“Perry?” Professor Polson asked.
“It isn’t her,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s not Nicole.”
88
She took only the things she’d need for a night in a motel—she couldn’t stay at Rosemary’s, not with her children there, not in the state she was in—but when Shelly closed the door behind her, she felt an intense moment of grief for the things inside the house: the teacups and the comforter and the prints on the walls and her shelf of CDs, things she felt she might possibly never see again. No one ever knew, did they?
She didn’t bother to lock the front door. It was such a safe neighborhood, she’d never bothered—a fact she’d shared with Josie.
Her hands were still cramped and shaking from the shovel, the hard early winter ground. As she buried Jeremy (with a blanket, because it was unbearable to think of him in the cold, in the dirt) and wept, she thought about whether she should call the police, and decided that, if she ever did, it could not be now.
The darkness was pale on the lawn.
The moon was full.
The snow was falling fast, and it made a webby froth on the grass.
There was what seemed to be an unusually large number of students out, walking in small groups or in pairs, girls in ridiculously high heels leaning against one another, slipping around, making their way to bars, she supposed, and parties, where exciting and terrible things would happen to them. There would be kisses, and accidents, and endearments, and bitter words exchanged. Someone would fall in love. Someone would dance all night. Someone would get drunk, get raped, get hurt.
Shelly had to wait for a couple kissing in the middle of her street to break apart (two beautiful blondes, the girl on tiptoes to reach the mouth of the boy) before she could pull out of her driveway. They noticed her taillights eventually, and laughed, and moved with their arms still around each other, to the sidewalk. When Shelly backed up and passed a few feet from them, separated by the rivulets of melting snow on the glass of her passenger window, the girl (whose scarlet lips were parted over her white teeth) gave Shelly the finger, and then the couple let go of each other, doubling over with laughter, slipping around on the sidewalk, headed away, lit up in the moonlight—two incredibly beautiful, pointless human beings with no idea what awaited them—and Shelly had no choice but to drive past them again, trying not to stare, willing herself not even to glance at them in her rearview mirror, but watching them anyway.
They had nothing to do with her.
She knew that.
She could stand out in the snow all night and lecture those two about the fleetingness of youth, the dangers of this world, the accumulating importance of every act in this life, the thin thread, so easily snapped, between death and life, or simply the importance of being respectful of one’s elders, and they would never hear a word.
89
“Go,” Professor Polson said, and handed Perry the keys to Professor Blackhawk’s car. “I’m going to stay and talk to Ted Dientz here about possibilities. Identification. That sort of thing. He seems willing to work with us. He seems intrigued.”
Perry agreed.
At first, when Perry said that the girl in the photograph was not Nicole, Mr. Dientz had stammered some defensive remarks about how even a miracle worker can’t make a girl who’s been burned over 90 percent of her body and who’s sustained massive head trauma look like she did in life. But when he realized that Perry and Professor Polson weren’t questioning his skills as a reconstructionist, but actually questioning whether or not this girl, in this photo, was Nicole, he seemed excited.
Perry could imagine Mr. Dientz perfectly, suddenly, as a reader of detective fiction—the kind of man for whom such a mystery offered an intellectual challenge, a thrilling possibility, and who wouldn’t think it was necessarily out of the realm of possibility that a dead girl could be exchanged for a living girl, buried in her stead. He at least wanted to entertain the possibility for a little while.
“You know,” he said, “stranger things have happened. I won’t even go into it, but let me tell you—”
He didn’t tell them what stranger things, but he did tell them that, just because so many stranger things had happened, in his years as a mortician he’d begun, years before, collecting the DNA of every body he’d had “dealings with.”
“The military paved the way. They developed such a simple system of collecting DNA that, in my humble opinion, anyone who deals with the dead would be remiss not to take advantage of it.”
He went on to explain that he made, for each body, a “bloodstain card,” and kept them stored and filed in his basement.
“The tiniest drop of blood carries the entire blueprint, you know. All the genetic information for a single being and his or her family going back to the origins of the species!”
Professor Polson nodded as if she knew exactly what he was talking about, and asked, “So, you’ve kept a bloodstain sample card for Nicole?”
“Of course. All I would need is about five strands of hair from her mother or a sister to positively identify whether or not the bloodstain I have on file belonged to a relative of one of those Werner females. Just get me the hairs and I’ll make a call to my pals at Genetech, and for eight, nine dollars, we’ve got our answer.”
Mr. Dientz and Professor Polson talked excitedly about how swift, how efficient, it had become to trace the dead to the living, or to each other. Mr. Dientz was clearly attracted to Professor Polson. Twice, he’d called her “my dear,” and when she was looking through her briefcase, safely distracted, Perry had seen him lean over his desk and peer at the place where the buttons of her silk blouse were undone, where a bit of cleavage could be glimpsed. It probably didn’t hurt either that, all along, she’d been expressing admiration for his work, for his facility, for his skills. She’d talked to him about other funeral homes she’d visited, a convention of morticians she’d attended, morgues in other states and countries, practices long forgotten and those still in vogue, and she’d compared his favorably to all those. Either Professor Polson knew this would make Mr. Dientz putty in her hands, or she genuinely admired and understood him.
“You know,” he told her, not looking over at Perry, “I feel like being honest with you. I don’t keep the DNA just for identification—because, honestly, how often does this happen. I mean, as I’ve said, it happens, but not frequently enough to warrant the trouble of keeping the kinds of records I have. You know, it occurred to me when I first heard about the military project: ah-ha, they have a plan.”
Professor Polson nodded, and he took a breath.
“DNA can replicate itself, of course, and how many years away are we, really, from learning how to build a human being, a clone, if you will, a replica from only the most microscopic sample? I thought to myself, this is how they’ll raise their armies in the future, now that American boys are getting so soft. Why, even my own sons—don’t get me started! There’s no way those boys could save our butts in a war. We’re not raising real men anymore in this country, and the military knows this. No. They’ve saved the DNA of the military elite, the fighting machines. They will raise their armies out of those as needed.
“And I thought, shouldn’t my dead have the same advantages? They may not have died heroes, most of them, but a mortician feels an affection for his dead, and, I’ve felt that, as the last one to whom their care had been entrusted, I owed them the possibility of this raising. Certainly their families were in too much shock and pain to take care of details like this. Plus, it only takes a few seconds. The cards are small. I’ve only filled one file drawer so far.”