by Dan Wells
His forearms had one spot each, perfectly hand-shaped, with no burned flesh whatsoever.
“Well,” said Margo. “You don’t see that every day.”
“Thank goodness,” I said.
I touched one of the unburned patches, prodding it with my finger. It was soft and almost mushy, like dead bodies were supposed to be, without any of the firmness of the parts that were more cooked. I picked up the arm and rotated it gently, looking at the handprint—it was unmistakably a hand. I wanted to test it for size against the marks on my backpack, but there was no way to do that without making Margo and Jasmyn curious about questions I really didn’t want to answer; I’d pinned a T-shirt over my backpack to cover the handprints, and thus far I’d managed to hide them and the entire attack from everyone. Instead I put my own hand on the print, testing it for size that way, hoping I could draw a useful comparison to the backpack prints later. I was surprised to find that my hand only fit the print on the arm when the arm was flat against the body’s sides, as if Assu had just walked up in front of him and grabbed Lucas’s arms. I had expected the opposite, with the grip reversed, as if Lucas’s arms had been raised in front of his face in a defensive position. What did it mean?
And what did it matter, if the Withered who’d done it was already dead? Could I learn anything from the body that would help me find the others? Or was it all just morbid fascination?
My backpack chirped a cheerful “We Wish You A Merry Christmas,” and I grabbed it and bolted for the door.
“Cell phone,” I said, “I gotta take this.” That song meant someone was at the receiving door, and I didn’t have any time to spare. I got into the hall, slung my backpack over my shoulders, and got ready to bolt. First I had to see who it was, though, so I lurked outside of the embalming room and listened.
The sound of a door in the adjoining room. Footsteps. “Margo, you here?” I thought I recognized the man’s voice, but I couldn’t place it. Not Harold. Younger.
“Come on in, Simon,” called Margo. More footsteps. “You brought me that new shipment of detergents?”
“Right here,” said the man. More footsteps. “Hey Jazz—good night, why didn’t you warn me?”
“It’s a dead body,” said Jasmyn. “What did you expect to see in an embalming room?”
More footsteps and the heavy thunk of a box being set down on a counter. “I’m gonna start leaving these damn boxes on the sidewalk if you keep scaring me like this.”
They made idle small talk while Margo signed for the package, and I wondered: if he was just a delivery man, then I was safe, wasn’t I? He wasn’t from the FBI. But I’d heard his voice somewhere before, and that made me nervous. It wasn’t any of Jasmyn’s friends, and I didn’t know anybody else in the city. What if it was someone who knew me from another city, under a different name? I couldn’t risk being seen. I walked away quietly, moving toward one of the side rooms. There was a window there with a perfect view of the receiving door. I reached it just in time to peer out through a gap in the curtain and watched the man walk out into the sun and back to his truck. My backpack sang its Christmas song as he went.
He wasn’t wearing the coat this time, but I knew him plain as day. He was the man who’d tried to drown me.
Should I follow him? Could I, even if I wanted to? I peered at the truck, trying to make out the license plate, but all I could see was the company logo on the side: DIAMOND DELIVERY. He got in and drove away.
Margo had called him by his first name: Alvin? Simon. If she was on a first-name basis, she’d know more about him as well. I could get all the info from her. I walked back to the embalming room, set my backpack in the corner, and washed up again.
“I heard you talking,” I said.
“We didn’t hear you,” said Margo.
“I’m pretty quiet on the phone,” I said. I nodded at the box of corpse detergent. “Delivery guy?”
“Panhandler,” said Margo. “Now help me set these features before another one shows up.”
“Yes, it was a delivery guy,” said Jasmyn. “Margo, you’re as bad as my friends from school.”
“I’m sorry I missed him,” I said. “Her friends from school are the only people I even know in this town.”
“Lord have mercy on your soul,” said Margo. “You’re going to start spelling your name with a smiley face instead of an O.”
