Come Little Children (9 page)

“Lucas,” Moira said, “start stripping Mr. Gall. Carleton, when was the last time you did a six-point injection? Never mind. Take a trocar, and we’ll go from there.”

Camilla gave a sharp nod, eager to earn some approval, and turned to the wall of instruments.

Trocar cabinet, trocar cabinet, trocar cabinet. Damn
.

She knew she knew where it was, but the sudden jolt of pressure had scared the memory away. Her eyes flew back and forth over the cabinets as panic welled up.

There it is—to the right!

She yanked open a cabinet and took out a long needle attached to the end of a light, dentist-like drill. As she jogged back to the embalming station, Lucas was already pulling the body bag away.

Camilla froze at the sight of the remains.

Dear. God
.

The man—what was left of him, at least—was in his late forties. There was a modesty cloth draped over his genitalia and two ID tags latched around his right ankle, one from the hospital morgue and one from the Vincents’ funeral home. But it wasn’t the nudity or putrefaction that made her shrink back.

It was the scar.

A large
Y
was carved into his torso, the arms of the letter beginning on either shoulder, then meeting below his sternum and running all the way down to his pelvis. The autopsy cut had been sewn closed with thick, heavy stitches, similar to the seams on a baseball, but Camilla thought the threading looked embarrassingly loose.

The coroner could learn a thing or two from the craftsman who stitched together the six-year-old boy
.

Instantly the little boy’s scar seared to the front of her thoughts again, staring at her like the slit of a bloody, baleful eye. That sewing was tight and professional. Continuous threads, clean ends.
What’s behind those seams…What’s hiding?!

“Any time,” a voice scowled.

Camilla blinked away from the flashback to see that Moira and Lucas were already working contrapuntally, going about their own tasks while managing to stay out of each other’s way. She didn’t know where to jump in—two was company around the slim station, three seemed a crowd.

Lucas gave a tap on the porcelain. “I’ll unlace the torso,” he said, “if you set the features.”

Thanks
, Camilla mouthed, and Lucas nodded back.

She moved to the top of the table and examined the man’s head, noting again a lack of effort in the autopsy stitching. Trading her trocar for a scalpel, she sliced her way through the poorly laced incisions and suctioned out the excess fluid, then padded it with fresh cotton before resetting the skullcap and sewing it back together. Next was the mouth. Forgoing an air gun, she found a needle and a roll of wax thread and began weaving it expertly through Mr. Gall’s gum lines just like she’d done a hundred times in school.

She breathed a little easier.

It was a relief to be doing something that she was actually good at. It took her mind off everything else and reassured her that, contrary to a certain funeral director’s opinion, she wasn’t a total idiot. As her hands piloted the thread, she even caught Moira giving a small nod of approval.
Hell hath frozen over
.

“Here we go,” Lucas warned. “Hold your breath.”

He dug his fingers into the man’s stomach and gave a forceful tug, pulling back the skin to reveal Mr. Gall’s rib cage and abdomen all at once.

But the organs weren’t where they should have been. The body was hollow with the exception of a clear, plastic sack—the viscera bag—lumped in the pelvic area. All the entrails were pooled into this one sack, stewing in their own fluids like bowel casserole.

Moira barely looked. She was flipping through the man’s chart, checking the list of personal items that the hospital had sent over.

“Any idea why he did it?” Camilla asked.

“Take his life, you mean?” Moira said. “That’s not our concern.”

“Of course not. I’m just—just curious.” Camilla’s eyebrows furrowed as she ran a hand over the corpse’s head. His hair was extremely healthy and still carried the pleasant scent of a strong citrus conditioner, which she assumed wasn’t widely available in prison. There were no signs of self-harm anywhere on his body.

“Depression doesn’t always leave footprints,” Moira said, ostensibly reading Camilla’s thoughts. The old woman paused, finishing her checklist, and held up a clipping from the autopsy folder. “Last Friday police responded to a call south of Road 16. They found a child in the ditch near a hatchback and Gall asleep at the wheel, seats soaked with pilsner and another case open in the box. It doesn’t take a two-hour autopsy to see what caught up to him.”

Lucas and Camilla looked at each other, perplexed. Moira sniffed and spelled it out for them: “Guilt.”

