Death and Douglas Read online

  Douglas pivoted out of bed and crept silently over to one of his windows, which looked out over the small visitor parking lot beside the house. He could see the family hearse and also the black van they used for removals when the dead didn’t need to ride in style. Christopher’s rust-red Grand Am, which was older than Douglas, was parked in the lot, too, along with Eddie’s small, green Civic. The four vehicles looked to Douglas like horses asleep in their stalls. Three of the vehicles were parked there almost every night. If Eddie’s was there, that meant he was pulling a late night, which also meant that Douglas would be pulling an even later one.

  When Douglas and his mother had arrived home after meeting with Reverend Ahlgrim, they had found an ominous funeral procession of cars crammed chaotically in the parking lot and against the granite curb in front of the house. Douglas recognized Chief Pumphrey’s dark blue patrol car easily among the rest of the police cars. The chief’s had a small, fuzzy black bear wearing a tiny police cap dangling from the rearview mirror. There was also a large white van with orange lights on its roof and the words MEDICAL EXAMINER painted along the side in large black letters.

  Douglas had seen that vehicle one other time in his life, a week and a half ago, when Mrs. Laurent had been delivered to the funeral home. At the time, he’d asked his father about it out of innocent curiosity. Turns out, the van was an official police vehicle, and the “Medical Examiner” title referred to Dr. Coffman. Apparently, he didn’t only make you say Ahhhh and hand out lemon candy.

  Douglas’s mother had made him go around back and up the stairs to the residence on the second story, while she went through the front door of the funeral home. He’d obeyed more out of confusion than anything else. As he went around back, he passed Christopher, who was leaning against the side of the green-paneled house, breathing heavily like he’d run a couple miles. Douglas tried to speak with him, but Christopher only shook his head and waved dismissively.

  Once in his own room, Douglas started to regret not pushing the issue. Unlike Lowell, Douglas didn’t have a vent that he could use as an oracle. He could have sat on the top of the stairs, but with so many people down below, it would be difficult to make out anything coherent, and there was a real chance someone would have caught him eavesdropping. As it was, from the front door of his room, only a buzz of low conversation wafted up to him.

  It almost didn’t matter, though. Douglas could guess most of what was going on down there. They’d found another victim. And that victim had an M carved into his or her cheek. The officials had brought the body to the funeral home to use the morgue facilities.

  Three days later, he was still highly aware of the murder victim two floors below. He had slowly realized, with a gradually sickening feeling that burned the tissue of his stomach, that he had to see it—he had to see the M.

  As he gazed out into the hazy dimness of the town, he heard the back door swing quietly open and saw the short form of Eddie Brunswick cross the parking lot. Eddie opened the door of the Civic, started the engine after a few seconds of fiddling, and drove off down the road.

  It was time.

  Douglas punched a random letter four times into his phone, and hit SEND. He would delete the short string of characters later, but if his parents somehow ever discovered them, it would look like an accidental text message.

  Douglas and Lowell had learned long ago that sneaking was only a minor sin, quickly forgiven. As a result, they had taken full advantage of the moral loophole on numerous occasions, although mostly just to visit the cemetery at night or to raid the refrigerator when they stayed over at each other’s houses. Other than one midnight incident a couple of years before, when Douglas’s father had been roused by a removal call, Douglas and Lowell had a perfect record of not being caught. Sometimes, Douglas would even slip downstairs late at night to watch the television in his father’s office, but he’d never snuck down to the morgue. Certainly not by himself.

  A lifetime of sneaking had taught Douglas to avoid walking down the middle of the hallway where the floorboards sagged slightly and could creak loud alarms into the nighttime silence. He knew to skip both the third and tenth steps for the same reason. He could, without barking a shin or bruising a forehead, navigate the whole house and funeral home in the dark. He didn’t even use his flashlight, although he did bring it. It was heavy and silver and oddly comforting, even with the light off.

  The morgue was in the basement. To get there, Douglas had to go downstairs and cross the showroom, the chapel, and a back storage room.

  He passed by the living room on his way to the stairs. “Living rooms are important rooms in anybody’s house,” his grandfather had told him a long time ago, “but they are particularly important when your home is a mortuary.”

  Finally, Douglas made it to the head of the stairs and silently descended into the funeral home part of the house.

  Normally, walking through a mortuary at night wouldn’t have been too much of a problem for a boy that considered it home, but tonight as he glided through the maze of oblong boxes in the showroom, Douglas couldn’t help imagining them filled with murder victims, each bearing a livid, bleeding M carved into their faces. One creak of a coffin lid would have sent him screaming for the stairs, near-perfect sneaking record or not. The chapel gave him barely more comfort as he passed the spot where Mrs. Laurent had lain in her closed casket just two weeks before.

  He was extra careful crossing the chapel, as Christopher’s room was above that space. Of course, Douglas was pretty sure that even had he pushed over one of the chapel benches and dragged it across the room, Christopher would barely stir, since sometimes Douglas’s father had to bang for a long time on Christopher’s door to wake him up for a late-night removal call.

