The light in the closet was so bright that Shelly’s eyes had begun to tear. She put a hand to her forehead, like a visor. She looked at Ellen Graham, whose own eyes were so red-rimmed it appeared as if she’d lined them with lipstick.
She swallowed, and then asked, “What do you think, Ellen? What happened to your daughter?”
“You think we didn’t try to contact the newspaper? You think we didn’t make about a hundred trips to the police, to university security, to the administrators? I know the layout of the University Administration building like the back of my own hand. We hired a private detective. We tried to involve the FBI. We aren’t perfect, but our daughter had no reason to run away from us.”
Shelly believed her. Completely. Implicitly. Maybe Shelly had spent the last three decades of her life in academia, where no one really believed that anyone outside of it could actually be intelligent, but she knew otherwise. There was the hard, glittering force of pure intelligence in Ellen Graham’s eyes. She could be anywhere, doing anything. She was smarter than Shelly, smarter than all of them.
Ellen Graham put a hand to her own throat, and said, “I know what happened to Denise, but I don’t know why, and I can know it without accepting it. I knew it that night, the night of that Spring Event.” She spat the word event. “Somebody killed my daughter. Her dad and I were on a jet, on our way home from our vacation. It was the middle of the night. We were over the clouds. I was planning to call the sorority the second we touched down, to see how her special night had gone, but when I looked out the window, there she was, wearing her white dress and my grandmother’s earrings. She was kind of peering in at me, like she wondered if I could see her, and there were tears running down her face, and when I put my hand to the window it was burning hot, and then she was gone, and now I’ll never see my daughter alive again.”
There was no self-pity in it. No whining. Just finality, factual clarity. Denise, Shelly realized, would have grown up to be just like her mother: The mother the slacker teachers in the public school would hate to see coming. The woman on the school board who actually made things change. The kind of person who lived the good, fulfilling life, who paid the taxes that made it possible for so many of Shelly’s academic colleagues to spend their lives feeling superior. Denise Graham, like her mother, would have married intelligently, maybe stayed home with her children, seen to it that they ate a hearty breakfast every morning, been there to pick them up after school, to supervise their homework, to drive them to their music lessons. She’d have enjoyed her home, her town, her parents as they slid from vital presences into old age. She’d have been at their bedsides when they died.
Shelly had to will herself to hold Ellen Graham’s gaze, and then the only thing she could think to say was, “But, you’re still looking for her…”
Ellen Graham snorted, tossed her head like a horse with an uncomfortable bit in its mouth. “What else?” she said. “What else would you have me do now?”
71
Karess came out of the autopsy room looking bleached of color and flushed at the same time. She had her hair tucked up into the shower cap, and when she took the cap off her head, the hair came tumbling down around her shoulders.
She tossed the scrubs to Perry and then tossed the cap in his direction, too, although it landed at his feet. She kicked the booties off with some difficulty, stumbling backward and managing not to fall down only because Brett Barber was standing behind her. She slammed into him, and he caught her awkwardly under the arms. Karess shook her head and looked back at Brett, appearing more annoyed by his presence than grateful. She hurried past Perry, and he could smell her, both in the gown she’d tossed to him and in the breeze she left as she ran: Formaldehyde. Sweat. Shampoo. Powdered flowers.
She smelled, he thought for a horrible moment as he slipped the gown she’d tossed to him over his arms, like the church on the morning of Nicole Werner’s funeral.
“It’s fucked up in there,” Brett said, leaning in to Perry. “I’m just warning you. This whole thing is fucked up. Professor Polson should get her ass fired for bringing us here.”
Perry did not even dignify Brett Barber, who was sweating profusely and breathing hard, with a nod. After he got his scrubs on, Perry followed the other three students and Kurt through the doors to the autopsy room. The doors closed behind him with a pneumatic hush, and the effect was like being teletransported onto another planet, with an entirely different kind of atmosphere: thin, and dustless, and tinged with a terrible sweetness. The walls were white, but everything else was made of gleaming stainless steel, even the floor, at the center of which there was a drain hole. Perry found himself in the center of the room, following Kurt and the other students, with that drain hole at his feet.
In it, there was a nestlike tangle of tawny-colored hair.
Perry took a step back and felt a cold pulsing at his right temple, as if someone were tapping at it with an index finger inside a cold latex glove. He put his hand to the temple.
“Are you okay?” Kurt asked. “You are okay?”
It took Perry a moment to realize that Kurt was talking to him, and that the other three students were staring. He swallowed and said, “Yeah,” and made a conscious effort not to look at the drain hole again, or speculate about its contents.
“Here we have the cabinet of the instruments needed for autopsy,” Kurt said, pointing at a brilliantly shining silver cabinet. He reached into a metal bin and briefly held up what looked like a large, thick needle before tossing it back down.
“Here,” Kurt said, “is chalkboard for recording data.” Perry looked in the direction Kurt had pointed. It was the kind of blackboard Perry remembered from his first-grade classroom in Bad Axe, before the whiteboards and the Magic Markers. What looked like a crude drawing of a torso was on it. A few dots were drawn around the neck. A–17–00 Wt NTD DB was underlined several times beside the drawing. Beside that was a list, checkmarks next to each word:
Liver X
Rt. Lung X
Lt. Lung X
Rt. Kidney X
Lt. Kidney X
Spleen X
Thyroid X
Brain X
Apparently, the last autopsy had been completed.
“The word autopsy”—Kurt pronounced the word as if it were one long vowel—“means ‘see for yourself.’”
The students giggled a little at the colloquial quality of this. The simplicity.
“So…” Kurt said. (There was no overlooking the showman in him now. He had been waiting for this part. Back in Yugoslavia, he’d probably been an amateur actor, or a magician.) “See for yourself.”
He pulled out a drawer by a handle that Perry hadn’t even noticed was in the wall. It made a slippery tinny sound, and suddenly it was rolling into the room so quickly that the little group of them had to part to make room for it. And then the smell was exactly as he remembered it from Nicole Werner’s funeral—Karess’s sweetness as he slipped the gown over his head—and it took Perry several seconds to realize that there was a sixth person in the room suddenly: