11. The Body
11
THE BODY
When shall the swan, her death-note singing,
Sleep, with wings in darkness furled?
— THOMAS MOORE, “THE SONG OF FIONNUALA”
“ D o you have some I.D.?”
I fished through my purse, then handed over my driver’s license to the impatient, helmet-headed clerk at the Tillamook County morgue, housed in the basement of the local hospital.
“Ms. Whelan?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“Your name doesn’t match the deceased.”
“That’s correct. As I mentioned earlier, she was my maternal grandmother. I was listed as her next of kin on hospital records, though.” I bit back my impatience, but it was getting harder. I had already filled out several forms, waited nearly forty-five minutes in an otherwise empty room, and had two other conversations about this issue with this person already. “I called ahead two days ago to let you know I was coming.”
The clerk glanced at her computer screen again, as if that would help her deny access. Just let me in! I thought.
To my surprise, the woman’s eyes immediately locked on my name. She smiled sweetly, revealing several crooked teeth. “This way, please.”
I followed her down a hallway into a large room filled with stainless steel drawers. A collective hum emitted from what was essentially a collection of refrigerators. Inside one of them was Gran.
We crossed the room, and the clerk knocked on the door to an office, then led me inside. There, a middle-aged man with horn-rimmed glasses and floppy, uncombed hair looked up from a cup of coffee, which he proceeded to spill all over his white lab coat.
“Agh!” he cried, dabbing himself with a dirty handkerchief. In another circumstance, I might have stifled a laugh, but I stood there passively while the clerk introduced me.
“Dr. Aaron, this is Cassandra Whelan. She is here to collect the body of Penelope Monroe. She says she’s her grandmother.”
“Oh, yes, um, hello.” The man stood while wiping one hand down the side of his coat, then reached across the desk to shake mine while continuing to blot his shirt. “I’m the, ah, assistant medical examiner.”
He was also a minor disaster, with one of his scuffed brown shoes untied and a stained lab coat covering a rumpled plaid shirt. Through my glove, a vision of a raccoon scuttling through a pile of trash flashed through my mind, and a shadow of a mask seemed evident just behind his glasses.
A shifter, then. Hmm. And a raccoon.
The medical examiner taking care of my grandmother was someone who potentially scavenged trash in his spare time.
Fantastic.
Dr. Aaron sniffed and offered a lopsided smile, though wariness shuttered his eyes as he also seemed to notice what I was. “I’m sorry about the mess,” he said, indicating his stained coat. “Gladys here always catches me a little off guard.”
Gladys sniffed in response and turned on her orthotic heel, leaving Dr. Aaron and me in his disheveled office.
“Er. Won’t you have a seat?”
I eyed the chair in front of his desk, both of which were littered with papers and other debris.
“Or maybe we should stand,” he conceded. “Hard, you know. We, um, can’t tell what others want the way, um, you can.”
There it was, the knowing look of another fae, recognizing me for what I was. But just as obviously not knowing that even seers had differences in abilities.
I cleared my throat but didn’t correct his assumption about me. “My grandmother?”
“Oh, um, yes.” He pushed his glasses up his nose and wriggled it in a decidedly feral manner. “If it’s any consolation, she died in her sleep. At least, that’s my assessment. No indication of foul play or anything else. Er…maybe you already knew that?”
I cocked my head. “That’s it? You don’t know anything else?”
“Well, I know this is difficult, but we haven’t performed an autopsy. We usually don’t in cases like these.”
“Cases like these?”
The doctor coughed. “Of death by natural causes.”
I couldn’t tell if he was playing nice or if he didn’t know what I was talking about. I pulled off a glove, then reached a tentative hand across the desk. He cringed but didn’t move to take it.
“Do you mind?” I asked.
He looked at my hand in bafflement. Then, as if he knew I wouldn’t let up, touched his paw to my fingers.
