Forever Dead

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  The zoology building was a utilitarian six-storey affair that paid no homage to any school of architecture, except box-like boredom. Even the brickwork was an anemic yellow. Maybe it had been cheaper than the rust red variety. At least it wasn’t like the architectural monstrosity of the library across the road. That looked like something out of a sci-fi plot.

  I crossed the small quadrangle of grass and weeds, with its token tree cordoned off from harm by a three-foot-high fence, and took the five flights of steps two at a time to my office. Half an hour late and so much to do. Damn. I rushed in through the tiny outer foyer of my office to find Martha drinking coffee with a blond bombshell. The comparison between the two was ludicrous, like an elephant and a gazelle. The bombshell rose swiftly to her feet and I turned to Martha for some explanation. As far as I knew I had no appointments this morning. And I didn’t want any either. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone.

  “Lord love you, lady. Where have you been, Dr. O’Callaghan? I told her half an hour ago you’d be here in two minutes. This poor woman is swamped with my gut-rot coffee and is too polite to say no every time I fill up her cup.”

  The bombshell made ineffective noises through her perfect teeth, as if she was embarrassed, but not really. She was taller than I am and very, very thin. She wore burnt orange pants that fitted her like a glove and a silk blouse with a navy blazer. Very elegant. She made me feel positively inelegant in my faded navy cords and T-shirt with frogs hopping all over it. She wore her frizzled hair shoulder length and her watery pale blue eyes looked unfocused as she turned to me. Her round, full lips were shaped like the period beneath the exclamation mark of her straight nose. Her anorexic eyebrows were dyed jet black. She was very heavily made up, sporting every colour of the rainbow on her face, except the natural ones. Around her neck was a stunning silver pendant and embedded in it was a small curved tooth. I looked pointedly at Martha for an explanation or introduction or something.

  “Oh yeah. Right. Sorry. This is Lianna Cole, Dr. O’Callaghan.” We shook hands and I was surprised at the strength of the handshake; I actually had to keep from grimacing as I matched her pressure and felt my ring jam into my hand. She hadn’t looked the type. I had pegged her as the dishrag variety. Martha said nothing more — she either didn’t know why the woman was here or was quite content to let the two of us work it out, hoping for an extra tad of gossip.

  “What can I do for you?” I asked.

  Lianna glanced over at Martha, who stood there looking at the two of us with a big expectant smile on her face. She looked positively predatory. Martha could sense gossip and scandal the way an ant can sense sugar.

  “Come on into my office,” I said, and led the way past Martha, who gave me the hairy eyeball.

  Lianna followed, picking her way through the pile of papers on the floor in the doorway. I cursed under my breath and pulled off a stack of file folders from the only guest chair in the room. My grimy lab coat lay sprawled on the floor, and I was suddenly aware of how messy it must look, but I was determined not to apologize for the mess. I sat on my desk, wondering if my hair looked as wind-blown as it felt.

  “Sorry about the mess.” I bit my lip. Damn. “What can I do for you?”

  Lianna Cole rummaged in her purse and took out a cigarette, her surprisingly short, chubby fingers gripping it like a vise.

  “Do you mind?” she said as she raised it to her round red lips. I was reminded of all the cigarette butts I saw in the parking lot, so many with red lipstick. I could see the grey choking smoke swirling through the trachea and bronchi to the tiny alveoli and capillaries. Positively revolting.

  “Yeah, sorry, but I do mind, unless of course you want to take over my laundry bill and buy me an air ionizer to clean up after you’ve left.”

  Whoa Cordi — you’re way out of line here, I thought, surprised at myself, as I watched the confusion spreading over her face. She wasn’t used to hearing no to that particular question, and I wasn’t used to saying it. I felt rotten, but even so, I didn’t say anything to make it easier for her, and wondered why. I guess I was just in a foul mood.

