by Gwen Hunter
It was the kind of night where the waiting room fills up with teenage classmates, alerted by cell phones’ early warning system. Rowdy and teary by turns, trying to get a glimpse of the injured or the body, they displayed that sense of duty and curiosity, prescient and persistent, that seems to be a congenital trait among the young. It was the kind of night that left a sad, sour taste at the back of my throat, a grim, acerbic flavor that no amount of cola or coffee could wash away.
The coroner’s working conditions were even worse than ours. He took the parents of the deceased to the morgue’s waiting room, where, with a compassionate voice, and sympathetic words, and carefully phrased euphemisms, he gently destroyed their lives.
Like I said. A hellish night. Long, hot, and emotionally devastating.
At ten-thirty the crowd finally thinned out, leaving us the cleanup, the paperwork, and the emotional letdown of failure. I stripped down a bloody stretcher, catching up the bits of brains that the coroner had missed. Gathered up the paper and plastic trauma suits, gloves and PPE—personal protective equipment—left by the doctors and emergency personnel. Discarded IV lines, a half empty bag of blood, the caps, bits of foil, and trash that always accumulate in emergencies. Around me, the housekeeping crew washed down the floor and blood splattered walls with diluted bleach. Death is always much more messy than the way it’s portrayed on television.
The Soiled Utility Room looked like a charnel house. There was a sink full of bloody water soaking contaminated surgical instruments. Two, hundred-gallon, heavy-duty plastic drums overflowed with bloody sheets, like a staged scene at a Halloween carnival. Someone had left a pair of Nike’s in the corner, the laces bloody. There was blood everywhere, and I dropped more bloody sheets on one pile, closed up the drum and wrapped my arms around myself, needing some nameless something that simply wasn’t there for me. I dropped my head against the wall in the cramped space, my eyes dry but closed in pain. The Soiled Utility Room was always hot, summer and winter, for no reason I ever understood. It was a pressurized heat that blasted out into the hallway each time the door was opened. A heat that closed out the rest of the world.
On nights like this, when I would come home so drained and worn, Jack had always been there. He had pulled my dirty work shoes from my feet, undressed me, and climbed into the shower with me, knowing without words that it had been bad. Really bad. And that I needed him. He had smiled that seductive smile, soaped me down, rubbed my shoulders, and made gentle love to me. Tonight when I got home he wouldn’t be there. All that would be there were the memories and, resting in the bottom of my closet, the photographs that branded them a lie.
The door opened silently behind me, given away by the small whoosh of depressurized air as the heat escaped, the sudden influx of noise and unintelligible voices. Releasing a pent up breath, I dropped my arms, plastered my professional smile on my face, and started to turn. Someone gripped my wrist and jerked me back. Tightened. My hand shot through with pain and went numb. Before I could think, before I could cry out, I was immobilized.
Cold, sharp metal pressed into my neck. Hot breath against my head. A foul smell enveloped me, the smell of death. The smell of rotting corpses. I tried to turn my head away and my arm protested. Rotten meat. . . . And he was tall. Outrageous thoughts. He had a knife.
"Ashlee Davenport. They know you got the file. And them permits. They know you hid ’em somewhere. Long as you don’t use ’em, long as you don’t ask no questions or cause no problems, you’ll be safe. Understand?" He leaned into me, pressing me against the wall. He was aroused. He was enjoying this. "I get to take care o’ you if you forget." The hand twisting my wrist lifted, sending a searing pain up my arm. The knife lowered and gently touched my breast. He laughed. "I’d enjoy every minute of it, but I don’t think you would. So remember, keep your mouth shut, or you’re all mine." His tone was almost caressingly gentle, the scent of rotting meat strong enough to choke a mule. "Oh. And they tol’ me to tell you. That McKelvey shit? That ain’t nothin’ to the trouble you’ll be in if you mess with them."
He whirled me and shoved, a hand between my shoulder blades, snapping back my head. I stumbled. Landed on the Nike’s, bruising my knee on the cabinet. I caught myself one handed; the hand he had twisted was useless. Panicked, I pushed upright. Whirled. The door was closing. I gagged, tasting coffee and pimento cheese, my supper of hours past. Smelling the scent he had brought with him.
