Bells jingle against the glass when she walks in. Deschane’s Taxidermy shop smells like urine and dust, a hint of tobacco. A transparent stream of vapor spews from an essential oil diffuser in a poor attempt to mask the musk of a man who probably came with the place. She imagines Deschane to be ancient, all leathery skin and white hair, with dentures that are too white and sharp, like the ones he fits into his dead animal skulls. His shop’s been here since 1931, as much a fixture of Black Harbor as Forge Bridge.
The shiver of the bells sends a corresponding tremor down Rowan’s spine. Her fingertips tingle as she reviews her current suspicion: Libby Lucas is larger than most girls her age. She’s larger than most boys, too. If Reeves Singh could be a viable suspect, why not Libby? Throughout this investigation, she has not even tried to conceal the fact that she disliked the victims. And then there’s the matter of the evisceration spoon.
Which is why she’s here. She waits at the front, her ears pricking as a new sound enters the environment: the low thunder of footsteps. Her gaze roams the shop, peering through the dozens of stuffed animals and boxes of buckshot to try and steal a glance of who she’s come to meet.
“Hello, what can I do ya for?” It’s an automated response, Rowan knows, because he stops abruptly when he observes that she is not his usual customer.
Neither is he what she expected. Broad-shouldered and bearded, this Deschane is a good twenty years younger than the one she was envisioning. He smiles, showing teeth that are definitely originals; they’re a little crooked and stained from probably thirty years of coffee and tobacco.
“Um…” Rowan inhales. It fills her chest and makes her stand up straighter. “Hello, Mr. Deschane. I’m Rowan Winthorp, the medical examiner for Sulfur County.” She offers her gloved hand, which he shakes. His grip is strong. The diamond from her wedding ring cuts into her finger.
“Dale Deschane. But you already knew that.” He looks uncertain. She notices his stare move over her shoulder to take a look at her car parked outside. “You with the police?”
A nervous smile cracks Rowan’s face. It’s out of character for her. She doesn’t usually get nervous while on the job, but then, this is unofficial business. A medical examiner’s investigation tends to stay with the body. Bodies, in this case.
She decides to stick with the truth. “I investigate deaths. You might have heard, we’ve had a few of them recently.”
Deschane retracts his lips. He strokes his facial hair that looks like a doe’s tail with a white streak down the middle. His eyes are a cold grey, the color of the lake on a sunless morning. “If you’re looking for dead things, you’ve come to the right place. But I don’t know if I deal in the kind of dead things you’re looking for.”
Slowly, Rowan peruses his shop. She avoids eye contact, not wanting him to catch a glimpse of her gears turning. How would Axel read this man, she wonders. He seems closed-off; she notes how he stands with his arms crossed and feet shoulder-width apart. But he’s not altogether unkind. She did just waltz into his store and start talking about murder, after all. She touches the snout of a stuffed badger, then taps the eye. “These are glass?”
“Sure are.” He takes a few steps toward her.
“Do you always remove the eyes when you … taxidermy something?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“With what?”
Deschane tilts his chin and narrows his gaze. “Depends. Usually a screwdriver, maybe a spoon to scoop them out. Scissors to cut the fatty tissue clinging to the skull.”
She stopped listening at spoon. Her heart skips. “Can you show me? The tools you use, I mean.”
Deschane squares his stance again. “Listen Miss Winthorp, do I need a lawyer or something? Or do you need a warrant?”
Rowan clenches her jaw. She doesn’t correct him on the prefix. In fact, it feels kind of nice. It makes her feel young. Untethered. Before Black Harbor was anything more to her than a faraway, destitute city at the edge of the lake.
Deschane’s eyes are locked on her, holding her in place.
“No. It’s just…”
“It’s just that there are little bunnies turning up around town with their body parts cut off and you thought you might start with the most obvious choice, the taxidermist, right?”
Rowan says nothing. Her whole body stiffens as though affected by rigor. Her cheeks burn and tears sting her eyes. Dale Deschane is a red buffalo plaid blur. She feels so stupid. She should never have come here. But she’s as desperate to prove her daughter’s innocence as she is desperate to stop the killer from snagging their next target.
