Home Is Where Your Boots Are (11 page)

The next morning I avoided any real food and swigged some Diet Coke instead, swinging into Fae Lynn’s driveway at six-thirty. I had on black leggings and
a sleeveless chambray button-up,
with my black ostrich and lizard cowboy boots with cream colored stitching and heart-shaped cutouts. I needed a pick-me-up. You can pick your own magic talisman, but I’ll stick to my boots.

I’d put my hand on the door handle to go get her when she stepped on the porch and closed the door softly behind her. We were hoping no one would be there this early. She got in and stuck her red monogrammed cup in my holder. I started the engine and motored toward the hospital in the center of town, just two besties, out for a pre-dawn ride about town.

“Why didn’t you tell me I’d gone off the deep end?” I asked her, filling the apprehensive silence. She laughed dryly
,
and I saw her smile out of the corner of my eyes.

“I didn’t need to.” I shook my head questioningly. She waved her skinny, ringed fingers dismissively. “I love you, Lilly Kay, right down to the bottom of your perfectly pedicured toenails. I know who you are deep down. You may be a little slow on the uptake, but you figure it out in the end.” I smiled at her description of me. “Besides, that’s the kind of friends we are. We just wait each other out. Same as how you knew I was hell-bent on screwing up my life with that loser in high school
,
and instead of getting mad at me, you just held me and prayed for me. I’ve been praying for you, sister. I knew you’d come out of it, the same way I knew you’d be home eventually.” I took a deep breath.

“Thanks for believing in me. But next time, can you tell me it’ll be okay?”

“I hope there’s not a next time. But no, you need to figure it out. A character-building experience and all that.”

“I feel like I’ve had enough of those to last a lifetime.”

We rode the rest of the way in silence
,
and I parked the car. We took deep breaths and steadied our hands on the car doors. She got out first, giving me a little wink as she swung her Julia Roberts’ legs onto the pavement. I got out to stroll beside her toward the entrance.

Brooks Regional Hospital was a big hospital. While Brooks itself was a small town, there were several surrounding communities and mini-towns, and th
us the hospital played host;
it was bigger than most for a town this size. Cash had graduated
from
medical school and come to work in the ER, and then when the Chief of Staff had retired the year he’d been official, the hospital had turned the job over to Cash. It wasn’t as odd as it sounded. If I’d come to town and wanted to be a judge, the same thing would have occurred.

Fae Lynn and I filed through the automatic door and checked the directory, taking the elevator down to the basement, which apparently housed supplies and dead bodies. We got an unexpected surprise when we stepped off the elevator. No one was manning the desk in front of the long corridor that led to the door marked MORGUE. We exchanged glances, and I took it as a silent blessing from God that we were doing the right thing. Because, really, i
t was for a good cause,
and if He didn’t want us to do it, he’d have stopped us by now, right? We started down the hall, fluorescent light flickering overhead and the stench of antiseptic leading the way.

It had been some time since I’d been afraid. As a type-A, high-strung child with an overactive imagination, I’d scared myself silly a time or two with thriller mysteries and gory movies I’d been too young to read or watch. But as I’d gotten older and learned some deep breathing techniques, I no longer was afraid of the dark.

I’d never been in any situations that had set my adrenaline pumping or my teeth on edge, save for the times we’d had to seek retribution on some unsuspecting cheaters and liars. So the clammy-handed, stuttery-hearted, icy-skinned state I was currently in had me a little on edge. I tried a little psychobabble justification, attempting to attribute the chills to the meat locker temperature, but that reference was contradictory to calming my nerves. I tried to blame the wild beating inside my chest on my earlier Diet Coke, but I had one of those every day. I gave up on an explanation for my sweaty palms and tried some deep breaths instead. When I started to hyperventilate, Fae Lynn slammed me against the concrete corridor and shocked me enough to stall the hiccupping breath.

“Stop it,” she instructed me, exasperated.

