By Jeffrey Ford
Stan Lowell was awake at 6:10 on that Saturday morning near the end of September when the phone rang. He’d been up half the night, sitting at his desk, nursing the phantom pain in his ivory foot. Lately, he’d gotten into the habit of taking morphine pills. When he’d started in mid-summer, one would do the trick, but he’d graduated to three as the cooler weather came on. Dr. de Vries never would have approved. Luckily, the amputation site flared up only once a week, no more, no less. Always some time after midnight. Which midnight it would be, though, was ever the question. The drug never eased the infernal ache, somehow separate from his body but no less agonizing. He sat through each episode in a stupor, listening to the ticking of the grandfather clock and the wind in the oak outside the study window.
On the third ring of the phone, he looked up and realized the pain had fled, as it usually did, at the first sign of daylight. Only on overcast mornings did it linger past breakfast. Stan scrabbled out of the chair, shook his head, and rubbed his face. He hobbled across the study and lifted the receiver.
“Lowell,” he said.
“Coroner,” said a quiet voice on the other end of the line.
“Detective Groot?” said Stan.
“Death never sleeps.”
“Where?”
“You know where Hek’s Creek runs along the west side of the Polson place?”
“The fishing spot,” said Stan.
“Yeah,” said Groot. “Bring the camera. I’m heading back out there now.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
Stan dressed in the only suit he had, a brown one, which he kept cleaned and pressed for official county business. He had a hat that matched it pretty well, which he hardly ever wore, and a mustard-colored tie held in place by a gold clip in the shape of a honeybee. Last, he put on the circular glasses, which did nothing for his vision but did, as his late former boss doctor de Vries had predicted, in conjunction with the suit, convince the citizens of Midian county of Stan’s “relative intelligence.” By the time he slipped sock and shoe over the ivory foot, which had the scrimshawed image of a devil beneath the heel, his left calf muscle had unclenched and the stiffness had worked itself out. He grabbed his bag and the camera and, no longer hobbling, but moving almost gracefully, left his house. Out on the porch, he felt the cold and stared out at the giant white clouds above the yellowing tree tops. For a moment, he forgot where he was going.
He drove through the center of Midian proper. In addition to it, there were two other towns, Hekston and Verruk, that comprised the county and thus his jurisdiction. Situated along the Susquehanna River, north of Chenango, it was the smallest county in the state of New York, and existed only due to the factories of Madrigal’s Loom, “manufacturers of fine woven products,” and some ingenious gerrymandering on the part of politicians. Each of the three towns had a main street, a factory, and a few neighborhoods. Midian, slightly larger than its brethren, had the hospital, a movie theater, and the county library. Factory towns nestled amid farmland and sugar maple forest.
Leaving town, Stan passed the first of Madrigal’s red-brick monstrosities, its smoke stack jutting into the blue sky. He thought of the three factories as hives, one in each town, abuzz with electric weaving. De Vries had told him that old man Madrigal had been the father of Midian County. “At times the place bears a striking resemblance to the jackass,” he’d said. Whatever shortcomings William Madrigal might have had, though, without his commerce, it was clear enough to all that the 20th century would never have taken hold in that locale. Thanks to Madrigal’s tenacity, the modern age had sunk its roots and slowly spread like the forest. Now, even in the midst of the Depression of the 1930’s, Madrigal’s sons kept it all going through a combination of cuts in work force, hours, and wages. In addition to their sheer determination, they counted on those roots to keep the whole enterprise from sliding away down the river.
With the banks of the Susquehanna in view, Stan took a left and headed up a steep road canopied by orange leaves. Halfway to the top of the hill, the pavement ended and the road turned to dirt track. Off to his right, through breaks in the trees, he caught glimpses of the sparkling flow. At the top of the hill, a meadow was fenced by a stone wall, which, he’d once been told, dated back to the 1700s. He spotted Groot’s black Model B and a Midian squad car pulled over to the side of the track. He parked behind them and grabbed his bag, strapped the camera around his neck.
The meadow grass was loaded with dew and a light haze drifted just above the ground, although the sky was clear and bright. He noticed red leaves on the stand of trees that hid the creek, and realized winter was closer than he’d thought. Up ahead, a short, bald man, stocky, in a long black coat, the hem of which trailed in the wet grass, took four steps into the meadow, stopped, flashed a silver lighter, and lit a cigarette. His face was as wide as Edward G. Robinson’s, his lips turned down at the corners.
“Morning,” said Groot as Stan approached.
“What have we got, detective?”
“A floater,” he said and took a drag. “But, ah...” Groot looked off to the west. “There’s something different about this one.”
“What?”
“You’ve got to see it for yourself,” he said and turned back, smiling.
As always, Stan was disconcerted by the dark round birthmark at the center of the detective’s forehead, often mistaking it for a fly. Whenever Stan glanced at it, he had a sense Groot was watching him.
They walked in among the trees and due north to the creek.
“The waterline’s been way up since the flood in July,” said Groot. “Two kids come fishing this morning early and found the body. They ran back to town and their parents took them to the station. Loaf is watching it so it doesn’t head down stream any further. We left it in the water for you.”
“Officer Lougher?” said Stan. “Midian’s finest?”
Groot smiled, shrugged, and flicked his smoke away onto the fallen leaves. The water came into sight and Stan was surprised to see how much it had risen. They stepped into a clearing along the bank and Officer Lougher turned and tipped his cap to Stan.
“You’ll want to be seeing this,” said the cop and waved for the coroner to step closer to where the willows hung over a natural pool. It was a legendary fishing spot, a centuries-old depression where the water was trapped and turned slowly before rejoining the swifts of Hek’s Creek.
As Stan drew near, he saw something pale, slowly turning in the calm green eddy. The surface was littered with willow leaves, here and there a yellow one from a maple, and amidst this debris of autumn floated a young woman, face-up, naked, her long black hair fanned about her head. Her arms lolled peacefully at her sides, her legs slightly open, dandelion seed in the black tangle of pubic hair, her breasts peaked above the waterline. Stan noticed no obvious signs of corruption in the flesh, but the open eyes still glistened; the startled gaze of the recently drowned.
Groot sidled up next to the coroner. “Every time I look at her I think she’s alive,” he said quietly.
“She’s not,” said Stan.
“It’s the smile,” said Lougher. “What’s she smiling about?”
“Risus Sardonicus,” said the coroner. “A spasm of the facial muscles after death. But this isn’t the usual grin. The eyebrows aren’t lifted, the mouth isn’t open, her teeth aren’t showing. Instead, she looks like she’s lost in a fond memory.”
“I thought she was mocking me,” said the cop.
“She’s got a secret,” said Groot.
“She’s certainly got something,” said Stan. He raised the camera and unlocked the bellows. “I’ll get a couple of shots of her in the water and a couple on the bank here when we pull her out.”
“I looked around a few hundred yards along the creek in either direction. Didn’t see anything. She probably washed down from Hekston. The creek’s deep enough since the flood,” said Groot as Stan snapped away.
Stan lowered the camera. “She’d have been in the water for quite a while,” he said. “I’m surprised she looks as good as she does. No noticeable bloating. What time did the kids find her?”
“About 5:30,” said Lougher.
“OK, Loaf, let’s get her out of there,” said Stan.
The officer leaned over and lifted an eight-foot wooden pole with pulleys and, running its length, a stiff cord with a small noose at the end. “I haven’t fished here since I was a kid,” said Lougher as he dangled the noose out above the young woman’s left foot.
“Be gentle,” warned Stan and handed them each a pair of gloves.
“Like a mother,” said the officer as he reeled the body in .
Groot joined them and they hoisted the dead girl onto the bank. They moved her with such ease it was as if she was simply sleeping. Her skin was as cold as ice and yet firm to the touch. She exuded an aroma of flowers.
“Roses,” said Groot.
“Wisteria,” said Lougher, who then sniffed again and changed his verdict to “lilac.”
