Death and Douglas Read online

  “We usually are. We’re a small operation. Of course, now, with the murders, it’s a lot more hectic around here than usual, as you saw yesterday. So what exactly do you teach?”

  “Teach? I’m sorry?”

  “Aren’t you Douglas’s teachers?”

  “No, no, we’re not.” The voice was light. It must have been the other woman, Ms. Keeney. “We’re Guardian Angels.”

  “Guardian Angels. Mine?”

  “It’s a volunteer group here in Cowlmouth,” answered Ms. Basford. “Like a neighborhood watch. Except that we watch out for local children. We’re firm believers that it takes a village to raise a child. Or at least to keep them safe. It’s a rough world out there. Especially in Cowlmouth these days.”

  “So you stake out playgrounds and bus stops? I have to admit, I am extremely confused right now,” said Mr. Mortimer.

  Douglas, sitting outside of the room on the hard floor, was also extremely confused.

  “Let me see if I can explain,” answered Ms. Basford. “I’ve been observing Douglas for the past few weeks now …”

  “Observing him?”

  “Nothing intrusive. Mainly, I’ve been coming to a few of your funerals, Irwin Stauffer’s, Marvin Brinsfield’s. Although I did run into Douglas at the library the other day by accident. I run a family support group there twice a week.”

  “I still don’t understand. For what reasons are you observing him?”

  “Well, Mr. Mortimer. We believe that Douglas might be in a somewhat unwholesome environment here.”

  “Here? You mean in his own home?”

  “Exactly,” answered Ms. Keeney. “Since his home is, after all, a funeral home, as well.”

  “Ladies, no offense, but I grew up here. My father grew up here.”

  “I understand that, Mr. Mortimer. But we live in different times. Much more complicated times. The wrong kind of influences can have far-reaching, negative effects on a child’s life,” said Ms. Basford.

  Ms. Keeney spoke up, “Do you believe that being around all this death every day is healthy for a boy his age?”

  “I do. Absolutely. Douglas is Exhibit A for that. He’s one of the most well-adjusted kids you’ll ever meet.”

  A footfall caused Douglas to almost take off running, but when he saw Eddie making his way across the funeral home, Douglas put a finger over his lips and bugged his eyes out in silent appeal. Eddie chuckled, shook his head, and kept walking.

  “You must admit, at the very least, that it is a bit strange,” pressed Ms. Basford. “I mean, right now, this second, there’s a murder victim on the premises of this house.”

  “Directly below us, actually,” corrected Mr. Mortimer. “And that’s because there’s a murderer on our streets. Can’t much help that, you know.”

  “Right, and I realize the delicate position we are putting you in, and we appreciate that you haven’t got defensive, but, well, at the library the other day, I saw him reading this.” Douglas heard a soft scratching. He knew what the woman was drawing from her stiff canvas bag before he even heard his father read the title aloud.

  “The Serial Killer Grimpendium, huh?” A few page ruffles later, Douglas heard his father add, “I can’t blame him too much. News of this Day Killer is everywhere. It’s healthy curiosity.”

  “Morbid curiosity,” replied Ms. Basford.

  “Sure, but that’s a legitimate form of curiosity,” countered Mr. Mortimer. “I’m sure most of the kids in Cowlmouth have the same questions, even the ones who aren’t living in funeral homes.”

  “That’s as may be, but for most of the children in Cowlmouth, these murders are a faraway thing, a story, something deep in the not-real space of televisions and computers. They don’t have to face any of the victims. They don’t have to sleep in the same house as them. They have natural buffers and harbors against the horrors of the world.

  “Besides, for Douglas, it seems to be a bit of a tendency for him, even without the serial killer. He lives in a funeral home, plays in graveyards, wears suits all the time, spends his free time at funerals. Certainly you must see, if not a harmful pattern, at least a potentially harmful pattern.”

  “No, actually I don’t.” Douglas heard the slight shift of furniture legs against floor. “You know what I see? I see a boy who gets death better than most adults. I see a boy unafraid of it and channeling that strength into helping those who have lost loved ones. I see a mature, thoughtful boy with a genuine joy for life. One day, Douglas is going to run this funeral home, and he’s going to be the best funeral director this old place has ever had.

