The Body Farm

It began with a letter. At least, that’s when it began for me. I worked the night shift and came home weary. The house was dark and silent when I pulled up in front. The sun rose bloody that morning, as though it knew what was coming. Heavy clouds soaked up the crimson light like a bandage over an injury.

I entered the house on tiptoe, listening for movement. You weren’t awake yet, my beautiful boys, four years old then. The mail lay scattered around my feet, pushed through the slot in the door sometime before dawn. I gathered it all up, noting absently that among the bills and catalogs was an electric-blue envelope of thick card stock, addressed to Beatrice. A yowl signaled the arrival of the cats, the only ones awake, three night-black silhouettes twining around my ankles. I stacked the mail on the kitchen counter with the blue envelope on top. I didn’t give it another thought as I went upstairs.

Beatrice was sound asleep in our king-sized bed in her usual pose, flat on her belly with her knees bent and shins lifted in the air. I have never seen anyone else sleep like that. Once I took pictures to show the friends who did not believe me, but Beatrice made me delete them.

I went to check on you. Technically you had separate rooms, but you always slept together. That morning you were tangled in a heap of sand-brown limbs in Theo’s bed. I lingered in the doorway, watching you dream, Lucas’s feet twitching, Theo snoring delicately. The sky brightened by the second. Soon your eyes would open at precisely the same moment, and at once you would both be talking, updating each other on your dreams, wondering what to have for breakfast, and continuing your ongoing, interminable debate about which one of you the cats loved more. There is no foggy transition between states of mind for children that age: one minute out cold, the next entirely awake.

As I stood in the doorway, the exhaustion of my long night fell over me. I staggered back down the hall and collapsed into bed beside my wife, dozing off as the house woke around me.

○

You did not know much about my work then. This was fine by me. If asked, you would both report that I did “science”—Lucas thickening the s’s with his adorable lisp. The specifics of my job were not important to you. You were scarcely out of your toddlerhood, sapling-skinny boys with identical crooked grins. Your existence revolved around the central hub of our house, our yard, your toys, and the cats. You knew that Beatrice (Mommy) stayed home with you, reading books about dinosaurs, making play dough from scratch, and kissing away your “boo-boos,” real or imagined. You knew that I (Mama) went to work and then came back again. What I did out there in the world, away from you, was inconsequential and vague. Your biggest concern about my job was that I always smelled like antiseptic when I returned. You both refused to get in my lap until I’d been home for a few hours, enough time to accrue the odor of cats and curry from dinner and a residue of Beatrice’s perfume.

At that time, I had worked at the Body Farm for nearly ten years. The official name is the Anthropological Research Center, but nobody ever calls it that. From the outside, the place is intentionally anonymous. A flat concrete building. A bland, unspecific name. There’s nothing else nearby—no offices, certainly nothing residential, just a blank strip of highway forty miles north of Lyle, Iowa, our hometown.

Visitors to the Body Farm are limited to the occasional police detective or forensic anthropologist. Sometimes teenagers from Lyle sneak over at night to see if the stories are true, but these would-be oglers inevitably find themselves stymied by the high concrete walls and motion-activated lights. Honestly, the smell alone is usually enough to deter them.

Behind the walls, the Body Farm comprises forty acres. The area was chosen for its variety: a stretch of forest, a stream, a meadow, zones of unbroken sunshine and perpetual shadow, a wetland, and a dry, high slope—as great a range of types of terrain as can conceivably be found in a single biome.

During that fateful winter, this idyllic stretch of midwestern greenery was inhabited by 127 dead people.

The purpose of the Anthropological Research Center is simple. Within its walls, corpses decay in every conceivable way, and my colleagues and I observe and record it all. How will a body deteriorate if we bury it in a shallow grave on a windy hillside? Will the data change if the corpse is nude, half dressed, wrapped in plastic, or slathered in sunscreen? What is the exact, mathematical progression of larval growth? What happens to the internal organs after four days, seven days, two weeks? What happens to the bones?

New corpses are always coming in. Thousands of people have signed up to donate their bodies to the Anthropological Research Center after death. (My own will stipulates the same.) Whenever a new cadaver arrives, the other researchers and I debate where to place it. Our aim is to study decomposition in every possible locale: riverbank, direct sun, partial shade, tall weeds, swamp. Each season of the year brings new information. Corpses are different from day to night, winter to summer—there’s always more research to be done. Should the cadaver be stripped naked this time? Should it be injected with heroin or OxyContin? Should it be hanged from a tree? What kind of data will be most beneficial? What gaps currently exist in our research? Once the corpse has been laid to rest—perhaps buried in sand, perhaps floating in the creek—its decay will be charted until nothing remains.

I’m one of eight on the team. Georgina is our botanist. Hyo specializes in fungi and bacteria—“the slime lady,” she calls herself. Kenneth trains law enforcement officers in the science of decomposition; they come from all over the world to learn at his feet. Luis focuses on microbes, a new and fascinating field, with groundbreaking applications for antibacterial medicines and anticancer chemotherapeutics. Jackson and Cal, both MDs, share the study of the corpses themselves. They dissect and photograph festering skin, weigh liquefied organs, slice up bones, and keep samples of blood at every stage of putrefaction. Then there’s LaTanya, who has the most difficult job of all. She serves as liaison, publicist, spokesperson, and official witness, testifying in court cases on behalf of us all and translating our data into digestible, user-friendly language.

I am the Body Farm’s entomologist. I spend my days among beetles and blowflies. I know the life cycles of pyralid moths and cheese skippers. In cold weather, I check for winter gnats and coffin flies. At a glance, I can tell the difference between species of insect eggs. The shelves in my office contain preserved larvae at every stage of maturation, lovingly coated in chemicals that won’t dehydrate the samples or change their color. My drawers hold trays of beetles, bright as pennies, and velvety moths arranged by size.

It’s disgusting work. But the grotesqueness of the Body Farm stands in direct proportion to its worth. Months, sometimes years after a corpse has been found, my colleagues and I can pinpoint the time of death, cause of death, manner and likely location of death, and more, offering a cornucopia of distasteful but salient facts. Killers have been convicted on the strength of our research.

The dead can’t speak for themselves. The story of how someone died—and, even more important, what happened to their body afterward—has fallen to me and the other researchers to uncover. I help put away “bad guys,” as you would call them. I name the nameless. Too many children die at the hands of a parent. The number one cause of death for pregnant women is homicide, usually by an intimate partner. How can a person walk around knowing these things and not participate in a solution? I get answers for the bereaved. I reunite the dead with their loved ones, bringing anonymous bodies, badly decomposed, home to the family who declared them missing months earlier. The dead can’t speak, but insect activity communicates loud and clear.

Still, I do not talk about my work with most people, and certainly not with my children. I have never told you anything about the Body Farm, my beloved twins—not until now, writing this letter, my confession.

○

On the day the blue envelope came, I woke with a foul taste in my mouth. Working the night shift always leaves me disoriented and bad-tempered. My colleagues and I take turns handling this unpleasant but vital task.

I climbed out of bed and washed my face in the bathroom sink. There was a bang, and one of you—I could not immediately tell which—dashed through the door and slammed into my legs. I let myself be climbed like a tree, then taken by the hand and led downstairs, where a glorious mess greeted me.

