Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files)

by A. J. Aalto

  Pale, stiff skin looked a sickly periwinkle under the floodlights. Open eyes, clouded by death, stared up in shock at the darkening sky above. The mouth was still stretched too wide in a silent scream. Black hair fanned out in all directions, including a lock that spilled across much of the face and had gotten caught among broken teeth; the rest, including the turquoise streak, was matted in a messy snarl across the rocks under the MUCE and tangled in a dead branch that stuck up between the stones. The upper lip had been flayed open, probably by the same force that had shattered each and every front tooth. A pale blue peasant blouse was ripped open at the neck, revealing a pallid chest stilled by death’s hand. The cheeks and the flesh beneath the eyes appeared sunken, like something had stuck a straw in her and drained something essential from the body.

  I asked the coroner’s assistant, “Can you lift her arm, please?”

  She glanced at the coroner, who nodded as he started gloving up. The coroner’s assistant took hold of the body’s left hand and pulled it toward her gently. It didn’t want to move; the body was in full rigor. I moved along the shoreline a bit, wary of the icy rocks, so I could get a better view of the corpse’s lymph nodes. There was no discoloration or visible swelling.

  “I’m not seeing any indication of crypt plague, doctor…?” I left it hanging, looking up at the coroner.

  “Les Taylor,” he answered in a voice like gravel in a tin pan.

  I nodded my hello and added, “I would suggest you run tissue and serology tests for ms-lipotropin and V-telomerase to rule out revenant involvement. I’d also run tests for batrachotoxins to test for mermaid activity, although if a mermaid were responsible for this we’d find multiple bite marks.” I considered the flickering lights we’d seen in the canal. “Check her eyes for severe damage to the macula from radiation possibly caused by Will-o’-the-Wisp, though I think it's unlikely. This canal isn’t bog-like enough for Wisps.” Finally, I looked forlornly at Constable Schenk. “In my considered, expert, and very, totally, for real certified as authoritative opinion, it completely sucks to be Britney Wyatt's corpse.” I’d run out of important sounding things to say.

  “Mmhmm,” Schenk said.

  “Your gunk expert has a request, constable,” I said reluctantly.

  He made an inquiring noise.

  “It’s time to call Father Scarrow.”

  CHAPTER 13

  “HE’S ON HIS way,” Schenk reported, putting his phone back in his pocket. I stepped back to let Dr. Taylor and the forensic team begin their collections. The floodlights' glare turned the pond to black glass. It was only six o’clock, but the early winter darkness made it feel like midnight. Behind us an ambulance was crunching cautiously along the path as close as it dared, but extraction of the body would have to wait.

  “Tell me what you know about this place,” I said, putting my gloved hands in my pockets. It wasn’t enough to block the wind; I felt it right through the down of the parka, invading my bones. I tried crushing my arms against my torso to hold in my body heat. It didn’t work, so I side stepped to use Schenk’s bulk as a windbreak. A constant shivering had started high in my belly, causing my breath to quiver in and out.

  “There was a town here once.” He pointed a thumb east, up the hill. “Built by United Empire Loyalists in the late 1700’s. You can find ruins in the forest there of the old mill wheel, a crumbled wall of a blacksmith. This spot was deeded to the Lutheran church that stood here for use as a burial ground.”

  “Red Hook,” I said, nodding, orienting myself. “New Red Hook Cemetery up the hill, Old Red Hook Cemetery down here. Where, exactly?”

  He drew out his phone again and pulled up the GPS coordinates and a satellite map. I was amused to see that the website he was using was a ghost hunter site. He must have noticed my smirk because he said, “Only good map of the old town available. Google said something was fucking up their surveillance vans, and it's not exactly prime spy satellite flyby territory here.”

  I was too cold to appreciate his sardonic humor, so I grunted around chattering teeth.

  “Right here.” He indicated with his left hand, pointing to the west. “About five acres. The first cemetery was here.”

  I pointed behind us, at the bottom of the hill, where the few old stones jutted out of the snow like crooked teeth. “You mean right there.”