Confusion scurried about his nervous mind like a rodent through a den. He didn’t know what I was doing—only that as a witch, I was strange but also powerful. And apparently fragrant.
Why does she need my hand? What is that odd smell under all that smoke? Brine, maybe, plus something sweet, like honeysuckle? The others never smelled that way. Even the one she’s supposedly related to. Sad, yes, but why all the fuss about an old woman who died of heart failure? Happens all the time ? —
I took back my hand and replaced my glove. So, he wasn’t lying, though I was a bit interested in what his enhanced smell could tell him. I, for one, had no idea I smelled faintly of honeysuckle.
As for Gran’s death, however, there was nothing more he could tell me that I couldn’t learn for myself.
I wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or happy about that.
“Can I see her?” I asked.
“Oh! Oh, yes, of course. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
I followed Dr. Aaron back into the room with the steel drawers, where he grabbed a clipboard from a rack on the wall. “Let’s see…Penelope Monroe….ah, yes, she’s in number twelve.”
He led me to one of the drawers and pulled it out, revealing a plastic-covered body. His nose twitched in a way that made me wonder if he sensed something more than just formaldehyde. Then he unzipped the bag, and my insides cracked in half.
There she was. Penelope Monroe. Gran. Her nearly unlined face, cold and slack, tinged purple with rigor mortis. Silver hair cut close, body still, graceful fingers curved slightly toward her hips. The red felt skirt and thick wool sweater were the most lively things about her.
My chest constricted, and my knees grew weak. I placed a hand on the wall to steady myself. Mistake. Muddles flashes of Dr. Aaron mixed with other people grieving new deaths dashed through my mind.
I pulled back like I’d touched a hot iron.
“Yes, that’s her,” I said, wincing as my voice cracked.
“Oh, that’s all right, we know.”
I looked up, mildly affronted.
The doctor turned red, waving one hand in front of his face. “I just mean that one of her neighbors already identified her. It was the mailman, I think, who found her. We just needed you here to collect her body and arrange for its, er, disposal.” Dr. Aaron’s thick brows stood out like black rubber stamps as he scratched his fingers nervously over his chin. “I’ll, um, just give you a moment.”
I turned back to Gran’s body as he bumbled back to his office. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t Gran. Just a body. I had to keep telling myself that. Just. A. Body.
Once my knees steadied, I removed my glove again, then reached down to touch her face.
At first, there was nothing. I wasn’t completely surprised. Energy seeps out of organic matter faster than almost anything else, considering how quickly it decomposes. Much of hers was already gone, along with the memories of what might have happened to her. I had a better chance of finding them lodged in the stone counters in the kitchen.
On top of that, Gran had always been able to mask her thoughts and feelings better than anyone. She was assiduous about saining and other ways of cleansing our home, usually before we left to go anywhere, and again when we returned. Our business is our business , she’d say. Anything left over was usually something she wanted me to see.
But even her best efforts to mask weren’t always effective against my strange, erratic abilities.
So I kept my hand in place, willing the tiny remnants left of her to tell me anything they could. “Come on, Gran. Show me who did this to you.”
Eventually, bits and pieces of her memory started to seep through the barriers that, even in death, still hung on.
In my mind’s eye, the house appeared, foggy and dim, like I was looking through a silk scarf. The vague, insidious mumbling began, the same as had echoed in the hallway when I’d arrived this morning. Here it was muted, but this time, I could hear the distinct back and forth of a conversation between Gran and an English stranger.
I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but the tone of voice I knew well. Eerily calm to the point of monotone, it was a warning to those who made the mistake of treating her like a doddering old woman when they saw the silver hair and wrinkles. Salesmen received it all the time. Tourists who tried to talk her into selling her sweaters for half their worth. One vendor at the farmer’s market who always tried to sell his eggs for twice what others paid. I received it regularly as a teenager, as did my mother the few times she visited.
The message was always the same. Don’t underestimate me . That tone was the calm before the storm.