Given the bitter wind howling among the rafters, Beatrice had decided that this was a good day to make bread from scratch. She always spends the winter baking, chasing away the midwestern chill with the warmth of the oven and the comforting aroma of yeast and sugar. Flour coated the kitchen floor and hung in the air in a fine mist. Both of you were covered in it too, your curls powdered like the wigs of British lords. Music jangled from the radio. Scuffling around in the snowfall of flour, you two were playing the mirror game, imitating each other so closely that I could not tell who was leading and who was following.

At the counter, Beatrice kneaded a sticky lump of dough. A smear of flour painted one cheek. I leaned in for a kiss and realized that her eyes were bloodshot and swollen. She had been crying.

○

She and I did not have a chance to talk until your nap time. You were on the verge of giving up this relic from your toddler years. When Beatrice was on her own with you, she often let you skip it rather than risk a dual tantrum. I, however, intended to maintain nap time for as long as possible, until you were in college, hopefully.

I set you both in my lap in the rocking chair in Theo’s room and read the dullest, most repetitive nursery rhymes I could find. Against your will, you yawned, your heads drooping and rising again, each blink slower and more prolonged than the last. I nestled your precious bodies, limp in my arms, beneath Theo’s blanket. Your faces inches apart. Each of you breathing in the air the other had just exhaled.

Then I went downstairs and found Beatrice at the dining room table, her head in her hands, staring at the electric-blue envelope.

I sat beside her. I rubbed her back. She was crying again, no sobs, just a wellspring of tears that seemed to ooze from somewhere deep down.

“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered.

I picked up the envelope and pulled out the note inside—the same color and weight, azure card stock. Two words had been scrawled in ballpoint pen:

FOUND YOU

Beatrice wiped the tears away with her palm. “What are we going to do?” she asked, still in that throaty whisper. “What can we possibly do?”

I thought about burning the note or running it through the shredder in the office. But instead I put it carefully back in the envelope, preserving the evidence.

○

And now I must go further back. At the age of four, you were not particularly interested in how your parents had come to be together. You knew that having two mommies was slightly unusual but not unheard of. Domingo, a boy in your class at the preschool you attended a few mornings a week, had two daddies, and another girl lived with her grandparents, no mom or dad in the picture. Your teacher made sure to read books that highlighted all the different shapes a family can take.

For my part, I’m a gold-star lesbian and proud of it—no boyfriends ever, not even in my childhood, when all it took to become affianced to a classmate was a shove on the playground. I like the term sexual orientation (as opposed to sexual preference, the problematic phrase used in my youth) because it so closely mirrors my own experience. I was born with a compass in my chest that points truth north. There was never any question about which way the needle would lead me.

Beatrice, however, identifies as bisexual and primarily dated men before we met. That’s fine, nothing wrong with men, they just aren’t my personal cup of tea. But among her sensitive poets and tattooed drummers, Beatrice happened upon a sociopath. Or maybe that’s the wrong diagnosis—I don’t know, I’d never met the guy, not then, anyway. A bad egg, a ticking time bomb, pick your metaphor.

They dated in college, long before Beatrice and I found each other. I’ve seen pictures of Emerson: a corn-fed white boy, strapping and tall, with a receding chin. Beatrice never loved him. She was young, sowing her wild oats and reveling in being out of her parents’ house. After one single evening together, this man told her he planned to marry her. He told her he’d been waiting for her all his life.

She has never disclosed very much about that time. Even now, it’s hard for her to talk about. Emerson consumed her college years—I do know that. She stayed with him because he made it clear he’d kill himself if she left. No more wild oats. Four years of Emerson walking her to every class and panicking if she didn’t answer his calls. He bought her necklaces and bracelets and pouted if she didn’t wear them, which made her feel, she told me, like a pet with a collar. He pleaded with her to leave her dorm and move in with him off campus. She was able to hold him off only by blaming her parents, claiming they’d revoke her tuition if she did such a thing, though truthfully they wouldn’t have cared either way. In photographs, Emerson is always touching Beatrice, one arm snaked around her waist, sometimes holding her braid in his fist, while she flashes a fixed, panicked smile that does not reach her eyes.

After graduation she found the wherewithal to end it. She took a job in the Colorado mountains, miles from their New England campus. She did not tell Emerson a thing about it until the day of her flight. Then he wept, pleaded, and threatened suicide. He outlined all the plans he’d made for her life—marriage, dogs, babies, nothing she’d ever consented to. When Beatrice held firm, Emerson opened the window of her third-floor dorm room, now bare, all her things packed and shipped already. He flung one leg over the sill, yelling that he’d throw himself out if she left him.

This time, however, she was prepared. She called 911, and Emerson spent the night in a hospital on an involuntary psychiatric hold while Beatrice flew across the country, believing she was finally free.

○

We had a security system installed at the house the next day. You were both ecstatic to have workmen clomping up and down the stairs and looming on ladders outside the windows. Nothing this exciting had happened to you since a fire truck came down the street the previous afternoon. Shrieking and pointing, you shadowed the workmen all morning while Beatrice attempted to nap—it had been a sleepless night for her—and I guarded the bedroom door, keeping you out.

At nap time I tried to sedate you with fairy tales, but my plan backfired. You are growing, always growing up before my eyes. Suddenly you could follow the plot, whereas only a few weeks earlier you would’ve been interrupting me constantly to ask unrelated questions about the nature of time or farts. Now, however, the story caught your attention, and you sat up straighter in my lap. Your eyes shone. “And then what happened?” you each whispered at intervals. I ended up reading fairy tale after fairy tale right through what should’ve been your nap time, all damsels in distress and armor-clad knights and a happy ending, maybe with a moral thrown in.

My shift started at three that day. I did not feel right abandoning my family in this moment of crisis, but Beatrice rose from our bed and said she’d be fine, you’d all be fine. The alarm system was armed now, and she had let a few friends know what was going on. They’d be dropping by and checking in throughout the day. She promised to keep you both at home. She promised to text me instantly if anything untoward happened.

In the parking lot behind the Body Farm, I took my vial of peppermint oil from the glove compartment and dabbed a few drops, as always, beneath my nose. Over the course of the workday, I would become inured to the stench of decay, but the first wave was invariably overwhelming.

I passed LaTanya’s office on the way to my own. She was on the phone, leaning back in her chair and speaking in her most soothing customer service voice: “I understand, but that’s not information we have. I can’t help you. I’m happy to share what we do know at this point. However . . .”

She caught my eye, made her fingers into a gun, and shot herself in the head. I laughed and moved on down the hall. I did not envy LaTanya, always on the phone, on the go, consulting with overworked police officers and blustering district attorneys. Every murder case is an emergency, while our work remains gradual and complex and painstaking. Decomposition can’t be rushed.

Stepping onto the grounds of the Body Farm was like teleporting to some echelon of the underworld. An elderly woman lay swaddled in a heavy tarp, only one hand visible, curling limply upward, not yet touched by maggots. A teenage boy had been rolled in a pile of leaves, naked from the waist down, his limbs smeared with mud. Corpses in direct sunlight. Corpses on the riverbank. Some were fresh, still recognizably human. Others had decomposed to the point of genetic regression, returning to an amoebic state, pink and gelatinous, perfuming the air.