  “No, that’s the Old Red Hook Cemetery. I’m talking about there…” He pointed ahead of us, at the overflow pond. “The older one. The original one.”

  “Wait, you’re telling me there’s a third? An Older Old Red Hook Cemetery? I wonder if the dingleberry who named it is still haunting around here somewhere so I can get up in his ectoplasmic grill for being a clod.”

  “It’s just called the Lutheran Cemetery; it was used long after the church was demolished to make room for the third Welland Canal, but abandoned in 1886.”

  “Abandoned?” I studied the water. It didn’t look very deep near the edge; I wondered how deep it was further out, and whether there were a bunch of six-foot-deeper holes in the bottom.

  “In 1928, a call went out in the newspapers to the ancestors of anyone buried here: remove your dead, or here they stay. A couple hundred graves were moved to either the Old Red Hook Cemetery or the new one they were building up the hill. A year later the pond was flooded.”

  “How many graves were not moved from the original burial ground?”

  He referred to the webpage he’d been consulting. “Six hundred sixty-three graves were unclaimed, according to this.”

  I tried very hard to ignore the goose flesh crawling between my shoulder blades, but my mind hates me; it promptly offered visions of rotted caskets, forgotten and disrespected, a bunch of yawning, submerged graves, or, worse, occupied ones, the stained skeletons choked with stilled plants, long since denuded by decomposition and fish and leeches and other crawling things that inhabited lake muck. “You’re telling me the remains of over six hundred people are now submerged under the overflow pond,” I said. “Like, right in front of us. Now.” I may have been hyperventilating slightly, but the thought of it was giving me the serious creeps. “And have been for almost a hundred years? Right there. Just,” I flapped my hands weakly, trying to grasp the immensity of my disquiet, “left in the mud.”

  “Six hundred sixty-four, if you count Britney Wyatt.”

  “I don't; she wasn't buried there and her grave abandoned. She'll get a decent burial after the autopsy.” At least, if she stays dead. I didn't bring anything that would make her get up and dance with me in my pockets, right? My brain hoarked up something half forgotten from my childhood. ”They still drain the canal and pond after Christmas, right?”

  “End of shipping season, they drain the locks and the water goes out of the pond,” Schenk confirmed.

  “But clearly they haven’t done it yet.”

  “Winter came early.”

  “And when they empty it, the mud at the bottom of the pond freezes, shifts, and heaves.”

  Schenk nodded. “A while back some local historian working on a book found human remains. He called the cops in, figuring it might have been a cold-case murder victim. The anthropologists from Hamilton decided they were from someone who had been interred here in the early eighteen-hundreds. They didn't say anything about foul play one way or the other, though.” So, Schenk had some snark in him after all; I was beginning to worry that he was a Boy Scout in a Godzilla suit.

  I thought morosely about the hundreds of people abandoned under the cold, dark water as life carried on without them, as though they had never existed, or no longer mattered. The horror of that struck me in the chest, and I suddenly had trouble breathing. I turned away from Schenk, pretending to study an interesting buckthorn tree, poking at the berries frozen to one branch with one gloved finger while my mind chewed over this new information.

  Scarrow had said that we had an angry ghost. If my remains were lost and uncared for, I’d be angry, too. Was that the problem? Had Britney gone snoopi
ng and disturbed a jealous spirit, a lost entity envious of her freedom and vitality? Had Britney said something disrespectful and awoken a bitter remnant of the past? Had she stepped on someone's incorporeal wang? Scarrow had also said Britney wanted to keep spirits around for her entertainment. How would she have been attempting that? And what would the aftermath be? I refused to glance over at the body; it was totally possible that I was turning my back on the aftermath. Something flickered in my peripheral vision, catching my eye from under the water.

  Tiny flickers of light.