Stan stared at her expression. Her face was undeniably beautiful but the smile now appeared more wistful than serene. A hint of loss had at some point crept into it. He set the camera down and got on his knees next to her. Moving her head carefully from side to side and lifting her shoulders, he looked for the pooling of blood—lividity—caused by the posture of a corpse in the water. There were no signs in the usual spots for a drowning victim. This meant the young woman had floated, flat on her back, most of the way from wherever she’d come, and yet rigor mortis hadn’t seemed to set in yet.
“Pretty recent?” asked Groot, lighting another cigarette.
“I can’t tell,” said Stan. “Could be. No wrinkling, no foaming, no trace of insects. When you guys get her to the hospital I’ll take a look at her and see. Most unusual, though,” he said, lifting the camera. He backed away and snapped a string of pictures.
Groot walked him halfway across the meadow.
“I’m going to the diner for breakfast,” said Stan. “I’ll be over to the hospital in about an hour or so.”
The detective nodded. “The body’ll be there. I’ll come for the lowdown when I get off this afternoon.”
“By the way,” said Stan before turning toward his car, “how’s your wife doing? Last I saw you, she wasn’t well.”
“Oh, yeah, it was just the flu. She told me the other day that she’s ready for me to retire,” he said, his fat face slowly forming a grin.
“What’d you tell her?”
“I laughed,” he said and laughed without making a sound.
#
Stan limped over the uneven ground back to his Chrysler. On his way to town, he recalled the summer’s flood—sudden, massive, and devastating. People had lost houses, cars, pets. He’d seen more than a couple of floaters, as Groot called them, that week in July, but none of them looked like this girl. As he drove along, he played Best Guess. Someone up in Hekston would I.D. her from the photos. The loom there had been hit the hardest with lay-offs and since the flood a bad spirit pervaded the place. Murder, suicide, an ill-fated accident, none of them would surprise him in the least. As he pulled to the curb outside the diner, he dismissed the foul play theory as preposterous. De Vries had always told him never to trust a best guess.
Stan sat in his usual seat at a table by the window that looked out on the corner of Ninevah and Oak. Bissie Clayton brought him his free coffee.
When he’d returned from Europe, the only one of twelve young men from the county to make it home alive, it was late winter, 1919. He was on crutches, still weak from the effects of the mustard gas, and the father he’d meant to please by enlisting in the Marines was dead. Junietta Poole, the girl he’d been going with, had run off to New York City with his cousin. His mother was losing her mind, and his older brother and sister had fled to Binghamton and Syracuse respectively. He couldn’t find work; who wanted an amputee? One day during that dark time, as he was passing the diner, Bissie came out onto the sidewalk and called to him.
“You’re the boy from the war,” she said. “Lowell.”
Stan stopped and nodded.
“Whenever you want, come and see me for coffee and a meal. Don’t be shy,” she said.
He thanked her, but it was weeks before he took her up on it. He waited till he was desperate for a decent meal. Bissie was good as her word. Before he left Clayton’s that day, she slid a piece of paper along the counter to him. On it was a name and address. “Go see this fella. He wants to talk to you about a job,” she said. Even after he started working for de Vries, and was able to pay for his meals at the diner, Bissie never charged him for coffee. The doctor liked to recount a story about Bissie from when she was much younger and a stranger had tried to rob the cash register when her back was turned. “She beat him into the emergency ward at Midian General with a skillet,” he’d said. “Two more whacks and I’d have been doing an autopsy on him.”
“Lowell,” she said. “You’re here early for Saturday.” She took a seat across from him and set the pot down on the table. There was a jar between them holding dried chrysanthemums. A fly, like Groot’s birthmark, bothered the window glass. She filled the seat and then some, her forearms like James Braddock’s, her sparse white hair trapped in a spiral by bobby pins. On the days she made soup, she wore a hair net.
“There was a body up in the creek,” he said. “Not for general knowledge, you understand. Off the record.”
“I already heard,” she said. “A girl?”
Stan nodded.
“I heard she looked like an angel.”
“Not knowing what an angel looks like, it would be difficult for me to corroborate that,” he said and sipped his coffee.
Bissie laughed. “You’re a wise ass,” she said.
“Actually, there was something... interesting about her.”
She stood and smoothed her apron. “You should be that interested in the live ones,” she said, and walked back toward the counter where two out-of-towners in hunting gear waited for her. “The usual?” she called back over her shoulder.
“Yeah,” said Stan.
The plate of creamed chipped beef came, a steaming cloud of froth on toast. He ate it three times a week and knew it would eventually kill him, but Bissie made it even better than they had in the service. He washed it down with the coffee, which, though free, wasn’t good but was hot, and tried to determine from memory how old the young woman in the pool had been. He surmised late twenties, but she could have been younger. With that smile, the bright eyes, her beauty, he could, at the very edges of his imagination, picture her walking, laughing, sleeping. Then something strange occurred that had never happened before, her name came to him out of the blue—Alina.
#
The coroner’s official offices were next to the morgue, in the basement of Midian General Hospital. One of the rooms, no bigger than a large closet, held a desk with a lamp, a chair, and two filing cabinets. Three times larger was the autopsy room with a table and counters and as many of the latest tools, testing equipment, and paraphernalia as de Vries had been able to wheedle out of the county, state, and federal governments. He’d done pretty well by the office until the Depression hit, had even gotten Stan a salary as his assistant although the work load for the entire county was light. Keeping up with the advancements in forensics went right out the window, though, once the “dirty thirties” rolled in. When the county threatened to eliminate the assistant position, de Vries retired and handed the reins over to Stan. Not long after, he died.
A portrait of the old man hung above the coroner’s desk. It was Stan’s habit, before every autopsy, to sit for a minute with his mentor. Occasionally, de Vries’s voice would sound in his head, usually no more than a line or two and always something he’d actually said when he was living.
“What of Alina?” Stan thought as he studied the portrait—the pointed white beard and thick eyebrows, the shelf of a forehead and a smile like the doctor was chewing a cricket with his right molar.
“Don’t name the dead,” Stan heard the doctor say. “They have their own names. They’re not pets.”
He found her laid on her back on the table in the autopsy room. At first glance, the body looked as fresh as when they’d pulled it from the creek. On the counter lay a note penciled in Groot’s terrible handwriting—right buttock. As Stan pulled on gloves and set out his instruments, he noticed the faint scent of flowers. Then he turned to her and saw her smile. It appeared not to have physically changed one iota but now it conveyed something wholly different, a deep sense of irony he’d not detected before. He was certain that if she could, she’d be shaking her head in disapproval. Loaf had said he thought she was mocking him, and now Stan understood why.
He began by rolling her on her left side, per Groot’s note. What he found on the right buttock was a surprise—a mark of raised skin as if she’d been branded by a hot iron. The scar was old, no more than four inches around, some sort of symbol he couldn’t quite make out. It appeared to be an oval, filled with crosshatching, and there were five small projections; four round, one pointed. Holding her in place, he moved his position from nearer her head to down by her legs and from that new perspective the wound became clear. It was a crude rendering of a turtle. He rolled her completely onto her front and then fetched his pencil and pad. As he sketched the figure, he had the faintest inkling that he’d seen it somewhere before.
He undertook a gross examination of the corpse, checking for bruising, cuts, or scrapes. As he worked methodically through his autopsy checklist, it slowly dawned on him that the preservation of Alina’s corpse was something quite remarkable. He’d read about other such cases. Religious history was littered with them. Incorruptible flesh, the scent of flowers. De Vries had shared his opinion on the matter. “Most of them are fakes,” he’d said. “And the ones that are real have been preserved intentionally by people or by the environment in which the cadaver was laid to rest. There’s nothing holy about it. They’re desiccated turds. End of story.”
Considering the tenor of the times, a miracle didn’t sound as bad to Stan as it had to the doctor. Still, he wondered, if it was a bona fide miracle, what would it change? He couldn’t think of a single thing and continued with the examination. He checked the girl’s airway, which was clear, looked for insects or larvae but found none, which could obviously be due to the fact that she’d been in the water, collected a few willow leaves from her long hair, and drew some blood. Taking the phials to the work counter, he prepared three slides and used the rest to set up chemical tests for poisoning.
