Dead in Bed by Bailey Simms, The Complete First Book (2 page)

I don’t think I
recognized whoever it was, but the face was so sunken and gray I couldn’t be sure.
To me, it looked like someone who had been dead for a long time…weeks, maybe.
But I guess I don’t know anything about how bodies decay—the cheerleaders
must
have used the locker room only a
couple of hours earlier, and the body couldn’t have been in the shower
then.I’d
been so distracted by the
deteriorated face, that it took me a moment to notice what Ian was staring at.

Well, him and everyone
else. Mrs. Whipple let out this long-winded weeping sound and started to cry.

The dead man was missing
his penis. Where it should have been was just this short, fleshy stump. The
wound was raggedly scabbed over and looked infected.

Ian glanced at me,
obviously regretting that he’d let Shawn and me come in here with him, but now
there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He returned his attention to the
body, maybe not entirely sure what to do next.

I was so stunned that
I didn’t even feel sick, not even when I saw what was below the missing penis:
two baseball-size spheres of tightly swollen flesh. They were the testicles,
puffed up unnaturally and darkened to a deep, blackish purple, like a pair of
giant, toxic mushrooms.

I could hear Shawn
breathing heavily behind me. I worried he was about to pass out.

"Holy fuck,"
he whispered.

In the middle of all
of this, Ian’s phone rang. He fumbled to answer it.

He listened. “Yeah,
it’s here,” he said. I could tell it was the hospital dispatcher again. “
Now
 you tell me,” Ian said,
exasperated, then he paused. “Right now?” Another pause. “That’s not how we do
things. I don’t care
who
—” He stopped and
listened again. After a minute, he reluctantly said, “Well…I guess. I guess if
that’s what they say. I don’t know. I’ll do what I can. Jesus.”

Ian stood and turned
away from us. For a moment he just held his wrist to his head, apparently
trying to figure out what to do. Outside in the distance, the football game’s
final buzzer sounded over the loudspeakers.

“Shit.”

Finally Ian turned
toward us.

“We have to get this
out of here right now.” He gave my husband a hard look. “Shawn, buddy. I hate
to ask you to do this, but I need a hand. I can’t get it into my rig on my own.
I got pretty strict orders to clear this out before the crowd comes through
after the game.” He nodded in the general direction of the football field. “And
everyone’s on their way now.”

Shawn was silent. He
took one step backward.

Then he threw up all
over a changing bench.

Instinctively, I put a
hand on my husband’s back while he retched. I didn’t know what else to do. I
glanced at Ian. He looked completely at a loss.

“I’ll help,” I said.
“I’ll do it.”

“Shit, Ashley,” he
began, “you don’t…”

“I can do it,” I said.

I stepped toward the
body before I could lose my nerve. Ian looked extremely uncomfortable, but I
could tell he knew he didn’t have any other choice but to accept my help.

I pulled two gloves
from the cardboard box in Ian’s medical bag and put them on.

“Shit,” he said,
again.

“Just tell me what to
do. What do I do?”

Ian took a deep
breath. “All right. Shit. You take the ankles. It’s not far. Let’s just hurry
and get this over with. Goddamn it, Ash. I owe you.”

I tried not to think
about what I was doing. I tried to tell myself that this was no different than
a dead animal or a dummy.

But as I clutched the
body’s ankles, the tendons and bones beneath the skin felt so human and
lifelike that I started to feel dizzy. I tried to breathe, but I hadn’t
expected the smell to be so strong. It was definitely the smell of rotten
flesh. I wondered if maybe the rancid smell was coming from the swollen testicles;
after all, they did look like they were rotting or maybe turning gangrenous.

I had to do something
to distract myself so I wouldn’t throw up. I was desperate not to let Ian down.
I knew that my sister wouldn’t have been able to do this, and somewhere deep
inside I’d always understood that Danielle couldn’t ever really let herself
imagine what Ian must have gone through in the war. I wondered if, by helping
him now in this unlikely way, maybe I could somehow show him that I knew his
life contained unspeakable horrors that my sister couldn’t comprehend.

“What do you think
happened to him?” I asked Ian.

