by catt dahman
“I’m serious, Dr. Rick.” Haylee said; then, with an anguished cry, she ran over to squat behind a tree instead. She wasn’t playing. Had she not been about to burst, she would have fainted when she saw the body, but the pain outweighed everything. She used a wad of tissue and hid it beneath a few leaves so no one would criticize her for leaving trash behind.
Rick walked to where she had been standing; if anyone complained later, he could say he had investigated the area. He thought most of his job was peacekeeping anyway, even with adults. Haylee had said there was a body, but she had been so calm and matter-of-fact that no one gave her a second thought.
Most were standing around by their vehicles, apathetic and exhausted.
To his surprise, there was a body lying partially on the shore of the small pond. Squatting by the water, he looked at the odd pile of clothes, hardened, mummified skin, and polished bone and turned his head this way and that. His students were so full of their own complaints and of weariness that they didn’t notice Rick beside the water. It was a little shocking that no one showed any inquisitiveness.
“Ann, can you come over here?” he called, resenting the fact that no one had previously noticed the body. It was a dead body; did that not garner any interest?
His graduate assistant trudged over, followed by Shimei, one of his best students, trailing her. Shimei was a thoughtful, funny man, African American, and potentially a great thinker if Rick could teach him to use his brain. “What is your initial thought, Ann?”
Ann cocked her head, not particularly excited, but looking at the body as if he had handed her a piece of paper with a math problem written upon it. With her hair in a tight ponytail, face clean of make-up, and clothing simple and utilitarian, she looked like a misplaced librarian with her sun burned skin and sour facial expression. The truth was Rick never noticed much from her but complaints and boredom; she was dependable, meticulous with her work, and levelheaded.
Shimei jumped in, “Oh, cool. It’s a body. Ummm…female from the clothing and really old. Really old.” He squatted to examine the remains while Ann looked bored as usual.
“How do you know, Shimei?” Rick felt a little better now that someone was curious.
“Bones are clean, polished, and yellow. The clothing…it’s really old. The body had to have been somewhere that usual predators couldn’t get to and spoil the clothing. Look, it’s near perfect even though it’s old.”
Ann Crisp agreed, “She looks like a stewardess, doesn’t she? Like one from the old days. How can the clothing be so perfect? And her hands, they’re almost mummified. If she had been here long, she would be torn up.” She looked at the body with more interest.
There were no footprints around the water. The pool lapped in small waves to the shore and might have deposited her there. There wasn’t another stream that entered the pool that Ann could see, but Rick would tell her that until it was proven true or false, they could not assume anything. A stream ran away from the pool.
“She wasn’t carried off by the stream and doesn’t look to have been here very long, which is interesting. There is no skin slippage; therefore, I don’t believe she has been in the water long,” Ann said. She frowned, and Rick was pleased that she had some emotions after all.
Rick pointed, “No footprints. We can say she didn’t enter the water here.”
On the face of the small cliff were two small waterfalls that fell to the pool. They were really too small to be called waterfalls but more like strong trickles that shot out from the rocks. They made the noise that distracted Rick.
Audrina, another excellent student, looked from the small falls to the body. “I may be crazy, but maybe she fell out of one of the falls. Of course, we would have to look all around; there could be many explanations, but I think that is one we would need to disprove unless we find something definite.”
“How would she get in one to fall out? And why is a dead stewardess here?” Shimei asked. “This sounds like a weird joke.”
“I would say she’s been dead more than fifty years. The uniform: seventy-five years. But she wasn’t hiking in a uniform, and she didn’t fall out of a plane, did she?” Ann asked. “That’s just guessing. Remember there could be variables: she is wearing an old costume and what is the cause of death? And she could have fallen from a plane, but her clothing is odd for that scenario, so she would have to have been on the plane dead a long time before she fell out.”
Rick Parker nodded, “We’re camping here.” He taught an advanced course in Speculative Literary Critical Thinking; students might go to a ghost town, the desert, or a remote fishing village up north, and then they traded out places and found new ones every semester. Most students took the regular classes for literature, but those always had waiting lists even if they were very expensive and often physically grueling. Two weeks was full credit, and he taught six classes a semester, or ninety people. There was still a waiting list of two years since some signed up for just this one class.
They left modern conveniences such as phones and games at home, camped out or stayed in modest accommodations, and found places that encouraged them to write: poetry, short stories, the beginning of a novel, or interesting blogs they could use on a website. Mainly, they thought and reasoned over everything and everyone they saw.
He would tell them to reconstruct the ghost town in their minds and decide what happened and why. What was it like? What was the desert like for those who lived there and those who intruded? What was special about it? What were all the ways fish helped a village and what was the society really like?
Rick felt that if he stripped off the familiar and got students into settings that were out of their usual, comfort zones, they tended to look at people, places, and things in unique ways. For the most part, they tried new food, saw interesting sights, met the most fascinating people, and tried to look at everything, not only with their own eyes, but also from the view of locals.
He didn’t expect this excursion to include a dead body.
