by Bob Bickford
A small figure sat by itself in a dim corner, back against the wall. A little girl. Her arms hung at her sides, with one knee raised. I took a step closer, straining to see. When I got near enough, the form resolved itself into a skeleton.
“Isn't she beautiful?” Annie said from just behind me. I jumped.
The child sat with her head tilted slightly upward and to the side, as though she had a question to ask us. Her eyes were empty sockets. There was darkened skin on her face, and long hair caked her head. Her dress was dark with dust. A single tiny strip of sun lay across her, catching the dulled fabric, showing a hint of pink.
“She's a mummy,” I breathed. “My God, she really is. How long have you known about this, Annie?”
I realized I was whispering. Annie had gone to her knees next to the girl. Her face was rapt. She reached out and caressed one of the delicate hands. The years and the dry heat had changed it to something that looked like a paw.
“How long have you known about this?” I repeated.
She said something, so softly I couldn't hear it. I leaned in closer and realized that she was talking to her sister, and not to me.
“I'm here, June,” she murmured. “I've brought someone to meet you.”
An odor of dried spices hung around the small body, a miasma of coriander or cardamom or sage. I didn't know much about spices, but I thought an Egyptian burial might smell like this. I fought down a sneeze.
“Cloves,” Annie said, as though she could read my mind. “She smells like cloves.”
“She's been here all of these years?” I asked.
“She must have been hiding here when they killed my father,” she said, without looking up. “She hid and never came out.”
“Why hasn't anyone found her?” I asked. “It seems impossible.”
“I own this place, and I never knew she was here until a little while ago,” she said. “It's an empty barn in the middle of nowhere. If you stick your head inside the door, you can see there's nothing of any value here. Why go all the way to the back?”
“People have come here to harvest the avocados.”
“Steal them, you mean. No one ever asked my permission, or paid me for what they took.”
“My point is, people have been here over the years. Surely some of the picking crews would have chosen this barn as a good place to stay overnight. They don't get to be choosy, and any roof is better than none.”
“There are places that people don't go,” she said. Her expression got very serious. “There are places that raise your hackles as soon as you're close. I'm sure no one but me ever went further than the doorway.”
“You might be right,” I said.
The little mummified girl looked up at me. The empty eye sockets seemed to spark with life, asking me to pick her up.
“You can't leave her here,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I knew when I found her that I would only have her for a little while.”
“What are you going to do with her?”
“I don't know what to do.” Her eyes were pleading. “Will you help me?”
I nodded. “She's been here long enough.”
We stood quietly, looking down at June. I heard the wind outside, moving against the sides of the barn. Annie spoke, reluctant to break the hush.
“She'll still be here.” Her voice was eerily confident. “I'll miss her, but she'll still come around sometimes.”
“I have to call in the police, Annie.” I tried to make my voice as gentle as I could. “They're going to treat this as suspicious, no matter how long ago it happened. Are you absolutely, positively sure this is your sister? This could be anyone.”
“It's her,” she said. “Of course it's her. I know her hair and her dress, and anyway we talk.”
The inside of the barn suddenly seemed unbearably, oppressively hot. I wanted to leave. I touched her shoulder, ready to guide her to the door.
“I'm crazy, I know that,” she said.
I had no answer for her, and after a moment she nodded. “As long as you know that, too,” she said.
“I'm going to have to call the police,” I said again, to be sure she understood. “If you want me to take care of this, it's all too unusual. You can't just carry her out of here. There will be an investigation, even if it's a long time ago. They will ask you all kinds of questions. I know a guy who can handle this without a lot of fuss.”
“Will he be gentle with her?” she asked.
I saw the start of her tears. “He'll be gentle with her, Annie, I promise. And with you. I'll stick around to make sure of it.”
Her tears increased, and I pulled her close. I wondered if she had cried for her sister before today, or if the tears had never really stopped. We stood there in the hot barn until the light outside started to fade, and then I took her home.
I stood with Rex Raines in the circular driveway of Casita Hospital. The building was almost new, and several miles north of downtown. I didn't know why they had built it so far away from where it was needed most often; probably because the land had belonged to someone with pull. It made for a long ambulance ride if you got shot in a downtown bar.
The day before, the coroner's office had removed the child's mummy from the barn, loading it into a black panel wagon before bringing it here. One of the stretcher bearers had commented that the girl's remains weighed hardly anything at all.
The county morgue was attached to the back of the building. Raines was here to get the autopsy results, and I was here to look over his shoulder at them. The place had been backed up with more anxious customers, so it had taken them a little while to get to her.
He took a long time to finish a pipe full of bad-smelling tobacco. I didn’t have the patience to smoke a pipe, but I felt no particular hurry to get inside the morgue, so I didn't mind waiting for him.
“I might have something that will make you happy,” I said. “Been waiting to drop it in your lap.”
“Hard to imagine,” he said. “Tell me.”
He inspected his pipe with obvious pleasure. The expression on his round face was mild and absent, but I knew his ears were pricked up. He didn't miss much.
“I have an eyewitness to Charlene Cleveland's murder,” I said. “Guaranteed positive on the shooter.”