The afternoon was icy, the sky frosted over with pale clouds. Leafless trees surged in a stiff breeze. I wore my usual uniform—latex gloves, a surgical mask, and cotton clothes that did not retain odors as much as polyester. On the hill lay my first stop of the day: a twenty-two-year-old woman, dressed in jeans and a neon-green T-shirt, half-buried in soil. She had been there for six days, and her organs had melted into soup. Her torso appeared sunken, the ground beneath her stained and damp. Her brain, I knew, was already gone. The bacteria in the mouth worked quickly after death, devouring the palate, then everything else.

I opened my tool kit and took out my forceps. There were several maggot masses. I collected a few samples from each area, then checked the temperature of the flesh; the insects’ bustling generated its own heat. I plucked up the wriggling bodies with a practiced motion, dropping each one into a separate jar. As always, I kept half alive and killed half immediately, preserving them for later inspection.

Next I studied the area around the body. Since the corpse lay on a slope, some of its fluids had seeped downhill. Maggots always follow fluids. I dug through the leaf litter with a sterile tool. Insect activity is a fairly reliable measure of time of death, though many things can alter the data: if the body has been moved, kept in extreme cold or heat, or covered with fabric or plastic. Part of my job is to think of every possible factor that could alter the timeline, study each one, and keep records.

Not long ago, I discovered that cocaine in the bloodstream of a corpse will supercharge the maggots, accelerating their growth and maturation, whereas barbiturates have the opposite effect, lulling them into lethargy. A serial killer was convicted on the strength of my data. That’s right—a serial killer. LaTanya testified on behalf of our team, as she always does, offering glossy photographs and her patented brand of wry humor to put the jury at ease. The result: multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole.

○

Emerson began stalking Beatrice the moment her plane touched down in Colorado. That was not the word she would have used then, however. It was a less enlightened time, lacking the language to describe the many kinds of mental and physical violence people can inflict on one another. If your boyfriend followed you everywhere you went and never let you out of his sight, that was puppy love. If an ex called you long-distance hundreds of times and bombarded you with bizarre gifts and death threats, that was just the natural expression of his heartbreak.

Beatrice stayed in Colorado for two years. She was content there, working at a coffee shop and daydreaming idly about getting an MFA in visual art or theater, something creative. She liked the clear mountain air, the hiking trails, and the breathtaking vista outside her living room window.

Emerson remained in Massachusetts on the campus where they’d been happy together, at least in his mind. Most days he called Beatrice dozens of times, leaving ragged, rambling voicemails. He sent presents at least once a week—a teddy bear with a heart on its chest, a charm bracelet, nothing that suited her taste at all. She figured that eventually he’d wear himself out. Surely he would find a new object for his affections. Every now and then, she decided it was time to reason with him and answered the phone, leading to hour-long arguments that left her raw and shaken.

She has a good heart, your mother. She did not realize that each time she gave in, she was training Emerson to be persistent. Not that I’m blaming the victim, you understand—he should have stopped the first time she said no. Always remember that. And Beatrice meant well; she had compassion for Emerson, no matter how much he hurt her. But if he called fifty times in a row before she answered the phone, he learned that it took fifty-one attempts to force her to submit. If he sent her ten cutesy stuffed animals without reply, then sent another and received a text saying Please don’t give me any more gifts, he learned that eleven unwanted presents would trigger a response.

Back then, Beatrice still believed she could set boundaries if she just explained herself well enough. Perhaps she hadn’t yet been clear, she thought. This is the danger of being a decent person in this complicated world, someone with a functioning conscience. She could not imagine the malevolent mentality of a brute like Emerson. All he wanted was contact, and every time he got it—even if it was “No” or “Stop” or “You’re scaring me”—his desire was met and his resolve strengthened.

Beatrice probably would have stayed in Colorado, and she and I might never have met, and you two would never have been born, if Emerson had not turned up on her doorstep one evening, sweaty and disheveled, suitcase in hand.

I wasn’t there, of course, but I can picture it clearly. Beatrice has told me the story many times. He tried to push past her into the house. He told her he was sick of “doing long distance” and it was time for them to try living together. Her “little independent phase” was getting him down.

Beatrice was almost too stunned to respond. She managed to bar the door with her foot, keeping him on the porch. He was acting as though they’d never broken up, as though the events of the past two years had slipped his mind. She could not tell if it was a performance or if he really believed they were still together and imagined that she would let him into her home, into her bed.

“Let’s order pizza,” he said. “The plane food was awful.”

“You have to leave,” she gasped out. She did not even know how to argue with him—he was so far from reality as she understood it that there was no common ground on which to stand.

There followed an incoherent shouting match, him declaring that she was acting childish and crazy, her sobbing that he wasn’t her boyfriend anymore. Eventually one of her neighbors called the police. Beatrice felt a swoop of hope when she saw the red and blue lights dancing off the buildings. She still imagined then that the law could help in situations like this.

Two officers clomped onto the porch, both men. Emerson spoke first, explaining that he’d flown across the country to see his girlfriend of six years and for some reason she wasn’t letting him in. The men looked at Beatrice with their eyebrows raised. This would prove to be a tactic of Emerson’s: if he could establish his own version of events with enough confidence right off the bat, anything Beatrice said to contradict him, no matter how true, seemed dubious to their audience. Faltering, she mumbled that she and Emerson broke up years ago. He shouldn’t be here, she said.

“I brought you this.” He reached into his suitcase and handed her a wrapped package. “Open it.”

“I don’t want it,” she said. “I don’t want anything from you. You need to leave.”

Emerson threw a glance at the officers, who nodded back sympathetically. He tore open the wrapping himself, revealing a lacquered plaque with HOME SWEET HOME etched into the wood. Beatrice has always hated that kind of schmaltz, of course. Anything in the vicinity of Live, Laugh, Love leaves her cold. She believes that people who need placards on the wall to remind themselves about affection or comfort or joy are deeply unhappy. In the past, she had said as much to Emerson. Did he listen to her? Ever?

“You have no idea who I am,” she said, with dawning horror.

“I think it’s nice,” one of the officers said, bristling on Emerson’s behalf.

Eventually Beatrice made it clear to everyone that Emerson wasn’t going to enter her house that night. The policemen offered to drive him to a hotel a few blocks away. It wasn’t technically allowed, but they obviously felt such sympathy for this poor jilted Romeo that they broke procedure to give him a ride.

In the morning, Emerson showed up at the coffee shop where Beatrice worked. He followed her to the grocery store on her lunch break and critiqued her purchases. He introduced himself to her coworkers as her long-distance boyfriend. They were all surprised they’d never heard of him, accosting Beatrice in the break room to ask for details. Hadn’t she been dating the clerk from the Taco Bell a few months back? Was she cheating on Emerson? Or did they have an open relationship?

Two weeks later, Beatrice moved to Maine.

○

After Emerson’s letter came, things were fraught for all of us. Beatrice flinched every time her phone rang. One of the cats tripped our new alarm system in the middle of the night and Beatrice seemed to forget how to breathe, wheezing and choking beside me as I threw off the blankets and ran to investigate.