During the first week they had camped at a river, they told or wrote happy stories, sad, dreary ones, and some that he simply didn’t understand, but liked. He had spent a week asking them to look at old campfires and recreate who had stayed there and what they had done, or they searched out fossils and pretended to be explorers two hundred years before.
“What does that leaf imprint in solid rock mean to you? Does it influence spiritualism? Is it frightening? Does it explain your world?” he asked them.
“Here? It’s nice enough but….” Ann brought Rick back to the present, “maybe a flash flood left her here. That’s possible.”
Walking over, Corrine saw the body, “Oh, wow. Now, this is creepy. It’s a mystery. We can write about how each of us approaches this mystery and what in our experiences leads us to approach the mystery in that particular way,” she explained as she glanced at Rick hopefully.
He rewarded her with a big grin, “Finally. Yes. That is exactly the way I want you posing questions and thinking, Corrine. It isn’t about solving the mystery as much as it is about how we solve it and why.”
Shimei laughed, “Corrine earned an A. All it took was a dead woman.”
“Well, it clicked finally,” Corrine said.
“Again, it just took a dead body, huh?” Shimei laughed with her.
“We have to report it,” Tate said. He ignored the looks everyone gave him. He knew they thought he was a know-it-all at times and a stickler for rules and regulations, but it wasn’t his fault if they were lax and he was always on his game. “Haylee, I hope you put the tissue in a bag to carry out with us.”
“Unfreakin’ real,” she said, and with a furious glare, she huffed, going back for her tissue. Tate got her on nerves.
“We will report it,” Dr. Parker promised, “after we do our week’s study here and all of you have had the most honest, strangest experience possible. That will either make you a writer and thinker or…well, you have no hope.” None of them that he k
new wanted to be writers but already had other careers they enjoyed. Most either wanted to enhance their careers with a graduate degree or were majors in other studies and needed the credit.
Regardless, Rick always wrote smoking hot references for the students who showed promise with this course that made nurses, teachers, computer geeks, and law enforcement shine equally. This class actually made the students think in new ways.
Ann caught the gist of how this would work, “Boys…men. I want you to set up all the tents and get camp made with a fire.” They all groaned. “When it’s your turn, the gals will be finding water and firewood, so it will all be fair.” She motioned the men to get busy.
“Emma, you are a nurse; give me a COD.”
“What’s a COD, Dr. Rick?” one asked.
“Cause of death. I can try.” Emma moved the light body, asking the rest of the women to mark with sticks and rocks where exactly it had been. They used the rocks to approximate an exact impression of where the woman had lain with her size and shape correct.
Setting the body face up on the bank’s flat surface on a tarp, Emma said, “Haylee, can you write down the identity of every piece of clothing I hand you? Corrine? You describe for the log?”
Emma finally got all the clothing removed, cutting it carefully with scissors as she had done before for victims of accidents and crimes. “Corrine, will you write for me even if I blither? It could be important later. That’s how I look at everything; I let it flow and then look again and see what is important after the fact, when I have done all the work? Dr. Rick, we are so going to jail for ruining a possible crime scene.”
“What an eye-opening experience that will be,” Haylee said.
“Good analysis, Corrine,” Rick added, “a week ago, you didn’t know you did it that way. In all the extra babbling, there could be something valuable.” He sighed a little to himself. These classes really awakened the students and made them much more self-aware; it was shame teachers in public schools were forced to teach answers and not how to think.
After each class, students wrote a piece on any topic in any style, and he put stories into a student anthology he published as an e-book. What was a sad statement on the reading culture was that people paid a lot of money for really bad writing in the e-book market, but the masses never bothered to check out the anthologies. It was a shame since they were probably some of the best, strongest pieces of literature being produced.
“Her feet are in the remains of stockings, torn and rotted, but still they were good- to-excellent quality, I would say, and I bet her shoes are somewhere in the water. If we find them, maybe we can get a brand name and see if it is a costly shoe,” Haylee reported.
“You are thinking of expensive shoes right now? How typical,” Tate huffed.
“It’s a detail we need. Don’t you watch crime shows?” Haylee frowned. “Go set up. We’re going first.”
“No, I don’t watch crime shows,” retorted Tate as he went away in a huff.
Emma added, “Her poor toes are distorted, the bones are ruined, so she wore sharp-toed high heel shoes every day. Women did that long ago before all the information came about showing how those shoes would ruin our feet.”
“Good,” Anne Crisp said, “next?”
“Expense is important because that is social strata, right?” Katie asked. She rarely spoke and wasn’t sociable among the rest, but she had a keen curiosity. If she had a question, she generally asked before anyone else could.
“I think so,” Ann said. “Good question. Katie, we know she was probably somewhat well off because of her stockings. Shoes will add to the proof. Knowing she was higher on the social ladder matters because it is always more likely she was reported missing.”
“Both shins are broken, and the skin is mummified. There is no healing evident, so the angle suggests she was standing, fell, landing on her feet and breaking both, and then was killed shortly after because there was no first aid or healing.” Emma talked to herself as Corrine wrote it all down. “She looks as if she were slammed into hard walls and something fell on her head, or she was slammed into something such as a surface or fell from a terrific height or she was hit and beaten. Broken fingers and nose. Nose bled so she was still alive then.”
