Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop (9 page)

“You’re sure? Exactly like that?” Both boys nodded confidently.

He moved around to the side of the body and began to search inside the bag itself. “Help me out here, all three of you,” he said, pointing to the opposite side of the bag. “I’m looking for late-instar larvae—really big ones—and especially for little brown capsules about this big. Sort of like brown rice. Check the pockets and the folds in the clothing too—quick now.”

The boys scrambled over one another to set to the task. Kathryn edged up to the bag herself and pretended to search, but her mind was desperately focused on something else, anything else that could block out the horror before her.

Nick came around once again to the head. “I guess this will have to do,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder at the door. He reached for the zipper and began to slide it up, but as it approached the head, he abruptly stopped. “Well hello there,” he said, peering closely at a small, sparsely infested wound in the center of the forehead. “You boys almost missed the party—and you just might
be the guests of honor.” He plucked a single specimen from the wound and held it up, examining it closely.

At that exact moment the door swung open and Mr. Schroeder stepped into the garage, and with a single sweep of his eyes comprehended the situation. His face began to grow red and to contort, as though he were rapidly trying on a variety of new facial expressions in sizes and styles unfamiliar to him.

“What,” he blurted out, “is the meaning of this?”

“Oh no,” Kathryn said aloud. It was her worst fear realized; in her mind’s eye she could already see the morning headlines.

“Mrs. Guilford,” Nick said quietly, still studying his specimen, “I could use a little help here.” Kathryn rushed to intercept the furious Mr. Schroeder.

“I distinctly forbade you to conduct this kind of examination!”

“Mr. Schroeder, if you’ll just listen to me for a moment, I—”

“You have gone behind my back to conduct this reprehensible procedure in my own facility!”

“If you’ll just give me a minute to explain, I’m sure I can—”

Casey leaned over to Nick. “You’re not really from the medical examiner’s office, are you?”

“Nah.” He shrugged. “But we’re having a good time, aren’t we?”

With each exchange Mr. Schroeder grew more and more livid, and soon he began to spit and splutter accusations and invectives so rapidly that it was impossible to understand him. For her part, Kathryn kept apologizing and explaining, calming and reassuring, all the time keeping herself strategically positioned between Mr. Schroeder and “the good doctor.” But she was quickly coming to the end of her diplomatic abilities.

“Griff,” Nick said urgently, “toss me another container—quick.”

“We’re out of containers,” Griff said, holding open the knapsack. “See?”

“Hold this!” he commanded, shoving the forceps and its tiny captive into Casey’s hand. “Very gently!” He hastily searched through the already-filled containers and chose the one marked “left ocular cavity.” He popped off the lid and with a flip of his wrist flung its contents across the room. The larvae rebounded like tiny marshmallows off the side of the gleaming hearse. “Sorry,
boys,” he said, taking the forceps carefully from Casey, “somebody else needs this cab.”

Mr. Schroeder was almost on top of him now, shouting and threatening and waving his arms around Kathryn. Nick tossed the last of the containers into the knapsack, cinched it shut, and stood up so abruptly that Mr. Schroeder stopped in midsentence.

“I believe we have everything we require here,” Nick announced with great dignity. “Thank you, Mr. Schroeder, it was a lovely service.” He rubbed Griff’s head, gave Casey a quick thumbs-up, and proceeded out the garage door. Kathryn watched him wide-eyed, then turned back to Mr. Schroeder, as if there might be some appropriate parting words for such a situation. She stood silently with her mouth half open, her eyes darting desperately from side to side. At last she smiled weakly, shrugged, and hurried down the driveway.

They sat in the car a long time, silently staring out the windshield. Kathryn pulled at the sun visor; it came off in her hand. She studied herself in the mirror. She was white as paste, and there were red circles around her eyes that almost matched the red bandanna still stretched across her face. She was panting hard, and with each breath the bandanna fluttered out in front of her like a crimson pennant. She sat slumped in the seat, her arms limp at her sides, and both her legs were trembling uncontrollably.

