Simon Watts didn’t leave his house all night. And another drowned body was found in the morning.
I watched Watts get up and leave for work at about 6:30 A.M., and I slipped out of his backyard and walked to the mortuary. I was growing more and more familiar with the city the more I walked around in it, and especially after I got lost in a subdivision, but now I knew how that subdivision worked, and I guess that was useful information. Probably not, but I’d spent the night in a plastic playhouse, and Arizona nights were far colder than I’d been expecting, and I was trying to look on the bright side. I found my way out and arrived at the mortuary early, checked all the batteries in my motion sensors, and sat in the back and waited for Margo. She came in around eight. When I heard the chime from my backpack I walked back up to the front door. She gave me the news before she even said hello.
“Crabtree Jones drowned last night,” she said. “Shelley found him on the property around three in the morning, out in the yard by the trucks. Apparently he never came back in to bed, and she woke up and wondered where he was and went looking for him.”
A hundred questions leapt into my mind: how had someone drowned if Simon Watts hadn’t done it? Where had it happened, and was it close to water? Did Rain have more than one visionary killer to do her bidding? These and more tumbled through my head, but after hunting Withered for so many years, I’d grown pretty good at hiding my investigations. The only question I asked out loud was this:
“There’s a person named Crabtree Jones?”
“It’s not his real name,” said Margo, pulling some blank paperwork out of her desk. “I think it’s Matthew, but nobody likes him and he owns the Crabtree Junkyard, so we all call him Crabtree. I say ‘we’ like I had some part in it, but they were all calling him Crabtree before I ever moved to Lewisville, back when his father owned the junkyard and he just lived there.”
“Wait,” I said. “There’s a person named Crabtree Jones, and he lives in a junkyard?”
“Well where else is he supposed to live? You own a junkyard, you don’t own much else. Crabtree’s yard is on the highway, maybe ten, twelve miles outside of town. He buys old vehicles and strips them for parts. Or at least he used to, before he drowned.”
I sat in the other office chair, watching as she started filling out the paperwork. “So how do you know all this?” I asked. “If his wife found him at 3 A.M., we don’t exactly have a bustling local journalist scene to pick up on the story and get it out this early in the morning.”
“Shelley called me.”
“Why?”
“She’s a friend of mine,” said Margo, licking her finger and turning a page. “One of the blue-hairs that was here the other day for Kathy’s viewing. You met her, though I can’t imagine you remember. All us old ladies know each other. We have a secret club—handshakes and everything.”
“Little Orphan Annie decoder rings,” I suggested.
“That’s the idea.” She filled in a few more blanks on the paperwork, writing the date in careful, block lettering. “Shelley called me first thing in the morning, wants my help setting up the funeral.”
I was curious and worn too thin to care about niceties, so I asked: “How old are you?”
Margo looked up. “Now what kind of question is that to ask a lady?”
“The women at the viewing were all seventy-five at least, and Kathy looked mid-sixties. You keep putting yourself in the same group, but you don’t look a day over…” I tried to guess, “… fifty-five.”
“Don’t lowball me, son. I earned these years.”
“Sixty, then,” I said. “But that’s pushing it.”
She finished the paperwork and stacked it neatly, lining up the edges of each page with fastidious attention to detail. “As it happens I’m a mite older than even that, but I’m not a blue-hair yet so you’re right enough about the difference in our ages. For whatever that information is worth. Now, when are you gonna tell me why you look like you slept in a treehouse all night?”
One of the great things I’ve learned about my life is that it’s weird enough that I can usually just tell the truth about it and no one will believe me. “It was a playhouse,” I said. “Had a little plastic sink and everything. I’m working up to treehouses, but I’m afraid of heights.”
“Well,” said Margo. “You take your smart mouth into the shower and get washed up. We leave in ten minutes.”
“Where are we going?”
“Have you not been listening? Crabtree died. You watched me fill out the paperwork for it.”
“So, you’re going out to the house to arrange the funeral?”
“I am a funeral director, after all. I don’t know which part of this is so mysterious.”
“My mom never made house calls.”
Margo tucked the papers in a manila folder. “That’s why you’re coming with me. You want to be the kind of funeral director who gets a phone call at six in the morning from a newly minted widow, you make house calls.” She stood up. “Nine minutes left for that shower.”