  Douglas went through the small back storeroom to a white door with large, black, metal letters tacked to it: MORGUE. Douglas placed his hand on the handle and pulled. The door opened silently. His father made it a point to have Christopher regularly oil all the hinges in the entire place. Eerie creaks were not something a funeral home wanted its customers subjected to. Below Douglas, concrete steps descended into blackness.

  He turned on his flashlight and walked gingerly downstairs. Sometimes, his father called this space the preparation room, but Eddie hated the softened terminology of the modern mortuary business. To Eddie, Douglas’s father was an undertaker, not a funeral director; he prepared the bodies of corpses, not decedents; and don’t get him started on the phrase memory portrait.

  Even though Douglas’s parents had been completely open about death, the morgue was still one place Douglas wasn’t allowed free reign. Occasionally, he’d visit Eddie down there, but Eddie’s job involved him doing things to the dead bodies that Douglas’s parents didn’t want him exposed to yet. Of course, had they known half the things that Eddie had shown Douglas down there, the Mortimer Family Funeral Home might have suddenly been in the market for both a new embalmer and a new heir.

  Douglas shined his flashlight around the room. Eddie needed the best lighting to do his job, so Douglas didn’t dare turn any on for fear that someone might notice the ultra-bright florescent glow through the small basement windows. Most of the surfaces that the beam bounced off were glass and stainless steel. A pair of horizontal human-sized metal tables with ceramic tops, gutters, and embalming stations dominated the room. Against the walls were various locked cabinets of chemical jars in a variety of colors and sleek-looking shiny implements that made you want to pick them up and twist them to catch the light. Tonight, everything seemed monochrome, like this was the laboratory of a mad scientist from an old monster movie. In truth, it was close enough to that. Here, Eddie made the dead live for one more day, a temporary resurrection to bring closure for family and friends, before his work was buried forever under dirt. Eddie’s art was a humble one.

  As Douglas continued to shine the flashlight aimlessly about the room, it caught a glint of crystal at one of the embalming stations—an etched tumbler filled wi
th a thick, dark, purple liquid that smell faintly sweet and extremely strong. Eddie would have been mortified to know he’d left it out, so Douglas poured it down a nearby sink, rinsed it out, and stuck it in an unlocked cabinet. Eddie would never even know that he’d left it out.

  Suddenly, a regular pattern of soft scratching noises stopped him cold. It was coming from the outside door, the one leading to the parking lot. Douglas heard it again, louder this time, and he started, almost upsetting a glass beaker near the sink. He swallowed his heart back into the appropriate spot in his chest and walked over to the door.

  There were a lot of dangerous chemicals and valuable equipment in a funeral home, so the house had a security system. Douglas keyed in the code to temporarily deactivate it and opened the door.

  “Anybody alive in here?”

  For two seconds, Lowell was his usual self, eyes full of mischief and mouth full of merriment. As soon as he crossed the threshold of the morgue, his fire hissed wetly into steam.

  “I don’t think I could ever sleep in a house with a room like this.”

  “You’ve slept over here tons of times,” Douglas reminded him, shutting the door and re-keying the security code.

  “Good point.” Lowell turned on his own flashlight, a black, sturdy police-issue piece of equipment that his father had given him on a past birthday. “Still, I don’t think I could do it every night, all alone in my room, like you do. You should really talk your parents into getting you a sibling. Heck, a half dozen of them. I wonder how many times you guys have been outnumbered by corpses here.”

  “They’re not the worst company. They mostly keep to themselves. I don’t have to share anything with them. They let me watch whatever I want on TV.”

  “I’ve always liked you because you’re weird. But, man. You. Are. Weird.”

  “We’re putting this off, huh?”

  “Yup.”

  “We don’t have to do this.”

  “Like hockey sticks, we don’t. We’ve got to see this.”

  “Yeah, we do. I guess. Actually, I’m not as sure as I was.”

  “Oh, you’re sure. You know as well as I do why we’ve got to see the M. Somehow, it’s worse not seeing it. At least I haven’t had to live above it for three days.”

  Lowell was right, and that was exactly why the first thing Douglas had done upon arriving home that day, was to text Lowell to let him know what had happened. Douglas knew immediately that he would need to sneak into the morgue, but he also needed Lowell to be the one to suggest it first.

  The three days had been rough for Douglas, especially with his parents giving him limited information, even after the sitting room talk with his father. Dr. Coffman had come to examine the body. Chief Pumphrey had come to examine the body. His father told him it was part of the autopsy process. Once that had been completed, it was in Eddie’s hands to get the body ready for the funeral, which would be held tomorrow in the chapel. Tonight was their last chance to see the M before it disappeared under six feet of dirt and worms. Douglas was glad he didn’t have to do it alone.

  “Let’s get this over with so that we can get on to the nightmares afterward.” As Lowell spoke, his eyes skittered nervously across the morgue tables as if he expected to see the body there, chest cut open and eyes staring.