Eye to the microscope, he looked for a number of things, but he was most interested to see if perhaps the blood held any freshwater organisms. He’d learned of the technique from de Vries, who’d said he’d heard of it from others, although it was not yet a widely known or approved test. “If the victim drowns,” he’d said, “their attempts to breathe, their gasping, will draw the water deeply into their lungs, all the way to the capillaries where blood and oxygen meet and are exchanged. It’s possible that microscopic organisms from the river will have time to travel to distant locations in the body’s blood stream before death steps in.”
“Steps in,” thought Stan, and it struck him as to how often the doctor had ascribed human qualities to the final process. He adjusted the focus and peered into Alina’s blood. He poured over the slides for three-quarters of an hour, but they revealed nothing. The tests for toxins revealed nothing. Not only was he sure she’d not drowned, but it seemed that she’d never actually died. Instead, she was just dead.
He considered cutting her open, but of late there were rumblings from the state about his lack of credentials as a forensic medical examiner. He wasn’t a doctor, and therefore not a medical examiner, nor did he have any official official forensics education. What he did have was more than a decade working as an apprentice to de Vries, who had been a doctor and, although he had no special degree confirming it, had been considered a forensics expert.
After retirement, de Vries had pulled strings with the governor’s office to have Stan appointed to the county coroner’s position, which gave him legal right to investigate a death in any manner he saw fit, whether he was a doctor or not. Stan knew his tenure was out of the ordinary, and at times he felt pangs of guilt about it, but he was also certain he’d gotten a better education at de Vries’s side than he might have at a university. The days when de Vries’s name carried weight in the county or at the State House, though, were swiftly receding into the past. Dr. Rashner, the state medical examiner, would have to come over from Albany to take a look at Alina. Given the lay-offs at the capitol and the turgid manner of the way things moved through the bureaucracy now, it could take a while. He didn’t like to think of the young woman stuck in a cold drawer in the basement of Midian General, but he also felt some relief at being able to foist the determination of cause of death off on Rashner. “It can be his miracle,” thought Stan. “I’ll be happy just to keep my job.”
While he was writing up his report at the counter in the autopsy room, he stopped, stuck on precisely the words he might use to describe her appearance. He needed to dispense with “remarkable” or “unusual” and instead stick to cold, clinical, physical descriptions. He turned and looked at Alina. Her body lay as he’d left on completion of his examination, her head cocked to one side. She was staring at him. Her smile was the expression of an old friend, as if he’d made a foolish joke that was funnier for the inevitability of his foolishness than for the joke itself. He got off his stool, approached the table, and studied her pale lips. Her face was like a fine marble sculpture, and the moment he had that thought, he remembered de Vries teaching him how to make a death mask.
The doctor had been a man primarily of the 19th century, but when he passed into the modernity of the 20th, he smuggled, like plundered artifacts, old secrets and forgotten techniques. Before photography was widely available, when an unidentified corpse was discovered, the coroner or examiner would use plaster to capture the exact features of a victim in a mask to be used for possible identification after burial. The corpse that de Vries had used to demonstrate the craft belonged to Leon, the erstwhile hospital janitor, who’d been found dead in his apartment from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the heart. “We will memorialize Leon Chechik,” said the doctor, who’d been the dead man’s chess opponent for twenty years.
Today, Stan worked quickly as de Vries always had. “If there’s anything worth doing, it’s worth doing fast,” the old man liked to say. The recipe for the plaster, the steps of the procedure all came back to Stan in a rush. He worked as methodically as the grandfather clock, mixing the plaster, cutting strips of gauze. After covering her face entirely with Vaseline, he began to apply wet strips of bandage. He started beneath her chin and worked his way up, pressing the slippery cloth firmly to the contours of her jaw. As the plaster spread above the lips, he thought of her sinking into white water. Within an hour of starting, he reached her scalp. While the bandage covering dried, he called the hospital cafeteria and requested they send him two eggs.
The next stage of the procedure was to cast a finer plaster mask from the bandage mold. The trick, as de Vries had told him, was to achieve just the right consistency of plaster. You wanted it to adhere to the inside of the crude mask without dripping or sloughing off. Stan remembered the doctor adding two eggs to the final mixture and referring to it as the batter. This was to be applied to the bandage mask with a tongue depressor, “Like you’re frosting a cake, but on the inside,” de Vries had said.
Stan felt a sense of relief as he gently pried the cast off Alina’s face, but her smile, when it came into view, revealed her displeasure. “My apologies,” he said, but her expression scorned him as he applied Vaseline to the inside of the mask. Once the eggs were delivered and the batter was mixed, he turned away from her and went to work. “You want a mask, not a bust,” de Vries had said. “Keep the internal layer thin.” Stan followed every instruction and the end result was remarkable. He’d not only reproduced her looks, but even the smile was intact. Although whatever she’d actually felt was beyond him, at least in plaster she finally seemed at peace.
#
By the time Detective Groot arrived, the corpse had been assigned to a drawer in the ice box, and Stan sat, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, in his small office, smoking a cigarette. He lifted his leg and pushed an empty seat toward the detective standing in the doorway. Groot took off his coat and shoulder holster, draped them over the back of the chair, and sat down with arms folded.
“Good day?” asked Stan.
“Just some broke people fighting with each other. Everybody’s getting ground down. More of the same.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“How’s the Mona Lisa?” Groot asked.
Stan shook his head, and said, “It beats me. I don’t know what killed her. I’m pretty sure she didn’t drown. Another cardiopulmonary arrest, if you catch my drift.”
“What’d she have in her stomach?” asked Groot.
“I didn’t open her up. It’s a bad time politically for me to be playing doctor. I’m gonna call in Rashner and let him take a look.”
“Understood,” said Groot. “But it’d be good to have something to go on. They’re gonna give me maybe two days to try to figure this out, and after that she goes into the Lost and Found with the rest of the unknowns and we let the devil figure it out.”
“I know,” said Stan. “There’s really nothing. I took her prints, so you can check those, for what they’re worth. The turtle on her rear end looked to be done with a thin, heated piece of metal. That could be significant if you can find who made the brand or who did the branding.”
“Jesus,” said Groot. “A turtle on your ass. What does it mean? All I can think of is how the turtle beat the rabbit.”
“That’s a tortoise and a hare.”
“Same bunk,” said Groot. “Slow and steady wins the race.”
“I took some more shots here you can use to look for an I.D.” said Stan.
“I’ll ask in town tomorrow morning and then go up to Hekston and see what I can find.”
“You’ll find something.”
“I was thinking about her all day,” said Groot. “I think she has to be a suicide.”
“Why?” said Stan.
The detective shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess I just can’t think of anything else.”
“I came up with a name for her over my creamed chipped beef this morning,” said Stan. “Alina.”
“Whoa,” said Groot in a near whisper. “Alina...”
Stan laughed but something in the way the detective winced made him decide not to reveal the death mask.
The detective stood and slowly slipped on his holster and jacket. “I’ll let you know what I find.”
“Good enough,” said Stan.
Groot saluted and left, whistling Moonglow on his way down the hall.
#
Stan pulled into the driveway at dusk, exhausted from the exertions of the day and all the previous night. He gathered his bag, the camera, and a green cardboard box, and headed for the porch. When he reached the front door, he found it unlocked. He entered the living room. There was a small blonde woman wearing a sizeable pair of glasses sitting on the couch. On the low table in front of her was an ashtray, a pack of Camels, an open bottle of Old Overholt, and two tumblers, one, a quarter full. Soft music came from the cabinet radio standing next to the staircase.
“You started the party without me?” said Stan.
“I had a realization today,” she said to him, leaving her shoes on the floor and curling her legs up under her flowered skirt. “Come here and I’ll describe it to you.” She patted the empty seat next to her on the sofa.