She stowed the autopsy report back in its folder before Camilla could lean in and get a peek.

What if
—Camilla’s mind raced, spiraling out of control again—
what if that picture’s the missing piece? The little boy had scrapes. Bad ones. Not hit-by-a-hatchback bad…but maybe…maybe they’re worse than I remember?

“That’s insane,” Lucas said, still registering the blow. “I used to bike past their house every day. Mrs. Gall was the nicest woman on the block.”

“Maybe one of her sordid affairs finally caught up with her,” Moira said, jingling the baggie of Leonard Gall’s personal effects. “His wedding band is missing. Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s linked to his BAC.” She snagged Lucas’s eye. “Just promise
me
your
ring won’t disappear in the next three weeks. Carleton, catch.”

The baggie sailed through the air, and Camilla caught it awkwardly at the last second. She blinked back from her trance to see Lucas staring at her, concerned.

“Everything all right?”

“Uh-huh.” She nodded, then diverted the conversation. “Wait, did…uh—did you say three weeks? Your wedding’s that soon?”

Lucas opened his mouth—

“
If
we get the minister,” Moira cut in. “
And
the music
and
the chrysanthemums.”

“Yes,” Lucas said, rolling his eyes. “Three weeks.”

He reached his hand into the corpse’s stomach, clearly wanting to avoid wedding talk, and grabbed the viscera bag. As he lifted it out, the guts sunk to the bottom of the sack and tore through the plastic, dumping out rancid bile like a busted sewage tank.

“Christ!” Lucas swore. “Goddamn it, Sven. Goddamn!”

“He’s done it before,” Maddock piped up from the other washing station. “Thinks slashing the bag is hilarious.”

“The pathologist?” Camilla asked.

“Yeah,” Lucas cringed, trying to scoop up organs as bits of them fell through his fingers and plopped onto the ground.

“Good Lord, don’t drip!” Moira shouted.

“Well what am I supposed to do?”

“Carleton, get him a bag.”

“A bag? From where—?”

But it was too late; Moira was already rushing off for a mop bucket.

Fine
. Camilla hopped over the pool of entrails and ran to the sink. She threw open the cupboards and began rooting through a veritable horde of antiseptic supplies, first-aid kits, and half-empty cleaning agents in search of new viscera bags.

“Hotter…no, colder…colder…” Maddock mumbled as he spied Camilla hunting through the storage space. He turned on a spigot and started hosing down Ms. Beaudry. “Colder…”

“Maybe a little help?” Camilla shot back.

“I am helping,” he sneered. “Colder…”

Camilla dodged left instead of right and found a stack of bright-yellow bags behind door number three. Seizing half of the pile, she ran back to the embalming table where Moira immediately grabbed the top sack and tried tearing it open.

“They’re the new ones,” Maddock called over. “You have to cut them.”

“Fine,” Moira said, stomping away again.

Camilla looked around the room like a soldier without directive. Lucas was plucking entrails off the floor, Maddock was still washing down Ms. Beaudry, and Moira was off at the wall of instruments.

Then she spied it: Leonard Gall’s autopsy folder lying unguarded on the back counter.

The decision came like a bolt of lightning.

Tiptoeing carefully over the bloody floor, Camilla stepped backwards through the room until her hands bumped the countertop behind her. She felt around for the manila folder, and when it grazed her fingertips, she slowly peeled the flap open and touched the papers inside. Her heart pounded as her eyes flashed around the room, making sure the others weren’t watching, and when she was absolutely certain they were all
preoccupied, she spun around and looked straight down at the police blotter.

From the nanosecond it took Camilla to turn around and lower her gaze, she was fully convinced that the six-year-old boy would be standing in the picture, staring back at her with the same set of hollow eyes that she’d seen the night before.

But the boy wasn’t in the photo. No one was.

It was a splotchy snapshot of Leonard Gall’s dented pickup angled beside a small tricycle. The trike’s bars were twisted like pipe cleaners, and the seat was snapped clean in half.

She flipped the page, and her breath skipped at the glint of a glossy picture that was stapled to the back. But when she registered the photo, her heart sunk with a heavy, solo
thump
.

