COFFIN (Bone Hollow Sinners MC #16)

Prologue

Rue

The trailer smells like lavender and old coffee and the particular sweetness that bodies develop in their final days—a smell that used to bother me, six years ago, when I was still new to this work.

I don't notice it anymore. Or rather, I notice it the way you notice your own breathing: present, constant, part of the room.

Alma Birch is dying.

She has been dying for eleven hours, which is not unusual.

Eighty-three years old, congestive heart failure, a body that has done its work and is ready to set down the tools.

Her daughter left at midnight to get some sleep, kissed her mother's forehead, asked me three times if I was sure I could stay, and I was sure.

I'm always sure. That's what they pay me for, and it isn't really about the money.

I adjust the morphine drip a quarter turn. Alma's breathing eases. The fingers of her left hand—papery, cool, the polish a soft pink I applied this morning because she mentioned she'd always done her own nails and her hands looked naked without color—relax slightly in mine.

"Rue, honey," she says, and her voice is thinner than it was an hour ago. "Tell me about your garden again."

I don't have a garden. I have a one-room studio above a laundromat in a town she's never seen.

But she likes the story I told her two days ago about the tomatoes my grandmother grew, and so I tell it again, the same way, with the same details—the green tomato relish, the wooden stake my grandfather carved with my initials, the bumblebee that landed on Alma's wrist one summer afternoon and didn't sting her, just sat there, soft and patient, like a small living blessing.

"That bumblebee," Alma murmurs. "I liked that part."

"It's my favorite part too."

Her eyes are closed. The lashes are silver and very long.

I once saw a photograph of her at twenty-two—it sits on the dresser, framed in tarnished silver—and the woman in that picture had the same lashes, the same stubborn chin, the same expression of patient amusement that says I see you, I see all of you, and I love you anyway.

"Henry planted tomatoes," she says.

"I know he did."

"He planted them every spring for thirty-four years."

"You told me."

"I planted them every spring for twenty years after he died."

"I know, Alma."

"I should've planted them again this year."

"You did," I say, because she did, and because the truth is the only thing I have left to give her. "Your daughter brought you the seedlings in March. Don't you remember? We put them in the window box."

She smiles. Her eyelids flutter. "I forgot."

"That's okay."

The heart monitor—a discreet little machine on the bedside table, mostly there for the daughter's comfort—shows a number I've been watching for the last forty minutes. The number is going down. Not falling, not crashing. Settling. Like a leaf finding the ground.

"Rue."

"I'm here."

"Is he here?"

I don't ask who. I never ask who. The dying see what they see, and the question is never literal. The answer is always the same.

"He's here, Alma. He's right here."

She exhales. The next breath is slower. The one after that is slower still.

I count them—a habit, a discipline—and I keep my hand on her hand and my thumb on the soft hollow of her wrist where I can feel the pulse falter, recover, falter again.

I have done this two hundred and forty-seven times.

I do not get used to it. I will not get used to it.

Getting used to it would be the worst thing I could do, and it is the line I have drawn for myself like a fence around a sacred field.

The pulse stops.

I sit with her for thirty minutes. The rule isn't medical. The rule is mine. Leaving too soon feels like abandonment, and Alma Birch does not deserve to be abandoned, even by the body she's already left.

I bathe her. I change her into the nightgown her daughter laid out two days ago—pale yellow, with a lace collar, the kind of nightgown a woman keeps in the back of a drawer for special occasions and then never wears because every occasion seems too ordinary.

I comb her hair. I straighten the quilt.

I fold her hands on her chest, the left over the right, the pink polish catching the lamplight.

I call her daughter. I call the funeral home.

I wait until the funeral home van arrives at four-twelve in the morning, and I sign the papers, and I watch the two men in dark coats wheel Alma out of the trailer she has lived in for forty-six years.

They are careful with her. I checked, when I first started working with this funeral home, that they were the kind of men who would be careful.

If they weren't, I would have refused the contract.