“Suh, suh, sorry,” I burbled. Fae Lynn rolled her eyes and looked down the blue-grey concrete hallway to our ultimate destination. Sighing and brac
ing her shoulders, she looked
in my pop-eyed eyes.

“Take stock, Lilly. We are in a morgue.” My stomach dropped. “We are going to look at dead bodies.” The whites of my eyes stretched even more. “They will smell. They will be dead. It will be gross.” I fought the urge to throw up all over Fae Lynn’s oversized sparkle hoodie from Target. She shook me before I could
,
and her voice softened a bit. “I’m well aware of the fact that you don’t consider brave your strong suit. But it’s apparent that the rest of the world does,” she eyed me, “So I’m going to advise you to do what you go around telling everyone else to do. Be brave. You just told me you had a l
ife-changing epiphany yesterday. W
here is it now? We’re here to help people.”

Sufficiently shamed, I took a steely breath and pasted on my best rodeo queen smile. Linking arms with her, I propelled us down the hall, fueled solely by the knowledge that as far as this town knew, Lilly Atkins never failed, damn the circumstances or the consequences.

The air grew chillier as we reached the door marked MORGUE. I fought the urge to giggle at the irony of the situation. Lilly Atkins, SMU Law graduate, real estate attorney extraordinaire, former cheerleader and Brooks Independence Day Rodeo queen, winner of the Brooks citizenship award (twice), and multiple student of the month nominee was currently sneaking into the county morgue in the hospital with her childhood best friend who happened to be employed by the police department.

Fae Lynn turned as she reached for the shiny door handle and gave me her trademark mischievous grin. She recognized the moment and waggled her eyebrows comically. We both stopped short inside the room; the heavy metal door thudding resoundingly behind us. Simultaneously, we turned back to regard the closed door and then swung back to survey the stainless steel rows of drawers.

I was
n’t
really sure what we were expecting to find. I was praying for some quick incriminating evidence implicating someone cleanly and clearly, but now that we were actually here, I had begun to think that while we might be at the scene of the crime, there wasn’t likely to be anything out of the ordinary. And even if there was, who were Fae Lynn and I to recognize it? I could tell Fae Lynn’s thought process was on the same track and she finally said my reluctant thought out loud.

“What is it exactly we’re looking for?” she asked.

“I was kind of hoping it would jump out at us,” I informed her, moving toward a cabinet that looked to house the requisite tools for cracking open corpses. Although my earlier trepidation had subsided, I was still grossed out at my latest thought and failed to stifle my gag.

“I’d rather it didn’t actually ‘jump’,” Fae Lynn corrected, “but it’d help to know what direction we’re looking.”

“Maybe the first thing to do would be to look at a dead body,”
I said, somewhat rhetorical. I
pulled out a drawer with a flourish to fight the waves of ick that threatened to overwhelm me. Unfortunately
,
the first thing I saw was big ole blue toe, with a big ole white tag. And the toe was missing its toenail. I didn’t even manage to shut the drawer, running across the white linoleum to the big red trash
can labeled, BIOHAZARDOUS WASTE
…

Which was exactly what came out of me as I spewed up Coke and then dry heaved until my queasiness subsided. Fae Lynn came to hold my hair and then handed me a rough hospital issue paper towel when I’d finished. I wiped my mouth and placed the towel in the bin with my vomit.

“Which one was it?” she asked
,
and I pointed at the drawer third from the top, fourth row over. She stalked over and pulled it out, examining the tag on his toe. “It says he’s to be cremated,” she told me. I nodded weakly.

“He’s also missing his toe nails,” I informed her. She looked back down.

“Huh. Yep.”
She pulled the drawer out farther and inspected one of his hands. “No fingernails either,” she announced.

“Fae Lynn,
what
is going on?” She rolled her eyes at me.