After a long moment, when nothing happened, I reached for the door. For safety. Pulled it open, feeling the whoosh of hot air escaping. The hallway was empty. Only the thudding of my heart and the tingling of my hand convinced me he’d been real. I took a breath, and my ribs hurt.
JoEllen glanced up at me as she passed and flashed a distracted smile. "Got a stabbing and a beating coming in from the Bunny Club, Ash. ETOH and fighting mad. A real prize. Thanks for getting Trauma Two cleaned up so fast."
I blinked. "What? Oh. Yeah. Trauma Two." She smiled a tight little smile, walked behind the nurse’s desk, and picked up the phone to alert the doctor in the call room. All normal, all routine. Didn’t I look different? Or had it all been a waking nightmare, born of imagination and the stress of the last weeks? But my wrist ached and my chest was bruised and . . . and . . . the smell. He smelled of rotten meat. Like a walking corpse, my mind whispered.
The doors to the ambulance ramp opened, buzzed electronically from the outside, and in came the two emergencies. Holding my injured arm against my body, I directed the first stretcher to the Trauma Two bed, with its fresh sheets and no brains littering the pillow, the blood mopped up. Behind them came Bret McDermott with the second stretcher. He nodded, flashing a white smile. Medic crews and the Rescue Squad had both responded to the call—perhaps a fire and accident. But Bret. . . . Was it just coincidence that he was here? At this particular moment? I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself, searching for comfort in the only place left to me. I nodded back and licked lips which were dry and rough. I asked, "Did . . . did you see a man come out of here?" I gestured at the Soiled Utility door, and then pointed to the ramp and the outside exit where the emergency vehicles sat, doors thrown wide.
Bret looked over his shoulder, then down the intersecting hallways, and shook his head. "No ma’am. You want this guy in here?" he nodded to the Trauma Room.
"Yes." Bret pushed the gurney into the Trauma Room, still talking, but all I heard were the words, "That McKelvey ain’t shit . . ." And, ". . . permits." What permits? What had he meant? Esther’s words came back to me then, spoken in her slow mill-town manner. Honey, this business ain’t nothin’ but problems . . . No tellin’s what’s took root and bloomed up ugly." What had Jack done? What problems had he left? I shivered, standing there in the doorway, hot air blowing around me.
"Ash, this monitor’s not working," Bret called.
Monitor? I shook myself alert and stepped into the Trauma Room. The heart monitor was stubborn, a piece of equipment needing to be replaced in next year’s budget. I turned it off and on several times. Finally resorted to rapping it smartly with my open palm. The monitor came on.
"Got a problem? Ask the lady with the solution," Bret said.
I jerked my head, staring at him. Problem . . . I backed slowly away. Bret smiled. Bret, who was an investor in Davenport Hills. Who might know about problems that involved murder. Who might be more than he seemed . . .
At the end of the long and grueling day, when my feet ached and my legs throbbed and my stomach felt like a smoldering fire ready to erupt, I called my supervisor and asked Lynnie Bee for a few more weeks off. She agreed with no hesitation, even though filling in for absentees is expensive. Her haste in accepting made me wonder if my problems had made me less effective on the job. I should have cared enough to ask, but I didn’t. Instead, I clocked out and slipped from the hospital to my car with no farewells to anyone. I drove home through the night with only the sound of the tires to keep me company. I started shaking as the Jeep barreled through the
night, my breath coming in gasps and sobs, half fear, half disbelief. And everywhere, I smelled the smell of death. I knew that smell. It was the scent of rotting flesh, distinctive and sharp. What was the man who had threatened me? My mind filled with images, vile and rotting, the walking dead out of a cheap B-Grade movie. But I wasn’t a teenager watching a low-budget film, I was an experienced medical professional. And I knew that smell. My hands gripped the wheel.
