Flour in the Attic

by Winnie Archer

  I replaced the folders I still held and slid the top drawer closed. I tugged to open the bottom drawer, but it stayed closed. “Locked.”

  Before I’d even finished saying the word, Miguel was up out of his seat and back at the desk, rifling through one of the desk drawers. He stood a second later, holding out a ring jangling with about ten keys. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  The lock was small and built into the cabinet, so he eliminated the few keys on the larger end of the spectrum, trying the smaller keys instead, one by one. Finally, the second to last one slid in and turned. The interior mechanism clicked, releasing the lock. He depressed the button on the handle and the drawer opened.

  More files filled the drawer, but not documenting the burial or cremation of the deceased. “There must be another filing cabinet somewhere,” I said. In the back of my mind, I knew that Emmaline was going to kill me, because Miguel was right. We were breaking and entering. But whether or not the forged donor contracts were what Marisol had discovered, what Benjamin Alcott was doing was definitely not legal and needed to be stopped.

  The folders in this drawer didn’t have a color-coding system. Instead of the blue and red labels in the upper drawer, these were all yellow. Inside the folder I’d withdrawn was a single sheet. It had an eight-digit number written in a designated box in the upper right corner. The paper itself was another checklist of menu items. Given the fact that these folders were under lock and key, the items on the list felt, if not sinister, then at least more questionable.

  Miguel read aloud. “Head. Right leg. Left leg. Right arm. Left arm. Torso with arms. Torso without arms.” He stopped reading, drawing in an audible breath before exhaling heavily. “What the hell is this?”

  Marisol’s list came back to me, specifically the words legal and regulations. Could this be what she’d been talking about? Regular donor services were legitimate, although not typically associated with a funeral home. But this . . . this was not your regular donor services, was it? This . . . this would have explained Marisol’s distress.

  “There’s no name,” I said, looking again at the number in the corner. The eight numbers were written with periods rather than hyphens, but they reminded me, nonetheless, of birthdates. And then it hit me. “It’s backwards,” I said. “Look—3319.0715. It could be July fifteenth, 1933.”

  He nodded, his jaw pulsing. “So a code. Which means there has to be a list somewhere linking the number to the donor.”

  We both swiveled to look back at the desk. “Probably on the computer,” I said.

  Miguel pulled out a thick stack of folders, looking at the codes in the upper corner. We didn’t know Marisol’s father’s birthday, so he wasn’t looking for that. Searching for his father, I realized. I didn’t need to look at any more folders. I focused my attention instead on Marisol. How had she come to realize the truth about what Benjamin Alcott was doing? Her father had been cremated. My gaze fell to my shoes, still lightly coated with the powdered cement from the memorial garden and from the spilled bag. And then a chill ran up my spine. I grabbed Miguel’s leg, my fingers clawing into it. At the very same moment, he uttered a sharp, “Holy shit.”

  We stared at each other, the rest of the truth settling into place.

  Chapter 23

  The sound of the door flinging open and hitting the wall was like a shotgun going off, ricocheting in my head. I swiveled around, moving in what felt like slow motion. I’d expected to see Benjamin, but it was Lisette. Her face was pale, her eyes wide and frantic. She wore the same black slacks and black-and-white striped shirt she’d had on at the funeral. She’d looked disheveled then. Now she looked completely undone. “Did you find her?” she asked frantically, as if we’d been in the middle of a desperate conversation and she had just picked up where we’d left off.

  My brain kicked in and I jumped up, yanking her into the room and quickly closing the door behind her. “Find . . . her?”

  “My mom,” she said, her voice shrill and nearing hysteria. “Did you find her?”

  I hesitated, not sure what was going on inside her head. At last, I said, “Ruben took your mother’s ashes with him after the funeral. You’re all supposed to meet up in the morning on the pier—”

  She began shaking her head, the ordinary movement turning almost violent. “No. No, no, no. Don’t you see? I saw David. He told me what happened to my grandfather.” Her lower lip trembled and her chin quivered. She jabbed her finger at me as if I were the culprit. “I am not going to let that happen to my mother.”

