Murder is on the Clock

by Fran Rizer

“I assured her we can have anything she selected here overnight, but she insisted on having something out of stock,” Otis said.

  “How were she and Philip Anderson acting toward each other?”

  “Seemed to have joined together in their grief. After she looked at catalogs, then we went upstairs and they looked in the casket room. He asked did we have any others. I led them to the warehouse in back and they selected the Gatesville 1440 from there. He held her arm and seemed very supportive, and Mrs. Caldwell asked his opinion over and over.”

  “Good. I know we don’t want another disturbance here.”

  It’s my personal belief that funerals bring out the worst in people. Relatives who have loved each other and gotten along for years will wind up disagreeing when it’s time to bury a loved one. Not just argue. We’ve actually had a few fights at Middleton’s. It’s not always over money either. They will fight over such things as what color flowers should be in the casket spray.

  “Since you’re more into girlie wedding attire, I’d appreciate it if you’d take a look and be sure everything is the way you had it before we casketed.”

  “Sure. Is there coffee made?”

  “It’s about empty. I’ll put on a fresh pot.”

  “I’ll take a look at Betty Jo and meet you in the kitchen.”

  I hadn’t felt it necessary to announce to Otis that I’d stop in the restroom first. That’s more of a man thing unless there’s a group out to dinner or somewhere. Then one of the females will announce a bathroom trip, and the rest of the women all go, too.

  When I got to Slumber Room A, I saw that the florists had arrived while I was gone. The room was filled with floral wreaths, baskets, and sprays—big, extravagant ones. I know that in many parts of the country, hardly anyone sends flowers to funerals anymore. The preferred tribute is a donation to charity in memory of the deceased. In a small town like St. Mary, flowers show respect and caring. I took a look at the cards on the displays. Many were wired in from all around South Carolina towns and other states. Like the flowers and stuffed animals left by the roadside after Betty Jo was killed, these were just the way people showed they cared even if they hadn’t known the young woman.

  I didn’t see any need for any cosmetic touch-up or adjustments to Betty Jo’s clothing or the fascinator veil. I hadn’t really expected to because Otis and Odell are both very particular when it comes to handling those who are entrusted to us.

  Back in the kitchen, Otis had two mugs of fresh coffee ready. We carried them into his office and sat down.

  “What about Josh Wingate?” I asked.

  “On hold. Even though he was embalmed before he came here, Odell put him in the cooler until we know more about what will happen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The sister wants another autopsy. The medical examiner in Charleston explained that the toxicology reports haven’t come in yet, but they’ll probably show the cause of death. She insists that Wingate quit using drugs a couple of years ago so she’s not—according to the sheriff— going to let them ‘blame’ his death on drugs no matter what the reports say.” Otis grinned. “Don’t worry. This won’t be another Spaghetti or Deaf Bill or a train robber who has to wait for burial.”

  “I’m glad. Just the thought of those cases is depressing.”

  “Wingate’s sister is adamant that someone killed her brother and threw him away bagged like trash on the road, and she’s willing to pay for a private autopsy to find out how he died.”

  “So we just keep him here in the cooler.”

  “For now. Since we don’t know how well he’s prepped, Odell and I think that’s a necessary precaution.

  “But we won’t wind up keeping him here for years like the ones you’ve told me about?”

  “No, Wingate’s sister is next-of-kin and if she’s willing to pay for a private autopsy, I’ll bet she’ll give him a decent funeral.”

  “I hope so. I’m not bothered by working here, but I don’t especially like the idea of keeping anyone in the cooler for years and years.”

  “Did I ever tell you about the most interesting case of all?”

  “Was that Deaf Bill? You told me about him.”

  “No, a woman named Julia Pastrana.”

  “Never heard of her. Did no one claim her after she died?”

  “Oh, she was definitely wanted after she passed away.” Otis smiled, but there was no joy in it. “First, let me explain that she was a Mexican woman born in the 1800s, I believe in 1834. She suffered from two congenital abnormalities. First was hypertrichosis terminalis, which caused her face and body to be covered with straight black hair.”

