To be honest, she wished that he would come again, closer, that he would speak to her, that he would explain.
Who had that other freshly dug grave belonged to?
Her mother hadn’t answered her, but she heard other people talking. Everyone said it was terrible. There had been a murderer on the loose, but luckily he was dead. He’d been killed by the police, or he was the police, or something like that. She was irritated by the way people clammed up when she came near. She was nearly a teenager, after all, tall for her age, and she was actually developing a shape. It was insulting to be treated like a child. Then she realized that she had set a flower on a murderer’s grave. That was disturbing. But she had seen Granda just before, and he had spoken about kindness….
“What’s going on?” she asked her friend Ana, who lived down the street and was her own age. Ana had come to the funeral and then back to the house afterward, of course, along with her parents and her cousin Jedidiah, looking handsome in his military uniform. Her grandparents’ next door neighbor was there, too, Tony, who was eighteen already. He and Jed were off talking, so she was able to talk to Ana alone.
“You didn’t know?” Ana asked her. “They got that guy that was killing people. I guess maybe you didn’t hear as much about him down south, but up here, people were paranoid. He was buried today, too.”
And she had put a rose on his coffin.
Later, when she was alone with her grandmother, she was told again to stop talking about seeing her grandfather.
“You loved him, my girl. I know that. But you must stop saying you’ve seen him, though I know you are only trying to ease my heart.”
“Am I hurting you, Gran?” she asked.
“No, it’s not that.”
“Then what?”
Gran looked at her very seriously. “It’s dangerous. Very dangerous. So today you’ve said goodbye. Never, ever think of him as speaking to you…being near you…again.”
“Granda would never hurt me.”
“Not Granda.”
“But—”
Gran was suddenly intense. “To see Granda…you have opened a door. And God alone knows who else might pass through that door.”
Gran’s words chilled her.
“Gran, was Ana telling me the truth? No one thinks twelve is old enough to understand anything, but it is. Tell me, please, was a murderer buried today?”
Her grandmother’s face went white. “Never speak of it, never speak that name in connection with your grandfather!”
“What name?”
“Never you mind. It’s over. An awful time is over. And your grandfather…well, he’s in God’s arms now. Where monsters go, I do not know.”
Gran kissed her then, and held her. “’Tis all right, my girl, ’tis all right. We have love. I have you, and I have your Mom, and my dear son and his lads…. ’Tis all right.”
Christie looked at her. She wanted to scream, because it wasn’t all right. They were always trying to shelter her from the world, but surely it was better to understand the world than hide from it.
But here in her grandparents’—her grandmother’s now—house, everyone was too upset.
Too lost.
She didn’t know why, and it made her afraid. Not afraid of Granda, but just…
Afraid.
Afraid of the dead.
That night, she didn’t sleep. She lay awake, praying silently in her soul that he wouldn’t come.
And he didn’t.
She had probably just been so upset that she was imagining things.
Granda, don’t come again. Don’t ever come again. If you love me at all, please, don’t ever come again.
She told herself that all she felt was the whisper of a breeze, though there was none. A gentle touch, as if…
As if she had been heard and understood.
Her grandfather didn’t appear.
In fact, she never saw him again, not even in dreams.
And as the years passed by, slowly, certainly, she forgot.
It had only been a dream, just as her mother had said.
She was able to believe that for nearly twelve years. And then one day she learned that her grandmother’s words were true.
Seeing the dead…
Was dangerous.
1
An autopsy room always smelled like death, no matter how sterile it was.
And it was never dark, the way it was in so many movies. If anything, it was too bright. Everything about it rendered death matter-of-fact.
Facts, yes. It was the facts they were after. The victim’s voice was forever silenced, and only the eloquent, hushed cry of the body was left to help those who sought to catch a killer.
Jed Braden could never figure out how the medical examiner and the cops got so blasé about the place that they managed not only to eat but to wolf down their food in the autopsy room.
Not that he wasn’t familiar enough with autopsy rooms himself. He was, in fact, far more acquainted with his current surroundings than he had ever wanted to be. But eating here? Not him.
This morning, it was doughnuts for the rest of them, but he’d even refused coffee. He’d never passed out at an autopsy, even when he’d been a rookie in Homicide, and he didn’t feel like starting now.
Even a fresh corpse smelled. The body—any body—released gases with death. And if it had taken a while for someone to discover the corpse, whether it was a victim of natural, self-inflicted or violent death, growing bacteria and the process of decay could really wreak havoc with the senses.
But sometimes he thought the worst smells of all were those that just accompanied the business of discovering evidence: formaldehyde and other tissue preservers and the heavy astringents used to whitewash death and decay. Some M.E.’s and their assistants wore masks or even re-breathers—since the nation had become litigation crazy, some jurisdictions even required them.
Not Doc Martin. He had always felt that the smells associated with death were an important tool. He was one of the fifty percent of people who could smell cyanide. He was also a stickler; he hated it when a corpse had to be disinterred because something had been done wrong or neglected the first time around.
There wasn’t a better man to have on a case.
Whenever a death was suspicious, there had to be an autopsy, and it always felt like the last, the ultimate, invasion. Everything that had once been part and parcel of a living soul was not just spread out naked, but sliced and probed.
At least an autopsy had not been required for Margaritte. She had been pumped full of morphine, and at the end, her eyes had opened once, looked into his, then closed. A flutter had lifted her chest, and she had died in his arms, looking as if she were only sleeping, but truly at rest at last.
Doc Martin finished intoning the time and date into his recorder and shut off the device for a moment, staring at him.
He didn’t speak straight to Jed, though. He spoke to Jerry Dwyer, at his side.
“Lieutenant. What’s he doing here?”
Inwardly, Jed groaned.
“Doc…” Jerry murmured unhappily. “I think