reached into her backpack again and pulled out the hand sanitizer. “I’m ready the moment you get back.”
I gave her my sister’s jacket. “Protect this with your life. If I take it down there, I might as well just stay in the vault.”
A small ladder was built into the wall. I slowly climbed down into the shaft. Actually, I tried to do it slowly, but I lost my grip and fell into the darkness. I landed on my butt, and when I looked back up at them, the sunlight around their heads looked like halos.
“Are you okay?” Dr. H asked.
“I found the floor,” I answered.
“There should be a door to the vault just to your left,” Dr. H told me.
“I really can’t believe I’m doing this,” I said as I stood up and brushed the dirt off my hands. I pushed on the door and was surprised by how easily it swung open. The sunlight didn’t quite reach here, so the vault was just empty darkness. It had a disgusting smell that made me wish I’d brought along my vanilla extract.
“What do you see?” Dr. Hidalgo asked.
“Nothing yet,” I answered as I turned on the flashlight.
&nb
sp; The shaft of light cut through the darkness. I knew that if I could do this, I could overcome almost any fear. I stepped all the way into the vault and looked around.
Thirty seconds later I stepped back out into the shaft and looked up at their still-haloed faces.
“Well?” Natalie asked nervously. “What did you see?”
“It’s what I didn’t see that’s interesting,” I replied. “Shouldn’t there be dead people in there?”
The Reason I Hate Swans
After taking a deep breath and realizing that despite my worst fears, I was not going to uncover a pile of maggot-riddled corpses, I took Dr. Hidalgo’s camera and went back into the burial vault for a second, slightly longer, look around. I counted enough slabs to hold ten bodies; each one was empty. Still, the vault rated pretty high on the creep-o-meter, so I took a few quick pictures and then climbed back up to the surface.
While the doctor scribbled some notes and I put the hand sanitizer to good use, Natalie went over to the wall where there are plaques that correspond with each of the vaults.
“According to this, there should be eight people buried in there,” she said, reading from one. “All from the Blackwell family.”
Dr. H nodded and wrote this down on his pad. “The Blackwells were an important family in the early history of New York,” he said. “In fact, Blackwell’s Island was the original name of Roosevelt Island.”
Natalie and I shared a smile at the mention of Roosevelt Island. It’s a thin strip of land in the East River that runs alongside midtown Manhattan. Hardly anyone lives on it and nothing much happens there, so most people never give it a thought. Natalie and I smiled because Roosevelt Island is a big part of our everyday lives. It’s where our school is located.
“By the way,” Dr. H asked Natalie, “are any of the Blackwells that are supposed to be in the vault named Cornelius?”
Natalie laughed, but she stopped cold when she looked at the plaque. “Yes!”
“Interesting,” he replied as he made a note.
Natalie and I were stunned.
“How can that be?” I asked.
Dr. H looked up from his pad and answered, “My guess is grave robbery, but that’s something for the police to figure out.”