  “I mean, sure, right now, he might be a little confused. His entire life, we’ve taught him how much a part of life death is. We’ve probably over-sheltered him from the darker details, to be honest. But then the Day Killer strikes, and now he knows about it firsthand. It’s a little too early for him to have to confront that, I think. And that’s unfortunate. It confuses things for him. For all of us, actually.” Mr. Mortimer paused. “So that we’re clear, what exactly do you want to do about Douglas?”

  “Well, we’re not Social Services, obviously,” said Ms. Keeney, “but we do have some relationships there and …”

  “Relationships? I’ve buried the loved ones of some of the most powerful people in this town. People who know Douglas and would vouch for him.”

  While his father was speaking, Douglas had been staring with empty fascination at the golden statue of the boy king’s sarcophagus. Tutankhamun had been nine years old when he became the pharaoh of Egypt, three years younger than Douglas was now. He had died nine years later, not even out of his teenage years. He must have dealt with a lot more in his short life than just a small-town serial killer. Or maybe running a kingdom was nothing compared to running from a serial killer.

  “No, Mr. Mortimer,” answered Ms. Basford. “I assure you, we don’t want anything drastic to happen at all. We would just like permission to have some of our professional contacts observe him more closely. Interview his teachers and some of his friends. Perhaps get a psychological evaluation for him. And, in the interim, maybe you could shield him more, not allow him to attend so many funerals, for instance. We’re only suggesting that you keep Douglas’s childhood a little more distant from the more … unfortunate … aspects of your professional life. Nothing outrageous. And nothing that we don’t think is in the very best interests of Douglas.”

  Suddenly, beyond the table and Tutankhamun statue, Douglas saw his father walk into view. He was facing the cabinet of Mexican funerary figures, studying them like they were far more interesting than what the Guardian Angels were saying. Mr. Mortimer must have seen his son out of the corner of his eye because he turned his head slightly from the clay sculptures toward Douglas’s hiding place and arched one of his eyebrows high on his forehead.

  Douglas got the message.

  He jumped up quickly and quietly, tiptoed up the stairs to his room, and dived into bed. He grabbed a nearby plastic rose and strangled it by its stem in his clenched fist.

  He was ecstatic. His father had said that he would be the best funeral director the Mortimer Family Funeral Home had ever had. Better than himself. Better than Grandpa. Better than Great-Grandpa.

  But there was the other side of the conversation he had eavesdropped on, the side that damped his joy a little and made his stomach feel like it was full of the shards of broken urns. Those women said he shouldn’t be growing up in a funeral home. Shouldn’t be around so much death. He was certain that had his parents been anything other than morticians, he wouldn’t be feeling what he felt now. Even Lowell and Audrey, as close as they were to everything that was happening because of who their parents were and, well, because they were friends of his, seemed better at dealing with the murders than he was.

  Douglas didn’t know what all was involved in a psychological evaluation, but if it made him feel better, he’d go through one. He thought about his grandpa for a while. Then he thought about the dead man in the d
ark, cold, metal drawer below and the F on his cheek. Monday, Saturday, and Friday. The monster wasn’t even halfway through the week yet. This was a long way from over.

  OCTOBER 15

  SATURDAY

  Another night, another nightmare. This one was a confused mixture of chasing footsteps and thick fog and barely distinguishable whispering. It ended with a slow-motion race through Cowlmouth Cemetery, until finally, as the black bars of the gates emerged from the haze, Douglas felt his leg grabbed from below with a hand that felt cold, like dead bone, and he was shaken, shaken, shaken …

  “Douglas, get up.”

  He slowly came out of sleep with a “Wuuth?” Blinking through the darkness, he could make out his father at the foot of the bed, his hand around one of Douglas’s ankles.

  “I need you to get up. We have a removal this morning, and I want you to come with me.”

  “I’m supposed to meet Lowell today.”

  “You’ll have time later.”