“No way Robert uses a smiley face,” said Jasmyn. “Maybe a devil emoji, though.”
I said nothing, and got back to work.
* * *
Over the course of the afternoon I managed to deduce the delivery man’s full name: Simon Jacob Watts. The motion sensors pinged one other time, but it was only Harold. When we finished embalming Minaker, I washed up, changed my clothes, and walked the three miles to the library, where I used their free Internet to find everything I possibly could about Watts, including his home address. There wasn’t much on him. No history of violence, no criminal record. I found an online map and wrote down the directions to his house, out in the suburbs. I zoomed in on the satellite image and stared at it, feeling like a missile drone looking down on my target. What would I do?
I walked out to find it, though it was another few miles from where I was. By the time I got there, it was already dark. A couple of windows were still bright, though I couldn’t see anyone inside. The front lawn had a bike and a toddler-sized plastic car; apparently he had kids. I slipped around to the carport, being careful not to touch the car, in case he had an alarm. I peeked in the side windows and even opened the garbage can, though I didn’t see anything immediately interesting. I slipped into the backyard and found that he had a small wooden deck outside his kitchen. It reminded me of the layout of Brooke’s old house in Clayton. The kitchen light was on and the blinds were open, and I could see Simon and a woman I assumed was his wife sitting at the kitchen table, smiling and picking at leftovers. The clock on their wall said it was nearly ten in the evening, so I assumed the kids were asleep. Their fridge was covered with crayon drawings stuck up with magnets. A cat slept on the floor. I backed away, not wanting to attract its attention.
By every appearance, Simon Watts looked totally normal. But serial killers always did. He wasn’t raving about the Dark Lady, or sharpening meat hooks, or cutting out letters from a magazine to write an anonymous note. He was just sitting there, talking to his wife, without a care in the world. And yet he was my only connection to Rain.
They didn’t seem to have a dog, so I took the risk and looked for a place to hide. I found it in a plastic playhouse in their backyard. It was weathered by the sun and sported more than a few spider webs on the door; it didn’t look like the kids used it very much. The night air was warm, and I didn’t even need a blanket. I crept inside the playhouse, propped myself against the back wall, and sat with a perfect view of the back door and the car.
And settled down to watch him, all night long.
CHAPTER 9
Simon Watts didn’t leave his house all night. And another drowned body was found in the morning.
I watched Watts get up and leave for work at about 6:30 A.M., and I slipped out of his backyard and walked to the mortuary. I was growing more and more familiar with the city the more I walked around in it, and especially after I got lost in a subdivision, but now I knew how that subdivision worked, and I guess that was useful information. Probably not, but I’d spent the night in a plastic playhouse, and Arizona nights were far colder than I’d been expecting, and I was trying to look on the bright side. I found my way out and arrived at the mortuary early, checked all the batteries in my motion sensors, and sat in the back and waited for Margo. She came in around eight. When I heard the chime from my backpack I walked back up to the front door. She gave me the news before she even said hello.
“Crabtree Jones drowned last night,” she said. “Shelley found him on the property around three in the morning, out in the yard by the trucks. Apparently he never came back in to bed, and she wok
e up and wondered where he was and went looking for him.”
A hundred questions leapt into my mind: how had someone drowned if Simon Watts hadn’t done it? Where had it happened, and was it close to water? Did Rain have more than one visionary killer to do her bidding? These and more tumbled through my head, but after hunting Withered for so many years, I’d grown pretty good at hiding my investigations. The only question I asked out loud was this:
“There’s a person named Crabtree Jones?”
“It’s not his real name,” said Margo, pulling some blank paperwork out of her desk. “I think it’s Matthew, but nobody likes him and he owns the Crabtree Junkyard, so we all call him Crabtree. I say ‘we’ like I had some part in it, but they were all calling him Crabtree before I ever moved to Lewisville, back when his father owned the junkyard and he just lived there.”
