Chapter 35
Tommy Fogg pushed back the old woman’s hair. At her age—and dead—the hair ought to have been dry and bristly, but it felt soft. Supple. He stared at her as if she were a puzzle he felt on the verge of solving, that if he looked just a bit longer, some great epiphany would arrive.
“What’s happening?” he whispered to the dead woman, leaving unspoken the last two words—to me.
Fogg began to hum. Slowly, deliberately, in time with the piano notes that floated on the air around them.
His boss had been unable to hear the music, which meant either Fogg had lost his goddamn mind or that he was somehow special.
The idea embarrassed him, but thrilled him even more.
He told himself he wasn’t a lunatic, evaluated his own thoughts and found them quite rational, and nothing else amiss.
He had never heard music so painfully beautiful, but he had no doubts about its origin.
From her. For me.
Soft, lilting piano, full of heartbreak.
Where had the police found her? Fogg had prepared unknown bodies for burial in the past and never needed to know their histories, but his questions about this woman would stay with him forever.
He imagined he saw her fingers twitch. He stared, waiting for it to happen again. A full two minutes went by before he told himself it had been his imagination.
Fogg ran his thumb over her lip. Did the music come from inside her? If he forced open her mouth, would it grow louder? Would he hear it more clearly? Would anyone else hear it then, if it was somehow amplified?
Two notes rang out, loud enough for him to flinch and jerk away from the table. He looked at the corpse. He’d closed her eyes, but they were open again, cold and blue. They shouldn’t have been able to open even if she were alive.
The next time he blinked, he saw that her eyes were closed.
A thump came from overhead, the front door opening hard enough to crash against the wall. Footsteps followed, hurried and heavy. Dwight was up there. Fogg heard the familiar tone of his boss’s voice, then a shout. A thump as something hit the floor.
The door at the top of the stairs crashed open. A man and a woman came thundering down. The woman pointed a gun at him. Fogg raised his hands and backed away from the corpse. His footfalls on the tile floor made him ashamed. All his life, he had been a coward, but that day, he surprised himself.
He stopped retreating. “What do you want? There’s nothing for you here.”
The woman gestured with the barrel of the gun. “Keep going. Back to the corner. Better yet, have a seat.”
Fogg ignored her, stunning himself with his boldness. He enjoyed the furrow of her brow as she tried to decide what to do about his disobedience.
“Violet, forget him. He’s not going to risk getting shot,” the man said.
Fogg didn’t like him. The dismissal churned a bitter stew in his gut.
This man had taken one look at him and made assumptions about his strength, his backbone.
It stung even worse when the two of them moved to either side of the table.
The woman thrust her gun into her coat pocket and began to gather the sides of the canvas shroud that now lay unfurled beneath the dead woman.
They meant to cart her away like a sack of laundry.
He took a step toward them. “You can’t do that.”
“Don’t do anything stupid,” the man said.
They hoisted the corpse up, barely wrapped in canvas. The smell of chemicals and meat and flowers wafted across the room. Piano notes sounded, somehow both muffled and slithering along the cold tiles at the same time.
“You can’t!” Fogg said. Darting forward, he grabbed the man’s arm.
The man dropped his end of the canvas. The body thumped onto the metal table. The woman, Violet, moaned in what seemed like sorrow, and Fogg had a moment to wonder if somehow he might be in the wrong.
The man slapped Fogg’s hand away, grabbed hold of his wrists, and quick-marched him across the room until he slammed against the wall. Jars rattled on a shelf. Fogg showed his teeth the way his old hound used to do when the arthritis had made agony out of every step.
“No,” he said, and shoved the man backward.
The man pinwheeled his arms and tried to keep his balance, but landed on his ass. Flushed with unfamiliar triumph, Fogg advanced on him.
“You people are sick,” he said. “Defiling the dead. Leave her in peace!”
Violet struggled to produce the gun from her coat pocket.
The man on the floor gestured for her not to bother, and Fogg felt the same old burning in his gut, the poison of that dismissal.
Fogg tried to kick him, but the man grabbed his foot and twisted sideways.
A muscle in his groin twanged like a broken guitar string, and the pain made him cry out.
He managed to stay on his feet but reeled away, crashing into the wall again. Jars fell, shattering on the tile.
The man stood. “This is my mother. You have no right to hold her remains. It’s not worth the pain you’re already in, never mind the damage I can do to you.”
“Malcolm, we don’t have time for—” Violet said.
“Tell him,” Malcolm interrupted, waving a hand at Fogg.
“You can’t take her,” Fogg whined. “Not until I understand.”
Malcolm had started to gather up the edges of canvas again, but now he glanced at Fogg. “What do you need to understand?”
Fogg found he had tears at the corners of his eyes. He knew he was begging and didn’t care. “The music. I have to know where it’s coming from.”
The dead woman’s son—if he were indeed her son—froze, fists full of canvas and pressed together. With a look of amazement, he turned to Fogg. “You hear it?”
Fogg’s heart lightened. “So it’s real? You hear it, too?”
Violet tugged the canvas shroud to get Malcolm’s attention. “We need to go!”
“I don’t know why you’re hearing it, mister. Maybe you’ve got a little sparkle to you. For what it’s worth, I’m glad I didn’t have to hurt you.”
They lifted the corpse in her canvas and started for the stairs. Fogg limped after them, desperate in his heart. “But what is it? The music?”
“It’s magic,” Malcolm called back to him.
Then they were gone.
Fogg propped himself against the wall, trying to keep all of his weight on the leg that didn’t send pain lancing through his groin. He felt ridiculous and defeated, but a giddy elation bubbled inside him, swelling until it pushed all other emotions aside.
Magic, he thought.
He limped up the steps, not in pursuit of Malcolm and Violet and the body they’d snatched but just to see the sky.
Outside, he watched them slide the body into the back seat of a mint-green convertible Frazer Manhattan sedan.
The only car like that in town belonged to Fogg’s boss, the owner of the funeral home, but it was a woman who climbed into the back seat of the Frazer with a boy who looked maybe ten or eleven.
Violet and Malcolm got into the front seat, closed the doors, and the Frazer whisked away with Malcolm at the wheel.
Fogg might have imagined the few piano notes he heard in that moment, fading as the car gained distance, but he allowed himself to think they were a private farewell.
He tilted his head back and stood in the rain, wondering what other magic might be out in the world, waiting for him.
The question frightened him, but the fear felt good. Like something worth embracing.
He’d been among the dead long enough.