"Well, it looks like someone took off his toenails, unless he had some degenerative disease that ate them.” She lifted the tag again. “Nope, he died of a heart attack.” I picked myself up from my slumped position next to the waste disposal bin and went to the first row of oversized filing cabinets, filled with an idea.

“Okay, start on that side. Look at the tag to see if they’re to be cremated
,
and if they are, see if they’re missing anything.” Fae Lynn looked at me, equal parts impressed and apprehensive as she moved to follow my directions.

“Why cremated?”

“Ronnie said the body was set to be cremated and the widow changed her mind.”

For over thirty minutes we looked at dead bodies, which by the way, are not attractive. I made the hasty decision to ask to be cremated when I died, but when I discovered that all toes tagged to be incinerated were left with no nail to cover their nasty nail beds, I changed my mind.

Luckily, no
t all the drawers were full;
between the two of us, we only had to examine seven bodies. But the discovery that every single body headed for the crematorium was missing certain parts of its anatomy was both disturbing and disgusting. We also found a suspicious scar across the chest of what appeared to be a twenty something male athlete who’d died from head trauma and not heart trouble as it looked like. We weren’t sure someone had stolen his heart, literally, but let’s say we were suspicious. Having found what we considered sufficient evidence to incriminate someone, of something, anything, we headed silently back up to daylight.

Fae Lynn and I stepped off the elevator with silent, simultaneous sighs of relief. We rounded the corner toward the entrance of Brooks Regional and Fae Lynn
boinged
off the belly of Char’s father-in-law, Big Jim Handler. I hoisted her up by the armpits as she untangled her legs. Big Jim reached out a meaty hand to help and chuckled heartily.

“Girly, I do apologize. These linoleum hallways aren’t supposed to make anyone stealthy
,
but I didn’t even hear you and
,
I sure didn’t see you.” Big Jim was a contemporary of Cash’s daddy and Charlie. A bit older than my parents, he ran both a used car lot and a rent-to-own furniture store. He’d also run uncontested for mayor last go-round and was serving his second term this year.

Big Jim had always kind of given me the creeps. He was a little too touchy, a little too leering
,
and the used car salesman adage was dead on. He was overweight in a florid, daily-drinking sort of way. He wore polyester pantsuits, grey alligator skin cockroach killers, and his cheap cigar was a constant figure in his stubby fingers. His face was pockmarked, his hair was greasy, and his eyes were squinty through his puffy face.  How Char’s husband, Aaron
,
had come from this, no one knew,
although Aaron’s mama had been a looker once upon a time.

“No worries, no harm done.” Fae Lynn dusted off her backside
,
and Jim reached out an overly proprietary hand to dust off her front side. She backed away and offered him a grimacing smile. I rolled my eyes inwardly.

“What are you girls doing here? Got a sick relative?” Crap. Lying is not at all my forte. Fortunately, Fae Lynn was excellent.

“Sure, Brandy’s Aunt Lolly’s having a little procedure. We came to bring her some breakfast.” Dang, she was smooth. He cocked a scraggily eyebrow and eyed her.

“Nice of ya.”

“Yep, we’re nothing if not nice. It was sure nice to see you, tell your wife we said hello.” We started to back away in order to edge around him. He
stepped forward and blocked us;
on purpose, I’m not sure.

“Miss Lilly, I heard you were representing Cash Stetson.”

“Well it’s all over town, so you heard right. I don’t know how long that’s going to last, though. He’s not the best client.” He tipped his head and eyed me much like he’d eyed Fae Lynn.

“Careful you don’t find out more about your client than you want to. Divorces tend to dig up
more dirt than anyone can shove
under the rug.” I started and tried to cover up an involuntary shudder.

“Any sort of secret in particular?” I asked, not that I really wanted to know.

“Nope.” He smiled a tobacco-stained grin and took his berth a little too close to us as he began his mosey down the hall. “See you girls, later. Tell that daughter-in-law of mine that if she isn’t going to work, she needs to get started breeding, instead of spending my money.” He winked nastily.