The morgue was a room beneath the hospital where the coroner and medical examiner had small glass-partitioned rooms with typewriters and charts and blotters. They were used to it, but it was all new and dreadful to Camellia Dupuis.
There was water on the cement hallway floor, collecting about a plugged drain. Overhead light bulbs were incased in wire mesh. The morgue proper was off to the left, through a heavy leaded door with a huge latch.
Despite steeling herself for this, Camellia needed to be held up by Monroe. The body was on the table in this small cement room that smelled of blood and antiseptic. A sheet covered it. The coroner—Mackey, a transparent and fussy man with fuzzy blond hair and weakened milky eyes—stood beside it, looking at her. Behind him was a large white basin. To one side of that a calendar from May 1939, the month Will Jameson had died. There were other deaths, of course—but the two recent ones were the first murders in town since Mrs. Dupuis.
And it seemed absolutely obvious to them that Camellia, the murderer’s daughter, would be caught up in it. All the signs had been there from the time she was a girl—passed over then with reservation to be appraised now. Her peals of laughter at the convent, sitting in detention four hours a week—all the signs never thought about until something like this was done.
Each of these men wondered how she would react. This was a typical point of pride with them. There was no way she could act that wouldn’t be deemed culpable if they themselves decided such.
“Well, are we here,” Mackey said.
She looked straight ahead as the sheet was taken off.
“You see why we need you here.”
She glanced at the body, understood and nodded. It was a man whose face was battered and partially missing. It lay with blackened fingers turned toward her. The silence in the room was profound.
“Can you tell?”
She nodded.
“You can tell it’s Reggie Glidden?”
“It is not my Reggie,” she whispered.
“Your Reggie. Mr. Monk, his closest relative, said today it is Reggie’s body,” the coroner said.
“It is not Reggie,” she said breathing quickly through her nose, a terrible scent of antiseptic decay.
“It is not Reggie’s—I mean, you would still say it wasn’t Reggie’s—maybe you didn’t even know he was going to do it—perhaps—” Crossman said, hoping for an admission where he could snare her and yet still have compassion for the memory of her as an innocent child, “perhaps you did not think he was capable of this?”
“I did not think the town capable of this,” she retorted in French, the one thing from her father she had not lost, that for the sake of his memory and her mother’s she had held on to throughout the difficult and lowly years.
They kept her another ten minutes, but she said nothing else.
The coroner covered the body, and she was led away. Once beyond the door, Mackey confronted her.
“Tell us why we should believe you,” he said, “when Mr. Brower don’t.”
“I long ago knew truth was not dependent on Mr. Brower,” she said. It was the harshest statement she had ever made against him, and caught them by surprise. But there once was a night when Mr. Brower had made a pass at a sixteen-year-old girl, which she never mentioned.
“He brought you up,” Mackey said, astounded—wanting more than anything to show that he was a part of her contrite accusers.
She said, “I am aware of that. And I know Reggie is not like that—he is not—circumcised. And you could see where Reggie’s left arm had mended—because he broke it baling hay—and his forearms were bigger—and his right arm damaged because they threw pulp sticks at him. His head, too, is bigger. I have said it is not Reggie—you wanted to display this poor man’s body to me—for some reason—to shock me into a confession—but it is not him.”
“Do you even know what circumcision means?” Mackey asked sharply.
“I know Reggie was not,” she said.
“Is Owen circumcised?” Mackey asked. Brand new to the town, he had to instill in others the fact that he was on their side. Never had anyone done this more slavishly.
She turned away from him and looked at Crossman, as if decency should prevail.
“That’s enough,” Crossman said.
Mackey did not say anything else.
“I want to go home,” she said in French.
But there was one other thing that night.
As she left she fainted, and had to be brought to her feet. She had never fainted before in her life. Of course, she had never been pregnant before either.