  “Not going to let what happen to her?” I asked.

  She waved her hands around wildly, her gaze darting around. “We don’t have my grandfather at home. They cut him up.” She sobbed, her breath shallow. “They shipped him off to God knows where.”

  I put my hands on her shoulders and guided her to the chair I’d been sitting in. She buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking with her heaving sobs. Miguel crouched in front of her. “Lis,” he said softly, shortening her name affectionately. Marisol had worked at Baptista’s for as long as I could remember, which meant Miguel had grown up seeing Lisette, Sergio, and Ruben. They had history, but would he be able to talk her off the ledge she was teetering on?

  He continued to speak to her in a low, calming timbre. She dropped her hands and he took them in his. His touch relaxed her. Bolstered her. Her breathing deepened, and her tears ebbed. She pulled her hands free and dragged the backs of her fingers under her eyes, wiping away what was left of her tears and smearing the remnants of her mascara. “Thank you,” she said after another minute.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, his voice calm, but concerned.

  She closed her eyes, but nodded slightly. “I think so.”

  I wasn’t sure about broaching the subject of David and her mother after she’d just regained control of herself, but she did it for me. “I t-talked to D-David.”

  Her voice broke with emotion, but she held herself together.

  “Today?” I asked, wanting to understand the timeline of events.

  “B-before the funeral. N-Not long before . . . before h-he died.”

  Miguel had stood and now leaned against Benjamin Alcott’s desk, his arms folded over his chest. I knew he still had his father in the back of his mind. The fact that we’d found his suit was all the more concerning in light of the illicit donor services. Was his father buried in the casket they’d put him in? Was his body whole?

  “What did he say, Lisette?” I asked.

  She looked at me, her eyes still glassy, but she was under control now. She sat up straighter, placing her palms on her thighs. “He told me about part of a letter he found. He said at first he thought it was written to my dad, and that my dad had done something to betray her. And he thought my mama was going crazy with all her talk about my grandfather’s ashes and something not being right. But then he realized that the letter wasn’t to my dad, and that she wasn’t crazy at all.”

  “Did he find proof?” Miguel asked.

  Lisette retrained her gaze on him and continued. “He said he came here to find out the truth, but they just showed him the c-consent forms my mother had s-signed.” She stopped, her voice starting to crack again with emotion.

  “Giving permission for tissue donations?” I asked.

  Her gaze snapped back to me. “You know?”

  I notched my head toward the filing cabinet she sat next to. “We found a lot of files with consent.”

  She swallowed hard as she steadied her breath. “My mother’s?”

  My skin pricked with cold. We hadn’t looked for Marisol’s file, but surely it would be here. I yanked open the top filing cabinet drawer. My fingers danced over the top edges of the folders, slowing as I came to the Rs. I skipped to the end of the section, slowing to read the names. Rodriguez. Rogers. Rowells. Ruggins. There is was. Ruiz, Marisol.

  I pulled it out, noticing right away that the label was red, which meant cremation. It had a black label with a white s
tripe, so Marisol had been a donor, but based on what Miguel and I had figured out, there would be at least two consent forms in here, one probably legitimately signed, the other forged. A quick flip through the papers confirmed it. Lisette, I remembered, had been the one to sign the contract with Vista Ridge. I had to remind myself that the first meeting with Benjamin Alcott had only been a few days ago. It seemed like a blip in my memory, but I closed my eyes for a minute to bring it to the surface.

  Alcott had gone over the contract. Lisette had initialed and signed. David’s signature and initials were there, as well. Was that signature authentic, or had it been forged? Alcott hadn’t given Lisette a copy, I realized, remembering how he’d steered us out of his office the second the contract was signed. Lisette, for her part, had scarcely read what she’d signed, trusting that Benjamin Alcott had accurately explained what was represented on paper. I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, but in hindsight, Alcott had orchestrated the encounter well. And why not, he was well versed at it. How many unwitting bereaved families had he gotten to sign and initial without even a second thought? He used people’s grief to his advantage.