“Oh yeah?” he said. He walked into the dining room and left his things on the table, draped his jacket over the back of a chair. “A realization, no less.”
He sat down and put his arm around her. She sipped her drink. “A lot of people come to the library during the day who are out of work,” she said. “They have no place else to go, nothing to do. They come and, even if they haven’t read anthing since grade school, they start reading again.”
“Well, that’s good,” said Stan.
“Sure,” she said, and shrugged Stan’s arm off to lean forward. She poured him a drink and handed it to him. She lit a cigarette, took a drag, and gave that to him. “But I noticed today that the people who don’t have anything to do but read, read differently than the ones who are still working.”
“How?” asked Stan, giving her back the cigarette.
“With a kind of desperation,” she said.
“You mean, like it’s a chore?”
“Worse than a chore,” she said. “I thought up a phrase for it this afternoon: infernal labor.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know what it boils down to in the end,” she said. “I have to think about it some more. I heard you were up by the creek this morning.”
“News travels in Midian,” he said.
“A young woman?” she asked.
He nodded. “I can’t figure out what killed her. It’s the damndest thing. She’s preserved somehow. Like a saint.”
“Intriguing,” she said.
“Intriguing but frustrating.” He stood up, went to the dining room, and returned with the green cardboard box. He set it on the table before her and sat down again. “Cynthia,” he said. “You may find this strange.”
“Stranger than you?” she said.
He reached forward and lifted the lid off the box.
“What is it?” she asked, peering inside. A moment later, she said, “Oh, that is disturbing.”
“It’s a death mask,” he said. “The young woman.”
She took it in her two hands, and brought it up to stare face to face.
“Smell it,” he said.
She wrinkled her nose and looked at him.
“Do it,” he said and nodded.
She brought the thin plaster visage closer. “Like a garden,” she said and smiled.
“And the smile?” asked Stan.
Cytnhia took a long look, holding the face at arm’s length. “Not always nice,” she said. She put the mask back in the box.
“I haven’t seen that smile yet,” he said.
“What ones have you seen?” she asked.
He took up his drink and listened to the music.
#
Later, just after midnight, Stan had a dream about the war, the shrapnel in his foot, the mustard gas poisoning of the wound, the amputation, the pain, and he woke to it, grunting.
“What is it?” said Cynthia.
Stan rolled to a sitting position at the edge of the bed. “It’s the god damn foot,” he said. “Two nights in a row.”
“Is there something you can take for it?” she asked.
“I’ll get it,” he said. “Just go back to sleep.” He lifted himself onto his good foot and then slowly brought the ivory one to the floor. Ever so gently, he applied pressure until it could bear his weight without making him scream. He hobbled to the doorway, grabbed his robe, and went for his bag. “Two nights in a row,” he said and downed three pills at once with a shot of Old Overholt. Then he picked up the mask and the cigarettes. In his study, he listened to the wind and the clock. The ghostly ache was far worse than usual. Cynthia had asked him earlier why he’d made the mask, and he hadn’t been able to answer. Now, groggy and high, he found all kinds of answers.
At dawn Cynthia helped Stan from his study to the bed. He laid his head on the pillows, and she spread the blanket over him. He could barely keep his eyes open to say goodbye. She was already wearing her coat and hat before he managed to get the word out. She kissed him and, as always when she stayed overnight, left early, not wanting to be seen by the neighbors as she made her way up the street.
Flat on his back, staring at the ceiling like a body in the pool at Hek’s Creek, Stan remembered the last time he’d asked her to marry him. A month earlier, in the library, just after closing. He was helping her in the stacks. She was squatting down, arranging a bottom row while he reshelved books from a cart next to him. He said simply, “Will you marry me?” It was his second try in as many years.
She laughed and stood up. “You’re sweet,” she said. She drew closer to him and put her arms around his waist. He kissed her. She hugged him and stepped away, bringing her hands up in front of her. “No,” she said.
“A peculiar woman,” was how de Vries had described her. Stan’s relationship with the librarian had begun in the last year of the doctor’s life. The old man had ticked off the reasons for his negative assessment—her clock garden, her voluminous reading, her insistence on being heard. “A good heart, but peculiar,” he’d said. “And not all that good-looking.”
As for her part, Cynthia said of de Vries, “He has a brilliant mind and a ponderous ego.”
At the time, Stan had pretended not to understand either of them, but now he wondered as he drifted into a swiftly moving dream of the summer flood.
Five hours later, the phone rang and its persistence pulled him from the depths. As he lifted the receiver next to the bed, he checked the alarm clock. It was 11:15 AM.
Bleary, rubbing his eyes, he propped himself on his elbow and said, “Lowell.”
“Coroner,” said Groot.
“Yes, detective,” said Stan.
“I’m in a pay phone at the Rexall in Hekston.”
Stan was about to ask why, but the events of the previous day came back to him. “Did you find something?” he asked.
“Are you busy today?” asked Groot.
“What have you got?”
“I want you to come up here and identify a body.”
“A dead one?”
“Not exactly. Meet me at the Windemere bar down by the river, next to the factory. Veersland Street.”
“It’ll take me about an hour to get there.”
“12:30. I’ll be way in the back in a booth,” said Groot and hung up.
Stan replaced the receiver and fell back into the bed and the lingering scent of Cynthia’s perfume. Now that he was fully awake, he discovered he was nauseated from the whiskey and pills. He lay still for five minutes but eventually rolled out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. Twenty minutes later, he’d puked, showered, and shaved. Staring into the mirror, he rinsed the razor and took in his weary eyes and pale complexion. The ghost of a pain was making him old.
#
He dressed in the brown suit, the mustard tie, the gold bee clip, gathered his bag and the camera, and stepped out the front door into a brisk, blustery day. He got in the old Chrysler and headed north, out of town. Soon the blocks of houses became pasture. The cows gave way to fields of dry corn stalks, which gave way to nothing but deep woods on either side of the cracked highway. Leaves tumbled and blew and the brooding clouds moved swiftly, suddenly revealing beams of sunlight and just as quickly swallowing them.
The journey to Hekston may have been beautiful, especially that time of year, but the town itself held a bad old memory that never faded, no matter how many years had passed or how many times Stan visited there on business. It happened some time after he’d started with de Vries, in the winter of ‘21. The road was dirt back then. The doctor was summoned by the police about a murder, the victim of which they’d just discovered. At that time, Stan worked in the doctor’s office and only assisted him in the autopsy room. This time, de Vries had said, “I want you to come along.” Stan was excited at the prospect. The murderer was still at large.
The victim, Mrs. Obalan, a large, middle-aged woman, bloated, with skin the palest green, lay in a blood-drenched sheer nightgown, on her dining room table. Her throat was slit and a chunk of flesh had been torn from her upper arm; another from her left cheek. De Vries hadn’t been in the room a minute before he pointed to the brutal wounds and said, “Teeth marks.” Sullivan, Hekston’s chief of police, a big, dull-looking man with a neck beard, leaned closer to see what the doctor was indicating. He nodded. “Are ya saying he ate her?” De Vries pointed to a pool of vomit on the floor. “I’m afraid it was a repast too rich,” said the coroner with a smile. Stan could hardly bear the sight of the woman’s remains, but when the mess on the floor was pointed out, he got dizzy. He’d seen men slaughtered by the dozen in France and nearly died himself, but this was something else entirely. He backed away into the living room of the apartment and just made it to the couch before passing out.
Later, while the doctor was filling out paperwork in Sullivan’s office and Stan was sipping a cup of black coffee that the chief had promised, “always helps when you’re caught between a shit and a sweat,” one of the Hekston cops came in and said, “We got a report Obalan is holed up in that old carriagehouse behind the church. ” The chief took his feet off the desk and grabbed his hat. Standing, he said, “You want to come along, doc?” De Vries said, “Of course.” He and Stan rode in the back of the chief’s car. The officer who’d brought the news sat up front in the passenger seat.