I nodded and ran to the tiny locker room, showering in a flurry and then getting back into my dirty clothes because they were all I had with me. I brushed off the last bits of grass and dirt and ran out to meet Margo at her car.
“I suppose that’ll have to do,” she said. “Hop in.”
Margo didn’t talk much in the car, which gave me the chance to think more about the situation with the Withered. I knew there was at least one in town, and the continued occurrence of inexplicable drownings certainly hinted at another. I assumed it was Rain, because of what the homeless girl had said, but what if she’d meant something else? What if she was just high? I needed to find her and talk to her.
“Does Lewisville have a homeless shelter?” I asked.
“Not as such,” said Margo. “Soup kitchens, though, and a halfway house.” She glanced at me as she drove. “You can always move back into the mortuary.”
“It’s not for me,” I said, “I’m just curious. Think maybe I’ll volunteer.”
“Good for you.”
If the girl at the viewing had really been homeless, volunteering in that community might be the best way to find her or someone who knew her. And if a Withered was preying on local homeless, I might learn a bunch of other things as well.
In the meantime, what could I do about Simon Watts? He was obviously connected to something dangerous, and it seemed likely to me that the Dark Lady he’d talked about was a Withered, but I’d been wrong before. Could I risk just approaching him directly? Would he attack me when he saw me? Would he run? Would he even recognize me at all?
And now another man had drowned and there was no way Simon had done it. How many people did Rain have under her control? Was the homeless girl one of them? If I got too close, would the entire town rise up and attack me? I looked at Margo, wondering how I could kill her if she suddenly felt compelled to drown me. She was a large woman, solidly built, and probably pretty strong as well. I might be able to take her, but a knife would be easier. I needed to get my own again, instead of just borrowing Parker’s all the time.
I needed to stop thinking about killing people. Or at least focus on killing the right people.
I wondered what Parker had thought when he’d realized I’d never come home the night before. Did he think I was a druggie? Probably most people did—a druggie or a drunk, but that was sometimes valuable. People made their own excuses for you, which saved a lot of time. And it was easier to maneuver around a person when you knew exactly what they thought of you.
We drove through a curving canyon of yellow and brown stone, dotted here and there with tenacious, twisted trees, and then the road straightened out into a wide, flat plain. I saw the junkyard a good five minutes before we reached it, an acre or two of fenced land stacked high with rusting cars. Margo exited the freeway, and then we turned sharp to the right and passed through a narrow tunnel underneath the road. The street was called Crabtree, and it was paved right up to the edge of the open gate of the Crabtree Junkyard. A wide sign hung over it, pale red letters faded by the sun. Inside the yard was a police car, parked by an old wooden house that looked so nice it seemed completely out of place.
Chalk body outlines are only used when the body is still alive, and they need to get it to the hospital before the police have finished studying a crime scene; they mark the body’s location as best they can, and then medics try to save the person while the police stay behind and look at bullet angles and that kind of stuff. All of which is to say that there was no body outline here, just a yellow plastic card, folded in half, with a black number one on it, marking the place where the body had lain.
“Morning, Joe,” said Margo, unfolding herself from behind the wheel of the car. “Brown’s already taken him away?”
“Missed him by ten minutes at the most,” said the cop.
“Blame him, then,” said Margo, pointing at me. “Slept in a treehouse; needed a shower. I’m going in to talk to Shelley.”
Margo walked toward the porch of the house, clutching her yellow folder tightly, but I stayed in the yard, trying to take it all in. The first thing to notice was the total lack of water: this was the full-blown Arizona desert, and with the sun already up, it was dry as a bone and climbing up toward scorching. The yellow card that marked the body’s position was about ten yards out from the house, and another yard or so from the closest vehicle—an old, dusty truck, with more rust on it than paint.
The cop looked me up and down. “Another of Margo’s charity cases?”
“Yep,” I said, and walked toward him to shake his hand. I figured I needed to be as polite as I could to make up for my scraggly looking clothes. “Robert Jensen. I’m the new embalmer.”
“Joe Kinney,” said the cop. “Careful where you step, this area’s still under investigation.”
“Gotcha,” I said, and stepped back. “Margo said it was another drowning?”
“That’s what we think, at least,” said Joe. He was writing something on his pad. “Guess the autopsy will tell us for sure.”
“Kathy Schrenk didn’t get an autopsy.”