The picture showed a little girl—eight or nine years old—smiling for her third grade head shot. She was cute as a dimple. Blonde pigtails, chubby cheeks, a lilac dress. The fact that she was missing a front tooth made her smile even more darling.

“Where. Are. My. Shears?”

Camilla slapped the autopsy folder shut, and her eyes shot immediately to the far cleaning station. Moira caught the sudden eye-movement and pick-whipped her line of vision to the body that the two of them had been trying to dress earlier.

There, stuck halfway up Mr. Yule’s overcoat, were the shears that Moira was looking for.

“What have you done?!”

Moira ran to the gurney and pulled out the scissors, examining the jacket.

“I’m sorry…” Camilla sputtered. “I…I know other funeral homes—”

“We never cut the coats!” Moira fumed. She spun around and marched ahead with the shears pointed straight at Camilla’s
chest. “
Ever
. If you’re too lazy to put on a jacket without a destructive shortcut—”

Whoosh!

In the blink of an eye, Moira slipped on a hunk of intestine and lost her balance. She fell against the porcelain table, grabbing desperately for the aspirating hose, but the tube jerked and the whole embalming machine sailed off the counter. The Turner shattered on the floor and gushed its bright-pink fluid all over the tile.

Lucas rushed to his mother’s side and helped her up. Her entire outfit was dripping with pink formaldehyde—her hair and face were covered too—and her eyes blazed with so much hatred that it looked like she was literally melting.

“Out,” Moira seethed, eyes limned with a murderous red.

“I’m so sorry—”

“Out!”

The members of the Beaudry family were all stewing in the narthex outside of the Vincents’ chapel. There were ten of them in total, the youngest no younger than fifty and the oldest no younger than eighty.

Camilla rounded the corner on her way to her room—

And froze. She was completely blocked by the gang of seemingly agitated seniors.

Immediately her anxiety spiked to an eleven on the Richter scale of stress. The last thing she wanted to deal with on her way to her embarrassing time-out was a throng of emotionally charged relatives; her eyes mapped an escape plan—the stained glass window by the south wall was situated above a patch of daffodils, which, all things considered, wasn’t the
worst
way to break a fall if she needed to catapult through—when all of a
sudden a man in red suspenders stepped forward and derailed her train of thought.

“Finally. There you are.”

“No,” said an older woman. “She’s different. Much sicklier-looking.”

“It doesn’t matter, she might have answers. Lord knows no one else around here does.”

The crowd formed a semicircle around Camilla, pushing her up against the wall. She shot a last look at the south window with its tempting daffodil patch, but it was too late—she was cornered.

“Speak, girl. Why haven’t we seen our mother yet?”

“We’re going our fastest,” Camilla said, “but there are a lot of—”

“Your fastest? You better not be!” shouted another crone, her sagging, overstretched earlobes flopping around her head as she shook with anger and Parkinson’s. “Take time with the poor woman.”

“Poor?” scoffed another relative. “Hogwash. Just ask Maggy, or maybe she hasn’t told you about the envelope
poor
auntie gave to her?”

“Maggy?
Wendy
’s the one who’s been draining her savings the last six months.”

“Shut your pie hole, Phyllis. You have no idea—”

“Oh yes I do! One cousin raises three children on her own and never sees a cent, then the old bat sticks a thousand dollars in an envelope and mails it to you.”

“I told you, you idiot, I don’t know anything about a thousand dollars.”

One of the younger men pushed the women apart, hollering, “Will you three stop it?”

“No. No, no, no. We’re just getting started!”

So many people were talking at the same time that Camilla couldn’t keep track of who was on whose side. The entire family seemed to be against Camilla though, and the closer they pushed, the tighter she hugged her arms.

“I want to speak to a director,” insisted the woman with the elephant earlobes. “Jasper or Moira. Now.”

“They’re busy.”

“Busy trying to make mother look rosy again? Hard, I imagine, since you people really banged her up good? Oh yes, Phyllis and I saw the house and we’re appalled. You’re sick people, sick. Slammed an old woman around, knocking furniture over—and the…the blood. You’re sick, sick, sick…”

The old woman pushed right into Camilla’s personal bubble. She spat the word
sick
over and over again until she was red in the face, and now the rest of the family was shouting along too.

“Tossed her around like burlap—”