The water Tim washed the body with was warm. He poured it from a tub instead of spraying Fritz down. Tim used a soft cloth to clean out the wounds. He arranged the body modestly and spoke gently as he took pictures of Fritz’s poor face – or lack of it – and limbs and trunk. Tim pointed the camera at the bottom of Fritz’s feet and the palms of his hand. He muttered apologies as he picked shot out of Fritz’s body. The doctor chattered on, sharing with Fritz all the good memories of him.
He knew all the muttering and cooing would be on the tape he had activated when he walked into the room. There would also be the sound of weeping. Tim didn’t care about that. Finally finished, he put away his tools, covered Fritz with a sheet and put him to rest in a climate-controlled room.
When all that was done, Tim catalogued his evidence bags. Fritz had carried with him three dollars in bills and twenty-seven cents in change. He had a crumpled piece of paper with a telephone number and a receipt for gas. He had another list in the breast pocket of his shirt. That piece of paper was so bloody Fritz could only make out bits and pieces of the phone numbers: Bernadette’s doctor, the pharmacy, the mortuary. Those were the only ones he recognized.
That piece of paper was still moist with Fritz’s blood. Tim ran his finger across the bottom line nearly erasing the mortuary number. Then he began to pray and then he began to cry in earnest. He sank to the floor, put his back up against the table upon which Fritz had been laid out and cried until he had nothing left inside him.
After that, he called Dove and told him what he found.
Then Tim cried some more.
The Road to Corallis
9:50 a.m.
Dove kept his foot heavy on the gas. Corallis wasn’t a stretch and the speed wasn’t going to get him there all that much sooner, but he had the need for it. He was not feeling kindly toward Cherie. She had dared him to put her back home when there was a woman missing, a man dead and work to be done. Dove argued it was for her own safety but she would have none of it. So he left, driving fast, reminding himself that he knew she was an obstinate woman when he married her.
Dove settled with it by the time he was a few miles out of Corallis. He slowed and dialed the FBI. Brian Drake was still active but out in the field on the California side. Dove left his contact information and rolled to a stop at the light on Corallis’s Main Street where Charlotte Bradley had confronted her mother’s friend. Then Dove set thoughts of Cherie aside and smiled. He looked at the Starbucks sign on the building on the corner of Main Street and Pine. The cup in the car had come from here.
He was getting somewhere.
Bernadette’s House
9:55 a.m.
In high school, Bernadette reigned as Ice Queen over the winter ball. Thirty-two of her classmates, and anyone on the mountain who wanted to dance, were invited.
Bernadette wore a red taffeta dress. Darlene, owner of Darlene’s Custom Beauty, piled Bernadette’s chestnut curls high to show the paste tiara off to its best advantage. The local newspaper ran a picture and mentioned how perfectly suited Bernadette was to a crown and a fancy do. She wore that tiara when she danced with Fritz and when they made love in the back seat of his car after the dance was over. On her wedding day, Bernadette’s mother attached her veil to the tiara. For fifteen years it was perched atop the television until Bernadette couldn’t bear to look at it any more.
A month after finding a lump in her breast, three weeks after learning it was in her bones and two weeks after starting chemo and radiation Bernadette packed that tiara away. Thankfully, those lousy little mutant cells had not made their way to her brain. She still thought clearly. Fritz, on the other hand kidded himself that it was business as usual.
Even when Bernadette came out into the living room, naked as a jaybird, wet as a hen, holding half her hair in her hand, Fritz still didn’t get it. He had wrapped her in a towel, sat her on his lap and pulled out the rest of her hair like a mama cat grooming her kitten.
Fritz never said a word about the cancer and that riled Bernadette. She screamed at her husband while pointing out the ravages of the disease. Shock kept him mum, but that didn’t make it any better. What Bernadette didn’t understand was that Fritz simply couldn’t imagine the world without her. What Fritz didn’t understand was that Bernadette would have appreciated a chance to tell him she couldn’t picture a world without her either. And, if he wasn’t going to do anything about it, if God wasn’t going to step in and give her a reprieve, then damn if she didn’t have faith in herself to make things right.
Now she was thinking that faith had been misplaced. The chore she set for herself was proving harder than expected. She lay on the floor of the shed, open boxes all around her, too tired to move. The scarf over her bald head barely kept out the chill. She thought she heard critters underneath the floor, but she knew better. There was nothing but the cold earth there and the only thing keeping her from lying underneath it was her will to live.
Sighing, Bernadette rolled onto her back and put her hand on her empty chest. There were times it surprised her to find her heart still beating when half of her wasn’t there. For a second she wished someone would find her, help her back to bed, discover the secret of what Fritz had done but Bernadette knew that wouldn’t happen.
They were all out looking for the boogieman – the one who had shot her man dead. They wouldn’t find him because the boogieman knew just how far to run and how low to lie. He knew just when to show up and what candy to dangle. That creature may have misjudged poor, dumb Fritz but he wouldn’t be misjudging anything or anyone else.
Moving onto her side, Bernadette rested another minute then rolled onto her stomach. Lying with her cheek on the smooth wooden planks, she put her palms down and pushed. By the time she got her back up against the wall, Bernadette was panting and the world was spinning. Still, she set to her task again: pulling paper out of one box, methodically tearing it into pieces and putting it in another box. She did it because Fritz would have wanted it that way.
Outside the air is fresh. The snow has stopped falling. It didn’t stick and the ground gives under my feet. A white cloud sits atop this mountain like a lazy cat. I feel better now that I’ve had a rest, now that I’m in the open again. I set the lantern on the ground, hunker down to turn it off. It is then I see something amazing. The hands on my watch have moved. I’m not sure if I was in that mine for one minute or one minute and a day but I am sure that my watch now says forty-one minutes after two. Damn, if this isn’t a sign. I am not going to die in the middle of nowhere. I’m going to be safe. Time is moving on and so will I.
Smiling now, damn pleased with the situation, I look up to scope out the forest and that’s when I learn that safety has an expiration date. I hear the crack of a rifle shot. My heart leaps, stops and leaps again. The fog muffles the sound and I can’t tell where the shot comes from. I hang on to my stick and stay close to the ground looking for the best place to hide. All I see is white. That means all they see is white. Staying low, I move with the fog, keeping in the thick of it, crawling away from where I think the sound has come from.
Another crack.
Where the hell is the damn shooter? A best guess is all I have left and my guess is that he is behind me. I gather up my courage and struggle to my feet. I throw myself into the forest, sucking up the pain of moving ’cause I have a feeling dying would hurt a whole lot more.