Night was falling fast and it had begun to lightly snow when they pulled up in front of the church. There was a patrol car there and a cop standing by the corner of the building. Sullivan got out of the car holding a flashlight. He drew his gun and motioned for de Vries and Stan to follow at a distance. As they came up to the corner of the church, the cop who’d been standing lookout turned and put his finger to his lips. He pointed toward the carriagehouse, and whispered, “In there. I seen him moving around before it started to get dark.”
Sullivan and his men trotted across the open field. They held up outside the broken door and the flashlight beam came on. As the police entered the dilapidated building, de Vries grabbed Stan’s arm and pulled him out of the sheltering shadows of the church. He fell once as they crossed the field, but the doctor helped him up and supported him the rest of the way. By the time the coroner and his apprentice reached the carriagehouse, the police had already passed through two rooms. In the third, an empty garage, Sullivan and his men stood just inside the doorway. The chief pointed the flashlight into a corner of the darkness. There sat a heavy-set man in his late forties, balding, with a gray mustache, his back against the wall. He wore a white, sleeveless undershirt, the front covered in dried blood, which was also smeared across his lips and cheeks.
He stared, glassy-eyed into the beam of light, and said, “She made me sick.”
Sullivan aimed and fired. Stan didn’t have a chance to look away. The bullet struck Obalan in the right temple, slamming his head back into the wall. His body twitched twice but remained seated. The wound smoked for a moment, appearing in the glow of the flashlight like a spirit leaving the body. There was hardly any blood.
After the echo of the gunshot died away, de Vries said, “Innocent until proven guilty, I assume.”
The chief shrugged and said, “A clear-cut case of resisting arrest.”
Nothing nearly as harrowing would happen on the job again. In the years that followed, Stan learned that the position of coroner was a relatively quiet one, lonely afternoons spent discovering and recording the secrets of those in whom life had lost interest. Still, the memory of that day in Hekston, with its pathetic horror and de Vries turning a blind eye to Obalan’s summary execution, never diminished.
#
Stan pulled into town and headed down toward the river. Bad memory notwithstanding, Hekston didn’t look that much different than Midian. People were on the street, going about their business, steam billowed from the factory. He passed the grade school and saw a gang of kids gathered in a ring, playing at some game. A flag flew outside the municipal building.
He found the Windemere, a sagging wooden establishment with a wraparound porch on the bank of the Susquehanna. Its sky-blue paint was chipping and its window panes were smeared. Stan figured it had obviously been a house at one time prior to the turn of the century. As he climbed the steps to the front door, he checked his watch to make sure he wasn’t late.
Inside, it was dark, and it took a moment for his vision to adjust. He stood in the entrance and watched the forms of three old men on stools cohere out of the shadows. The light behind the bar was dim. A white-haired woman in a plaid flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up, waved Stan over and said, “What’ll you have?”
“I’m just here to meet someone,” he said.
“A stout fella?”
Stan nodded. “That could be him.”
“Go on,” she said and nodded toward the dark back of the place.
He stepped around some tables and peered down a long row of booths. Way at the end, just barely visible, a leg jutted into the aisle. As he approached that table, he heard Groot’s voice.
“You’re punctual,” he said.
“The job drives you to it,” said Stan as he took a seat on the bench across from the detective. “Who are we hiding from?”
Groot said, “I gave Loaf a few pictures of the girl to pass around Midian and I came up here at daybreak. I showed the girl’s picture everywhere. No one knows her. Never seen her. I drove over to where Hek’s Creek comes off the Susquehanna and it’s moving pretty fast. By then it was around 10:30. I decided to stop and get some lunch, so I came in here for a sip. While the woman up there was drawing my beer, I showed her the photo. I asked her, ‘Do you recognize this person?’ She said, ‘No.’ But when I went to sit down, she told me, ‘Wait, let me see that again.’ She looks at it, smiles and says, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen her.’”
“Where?” asked Stan.
Groot took out his cigarettes and put one in his mouth. He flipped the lighter open and sparked it. Instead of lighting the butt, though, he held the flame aloft, toward the wall. “Right here,” he said.
The flame illuminated a small painting Stan hadn’t previously noticed. He stood and leaned in close to the picture, careful not to let Groot set his tie on fire. It was a portrait of a young woman with long black hair, wearing a white gown. She stood on an oddly shaped boulder that had a profile like a face, an outcropping of a nose. She and her perch glowed as if standing in moonlight against a black background darker than her hair and sparsely dotted with stars. The lighter went out, but a moment later Groot managed to revive the flame. “The smile, coroner,” he said.
No matter how many times Stan looked away and then back at the painted face, he saw his Alina, exactly as she’d looked on the autopsy table. “It’s her,” he said.
Groot closed the lighter and slipped it back in his coat pocket.
“You know why no one knows her?” asked Groot.
Stan sat and shook his head.
“I found a date in the bottom right hand corner. 1896.”
“She looks the same after almost forty years?”
Groot took a sip of his beer. “The whole thing’s cocked up,” he said.
“Does the bartender know who did the painting?”
“She said it’s always been here as long as she can remember. This place was a bar for quite a while before Prohibition, and even in the dry years it masqueraded as a restaurant with a speakeasy in the basement. What I need to find out is who lived here when it was a residence, but that might be hard to come by.”
“You’ve got to find some old-timers,” said Stan.
Groot nodded.
The detective took the painting off the wall and carried it in two hands to the bar. Stan followed him. “I got to confiscate this as evidence,” he said to the bartender.
“No one’s gonna miss it,” she said. “I’m probably the only one who knows it’s there.”
“I’ll return it to you when the investigation is complete,” said Groot. “Do you know anybody in town who might be familiar with local history, going back a ways?”
The bartender grabbed a coaster and a pencil. As she wrote, she said, “Try this guy. Joe Venner. He’s old as dirt, but he’s got a good memory. Still comes in here on the days he can get his body out of bed. I’ll call him and tell him you’re coming over. He’ll be glad for the company.” She handed the cardboard circle to the detective. He shifted the painting under one arm, said “Thanks,” and looked at the address.
Out in the parking lot, Groot said to Stan, “Did I hear her describe me as ‘stout?’”
“Yeah. Stout fella,” said Stan.
Groot spat. “You want to go talk to this guy?”
“The old man?”
“We’ll show him the painting.”
They took Groot’s Model B. Ten minutes later, they were in a furnished room over a delicatessen, sitting at a table with the venerable Joe Venner, an obviously shrunken man, curled like an autumn leaf. He wore a moth-eaten cardigan over a flannel shirt and sipped at a pint of Overholt. Stan noticed that the man’s glasses were even thicker in the frame and lenses than Cynthia’s. The space was cramped beneath slanted ceilings of exposed wood. There was one small window at knee height that lit a patch of floor. The old man had a bed, a desk, a bookcase, and a trunk used as a dresser. There was a single bare bulb suspended from a cord overhead.
“What do you want to know?” asked Venner.
“Can you tell us who this is?” said Groot, holding up the painting. “The picture is dated 1896.” Setting it down in front of Venner, he said, “What about the girl? Do you remember her?”
The old man winced, tilted his glasses an inch downward, and stared at the portrait of the woman on the rock. He touched a trembling finger to his lips and then shook it at the painting. “I don’t know who she is,” he said.
“Do you know any local artist who might have painted it?” asked Groot.
“I don’t know shit about art,” said Venner. “I worked every day of my life till I couldn’t work anymore, first in the fields, then in the loom. The novels I read have pictures on the covers. That’s what I know about art.”
“OK,” said the detective. “Thanks for your time.” He reached forward to lift the painting off the table.
“Not so fast,” said the old man, putting a hand on Groot’s right forearm. “The big rock in the picture is a real place. I remember it from when I was a kid.” Venner went silent for a time, dredging his memory.
Stan asked, “Do you remember where?”