  Now, however, Lisette looked carefully at the contract she’d signed. Cremation had been selected, without tissue donation. When she flipped to the next page, however, her expression changed. “I didn’t sign this,” she said, looking at the second tissue donation form. She pointed at the bottom line. “That is not my signature. And that’s not David’s,” she said, pointing to the scribbled name.

  Now I understood why Vista Ridge stuck with pen-and-paper contracts, and nothing in duplicate or triplicate. It was easy to simply create a new page and forge the bereaved’s signature. The Alcotts relied on people being too sad to pay close attention, and if a problem ever arose, they would no doubt blame the poor memory of the bereaved, in their grief.

  Manny knelt down in front of the filing cabinet again, pulling out the bottom drawer. He looked at me, his mouth grim, before asking Lisette, “What’s your mom’s birthday?”

  “October twenty-first,” she said.

  “Year?”

  She rattled it off and Miguel set to work converting the set of eight numbers into the code the Alcotts used in their underground donor business. He made short work of it, pulling out the yellow-tabbed folder. Without the master list, there was no way to confirm for certain that this was Marisol’s file, but the identifiers—fifty-seven-year-old Hispanic female—fit. Three checklist boxes were marked, each with a heavy X.

  Lisette glanced at the list and let out a pained wail. “We have to stop this!”

  My own stomach had grown uneasy. The dead deserved to be treated with dignity. It should be a given, I thought, not something hit or miss. My mind went back to Marisol’s list. She’d written Regulations? Regulations demand adherence to protocols that safeguard those who can no longer protect their own interests—namely, the dead.

  “She’s here,” Lisette said, and I thought of what she’d said when she’d first come into the office. Did you find her? she’d asked. I understood now. She was assuming that the ashes we thought were Marisol’s were not, and that her body was still here awaiting—

  “Oh my God,” I said. “What time is it?”

  I fished for my cell phone in my pocket, but Miguel wore a watch. “Ten forty-three,” he said.

  We’d spent all of this time in Benjamin Alcott’s office looking at the contractual side of the illicit business the funeral home was running, but we’d given no thought to the practical side of it. Someone had to prepare the tissue and the body parts. Blood and bones. Marisol had been haunted by that phrase in her nightmares because that’s what it all came down to. Blood and bones.

  “Suzanne.” She wasn’t an innocent in all this. Her brother ran the business side of things, and her domain was downstairs—in the sterile surgical room off the loading bay. The one with the stainless steel tables, and the equipment I hadn’t wanted to think about . . . and the body drawers, just like those in a morgue. “I heard her on the phone earlier. She planned to see someone at twelve o’clock. I’d thought that meant tomorrow, as in during the day, but I also saw her talking to a man with a van outside the morgue room downstairs. He told her he’d see her bright and early, but then he corrected himself to dark and early.”

  “As in midnight?” Miguel said, piecing together what I was saying.

  “What if he’s coming to pick up—” I broke off, not knowing how to finish the sentence.

  “My mother,” Lisette said, doing it for me.

  An hour and fifteen minutes before midnight. If Marisol’s body was here—and still intact—we had to hurry.

  * * *

  Lisette clutched the file folder in her fist as we ran down the hallway. At the door leading downstairs, we regrouped, catching our breath and stilling our racing hearts. I held my finger to my lips. We didn’t know what we’d find downstairs, but we needed to approach with stealth, not the thundering footsteps of a herd of elephants.

  I opened the door and led the way, creeping down the stairs with the lightest tread I could manage. Lisette was on my heels, close enough that I felt her breath on the back of my neck. Miguel, with his years in the marines, had stealth down to a T. I couldn’t hear him, but I knew he was there behind us somewhere.

  The door at the bottom of the steps that led to Suzanne’s workroom was slightly ajar. I held up my right arm, crooked at the elbow, hand fisted, signaling Lisette and Miguel to stop. We pressed our backs against the wall, once again calming ourselves. The familiar strains of a Taylor Swift song suddenly drifted out to us. I pinched my thumb and forefinger against the bridge of my nose, trying to merge the idea of a pop princess as the soundtrack to the gruesome practices that took place in that room.