  “Later? What time is it?”

  “5 A.M.”

  “Wuuth?”

  “Yes, Saturdays have 5 A.M’s. Now, get up and throw a suit on.”

  Douglas obeyed. It wasn’t until another twenty minutes had passed, after he had doused his head with water and thrown on a blue suit and a yellow tie with pale blue diamonds on it, that he realized where he was going. A removal. His father had never taken him on a removal before.

  He grabbed his phone and sent the Ghastlies a quick message telling them that he wouldn’t be able to go out until later. He wasn’t quite sure what they were going to do. Probably patrol, maybe get some lunch, see a movie. It wasn’t a Day Killer day, so they had free reign of the town.

  The entire town of Cowlmouth had reset their calendars to this grim schedule. On days that the Day Killer had already claimed a victim, people let their guards down, let their children go to the playground, went to restaurants in the evening. On days that the murderer had not carved the corresponding initial into some unfortunate person’s cheek, Cowlmouth became a ghost town, haunted by the slowly moving dark blue cars with the flashing lights on top of their roofs.

  It had been more than a week since the last victim had been found. George Rivet had been his name, although everybody thought of him as the Friday victim. He had been a delivery driver, not a bus driver as Christopher had said. It was one of the many facts of George Rivet’s life overshadowed by the last fact of his life, his murder.

  Douglas met his father in the kitchen and followed him down the back stairs to the parking lot. It was still dark outside. The cold October sun couldn’t be bothered kicking out from under its covers yet. As Douglas pulled himself up into the front passenger seat of the van, he could hear the metal clangs of his father checking the equipment in the back. Eventually, Mr. Mortimer slammed the back doors and jumped into the driver’s seat. Before he’d even buckled his seat belt, Douglas started peppering him with questions.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We have to pick up a pair of bodies in Gorum.”

  “Where’s that”

  “About two and a half hours north.”

  “That’s kind of far away for us.”

  “It’s not our territory, but we’re helping out Emmett’s Funeral Home. They’re really busy right now.”

  Even though we’re the one with the murder victims. Douglas didn’t dare speak the observation aloud.

  Outside, dark houses were speeding past the window, each one shuttered against the horrors of the town.

  “Why isn’t Chris on this removal?”

  “Chris quit two days ago.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I wish he would have given a few weeks’ notice, but the poor guy was definitely not cut out for this work. I kind of knew it when I hired him, but I needed somebody, and I thought I should at least give him a chance. He lasted longer than I expected.”

  After talking to Christopher on the way home from the cemetery last week, Douglas couldn’t pretend to be surprised. But he was a little jealous. And he felt a little more alone. “The murderer,” he said, not really meaning to say anything.

  “Yeah. That put him over, I think. Want some breakfast?”

  “Sure.”

  Mr. Mortimer pulled into the drive-through of the next fast food restaurant they saw. Food was one of the reasons that they took the van for removals. The black vehicle was unmarked and the windows in the back doors were tinted. Nothing about the vehicle would tip anybody off to its business, and that was a good thing when you had to run a quick errand or get some food. Nobody wanted to be creeped out by the knowledge that dead bodies were two parking spots away from them or at the drive-through window of their favorite burger joint. But sometimes you had to stop, whether you were carrying corpses or not. Of course, since there were two bodies to pick up this time, they needed the van anyway, which had a multiple-tray mechanism in the back that could hold up to three, stacked like they were in bunk beds.

  As Douglas downed his orange juice and sausage biscuit, the sky began to lighten and his eyelids began to feel heavy. His father noticed. “Why don’t you get some sleep? It’s going to be a long trip.”

  Douglas nodded in acknowledgement and then in sleep, his head leaning against the cold glass of the window. He couldn’t recline his seat because of the human trays in the back. Only the dead got to lay down in this van.

  He slept well, until a loud ambulance siren startled him awake. It took a few groggy moments until he realized what the noise meant.

  “Good morning, again,” said his father.

  “We’re there?”