The two of you were affected as well. Four-year-olds are as sensitive as tuning forks, picking up and echoing the vibrations of their parents. You each responded differently—Lucas by sobbing at imaginary injuries and ending each day with dozens of colorful Band-Aids on every limb, Theo by charging around the house with a plastic spear and cardboard armor, fighting pillows and shadows and the poor cats, who took to crouching on top of the tallest furniture.

And I was angry. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt such sustained, slow-burning rage. Teeth gnashing. Fists clenched. Even my dreams were fiery and bloodstained.

Our friends rallied around us, offering to babysit or spend the night on the couch. Several of them made noises about involving the police, but Beatrice, with the weary resignation of painful experience, explained that the electric-blue note wasn’t signed, and anyway it didn’t contain a threat or anything actionable. All her previous restraining orders against Emerson—one in Maine, one in Virginia, and one in Texas—had lapsed.

So there was nothing we could do but wait, all of us, Beatrice terrified, me furious, and both of you keyed up. Tender Lucas. Warlike Theo. We did not know what would come next. It was like waiting for a meteor to fall to earth without having a clue when or where it would land.

In the past, Emerson had sent texts, selfies, handwritten sonnets with improper scansion, and an engagement ring in a velvet box. Whenever Beatrice changed her phone number, he eventually discovered the new one. He lurked outside her previous apartments in his car, smiling up at her window. He sent flowers to each of her workplaces. Once he slashed her tires. He no longer claimed to be suicidal, not since she’d had him involuntarily committed. Sometimes he threatened her, but never in any way she could substantiate to others. He might send an anonymous note saying he’d kill her if she didn’t stop sleeping with that trashy line cook from the diner. He might leave a knife on her porch steps. He stayed just on the legal side of things. She couldn’t prove he’d been the one to slash her tires. She couldn’t explain to the officer behind the desk why it was so alarming that he’d sent her a diamond ring.

Each time she moved to a new town, a new state, there would be a grace period before Emerson caught up. Beatrice could breathe again. She could begin to hope that the last time might have been the last time. Maybe he wouldn’t discover her new locale. Maybe she had finally proven to be too much trouble for him to pursue. She would find a job and rent an apartment. She might tumble into a crush, into bed with someone new. She even dated men, which to me seems rather like visiting grizzly territory after having been mauled by a bear. As time passed, she would relax, sleeping through the night again, not looking over her shoulder every time she turned a corner.

And then the call, the knock on the door, the bouquet sent to her desk at work. Can you imagine her fear and dismay? I couldn’t, not until it happened under my roof.

○

At the Body Farm, I sat at my desk with the lights off, spinning in circles in my wheelie chair. Would the meteor strike today, while I was out of the house? Armando and Joe—longtime friends of ours, a dear married couple in their sixties—were spending the morning with you and Beatrice, teaching you to grow herbs in pots, which could then be transferred to the garden when spring came. But I wasn’t sure this was sufficient protection. Joe was frail, requiring a cane to walk more than a few feet, and I didn’t like the bulbous appearance of Armando’s nose lately, the distinct thickening and reddening caused by alcohol overuse. Sometimes it’s hard for me not to look for a cause of death in the making.

A knock at my office door startled me. Hyo stepped into the room, holding a canister of specimen jars. Her expression was quizzical, her eyes as bright as a bird’s.

“Let’s go,” she said. “It’s a perfect morning.”

“What?”

She leaned over and flipped on the light. “How long have you been sitting here? Come on, there’s work to be done.”

“Right.”

“You okay?”

“Yes. Fine. It’s nothing.”

We strolled down the hill, both of us in down coats and latex gloves and surgical masks, muffling our voices as we chatted. We had worked together for years, and our small talk was as comfortable as breathing: slime, larvae, mildew, blowflies. Hyo sported a sunflower-yellow shower cap, incongruous in the wintry air. In theory, this would keep the smell of death out of her dark mane. I wore my own hair pixie-short. Easier to scrub clean at the end of the day.

As we walked, I was surprised by my ability to perform normalcy. My mind was not there, on the grounds; it was back home, hovering around my family like an avenging angel. And yet I made notes on my clipboard and conversed casually with Hyo about the humidity, the cloud cover, and the corpse lying in grass: a man in his thirties, his face melted like candle wax. Despite the cold, phorid flies droned around his torso. Hyo leaned over him and began gathering specimens. I watched her label each jar in her tiny scribble before dropping it into her bag. Beneath her mask, her cheeks were pink from the chill.

“Remember when we first started?” she said. “You always used to put the bodies on their bellies. You didn’t like to see their faces.”

“That was a long time ago.”

She brushed a stray lock of hair off her cheek with her forearm. We were all conditioned never to touch our faces with our gloved hands out in the field.

“I was worse than you,” she said. “I couldn’t use the word murder. Remember? I’d say ‘dispatched’ like we were in a Jane Austen novel.”

I put on an upper-crust British accent. “This fellow was dispatched a week ago. The bloat is quite severe. His testicles have swollen to the size of a cricket ball.”

Hyo laughed. “God, how things change. I’ve got no problem with it now. Murder, murder, murder.”

She moved up the hill, toward the next corpse on her list. I stood still, the word echoing in my mind.

○

At three in the morning, Beatrice’s cell phone rang. I heard her turn over in bed and fumble around on the nightstand, knocking the lampshade against the wall.

“Hello?” she muttered into the pillow.

With a lurch, she bolted upright. I did the same. Even in the dark bedroom I could see that her irises were ringed with white all the way around.

“How did you get this number?” she asked. Then, quickly, she placed the phone on the blanket between us and put it on speaker.

“—always do,” a man’s voice was saying. A reedy tenor. Clipped consonants. I reached for Beatrice’s hand and laced her fingers through mine.

“Did you get my letter?” Emerson asked.

“I did. How long have you been in the area?” She gripped my hand so tightly that I felt my bones scrape together.

“Just got here,” he said lazily. “You know, I’ve come to really enjoy this game we play. The thrill of the chase never gets old.”

“It’s not a game,” Beatrice said. “I thought this time—”

“You thought I wouldn’t find you? I’ll always find you, honey.”

She shuddered convulsively at the endearment. I moved closer, laying my cheek against her shoulder.

“You got married,” he said. “You changed your name. I liked your old name better.”

There was an unsettling singsong quality to his speech. I wondered if his voice was always pitched so high or if emotion had altered it.

“I’m going to hang up now,” he said. “I’d rather talk to you when you’re alone.”

“Are you saying—” she began, but he was gone. She checked that the call had ended, then turned her phone off. She tucked it under a pillow, shook her head as though disagreeing with herself, got to her feet, and paced. Finally she carried her phone into the bathroom, holding it between two fingers like a grimy scrap of garbage, and shoved it into a cabinet among the hand towels. Only then, it seemed, could she be sure that no part of Emerson was present.

“Is he watching us somehow?” she murmured to me, climbing back into bed, her eyes darting everywhere. “Is that what he meant? ‘When you’re alone,’ he said. How did he know?”

I stroked her hair out of her face. “He made an educated guess. He assumed I’d be in bed with you. Where else would I be? He’s just trying to scare you.”