“Kathy Schrenk was an anomaly,” said Joe. “Crabtree makes it a pattern.”
“And how could you tell he drowned?”
Joe shrugged. “He was full of water. Seemed like a likely explanation. Came trickling out of him every time we tried to move him. Plus he was soaked to the bone, like we’d pulled him out of a river.” He pointed at the dry dirt around the yellow card, tracing a wide oval in the air with his finger. “You can’t see it now, but there was a whole patch of wet ground around him. This desert just drank it up, like it was running down a drain.” He stared at the spot on the ground. “I don’t know how the water got to him, but it did.”
I stared with him and then looked at the yard again, wondering where an attacker might have come from. How were Rain’s servants drowning people? How were they bringing in that much water and getting it into the victims? And for that matter, how were they choosing their victims? An old woman, an even older man, and me. It didn’t make sense.
“Well would you look at that,” said Joe. I glanced over at him and saw him crouch down, peering not at the ground by the marker, but at the rusted truck nearby. “I’ll be damned.”
“What?”
“Tracks in the dust,” he said, pointing at the side of the truck. “This heap’s been here probably thirty years—that’s a ’78 Ford—and probably only ever gets washed when it rains. But there’s rivulets of water tracing all through the dust here, and this middle patch doesn’t have any dust at all. It’s been sprayed with water.”
He was right, and once pointed out, it was impossible not to see it. The splash zone, or whatever it was that had gotten the truck wet, extended to the left onto a second truck—it hadn’t been sprayed as heavily as the one by the body, but it had definitely gotten wet. Drops had hit the dirt and run down the metal, leaving long, clear trails in the layer of dust. We stood up, looking at the other cars stacked on top of these two; the splash pattern extended maybe ten feet up, exploding out like a ghost of fireworks frozen in dried mud.
“Robert!” called Margo from the doorway. “You coming in or not?”
I stared at the water pattern for a moment longer, then turned and walked to the house while Joe took pictures of this new clue.
How had water sprayed out like that? Which of Rain’s minions had done it, and what method or tool had caused the splash? How, and why, did you drown someone like that?
I thought for one second that it might have been Shelley Jones herself, mind controlled into killing her own husband, but as soon as I reached the front door and saw her I discarded that idea. She was tiny and frail and used a walker to move painfully from the kitchen to the couch. She sat down gently and then, with shaking hands, pulled a pair of small water bottles from the basket on the front of her walker.
“Have a drink,” she said. “It’s hot out.”
I took the bottles and handed one to Margo.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do now,” said Shelley.
“You’ll find something,” said Margo, and twisted the top off her water bottle. She sat down on a sofa, and I sat next to her. “We all do.”
“How do you manage?” asked Shelley. “Your husband passed away so long ago, and you’ve been so all alone.”
“I have Harold,” said Margo, and took a sip of water. “And Jasmyn. And Robert here. Robert, this is Shelley Jones.”
I waved. “Hi.”
“Good morning,” said Shelley. She smiled, but it only lasted a second, and then the happiness drained back out of her face. “He was all I had, you know.”
“Not that he was ever much worth having,” said Margo.
My eyes opened wide in shock. Did she really just say that to a widow?
“He helped me remember the pills,” said Shelley. “With this arthritis I can’t even open the bottles on my own—what am I going to do now?”
“You can sell the yard,” said Margo. “And the house. I don’t imagine it’s worth much as a business these days—you were mostly living on social security, anyway—but the state might want it. Not everyone’s piped up for water and electricity this far out in the desert, and that’s got to be worth something to somebody.”
“And live in a home?” asked Shelley. “This is where I belong.”
“You’ll have more company in a rest home than you do out here,” said Margo. “The only time you ever leave this place is to come to a funeral.”
“Company,” said Shelley. Her eyes got watery and the corners of her mouth turned down. “Company comes and goes, and nurses are only there because you pay them. I don’t want company, and I never did.”
“What do you want?” asked Margo.
“Matthew wasn’t kind, but he was mine,” said Shelley. “And we never had children, so now there’s nothing of mine that’s left to be had.”