“How do you know about all that?” she asks. Nothing about the crime scenes and mutilation has been disclosed to the news. Unless something leaked, which wouldn’t be surprising.
“I might spend a lot of time talking to dead animals, but I don’t live under a rock. You’d have to be deaf, blind, and dumb not to know what’s been going on. Lots of rumors going around. And by your reaction just now, I’d say there’s some truth to them.”
Rowan’s moved on to a rabbit now. She pinches its little cottontail. She had one with this same coloring when she was young, except it had floppy ears. What a terrible existence it must’ve lived, she thinks. Kept in a cage outside, sucking water from a metal spout and chewing tasteless pellets. It lived and died in captivity, all for a little girl’s amusement. She never let Chloe have one, no matter how many times she asked. “Wild things can’t be kept,” Rowan always reminded her. “You’ll kill it.”
“You didn’t come here to accuse me of killing little bunnies, did you?” Deschane’s voice is disembodied. As hairy as he is, he’s quite camouflaged in this menagerie of stuffed carcasses. Ironically, the question sounds like an accusation.
“No,” says Rowan a touch too quickly. She yanks her hand away from the rabbit as though the tail has become a flame. She thought she heard him say it before, but this time the word “bunnies” is unmistakable. Her ears prick to the sound of the large man’s footsteps. The old floor creaks beneath his weight. She’s easy prey, she realizes. Every hair on her body stands on end as she thinks of the marks left on the girls’ necks. Is that where he pressed his thumbs when he choked them?
She imagines Axel reviewing the security camera footage after she’s dead and bagged up. Once he gets over the mortification of her murder right here in Deschane’s Taxidermy shop, he will rack his brain wondering how she could have been so stupid to wander into a killer’s den.
Because Deschane is a killer. Her eyes dart from one dead animal to the next. He killed all of these or most of them. Or his family did. Killing is in his blood.
“You know, I grew up in this shop.” Deschane is circling her. She can feel his atoms disturbing the stagnant air, closing in. Her chest tightens. Her arms are stiff at her sides. She’s as petrified as a deer in an open field. “My dad owned it and his dad before him. So, in three generations, no medical examiners or beautiful women have ever set foot in here. And here you are killin’ two birds with one stone.”
“I—” She what? She’s sorry for coming here? Apologizing would insinuate she’s accusing him of murder. And she isn’t. She’s just looking for answers. “I—” She’s stammering now. She has no recourse, no tactful way to escape.
And then Deschane says something that makes her knees go weak: “You look like you could use a cigarette.”
They stand out back behind his shop, letting the building block the wind. Rowan takes her first drag in over a year and feels suddenly awake, her head cleared. She blows out a puff of smoke, some of her anxiety with it.
“I know who you are,” says Deschane.
Rowan’s breath hitches. She sucks in the anxiety she just exhaled. It hits her tenfold. She coughs like a rookie smoker. “I should hope. I introduced myself a few minutes ago.”
“You’re the mom of that little bunny who’s gone missing. I recognize the name. Winthorp.” A pause settles between them. “I’m sorry,” he adds.
Rowan is not good at responding to comments like this. She never knows whether to nod or shrug or say thank you, so she usually does nothing. Except to Deschane, she asks: “Why do you call girls bunnies?”
Deschane takes a long drag and lets it out. “Because girls are prey.” He says it so matter-of-factly that Rowan flinches. He side-eyes her. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me that in the last few days, we’re not dealing with the wrongful deaths of two or three girls who all attended Monroe Academy. In a school of four-hundred-and-some students, that’s inexcusable. And undeniable.”
“I hate that,” Rowan says.
Deschane shrugs. “It’s a fact. You don’t have to like it for it to be true.”
The silence is back. One by one, Rowan sees the corpses of each victim: Madison. Sari. And Chloe, the question mark. You’ll love me more when I’m dead. Is that a fact, too?
“I’ve seen her,” says Deschane. “Not recently, but … recent enough, I suppose.”
“Who?” Rowan is zoned out. There are a handful of names he could say. But he says the one that matters most to her.
“Chloe. She’s never taken my class, but…”
“You teach there?” Rowan feigns being dumb.
She’s not very good at it, because Deschane smiles and says, “You already knew that. It’s an elective. I’m there every afternoon, Monday through Friday. The shop closes at one during the week.”