  Something whirred, drowning out the sound of the music. Lisette grabbed hold of my arm, her fingers clawing into me. “Ivy,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper.

  My heart was in my throat, but we had no more time to wait. I glanced back at them, then wrapped my fingers around the edge of the door, slowly opened it, and then, without another conscious thought in my head about what we would find, I charged into the room, Lisette and Miguel hot on my heels.

  Suzanne jumped, dropping the small hand tool she’d been holding. It hit the floor with a loud crash. Her sudden release of it cut off the power and the whirring sound we’d heard, leaving only Taylor Swift’s voice belting through the speaker system. “What the hell are you doing here?” Suzanne yelled, disconcerted anger in her voice.

  She sidestepped, bending to retrieve the electric hand tool she’d dropped, but Miguel had skirted around me, had ahold of the cord, and yanked it out of her reach. “I’ll just take that,” he said, picking it up.

  I gave the room a cursory glance. The door to the outside delivery bay was propped open with a bag of cement. Suzanne was the only person in the room. No bodies on the stainless gurney-like tables. No blood. No bones. Unless Suzanne had done it already, maybe we’d gotten here in time to stop her from doing to Marisol what had been done to so many others right here in this very room.

  “What do you want?” Suzanne asked, but with the three of us surrounding her, she’d lost some of the bravado from a moment ago.

  “Where’s my mother?” Lisette’s voice had waffled between broken and barely controlled since she’d ambushed us in Benjamin Alcott’s office, but now it was brittle with accusation.

  Suzanne’s jaw gaped. “She was cremated.”

  “Uh-uh.” Lisette shook her head, taking a step closer to Suzanne.

  Miguel was now behind Suzanne, his back to the body drawers. I directed my gaze at them, dipping my chin and lifting my eyebrows to communicate to him.

  He got the message. He turned, grabbing hold of one of the chrome handles. I could see him brace himself for what he might find. He took a breath and pulled. The drawer opened just enough for him to see inside. He threw me a glance over his shoulder, gave a little shake of his head, and shut the d
rawer again.

  “We know what you’re doing,” Lisette was saying to Suzanne. “Cutting up the dead and selling them for your own profit. You’re sick.”

  Miguel moved on to the next drawer, gripping the handle, inhaling, and pulling it open. Once again, he shook his head and closed the empty drawer.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Suzanne ground out. With Miguel behind her, Lisette smack in front of her and moving closer, and me on her right blocking the door to the stairs, she was like a trapped animal. Her eyes had grown wide and feral. She searched for a way out, but there was none.

  “Recognize this?” Lisette thrust the file folder with the coded number and Marisol’s identifying characteristics at her. “That’s my mother’s file, isn’t it? This is what you’ve sold of her. She wasn’t cremated. You’re going to sell her for parts.”

  “You’re crazy,” Suzanne said, but at the same moment, Miguel yanked open the third drawer, and this time there was no shake of his head. He didn’t close it again. He closed his eyes for a beat, his nostrils flaring, his lips pressing hard together, and then he pulled it open enough for us to see the body lying there. It was covered with a thin sheet, but there was no doubt in my mind that it was Marisol.

  “Is she?” Miguel asked.

  Suzanne spun around. When she saw the open drawer, her face collapsed in defeat. She had nowhere to run, and nothing more to say.

  Chapter 24

  Music had the power to affect the entire mood of a place, but the song playing on the speaker system changing from Taylor Swift to One Republic did nothing to lighten the air in the room. Lisette stared at the body in the drawer, her tears flowing freely. “Do we—” She paused, gathering herself together. “If my mom is there, whose ashes do we have?”

  The answer hit me like a brick to the head. I glanced at the heavy black-and-yellow bag propping open the outside door, then at my dust-covered shoes. The truth was hiding in plain sight. “It’s not ashes. It’s cement.”