  I turned to tap Schenk’s arm to tell him about it, but he was already squinting in the same spot. The Blue Sense sputtered awake to report Schenk’s quick, aggressive attention to detail, his remarkable ability to shove his feelings about the victim into a mental box and shut them away in a flexible, analytical mind. The Blue Sense dissipated almost immediately, snuffed by my own anxiety. I tried to relax and empathetically probe around him again, but I was standing fifteen feet from a corpse covered in ectoplasm, and the jitters had my Talents in a stranglehold. Schenk and I stepped closer to one another without really thinking about it, and the snow under our feet squeaked. My science fled, and my dark humor stepped up to the rescue with a hundred inappropriate things to say.

  I said none of them. Instead, I asked, “Do you hear dogs?”

  “Dear Diary: Who let the dogs out?” Schenk whispered. “Write that down.”

  “Pretty sure that was the Baha Men,” I whispered back, so grateful for his humor that I could have thrown him a party.

  Schenk said, “Your phone is buzzing.”

  It was. It was on silent, but was vibrating like mad in my back pocket. How he'd heard it when I wasn’t even coherent enough to feel it was beyond me; maybe his eyes hadn't frozen as solidly as my butt had. That was some serious attention to detail; Batten would just have been checking out my ass and saying something annoyingly sexy. Point: Longshanks. I pulled off a glove, hissing when the too cold air hit my skin, and dug my phone out.

  “Baranuik,” I said sharply.

  Chapel’s voice was tentative. “Everything all right, Marnie?”

  He was probably confused by the lack of cheeky repartee. I looked down at the body crew setting things up to move Britney Wyatt out of the water. “Things have been better, Agent Chapel. For instance, I really need a coffee and a cruller, and my chance of getting either doesn’t look good. What can I do for you?”

  “I just wanted to give you a heads up on a few changes as per the investigation by Internal Affairs.”

  I bristled, but held my tongue in check. Point: Marnie. “I can handle change, boss man,” I lied. “Change and I are like this.” I held two crossed fingers up, not that he could see it through the phone. Schenk glanced at me curiously. To his credit, he kept his mouth shut, but his lips did that yeah right pucker.

  Chapel said, “Great. Well, firstly, the zombie beetles had to go.”

  “Fred and Wilma? For realsies?” I sucked my teeth. “They were plague free! I made sure.”

  “Also, the investigators suggested that you refrain from using certain words in your reports.”

  I sighed long, searching the sky above for patience. “Like what words?”

  “I have a list,” he said helpfully.

  “Of course you do,” I said under my breath, and shot Schenk a sour smile. I covered the phone with my hand and whispered, “Work call.”

  Schenk nodded and indicated I should go ahead and take my time. A uniformed officer was escorting Father Scarrow down the road. Under a long, black wool coat, Scarrow was in his high-collared cassock again, but he didn’t move like a holy man. This guy had a swagger that couldn’t be hidden by a robe or blunted by the treacherous path; he moved with a liquid sensuality that bordered on wrong, given his former profession. Two German Shepherds strolled at his heel on red leashes. Those leashes were wrapped around one lean, capable, and conspicuously bare hand. The dogs constantly glanced up at him for guidance, ignoring all the people around them. What a field day the media must have had when he showed up this time. I had no doubt that when he’d lurked about at Lock One when Britney Wyatt went missing, the media didn’t notice him. Now, the priest and his dogs would be quite the spectacle.

  I tuned back in to Chapel, who began reading from his list of no-no words. “Bitching, awesome, coolio, sweet-ass…”

  “Oh, come on!” I exclaimed. “I know my higher-ups appreciate me injecting some color into what would otherwise be mind-numbingly dull reports.”

  Considering that my only higher-up was Agent Chapel himself, this was his chance to disagree. I felt a mild press of amusement through the phone, warming my cheek. “Also, Marnie, in the reports on the zombie attacks, you referred to the reanimated remains of Deputy Neil Dunnachie as ‘that slug-rotten cocksplurt.’”

  “Justifiably so. If someone tries to eat my face,” I said, “I can call them whatever I want. That’s a rule.”

  Father Scarrow pulled up beside Schenk, and I was aware of a prickly heat under my parka; I didn’t know if it was another rash or some kind of sick arousal on my part, but either way, I was blaming the exorcist. Neither Scarrow nor Schenk made an effort to give me privacy for my phone call, especially after my last statement.

