by Chuck Logan
Jenny hefted the suitcase and opened the door, like a traveler heading for baggage check-in at the airport. She cleared the door, walked through the quiet lobby to the reception desk, and told the woman behind the desk, “I have a private viewing for Paul Edin.”
The receptionist nodded, picked up her phone, spoke for a moment, and then said, “Mr. Bradley will be right with you.”
Donald Bradley, director at the center, appeared in less than a minute. He was a tall, white-haired man with deep blue Himalayan eyes, a reliable Sherpa who would guide Jenny through the foreign terrain of the Dead Zone.
“I have some things,” Jenny said, nodding to the suitcase.
“Of course,” Bradley said, leaning forward, offering to carry the case. Jenny smiled tightly and held on to the suitcase. She would carry it herself.
“This way,” Bradley said. He led her down a corridor to a large elevator, like a freight elevator; big enough to accommodate a wheeled gurney.
Going down evoked a bevy of odd thoughts. Shrouding. Sally Fields in a movie, dutifully washing her dead husband’s body and sewing a winding sheet from bedsheets.
Women’s work.
She didn’t know what to expect. She and Paul had given up on Six Feet Under after one season.
The basement level was a clean, quiet corridor. Bradley’s staff were apparently all ninjas, who walked without making a sound.
“In here,” Bradley said, opening a door to a carpeted room.
Jenny stepped into the room and held her breath. Not Paul. A manifestation of Paul lay on a table draped in an off-white sheet. His eyelids were shut. According to Molly’s relentless Google research, the eyes were closed with tiny curved plastic discs called “eye caps,” inserted under the eyelid. The cap was perforated to hold the lid in place. Bradley had explained they didn’t use the caps. Stitches.
Jenny exhaled.
The manifestation of Paul wore a braced waxen expression, the head resting on a dark rubber block with a sheet pulled up to the chin. A livid bruise marred the forehead and the neck wound had been closed and tidied. Bradley indicated a portable table on casters and helped Jenny hoist the suitcase and open the latches. Two metallic clicks dissolved in the huge silence.
“As you requested, we’ve removed the travel garments. You understand, when I lift the sheet, you will see the autopsy sutures,” Bradley said.
“I understand,” Jenny said. Staring at the antiseptic mangle in the neck brought back phrases from the coroner’s description on the death certificate:
Projectile clipped the carotid artery left side, penetrated the windpipe, causing massive hemorrhage…missed the vertebrae column…exited through soft tissue…
Jenny took a deep breath as the sheet was removed and she saw the puckered pattern in the pale skin. No actual stitches were visible.
New word: Autopsy.
She removed the bathrobe, which, on Bradley’s instructions, had not been divided down the center of the back to facilitate draping. In keeping with the center’s natural approach, dressing a body meant dressing without costume gimmicks.
They cut the body open and take the insides out and inspect them to help determine the cause of death. They start by making a Y-shaped incision from each shoulder, which meets over the breastbone. Then they cut down to the pubic bone. After they peel back the skin, the chest cavity is opened by cutting the bones away with an electric saw…
With Bradley’s assistance, Jenny lifted the body slightly. When she inserted one arm in the sleeve, the joints of the elbow and shoulder resisted moderately and some effort was required to thread the sleeve. They lifted the chest and head and tugged and tucked with their free hands. The empty sleeve was scooted underneath the raised back to the other side.
Scheduling this visit, Jenny had asked Bradley a specific question. She’d wanted to know just how much of her husband had been returned, embalmed, from Mississippi, following the forensic procedure conducted at the state lab in Jackson.
Jenny’s eyes riveted on the Y-shaped line of puckered skin, diagonal across the chest to the stomach and down to the pubic bone. She tried to imagine the bright steel electric saw. What it sounded like.
The director had assured her that all the organs had been returned after the examination; although they might not be in their proper places.
Did he know that for certain?
No.
Jenny’s doubting mother was not convinced. She’d read stories about pathology labs lifting organs for dissection and display purposes after autopsies. Paul’s cadaver, according to Lois, could be packed with sawdust.
Now Jenny and Bradley moved to the other side of the table and repeated the procedure of fitting the sleeve and lifting and tugging. After the difficulty of managing the sleeves, the rest of the robe easily draped around the torso and legs. Finally, the stitches were covered.
Sometimes the saw makes so much dust cutting through the bones that they use big shears instead. They cut through the ribs on each side so they can lift the ribs and sternum out in one piece. This piece is called the chest plate.
So they can get at the stuff inside.
They also cut around the circumference of the skull, leaving a flap intact in the front so they can tip it forward and remove the brain.
People wearing white coats, masks, and vinyl gloves had used shiny steel saws, big shears, and scalpels to eviscerate Paul’s body. Briefly, she wondered if there were flirtations around the autopsy table? Did they wash their hands a lot?
The point was, when they were finished, they put it all back, replaced the chest plate, sewed the chest up, and fitted the top of skull back on, like one of those eggs silly putty comes in. Except what if Mom was right? What if the egg was empty? And the chest. After the examination, what if they’d carted Paul’s insides off to an incinerator and burned them? Or pickled them in jars?
