by Dan Wells
“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.
“Well would you look at that,” said Joe. I glanced over at him and saw him crouch down, peering not at the ground by the marker, but at the rusted truck nearby. “I’ll be damned.”
“What?”
“Tracks in the dust,” he said, pointing at the side of the truck. “This heap’s been here probably thirty years—that’s a ’78 Ford—and probably only ever gets washed when it rains. But there’s rivulets of water tracing all through the dust here, and this middle patch doesn’t have any dust at all. It’s been sprayed with water.”
He was right, and once pointed out, it was impossible not to see it. The splash zone, or whatever it was that had gotten the truck wet, extended to the left onto a second truck—it hadn’t been sprayed as heavily as the one by the body, but it had definitely gotten wet. Drops had hit the dirt and run down the metal, leaving long, clear trails in the layer of dust. We stood up, looking at the other cars stacked on top of these two; the splash pattern extended maybe ten feet up, exploding out like a ghost of fireworks frozen in dried mud.
“Robert!” called Margo from the doorway. “You coming in or not?”
I stared at the water pattern for a moment longer, then turned and walked to the house while Joe took pictures of this new clue.
How had water sprayed out like that? Which of Rain’s minions had done it, and what method or tool had caused the splash? How, and why, did you drown someone like that?
I thought for one second that it might have been Shelley Jones herself, mind controlled into killing her own husband, but as soon as I reached the front door and saw her I discarded that idea. She was tiny and frail and used a walker to move painfully from the kitchen to the couch. She sat down gently and then, with shaking hands, pulled a pair of small water bottles from the basket on the front of her walker.
“Have a drink,” she said. “It’s hot out.”
I took the bottles and handed one to Margo.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do now,” said Shelley.
“You’ll find something,” said Margo, and twisted the top off her water bottle. She sat down on a sofa, and I sat next to her. “We all do.”
“How do you manage?” asked Shelley. “Your husband passed away so long ago, and you’ve been so all alone.”
“I have Harold,” said Margo, and took a sip of water. “And Jasmyn. And Robert here. Robert, this is Shelley Jones.”
I waved. “Hi.”
“Good morning,” said Shelley. She smiled, but it only lasted a second, and then the happiness drained back out of her face. “He was all I had, you know.”
“Not that he was ever much worth having,” said Margo.
My eyes opened wide in shock. Did she really just say that to a widow?
“He helped me remember the pills,” said Shelley. “With this arthritis I can’t even open the bottles on my own—what am I going to do now?”
“You can sell the yard,” said Margo. “And the house. I don’t imagine it’s worth much as a business these days—you were mostly living on social security, anyway—but the state might want it. Not everyone’s piped up for water and electricity this far out in the desert, and that’s got to be worth something to somebody.”
“And live in a home?” asked Shelley. “This is where I belong.”
“You’ll have more company in a rest home than you do out here,” said Margo. “The only time you ever leave this place is to come to a funeral.”
“Company,” said Shelley. Her eyes got watery and the corners of her mouth turned down. “Company comes and goes, and nurses are only there because you pay them. I don’t want company, and I never did.”
“What do you want?” asked Margo.
“Matthew wasn’t kind, but he was mine,” said Shelley. “And we never had children, so now there’s nothing of mine that’s left to be had.”
Margo laid her yellow folder on the coffee table and started going through the decisions for the funeral arrangements: what day, how big, do you want a viewing, do you want a graveside, do you want a burial or a cremation? I listened, but I wasn’t paying close attention—something Shelley said had sparked an idea. Who were the drowning victims? Kathy, and Crabtree, and me. I’d thought we didn’t have anything in common, but we did: not age, not location, not profession, not any of the typical demographic markers a serial killer used to pick their victims. But this wasn’t a serial killer, it was a Withered, and the Withered had their own dark needs that the rest of us couldn’t fathom. The drowning victims weren’t linked by anything physical, but we had one powerful emotional similarity.
We were all alone.
Kathy Schrenk had had no family, no husband, no children. A sister and a few passing social friends, and that was it. Crabtree Jones had had a wife, but they obviously weren’t very close, and out here in the desert they wouldn’t have seen much of anyone else. And me? I had no one left at all, and my only friend was a thousand miles away, locked up in protective custody. I didn’t have anyone I could talk to, or stay with, or be with, outside of a tiny handful of barely acquaintances. Margo was an employer, not a friend, and Parker only knew the false face I put on around others, and that only a little. We were all alone, and we had all been attacked.