Privately, however, I vowed to check and recheck all our new security cameras. Maybe I’d get one of those bug sweepers I’d seen on spy shows. Who knew what this madman was capable of? The rage burned in my chest like a coal.

“It’s never going to stop.” Beatrice buried her face in my throat, wetting my skin with her tears.

○

Ours was a whirlwind courtship. Fleeing Texas, Beatrice moved to Iowa. We met at a summer barbecue hosted by one of her new coworkers. Within the week we were engaged. My queer friends teased me for hitching the U-Haul to the Subaru with such stereotypical swiftness, but nothing about this love felt ordinary to me.

I’d always maintained a distance in relationships before. My work made romance tricky. I would wait a reasonable period of time before telling each new girlfriend about my job, hoping first to enchant them with my wiles and sexual prowess. Usually they broke it off as soon as they learned the truth. Other times they stuck around for a short while but urged me constantly to get into another field, something normal, not quite so horrifying.

It has always been difficult for me to explain why I enjoy this work. Initially I took the job because full-time gigs for entomologists are few and far between, and I have no taste for academia. I figured I would see what the Body Farm was all about, help close a few cold cases, and leave for greener pastures as soon as I got an opportunity for fieldwork, ideally in a rainforest where I could make my name discovering a new species of beetle. There are always more beetles to be found.

Most researchers stay at the Body Farm for either a couple of hours or their entire lives. There was, of course, an adjustment period for me. In my introductory meeting, LaTanya informed me casually that if I needed to throw up or faint, that was fine, as long as I didn’t do it on the corpses themselves. And yes, I vomited once or twice at the start, I admit. But soon it turned out that I had the right mindset. I could focus on the trees instead of the forest. I learned to turn my attention to the details (the timeline of pupation, the movement of larvae through rotting tissue, or the metallic sheen of healthy adult blowflies) while ignoring the bigger picture entirely (existential dread, gut-wrenching repulsion, and my own fear of inescapable death).

I didn’t stay just for the bugs, however. My work matters. I sleep well at night knowing that I’m helping balance the scales of justice. Even as a child I was a righteous soul, beating up other people’s bullies on the playground and shattering a neighbor boy’s magnifying glass when he used it to fry ants. Now I take on the work that few others are capable of. I look death in the face every day and analyze how it moves, what it wants. I do it for the good of us all.

“I think your work is amazing,” Beatrice told me the night I proposed. No one had ever said anything like this to me before. She even enjoyed my interesting insect facts—or pretended to, anyway, well enough that I never knew the difference.

God, I was smitten—I still am, honestly, all these years later. Your mother is a rare creature. The way she listens with her whole body. The way she radiates calm in a palpable forcefield, softening the mood of an entire room. The way she reacts viscerally and audibly to whatever she’s reading—laughing and nodding and saying “Oh!” alone on the porch swing, as though the author could hear. Her hopefulness is like a kite rising on the wind, carried irresistibly upward. As a grouchy pessimist, I stand in awe of her innate buoyancy. Nothing else could have seen her through Emerson’s madness. Each time she escaped him, she was able to hope, sincerely and completely, that it would finally end.

We married. She took my name. By that point Emerson had been silent for over a year, the longest stretch since college.

He did not make contact when we traveled to Paris for our honeymoon. He did not make contact when we bought our house. He did not make contact when you were born, first Theo, then Lucas, a vaginal delivery, brave Beatrice laboring for thirty-seven hours. You looked like her even then, my angels, with your identical tufts of black fuzz and crumpled faces. Her nose went to Lucas. Her chin went to Theo. Both of you got her perfect tawny skin.

Seven years of peace punctured by a bright blue envelope. I thought Emerson was gone, I really did. To be honest, I figured he was dead.

○

A second electric-blue envelope showed up a few days after Emerson’s late-night phone call. You two found it, rushing to the door at the sound of letters sliding through the mail slot. I’m sorry that I shouted at you. The world dissolved into a crimson haze the moment I glimpsed my babies holding something that monster had touched. I yelled, and then the envelope was in my hands and you both were staring wide-eyed at me from the safety of Beatrice’s embrace on the other side of the room.

“Don’t take it out on them,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I went to you, kneeling down to your eye level. “Mama’s so sorry. Mama was being a jerk.”

“Mama was being a jerk!” you chorused.

“A-plus parenting, babe,” Beatrice said, plucking the blue envelope from my grasp. She gave me a nudge to take the sting out of her words, then slipped from the room.

He had written her a poem, that son of a bitch. I won’t repeat his maudlin little stanzas here. Suffice it to say that after reading it, Beatrice went to bed and cried for the rest of the day.

○

I know a lot about murder. I’ve spent years considering motive, means, and opportunity. There are five classifications of death: homicide, suicide, accidental, natural, and unknown. Though the cadavers we study at the Body Farm usually fall into the “natural” column, our research applies to all the other kinds too. Part of our job is to beat killers at their own game, to think like they do, to think better than they do. The police are fond of saying there’s no such thing as a perfect murder, but I don’t agree. There are flaws in any system. I helped design this particular system, so I’m aware of its flaws.

Toxicology reports, for instance, are far from comprehensive. During an autopsy, the medical examiner studies the victim’s blood. She looks for illegal substances (like heroin and cocaine) and prescription medications (like opiates and amphetamines). But it simply isn’t possible to screen for everything. Nobody checks for jellyfish venom or deadly nightshade, for example—not unless there’s a specific reason to do so. Other poisons melt away upon ingestion, leaving no trace in the body. Cyanide does not linger in the blood; the only indication is a faint smell of almonds, and even that varies. Ricin, too, kills within days and leaves no sign of its presence.

Then there are the everyday poisons, so ordinary that they fly beneath the radar in a different way. Large amounts of potassium can be lethal, but it also occurs naturally in the body and is always found in the blood. Why would anyone bother to test for a substance that’s definitely going to be there? Toxicology reports focus on a couple hundred possible poisons, but there are thousands more in the world. In truth, almost anything can be fatal in sufficient quantities. Too much nutmeg. Too much salt. Too much water.

Even air can be a problem. Once a cadaver came to the Body Farm, a woman who’d died of cardiac arrest. But given her comparative youth, Jackson and Cal, our MDs, were not satisfied with this verdict. Cardiac arrest means only that the heart has stopped beating. It is a symptom of death, rather than the cause.

So Jackson did a thorough autopsy. He scanned for surface and subcutaneous trauma. He examined the seven locations in which a needle can be inserted without being noticed by most medical examiners. At last, he found an incision beneath the woman’s tongue. Someone had injected her with a syringe full of empty air, which formed an embolism and stopped her heart.

And, of course, there are accidents—or deaths that appear to be accidental. The world is a dangerous place. People fall down the stairs and slip in the shower. They get drunk and crash their cars. They leave cigarettes lit and burn their houses down. With a little help, life can be fatal. A loose wire. A stove left on. A push at the wrong moment. An unseen, guiding hand. Even if the police suspect foul play, they can’t act without corroboration. Innocent until proven guilty, after all.