  Otis stopped and drank some coffee.

  “How do you remember all those words?” I asked. “You sound like a doctor.”

  “I’ve always been interested in medicine. If my parents hadn’t owned this funeral parlor, I might have become a doctor. Anyway, she also had a rare disease that was visible but undiagnosed until after her death.”

  “What was that?”

  “Gingival hyperplasia which made her lips and gums thick. She had double rows of teeth, one inside the other, in both her upper and lower jaws. The teeth and enlarged mouth made the bottom of her face protrude. Her deformities resulted in a woman covered with hair and a gorilla-like face.”

  “How tragic.”

  “It gets worse.”

  “How?”

  “A woman thought to have been her mother sold her to Theodore Lent, who also went by the name Lewis B. Lent. He traveled with Julia, advertising her as ‘the ugliest woman ever, Bear Woman, and the result of cross breeding a human with an Orangutan.”

  “Cruel.” I added more sugar to my coffee.

  “Yes, but it gets even worse. She was bringing in lots of money, so Lent taught her to sing and dance. Then he married her. By all accounts, she was musically talented and in love with Lent, though he probably married her to keep her under his thumb and control her money. When she became pregnant, her only wish was that the child be born normal without inheriting any of her deformities.”

  “Was it normal?”

  “No, her baby boy was born covered with long black hair. He survived for only three days after birth, and Julia Pastrana died of postpartum complications five days later. They were touring in Moscow when Lent’s wife and child died. Instead of cancelling the exhibit, Lent had the bodies embalmed and mummified, although from what I read, it may have been a combination of both with a little taxidermy thrown in. Lent continued touring, displaying them in a glass cabinet with Julia dressed in extravagant dancing clothes and the baby perched on a stick like a parrot.”

  “How horrible. When did they finally bury her?”

  “There’s a lot more to the story. Lent later married a woman with features similar to Julia Pastrana’s, changed her name to Zenora Pastrana, and exhibited her beside his dead wife and child claiming she was Julia’s sister. Lent died in 1884.”

  “And then they buried Julia?”

  “Not yet. She and the infant were out of sight until 1921 when they went back on display in carnivals and freak shows until 1971.”

  “When did you say Julia and her baby died?” I asked.

  “In March, 1860. I don’t remember the exact date.”

  “You remember everything else.” I did some quick mental math. “So, if she died in 1860 and was displayed until 1971, that’s a hundred and eleven years before her funeral.”

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself, Callie. Julia and her baby were put into a storage facility in the early 1970s and in 1976, vandals broke in and mutilated the infant’s preserved corpse. His remains were consumed by rats. In 1979, Julia’s body was stolen. When police found it in a trash-hauling bin, one arm was missing. They couldn’t identify it, and the body was stored at the Oslo Forensic Institute. In 1990, it was identified as Julia Pastrana and moved to a sealed coffin at the Department of Anatomy in Oslo University in 1997. In 1994, the Norway Senate authorized burial, but the
Minister of Scientists stopped it for research. The body was no longer displayed and a special permit was required for scientists to have access to her.”

  “Is she still there?”

  “No, a Mexican state governor, an artist in New York named Laura Anderson Barbata, Norwegian authorities, and others were able to have Julia Pastrana’s body turned over to the government for burial. If you want, you can read about it in a New York Times article on February 11, 2013. It’s on the Internet. She was buried in a Catholic ceremony in Sinaloa de Leyva, a town near her birthplace, on February 12, 2013.”

  “I don’t see how you remember all that.”

  “Our daddy told Odell and me those stories while we grew up. Years later, I researched them, which is fairly easy with the Internet. Before that, I went to the library.”

  “I still say you should write a book, a collection of stories like those.”

  Otis blushed. I’d never seen that before. “Callie, there are lots of things I can do, but I don’t believe writing a book is one of them.”

  “I believe you can.” I thought for a moment. “Okay, Julia Pastrana was born in Mexico in 1834, died in Russia in 1860, and her funeral was in 2013. That means she was only twenty-six when she died, but she wasn’t buried for over a hundred and fifty years.”