Rick broke her train of thought, “Emma, does that make sense?”
“I would say that she fell off a bluff and died, but the mummification and age make me wonder where she’s been and above all what crushed her bones?”
“Death?”
“Looks like a final blow to the head, a sharp implement, and then she ended up in a cool, very dry place with good air circulation for mummification. No light.”
“Wow, Emma. You’re on fire. You’re tapping files in your brain that you haven’t used in a while, I bet.”
“Thanks, Dr. Rick.” Emma frowned at the body, wondering why she couldn’t figure this out. “I don’t think people mummify easily, so this is a bizarre thing.”
Audrina, using binoculars, walked around for a little, staring through the lens, “Two small waterfalls. Or big trickles. They both come out to the pool. It could be they pour from a great lake up there or caves.” Her way of examining life was to look at the big picture and to start at the beginning; she had learned this in the last week. She was in school still trying to decide what she wanted to do the rest of her life.
Corrine shrugged, “But she hasn’t been in the water long, or she would have gotten water-rotten. She’s been in a cool dry place, not water, and to me, that says cave. Therefore, she recently fell into the stream and plopped out.
“Or a freezer,” Katie said sullenly. She hated working in groups.
“Are we in cave country?”
“When streams run over rocks, then it’s possible.”
Dr. Parker turned to Haylee, “Your opinion on the clothing?”
“Missing high heels, I agree with Corrine. High quality nylons, she was a professional at her job. Her skirt was long and cut generously, so I feel it was conservative, especially with the jacket, and this shirt was probably very white. The buttons are marked with tiny planes it looks like. I say stewardess.”
“Good job. I am impressed, Haylee.”
“But there is more,” Haylee said as she slid out a small card from a pocket of the clothing. Audrina stopped looking over the bluffs to peek at the card. Most of it was smudged and ruined by water, but two things were clear. Her name was
El—z- eth which had to be Elizabeth and she was born in –25, which was 1925.
“Teeth were crushed from initial wounds, but I’d put her at twenty-five,” Corrine added.
“Crushed?”
Corrine nodded, “Like I said, her bones are broken badly and never had a chance to heal, but she was alive long enough to suffer a bloody nose for at least a minute. She was pounded, crushed, or dropped; I mean she could have fallen, too, and the impact clacked her teeth together so hard they broke and popped out. Some are almost pulverized.”
Audrina laughed, “So what are we leaving for the boys to figure out? We’ve got some vital information now. I have enough for a great story.”
Dr. Parker chuckled, “Yes, all of you have done a great deal. Your brains are in gear, but how did she get somewhere cool and dry and lie there for almost eighty years? Where was she, rather where is the place she has been? Second question, if this happened in 1945, how did she get here and where is the plane? Did she fall out or what? Was it reported? Was she on a plane when she died? Are we only assuming a plane because of her clothing?”
“It’s like a locked room mystery. We have a stewardess dead for over seventy-five years and preserved. She’s in a pool of water but hasn’t been here long. Who is on second base?” Daisy asked. She was most usually verbal when a joke was involved.
Fran, not to be out done, raised her hand, “If she was in a cave and was shot out…recall the last three days have gotten more rain in this area than in a century, they said on the radio.” That was one reason they hadn
’t found another place to camp since so much of the area was flooded and they had to make do sleeping in vehicles, cramped up. “So the heavy rain scooted her out. Out of where? There.” She pointed. “The answers must be up there.”
The males joined them in time to scoff. Shimei pointed out that there was no evidence to show the woman had been in a cave or that any of the other ideas were possible. He was logical and approached everything with a desire for concrete proof. With flashlights in the gloom, the men walked around the pool area, studying the ground intently as the women gathered wood and finished camp chores.
Tony walked close to Shimei and examined every rock and stick they saw. Luckily, the pool was only a small pond in a basin of rock, so it stayed clear and fresh as the falls filled it and the stream drained any debris that fell into it. While it was still light, the pair stripped off all but their boxers and walked into the water, finding it chilly. The rocks quickly dropped off, so it was deep, fast.
Swimming to the bluff, they dove several times and took a rest against rocks behind the falls. “Could you see the bottom?” Shimei asked.
“No, and I went deep. How long would it take for water to smooth out this much area?”
“A long time. We’re fresh out of geology students,” Shimei chuckled, “you gotten anywhere with the ladies?”
“Hell, no,” Tony said. Rick didn’t allow any but singles to take his class because he didn’t want anything going on during his watch that might lead to divorce; he was strict with moral and ethical codes; his class expedition was not a place for hooking up, and he always made that crystal clear.
In five years, there had never been gossip of indiscretions, but that didn’t mean the students didn’t talk a little about one another.
Tony didn’t add that the first two nights they had been quiet around one another, and other than the law enforcement guys, like him, they took the class together so they wouldn’t feel silly for taking the literature class.