Did Rain target lonely people because there was no one around to defend them? The only reason I’d lived through my attack was the unexpected appearance of help. It was possible that this was just a matter of convenience, choosing victims away from witnesses, but there was a difference between people who were alone and people who were temporarily by themselves. Every killer chose victims when no one was around; that was one thing. Rain was choosing victims who were deeply, perhaps fundamentally, alone, and
that was another thing entirely. But what did it mean?
Shelley’s arthritis was so bad she couldn’t hold a pen, so Margo filled out the rest of the paperwork for her, walking her through each decision on the funeral. The business of death was, for many morticians, pure business: they pushed the expensive options, they racked up the add-ons and extra fees, and they used your loved one’s death to maximize their personal profits. And I guess I couldn’t blame them, because that was their job—everyone’s trying to make money and someone has to bury the dead, so they might as well make some money too, right? That had always been my father’s philosophy. But my mother had never been like that, and Margo wasn’t either; she walked Shelley through the maze of choices calmly and honestly, explaining everything clearly and talking Shelley out of the more superfluous luxuries. We left about an hour later, with a modest funeral laid out on Margo’s small stack of papers, capped off with Shelley’s credit card number written down in Margo’s neat block handwriting.
I took one last look at the crime scene, wondering again where the water had come from and how it had splashed so high, and then we got in the car and drove back to the mortuary.
Jasmyn and Harold were already there, cleaning up but mostly killing time; Luke Minaker’s funeral wasn’t for another day, and there was only so much prep work to be done for it. Margo explained our visit to Crabtree and then called the coroner, trying to get an idea of when we might receive the body after the autopsy. I leaned against the office wall, leaving the chair for Jasmyn, when suddenly my backpack, forgotten in the corner, started singing “Happy Birthday.” It took me a second to realize what that meant, but then I grabbed my backpack and bolted from the room.
“Robert?” asked Jasmyn. “Are you okay?”
“Cell phone,” I called back.
“Happy Birthday” meant the back door, so I ran to the front and looked out carefully. When I saw no cars or armed FBI task force, I slipped outside. The motion sensor in the garden saw me, and my backpack ding-donged, and I stuck close to the wall as I ran along the side of the building, headed toward the corner. It felt stupid, but I had to treat every alarm as the real deal or what good did they do me? If the FBI showed up to investigate the mysterious fire I’d be captured, and probably spend the rest of my life in jail; now that we had a pattern of impossible drownings, like the cop had said, the odds of FBI involvement were growing even higher. I couldn’t let them see me. Honestly I needed to just leave the mortuary completely, but I was learning too much here. It was the best way I had to follow the trail of bodies, because the trail inevitably passed right through this building.
But how long until it got too dangerous to stay?
I peeked around the back of the building and saw one lone car in the parking lot; I couldn’t tell the make, but it was old and foreign, and almost definitely not an FBI fleet vehicle. Could I risk going back in? I walked slowly to the back door, listening carefully, and heard Margo and Harold talking with someone. I glimpsed him through the gaps in a tree—older, probably Margo’s age, but thin as a rail and wearing a suit. He had glasses and a briefcase. She seemed to be talking to him in a friendly enough manner, like she knew him, but his responses were odd—not rude, but standoffish. Above all else, he didn’t look FBI; they had a way about them that was all too easy to spot once you’d spent a lot time with them. I watched a while longer, until my backpack chirped ding-dong again. Someone going in the front door, or coming out of it looking for me. I returned to the front of the building and reached the corner just as Jasmyn came around it.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, patting my backpack. “It’s nothing. Just my cell phone.”
“Yesterday your ringtone was Christmas,” she said. “Is it … your birthday today?”
“No, it’s my friend’s. From another town. Customized ringtone.” I looked behind me, then back at Jasmyn. “Do you know who that is at the door?”
“Some friend of Margo’s,” said Jasmyn. “Mr. Connor; he didn’t give a first name. I’ve never met him.”
“Okay,” I said, and nodded. I stood there for a moment, then nodded again. “Well, my phone call’s done, so should we go back inside?”
Jasmyn shrugged, and we walked around to the back door. My backpack sang “Happy Birthday” again as we approached it, but I ignored it. “It’s nothing,” I told Jasmyn. “They can leave a message.”
We found Margo and the newcomer in the office, talking about money. Margo looked up as we came in. “Jasmyn, Robert, this is Mr. Connor, an old friend of mine from before I moved to Lewisville. He’s here to work on our books and get us on whatever this software’s called.”