His voice got instantly sharp. “What the hell are you talking about, Nate?”
“Annie Kahlo saw the whole thing. She was there that night. She saw Sal Cleveland walk down the drive and shoot his wife in the wrecked car.”
“She didn't call it in until the next morning. Why did she wait so long?”
I thought it might be better if I didn't mention that she had probably sat in a pitch-black barn and visited all night with the little mummy whose remains lay just a short distance from where we stood; remains we would soon be viewing.
“She was scared. She hid out, and drove into the city when the sun came up. She didn't just happen upon the crashed car. She was there the whole time.”
He thought about it. I could tell it bothered him that the scenario had escaped him.
“She says Sal Cleveland did it, huh?” He looked at me quizzically. “What's in this for you?”
“She says Charlene was crying in pain when he walked up to the car. Begging for help. He shot her in cold blood, and I want him taken down. That's what's in it for me.”
I felt the anger stretch itself awake in my gut again.
“You said hundred-percent positive?” he asked. “Your witness knows the shooter personally?”
I nodded. “It was Sal Cleveland. Hundred-percent positive.”
He stared at me. It pleased me in a perverse way that I had wiped the usual sunny expression off of his face.
“How does an artist happen to know Cleveland personally?” he said. “She run with that kind of crowd when the sun goes down?”
I shook my head, and his expression changed.
“And since when does Sal Cleveland do his own shooting?” he asked. “He h
as a whole crew to do his dirty work for him.”
“Maybe when it's a blonde wife with a couple of crushed legs who can't shoot back,” I said. “Maybe then he doesn't mind doing his own killing.”
“So how does she happen to know Sal Cleveland well enough to recognize him in the dark?”
“She knew him a long time ago,” I said. “He might have something to do with the dead little girl in there, too. She broke off a romance with him, and he might have killed her family as revenge.”
I gestured toward the morgue. He stared at me without saying anything, and then shook his head slowly. He walked a few feet up the cement walk and tapped his pipe into the gutter. When he had satisfied himself it was out, he stuck it into a pocket and came back. “There's one big problem with that,” he said. “The Kahlo woman is ditzy. She's ready for a butterfly net. Even if she really saw what she says, she'd never survive a cross-examination.”
“She might be different, but she saw what she saw.”
“I don't know how you come up with this stuff,” he said. “I couldn't write it for a magazine. As it happens, I had her here an hour ago. She's as wacky as it gets. She didn't say a word about being a witness to any murder, but she doesn't act like she knows where she even is, half the time. I asked her to give me a formal identification of her sister, and she about flipped her wig.”
“Doesn't mean she didn't see what she saw,” I said again. If I said it enough, he might listen.
“Let me tell you how crazy your witness is. She claims to have found the mummy inside the morgue there, says she knows it was her sister. Okay, I say, I'll buy it. No one else is claiming the bones, and it's been a long time. The facts fit. If you want to take what's left and bury it, I say, we'll do what we have to and when it's legal you can take her.”
An ambulance cruised into the entrance. Its lights and siren were off. At the top of the drive it stopped, and the attendants got out and moved to the rear of the car. They didn't seem to be in any kind of hurry.
“Part of what she has to do is identify her,” he said. “No one expects her to look at a mummy and say it's her sister. It's a formality. You look at the height and hair color and say there's nothing that definitely says it isn't her, you know? It looks like her clothes. If the deceased had blonde hair, and the mummy has blonde hair, that's probably the best you can do. If you want the body, you just nod your damn head and say it's her, am I right?”
“If you say so.”
“I do say so, and I told her that. So what does she do? She looks at the bones and comes unglued. She gets more and more upset, and asks me how is she supposed to say anything for sure? How is she supposed to recognize her? Why am I asking her to do what she can't? She's screaming at me, the dizzy bitch.”
“It can't have been easy,” I said. “It was probably a shock.”
“She found her!” he barked. “She found her in the barn in the first place! That should have been all the shock there was. Why get crazy now?”
I shook my head. I didn't know. The ambulance attendants had the doors open, and they pulled out a chromium gurney with legs that folded down and locked. A sheet covered the reclining passenger. They wheeled it inside.
“Anyway,” Raines said. “She's not someone who I want to put on a stand to testify against Sal Cleveland. I wouldn't know what she was going to say to a judge until she opened her mouth and said it. Nothing would surprise me. How did she see all this in the first place?”
“She was out at the ranch. She found her sister and it was getting dark. She decided to hold a . . . vigil, I guess, and go for help in the morning. Sometime in the night she heard the car chase and saw the Ford crash, and then the rest of it. She had left the barn and was maybe a hundred feet away when Cleveland fired the shot. She saw him in the headlights of his own car.”
“She spent the night in a dark barn with a skeleton in a dress, and you think she's not crazy?”
“I imagine she had her reasons,” I said.
“You know what she reminds me of, with all respect? Shell shock. She looks and acts like the guys who came back from the Pacific . . . ruined. You know the ones I mean.”
“We both almost came back like that. Who says we didn't?”