  “Look,” I appealed to Chapel, “I know I’m a colorful employee, and kind of a handful. But I’m, like, a lovable scamp. Right? Can’t you tell them that?”

  I could practically hear his smile over the phone. “I did, Marnie. Their recommendations came down through Assistant Director Johnston, and Geoff’s somewhat less forgiving than I am.” Gary didn't have to practice his people skills. He also didn't need to lay on the understatement with a dump truck like that.

  “Okay,” I said. “This is me agreeing with you, Agent Chapel. I promise I’ll tone it down on the official reports. Will I get in trouble if I slip up on the rough copies?”

  “You’re the only one who looks at those, Marnie.”

  “Right. Bitchin’. Sweet-ass, even,” I said. Then, realizing I owed Jeeves another two grand, I dropped my voice. “You didn’t really tell Internal Affairs that I was a handful?”

  “No,” he assured me, “but I did say ‘colorful employee and lovable scamp.’”

  “Fibber,” I accused, trying not to chuckle at an active crime scene. “Is everything else okay at home?”

  “Very quiet. I understand from Mark that your guest is convalescing peacefully alongside Wesley, and that Mark’s had no trouble, save a couple bad scratches he got from playing referee between Wesley in bat form and Bob the Cat.”

  I smiled and wished him goodnight, putting my phone away, gladly pulling my glove back on my freezing hand. My knuckles ached from the cold, and I wondered if later Harry would massage my hands for me. The thought of my Cold Company rubbing my aches away with his comforting hands, warmed by the effects of a nice, deep feeding, provided a much needed moment of comfort. I was standing in the cold night next to a giggle-inducing exorcist who had no business being sexy at all, much less this close to a corpse, but I’d go home and escape these worries by spending some quality time with my Harry. Shored up by that thought, I turned to tune in to Scarrow’s lecture about ectoplasm.

  “When MUCE-grade ectoplasm collides with water it builds up an electrical field, and given enough movement and friction, can release a spark similar to ball lightning.” Scarrow looked at me to include me in the conversation. “Poltergeist emissions of this sort are known to be igniparous. And by that, I mean—”

  “Bringing forth the fire.” I nodded to show him I understood where he was going. I didn’t look at Schenk, but I felt him tense on my other side.

  “Ghost lights. Spirit flame. Similar to Will-o’-the-Wisp, with the difference being poltergeist emissions are not a constant glow. Brief, rapid flashes,” Scarrow confirmed. “It may have been mesmerizing.”

  “Are you suggesting it was purposefully mesmerizing?” I asked, remembering Schenk’s near-hypnotic state beside the ca
nal; it seemed like forever ago, but had only been the previous night. I was already tired of ghosts and their nonsense.

  “I wouldn’t be prepared to suggest malevolent sentience,” Scarrow said, “but I also wouldn’t discount the possibility, considering tonight’s discovery.”

  “In your opinion, these MUCE-spreading ghosts may have bewitched Britney Wyatt and caused her to dive into the canal to her death?” I asked him.

  Schenk shifted in his boots, likely to stir his circulation and get some blood moving to his cold toes. “But you said—“

  Scarrow interjected, “Yes, there are ghosts here. Ghosts in the water. But no, these ghosts, the ones that left behind ectoplasm, did not kill her. I don’t believe that. She’s still here.”

  I jolted unhappily. “Britney is?”

  “And they’re here with her. Look at the dogs.”

  Staring at the same spot in the water one started wagging his tail. The other flopped on his belly and let out a strange yip, bowing his muzzle into the slush and snuffling.

  “They do not mean to hold her with them,” Scarrow posited as though he were thinking aloud. “I do not think the IHEs that left the ectoplasm are aware of her, any more than they are aware of one another.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said with a long sigh. “Why would the ghosts of two hundred-year-old bones still be here after so long?” I noticed Schenk had a little flip-style notebook out, and a pencil. In want of something to go taptaptap on that wasn't one of our heads, I guessed he was going to take notes.