The old man nodded. “It’s in the woods halfway between here and Verruk. Nobody lives out that way, so the rock’s probably still there. Some people called it the Wish Head and some called it the Witch Head, depending on what side of the Susquehanna you lived on. I went there a couple of times with my parents. We walked for miles over fields and through the woods to get to it. People came from all around to climb up on the head. There was a place for your first foot in the groove of stone that was the chin of the face. There was a place to hold on in the right eye, and the nose was like a platform. You were supposed to get up there on top and this part I can’t remember for sure. But it was either that you made a wish, or you prayed to God, something along those lines.”
“If you wished up there, it came true?” asked Groot.
Venner laughed and sipped at his bottle. He nodded. “I suppose that was the idea. People said it was ‘ground magic,’ like it comes up out of the earth through the head.”
“Do you remember what you wished for?” asked Stan.
“Only the one them. I must have been ten or eleven.”
“Did it come true?” asked Groot.
“Hell no, I wished I’d never get old,” said Venner.
Stan let out a laugh.
“I whispered my wish to my father that night before going to bed. I didn’t understand then why he laughed,” said the old man.
“There’s young and then there’s young,” said Groot. “You’re young in the head, Mr. Venner.”
“A very sharp recall,” said Stan.
“You two don’t know yet,” he said. “When you get old, you think more about the past than about what you did five minutes ago. Time changes.”
“We’re gonna go out to the Wish Head, can you draw us a map?”
#
It was mid-afternoon, the temperature had dropped, and the sky had grown darker. A strong wind blew leaves across the field in the woods. Positioned in the very center of the open expanse in the trees, as if consciously placed there, was a flat-topped granite behemoth that really did have the contours of a human head. It took no stretch of the imagination to see that, nor to read the expression it wore, one of subtle contempt. Groot stood face to face with the boulder, jotting notes in a pad.
“What are you writing?” asked Stan. “It’s a boulder.”
“My impressions,” said the detective.
“What have you got so far?”
“Big gray rock,” said Groot.
“Do you feel any ground magic?” asked Stan.
The detective cocked his head as if listening for it. Stan looked back from the center of the field at the woods. A gust of wind brought the first drops of rain.
“Maybe,” said Groot.
“I know what you mean,” said Stan. “I’ve seen enough. Let’s get out of here.”
“Hold on a minute,” said Groot. “We’re not done yet.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” said Stan.
“I’m too old and too fat. By the time I made it up there, I’d have to wish for my last breath.”
“You’re talking to a man with a fake foot.”
“Think about how wonderful it is up there.”
“I’m afraid of heights.”
“You can make a wish,” said the detective.
“Oh, shit,” said Stan and took off his jacket and necktie and handed them to Groot. As he approached the stone face, he tried to remember what Venner had said about climbing it. He immediately found the groove in the lips of the old frowning face and secured his good foot. He hoisted himself up against the rock and was able to grab the depression in the eyehole. From there it was a mad scrabble upward.
“Very athletic,” called Groot when Stan reached the nose.
Working to catch his breath, Stan said, “If I get struck by lightning, tell Cynthia I love her.”
“Will do,” said the detective.
Stan turned toward the forehead. “This is crazy,” he said, and then went into a crouch. A second later, he sprang upward against the hard rock and grabbed for the edge of the boulder’s flat top. He managed to get a hand-hold, and then swung his leg up over the ledge. From there, he used his arms to pull himself forward onto the crown of the head.
Groot applauded.
Stan stood up and, a little dizzy from the height, stepped away from the edge. He gazed out across the field and felt the wind and a light rain on his face. “Make a wish,” he heard from below.
“If it comes true, you might not be there when I come down,” Stan called back. He looked up into the dark sky. “A wish,” he whispered, and thought about what he wanted. The first idea he came to was to pray for Cynthia to marry him. But just as quickly came the thought, “What if it came true?” That’s when he hit upon something more practical. He closed his eyes, raised his hands out at his sides, and made his plea to the powers of the earth that the ghost pain in his foot be exorcized and leave him forever. Doubt ruled his mind but somewhere in one of its hidden corners existed the anticipation that he’d feel something, a twitch of electricity in his joints, a fluttering of the heart. What he felt, after giving it two solid minutes, was nothing. He opened his eyes and realized the rain was falling steadily now.
“How goes it?” called the detective.
“Less than magical,” said Stan, who lowered himself to his knees and crawled back to the edge.
“Watch your step,” said Groot as Stan dangled off the nose, trying to achieve a foothold in the lips.
“There,” said Stan, finally anchoring himself in the groove. As he let his weight down, his dress shoe slipped on the wet rock and he fell backward onto the ground.
“What did you wish for?” asked Groot, helping him up.
Stan stood, his white shirt and trousers marked with dirt, and arched his back. “I’ll tell you if it comes true,” he said.
The detective handed him his jacket and tie. “Did anything happen up there?”
“Yeah, I banged my knees a dozen times and have cuts all over my hands.”
“But ground magic?” said Groot as he took out his notebook.
By the time they made it back through the woods, and to the car, darkness had fallen and the rain had become a downpour. On the return to Hekston, the radio played quietly, and the wipers beat beneath the music. The detective drove slowly through the storm. “Deer all over the road this time of year,” he said.
“I know,” said Stan. “Take your time.”
“We did a lot today,” said Groot. “But really, at the end of it all, I’ve got nothing but a big rock.”
“You’ve got the painting,” said Stan.
“That has to be a coincidence.”
“The fact that it’s the spitting image of a young woman in the ice box in the basement of Midian General or that you found it?”
“I don’t like it,” said the detective. “Any of it.”
From that point on, with the exception of Groot singing along to the radio—“Heaven, I’m in heaven”—they drove the rest of the distance to Hekston in silence,
There were quite a few cars in the parking lot, and the The Windemere glowed from within. Groot pulled up behind Stan’s car. The rain had slowed to a drizzle.
“OK, coroner,” he said. “That’s enough for one day.”
“That’s plenty for me,” said Stan. He opened the door, and before he could say good night, the detective said, “Wait, I want you to take the painting.”
“Why?”
Groot reached into the back seat, grabbed the picture by the frame and lifted it into the front. “Go ahead. Take it over to the hospital tomorrow and take a look at it with her there. I want to make sure what we’re seeing is what we’re seeing.”
Stan touched the painting and for an instant felt the loneliness of the dark back booth where they’d found it. He got out of the car. “Driving home from Hekston with this thing in the back seat. Jeez, I’d rather climb the rock again,” he said.
“That’s what I was thinking,” said the detective and hit the gas. The sudden velocity slammed the door shut, and the car traveled a graceful arc through the parking lot, spitting gravel in its wake.
The moment Groot was gone, Stan felt Hekston’s dark spirit closing in. He clasped the painting hard under his right arm and made for his car. As he walked, memories of the Obalan case came back in brief flashes. Before getting in, he stowed the picture in the trunk to avoid any possibility of it appearing in his rear view mirror during the trip. Pulling out of the parking lot, he headed up the street toward the highway turn-off, his mind buzzing like one of Madrigal’s mills, weaving strands of the Wish Head, Alina, Joe Venner, the painting, scenes from that long-ago night with de Vries, into a snarled and snarling tapestry. It was hard to concentrate, and he traveled slowly until he reached the town limits. The rain began to fall in earnest, and he flicked on the wipers. Once over the town line, his thoughts calmed a little and he picked up speed.
There was no moon and the long stretch of highway through the woods was pitch black. Stan hadn’t seen another set of headlights for miles. He thought about his wish made standing atop the boulder. He remembered the rain on his face and the rush of the wind. The scene was vivid in his mind when a six-point buck stepped, seemingly out of nowhere, into the beams of the headlights. He was stunned. The creature was fewer than twenty yards away and was staring directly at the oncoming car. The light gleamed in its enormous eyes. Stan jammed the brake pedal with his ivory foot before his good one was even off the gas and cut the wheel to the right with both hands. The car went into a skid, the back end hurtling toward the animal. He braced for impact, but it never came. Instead, the car snaked off onto the shoulder of the highway, over a small rise and down into a hollow ringed by oaks where it rolled to a smooth stop. The branches overhead blocked the rain. With the exception of Stan’s heavy breathing, it was perfectly silent and perfectly dark.