I didn’t actually care
what had happened, not at that moment. But I couldn’t think of any other way to
get my mind off the smell and the body’s sagging, loose weight in my hands as
we shuffled through the locker room.

“I have no idea,” Ian
whispered. “He must have been trying to peep through the window. And then I
guess he fell through the glass.”

“But what about his…?”
I started, but I couldn’t finish. “Why is it
 
missing
?”

I could barely bring
myself to ask about the missing penis, and I couldn’t even begin to mention the
bloated testicles. They appeared at the point of bursting as the body swayed
between us.

Ian gave me a look of
total perplexity and shook his head. “I have 
no
 idea.”

“It’s one of those
carnies!” Though Mrs. Whipple was still crying, she was obviously in control
enough to make this last proclamation as she held the locker room door open for
us, shuddering. “They’re all on drugs!”

The hardest part was
lifting the body into the back of Ian’s SUV.

Ian laid the shoulders
on the tailgate while I kept hold of the ankles. I’d managed to control my
nausea, but now my arms were burning. I didn’t even want to think about letting
the body drop or the sound of it hitting the pavement. Ian climbed into the
back and pulled the shoulders from the inside, and then, finally, I could let
go. I looked around the dark lot outside the gym. I didn’t think anyone saw us,
but I could hear the crowd from the game moving in our direction.

“You okay?” Ian asked.

I nodded.

“I’m real sorry, Ash,”
he whispered. “Really.”

“It’s okay.” I tried
to smile. “I need a drink,” I laughed, “but I’m okay.”

Now Ian laughed, too,
obviously relieved that I’d been able to handle it. Maybe he was even a little
impressed.

After laughing,
though, he added earnestly, “Technically, you weren’t supposed to see any of
this. Right?”

“Right,” I nodded. “Of
course. Okay.”

* * *

I helped
Shawn wash the splattered vomit off his shoes while Mrs. Whipple hurried to
sweep up the broken glass.

I bought a Sprite from
the vending machine for Shawn, which he said helped his stomach, but I had to
hurry him out of the locker room before the cheerleaders arrived.

By now everyone who
had been watching the football game was passing through the parking lot on the
way to the fair. No one seemed to have a clue about what had just happened. My
sister was there with Haley, waiting for Tyler to finish showering.

“They won! Tyler
scored!”
Danielle waved, surprised to see us.
“What
are you guys doing here? I thought Ian was taking you straight to the beer
garden.”

“He got called to the
hospital on the way, so he dropped us off here.”

Technically, I wasn’t
lying. I just wasn’t sure what Ian did or didn’t want me to say, even to my
sister.

Haley skipped over to
me, totally hopped up on excitement for the fair. I remembered feeling the same
way when I was a kid.

“Aunt Ashley!” She
slammed into me and gave me a hug. I hugged her back tentatively. I’d washed my
hands and arms three times in the locker room, but I was still hesitant to
touch my niece after what I’d just done. “Are you going with me to the carnival
tonight?” she pleaded.

“Tomorrow!” I said.

It was so hard to say
no to Haley. Over the last couple of years my niece had turned into this
blond-haired, wide-eyed kid who was kind of small for her age, just like I’d
been at nine. I got to play the role of the fun, slightly reckless aunt when I
was with her. Last year at the fair we’d spent hours playing the same pinball
horse-racing
carnival game I used to be addicted to as a
kid, and I’d taught her how to cheat by tipping the machine.

But there was no way I
was going to do anything tonight other than have a drink as soon as
possible—an even stiffer one than I’d planned on earlier.

“But I want to play that
horse game!” Haley whined.

Danielle cut in,
saving me. “Aunt Ashley and Uncle Shawn are having an adults’ night tonight,”
she announced. “I’ll take you to the horses with Grandma and Grandpa.”

Haley looked up at me,
pouting. It was annoying, but still I felt guilty for letting her down.

“Tomorrow we’ll play
the horse game,” I promised. “Just you and me.”

“You guys want a ride
over?” Danielle asked. “Tyler’s still
gonna
be a
while.”

“I feel like a walk,”
I said. “Maybe I’ll see you over there.”