  “It’s in one of the refrigerator cabinets,” said Douglas, pointing with his flashlight beam. One entire wall was made up of a morgue refrigerator, although it wasn’t the type of refrigerator one would want to raid in the middle of the night, even though that’s exactly what the two boys were there to do. The stainless steel refrigerator had nine square panels in three rows, like an empty tic-tac-toe board, each of which pulled out into a human-sized drawer. Nine was more than adequate for the needs of the Mortimer Family Funeral Home. As far back as Douglas could remember, the closest they had come to filling up all nine spaces at the same time was the night of a bad automobile accident. Douglas’s father had given Eddie an extra two weeks of vacation not long after.

  Lowell followed the beam of light with his eyes, but didn’t move … his feet, at least. His head and neck were convulsing in quick jerks, signaling that Douglas should take the lead.

  Douglas walked warily over to the cabinets. He’d opened drawers full of the deceased before. It wasn’t a big deal. Except that this time it wasn’t just a dead person—it was a murder victim. And that changed everything. He took a deep breath and chose the center drawer. The long shelf rumbled out with the obscenely mundane sound of metal tracks in metal grooves. Douglas wasn’t too concerned about the noise. The morgue was well isolated from the rest of the house, and he’d stood near its upstairs door many times without hearing a single clatter from Eddie below.

  The drawer was empty.

  Douglas exhaled and tried the next drawer. Empty, as well.

  “Man, I really don’t like this game,” Lowell muttered behind him.

  Douglas chose the left bottom drawer next.

  “You’re kidding me,” was Lowell’s response to its contents.

  The drawer wasn’t empty, but it didn’t contain a corpse, either. Instead, the long shelf held a thick red sleeping bag, a pillow, and a plush gorilla in a brown coat and Sherlock Holmes hat.

  “I’ve always thought that Eddie spent the night down here sometimes,” Douglas remarked. “I guess it didn’t occur to me to wonder where.”

  “And what does it mean that the gorilla is the least weird thing about this?” Lowell quipped.

  Finally, after closing Eddie’s impromptu bed, Douglas chose the center bottom drawer. It slid open to reveal a sheet-covered form, as white and pristine as the end of laundry day. He heard Lowell suck air through his teeth. Douglas, holding his flashlight in one hand, reached with his other to the head of the cadaver and quickly pulled the sheet down about a foot before yanking his hand away like he’d touched something slimy.

  “It’s possible that my eyes are closed in horror. What do you see, Doug?”

  “A dead man.”

  Lowell shouldered up beside Douglas and took a look. Bright circles from two flashlights hovered over the pale face on the slab. “That … looks like a high schooler.”

  The young man on the slab had a dark, tangled mess of hair that Eddie had yet to arrange, a somewhat flat nose, and eyelashes that seemed too long on his widely spaced eyes, which were, thankfully, closed. “You know what’s weird?” asked Douglas.

  “Two boys sneaking into a morgue to see a dead body and not running away scared when they do?”

  “There’s no mark on his face. No M for murder.” At Douglas’s simple observation, Lowell leaned in closer. Both of the dead guy’s cheeks were smooth, pale, and unblemished.

  “Maybe you got two new clients today.”

  “Maybe. Easy enough to find out.” Douglas replaced the sheet and pushed the body back into the dark and cold of the morgue refrigerator before trying the rest of the cabinets. He had to use Eddie’s stepladder to reach the upper three. They all came up empty. There were no other bodies, only the one in the lower center cabinet. The one without an M on his cheek.

  “Maybe you were wrong about all the commotion on Saturday.”

  “No. There was another murder.”

  “Maybe they were wrong. Or maybe this guy was murdered. Just not by a killer who signs his handiwork. That would be crazy. Cowlmouth suddenly full of murderers. We can check online tomorrow. See what the news says.”

  “We can check right now.”

  “The news?”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A real quick check. For wounds.”

  “Man, the admission price tonight was not supposed to include a full body search on a corpse. Only a quick peek and a terrified scream, followed by a brisk run back to the safety of my dinosaur sheets.”

  Douglas ignored his friend and opened the lower center cabinet again, sliding the white-sheeted form out slowly, so that the metal rails emitted only a soft rumble. Douglas
pulled the sheet down past the cadaver’s chin and stopped.

  “Wait a minute.” He bent closer. “Hold on.” Douglas walked over to a small drawer on the far side of the room and returned with a scalpel. It was tiny, sharp, and didn’t at all look right in a boy’s hand. Lowell moved out of his way to the far side of the drawer so that it separated them like a sideways ping-pong table.

  “What … are … you … doing?”

  “Eddie calls this his tenth finger.” Douglas lifted the scalpel in a trembling hand to the right cheek of the man. Pausing to get more control over the wavering piece of surgical steel, he carefully scraped away at the flesh.

  “Aw, man. Don’t touch it. Don’t touch it. Aw, man.” Lowell took a few steps back from the body.

  “He has mortician’s wax on his cheek. Eddie uses it to cover up facial scars for viewings.”

  “Oh.” Suddenly Lowell’s interest returned and he moved closer. “They’re definitely going to know that we snuck down here now.”

  “I think I can reapply it. I’ve seen Eddie do it a few times. The wax is in one of the locked cabinets, but I know where he hides a key.” By then, Douglas had removed enough of the wax to reveal what was underneath it. “Uh-oh.”