He sat forward and turned the key. The car gave him more silence for his effort. He tried a dozen times, whispering strings of curses. Deciphering what might be wrong was out of the question. He was no mechanic. The thought of being out on the highway in the dark, rain drenching him, trying to flag somebody down, made him weary beyond reckoning. He slowly reached for the door handle, but before his fingers touched the metal, he felt the invisible worm begin to gnaw at the heel of his missing foot. The second he noticed it, the pain started to spread, and he pictured the scrimshaw devil dancing.
“Not again,” he said aloud and pulled himself up to a kneeling position on the front seat. The pain moved to where the arch of the foot should have been as he leaned over the seat into the back and rummaged through his bag. He felt the small bottle of pills and pulled them out. Removing the cork stopper, he carefully poured the bottle’s contents into his hand. Then he turned and sat back into the driver’s spot. He reached into his pocket for his lighter. Like the glow from Groot’s lighter in the back booth at the Windemere, Stan’s flame revealed something startling. There were only four pills in his palm. All that was left. They weren’t easy to come by and the doctor who prescribed them was getting suspicious. In addition, the pain now seemed to be coming every night. He considered these dilemmas briefly but in the next moment popped all four tablets in his mouth and swallowed them dry.
There followed a long dark period of intense agony, which set him sweating and groaning, but soon enough he forgot about how long a time it had been. His eyes adjusted to the night and he could now make out the dials on the dashboard, the empty pill bottle on the seat, and beyond the windshield, the silhouette shapes of tree trunks. The drug, of course, had nothing to do with the pain, but it did distract him with slippery thoughts and bouts of twisting memory.
Often, when in the throes of this pain, he thought about the ivory foot, saw its off-yellow sheen and its delicate sculpture—the cuticles, each articulated toe. He’d never experienced a twinge of discomfort from what wasn’t there until he was fitted for the prosthesis. He recalled de Vries revealing why he’d ordered that the foot be made from ivory. “I once knew an old man,” said the doctor. “He had been a sailor. He had an ivory hand, which had been made for him in Java by a native craftsman. The fingers were frozen in the act of taking something, but at the same time you swore the pale thing moved of its own accord. The old man told me that unlike modern metal prosthetics, ivory holds on to the life of the limb.”
“And what’s so good about that?” Stan said aloud and came suddenly back to the fact that he was stuck in the woods in a dead car miles from Midian.
He rolled down the window, took out his cigarettes, and lit one. “It holds onto the life of the limb,” he said and shook his head. “More like its death.” His hands trembled from the pain he’d again become aware of. His only escape was into memory, and he began to let his thoughts slip away to the first phantom attack, two weeks after the foot had been fitted, but something he saw through the smoke drew him out of his reverie. He tossed the cigarette and waved his hand to clear the air. Through the windshield, he recognized the dim image of a pair of eyes staring in at him. He felt a jolt of panic in his chest, and then a second pair of eyes slowly divulged themselves. Stan looked out the side windows, and more were there as well. The deer crowded around his car, staring in. He wondered how long they’d been there watching him writhe and complain.
“What do you want?” he yelled and they bolted, vanishing into the night. He rolled up the window and locked the doors.
Stan slept and woke later to the dark. The first thing he realized, after recalling he was stranded, was that the pain was gone. He couldn’t believe it, and concentrated hard to try to feel its bite. Not sunrise yet and the ivory foot felt fine and he’d actually dozed off. He rubbed his face with both hands, smoothed his hair back, and took a few deep breaths. No longer groggy but still somewhat giddy from the pills, he leaned forward and turned the key.
The sudden sound of the engine coming to life momentarily frightened him. Then he let out a laugh. He put the car in reverse and eased down on the gas pedal. The Chrysler responded, backing slowly up out of the ring of trees. At the top of the rise, he cut the wheel to the left, hoping to bring the front around so he wouldn’t have to back down onto the highway. When the car was perpendicular to the incline, he felt the pull of gravity and feared the vehicle might tumble on its side, so he shifted quickly and spun the wheel in the opposite direction. Gliding down across the shoulder and out onto the road, he beeped the horn. The highway was empty and there were no deer along the tree line. Off to the east, the sky had begun to lighten.
#
When he got into Midian around nine, he needed sleep, but there was something he wanted to tell Cynthia. He drove over to the library, at the edge of town, forgetting halfway there why he wasn’t heading for bed.
The Midian County Library had been a gift to the community from William Madrigal. In the late 20s he’d had an abandoned estate completely refurbished, from the marble floors to the gold leaf constellations painted on the dark blue ceilings. Handcrafted book shelves lined the three stories, the mansion’s rooms turned into library sections. What had been the nursery now contained the library’s entire holdings on philosophy. The kitchen held crime and adventure. The master bedroom, history. Madrigal hadn’t skimped in his endowment, and the place continued to have a healthy budget even through the lean years.
In the center of that rectangular mansion was a courtyard, sixty feet square, open to the sky. In the confines of that space, Cynthia had planted her Clock Garden—a circular bed, divided by white stones into twelve equal wedges, the points meeting at the center. Within each bed was planted a different type of flower chosen for the time of day it either opened or closed. Some were wild, like the hawksbeard and foxglove, and some were planted each year from seed like the zinnias. As the flowers opened and closed around the circle, they told the time of day. Goat’s beard opened first, then chicory, and later, around six, the dandelions. At the halfway point of daylight hours, the clue to the time was in a blossom’s closing.
On the south side of the garden, facing it was a curved stone bench. Stan sat next to Cynthia, holding her hand, his eyes half-closed. It was cold in the courtyard and the garden was devastated. Curled brown maple leaves had blown over the walls and were trapped amid the drooping stalks. Colored petals were scattered on the dirt. A handful of black-eyed susans held on, wilted at the edges, as did most of the wedge of chrysanthemums. Time had run out for everything else, though, including Stan, who lifted his legs and curled up on the stone.
He tried to tell her about his day with Groot and the near-accident, but his mind kept veering off the highway toward sleep. “There was a painting,” he told her, “and this big rock, and we talked to an old man.” His strings of phrases ended in sighs.
“You’re exhausted,” she said.
“Thank you,” he whispered, blinking like a tired child.
“I’ve got to get back to work,” said Cynthia. “What did you want?”
“The pain in my foot, I know it’s gone. I made a wish.” He folded his arms and laid the side of his face against the cold stone. “Do me a favor and look up the Wish Head or Witch Head in local history. It’s out on the way to Verruk.” he told her.
“What is it?”
“A giant rock in a field.”
“OK,” she said. She got up and patted him on the shoulder. Turning, she headed through the remains of the garden toward the courtyard door. She looked back at him once more before entering the building. Stan lay on the stone bench, eyes closed, and dosed in the early morning sun.
#
That afternoon, in the empty autopsy room in the basement of Midian General, Groot sat on a high stool, his heels hooked on the bottom rung, and Stan leaned against the lab counter, telling the detective about his ordeal in the woods.
Groot laughed. “Well, in about two hours, I’m officially done with this case,” he said. “They’re making me move on to something new. Your Alina is bound for the Heartbreak file.”
“Rashner’s sending his guys this evening to pick her up and take her to Albany so he can do an autopsy. When you leave, I have to bag her for them.”
“I hope she at least perplexes the asshole.”
“That would be sweet of her,” said Stan.
“Go get the painting,” said Groot. “Before she’s gone I want to match the painting and the body.”
Stan went into his office and returned with the canvas they’d picked up in Hekston. He led the way into the morgue and Groot followed.
“The quietest spot in town,” said the detective as Stan leaned over and opened the door to the bottom slab in the refrigerated unit.
“Alina,” he said as she rolled forth. When she was completely in view, Stan stood straight, and he and Groot were quiet for a moment, contemplating her expression.
“She looks pissed off,” said the detective.
“I’d say pensive,” said Stan. He held the painting at arm’s length. “What do you think?”