It felt weird just
traipsing off to the fair after everything that had happened. Someone had died,
and I’d just helped carry his body with my hands. It all felt completely
unreal. I guess the right thing to do would have been to go home, have a sober,
contemplative evening, and try to make sense of what had happened, but I
couldn’t imagine anything worse than being stuck alone with Shawn way out there
in our quiet little house. I needed to be around people—a lot of them. I
needed to get rid of the image of the mutilated body. I could still feel its
weight in my arms. I was also really hoping to catch up with Ian later and find
out if he’d learned anything about who the guy was, or what had happened to
him, or why we’d had to rush the body away so fast.

Shawn and I joined the
crowd making its way to the fairgrounds. I expected him to object to continuing
on to the fair, but he just walked along beside me silently. He still looked
pretty pale.

“How are you?” I
asked, folding my arms against the chilly evening air.

“Fine,” he said. “I’m
fine.”

He didn’t really look
at me.

I knew he was
embarrassed that I’d been the one who had to help Ian. That was why he wasn’t
saying anything. I was pretty sure he wanted to just go home but was too ashamed
to insist on it if I wasn’t going to suggest it first. Or maybe he also just
really wanted a drink.

* * *

When
we reached the beer garden, Morgan wasn’t even there yet. She was always late.
I should have known.

I texted her, and she
replied right back:

So there was nothing
to do now but wait around with Shawn’s friends, who of course had been at the
beer garden for at least an hour by then. Jason Gibbs was already mostly drunk.
Right away he bought both Shawn and me a beer.

Jason was a few years
younger than us. I used to babysit him. He was always a little jerk as a kid.
He used to try to take
Polaroids
of me peeing through
the bathroom window from outside.
 
He
was the basketball star in high school, but no one from Muldoon ever gets a
scholarship anywhere, so he worked at the mill for a while with Shawn. Now he
was a highway patrol cop. The fair kept cops busy in Muldoon; I had no idea how
he’d gotten the night off. For a while, I hoped that maybe he’d influence Shawn
to go to the patrol academy, too.

Shawn drank his beer
down faster than I’d ever seen him drink. I bought the next round, getting a
vodka tonic for myself this time.

“Whoa, Ashley!” Jason “clinked”
his plastic beer cup to my drink. “Somebody’s partying tonight!”

“It’s been a long
day,” I confessed.

Jason tapped Shawn’s
arm. “You better watch your wife, bro. It’s fair time. She keeps going like
that, might end up with somebody else’s dick in her ass. Not saying whose—I’m
just saying.”

I tried to glare at
Jason and express as much of my annoyance as possible, but I was distracted by
whatever spiked hairstyle he was trying to pull off. A couple strands kept
idiotically bobbing up and down over his horsey face whenever he laughed. I
don’t think he was aware of it.

Shawn finished the
last of his second beer. “You might end up with somebody’s dick down your
throat, dude,” he said. Some of his color had come back. “And I’m saying whose.
Mine.”

“Charming, as ever,” I
said to both of them. I didn’t mind that Shawn had actually sort of stuck up
for me, even if it was by threatening his friend with forced fellatio in the
middle of ordering more beer.

“I don’t know, bro,”
Jason said without taking his eyes off me. “We have a history, me and Ashley.
She told you, didn’t she? She used to beg my parents to go out of town. She
said I had the biggest cock of all the kids she babysat for. When they got
home, she used to be, like, ‘No, Mr. And Mrs. Gibbs, you don’t owe me anything.
Little Jason took care of all my needs.’ Your wife’s a nympho, bro! Seriously!”

Apparently my husband
thought the high-pitched voice Jason used to impersonate me was the funniest
thing in the world. Shawn was laughing, then Jason started laughing at his own
joke, and that only made Shawn laugh harder. Apparently it was much easier for
Shawn to put the locker room out of his mind than it was for me.

“No, dude!” Shawn
said. “You don’t even know! I mean
,
she kind of 
is
 a nympho!” My husband laughed
hilariously at this revelation.

All I’d wanted was to
have a drink and to try to calm down a little. And now I had to deal with this.