  Lianna tossed the cigarette into her purse, closed it, and, tight-lipped, said, “Maybe I’ve come to the wrong place. I’m not so sure you can help me.”

  I bit my lip and refrained from saying, “Just because I don’t like smoking?” and said instead, “Well, I won’t know unless you tell me.” Why was this woman getting under my skin?

  She stared at me for what seemed like an eternity, and then made up her mind.

  “Jake Diamond was my husband.”

  Oh boy. What an insensitive jerk. Too late, I now saw that the finely sculpted face looked puffy; the carefully applied makeup didn’t quite hide the shadows under her eyes, and the blush, expertly applied, didn’t hide the extreme pallor of the rest of her face. She was struggling for emotional control. Or was she?

  I wildly searched for the right words, but couldn’t find them, and said nothing instead, surprised again by my own belligerence. I’m not normally rude, and certainly not to strangers. Like everyone, I usually like to make a good first impression.

  Lianna took a deep breath and said, “I kept my family name when we married. He used to kid me that I was the only woman he knew that didn’t want to exchange Cole for a Diamond.” She laughed, a lonely, haunting sound that made me squirm. Cole for a Diamond. Jeeesus.

  “I understand that you found the, um, that you found …” Her voice cracked and her hands nervously fiddled with her necklace. Hauling my eyes away from the necklace, I finally rallied to the niceties of human etiquette.

  “Yes, that’s right. We were on a canoe trip and found his camp. We didn’t know who it was until later. I’m so sorry,” I added lamely.

  Lianna held up her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Look. I’m not here to hear your rendition of how you found the body. I’m here because Jake accidentally took my diary with him and I sort of want it back.”

  “Haven’t the police contacted you about his belongings?” I asked.

  “The police finally released everything to me. But there was no diary. I called them but they knew nothing about it — said they’d never seen a diary.”

  “It must have been lost,” I said, trying to remember if I’d seen it. “The cops must have misplaced it.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Lianna. “I mean the cops, anyway. They did double-check for me. And why would they lie?”

  “What’s this got to do with me?”

  “You were there, before the cops got to the scene. Was it there?”

  My interest quickened. “What did it look like?”

  “It was about the size of a deck of cards, hard black cover with bright orange tape on both sides, so that I wouldn’t misplace it easily.”

  I thought back to the inside of the tent, saw the empty canister, the sleeping bag where I had thought a body would rear up and bite me. I saw an image of a small black book with an orange slash poking out from under the tent, but the name on it had not been Lianna’s. I hesitated, then said, “I think there was a small black book of some kind, but I didn’t look at it.” It had been there and yet it wasn’t when the cops arrived. What had happened to it? What was going on here?

  “Look, Lianna, it was likely lost in the shuffle,” I added. She looked at me curiously and I ploughed ahead. “There was a lot of stuff the police took. They could easily have lost it, or more likely misplaced it. I’m sure it will turn up. Why is it so important?”

  “You can ask that? I’ve just lost the man I spent fourteen wonderful years with and you ask me why I want my diary of some of those years?”

  “I didn’t mean to sound callous but …” Jesus, I did mean to be callous, I thought. And why this reluctance to tell her everything I knew? And why hadn’t she asked me about their cat — presumably it was hers too? And it was still lost out there in the woods, as far as I knew. We’d forgotten about it in our haste to get back.

  “Look, I don�
�t see that there’s anything I can do,” I said, hoping my lies weren’t as transparent to her as they were to me.

  Liana stared at me, and then gathered up her bag. “It was there. You saw it. You said so. Maybe you took it.”

  The words hung between us like a red flag and I said. “Look, I have no idea …”

  But Lianna suddenly lashed out at me. “No idea, my ass. I had hoped you could help, but I can see there’s no point.”

  “Perhaps I can help you if you explain why you insist that it is your diary. The book I saw had Diamond’s name on it.”

  She looked at me, her eyes widening and narrowing like a camera focusing. Her anger vanished and she seemed to shrink back into a vulnerable snakelike bundle in the chair.