Corpses are like postcards, written unknowingly by the killer, full of unintended clues. Fingerprints. Hair. Droplets of saliva or tears. Without meaning to, the murderer might record whether they were right- or left-handed. They might hint at whether they had done this before. (An inexperienced, nervous attacker leaves different marks from one who is confident and assured.) They might indicate their height and weight. (A blow struck by a short skinny woman is quite unlike a punch from a six-foot-tall 350-pound man.) At the Body Farm, my colleagues and I can read these things printed on the flesh in the killer’s unique script.

To get away with murder, it’s best to dispose of the corpse altogether. A wood chipper and an eight-foot grave. A deep lake, a length of chain, and a cinder block. A concoction of lye and bleach, melting the flesh like warm ice. No evidence at all. No trail for the police to follow. No message for the medical examiner to decode. No body, no crime.

○

What was the tipping point for me? Not Emerson’s first letter, or the late-night phone call, or the pathetic poem. Not the nights I lay awake in bed, tossing and turning, finally getting up to verify for the tenth time that every door and window was locked and that you were safe and dreaming in your shared bed. Not the second call, which came one morning while you ate breakfast and Beatrice sat beside you at the table, smiling cheerfully with the phone to her ear so you wouldn’t be alarmed. Only heavy breathing, she said later, but that was bad enough. Not even Emerson’s third letter, in which he described me as an “androgynous nothing person.”

He had always treated Beatrice’s lovers that way, as though they couldn’t possibly live up to his example or offer any real threat. He would graciously forgive her each time, too, clucking his tongue and reveling in his own magnanimity.

His assault on our family went on for weeks. Another letter on blue card stock, which the two of you avoided like it was radioactive. You collected the rest of the mail and left that envelope in the front hall for me to find on my way to work. More heavy breathing down the phone. A single rose tucked beneath the windshield wiper of Beatrice’s car. How did he know which one was hers? I went to the police then, but the officer said exactly what Beatrice told me he’d say. Emerson hadn’t done anything illegal. Was I even sure it was him? The car was parked on the street; anyone could have put the flower there. If the guy became violent or trespassed on our property, I should file a police report for sure. Then it would be too late, I said, and the officer raised his hands, palms up, in a gesture of helplessness or supplication.

I fervently hope that you don’t remember that brief, terrible phase of your young lives. Beatrice’s nerves tautened like a guitar string pulled too far, ready to snap. I subsisted on coffee and energy pills. A bracelet in a velvet box left on the porch. Another electric-blue letter covered in drawings of hearts. A dead bird in the grass of our backyard—had it fallen from a nest in the pine tree, or had a Machiavellian maniac tossed it over the fence as a warning? A midnight call, consisting only of kissy noises and sexual groans.

But the tipping point came when I saw Emerson with my own eyes.

I’m still not sure what woke me. I’d been sleeping lightly for weeks, startling at every sound, but there was no creak of floorboards or tap of branches on the window that night. I slipped out of bed, listening to the ringing silence, the carpet cold beneath my bare feet. Beatrice lay on her belly with her feet in the air. My ridiculous, wonderful wife.

I padded down the hall to check on you both. You were in Lucas’s bed this time, sleeping head to foot. I wondered if you’d started out the night that way or if you began with both heads on one pillow and one of you migrated. You were wild sleepers at that age, kicking and rolling in frantic motions that never woke either of you.

I went to the window to make sure it was locked. And there he was, standing on the sidewalk, staring up at the house. At your room.

My heart jolted violently enough to knock the wind out of me. I don’t know if Emerson saw me through the curtains. He did not react to my appearance, at any rate. The streetlamp turned him into a copper statue, dressed in a puffy coat, hands folded behind his back, blond hair glittering. He was taller than I’d expected. His stance suggested he’d been out there a long while, despite the cold. An unnerving stillness. Endless patience. As my eyes adjusted to the watery glow, I saw the expression on his face: chin lifted, a small smile.

I read once that geckos can hold a pose for hours, exerting no energy while remaining perfectly alert, ready to launch their tongues at the first appearance of prey with the speed and lethality of a bullet. They are harmless to humans but vicious predators of insects. There was something of the lizard about Emerson as he lurked there on our street, motionless, vigilant, waiting.

I watched him watching us. I stayed where I was for god knows how long. The two of you mumbled in your sleep, smacking your lips and rustling amid the blankets. My leg began to cramp and I needed to pee, but I didn’t move from my post at the window until Emerson pivoted on his heel and strode away. I kept my gaze on him until he turned the corner and disappeared into the darkness.

○

Once I make up my mind about something, I act quickly and decisively. I have always been like that. I wanted to buy our house the moment we stepped inside, and we made an offer that same day. Beatrice longed for babies before I did, but the instant I knew I was ready too, we went hand in hand to the sperm bank.

I decided to murder Emerson the night I saw him.

The idea had been bubbling away at the back of my mind for some time, but I had not taken it seriously. We all think crazy things in the privacy of our weird little brains. To blow off steam, I’d considered means and opportunity. Motive I already had in plentiful supply. It had become a game to play during sleepless nights or quiet moments at the Body Farm. A reverse whodunit, figuring out how, in theory, I might get away with it.

Female killers are not caught as often as male. It skews the statistics. In fact, no one really knows how many women have committed murder. The records track only those homicides that result in arrest and conviction. It’s impossible to count the successful killers—the ones who are never found out, never suspected at all.

The evidence of women’s prowess in this area is anecdotal but compelling. Cal, one of the MDs at the Body Farm, worked at a hospice facility for years before coming to Lyle. He was shocked, he said, by the number of sweet old ladies who confessed on their deathbeds that they’d poisoned or suffocated somebody decades ago. None of their relatives or friends ever dreamed of such a thing, Cal said. These women made it to old age, to the point of their own demise, with their crimes undiscovered.

In the break room, my colleagues and I debated the gender disparity of murder. Everyone had a different theory to explain it. Luis believed that social conditioning was the root cause. At a young age, boys were encouraged to lash out, to dominate, whereas girls were taught to contain and control their anger. As grown women, this ability allowed them to act with premeditation and cool heads, which accounted for their success and secrecy.

Hyo thought it was a matter of cleanup. Men couldn’t properly scrub a toilet or discern when the carpet needed vacuuming. How could they ever hope to leave behind a sterile crime scene? In addition, most women had decades of experience scrubbing bloodstains out of their underwear. Men wouldn’t know to soak the fabric first and wash in cold water, since hot would induce the stains to set.

Kenneth, who had more experience with the law enforcement side of things, believed it had to do with ego. Men overestimated their own intelligence and made mistakes as a result, while women often underestimated themselves, leading them to plan more thoroughly and take greater precautions.

Georgina felt it all came down to motive. Women held grudges, she said. They could wait years before taking action, long after any apparent motive had faded from everyone else’s minds. Men didn’t tend to let things fester that way. They either acted at once or moved on.

And LaTanya said that women were simply the smarter sex, more capable of doing everything under the sun, including homicide.

Now that I have become a murderer myself, I believe all of them were right, more or less.

○

Do you remember the fairy tale that obsessed you during that time? I hope so, since I read it aloud to you daily for weeks on end. You’d found it on one of your shelves, a hand-me-down picture book with no cover, the pages soft from use. I still don’t know the title. The spine, like the cover, had been torn away by some other child’s hands.

