The Dead Place (4 page)

The man who left his calling card in the antique store window watched from the coffee house across the street as the police arrived. He sat in the sun at a small corner table and sipped iced coffee through a straw, delicate beads of sweat dotting the glass and his upper lip.

Two middle-aged women at the table next to him discussed what was going on, craning their necks to see over the squad cars, one of them actually standing up and shading her eyes to get a clear look. She had a runner’s legs, the tendons taut against lightly tanned skin. Well preserved, he thought, and smiled at the irony. The girl in the picture was well preserved. He’d seen to that.

From his father he learned everything about death. The man had been the funeral director in their small West Virginia town, a job title that couldn’t begin to convey the messy and intricate work of preparing the dead for their final journey.

Half of the boy’s house had been a normal family home, the other half devoted to the business, which his father had inherited from the boy’s dour grandfather.

Living around people who regarded any talk about the human body as perverse and where death, especially unexpected death, was talked about in whispers, the boy grew up in a world divided in two: above and below the thin floorboards of the old house.

Downstairs, in the cool basement, were two great porcelain tables suspended on large metal cranks. There were shelves filled with bottles and jars that held embalming fluid, and tubs of putty-colored skin enhancer, and even flat tins of hair crème and thin tubes of vermilion lipstick. There were blue cardboard boxes filled with syringes, and red ones bursting with rubber gloves, and a large glass apothecary jar filled with cotton balls.

The floor had a drain in it, and there were lengths of rubber hosing coiled in a corner, and hanging from metal hooks on the far wall were dark oilskin aprons.

Without the bodies it reminded him somewhat of the drugstore in the main street of town, the same medicinal smells and shelving, the same orderliness, and while the shop had penny candy and magazines for sale, the main business of the place was the care and treatment of the body.

The dead were brought to the basement by his father in the back of the hearse, or dropped off by refrigerated van courtesy of the coroner’s office. Sometimes they were wearing the same stained clothes in which they’d died and sometimes they came in naked, their bodies already subject to the various indignities visited upon them by the coroner and his assistants.

They were laid upon those slabs of tables and then the boy’s father or his assistant, a single man named Poe who lived on the top floor of a rooming house and owned a basset hound named Lucille, would begin what Poe called “prettifying” the body for the viewing public.

The first body the boy could remember seeing was that of a coal miner who died when the shaft elevator slipped on its journey, dropping the cage more than sixty feet into the darkness, and landing so hard that people said the noise was heard above ground and even a half mile away in the small, dirt-rimmed homes of the miners’ wives and children.

The boy was four or five, small and young enough that his mother and other neighborhood women talked around him about how the man died and how two other men were crippled and about the dead man’s pregnant wife and their two other children and how shameful it was that the company’s policy was that she’d have to vacate the house in just two weeks.

He stayed long enough to hear the story, taking small sips of slightly sour lemonade from an enamel cup his mother set down next to him on the floor where he pretended to play with his toy cars.

As soon as he was able, he escaped through the door to the basement, carrying down a glass of iced tea with pieces of fresh mint floating on top, that sharp smell of spearmint forever associated in his mind with the sight of the body emerging from dirt and blood-crusted clothes.

The miner’s face and exposed arms were black with soot, and he could still remember that jerk of surprise he felt when Poe cut neatly through the man’s trousers and an icy white length of leg emerged. That powerful contrast between light and dark stayed with him, as did watching Poe carefully wash the man’s body once it was fully naked, sluicing the dirt and blood down the drain, washing the dead man’s face with a cloth just as the boy’s mother did to him at bath time. The assistant’s touch had been slower and softer somehow, something he wouldn’t understand until much later, until his own life’s work began and he experienced firsthand the change to human skin when blood flow ceases.

He felt a frisson of excitement when Poe’s gloved hands moved down the body to lift the thick, flaccid penis, washing the nest of reddish gold pubic hair, and dipped lower to swipe once around the scrotum. His own penis twitched against him.

The boy’s father moved between the man’s body and the shelf beyond him, selecting several vials and mixing various lotions and powders into a small bowl. He paused to take the tea from the boy, holding the glass with a gloved hand and taking a long swallow before smiling at the boy and pronouncing it nicely sweet. All the while the smell of blood and soot and mint mingled in the boy’s nostrils.

Music played on a small radio high above the boy’s head, a woman’s mournful voice skating along a scale from high to low. “Jazz,” his father said when he saw the boy listening. “It helps the concentration.”