Jenny’s chest ached and her stomach heaved. It was a new sensation that she now thought of as advanced crying. No tears came anymore. The sadness had become a deep, regular vibration that echoed her breathing and her heartbeat and glowed in her bones. She wondered if it was going to be permanent.
Jenny reminded herself that Paul had been an unsentimental man with slightly Buddhist leanings and he would have approved of her frank reactions to the leftovers of a life. Such were her thoughts as her hands touched the cool, stiff skin of the man she’d lived with for eleven years. Carefully, she adjusted and tied the robe, put the slippers on the white feet, fitted the hat, and positioned Molly’s briefcase on the chest.
My gentle, decent man.
She looked at the smooth, wax-museum face for the last time, laid her palms alongside the cold cheeks just once, then stepped back and nodded to Bradley.
Bradley escorted her upstairs to his office and held out a chair at a small table. Jenny sat, declined a cup of coffee, but took his advice and drank the small cup of water he held out. Then he placed the form for the cremation authorization in front of her.
“You’ve had a chance to thoroughly look this authorization over?” Bradley asked as he placed a pen next to the form.
“Yes,” Jenny said as her eyes flicked at the document’s upper right corner, where she noted the blank line identified as “cremation number.”
I authorize and request…cremate the body of…(hereafter Decedent) who died…
I assume legal responsibility for the disposition of the Decedent…
Jenny’s eyes bounced over the small type descending through the subparagraphs at random…
to the best of my knowledge the body of the Decedent does not contain any implanted or attached mechanical, electrical, or radioactive device that may create a hazard when placed in a cremation chamber…
…the cremated remains of the Decedent will be mechanically reduced to granular appearance and placed in an appropriate container…
…even with the exercise of reasonable care it is not possible to recover all the particles of the cremated remains of the
Decedent and that some particles may inadvertently become commingled with…other particles of cremated remains…
Routine setting in. The wheels keep turning. She picked up the pen and signed the form in all the appropriate places.
Next Bradley opened the price list for cremation caskets and alternative containers. “Have you made a decision as to a cremation container?”
Jenny smiled briefly. “Do many people choose the velvet-lined mahogany casket for over three thousand?”
“No.”
“It was my mother-in-law’s first choice in lieu of an earth burial,” Jenny said. “Fortunately Paul left a will. He wanted a simple ceremony and then an unadorned temporary urn. We’ve decided to scatter his ashes in Quetico. So we’re going with the standard alternative container…”
Jenny stopped in mid-sentence when her cell phone rang inside her purse. She retrieved it, checked the display, and saw the 662 area code.
Mississippi.
“Excuse me,” she said as her heartbeat doubled. With a steely finger, she connected to the call. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Edin? This is Deputy Beeman, from Alcorn County, Mississippi.”
Her chest relaxed visibly. “Yes, ah…could we talk later, I’m in a funeral home and…”
“Mrs. Edin, I’m sorry to bother you but I think we gotta talk now,” the cop said forcefully.
The quiet decor of the office swam in her vision and she began to sweat. Her eyes settled on a framed Dr. Seuss cartoon on the wall over the desk. An odd Seuss-type character reclined in a coffin, talking on a phone. It was too far away to read the caption. “Just a moment,” she said to Beeman. Then she turned to Bradley. “I’m sorry, but I have to deal with this.”
“Of course,” said Bradley.
“I’ll just be a few minutes. Could I take this outside?” Jenny asked, rising from the chair. Courtly and low-key, Bradley escorted her out of the office, across the hall, through the room with casket and urn displays, and through a door into a patio area. She walked to a wooden bench in front of a block wall, sat down, and raised the phone. “Deputy?”
“Are you familiar with a news photographer with the St. Paul paper, named John Rane?” Beeman said without preamble.
Familiar, Jenny thought. It was an imprecise term.
“Mrs. Edin?”
A siren whelped on Highway 36 and her eyes caught the green, white-trimmed ambulance racing through traffic. Closer in, she noticed the grounds beside the walking path were planted in prairie grasses emerging from winter sedge.
“Yes,” Jenny said. “I am.” She was staring at the wall in front of her, which she realized was a repository for cremated remains. There were names and dates on some of the panels.
“I know this is…hard, ma’am. We never really met and I’m a thousand miles away but I got a situation here and I need to know more about this man,” Beeman said.
“So do I,” Jenny said.
Now it was Beeman’s turn to pause on the connection. After a moment, he started again. “Thing is, he’s carrying his camera in Paul’s—your husband’s—haversack. And he’s got his uniform in his car. I read his name in the bag and on some of the clothing. He’s been in town all day and he ain’…isn’t taking any pictures…”
“I guess we have to trust each other,” Jenny said.
“Ma’am?”
“You were next to Paul when he died. Davey Manning said you tried real hard to save his life, so I guess we have to trust each other.” She was trying to fit the man to the voice, but it was hard to read him through the filter of his Southern accent.
“He ain’t like any newspaper guy I ever met,” Beeman said.
“In your line of work I’m sure you know all the usual reasons people get in trouble. Well, John Rane is the kind of man who gets in trouble because he’s very, very good at everything, except getting close to people.”