The heroine was a “golden-hearted woman.” No other personality traits were mentioned, but perhaps they weren’t needed. She caught the eye of an evil wizard, who cursed her, transforming her into a bee. That was the part I liked. Any story with an insect in it gets my vote. She flew unhappily from flower to flower, growing weary, so lonely, until a kind farmer held out his hand and gave her a place to rest. His touch transformed her back into her human shape. They married and lived happily ever after. Heteronormative but sweet.

“What happened to the evil wizard?” you asked every single time I closed the book.

“It doesn’t say,” I told you.

“Did he die? Did he go to jail?”

“I don’t know.”

You were never satisfied with this answer. Eventually you would climb off my lap to finish the story on your own, drawing crayon illustrations of the wizard boiling to death in a pot or falling off a cliff. You killed him a hundred bloodthirsty ways and cheered his demise, then asked me to read the book aloud again.

I’ve heard people say that children can’t fully understand death. That’s why they crave such cutthroat stories and playact such barbaric things. (Once the evil wizard had his arms and legs ripped off by elephants; another time he got kicked into a volcano.) But I think children are perfectly capable of understanding what death is. They’re not naive and guileless; they’re clear-eyed about the limits of justice. They know that the world of fairy tales is better than ours.

Real life isn’t fair. In my work, I’ve seen the full measure of what human beings can do to one another, and I’ve seen the limits of our justice system too. But in a fairy tale, there’s no need for cops or courts, since the story itself brings balance. Murderers have their eyes plucked out by doves or drown in the sea, while good people are guaranteed to live happily ever after. The Body Farm wouldn’t exist in a fairy tale. Why would anyone study death and decay in a world where magical retribution is a fundamental law of nature?

That’s the reality I want.

The book with no title became your obsession because it broke the most essential rule of fairy tales: it wasn’t fair. You wanted to hear the story over and over because it bothered you, not because you liked it. Yes, the golden-hearted woman and the kind farmer were rewarded by fate, as they should have been, but what about the evil wizard? You kept hoping that he might finally be punished this time. And then, when the ending let you down again, you wrote a better one yourselves.

○

My plan was simple. The best plans always are. I bought a burner phone on my way to work, taking a leaf out of Emerson’s playbook. He used disposable cell phones so that he could harass Beatrice and threaten her without leaving a paper trail. She would go to the police and show them a string of terrifying text messages, and they’d tell her there was no way to be sure of the source.

One night, as Beatrice slept, I scrolled through her phone. (To be clear, I usually respected her privacy. This was a one-time breach of my moral code, done only in exigent and extreme circumstances.) As I suspected, Emerson had been bombarding her with texts for weeks, from a slew of different numbers—messages she hadn’t told me about, not wanting to worry me. Beatrice never replied, but that didn’t stop him.

Using my new flip phone, I texted his most recent number, posing as Beatrice. Emerson believed she would do that—contact him of her own volition, after all this time. Can you imagine? I asked to meet him in an isolated spot, late at night. He agreed. We worked out the details of our rendezvous, him and me.

Now I wonder: Was he really so arrogant, or was he delusional? Did he actually believe that one day it would be him and Beatrice, a perfect match, destined for each other? Did he buy the story he kept selling? Or did he see the situation clearly—predator and prey, psychopath and victim—and the poems and diamond rings were simply weapons in his vast arsenal? How much was gaslighting with the intent of causing harm, and how much did he regard as true?

I guess it doesn’t matter. Actions are important, not motives. That’s what LaTanya always tries to explain on the stand. The jury wants to know why the victim was killed, why the murderer did it, but the only thing science can reveal, at the end of the day, is how.

I met Emerson at midnight, in a place of my own choosing. I wore a hat and scarf and he didn’t know it was me until it was too late. I won’t go into the details. That is not my purpose, and I don’t want you to be burdened with those images.

When he was dead, I wrapped his corpse in a tarp, wrestled it into my trunk, and drove to the Body Farm. It was my turn to take the graveyard shift. We all hate doing it, so we follow a rotating schedule. Temperature, insect activity, fungal growth, humidity—these things don’t stay constant after nightfall, and it is essential that we observe our subjects around the clock. But the Body Farm is creepy after dark, even for us. The trees rustle menacingly. Darkness erases the visual markers of death—liquefied eyeballs, putrefied flesh—that we normally count on to remind ourselves that these are corpses, not people. At night, the Body Farm seems to be inhabited by a watchful, unmoving crowd.

In addition, the dead are not always silent. Fresh cadavers sometimes sigh or groan. I’ve heard them pass gas. I’ve seen them twitch their fingers or blink. As they move further through the process of decay, the sounds don’t stop; they merely change. Sometimes month-old corpses bubble or belch. In rare cases, they explode, their torsos ripped apart from within by a profusion of volcanic gases.

That night, I parked by the back door, where there are no security cameras. Why would there be? We only ever use that entrance to receive the dead or throw away hazardous waste. To get that close to the building, we have to pass through two locked gates with keypads. The cameras face outward along the walls, keeping teens and miscreants away, rather than monitoring the researchers inside.

I fetched a gurney and wheeled Emerson’s corpse through the halls. I did think briefly about keeping him there, on the grounds. I could mock up the paperwork of a new admission. I could smash his face and snip off his fingertips, rendering him unidentifiable. I could find an appropriate resting place for him and watch him molder away until there was nothing left but bones.

There was an odd symmetry to the idea. I imagined counting the maggots that devoured him and measuring the life cycle of the coffin flies that made their homes in his flesh. In life he had been a pernicious soul, causing only harm, but in death he could be useful. His body would provide data and aid the noble cause of science, and I would be able to savor my revenge.

I blame the graveyard shift for that particular line of thought. I am not normally such a ghoul, but the Body Farm is eerie in the wee small hours.

I cremated him. We have our own incinerator, for obvious reasons. I needed to use it that night anyway, since we’d amassed more skeletons than we could utilize, picked absolutely clean by insects and bacteria, nothing left to learn. I burned four skeletons and Emerson, then went out onto the grounds to do my work.

○

I wish I could tell you that it upset me to take his life. That’s what I’m supposed to say, isn’t it? That it left me nauseated and shaken. That I could scarcely look at myself in the mirror afterward. That it haunts me to this day.

But the truth is quite different. Years at the Body Farm have reshaped my reaction to death. Emerson was a problem for me to solve. At work, I solve objectively disturbing and disgusting problems all the time. What’s the most efficient method of removing blowfly eggs from the mouth of a corpse? Use a child’s paintbrush. What’s the ideal preservative for beetle larvae? Alcohol or naphtha. What’s the best way to change Emerson’s body from alive to dead? That was the problem before me: a man who ought to be a corpse. I found an ideal solution. Doing so was no more repugnant or upsetting than any old shift at the Anthropological Research Center.

The next few months were difficult. I knew Emerson was gone, but I could not tell Beatrice, who continued to wake up screaming from nightmares and startle every time her phone rang. With the two of you, at least, I could be myself again. Fun Mama. Science-y Mama. When the weather warmed, I took you to the zoo. I hung a tire swing from our oak tree. We worked in the backyard, transferring the herbs Armando and Joe had helped you grow in indoor pots to a vegetable garden by the fence.