When the buzzer sounded, two sharp, short bursts of noise, he reached up a hand and turned off the voice, moving quickly to strip off his gloves and hang up his apron before walking to the back door concealed from view by a floor-to-ceiling striped curtain.

The boy sidled after his father and watched him open the door to a moon-faced woman with red-rimmed eyes holding a small pile of clothes with a framed photo on top. A grim-faced man wearing a black suit and a gray hat held her elbow.

The boy watched as his father took the clothes from the miner’s widow, watched as he took a long look at the photo.

“He was a fine-looking man,” he said, and something about these words made red flare across the woman’s wide cheeks and new tears tremble in her swollen eyes, though she smiled, too, pleased with the comment all the same.

These were the things he would remember: that woman’s smile with her swollen eyes. The way his father carried the clothes carefully back into the other room and showed the picture to Poe, both of them discussing how they’d put that flattened face back into the visage looking out at them from the photo.

After they were finished and the body had been carefully placed in the burnished wood coffin with gleaming handles that the company would pay for, the boy crept into the empty viewing room to take another look. Moving swiftly past the rows of folding chairs, he placed his small hands onto the box and carefully lifted the lid.

The face of the miner looked peaceful, clean, his eyes shut as if he were just resting, his arms folded across the breast of the cheap blue suit that had been his best. A wreath of lilies sent by the company stood on one side of the coffin, a cross of roses on the other. The scent of flowers was powerful in the closed room.

Later, much later, he would find the drawer filled with photos, dozens of snapshots of corpses dressed and made up to look like they were living. “I like to keep a record of my work,” Poe said with a little smile when he caught the boy. “Best not to tell your mama.” He let the boy play with them, sifting through the dead like they were a set of playing cards.

The man took another sip of coffee and watched a young police officer wearing gloves carry a manila envelope out of the antique store. Did the officer remember the last time they’d found a photo like the one he was carrying, or was he too young? Eight years was a long time to live on memories. It was time to create some new ones.

When Ian and Grace left each morning, Kate double-checked the lock on the front door before retreating to the kitchen to prepare a pot of tea. While waiting for the water to boil, she flicked aside the curtains on the kitchen window several times to scan the backyard and driveway. A new talisman of sorts. In the months before they’d left New York, she’d taken to checking the peephole in their front door multiple times a day. Obsessive. She knew that, knew what spurred it, knew what Ian would say about it if he saw her.

When the tea was ready, she poured it into a thermos and carried it out the kitchen door, pausing to lock the door carefully behind her.

It was no more than ten steps from the back door to the door of the studio, but it often felt like a gulf. She unlocked the studio with a silver key, trying not to hurry it so that it stuck in the lock, and when the door opened she stepped in and slammed it closed behind her, breathing hard as she turned the bolt to lock herself in.

There were wooden blinds on the windows, and she turned the rods on them just enough to look out. If Ian or Grace were home, she would pull up the shades themselves, but not when she was alone. Too much like being in a fish bowl, though she realized that there was no one there to look in at her. Well, except their next-door neighbor. She had a clear view of the back of his house, and sometimes saw him sitting out there alone petting a large yellow cat.

He was odd, that one. Apparently he owned a floral shop in town, but she found it hard to picture someone so dumpy-looking creating anything beautiful. He gave her the creeps, the way he skulked from his house to his van when he left the house, scuttling along the sidewalk like some overgrown bug. Ian said he was just shy, and she could tell from the look on his face that he thought she was hardly one to talk about someone else’s reclusive behavior.

Kate sighed and stepped back from the windows. She poured some tea from her thermos and wrapped her hands around the steaming mug, remembering all the mornings she’d done this at her studio in Brooklyn. It felt strange to be doing it somewhere else, but it wasn’t just that her space had changed. She’d changed. She was so different from the Kate Corbin who’d walked the streets of the city after midnight feeling perfectly safe.

“I don’t like you coming home alone that late!” Ian had yelled at her more than once in the early years of their relationship.

“I need to work!” she’d shout back at him, frustrated that he didn’t understand that an artist couldn’t fit the workday into nine to five.

“It isn’t safe, Kate,” he’d said. “Call me if you’re going to be late.”