  Mr. Mortimer only nodded since they were passing a large sign with the words ST. JOSEPH’S HOSPITAL. The sign hung from a horizontal plank that was wide where it met the pole and thin at the far end and arced between the two in a gentle curve. Like a scythe, thought Douglas. The scythe-shaped posts were repeated throughout the hospital campus, each blade dangling friendly placards extolling hospital services along with images of smiling patients, doctors, and nurses. It seemed a strange motif for a hospital to adopt but, then again, few brains were as drenched by death as Douglas’s to immediately recognize the vague similarity to the Grim Reaper’s favorite walking stick.

  The hospital was enormous, sprawling, and modern-looking. Its only real adornment was a large empty crucifix affixed to an otherwise blank brick wall of an upper story. They drove past its friendly signs until they reached the ugly back-end of the asymmetrical building. There were no windows on this portion of the hospital, only a line of large, retractable metal doors with white numbers stenciled above them. Mr. Mortimer slowed the van and consulted a yellow document that had been lying on top of the van’s wide dashboard before driving the van toward one of the gray doors, putting the vehicle in reverse, and skillfully backing up until he was parked in front of it.

  Mr. Mortimer turned off the engine and hopped out. Douglas followed. Taking in the sudden squalor of his surroundings, he figured it was an area of the hospital that patients never had to see. Well, unless they became un-patients, the type at the extreme bad end of the health scale. The area was filled with delivery trucks, large rusted green dumpsters, and, off to one side, a bunch of red bins labeled BIOHAZARD WASTE beneath branching six-pointed symbols. All under the shadow of a massive brown smokestack that towered into the sky.

  Mr. Mortimer wasn’t looking around like Douglas. Instead, he was studying a small panel to one side of the metal door. After a few moments hesitation, he hit a large orange button. A loud buzzing filled the air.

  A few seconds later, the garage-style door started slowly rolling upward with a grumpy mechanical rumble.

  Inside were about eight or ten cadavers on gurneys, each wrapped neatly in plastic as if they were fresh from a factory. They were positioned almost haphazardly, as if they had been pushed down a chute to end up at this loading bay.

  Standing in the middle of all the tabled dead people like he was stuck to the hips in qui
cksand was a man. A big man. A huge man. He was completely bald and his lower lip was pierced by three gold rings. Two sparkly studs pressed into both sides of a nose that looked as if it had been pounded into his skull with a sledgehammer. A large black stone stretched his left earlobe, and his chin had about two days’ worth of stubble. Both of his arms were covered in a confusing sleeve of sinuous tattoos. He wore bright pink scrubs.

  The hulk spoke. “You here for the … Hey, is that your kid?”

  Douglas’s father nodded and drew Douglas closer to him. “It’s a family business.”

  “Whatever, I guess. Bring your grandmother for all I care. Just glad you’re here. Most of these bodies should have been picked up an hour ago. How many are you taking off my hands?”

  “Two.” Douglas and his father walked into the bay. It was cold and there were boxes of medical supplies everywhere, like a warehouse. “Here’s the paperwork.”

  The big man took the sheets offered by Mr. Mortimer and glanced quickly at them. “You guys from Cowlmouth, huh? How’s that Day Killer treating you? Getting much business out of it?”

  “We’ve had better months,” Mr. Mortimer responded neutrally.

  “Whatever, I guess.” The pink giant lumbered over to a small station covered in similar sheets. “Let me fill this out,” he growled. “You’ll have to look around. I’m not sure which of these guys are yours.”

  “Not a problem,” Mr. Mortimer answered. “Douglas, do me a favor and go unload the gurney.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  Douglas walked to the back of the van, opened it, and struggled with the collapsible metal contraption for a few minutes. Finally, he was able to pull it out and unfold the legs.

  By the time he pushed it up the ramp and into the bay, his father had already found one of the bodies and was busily checking it for personal effects and double-checking the hospital bracelet to ensure it was the correct body. Mistakes were made at every kind of job, but morticians didn’t get any allowances for theirs.

  While his father picked over the carcass, Douglas looked around. He had never been on a removal before, and he was fascinated. This was a part of the business he had wanted to experience for as long as he could remember.