“Well, that must have been a shocker for you!”
There was no escaping the amusement in Mr. Dientz’s voice, and Perry remembered now Mr. Dientz standing over a table of Cub Scouts in the Bad Axe Elementary School cafeteria chuckling as the Scouts tried to pound nails into boards. What had they been building? Birdhouses? Toolboxes? The pine boards had been thick and incredibly hard, and the Scouts were all under the age of ten, and with every smack of the hammer, a nail would bend over dramatically instead of being driven into the wood. “Hah, hah. We aren’t too good at boys’ work, are we, girls?” Mr. Dientz had teased, and Perry remembered the screwed-up expression on his son Paul’s face, the watery glare he kept trained on the nail as he prepared to smack it again with a hammer, and the way, when the nail bent over a fourth or fifth time and his father began to laugh, he didn’t throw the hammer down or even drop it, but very carefully placed it next to the boards and walked away as his father watched and continued to laugh.
“This,” Mr. Dientz said, “is the image I meant to show you, the post-reconstruction photo. Very good photo, and nice work, if I do say so myself.”
“First, let me see,” Professor Polson said, letting go of Perry’s arm, and leaving him in the corner of the office.
“You can see, Professor,” Mr. Dientz said, “how much work went into this, I hope. There’s really no resemblance between the first face and this one, is there?”
Professor Polson said nothing. She was looking intently into Mr. Dientz’s computer screen. Perry could see that there was a small line of sweat at her spine, gently soaked through the red silk of her shirt. The blouse wasn’t tight, but the material clung to her back, and Perry could have counted the vertebrae from where he stood. The electric glow from the computer illuminated the hair around her face, causing it to look both black and blindingly bright. “Perry?” she said gently, turning toward him. “Do you think you can you look?”
Perry swallowed. He crossed the mauve carpeting again, took the seat beside her, rubbed his eyes, which were watery and blurred from vomiting, and then he leaned toward the computer screen.
“You can see,” Mr. Dientz said, “that it’s truly like sculpting, the kind of work that has to be done on a face in the kind of condition in which this particular decedent was delivered to me. Luckily, the skull was mostly intact, and provided in its entirety, so that the fragmented sections could be glued back to their original places.” Mr. Dientz inhaled, as if reexperiencing the exhausting task in his memory. “I was then able to use something we call mortician’s putty to cover the bone, and then of course, because of the burning and discoloration, I needed to use mortuary wax as a kind of masking. But after that, with some cosmetic work, she was really almost finished. The hair needed only some styling and a synthetic addition or two. That was lucky, considering the damage from the fire to her skin. In total, maybe five hours work? Sadly, until the two of you, no one except me has ever seen her.”
Perry leaned in closer.
The face of the girl in the digital photograph was like no human face he had ever seen.
She radiated something so purely radiant that he wanted to close his eyes and lean forward at the same time, to disappear inside it. He had the feeling that, if he put his hand to the computer screen and touched her, she might wake up. She would be startled, confused, perhaps, but she would be more alive than anyone else in this room.
She had her eyes closed, this dead girl in the photo, but Perry didn’t have the sense that she couldn’t see. He had the sense that she no longer needed to have her eyes open to be able to see. She was seeing everything. She was everything. He had to lean back in the plush velvet chair and close his own eyes, and then open them again, and then he looked from Professor Polson to Mr. Dientz, and back to the girl.
“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 happe
ned, 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.”
Professor Polson’s mouth was open, but she said nothing. She blinked, seeming astonished, speechless.
“But!” Mr. Dientz said, “in the meantime, I have what we need to solve this mystery!” There was more color in Mr. Dientz’s face then than there had been even when he was discussing the marvels of reconstruction and his passion for the work.
Now he’d disappeared into his basement to find Nicole’s card.
Perry took the keys from Professor Polson.
“Go see your parents,” she suggested. “But if you feel like you can stand it, could you visit the Werners? Pay your respects, as it were. And—just see. We might need them, you know. Their cooperation, eventually. I’ll take care of things here while you’re gone, and then we’ll see what’s next.”
“Okay,” he said, although he didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to leave the funeral home, to face his own or Nicole’s parents, to drive off into Bad Axe, which, in this new context, seemed like an entirely alien place. But he nodded, and said, again, “Okay.”
“And if you do visit the Werners, Perry,” Professor Polson said, “it couldn’t hurt to bring something back. Everyone has a hairbrush, or a comb, or a few strands of hair lying around a bathroom sink. With all those sisters? All that hair? Mr. Dientz said he needed five hairs, but I’ve heard of this being accomplished with one. I don’t want you to do anything you feel uncomfortable doing, but it would save us having to tell them, right now, about any of this, if, until—”
“Yes.” Perry nodded.