“She's crazy, anyway, as far as I'm concerned. Not a reliable witness. I need more than this.”
I didn't want to give up any more than I already had. “You're going to at least get a statement from her, aren't you?”
He waved a hand at me, like clearing smoke, and started walking away. “I need to think about all this,” he said. “Let's go see what you came to see.”
“There's maybe another problem here, Rex,” I said. “If Annie Kahlo saw Sal Cleveland clear enough to identify him, there's at least a good chance he saw her, too. I chased off a couple of thugs who were watching her house already. Someone better do something fast.”
“All right. I'll talk to her at some point,” he said. “Maybe later today or tomorrow.”
“I want her to tell you why she thinks Cleveland killed her family twenty-five years ago, too,” I said. “Let me work on her a bit. Get her prepared. She's been through a lot.”
He started to walk away, and I followed his back.
“Unbelievable,” he muttered over his shoulder. “Couldn't write it for a magazine.”
He was still shaking his head as we went into the morgue.
The little girl looked up at us from the steel table. Her eye sockets were empty, and her mouth stretched away from her teeth in an expression difficult to read. She rested on her side, with legs slightly akimbo. In some places, her remains were skeletal, but in others the skin was entirely present, cured like delicate leather.
When I had first seen her in the dark barn, the shafts of sunlight had made it look as though she wore a pink dress. Under the harsh lights of the morgue, her bones were swaddled in a filthy brown rag, and I didn't know why I had seen anything pink in it. One hand was beneath her head, and the other curled on her chest. She looked like a tired little girl waking up from a nap. A corona of what looked like the stuffing from a mattress scattered the table in clumps around her head. I wasn't sure what it was.
“Her hair,” Doctor Runtz said, as though he read my mind. “She was a dark blonde. A sort of honey-blonde.”
“You moved her hands,” I said. “When I saw her in the barn, she had her hands down at her sides.”
“You remember wrong, Mister Crowe. This girl hasn’t moved since she died. The body is mummified. Does she look flexible to you? You were in grade school the last time she moved any part of her body.”
He gave me a queer look, and I shrugged. I knew what I had seen. Her hands and arms were in a different position, now.
“What else can you tell us?” I asked.
“There's a lot I can't tell you,” he said. “I can't tell you what caused her to die. If she was murdered, I can't tell you if she was drugged or poisoned or drowned. This is more a post-mortem examination than any kind of autopsy. I'm not going to cut into her.”
He reached out and touched the corpse with a forefinger, tracing down from forehead to cheek to chin. His touch was surprisingly tender.
“My own daughter was this girl's age once,” he said, mostly to himself. “She isn’t a horror. She’s just a little girl.”
“Can you guess how she died?” Lieutenant Raines asked. “Anything you know for sure?”
Runtz nodded, and bent over the table.
“I can tell you that she probably didn't die violently,” he said. “There are no broken bones and no evidence of injury on what tissue is left. Her face is nearly intact, and unmarked.”
“What is she wearing?' I asked. “Can you tell?”
He peered up at me, and nodded again.
“It's satin,” he said. “Probably a party dress, as odd as it seems. It was pink, back when she put it on. A pink party dress.”
The door to the hall opened, and an orderly in a white tunic stuck his head in and seemed surprised t
o see us there. He left without saying anything. Doctor Runtz straightened up and faced us.
“I'm not going to examine this child any further,” he said. “She's been dead for twenty-five years, and dissecting a mummy won't give up any more answers than we have now. Her sister has made some sort of identification, enough of one, anyway.”
He pushed up his glasses and glanced at Raines, who said nothing.
“I don't have any good reason to inflict more insult on this girl,” he repeated. “She fits the facts as we know them. What's left here matches her physical description, and the circumstances she was found in also match what is known of her. I won't disturb her further.”
“You'll sign off on this, doc?” Raines asked. “This is officially June Kahlo?”
“This is June Kahlo,” Runtz nodded. “I'll make it formal, and release her to her sister, Anne Kahlo, for burial.”
The three of us stood there, looking down at the little girl.
“After all this time,” Raines mused. “Found, and nobody even knew she was lost.”
“Annie knew she was lost,” I said. “She never forgot, or stopped looking. She said she would find her someday, and she did.”
“She says a lot of things,” Raines said. “Most of them crazy as hell. Never met a broad so dizzy in my life.”
I gave him a hard look, and decided not to chase it. I settled my hat on my head and turned to go. At the door, I turned for a last look at the girl.
“That’s it, then,” I murmured. “It’s over, now. Goodbye, June.”
Part Two
Baby Elephants and Playing Cards
-Twelve-
Friday, August 4, 1922
Santa Teresa County, California
2:30 p.m.
Outside of the barn, the desert went about its business. The sun was bright, hot, merciless and alien. Inside, the interior was dark, but the temperature had hovered at a hundred degrees since morning, and Junie Kahlo's body temperature had risen to match. The small girl had last had a drink of water twenty hours before, and she couldn’t get up any more, though she didn't know it. She drifted in and out of a hot, fevered sleep that moved quickly toward coma.