  “Yes,” Otis agreed.

  “Did you read anything about her being mentally challenged?”

  “Absolutely not! It was reported she had a beautiful singing voice, learned a great deal about music, and could read and write in three languages. Why do you ask that?”

  “I was thinking how she must have suffered during her life. Then to have her remains so mistreated after her death. The thought that she was intelligent and knew the life she lived and then knew her baby was born with the hairy condition. It would have completely saddened her to know it for even the few days she lived beyond losing him.” I thought for a few minutes. “She probably knew in her heart that her husband didn’t really love her, too.” Tears welled up in my eyes.

  “You have a kind heart, Callie,” Otis said and handed me a Kleenex.

  I said, “I’m glad Julia Pastrana was finally given the respect every human deserves,” but I’m not sure if the tears were for Julia or for me.

  4:00 P.M.

  I looked at the clock, it was nearly four When a strange bird pecked the car door As I drove away, I couldn’t stop thinking how horrible some people’s lives are and how unappreciative I am about my own sometimes. Upset about Bill’s situation, the postponement of Daddy’s wedding, and a fifteen-year-old who lay pregnant and dead in a casket, I hadn’t thought about my personal positives. I had a good job, my own apartment, my health, and most of all, friends and family who loved me. I was so absorbed in my thoughts that I almost ran into something in the middle of the road.

  At least this wasn’t a trash bag with a dead body in it. A large goose stood smack in the center of my lane. I swerved to go around; head held high, the bird strutted into the other lane. I slammed on brakes and got out.

  “Get out of the road,” I yelled, waving my arms at the goose.

  Now, my exposure to geese had been only that Mother Goose is attributed with so many nursery rhymes. When Daddy was actively farming, we had farm animals that he no longer kept at the home-place. In the bird family, we had chickens, ducks, turkeys, and guinea hens. Daddy never kept geese. He always said they were too ornery and mean.

  I saw what he meant. The goose would not get out of the road.

  Remembering an encounter with a rooster when I was a girl, I ran at the goose flapping my arms expecting it to go the opposite direction.

  The big bird squawked and honked back at me, but it didn’t move.

  “Get out of the road!”

  Louder noises as it lunged at me—snapping its beak and beating its wings. I ran back to the rental car, jumped in, and slammed the door. Frantic, I locked it as though expecting that feathered animal to reach up and open the door.

  The danged bird still didn’t move out of the road. It stood stubbornly beside the car as though consciously waiting for me to get out again. Just as I decided to pull off and hope the goose didn’t get close enough to be hit by the car, it walked pompously around to the front of the car.

  I pressed the palm of my hand against the horn and held it. The goose stared arrogantly at the car as the blaring continued. I wished I still had my pepper spray or even a taser, but I had neither. After a couple of minutes watching the goose squawk at the car, I got the giggles.

  Years ago, Daddy had a car with a funny horn. It went oooogah, oooogah. The thought of that horn and how the goose might have reacted to it seemed funny to me. Laughing felt good, and so did the sight of a tow-headed kid about twelve years old coming down the road. A short stick wrapped in cord tied with a ragged chicken neck on the end hung on one side of the boy’s belt, and he had a dip net through the belt loop on the other side. He carried a metal bucket with a plastic lid on it, and since the way he held the handle made it look heavy and the tide was rising, I figured he’d been crabbing.

  His unbuttoned red shirt fluttered against his skinny chest and the khaki pants rolled up above his bare feet were splattered with mud. For lack of better words, the boy looked like I’d always pictured Huckleberry Finn, though Huck went fishing, not crabbing.

  Mark Twain was one of my favorite authors growing up. I’d found some of his books in Daddy’s room when I was in third grade. He let me read them if I promised to be careful because they’d belonged to my mother when she was a little girl. Oh, I enjoyed Nancy Drew and that crowd, too, but I loved Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and some Charles Dickens characters like Oliver Twist and Tiny Tim.

