The Angel of Death (15 page)

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Authors: Alane Ferguson

BOOK: The Angel of Death
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The crowd hushed. He cleared his throat and looked up to where Cameryn sat, and when their eyes met, he straightened. “In a world short of heroes . . .” he began. His voice sounded higher than normal, but she doubted others would notice. “Mr. Oakes was the greatest of heroes to me. He taught me to love words and to love nature. He was my Scout leader, and he showed me the beauty of our mountains and how to survive outdoors. He taught me to think, to understand both nature and life.” Taking a wavering breath, he looked at Cameryn, locking onto her eyes as if he was speaking only to her. “In his class, we read F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mr. Oakes told us that Fitzgerald said, ‘Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.’” Kyle’s voice cracked as he finished. “Mr. Oakes, losing you is a tragedy to each and every one of us. I’ll never forget you. None of us ever will.”
And then, as Kyle walked away, the room did something it hadn’t done for anyone else who spoke. It erupted in applause. Cameryn swelled with pride as she understood this tribute to both their teacher and to Kyle. He had said what they were all thinking, only better. Kyle had put words to what none of them could express.
Later, they all crowded in the lunchroom, where the other kids revealed what was really on their minds: they wanted to know about the death. Every gory detail.
Cameryn was sitting next to Kyle in a section dominated by the team, but this time Lyric and Adam had joined them, too. It was an odd mix but one that seemed to be working. The overarching theme was death, a canopy that encompassed them all, despite their usual habitat in different social strata.
Scott Charlton took a bite of cold pizza. “So, Cameryn,” he said between chews, “you work with your dad, right? Does that mean you were at Oakes’s autopsy?”
The eyes of everyone at the table suddenly turned onto her, and there was a hush. Here they were, the cheerleaders and the jocks, with their attention trained exclusively on Cameryn. She was holding a breadstick, and she felt her hand slowly drift back to her plate. She felt the full weight of the obligation. This is what they’d been waiting for, she realized: the real story. As assistant to the coroner, she was the show after the commercial break. Panic welled inside her, but Kyle put his hand firmly on her knee. He was pressing strength into her through his strong fingers.
“I was there,” she admitted. “But before you ask, I can’t get into it. It’s still an active case.”
Nodding, Scott said, “That’s cool. But I heard some pretty weird stuff about the way the body looked, like . . . he didn’t have any eyes.” Scott held up a hand and fluttered his fingers as though they were lashes. “All I want to know is if you have any idea about what killed him?”
“Nope.”
“His eyes
were
blown out, right?”
She hesitated.
“We already know. Kyle told us.”
“Yes, but—”
She didn’t get any further. Everyone at the table erupted with theories of what had happened to their teacher. Jessica, a thin girl with a model’s face, said, “I think it’s something like a rare kind of disease from South America or Africa. Since the rain forests have been cut down, all kinds of nasty stuff’s gotten out.”
“No,” another voice protested, “he never traveled there.”
“He flew, didn’t he? Maybe he caught a disease on a plane.”
“The last trip he took was, like, last spring. A disease wouldn’t take that long to show up.”
“I’m wondering if it was a ball of lightning that went right into his room.”
“My dad said the sheriff put up crime-scene tape. Do you think he was murdered?”
“Who would murder Mr. Oakes? He had, like, a ton of friends. Everyone in town loved him.”
“You never know.”
“Wait, I have a theory, and it’s a really good one,” a voice said, one Cameryn finally recognized. It was Lyric. She had the floor, and she looked as though she was enjoying it. This wasn’t a group that usually paid attention to her.
Lyric slid her fingers through her blue hair and then squeezed it at her crown, fluffing the locks so they fell in ringlets. Her eyes danced as she announced, “Okay. Here it is: spontaneous human combustion.”
Cameryn groaned.