Margo laid her yellow folder on the coffee table and started going through the decisions for the funeral arrangements: what day, how big, do you want a viewing, do you want a graveside, do you want a burial or a cremation? I listened, but I wasn’t paying close attention—something Shelley said had sparked an idea. Who were the drowning victims? Kathy, and Crabtree, and me. I’d thought we didn’t have anything in common, but we did: not age, not location, not profession, not any of the typical demographic markers a serial killer used to pick their victims. But this wasn’t a serial killer, it was a Withered, and the Withered had their own dark needs that the rest of us couldn’t fathom. The drowning victims weren’t linked by anything physical, but we had one powerful emotional similarity.
We were all alone.
Kathy Schrenk had had no family, no husband, no children. A sister and a few passing social friends, and that was it. Crabtree Jones had had a wife, but they obviously weren’t very close, and out here in the desert they wouldn’t have seen much of anyone else. And me? I had no one left at all, and my only friend was a thousand miles away, locked up in protective custody. I didn’t have anyone I could talk to, or stay with, or be with, outside of a tiny handful of barely acquaintances. Margo was an employer, not a friend, and Parker only knew the false face I put on around others, and that only a little. We were all alone, and we had all been attacked.
Did Rain target lonely people because there was no one around to defend them? The only reason I’d lived through my attack was the unexpected appearance of help. It was possible that this was just a matter of convenience, choosing victims away from witnesses, but there was a difference between people who were alone and people who were temporarily by themselves. Every killer chose victims when no one was around; that was one thing. Rain was choosing victims who were deeply, perhaps fundamentally, alone, and that was another thing entirely. But what did it mean?
Shelley’s arthritis was so bad she couldn’t hold a pen, so Margo filled out the rest of the paperwork for her, walking her through each decision on the funeral. The business of death was, for many morticians, pure business: they pushed the expensive options, they racked up the add-ons and extra fees, and they used your loved one’s death to maximize their personal profits. And I guess I couldn’t blame them, because that was their job—everyone’s trying to make money and someone has to bury the dead, so they might as well make some money too, right? That had always been my father’s philosophy. But my mother had never been like that, and Margo wasn’t either; she walked Shelley through the maze of choices calmly and honestly, explaining everything clearly and talking Shelley out of the more superfluous luxuries. We left about an hour later, with a modest funeral laid out on Margo’s small stack of papers, capped off with Shelley’s credit card number written down in Margo’s neat block handwriting.
I took one last look at the crime scene, wondering again where the water had come from and how it had splashed so high, and then we got in the car and drove back to the mortuary.
Jasmyn and Harold were already there, cleaning up but mostly killing time; Luke Minaker’s funeral wasn’t for another day, and there was only so much prep work to be done for it. Margo explained our visit to Crabtree and then called the coroner, trying to get an idea of when we might receive the body after the autopsy. I leaned against the office wall, leaving the chair for Jasmyn, when suddenly my backpack, forgotten in the corner, started singing “Happy Birthday.” It took me a second to realize what that meant, but then I grabbed my backpack and bolted from the room.
“Robert?” asked Jasmyn. “Are you okay?”
“Cell phone,” I called back.
“Happy Birthday” meant the back door, so I ran to the front and looked out carefully. When I saw no cars or armed FBI task force, I slipped outside. The motion sensor in the garden saw me, and my backpack ding-donged, and I stuck close to the wall as I ran along the side of the building, headed toward the corner. It felt stupid, but I had to treat every alarm as the real deal or what good did they do me? If the FBI showed up to investigate the mysterious fire I’d be captured, and probably spend the rest of my life in jail; now that we had a pattern of impossible drownings, like the cop had said, the odds of FBI involvement were growing even higher. I couldn’t let them see me. Honestly I needed to just leave the mortuary completely, but I was learning too much here. It was the best way I had to follow the trail of bodies, because the trail inevitably passed right through this building.
But how long until it got too dangerous to stay?
I peeked around the back of the building and saw one lone car in the parking lot; I couldn’t tell the make, but it was old and foreign, and almost definitely not an FBI fleet vehicle. Could I risk going back in? I walked slowly to the back door, listening carefully, and heard Margo and Harold talking with someone. I glimpsed him through the gaps in a tree—older, probably Margo’s age, but thin as a rail and wearing a suit. He had glasses and a briefcase. She seemed to be talking to him in a friendly enough manner, like she knew him, but his responses were odd—not rude, but standoffish. Above all else, he didn’t look FBI; they had a way about them that was all too easy to spot once you’d spent a lot time with them. I watched a while longer, until my backpack chirped ding-dong again. Someone going in the front door, or coming out of it looking for me. I returned to the front of the building and reached the corner just as Jasmyn came around it.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, patting my backpack. “It’s nothing. Just my cell phone.”