  I stopped blowing the horn. “Hey, miss,” the young man cried out, “does you need some help?”

  Rolling the window down only a few inches, I called, “Yes, I really want that goose out of my way.”

  “Is you going anywheres near the Gastric Gullah Grill?”

  “I can.”

  “If I gets rid of the goose, will you take me to the grill?”

  “Fair enough.” I wasn’t getting anywhere blowing the horn.

  The boy walked to the passenger side of the car and motioned for me to unlock the back door. He carefully set the bucket on the floor, closed the door, and pulled the dip net from his side. I’ve never seen a Tasmanian Devil except in cartoons, but that’s what I thought of when the boy began twirling and dancing around, swinging the net, and screeching sounds that didn’t sound like any words I’d ever heard.

  I waited for the goose to charge at him, squawking and flapping its wings at him like it had done me. Instead, it walked to the side of the road and into the woods with total dignity.

  The boy opened the front passenger door and sat down. “You can call me Billy Wayne. It’s my name,” he said.

  “I’m Callie.”

  “I hope it ain’t too far out of your way to taken me by Gastric Gullah Grill, but Ms. Profit give me a bettern price for crabs than other folks do. I like to get ‘em to her as soon as I can after the tide changes.”

  “Well, Billy Wayne, it just happens that Ms. Profit is a good friend of mine. I’ll be sure to tell her you helped me out. How did you know what to do to run that goose off?”

  “I seen ‘em act that way afore. They can’t help it. A goose is just hatched out mean. Now, human folks is different. We gets to have a choice to be kind or to be mean. Goose comes into the world mean and leaves it mean. Some peoples thinks it’s mean for an animal to kill and eat another animal. That ain’t mean. It’s just instinct which is Maw’s word for nature. They calls it prey and predator. I seen it on TV.”

  “Do you watch a lot of television?”

  “Yes, ma’am, ever since Maw took me outta school.” “How old are you? Why’d she take you out of school?”

  “I’ll be a teenager next month. It’s my birthday. I’ll be thirteen then. Maw took me out of school cause I couldn’t learn nothin’ no how. I can’
t read and I can’t write. Couldn’t learn how to do neither of them things. The school just kept holdin’ me back and then they decided to put me in a special school. Maw said, ‘That’s ‘nuff of that.’ Bet you can read, can’t you?”

  “Yes. In fact, I used to be a schoolteacher.”

  “Good for you.”

  I was glad we were almost to Rizzie’s because I could tell from that young man’s tone that he’d had enough conversation about schooling.

  When we went into the grill, Rizzie called out, “Hey, Callie. Are you hungry again?” Then she turned to the boy. “Billy Wayne, I’ll take all you have. Just put them in the kitchen. You know what to do with them.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” As he passed me, I could hear the scritchy scratchy sounds of the crabs scrabbling around in the bucket.

  “Are you two together?” Rizzie asked me.

  She laughed like crazy when I told her about the goose and Billy Wayne’s Tasmanian Devil dance. “He’s a good kid,” Rizzie said. “It’s a darn shame he has some kind of learning disability.”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “No, but I know his mother pulled him out of school two years ago, and nobody’s come looking for him. From the few things he’s said about school, he took a lot of bullying and picking on because he just couldn’t learn to read. He spends his days catching whatever is in season and selling it to local restaurants. Billy Wayne can’t read or write, but he’s a math genius. Nobody will ever get away with cheating him on his money.”

  “The reading and writing are sad though,” I said.

  “Don’t go getting any idea that you can ‘cure’ him, Callie. Maum told me many times before she died that Billy Wayne is special.”

  “Yes, that’s the word they use now—special.”

  “She didn’t mean it like that. She said Billy Wayne is an ‘old soul’ and he might not be what educators call smart, but he’s wise.”

  That interested me, but Billy Wayne coming out of the kitchen swinging his empty bucket ended that discussion.

  “Billy Wayne,” I said, “I really appreciate your handling that goose for me. Can I buy you something to eat as a thank-you?”