Lyric was sitting four people away, so she leaned forward to swivel her head toward Cameryn. “No, Cammie, I’m serious. It’s a real thing. Adam and I looked it up on the Internet, and there’re tons of articles about it. There’ve been people all over the world who, like, just”— she snapped her fingers—“burn up, right in their own beds and stuff, without any reason at all. Their houses aren’t on fire or anything, not their sheets or their walls or anything around them. Go look it up if you don’t believe me.”
“I know all about spontaneous human combustion,” Cameryn replied.
“Then you know they just find the bodies with the torso all burned up, and maybe an arm or a leg left in a pile of ash. I think maybe that’s what happened to Mr. Oakes.”
Cameryn tried to keep her tone even. It embarrassed her that Lyric would reveal her bizarre theories in a group like this. In Lyric’s house, with her beads for curtains and her psychedelic posters covering every inch of her bedroom walls while incense wafted, Cameryn would listen to any wild hypotheses and try to give them their due. But this was different. She tried to telegraph this to Lyric, but for once her friend’s psychic connection failed her. Lyric kept right on talking.
Eyes bright, Lyric began a list of the dead. “Dr. J. Irving Bentley. His body was found in the bathroom. He burned a three-foot hole though the floor, with only one section of his leg left intact on the linoleum. Everything else, even his teeth, turned to ash.”
“Lyric—”
“Mary Reeser. All they found of her was backbone and a shrunken skull the size of a baseball, plus a foot in a slipper—I think it was black satin—and ten pounds of ashes. Helen Conway burned up like a Christmas log.”
“All right, all right. Lyric, you’ve made your point. It’s an interesting theory, except Mr. Oakes didn’t burn up like that. He didn’t turn to ash.”
“You told me he was cooked.”
Cameryn winced. That part wasn’t supposed to get out, and she could get in real trouble if her father discovered she’d told Lyric and then Lyric, in turn, had announced it to a table of A-listers at the school. For an instant she hoped no one noticed, but then she heard the whispers buzzing as this new piece of information got passed down the table. “Cooked,” she heard someone say, followed by, “No way! ”
“We really don’t know anything yet,” Cameryn declared loudly while shooting Lyric a hard look. “That was just a theory. The autopsy results aren’t in yet.”
Undeterred, Lyric said, “Maybe Mr. Oakes had a
partial
spontaneous human combustion. Maybe this is something new.”
“Yeah, like
that’s
what happened,” Kyle murmured under his breath.
Now it seemed everyone at the table was looking at Cameryn, trying to read her reaction to this latest theory. “It doesn’t do any good to speculate,” she argued. “Not when the results aren’t in.” She could feel the heat rise in her cheeks as she saw Lyric as the others must see her: a blue-haired girl with wild theories, probably believing in the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot. Cameryn didn’t want these students to think she was like that. Her interest was real science, not hokey Internet theories.
When Lyric stated, “I’m just trying to think outside the box,” Cameryn forced a smile and murmured, “It’s more like outside reality.”
The kids at the table laughed at this, and Cameryn felt her spirits buoy. “Ooooh,” Jessica cooed, “sounds like trouble in paradise.”
Shocked and stung, Lyric glared at Cameryn, her eyes blue lasers. Cameryn held up her hands and said, “Sorry, Lyric, I didn’t mean it to come off like that.”
“Well, it did!” Adam said, speaking up for the first time. His pale skin looked even more pallid as he stood beneath the humming cafeteria lights. “Lyric put a lot of work into this idea. We were on the computer half the night, printing files. You can at least keep an open mind.”
“But Adam, those people you’re talking about were piles of ashes, which Mr. Oakes was not, so right there your theory doesn’t fit. Besides, we know what causes spontaneous human combustion. There’s something that starts it, like a dropped cigarette onto the chest of a person who has already died. The nightshirt or whatever starts to burn and the person’s own fat becomes the fuel. That’s not what happened here.”
Indignant, Lyric grabbed her lunch and stood up beside Adam, gripping the tray so hard her fingers blanched white. “
We
know? It’s bloody amazing that you always know everything about
everything
! I think Adam and I will finish our pizza somewhere else.”