Their glances moved from the painted figure to the body and back.
“The eyes are definitely a match,” said Groot. “And the mouth is very close.”
“I think it looks just like her,” said Stan.
“As close as you can get with a painting.”
“What does it mean, though?”
“I don’t know,” said Groot. “One thing I did happen upon, though, this morning at the diner. These two guys from the factory were having coffee and talking about hunting and such in the area when they were kids. I lost track of what they were saying for a while, and then one says, ‘Some of these turtles around here live over a hundred and fifty years.’”
“You think the brand on her rear end has something to do with that?” asked Stan.
“Who the hell knows,” said Groot. “Close her up. I’ve had enough.”
As the drawer holding the body rolled back into darkness, Stan said, “You want the painting?”
Groot hesitated, then grinned until he caught the coroner glancing away from his birthmark. “I gotta take it back to Hekston next time I go up that way.”
“Will you dig around anymore for this case?” Stan asked, heading for his office. Groot followed.
The detective shook his head. “This shit doesn’t make sense to me. I’d rather forget it. I’m retiring anyway.”
Stan laughed. “Been talking with your wife some more?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Groot and took a seat near the office door. Stan rested the painting against the wall as he sat down at his desk. He swiveled the chair around to face his associate.
“What are you going to do when you retire?”
“My wife wants to move to the ocean. Which one she means or whether she means it, I’m not sure.”
“You’ll miss Midian,” said Stan.
“I don’t think so,” said Groot. “This case gave me the jitters.” He obviously had more to say but hesitated, closed his eyes momentarily and shook his head. “I wasn’t gonna tell you this, but on my way back from Hekston last night, I passed this woman, standing on the side of the road. In the middle of nowhere out there in the woods. Not a stitch of clothes on her. Long hair.”
“Alina?” asked Stan.
“It happened so fast, I never got a good look at her, but it was enough of a look to know I didn’t want to go back for another. I never slowed down. Somewhere between there and home, I decided to retire.”
“Are you sure you saw something?”
“No,” said Groot and stood up. “I’m not, really.”
Stan leaned back, grabbed the painting and handed it to him. They shook hands. “Here’s to the devil taking off till the end of the year.”
“Good luck, detective.”
“Coroner,” said Groot, tipped his hat, and stepped into the hallway.
#
That night, Stan lay next to Cynthia in his darkened bedroom. He had his arm around her. Her glasses lay on the nightstand, her head rested on his chest.
“The Wish Head,” she said. “I found two brief articles about it. It was either erected or discovered by a group called the Schildpad in the late 1620s. They were a pagan group made up of Dutch trappers and traders who lived by their wits in the woods. They believed there was some kind of magical energy in the earth, you could draw its power into you by standing atop the Wish Head.”
“The old man, Venner, said the same thing about the rock,” said Stan.
“There was a brief piece about a witch, Griet Vadar, associated with the Schildpad, who lived in the 1800s. She was captured by settlers in the area, tried, weighted with stones, and thrown in the Heckston River. That’s pretty much all there was.”
“The Schildpad?” said Stan. “Never heard of them?”
“Sort of like a homespun religion, created out of the life they lived in the wilderness. Schildpad is Dutch for turtle,” she said. “They were turtle lovers.” She laughed and lifted herself up to see if he was smiling. “Sounds crazy,” she said.
They rested back on the pillows. It seemed only a minute or two before he felt, in her heartbeat, her breathing, that she was asleep. He thought he’d have no problem following, but something wasn’t right. He knew it wasn’t the fact that they’d had to close the case on Alina. That was a turn of events both he and Groot favored. The mystery of what had happened needed to be laid to rest in one of the dark drawers in the basement of the hospital and locked up for good. He recalled de Vries explaining to him once, “There’s going to be times when you have to admit you’re stumped.” But he was already there, more than willing to move on. Then he thought of the word “stumped” and realized what it was that kept him awake.
Ever since his encounter with the deer the previous night, all through the long drive that followed, sleeping on the cold stone bench before the Clock Garden, meeting with Groot, bagging Alina for Rashner’s flunkies, and making it through the rest of his day—all those hours and he’d not felt the slightest twinge of pain from his foot. Where there was no pain, there was nothing. The ivory piece no longer felt an extension of himself, but just some cold block of something swinging off his ankle. It wasn’t so much painless as it was lifeless now.
“The granting of my wish?” he wondered and pictured himself standing upon the stone head in the field. “Cured by earth magic.” He rolled out of bed, careful not to wake Cynthia, and limped to where his robe hung. He put it on and left the bedroom. On his way down the hall to his study, he whispered, “Or cursed by Griet Vadar?”
Sitting in the same comfortable chair he had occupied during his bouts with the phantom limb, he poured a tall whiskey from the decanter on his desk. He sipped and listened to the wind in the trees outside the window and to the beat of the grandfather clock. It became clear to him that the emptiness was seeping out of the ivory appendage and invading the rest of his body. He drank faster, thinking that might stave it off. “Calm down,” he whispered to himself. “A dead woman is not stealing your soul.” He poured another drink, downed a quarter of it, and had a creeping inclination to add a couple of morphine pills to the mix. “Not smart,” he thought. “I’m getting all worked up just so I can have an excuse to take the drug.” To distract himself, he got up and walked across the room to fetch the mask, which lay atop a pile of books on a shelf. Returning to his chair, he held it in front of his face, so that he was eye to eyehole with it.
The white visage was smiling, almost broadly. Her always-closed lips appeared just on the verge of opening. If he hadn’t been holding it, he’d have sworn the facial muscles moved, but what muscles?—it was plaster. She was beautiful, no doubt. He stared for a long time, the grandfather clock chiming the hour at some point. De Vries appeared in his memory, standing over the corpse of a cherubic-faced child he’d just finished sewing up. “Remember,” the old man had said, “Death is our business, but we should never become friends with it. It’s single-minded and exquisitely shrewd.”
Stan poured some more whiskey into the glass on his desk. His entire body felt numb, his mind dull. “What do I want?” he wondered. He closed his eyes and swayed, sitting forward in the chair. The wind blew outside, and the tall clock chimed again. He fell back, the mask hanging from a finger hooked through its right eyehole. His eyes were closed, he was breathing deeply, but in the next instant, he sprang up and hurled the mask. The white face shattered against the glass clock face and littered the floor. Crossing the office, he opened his bag and retrieved his pills. Returning to the chair, he placed them within easy reach on the desk. He freshened his drink and waited.
The pain started so subtly, like an eye opening, and that was all for a while. When he felt the first twinge of real discomfort, he took two pills and washed them down with a long swallow. Then there it was, the pain as he’d missed it, moaning like a ghost. He winced, he groaned, and his mind swirled with dark thoughts. At one point, he had a premonition that Groot would never see retirement. He saw the dogged detective clutch his chest and fall over into the field before the Wish Head. Then the birthmark lifted off, and flew, buzzing through the coroner’s skull.
#
Stan was awake when the phone rang at 6:06 the next morning. He pulled himself out of the chair and answered it. “Midian coroner,” he said.
“Stanley, is that you?” The voice was angry. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Doctor Rashner, did you get the body?” Stan asked.
“Are we playing games? Are you mocking me?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Stan.
“I read your report. Incorruptible flesh, a victim who has died but exhibits no signs of death. Then I open the body bag, and what do I find?”
“The woman?”
“A bag of rotten leaves dug up from the creek bed. Have you lost your mind?” yelled Rashner.
There was silence, and then the medical examiner said, “I want an explanation.”
Stan looked up, noticed the first light coming through the window, and realized the pain had once again vanished. He lifted his left leg a few times to feel the life in it. Rashner was still talking, but Stan hung up, his attention drawn to something on the floor. Alina’s mouth had separated from the mask and lay unbroken. He walked over to the smile, hesitated for a moment, and then picked up the piece of plaster. Brushing it lightly with his thumb, as if it had kissed him, he slipped it into the pocket of his robe.