“Wait,” I said. “There’s a person named Crabtree Jones, and he lives in a junkyard?”
“Well where else is he supposed to live? You own a junkyard, you don’t own much else. Crabtree’s yard is on the highway, maybe ten, twelve miles outside of town. He buys old vehicles and strips them for parts. Or at least he used to, before he drowned.”
I sat in the other office chair, watching as she started filling out the paperwork. “So how do you know all this?” I asked. “If his wife found him at 3 A.M., we don’t exactly have a bustling local journalist scene to pick up on the story and get it out this early in the morning.”
“Shelley called me.”
“Why?”
“She’s a friend of mine,” said Margo, licking her finger and turning a page. “One of the blue-hairs that was here the other day for Kathy’s viewing. You met her, though I can’t imagine you remember. All us old ladies know each other. We have a secret club—handshakes and everything.”
“Little Orphan Annie decoder rings,” I suggested.
“That’s the idea.” She filled in a few more blanks on the paperwork, writing the date in careful, block lettering. “Shelley called me first thing in the morning, wants my help setting up the funeral.”
I was curious and worn too thin to care about niceties, so I asked: “How old are you?”
Margo looked up. “Now what kind of question is that to ask a lady?”
“The women at the viewing were all seventy-five at least, and Kathy looked mid-sixties. You keep putting yourself in the same group, but you don’t look a day over…” I tried to guess, “… fifty-five.”
“Don’t lowball me, son. I earned these years.”
“Sixty, then,” I said. “But that’s pushing it.”
She finished the paperwork and stacked it neatly, lining up the edges of each page with fastidious attention to detail. “As it happens I’m a mite older than even that, but I’m not a blue-hair yet so you’re right enough about the difference in our ages. For whatever that information is worth. Now, when are you gonna tell me why you look like you slept in a treehouse all night?”
One of the great things I’ve learned about my life is that it’s weird enough that I can usually just tell the truth about it and no one will believe me. “It was a playhouse,” I said. “Had a little plastic sink and everything. I’m working up to treehouses, but I’m afraid of heights.”
“Well,” said Margo. “You take your smart mouth into the shower and get washed up. We leave in ten minutes.”
“Where are we going?”
“Have you not been listening? Crabtree died. You watched me fill out the paperwork for it.”
“So, you’re going out to the house to arrange the funeral?”
“I am a funeral director, after all. I don’t know which part of this is so mysterious.”
“My mom never made house calls.”
Margo tucked the papers in a manila folder. “That’s why you’re coming with me. You want to be the kind of funeral director who gets a phone call at six in the morning from a newly minted widow, you make house calls.” She stood up. “Nine minutes left for that shower.”
I nodded and ran to the tiny locker room, showering in a flurry and then getting back into my dirty clothes because they were all I had with me. I brushed off the last bits of grass and dirt and ran out to meet Margo at her car.
“I suppose that’ll have to do,” she said. “Hop in.”
Margo didn’t talk much in the car, which gave me the chance to think more about the situation with the Withered. I knew there was at least one in town, and the continued occurrence of inexplicable drownings certainly hinted at another. I assumed it was Rain, because of what the homeless girl had said, but what if she’d meant something else? What if she was just high? I needed to find her and talk to her.
“Does Lewisville have a homeless shelter?” I asked.
“Not as such,” said Margo. “Soup kitchens, though, and a halfway house.” She glanced at me as she drove. “You can always move back into the mortuary.”
“It’s not for me,” I said, “I’m just curious. Think maybe I’ll volunteer.”
“Good for you.”
If the girl at the viewing had really been homeless, volunteering in that community might be the best way to find her or someone who knew her. And if a Withered was preying on local homeless, I might learn a bunch of other things as well.
In the meantime, what could I do about Simon Watts? He was obviously connected to something dangerous, and it seemed likely to me that the Dark Lady he’d talked about was a Withered, but I’d been wrong before. Could I risk just approaching him directly? Would he attack me when he saw me? Would he run? Would he even recognize me at all?