They went back and forth, the voices fervent but still unintelligible as they sharpened into a quicker exchange. The man began to shout and assumed a more distinct rhythm, like the difference between a verse and regular conversation. My skin pricked with recognition. There was something about that cadence. There was only one type of person who would start shouting poetry in the middle of a fight.
Not poetry. A spell.
A sorcerer .
The thought occurred before I could stop it. Reina’s suspicions about the strange sorcerer who had rescued me not once, but twice, echoed in the back of my mind as loudly as if she were actually there, holding my hand. But before I could contemplate it, I was pulled back into the memory.
Gran was chanting herself now over the sorcerer’s words. A struggle was emerging between them. She was fighting him, but fighting what?
Suddenly, the distinct outline of a black fedora rose into my vision before it was completely snuffed out, along with every other sense. It was like my eyes had been covered with a bandana, my ears covered with muffs. The voices ceased. Something wrapped around my throat so tightly I could barely breathe. My head felt like it was about to explode.
And then there was nothing more to See.
I took back my hand, shaking. “Holy shit,” I murmured. The murmuring, that insidious rhythm, crept back into the back of my mind. My eyes pricked. But still, no tears came. I was too terrified for anything else. “Oh, Gran. Gran. What did he do ?”
With dread lodged in my chest like an anvil, I lay my hand on her cheek. I didn’t want to know. But I owed it to her to learn the truth. Whatever the cause of her death, it was definitely not natural.
This time, though, nothing came to me; no voices, no blackness, just that light constriction around my throat. I stayed there for close to ten minutes, eyes closed, searching for any remnant of Gran’s final moments. But nothing came. Her energy was gone, and her memories were now only what mingled with mine.
“Ms. Whelan?”
I turned around to find Dr. Aaron watching me sympathetically, flexing his hands against one another. My face was stone, but the rest of me was shaking.
“Are you all right?” he asked cautiously.
I shook my head and looked back at Gran. Or sort-of Gran. Whatever this body was...she wasn’t my grandmother anymore.
“Did you find what you were…looking for?”
I sighed. “No. Is there any way to order an autopsy?”
He flipped through a few pages on his clipboard to what I presumed were the notes on her body. “Are you sure? It says here she was eighty-four. As I said before, it’s most likely just natural?—”
“I’m sure,” I interrupted. “We don’t have many family records, and my mother and I would both like to know for certain the cause of death.”
His nose twitched. He knew I was lying—did lies have a scent?—but was wise enough not to press the issue. I didn’t have to touch him to know the fear passing through him, strong as a riptide. Everyone was afraid of seers. They knew what we could do when pressed.
“Well, there is an additional fee for that in cases like these, you see…”
“That’s fine, I’ll pay whatever you need.” There were a few spots in the house where Gran kept mad money tucked away for emergencies. I’d say this qualified. “Just do it. What do you need from me now?”
“Just a few forms need to be signed, and we, ah, need to know what you’d like to have done with the body once the autopsy is finished. I see your grandmother wasn’t an organ donor.”
No, she wouldn’t have been. There was no way my suspicious Gran would want any part of her body given to anyone else, for any purpose.
I nodded, and he zipped up the bag and pushed Gran back into her drawer. I followed him back to his office where we sat down at the large desk strewn with wrinkled papers.
“Typically we send the deceased to the local funerary home, where they prepare the bodies for burial?—”
“That won’t be necessary,” I cut in. “She wanted cremation.”
He nodded. “I’ll give you their contact information to make those arrangements.”
With a few more instructions, I bid the doctor farewell, then signed a few papers with Gladys, who took my credit card along with them.
“The autopsy will be completed by Friday, so please arrange for the funeral services to pick up her body at that point,” she said. “You’ll receive the report within six to eight weeks.”
It couldn’t come soon enough. Or, I reflected on the drive back to Manzanita, maybe it would be better if I didn’t get the news at all.