“I don’t know about you,” Nick said, “but I’m starving.”

Kathryn sat slowly sipping black coffee in a remote corner of the Smithfield Chicken and Barbecue in Rayford. She insisted on a table as far as possible from the All-You-Can-Eat Pig Pickin’ Buffet and positioned herself with her back to any possible view of food.
She stared blankly at the emergency exit door, not more than ten feet away, while she mentally reviewed the events of the day. She had wrecked her new car, ruined an entire outfit, promised her second mortgage to a man who just might be a raving lunatic—and to top it all off broke into a funeral home to pick bugs off a decomposing corpse. She looked again at the emergency exit. Does the alarm really go off if you open the door?

“You’re not having anything?” Nick said, returning to the table with three loaded plates balanced on his arms. “How do women do it?” He stooped down and slid the dinner plate forward. It was heaped with pulled pork, potato salad, and a pool of beans with a pallid cube of pork fat bobbing in the center. His salad plate held only a few leaves of lettuce, smothered with a great mound of black olives and bacon bits. His dessert plate was piled high with a thick white ambrosia salad of marshmallows, mandarin oranges, coconut, and whipped cream.

“How in the world can you eat after … that?”

“You’ll notice I passed on the macaroni and cheese,” Nick said through a mouthful of potato salad. Kathryn shut her eyes hard. “Sorry. Inside joke.”

“I never felt so useless in my entire life,” she muttered.

“I thought you did very well back there.”

“I spent half the time on my hands and knees vomiting!”

“Well … you were very good at vomiting.”

Kathryn closed her eyes again and dropped her head to the table with a thud.

“Don’t take it personally,” Nick said. “A decomposing body emits two unique chemicals. One is known as putrescine and the other cadaverine—cute names, don’t you think? When they team up, they can reach down your throat and jerk your insides out.”

“They didn’t seem to bother you.”

He shrugged. “It’s an acquired taste.”

They sat in silence for several minutes. It was all Kathryn could bear to sit and listen to the sounds of her companion munching and crunching his way through plate after plate of vile obscenities. She wanted to ask him if he had been able to learn anything from his hurried investigation, but she knew she couldn’t tolerate a detailed evaluation—not yet. She really didn’t want to talk at all. More than
anything she wanted to go home and take an endless, steaming shower—but anything was better than listening to that sound.

“Do you think Mr. Schroeder will call the police?” she asked.

“Probably. We dared to disturb Cerberus, guard dog of the dead,” he said in an ominous tone, “though I suspect his bark is worse than his bite. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

She watched him wipe a bit of marshmallow from the corner of his mouth. “You don’t strike me as the kind who worries about much of anything.”

“I’ve found that worrying takes a lot of energy and produces few results.”

“Must be nice,” she said, picking at the plastic chrome peeling from the top of the salt shaker. “I just hope nobody finds out about all this.”

Nick shook his head in disdain.

“You’re not from a small town, are you, Dr. Polchak?”

“Not quite. I’m from Pittsburgh.”

“In a small town, if one person knows, everybody knows. Then come the funny looks and the whispers behind your back when you pass. ‘Did you hear what happened at Schroeder’s Funeral Home? Did you hear what she did?’ But to your face it’s always, ‘How do,’ or, ‘Nice day.’”

“And all your friends are thinking, ‘Why can’t she find herself a nice, living man?’”

“I’m serious!”

“Mrs. Guilford,” he said, pushing aside the last of his empty plates, “there is a difference between small-town people and small-town minds. The first you can live with, the second you can live without. Just let it go.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“Yes,” he said, “it is.”

The front door opened with a jingle, and Kathryn looked up to see Sheriff Peter St. Clair step inside. He was tall, wide-shouldered, and narrow at the waist, looking like an athlete just barely past his prime. His hair was sandy blond and stiff as wire, cut close, a throwback to his last tour of duty less than a decade ago. Kathryn smiled. Everything about Peter was still army; head to toe he was sharp, tight, lean, and hard.