And now another man had drowned and there was no way Simon had done it. How many people did Rain have under her control? Was the homeless girl one of them? If I got too close, would the entire town rise up and attack me? I looked at Margo, wondering how I could kill her if she suddenly felt compelled to drown me. She was a large woman, solidly built, and probably pretty strong as well. I might be able to take her, but a knife would be easier. I needed to get my own again, instead of just borrowing Parker’s all the time.
I needed to stop thinking about killing people. Or at least focus on killing the right people.
I wondered what Parker had thought when he’d realized I’d never come home the night before. Did he think I was a druggie? Probably most people did—a druggie or a drunk, but that was sometimes valuable. People made their own excuses for you, which saved a lot of time. And it was easier to maneuver around a person when you knew exactly what they thought of you.
We drove through a curving canyon of yellow and brown stone, dotted here and there with tenacious, twisted trees, and then the road straightened out into a wide, flat plain. I saw the junkyard a good five minutes before we reached it, an acre or two of fenced land stacked high with rusting cars. Margo exited the freeway, and then we turned sharp to the right and passed through a narrow tunnel underneath the road. The street was called Crabtree, and it was paved right up to the edge of the open gate of the Crabtree Junkyard. A wide sign hung over it, pale red letters faded by the sun. Inside the yard was a police car, parked by an old wooden house that looked so nice it seemed completely out of place.
Chalk body outlines are only used when the body is still alive, and they need to get it to the hospital before the police have finished studying a crime scene; they mark the body’s location as best they can, and then medics try to save the person while the police stay behind and look at bullet angles and that kind of stuff. All of which is to say that there was no body outline here, just a yellow plastic card, folded in half, with a black number one on it, marking the place where the body had lain.
“Morning, Joe,” said Margo, unfolding herself from behind the wheel of the car. “Brown’s already taken him away?”
“Missed him by ten minutes at the most,” said the cop.
“Blame him, then,” said Margo, pointing at me. “Slept in a treehouse; needed a shower. I’m going in to talk to Shelley.”
Margo walked toward
the porch of the house, clutching her yellow folder tightly, but I stayed in the yard, trying to take it all in. The first thing to notice was the total lack of water: this was the full-blown Arizona desert, and with the sun already up, it was dry as a bone and climbing up toward scorching. The yellow card that marked the body’s position was about ten yards out from the house, and another yard or so from the closest vehicle—an old, dusty truck, with more rust on it than paint.
The cop looked me up and down. “Another of Margo’s charity cases?”
“Yep,” I said, and walked toward him to shake his hand. I figured I needed to be as polite as I could to make up for my scraggly looking clothes. “Robert Jensen. I’m the new embalmer.”
“Joe Kinney,” said the cop. “Careful where you step, this area’s still under investigation.”
“Gotcha,” I said, and stepped back. “Margo said it was another drowning?”
“That’s what we think, at least,” said Joe. He was writing something on his pad. “Guess the autopsy will tell us for sure.”
“Kathy Schrenk didn’t get an autopsy.”
“Kathy Schrenk was an anomaly,” said Joe. “Crabtree makes it a pattern.”
“And how could you tell he drowned?”
Joe shrugged. “He was full of water. Seemed like a likely explanation. Came trickling out of him every time we tried to move him. Plus he was soaked to the bone, like we’d pulled him out of a river.” He pointed at the dry dirt around the yellow card, tracing a wide oval in the air with his finger. “You can’t see it now, but there was a whole patch of wet ground around him. This desert just drank it up, like it was running down a drain.” He stared at the spot on the ground. “I don’t know how the water got to him, but it did.”
I stared with him and then looked at the yard again, wondering where an attacker might have come from. How were Rain’s servants drowning people? How were they bringing in that much water and getting it into the victims? And for that matter, how were they choosing their victims? An old woman, an even older man, and me. It didn’t make sense.