It was early evening but already pitch-black outside. Snow had been falling all day, and now it looked like shattered glass all over the lawns and the sidewalks and the streets of Bad Axe. No one was out. The only signs of human life Perry glimpsed were behind curtains: shadows in front of flickering television screens, a lamp burning over a shadow’s desk. Some people had their Christmas lights up already. Blinking, blinking.
Every house, Perry realized as he passed them, had a story—and because it was a small town, Perry knew the stories. It wasn’t always death, but, over there, somebody’s grandmother had fought off her meth-addict grandson with a shovel when he came to try to steal her wedding ring. Across the street from that, Melanie Shenk’s house was dark. Her mother, Perry knew, had been put in jail for bank fraud. One of the houses on the corner belonged to the father of another girl Perry had gone to school with, a girl a few years older than he was. Sophie Marks. Everyone had pitied her because her parents were divorced and her father had custody and she dressed poorly, and often joked, herself, about not having had an actual home-cooked meal in her entire life. (“How is that different, ‘home-cooked,’ from, say hot dogs?”), but now she was a flight attendant, married to a pilot, and Perry’s mom had told him that Sophie flew her father, a retired postman, all over the world for free these days. “Last I heard he was headed to Singapore.”
Before Perry realized he’d done it, he’d driven past his own house without stopping, only glancing at it as if it were any other house on the block—lit up warmly from within, someone’s mother carrying a plate of something to a table. Someone’s father at the table. They would not be expecting a knock on their door. It would surprise them, concern them, to find their son, who was at college, at that door.
He was, instead, on his way to the Werners’. Left on Brookside. Right on Robbins.
He’d done this drive a hundred times, picking up Nicole for a student council carwash or debate team meeting. He’d had access to a car, and she didn’t. It was a small town. No one needed directions to anyone’s house. All you had to do was say, “Oh, he’s three houses down from the Werners,” or “Catty-corner to the Edwardses, and then across the street.”
The Werners’ house was lit up warmly, too. They already had their Christmas lights up. Blues and reds and whites and greens shone in little points along the eaves. The curtains in the front window of their nice little ranch house were closed.
Perry had been in that house many times. There were only a few bedrooms, he knew, and so many girls. The sleeping arrangements must have changed with the years, as one girl went to college and another girl got a room of her own. The house was small, but it had always seemed warm and clean. Perry had always had the feeling, as he waited in the living room for Nicole, that you could crawl around all day on your hands and knees in that house looking for a speck of dust and never find one. Of course, their restaurant was the same way. You could imagine it being run through a car wash every few hours. Blasted into perfection. Every surface shining.
But the Christmas lights seemed st
range.
Had Perry expected black drapery over the windows?
Well, no. But he hadn’t expected early Christmas lights. And he was even more surprised to see, beyond the Christmas lights and the gauzy curtains, several female shadows gathered around the broad shoulders of a masculine shadow. They were gathered, Perry realized, after stopping the car in the middle of the street and staring long enough, around the Hammond organ in the Werners’ living room.
All the girls played, he was pretty sure, as well as Mr. Werner. Nicole had told him about the all-night caroling that went on sometimes on Christmas Eve.
He turned off the engine of Professor Blackhawk’s car after parking it in front of the house, and the whole rattle-trap—chrome, engine, upholstery—shuddered loudly before dying. It was more noise than Perry had expected to make or he’d have parked farther away, and someone in the house, apparently, had heard it, too. He watched as one of the feminine shadows (Mrs. Werner?) turned from the gathering and moved toward the window. Her hand parted the curtains, just at their edge, and he saw a face, silhouetted with the light from behind, peer out quickly before dropping the curtain. She seemed to have said something that made the others turn away from the organ and look at her.
Perry was glad, he supposed, that they knew someone was on the way, glad that there’d been a bit of warning.
He’d hated the idea of surprising them.
Even with their other daughters at home, even gathered around an organ, Perry imagined that the grief of the place would have its own texture—those shadows—and a smell, maybe the smell of the Dumpster in the parking lot behind Dumplings. When Perry was first learning to ride a bike, his father would sometimes take him to that parking lot on a Saturday morning before the restaurant opened, when there was no one there. It had a hill that sloped down into nothing but high grass, so it was a good place to practice turning, braking—better than the street in front of his house, where a car might be coming. Perry used to smell the Dumpster those mornings, and it wasn’t a bad smell. Just yeasty, tired, soft disintegration. Wet bread, he thought. And the scraped-off remnants of cabbage some child had refused to eat. Maybe half a piece of black cherry torte some woman on a diet hadn’t finished. Gravy in a garbage bag, bones.