to do it.
A dozen people clustered by the creek. I wanted to push ahead because they might be contaminating a crime scene, but Buddy held me back with an extended arm.
Wait, he said. No crime. It’s a drowning. That’s why there’s no police.
How do you know that? I croaked.
They told me.
They? The men were in brown short-sleeve shirts buttoned to the neck, the women in long, simple burgundy dresses. They looked like few people we ever saw in Danville; maybe the Mennonite honey sellers who set up occasional Saturday farmers’ markets in a deserted bank parking lot.
Kin, Buddy said. When I looked at him he shrugged and said, Distant. The only kind I have left. That’s how I knew to come.
A woman knelt beside the drowned man, who’d been dragged from the clear shallow water and lay face down on the muddy bank. Two men stood in the creek, on limestone slabs so smooth they looked placed, and the woman was holding a baby with a port-wine stain covering half its face. She took the dead man’s hand and touched it to the birthmark.
Okay, Buddy said, dropping his arm. He’s ours now.
What was that about? I asked.
They think it’ll make the birthmark disappear. He’s the baby’s father.
Before attending to the body, Buddy shook everyone’s hands, even the women’s, so I did the same. The men helped us bag and carry out the corpse, but even so it was getting dark as we turned to make our way back up the hills, which seemed twice as steep now, twice as slippery; the men carrying the body had to stop every ten yards to let Buddy and me catch up. The women went ahead through the trees with flashlights, singing through the dusk, something that surprised me by sounding celebratory. A psalm, I guessed; I was too shy to ask which one. The nesting cardinals in the darkening trees began to sing and whistle too, as if in response, with their clear, piercing calls: what cheer, what cheer, what cheer, wheat wheat wheat.
Now, Buddy said, if anyone tries to take out those leg bones, they’d better be careful.
I knew what he meant; the metal splinters could cut badly. Had, many times, on careless bone removers, myself included the first time I’d come across one, a WWII vet. All kinds of things got blown into legs in accidents and times of war; with road rash you always looked for gravel, but with war injuries the subsequent gifts were mysteries. Watch sprockets and gears or a bit of a photograph, a Gillette razor blade, the name still clearly written after fifty years, on one vet three embedded molars, as if some enemy had bitten down on him in his final agony. But Buddy fell quiet after discussing this guy’s wounds, though he did crank the country music up to deafening levels when he began handing me the internal organs to weigh.
At eleven—the Episcopal church bells sounding through our open window—Buddy finished the last bit of sewing on the heart attack, snipped the thread, and tossed the needle in the biohazard bin. The king is dead, long live the king, he said, the way he ended all autopsies and obituaries. I’d always meant to ask him where his little Britishisms came from, but now didn’t seem the time.
He peeled off his gloves and said, About McDonald’s, she had no defensive wounds.
So it’s an accident, right? I said.
He opened her file, noticed a chunk of concrete in a picture. That could be blood, right? He laid his finger on a dark stain covering one corner. Could be what she fell back against. Maybe it was that weird lunch she had.
He’d commented on her stomach contents during her autopsy—pomegranate and pears. Now he said, Maybe she was dizzy from lack of protein.
A chunk of concrete four feet from her body; how could she have fallen against that, Buddy? But I already knew she was going to be an accident. Okay, I said. I’ll make the switch, after I clean up here.
Good, he said. I’m going to take an early lunch. Make sure you send an amended report out to all the police departments we initially contacted, telling them they no longer have to worry about a murderer on the loose.
Buddy? I said, before he left the room. Can I have the afternoon off?
His shoulders stiffened, but I wasn’t worried he’d say no. I’d heard him talking to my PO earlier in the morning, as he did daily, confirming I was at work, and though she could drop in at any point unannounced, she wasn’t likely to drive the ninety miles from Louisville to Danville. Who could blame her? She’d gone to the University of Louisville, and the only flags that outnumbered the blue University of Kentucky’s on the drive down were Confederate ones, both of which infuriated her. But even if she did, Buddy could say I was running errands for the morgue, which would be enough to keep me from violating my probation and ending up in prison. Or so I hoped.
It’s something personal, I said. Something important. I couldn’t tell him what because the PO often asked if I was breaking any rules: dealing with corpse wranglers; marketing tendons or heart valves; contacting medical researchers; visiting morgues or funeral parlors. And I knew Buddy: if I told him the truth, he’d feel obligated to pass it on. Promises aren’t piecrusts, he’d once said. They’re not meant to be broken.
He seemed to understand that and nodded again, rubbing the lemon-scented disinfectant into his hands. Don’t do anything stupid, he said, and pointed at me with glistening fingers, which made me shiver.
Too late, I thought. But I said, No, of course I won’t. I’ve already done enough stupid things to last a lifetime. And Buddy, I said, just as he reached the door. Keep McDonald’s around for a bit, okay? Now that we’re going to reclassify her, maybe something unexpected will come up. It always happens that way.
He held up two fingers, which for a bizarre moment I thought was a victory sign. Then he said, We’ve only got two weeks, but I will. His eyes glistened, though I only realized it when he wiped one with his shirtsleeve.
He said, I’d keep her forever, if we could. Until we knew.
I realized then that he had the sickness, this attachment to the dead. For me it had been sheer numbers that did away with it, body after body after body, so that they blurred together into a river of death and I became merely another set of hands they passed through on their way to their final, distant shores. That wouldn’t happen here, couldn’t; Danville simply wasn’t big enough. It wasn’t all bad—a reverence for the dead was something I’d parted with too easily, and in McDonald’s case I was beginning to feel some of the same things as Buddy—yet it could lead someone to concentrate on the dead at the expense of the living. And once that happened, there seemed almost no way to come back.
After he left, I searched through McDonald’s file one more time, stopping at the details of all the women she might have been—their names, their birthdates and Social Security numbers, a bit of their family histories. In my worst moments, when the scandal seemed like it would never end, I’d wished that I could die and come back as one of them, or take one of their identities and move on. Once I’d said as much to Buddy.
You couldn’t, he’d said. Wouldn’t be right.
I know, I said. It’s not something I’d actually do. Just something I wish I could. And really, it’s not that I wished I were dead. Just that I could have a clean slate. Without that, it seems like I’m always going to be running from my past.
That’s not what I meant, he said. It’s not that you need to suffer for your sins, but that sooner or later someone might find you out. You’d use their Social Security number to get a job, and a cop or a PI would track you down because the parents were still hoping you were alive. It would hurt them, you know?
I could always use Carmine, I said. And in truth, I’d had a fake ID made up for myself in that name, just in case.
He gave a bitter smile. Sure.
Carmine Semple was an orphan and a missing person, but no one was really looking