Cameryn was incredulous that Lyric would work herself up and overreact that way. She didn’t know what to say. She could feel her own body tense as she stared, her gaze faltering, at Lyric’s indignant expression. It was obvious Lyric was waiting for her to react, but Cameryn didn’t know what to say with an audience looking on. She and Lyric had fought before, but never in front of witnesses. Unsure, Cameryn said nothing.
“Okay, well, have a
great
lunch,” Lyric told her, glaring. Then, turning on her heel, she stomped off with Adam trailing behind.
Now Cameryn did find her voice. “No, Lyric, wait! ” she cried, but Kyle, with his steadying hand, whispered, “Let her go. You guys should work this out when it’s just the two of you. Cammie, I like Lyric, I really do, but . . . she seems a little intense.”
“She’s my best friend.”
“Who probably needs a little space right now. Don’t you think?”
Cameryn bit her lip as she watched Lyric’s retreating figure. Adam had draped his thin arm across her, like a shawl, and Lyric’s head was bent as she listened to whatever it was Adam was telling her. A moment later they were gone.
“I don’t even know what happened there,” Cameryn said softly. “I don’t understand why she got so mad.”
“She was hurt because you blew off her theory,” Kyle told her. They were at the end of the lunch table, Kyle at the corner and Cameryn next to him. He pulled her toward him so that her back was now turned toward the rest of the table, and his voice was so soft she wasn’t sure she understood his next words. “I think I know how she feels.”
This checked Cameryn. She could feel herself wilt.
“You do?”
Gently, Kyle placed his fingertip beneath her head and turned it. He moved her hair, and his lips sought her ear, touching it as lightly as a butterfly. When he whispered to her, she could feel a flush warm her skin, as though the words themselves could leave the barest imprint on her flesh. They were in the cafeteria, surrounded by a cacophony of noise, the slamming trays, the eruptions of laughter, and yet the two of them were alone in their own private, whispered space.
“Will you laugh at me if I tell you something?” Kyle asked.
“No. I’d never laugh at you.”
She turned her face toward him, so close now their foreheads touched, and they held that pose for almost a minute before Kyle said, “Because, believe it or not, I have a theory, too.”
His breath was hot between them.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’m not sure I should say it out loud. Not here, anyway. Not now. I’m not sure it’s even right. But it just keeps going through my head, again and again.”
“I’m the assistant to the coroner. I think you should let me decide. Does it have anything to do with extraterrestrials? ”
Kyle’s brown eyes darkened. “I’m not kidding, Cammie.” “Sorry,” she said. “Don’t keep me in suspense. Lunch is almost over, and I won’t be able to wait until after school. So tell me!”
Kyle took a breath and let it out slowly, a warm plume of air on her lips. For a moment he was quiet, blinking. Then he whispered, “I think . . . I think I might know who killed Brad.”
Chapter Eleven
“NOW I’VE HEARD it all,” her mammaw cried. “First a man dies with no explanation, and then the small-town rumors start flying like feathers in the wind. You know the story about gossip and feathers, girl?”
“Yes, Mammaw, I know the story,” Cameryn replied. It was one of her grandmother’s regulars, a morality tale she dragged out whenever she saw the need. Throw a handful of feathers into the wind and then try to catch them, which was impossible because the feathers had already been swept to the four corners of the earth and no one could ever gather them up again. Mammaw said the story was Irish, but Cameryn doubted this.
She couldn’t help but think her mammaw’s hair looked like feathers. White tufts stood out from her head, curling softly at the ends like down pulled from a pillow.
When she spoke, her soft Irish lilt curled the edges of her words, too. But Cameryn knew better than to be fooled by the soft periphery. In addition to her Irish looks, her grandmother possessed an Irish temper, and her eyes, when angry, didn’t resemble the blue sky so much as cold steel.
“Don’t go ignoring me when I’m telling you a truth,” Mammaw said now. “You’re accusing a perfectly wonderful man on no evidence at all. It’s shameful, is what it is! ”

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