“How was she when you saw her? What was she doing?”
Holding his cigarette between his index and middle finger, Deschane scratches his head. A ribbon of smoke curls upward, disappearing into the overcast sky. “It was kind of abrupt, wasn’t it? Her transformation. One day she’s like this ray of sunshine, all blond and skipping down the halls; and the next she’s a storm cloud, dressed in black, safety pins punched through her ears. I thought something was up, but…” He swats dismissively at nothing. “Kids are weird. Especially high school ones.” He pauses, his thoughts catching up with his mouth. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend your daughter by calling her weird.”
“No, it’s fine,” Rowan replies on impulse. “It was weird … Seeing her change so fast like that. She told us she was method acting.”
“I thought maybe something was going on,” Deschane offers. “I’d heard things.”
Rowan nods, and she can tell by the look he gives her that he knows she’s familiar with the rumor. Thankfully, he doesn’t rehash it. She doesn’t have the mental fortitude for that right now.
“But what can you do? You learn quick not to stick your nose anywhere it don’t belong. Especially as an adjunct. Besides, the cops were investigating it.”
Rowan’s forehead knits. This is news to her. Axel never shared anything about an investigation. Did he know about the rumor of Chloe and Mr. Cutler this whole time? Despite the cold, her blood begins to boil.
Deschane doesn’t need to know she’s rocked, though. She’ll deal with the shock later. “What do you mean about being an adjunct?” she asks. “The full-time teachers are … standoffish, or what?”
He grins. “That’s putting it nicely. Look at me.” He pivots away from her and gestures at his body from neck to knees. Rowan’s gaze drifts even farther down to his boots that are so worn, the steel toes are visible. Deschane sniffs. “I’m not exactly Monroe Academy–chic here. They like to make it known I’m on their turf. Only reason there’s a taxidermy class at all is because my granddad’s one of the school’s founding fathers. We used to have money, I guess, back when the tannery was up and runnin’. Every now and again I grab a shovel and start diggin’ in the back forty. Hopin’ I’ll find where he buried his treasure.”
Rowan knows what it feels like to be the black sheep. She used to get it a lot when she first started out as a medical examiner. The cops didn’t take her seriously. They acted as though she—a woman—belonged literally anywhere but their crime scene. Even the women cops.
“Bunch of elitist pricks.” She doesn’t realize she’s spoken out loud until Deschane snorts.
“That’s putting it nicely, too. There’s some characters in that school for sure,” he says.
This piques Rowan’s interest. “Like who?”
You’re going to say Cutler, aren’t you? Come on, say his name.
Deschane flicks his cigarette and squishes it into the asphalt. “Meet me out for a drink and I’ll tell you all about ’em.”
Rowan stops breathing. Her heart skips, not in a good way. It’s been ages since she’s been asked out; she’s out of practice. But this is not a date or anything like that. It’s one drink in exchange for information. A transaction.
Axel. What will she tell him?
She waves him away as though he’s nothing more than a cloud of smoke. He never came home last night. God knows who he’s with, doing God knows what.
He was probably with Riley. It’s always Riley.
Texting him. Calling him. Sparring with him. For a while now, Rowan has wondered if she’s in the way of something. Taking one final drag, she drops her cigarette to the ground, too, and corkscrews it with the ball of her foot.
She doesn’t have time for that right now. First, she will find Chloe. Then, she’ll worry about picking up the pieces of her marriage. Because right now, Deschane is telling her he knows something that could help her clear her daughter’s name and nail a killer.
For a second, she is yanked back to Thursday night, when she faced the terrible disappointment in Chloe’s eyes and when she warned her that she would love her more when she’s dead. But there had been something after that, hadn’t there? Chloe’s lips had moved to form words, but … she never said them. What had her daughter been trying to tell her?
Rowan drags her gaze to meet Deschane’s which, frightfully, never strayed from her. She shouldn’t do it and yet, she has no choice. She cannot keep pining at the window and carving pumpkins until Chloe comes home. She has one singular, double-edged mission now. Find Chloe, nail the killer.
Here she goes again, killin’ two birds with one stone when she says: “Beck’s. Six o’clock.”