  “He once asked me that if I outlived him, would I please burn all his black books, without reading them.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her and Lianna hurriedly continued.

  “He sometimes read bits of his diaries to me, about other people, and he could be pretty cruel — truthful, but then truth can be cruel, crueller still if the person is no longer around to soften the written words. I just wanted to carry out his wishes.” Her eyes flickered past me but refused to meet my eyes. She dabbed them with a handkerchief.

  “Look, all I can tell you is that I saw a black book in his tent, so the police must be mistaken. You’d better ask them again.”

  After Lianna had gone I stood by the window fiddling with the blind, my eyes unfocused, thoughts swirling. Things were getting decidedly suspicious. No signs of bear, the possible attempt on our lives, my fumigated insects, no larvae, the loss of my disks, and now the mysterious disappearance of a small black book that I had seen with my own eyes, and Lianna’s sudden vehemence when I remembered the book but didn’t know where it was. Suppose there was something suspicious about Diamond’s death? More to it than a bear? But what? Suppose that was the link? Someone was hiding something, and whatever it was, it had to do with Diamond’s death.

  I looked down over the quad and saw Lianna walking briskly toward a row of parked cars. I watched as she unlocked the driver’s door of a candy apple red Porsche and roared out of the parking space, cutting off a cyclist who raised his fist at her as she sped away.

  I sighed and went in search of Martha. I found her in my lab cutting liver to feed the newly arrived larvae and others, which I’d begged from a colleague.

  “One of the larvae from you know where has pupated.” Martha raised her plump forefinger and pointed, the look on her face almost palpable — if a face could roll its eyes, Martha’s face was doing so now.

  I moved down to the cage in question and stood staring inside. I read the label. One of the grubs from Diamond’s body. The ones salvaged from the lab next door where I’d left them the night of the fumigation. I looked inside. The fly was settled on a hunk of liver, its wings still clinging to its body. I’d pickle it and identify it later. Something twigged in my mind and I looked at the label again, remembering the pine forest where I had collected the grubs. Surely it wasn’t possible? But I remembered distinctly the cedar twigs collected with the larvae and the cedar embedded in Diamond’s wounds.

  “Well, I’ll be dammed,” I whispered. What the hell was going on here?

  I stared at the newly pupated insect and realized I was out of my depth.

  chapter eight

  I hauled down my entomology and forestry texts and spent the next couple of hours immersed in them. Ryan called to say he had a ride back with Mac, who had come into town for a doctor’s appointment, so I was able to stay until I found what I was looking for. I finally called it a day at 7:00 p.m. Now I needed Ryan as a springboard for the theory forming like a wasp’s nest in my mind.

  I pulled in by the barn and saw Ryan dismantling a cedar rail fence, making the most of the long daylight hours. I walked over and leaned on the fence watching him. I decided to be blunt and came straight to my point.

  “Jake Diamond’s body was moved after he died.”

  “So what?” said Ryan.

  “But it’s weird, Ryan,” “Why? It’s really no big deal. So the bear dragged him a short distance. There’s nothing ominous about that.”

  “It was moved a long way, Ryan. At least a mile and a half.”

  “So the poor guy hauled himself all that way trying to find help before he died.”

  I don’t know what I was expecting his reaction to be, but his lack of interest to this point was disheartening. I needed to find a reason for my stolen disks before I could hope to find a lead. I was pretty sure I had that lead, but I wanted support.

  “You think he could have crossed a river and walked over a mile in rotten terrain while mortally wounded?”

  Ryan raised his eyebrows at that and finally looked at me with a modicum of interest.

  “And,” I added, “you show me a bear that would do that and I’ll make my name in zoology. It’d be a rogue bear in more ways than one.”

  “How in the name of God do you know it was moved that far?” asked Ryan.

  “There was no bear sign in the area where he was found.”

  “No bear sign my ass. You saw the body.”