“Quicken,” said Mr. Connor. The wrinkles in his face were almost all vertical, which made him look solemn, like a slim cathedral. He walked past Margo to the chair behind the desk and sat without asking permission. “I can get started right now if you like.”
“Thank you,” said Margo. “Jasmyn, honey, can you run and get Mr. Connor a drink? What do you want, Mr. Connor, cola or lemon-lime?”
“Water will be fine,” said Mr. Connor. He was already clicking away with the mouse.
“Run along, honey,” said Margo. “Robert, walk with me a second.”
Oh no.
Margo led me down the hall a bit, finding a secluded spot by a draped alcove, and looked at me seriously. “You seem awfully jumpy.”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t want an apology, I want an explanation.”
“My cell phone rang, and I had to go answer it.”
“That doesn’t sound like any cell phone I’ve ever heard, though I can’t imagine what else it is. And it has an interesting habit of ringing every time somebody comes to our door.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
Margo stared at me a moment, like she was trying to read a book that was written on my face. “Do you know why I hired you?” she said at last.
“Because I’m very good at a job you need done.”
“Because you need help,” she said. “I saw it with Jasmyn and all the others, and I see it with you. Homeless and drifting and addicted. Sprinting out the door every time that phone rings. I don’t know what you’re running from, Robert, but I know you’re running.”
“I…” I didn’t know what to say. That I was running from humans and monsters both? That I needed this job to help me find them first? Would any of that matter, even if she believed it? Maybe it was just time to move on. “I can get out of your way.”
“I’m not asking you to get out of my way,” she said. “I tell you you’re running from something else and your first instinct is to run from me, and I understand that. You’re not the first teenage drifter I’ve taken in and you won’t be the last, though you’re certainly the only one who could work a minor miracle on that third-degree burn victim’s makeup yesterday. I don’t want you to leave. What I’m asking you for, Robert, is a little trust. I don’t need to know all your secrets any more than you need to know all of mine, but I can’t help you if you don’t tell me at least something.”
I watched her, trying to decide what to say. “I don’t really respond well to people trying to help me.”
“Like I haven’t noticed that.”
How much could I tell her? If she really made a habit of helping troubled youth, surely she’d be accepting of a little strangeness? Obviously I couldn’t tell her the whole truth, but maybe there was some portion of it that would calm her down and get her off my back?
“I left my family,” I said. I guess my sister counted. “I don’t want them to find me, so I’m … laying low.”
She stared at me a while before responding. “That’s not everything,” she said at last.
“But it’s true,” I said. “The details can come out later.”
She pursed her lips, considering me. “All right,” she said at last. “Promise me you’re not running drugs, or anything like that.”
“I promise.”
�
��And you’re eighteen? Not a minor anymore?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll cover for you,” she said. “But sooner or later you will need to tell me the rest of this story, so that I know what I’m covering and the best way to get you out from under it.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I don’t know how long it’s been since somebody had your back,” she said, “but I hope it helps you relax enough to get yourself together.”
“Thank you,” I said again. “I guess we’ll see.”
She nodded and walked away, and I thought about all the people who’d had my back before.
There was only a tiny handful of them still living or sane.
CHAPTER 10
If you want to drown somebody, you have to drown them in something, right? Simon Watts, under the sway of the Dark Lady, had tried to submerge me in the canal, and he or someone else had probably submerged Kathy Schrenk in something as well, even if it was only her head in a bucket. And if someone had brought a bucket to Crabtree—or probably something bigger, like a tub or a barrel—and then forced him into it, then that might explain the splash pattern we’d seen etched into the dust. His whole body had been soaked, so he’d obviously been immersed in something. Maybe he’d fought back and sprayed water everywhere. So that much was obvious: someone was using large quantities of water to kill people.
The bigger question was: why?
I looked at Jasmyn, who was pulling on a pair of latex gloves as we prepared to work on Crabtree’s corpse. My backpack had dinged and beeped and sang occasionally over the last few days, but Margo was understanding of it, and she’d assured the others that they could be as well, so life had gone on, and now the body was here. I finished tying my apron and pulled on some gloves of my own.
“Why is she doing it?” I asked.
“Why is who doing what?” asked Jasmyn.
“The serial drowner,” I said. “Why is she drowning them?”
“Why do you think it’s a she?”
I couldn’t exactly tell her about my inside information on Rain the Dark Lady, so instead I shook my head. “I’ve had about enough of your gender-normative stereotyping, young lady.”