“Yesterday your ringtone was Christmas,” she said. “Is it … your birthday today?”
“No, it’s my friend’s. From another town. Customized ringtone.” I looked behind me, then back at Jasmyn. “Do you know who that is at the door?”
“Some friend of Margo’s,” said Jasmyn. “Mr. Connor; he didn’t give a first name. I’ve never met him.”
“Okay,” I said, and nodded. I stood there for a moment, then nodded again. “Well, my phone call’s done, so should we go back inside?”
Jasmyn shrugged, and we walked around to the back door. My backpack sang “Happy Birthday” again as we approached it, but I ignored it. “It’s nothing,” I told Jasmyn. “They can leave a message.”
We found Margo and the newcomer in the office, talking about money. Margo looked up as we came in. “Jasmyn, Robert, this is Mr. Connor, an old friend of mine from before I moved to Lewisville. He’s here to work on our books and get us on whatever this software’s called.”
“Quicken,” said Mr. Connor. The wrinkles in his face were almost all vertical, which made him look solemn, like a slim cathedral. He walked past Margo to the chair behind the desk and sat without asking permission. “I can get started right now if you like.”
“Thank you,” said Margo. “Jasmyn, honey, can you run and get Mr. Connor a drink? What do you want, Mr. Connor, cola or lemon-lime?”
“Water will be fine,” said Mr. Connor. He was already clicking away with the mouse.
“Run along, honey,” said Margo. “Robert, walk with me a second.”
Oh no.
Margo led me down the hall a bit, finding a secluded spot by a draped alcove, and looked at me seriously. “You seem awfully jumpy.”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t want an apology, I want an explanation.”
“My cell phone rang, and I had to go answer it.”
“That doesn’t sound like any cell phone I’ve ever heard, though I can’t imagine what else it is. And it has an interesting habit of ringing every time somebody comes to our door.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
Margo stared at me a moment, like she was trying to read a book that was written on my face. “Do you know why I hired you?” she said at last.
“Because I’m very good at a job you need done.”
“Because you need help,” she said. “I saw it with Jasmyn and all the others, and I see it with you. Homeless and drifting and addicted. Sprinting out the door every time that phone rings. I don’t know what you’re running from, Robert, but I know you’re running.”
“I…” I didn’t know what to say. That I was running from humans and monsters both? That I needed this job to help me find them first? Would any of that matter, even if she believed it? Maybe it was just time to move on. “I can get out of your way.”
“I’m not asking you to get out of my way,” she said. “I tell you you’re running from something else and your first instinct is to run from me, and I understand that. You’re not the first teenage drifter I’ve taken in and you won’t be the last, though you’re certainly the only one who could work a minor miracle on that third-degree burn victim’s makeup yesterday. I don’t want you to leave. What I’m asking you for, Robert, is a little trust. I don’t need to know all your secrets any more than you need to know all of mine, but I can’t help you if you don’t tell me at least something.”
I watched her, trying to decide what to say. “I don’t really respond well to people trying to help me.”
“Like I haven’t noticed that.”
How much could I tell her? If she really made a habit of helping troubled youth, surely she’d be accepting of a little strangeness? Obviously I couldn’t tell her the whole truth, but maybe there was some portion of it that would calm her down and get her off my back?
“I left my family,” I said. I guess my sister counted. “I don’t want them to find me, so I’m … laying low.”
She stared at me a while before responding. “That’s not everything,” she said at last.
“But it’s true,” I said. “The details can come out later.”
She pursed her lips, considering me. “All right,” she said at last. “Promise me you’re not running drugs, or anything like that.”
“I promise.”
“And you’re eighteen? Not a minor anymore?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll cover for you,” she said. “But sooner or later you will need to tell me the rest of this story, so that I know what I’m covering and the best way to get you out from under it.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I don’t know how long it’s been since somebody had your back,” she said, “but I hope it helps you relax enough to get yourself together.”
“Thank you,” I said again. “I guess we’ll see.”
She nodded and walked away, and I thought about all the people who’d had my back before.
There was only a tiny handful of them still living or sane.