  “Yeah, sure, but I think the bear killed him somewhere else. There were open tins of food and a chocolate bar in the tent, for heaven’s sake, and you tell me a bear wouldn’t return and ransack that? There were no droppings, no claw marks on any of the trees. We would have seen something. But there’s more. I did some research in the library. Larvae on a dead body can tell people a lot of things. Have you ever heard of forensic entomology?”

  Ryan raised his eyes heavenward. “Oh lord, Cordi, I can guess.”

  “I spent the afternoon in the library reading all I could about it. Did you know that forensic entomology is the study of insects and crime? You can sometimes pinpoint time of death, where the person died, and if they died inside or outside by the larvae and insects found on the body.”

  “That’s gross, Cordi.”

  “It’s kind of neat, really. If some guy accused of murder claims he found the victim outside and the bugs show he died inside, bingo!”

  Ryan said nothing.

  “Okay, okay. So it’s gross, but once a person dies, especially if there is a lot of blood, flies are attracted to the scene and lay their eggs in the body. Every insect species has a different incubation period and you can tell by how long it takes them to develop into full-grown larvae just when the person died. Not only that, but only insects endemic to the area where the body is found should ever be found on the body unless it’s been moved.”

  “So?” Ryan wrinkled up his nose in disgust. “I hope there’s a point to this, Cordi.”

  “One of the larvae that I collected from Diamond’s body pupated today. I haven’t identified it yet and it may not tell me anything, but the cedar twig it was on when I collected it tells me a whole lot.”

  Ryan interrupted me.

  “Whoa, wait a minute Cordi. I thought all the larvae were destroyed?”

  I told him about the larvae in my colleague’s lab.

  “Okay, so how does any of this tell us his body was moved?”

  “Because there were no cedars anywhere near that body, Ryan. We were in a white pine forest.”

  Ryan let out a long, low whistle. “No cedar. God, you’re right.”

  “I checked the vegetation maps for the area, went over them meticulously, and the closest cedar forest of any consequence starts upriver about a mile or so from where he was found.”

  Ryan still wouldn’t give up.

  “Okay, so he got cedar twigs stuck in his clothes. I mean, he was in the bush for weeks before he died.”

  “Not deeply embedded like that. They were deep inside, as if he’d been rolling around in the stuff and the bear’s claws or teeth had driven them in.”

  Ryan had stopped working on the fence and was deep in thought.

  “Ryan, isn’t it possible that my lab was fumigated and my data destroyed to get rid of a
ny evidence that Diamond’s body had been moved?”

  “Whoa, Cordi. That won’t work. No one knew you had larvae in the first place, except me and Martha.”

  “That’s not true. Remember? It was in the papers that I was a zoologist and had collected some grubs from the body before I knew it was human. The reporter thought it was a good gross slant and that he could get some mileage out of it.”

  “Yeah, Cordi, but why would anyone want to hide the fact that the body had been moved in the first place?”

  Good question. We wrestled in silence with our thoughts as I helped him wrestle the split rail into position.

  “I don’t think it was the first time they tried to get the larvae, either,” I said quietly.

  “What do you mean, Cordi?”

  “When that boulder sent us down the river. I’m sure it was no wild animal that sent that flying.”

  “What?” Ryan wiped his brow and looked at me. “I saw a flash of purple just before the boulder fell. What wild animal that you know wears purple?”

  Ryan continued to stare at me and finally found his tongue. “You saw it too? It looked like somebody’s shirt or sleeve,” he said quietly. “But I thought it was my imagination. I mean, why would anybody do that?”

  “I couldn’t believe it myself,” I said. “There was no reason for someone to push a boulder at us — until now. I think whoever was hiding on that cliff thought I was carrying all the larvae with me. They must have watched us taking specimens and understood the significance of that. I still had my collecting pack with me, remember, but I’d emptied it at the far end to make it lighter. They wouldn’t have known that.”