Except if she called, he’d be angry that she was gone so long. He hadn’t understood what it was like to be consumed by something, by the emotional energy necessary to get fully involved in her work. She had to be immersed in order to produce. And she’d been immersed. Too immersed to see that where she worked wasn’t safe, that the building wasn’t secure, that someone could climb the steps unnoticed, could pick the lock on the battered metal door, could wait in the shadows—

Kate squeezed her eyes shut and shoved the memories to the back of her mind. She wouldn’t think about that. No. She was in a new space. This was a new beginning. She took a long, slow deep breath and reached for a can of brushes on a shelf.

The previous owner had done a nice job with this space. The room was large and light and there was ample shelving. Kate had unpacked her boxes, taking care to arrange her brushes and paints and carefully set up her easels where she liked in relation to the windows. The paint-flecked portable CD player she’d used for years found a new spot on one of the broad wooden shelves, and she hung the old men’s shirt, worn more for luck than protection from splatter, from a hook on the back of the door.

It was strange to have a kitchen so close by. In her old studio she’d kept a hot plate plugged into an extension cord running from the single outlet, but now she could just walk a few feet back into her house. The thermos was more for old time’s sake than necessity. Other things were different, too, like the cleanliness of the space and the fact that the windows didn’t look out on the flat, tarred roofs of other industrial buildings, but on tidy green lawn and another house.

The incomplete portrait of a banker sat on a maple easel next to one window. She sank into a chair nearby and stared at it with a critical eye. It wasn’t working and she didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t done plenty of these bread-and-butter portraits. This commission, from the prominent man’s widow, had come over nine months ago and it still wasn’t done. It was work like this that allowed her to pursue more creative projects, but she’d never have the time for them if she didn’t finish this up.

Halfheartedly sorting through the photos she’d been given of her stout and ruddy-faced subject, she started at the sound of a door slamming. She stepped to the window and caught a glimpse of the dirty white van pulling away. The shop’s name, Bouquet, was painted in fading pink letters on the van’s side panel.

Somewhere she’d gotten the idea that small towns like Wickfield sent out welcome wagons and were populated by neighbors bearing homemade cookies to newcomers, but in the two weeks they’d been here they’d had no visitors. Aside from the party thrown by the Beetlemans, they hadn’t met or socialized with anybody.

Not that she’d wanted to socialize. In fact, just the night before she’d turned down Ian’s suggestion that they walk up to town and try one of the local restaurants. Still, she was surprised that no one had shown up on their doorstep to welcome them.

It was too quiet here. In her old studio she’d played CDs to try and drown out some of the louder traffic noise. Here she played them to create noise and distract her from the disturbing silence. She sifted through her CDs and chose an old recording of Sarah Vaughan before squeezing paint onto her palette. It was the banker’s face that needed work. A haunting jazz melody filled the studio as she stirred the paints with her brush.

Sharp rapping on the door interrupted her hours later. Startled, Kate dropped her palette and paint spilled onto the floor. Heart racing, she stepped over to the window and looked through the blinds.

A mailman stood outside the studio door holding a large box.

“Yes?”

“Will you hold a package for your neighbor?”

“Who?”

“Your neighbor.” The mailman jerked his head at the house next door before glancing down at the label on the cardboard box he held in his arms. “Terrence Simnic. He’s not answering and I got to leave it with somebody.”

“Sure, okay.”

The package was surprisingly light. She locked the door again and left the box next to it. She cleaned up the paint on the floor with a tiny bit of paint thinner and water and returned to the banker’s face. It was wrong, all wrong. She started the CD again, resisting her desire to slash through the canvas with a palette knife. It would have to be completely redone, but she wasn’t sure she could do it. With a sigh, she picked up her brush.

The package was completely forgotten until tapping at the window startled Kate. She whirled around and saw Grace peering in the window.

“Don’t do that,” she said when she opened the door. “You scared me.”

“Sorry.” Grace didn’t sound it. She stepped into the studio and bumped against the box. “What’s that?”

“Something for the neighbor.” Kate leaned toward Grace for a kiss. “How was your day?”

“Eww! Mom, you’ve got paint all over you!”

“Have an air kiss then.” Kate mimed a kiss near her daughter’s face and Grace rolled her eyes.

“Fine. Just don’t touch me. I’m hungry—can I have a snack?”

With a last look at the banker, who was becoming less distinct with each stroke of the brush, Kate broke away and followed Grace out of the studio, taking the neighbor’s package with her.

“You shouldn’t leave this door unlocked,” she said when the back door, which led into the kitchen, opened as she tried to put the key in the lock.

“What, like someone’s going to break in while we’re eight feet away?” Grace snorted. “Get real, Mom.”

“Just keep it locked.”