The sheriff tucked his Ray-Bans into his front shirt pocket and refastened the button. The waitress smiled and greeted him from behind the counter. He nodded to her without a word, pointed to the percolating Bunn-O-Matic, and headed directly for Kathryn and Nick.

The sheriff stopped abruptly in front of the table and stood, hands on hips, staring silently at Nick. Then he bent over, kissed Kathryn on the cheek, and sat down.

“So much for your fears of police brutality,” Nick said sotto voce.

“Okay, Kath,” the sheriff said. “What’s going on?”

“Hello, Peter,” she said, squeezing his forearm.

“I just got a call from old man Schroeder. He said you came by this afternoon with some guy he’d never seen before—some kind of doctor.” He glanced at Nick again. “He accused you two of everything from breaking and entering to burglary to desecrating a graveyard. It sounded like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
!” He turned back to Kathryn and lowered his voice. “He claims you two did some kind of autopsy on Jimmy’s body.”

“We did not!” she shouted back just as the waitress arrived with the sheriff’s coffee. There was a moment of frozen silence as the waitress clacked the cup and saucer onto the table, and Kathryn was greatly annoyed that she took an extra minute to tidy up the table and wipe the ring of water from under each glass.

As the waitress turned away, Kathryn leaned forward. “We didn’t break into anything, we didn’t desecrate anything, and we didn’t take anything!”

“Well,” Nick held up the canvas knapsack, “that’s not exactly true.” Before Kathryn could protest, he dumped the knapsack over and sent its contents clattering onto the table. She watched in horror as a single container rolled slowly toward the sheriff until it stopped against his cup. With each revolution the milkwhite passengers rode the plastic wall to the top, dropped off, then began the upward ride again. It was like watching the popcorn machine in the lobby down at the Imperial Theater.

The sheriff looked in astonishment at the assortment of plastic containers. He lifted the one before him and stared at a trio of writhing, white maggots on a folded piece of damp paper towel.

“Peter,” Kathryn said quietly, “I want you to meet Dr. Nicholas Polchak of North Carolina State University. Dr. Polchak is a forensic entomologist. I hired him, Peter—to investigate Jimmy’s death.”

“How do, Sheriff.” Nick extended his hand with a flourish.

The sheriff groaned and dropped his head into his hands. “Kath, what have you done? I told you not to do anything!”

“You told me there was nothing more you could do,” she said defiantly. “So I decided to do something myself.”

“You,” he shook his head in bewilderment, “are the most muley, stiff-necked, bullheaded woman I ever met.” He reached out and made a mock strangling gesture at her throat, then placed his hands on hers and squeezed hard. Kathryn smiled faintly in return.

The waitress slowly approached the table once again, uneasily eyeing the pile of transparent containers and their contents.

“You folks got anything you need me to … dispose of for you?”

Nick looked quizzically around the table. He handed her a single crumpled Sweet ’n Low packet.

“By the way, Darlene, do you have any liver back there?”

“Liver?” she said suspiciously. “We got the fried chicken livers over by the chickpeas.”

“Yes, but can I have them prepared a different way?”

“How you want ’em?”

“Raw. About a half a pound will do.” He held up the largest of the containers. “Your sign says, ‘Kids Eat Free.’”

She turned away again, stopping every few paces to glance back at Dr. Polchak. “Her name is Beverly,” Kathryn scolded.

“Really? I thought everybody down here was named ‘Darlene.’”

Sheriff St. Clair set the container back on the table and slid it well away from him. “Down here? And where might up there be, Doc?”

“Pittsburgh.”

Kathryn watched uneasily as the sheriff studied Nick. He glanced at the Pirates cap that still sat tight atop Nick’s head and the tufts of dark hair that protruded from underneath on both sides. He stared a long time at Nick’s colossal eyeglasses and the floating orbs behind them. He cocked his head from side to side,
as if he were trying to guess the contents of the Mystery Jar in the sideshow at the Holcum County Fair.