And suddenly it was there before me, as if I saw it in a textbook. The scent of periodontal disease. A particularly bad case. I laughed, the sound hollow and coarse. The man’s gums were rotting. That’s all . . . I drove on, trying to calm my childhood fears, trying to convince myself of the diagnosis. Trying to swallow past the dryness that claimed my throat.
It had rained again while I worked, one of the violent storms so common to the Southeast. Now, the world was still, windless, and suddenly chilled, as a front moved down from Canada, dropping temperatures and taking us back nearly to winter. Big, silent drops gathered at the tips of young leaves and fell, to splat against the windshield. Wisps of fog rose from the warm ground, formed tendrils, coalesced, thickened. Driving became hazardous.
I slowed the Jeep, the tires humming wetly on the pavement, the headlights a white blur on the fog. I passed a dead skunk, its white-black coat washed by rain, its stench strong. Road kill. I pitied the driver who had hit the animal; he would carry the musk scent on the underside of his car for weeks before it finally faded.
I laughed then, the sound wild and shaky. The unbalanced laughter of the not-quite-sane.
I had been attacked tonight. Threatened. Pressing the gas pedal, I increased speed, though the curves and hills made speed dangerous, especially with the fog. The man had threatened me . . . I should have left the hospital immediately. I should have called the police. I should have—
The tires went silent on the wet road, the Jeep sliding into a bank of fog. Hydroplaning . . . I pumped the brakes, turned into the skid. They caught; the Jeep rocked to a halt. Spinning the wheel, I gunned the motor and pulled back into my lane, my breath too fast, my hands tingling with hyperventilation and fear.
Cornering the turn at Magnet Hole Creek, the curve where Alan and Margie and Jim had lost control and crashed, a spray of water shot from beneath the Jeep, like the spray made by a water skier on the lake. The road was inches deep in running water from the overflowing creek. Fog wrapped around me. Forced to slow even more, I made the turn into Chadwick Farm Acres, Jack’s first development in South Carolina after we were married. He had turned one hundred acres of the Old Chadwick Farm, Nana’s farm, into upper-middle income housing. Nana had contributed the land, taking her payment in long term dividends, one of the business decisions that had made her richer. I laughed again, clenching the steering wheel. Now he was about to ruin us all. Jack. . . .
Still moving too fast for conditions, I swept though the development and on down Chadwick Farm Road. The houses disappeared. Trees, cadaverous and pale, hung over the road, dropping rain like tears. Darkness, made nearly gelatinous by the mist, closed in around the Jeep. My drive was suddenly there. I slammed on brakes, my tires an anguished whine. The lights picking out— "No," I whispered.
Across my dented mailbox was a cat. Demented teenage boys sometimes tortured cats. Rarely, teenage girls would injure one. But they seldom arranged them so decoratively. The cat was on her back, hips splayed open and tied into place. Her intestines, pulled from the abdominal cavity, were braided down the simple pole to the ground. There was amazingly little blood.
"Oh my God," I said, into the silence. My eyes were glued to the sight illuminated by the headlights. The car idled in the middle of the road, thick strands of fog drifting past in an inconstant breeze.
I leaned forward and right, pulling the cell phone from the glove-box. I dialed 911.
"Nine one one. What is the nature of your emergency?"
The words jerked me up from the dark, immobile place I had fled to in my mind. "I . . . have a cat . . . a case of animal cruelty . . . to report," I said, my lips numb and moving in slow motion, like the fog that slid past my car. Hiding the cat. Revealing the cat. Hiding it again. I described the cat, gave my address and directions to my house, and was promised a deputy would be here soon. After I pressed the power button, I sat numb, staring at the disemboweled cat. And then I remembered. I hadn’t called Jas on the way home, breaking our long-standing rule. Lost in the scent of rotting meat, I had forgotten.
Jas . . . Dropping the phone, I floored the truck. Tires ground on the wet asphalt and sprayed gravel as I completed the turn. The ground was nearly dry here, the storms missing the farm or passing through here first on the way to town.