“That may well be,” Beeman said patiently, “but what I’m after is something more specific, like exactly what’s he doing here with Paul’s bag and clothes?”
Beeman’s voice had this gentle sway, almost like music. “Of course,” she said, more attentive, “I see. When I met Rane almost twelve years ago he wasn’t a photographer…he was a St. Paul cop.”
“I know,” Beeman said. “I read up on him online. He’s been a lot of things. And now I got him in my county.”
Jenny became stuck. She stood up, advanced a step, and placed her open palm on one of the blank panels. The day was cloudy and threatening to bluster. The stone was cold to her touch.
“Mrs. Edin? You still there?” Beeman said, trying to keep the conversation going.
“The thing you should know, Deputy Beeman…”
“Yes?”
“The day you called, last Saturday afternoon. When you told me, I collapsed. A man picked up the phone and spoke to you. That was John Rane.”
“Damn,” Beeman muttered. “I knew there was something about him. It was his voice. I heard it before.”
Jenny looked over the names on the panels and wondered how many of these people died violently; abruptly scissored out of the family picture. She tried to visualize the size of the shears they used to cut through a cadaver’s chest.
“Mrs. Edin?”
“I’m here,” Jenny said. “The reason he’s got Paul’s things is my fault. Rane was at the house when Davey Manning and Tom Dalton came over to return them. That’s when he heard Davey and Tom discuss what happened, how they’d talked to you and how you expressed the opinion Paul’s death wasn’t an accident. I let him take Paul’s things. And your card.” She paused. “So, on the surface, yes, he works for a newspaper and he’s there to investigate a story. But I don’t think that’s why he went.”
“Why’s he here, then?”
“Ah, I think he’s trying to figure out how to be a father.”
“Say again?”
Jenny watched a large crow strut stiff-legged among the desiccated tufts of prairie grass. The bird was close enough for her to distinctly see the stern flash of the remorseless, alert eye against the swept black feathers. Beeman could be like that. Single-minded, suspicious. Cops spent their lives tidying up human roadkill, didn’t they?
“Mrs. Edin?”
Jenny debated. Rane was playing with fire again and she’d had a part in it. People could get hurt. She had intended to confide this to Patti but now she was telling it to a stranger.
“Deputy Beeman. Paul and I had—have—a daughter named Molly. But Rane is the biological father. I was pregnant by him when I married Paul. I had not spoken to him since before Molly was born except once on the phone when she was starting kindergarten. He’s been absolutely scrupulous about not intruding in Molly’s life.” Jenny paused and considered the photos and decided not to mention it. “Molly had—has—no idea who her biological father is…” Jenny paused again. “I know how scattered this must sound…how…bad…”
“Ma’am, I ain’t exactly…. a good-and-bad kind of person.”
Something in the deeply felt way his voice wrestled through that statement prompted her to say, “You’re struggling with this too…”
“Mrs. Edin…”
“Jenny.”
“All right, Jenny. The way it’s starting to look down here is somebody came to Kirby Creek with a plan to shoot me and hit your husband instead.”
She was looking at a wall full of ashes, talking to a man she’d never met, and it was turning into a surreal communication. Strangers linked by a cell phone, like a passenger on one of the doomed hijacked planes thrust in sudden intimacy with a 911 dispatcher.
“Deputy Beeman,” she blurted, her voice shaking. “I got a feeling you better catch the guy who shot Paul and lock him up quick. Last Saturday John Rane spoke to his daughter for the first time and had to tell her that her father was dead. The man has an almost suicidal habit of charging into dangerous situations. I think all this has turned his life upside down. And this conversation is starting to have the same ef
fect on me. Right this minute I’m standing outside the undertakers! We have to stop this for now…”
“Damn right, ma’am. Hell, I mean…you have my number?”
“Yes.” Calmer now. “It’s written down half a dozen places at home. It’s on my cell.”
“Can we talk again?”
“I just need some time to think,” Jenny said. Then her tone relaxed and she asked, “Where are you?”
“Ma’am?”
“I mean where are you physically right now, what’s it like?”
“Ah, well, I’m standing on this back road, kinda, out here all alone. It’s a clear day, almost hot…”
“I gotta go,” Jenny said. She ended the call, stood up, and swiped a damp spot on the seat of her slacks. Something on the bench. Absently, she thought it might stain. Then she started walking back toward the building where Paul’s empty shell lay held together with Frankenstein stitches. With the bizarre echo of Beeman’s call still ringing in her mind, she realized that she’d never know if Mom was right about Paul leaving his heart in Mississippi.
39
BEEMAN LIVED DOWN A GRAVEL ROAD NORTH OF town, in a large split-level rambler set in a wooded lot with a crater, edged in crime-scene tape, where the mailbox had been. More tape picketed the lawn in front of a picture window blinded by a sheet of fresh plywood.
“You been redecorating in yellow,” Rane said when they parked side by side in back of the house.
Beeman made a face. “Go on in, John. Door’s always open. There’s a spare bedroom and bath in the basement. I’ll be back directly and we’ll take a drive. You want to go to Shiloh with me you’ll stay put. Hear?”