I drive home as the sky turns the color of an old bruise—purple at the edges, gold underneath.

I park behind the laundromat. The dryers are running already; somebody's in there folding sheets at five in the morning, and I can hear the soft tumble of the machines through the wall as I climb the back stairs.

I eat cereal standing at the counter. Cornflakes. Skim milk. The same breakfast I've eaten almost every day for six years, because the thought of cooking after a death feels obscene, and the thought of going hungry feels weak.

I open my laptop.

There is an email in my inbox from a name I don't recognize. Dr. Josephine Bellerose. The subject line reads: Hospice position—rural community—immediate need.

I open it because I open every email about hospice positions.

Not because I'm looking. I'm not looking.

I have a steady contract, a steady income, a steady rhythm of patient after patient after patient, and the rhythm is exhausting in a way I cannot name but also the only thing that keeps me from dissolving.

The email is short. It does not have the breathless, recruiting-agency tone I'm used to.

It is clinical, almost military. We are a growing community in a remote location.

Our population includes a number of elderly individuals and several patients with terminal conditions.

We require a hospice nurse with significant rural experience, demonstrated competence with end-of-life care, and the capacity to live on-site.

Compensation will be three times your current annual salary, with housing, utilities, and meals provided.

References would be appreciated but are not required—we have already conducted our own evaluation.

If you are interested, please reply within seventy-two hours.

I read it twice.

I read the salary number twice more.

I am not motivated by money. I want to be clear about that. I have never been motivated by money. But the number is not, I realize after the second reading, what is making my pulse quicken. What is making my pulse quicken is the phrase live on-site.

I have not lived anywhere on-site in six years. I have lived above a laundromat. I have lived in my car between contracts. I have lived in motel rooms in towns whose names I forget the moment I leave them. I have lived, in some essential sense, nowhere.

I write back.

Interested. When do I start?

The response comes seven minutes later, which means whoever Dr. Bellerose is, she was awake at five in the morning too. The response is two words.

Yesterday. Details attached.

The attached PDF contains driving directions, a list of belongings I should bring, a confidentiality agreement, and a single photograph.

The photograph is of a wooden building set against a mountain—timbered, weathered, with a sloped roof and a porch and the kind of unadorned, made-by-hand quality I recognize from the cabins of my Appalachian patients.

The caption reads: Your cottage. Furnish to your taste.

I close the laptop.

I look around my studio—the futon, the bookshelf made of milk crates, the print of a Mary Oliver poem I taped to the wall four apartments ago and have carried with me ever since.

I start packing.

Two weeks later, I am driving up a mountain in Kentucky that does not appear on any map I can find, following directions that include phrases like turn left at the leaning poplar and continue past the abandoned tobacco barn for one-point-four miles.

My car is packed to the roof. My books are in the back seat.

The Mary Oliver poem is folded in the glove box.

The radio stopped picking up signal forty minutes ago, and the silence in the car is the kind of silence I've worked in for years—the silence beside a deathbed, the silence that holds you instead of empties you.

I find the gate.

It is a real gate, iron and tall, and a man in a leather vest with a patch I don't recognize—PROSPECT, in block letters—steps out of a small shack and looks at me the way men with guns look at women they aren't expecting.

I roll down my window and say my name. He checks a clipboard. He nods. He opens the gate.

The road beyond is narrow and steep and lined with trees that have started to turn—October in the mountains, the leaves going gold and crimson, the air sharp with the first real cold of the season. I drive for almost a mile. The road bends. The trees clear.

And there it is.

A compound. Timber buildings, some old, some newer, arranged in a loose curve along a flat shelf of mountain.

Smoke rising from three different chimneys.

A wide central yard with motorcycles parked in rows that suggest discipline more than display.

A clinic at the far end—I recognize the red cross over the door.

A row of cabins. A larger building that looks like it might be a clubhouse.

And on a hill above all of it, rising against the late-afternoon sky, a small fenced cemetery with hand-carved headstones catching the last of the light.

I park.