The drive was nearly a quarter mile long, a twisting snake of a lane with pasture and fields to either side. Young green leaves and wild cedars lining the white wooden fence hid the open spaces just beyond. The house blinked into sight, alternately revealed and obscured by the fog, the trees, and the glaring headlights. I fought the wheel as the spin pulled at the Jeep.
I took the right fork, the quickest way to the barn, passing the two-horse trailer, the six-horse trailer, and the dual wheel Ford truck that pulled them both. The hay barn, nearly empty now, in the early summer, sped by in a flash of headlights. The tractor shed, with the John Deere and the bush-hog and the manure spreader and the plow. The carriage shed, all locked and bolted. If Jas was here, she would be at the barn.
The tires spun out, the Jeep rocking sideways. I fought the vehicle to a standstill and exploded out the door, grabbing the 9mm out of the glove-box as I moved. The pain in my ribs and wrist was forgotten. I left the car behind, wanting surprise and needing the silence. The car was still running, the motor a civilized hum in the quiet, a way out in a hurry, if I needed it.
Fog—damp and chill—and blackness enveloped me. My breath was a billowing cloud in the sudden cold. Rushing through the darkness, I raced toward the barn. No security lights showed through the thin-leafed trees. Only blackness ahead and silence behind; the hum of the Jeep had been swallowed by the night. Fog wrapped around me, a specter of disembodied hands, grasping and groping, wet and slimy cold.
My nursing shoes were never made for running on gravel. I stepped wrong, my ankle twisting a spiraling agony as I fought for balance.
A faint light poked through the dark. The barn was gently lit from within, yellow brightness spilling out from open stall half-doors. Jas never left the lights on when she left the farm. She was here. Somewhere. I limped, wet and bruised, through the open, heavy, four-foot wooden front door. Just inside, I stopped, holding the 9mm in both hands, the barrel pointing to the ground. Training remembered from lessons Jack had forced on me during a major rabies epidemic.
The barn was a small affair, with four stalls, a tack room, and a wide area near the big front doors for grooming and saddling a mount. Horses stomped, snorted, and made the less appealing noises of four footed creatures everywhere. The sound of my breath was loud, hoarse. I fought to control it, to breathe silently. Standing inside the barn, the pain in my ribs and wrist from the attack in the Soiled Utility Room returned, blending with the pain from my near fall. I had some bruised ribs, perhaps a sprained ankle. I didn’t care.
The barn seemed empty, yet it was the place Jas went since Jack died, talking to Mabel, pouring her heart out, too young to realize that grief shared with humans was grief diminished.
I slipped from the doorway to Mabel’s stall. The big, pregnant Friesian raised her head and snorted. Stomped with displeasure, her massive left hoof thumping into the hard ground beneath the thick bed of hay. It was past Mabel’s bedtime and she wanted the light off so she could rest. Mabel was crotchety when pregnant. Her stall was otherwise empty.
I checked each of the other stalls. No Jas. The three other mares and their foals were unharmed, though stomping and uneasy. Perhaps the cat was killed close by and feline screams had frightened them. Yet the light was on. Where was Jas? I shivered aga
in with cold and shock.
Gripping my 9mm, I stepped from the barn. My hands were slick on the pearl-handled grip—the gift from Jack on our second anniversary, before he understood that I hated guns. I was still breathing hard.
The lights of the Jeep flickered up the lane as patchy fog wisped thicker and thinner before them. Listening carefully, I could barely make out the engine’s hum. And then I heard it. The silence. Thick and lifeless and cold as the fog itself. Unnatural. Cloaking me in clammy terror. The dogs. Where are the dogs?
Thumbing off the safety, I left the circle of light, moving silently along the path toward the house. The security lights were off, wrapping the house in blackness, the security lights that came on automatically at dusk unless I flipped a control switch. And I hadn’t.
The silence was ominous. A complete absence of sound, more insulating than the fog which touched my face in lifeless tendrils. No dogs.
"Big Dog?" I called softly. The words vanished in the white. The moon broke through, high and cold, turning the world around me blacker than velvet, overlaid with the grayish white of gauze.