“Whatever.” Grace buried herself in the fridge and Kate reached around her to pull out an apple.

“Here. These are good.”

“I don’t want an apple.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know, Mom, that’s why I’m looking.”

The tone of exaggerated patience would have infuriated Ian, but Kate didn’t react. Pick your battles, friends with older children had cautioned when she described the strange metamorphosis affecting her once-sweet daughter. Kate had taken to repeating that to herself like a mantra.

She carried the package out to the entrance hall and cautiously peered out the glass-paneled front door before opening it. The dirty white van had reappeared on the street, but when she stepped out on the porch she couldn’t see any movement in the neighbor’s house.

She looked down at the box and then back in the house, wondering if she could get Grace to carry it over for her. Only Grace would ask why and probably mention it to Ian and he would want to talk about it. “You’re becoming agoraphobic,” he’d said angrily when she refused to walk up to town the other night.

As if she didn’t know that, as if she didn’t realize it was a problem. It wasn’t as if she wanted to be this way. She’d tried once to explain how painful it was to be around other people since the attack, how it made her feel as if she were exposed.

To feel her skin tingling, as if everybody knew, to wonder if every man she saw was the stranger who’d broken into her studio—sometimes it was more than she could bear and she just wanted to hide. It was as if the assault hadn’t been a single incident, but a virus infecting her and all parts of her life.

The days when she’d felt safe on the streets of the city seemed so far in the past that it was as if they’d happened to another person. She’d been so naïve about danger, so blasé about her own personal safety. Rape was something that happened to women who lived in dangerous neighborhoods or went out at four in the morning or dressed provocatively. Rape didn’t happen to married women, to mothers, to women who always locked their car doors.

She glanced down at the box in her hands and read the address label again. Terrence Simnic. Well, maybe she’d just leave the box on the porch, ring the bell, and walk away.

That decision propelled her off her own porch, over the driveway, and up Mr. Simnic’s clipped lawn to his front steps. The house was similar in style to hers, but there was something timeless about this one, as if she’d stepped back into a Victorian novel. Maybe it was only that the old wicker furniture on the porch reminded her of her grandmother’s house.

The door had probably once been painted a deep green, but it had faded over time. She rang the bell and heard it echoing faintly through the house.

Nobody came. She shifted the box in her arms and hit the bell again. Something brushed against her leg and Kate screamed and dropped the box.

A yellow, short-haired cat stepped between her legs and leaped soundlessly on top of the box, looking up at her quizzically, its sinuous tail curling like a question mark.

“You scared me,” Kate said, crouching down and extending her hand. The cat leaned into her tentative touch, and she stroked his soft fur and wondered what to do about the box. She couldn’t just leave it here, not after she’d dropped it. She picked it up again and gave it a slight shake, praying whatever was in it wasn’t fragile.

A third try of the doorbell, though she’d given up hope of finding Mr. Simnic. Maybe he was hard of hearing. She knocked on the door anyway and it swung open. Startled, Kate looked into the house. It was gloomy thanks to the heavy curtains drawn over the front windows.

“Mr. Simnic?” She wasn’t even sure she was pronouncing his name correctly. There was no answer, but the cat had followed her in and meowed loudly near her feet.

“Hello? Mr. Simnic?” she called louder, and took a few more steps into the house.

“What do you want?”

The voice, deep and flat, came behind her. Kate whirled around and managed to turn a startled cry into, “Hello!” She gestured at the package. “Just dropping this off for you. I rang the bell but nobody answered.”

The man standing in the doorway looked down at the box and back up at her. He was anywhere from thirty-five to fifty years of age, just above average height, and with skin that looked pasty white as if he spent no time in the sun. His short, brown hair was wispy and receding, but as if his body were compensating for that, he had thickly haired arms hanging, somewhat chimp-like, down at his sides. He was wearing a short-sleeved baby blue shirt with sweat stains visible at the underarms. More body hair sprouted from the open neckline. His khaki pants had an oily-looking stain on one knee and they looked like they were dependent on his cracked leather belt to hold them up.

“Who are you?” he said in the same flat voice. His eyes were large and the muddy brown of river silt. It was too late to flee. Kate saw no other option and stuck out her hand.

“I’m Kate Corbin, your new neighbor.” She gestured at her house, but the man’s eyes remained focused on her face. “You’re Terrence Simnic, right?”

“Yes.” He sounded deeply suspicious.

“Well, I guess you weren’t here today when the mailman tried to drop this off, so he asked if I’d hold it for you.”