“It’s been a while since I’ve heard from you-know-who,” Beatrice said on a rainy day in spring. “I’m getting antsy waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“Maybe it won’t,” I said. “Maybe he’s finally moved on.”

She smiled at me. Her hopefulness is amazing. I will never stop admiring it.

Flowers bloomed. You splashed in puddles. One morning you found caterpillars, seven of them, crawling around on the parsley we’d planted in the garden. They were black swallowtails—I could tell from the coloration and their choice of host plant. We carried them inside, safe from predators, and raised them by hand. I have never seen such smiles. You named them, loved them. When they melted and solidified into chrysalises, you mourned. When they hatched into miraculous, dewy creatures with midnight-black wings, you laughed. When we released them into our garden, you danced, watching them flit and circle and finally rise, vanishing into the blue.

On the one hand, homicide is objectively wrong. On the other hand, is it? I don’t think I’m deranged. I hope you don’t think so either, my darlings. I believe you see me as I truly am: a doting mother, a loving wife, and an affectionate friend to my friends. A good provider. A well-balanced person. A conscientious member of society.

The Emersons of this world are a dying breed. That’s my hope, anyway. I want it to stop with your generation. It comes down to you, my beautiful boys. You are growing up every moment, and one day, all too soon, you will no longer be interested in fairy tales. You will shed the wild sweetness of these early years. It’s hard to imagine you as preteens, high schoolers, adults, but I know it’s coming.

You will be good men. That isn’t hopefulness on my part—it’s decision, intention. Despite our years together, none of Beatrice’s optimism has rubbed off on me. I know you’ll be good men because I will see to it. Lucas, with your tender heart, so like your mother’s. Theo, with your righteous spirit, so much like mine.

“Can Emerson be gone?” Beatrice asked when summer came. “He isn’t gone, is he? I’m afraid to let my guard down.”

“I think he gave up,” I said, pouring her a glass of wine. “Maybe he finally saw how happy you are. How happy we are.”

She laughed the way she used to, a cascading waterfall. I hadn’t heard that unfettered laugh since the first blue envelope arrived.

○

When I began writing this letter to you, I thought I understood my purpose. I believed I was setting down my confession in case the truth ever came to light. I wanted you to know why I did what I did. At the Body Farm, we only care about how, but you, my children, would want to know why. And so I have tried to explain. I intended to hide the letter somewhere secret, to be opened in the event of my conviction. Not arrest, you understand—conviction. That was my plan at the start, anyway.

But now that I have written it all down, I can see that I will never be caught. It was indeed a perfect murder. I even incinerated Emerson’s burner phone, and mine, along with his body—the only extant things in the universe that could possibly connect him to me.

It has been a year since I killed him. Winter has settled in once more, and Beatrice seems at ease in her own skin again. I’ve seen her shoveling snow without glancing up every time someone walks by. She forgets to turn on the security alarm some nights. The doorbell rang the other day and she ran, excited for the package she’d ordered, throwing open the door without looking through the peephole first. I took her out for a night on the town and she did herself up, highlighter on her cheeks, a slinky red dress I’d never seen before. She wouldn’t have been so bold and colorful if Emerson was on her mind. Our lovemaking—well, I’m sure you don’t want to hear about it, so I will only say that Emerson had a stifling influence on both of us that has since vanished entirely.

Even now, the police don’t realize he’s missing. They probably never will. Beatrice mentioned once that Emerson didn’t have any family. I’m sure there are no friends to report his loss either. A loner. An oddball. The only person who will notice his absence is Beatrice, and for her it has been a balm, a delicious silence, the cessation of persistent pain.

What, then, have I written here? Not a confession—there would be no point. I will take the truth to my grave. I will let time prove to Beatrice that Emerson is gone, and I will say nothing, not to her, not to you, not to anyone.

And yet, even if no one will ever read this letter, it may still serve a purpose. It could be a blueprint of sorts—a battle plan. Not that I anticipate ever needing to take such drastic action again, you understand. I killed Emerson because I had to. There was no other solution to the particular problem of his aliveness.

But if I were to take the lessons I learned from his death and turn my attention to someone else, another “bad guy,” a stranger to me . . . I will admit that during one of my recent graveyard shifts, in the ghoulish lull of the witching hour, the thought did cross my mind. The only tricky part of Emerson’s murder was the connection between us, however tangential. There was the slimmest chance that a search of motives could lead back to me.

A stranger, however—someone with no link to me at all—well, what could be easier? Yes, the thought has crossed my mind. There’s that neighbor who screams such vile things at his wife after a few drinks. There’s the principal of the local elementary school, who has kept his job for a decade despite persistent rumors that he sexually harasses his teachers. There’s the woman Hyo told me about, a dear friend of hers from college, trapped in an abusive relationship, too afraid to leave him even after he beat her badly enough to put her in the hospital. Hyo mentioned the man’s name to me as she wiped away her tears. I did just happen to jot it down.

And a couple of weeks ago, there was a news story about a serial rapist right here in Lyle, convicted of assaulting eight different women and sentenced to a paltry two years in prison. I did just happen to make a note of his release date as well. God, it would be so easy. No affiliation between any of these men and me. No apparent motive. My rotation on the night watch comes back around like clockwork, and the skeletons are always piling up again, ready to be incinerated.

So maybe what I have written here is a cautionary tale. Maybe it was never intended for you or me. Maybe, all along, I meant it for men like that rapist or the principal or the neighbor—men like Emerson. The fact that none of those despicable souls will read it is irrelevant. A story like mine has power in the mere fact of its existence. A warning. A tremor in the fabric. A new kind of ending.

I don’t have to decide yet what I will do. I have all the time in the world to see what kind of person I am becoming. We are all in a process of constant evolution, larvae metamorphosing into blowflies. That’s what I love most about insects: their capacity for transformation. A tiny translucent egg sac becomes a half-blind, slow-moving grub, which mutates into a cocoon filled with mush that lies motionless in the soil for days as though dead, then erupts into its final form, a fierce winged creature with a panoramic field of vision and an accelerated perception of time, with feet that can taste the ground. It’s the closest thing to magic to be found in this life.

And insects transfigure more than themselves. Without bees, there would be no flowers or fruits. Without bone beetles and coffin flies, the dead would not decay, and the cycle of life would be broken. The work of insects, like mine, is both grotesque and vital. They transmute flesh and bone into mulch and nutrients. They change the dead into the raw materials for new life. There are no plants as green as the ones on the Body Farm, feeding from the richest, most blood-soaked soil on earth.

What happened to Emerson was not legal, but it was right. It was fairy-tale justice. And I suppose, in the end, that’s what this story is: a fairy tale. Once upon a time, there was a golden-hearted woman, pursued over hill and dale by an evil ogre. She met a gallant knight—me, of course—and bore two fine sons. They lived peacefully for a time, hoping the ogre was gone, but he came back, as wicked things so often do. Bravely, cleverly, the knight slew the ogre and burned him up. The golden-hearted woman rejoiced. Together they raised their sons to be better men than the men who came before them. And they all lived happily ever after.