When Secrets Die (23 page)

I saluted.

“Come on back, and let me get you outfitted.”

We'd decided earlier that I would wear the company overalls. We even had a short written agreement about me working for him on a temporary basis. The structure of legitimacy seemed to make him feel better about the appalling ethics of letting me into the clinic to “assist.” It was done all the time, but not by straight-up guys like Borneo. He didn't even owe me any favors, like the majority of ex-clients, but I have gotten so good at calling in markers that Borneo was happy but conflicted about helping me out. In truth, the path lab had been getting under his skin for months, and getting the background on the Marsden case provided enough motivation to prod him across ethical lines.

There was a bounce in his step.

“Are you always this perky at two
AM?
” I asked.

He looked at me over his shoulder. “It's my workday, Lena.”

He opened a rolling closet that reminded me of the coat closet we'd had in elementary school. White work overalls of various sizes wrapped in dry cleaning bags hung like robots from the rack. He frowned, slid some hangers until he came to the very end.

“Try this one. It'll be too long, but I don't have any smaller ones. I'll get you a cup of coffee to go while you change. Do you take cream?”

“If it's that gummy powder stuff, I'll take it black.”

“Black it is.”

I shut the door and shed my jeans. I'd come prepared in a white T-shirt, with a white sweatshirt over it. Michael was a stickler about the company logo and the uniform, particularly since he wanted to make it clear he and his employees were legitimate and not burglars. Alarms and security guards were an occupational hazard.

The overall was lightweight, well worn, and entirely comfortable. I tightened the straps as high as they would go and bent over to roll up the hem of the pants, which were a good six inches too long.

“Ready?”

I opened the door. Michael handed me a Styrofoam cup that felt too hot to drink, and put a white company ball cap on my head. He immediately bent down and rerolled the hem of my pants. I suppose attention to detail was what made him good at his job, but it occurred to me that one night working with him was going to be enough.

The parking spaces in the front of the clinic were empty. We drove to the back lot and entered through a side door. No keys here, but an electronic locking system and a pass card. Michael seemed distracted, his mind on the job, and I sipped at the strong and terrible coffee and winced. My mind was waking up.

Michael propped the door open to bring in his cleaning gear, the heaviest piece being some kind of floor buffer, and I slipped into the ladies' room off the hallway and poured the coffee into the toilet. When I came out, Michael was locking the door behind him and turning on all the lights.

“It's safer that way,” he told me. “Anybody who wants to rob the place knows when I'm here and when I'm gone. They stay out of my way and I stay out of theirs.”

He handed me a huge black garbage bag. “The first thing I want you to do—”

“Michael?”

He frowned at me.

“Show me where the desk is where you found the trophy items—the cemetery flowers and all that. Afterwards I want to go down to the path lab. I'll try not to disturb you while you work.”

“Oh, right. Sure, this way.”

He looked at me warily. We had set very rigid parameters. He didn't mind if I looked in the storeroom desk and cabinets for the trophies or wandered through the lab. Desk drawers and file cabinets used by the regular staff were off-limits. I could take pictures, but nothing else.

“But I will take the bag.” I held out my hand. “Just in case someone sees me through a window or something. Then it will look like I'm on the job. But don't expect me to actually clean anything, okay?”

He grinned. “Okay.”

He pointed me to a room in the center of the hallway. Some of the doors were locked—this one wasn't. There were no windows, and the walls were lined with shelves and storage cabinets. I stood in the doorway, taking in the details. None of the furniture matched, and the room had the air of a catchall for things that weren't needed anywhere else. One cabinet held mostly office supplies: staplers, rubber bands, a stray computer keyboard, stacks of used but empty file folders. There were no medical supplies here.

A pinkish beige metal desk had been shoved into a corner next to a stack of boxes. Computer parts were piled on top of the desk. Someone had arranged them into the smallest footprint possible. A faux brass name plaque sat on the corner facing the doorway.
AMARYLLIS BURTON
had been printed out on copy paper that had clearly been cut to fit. It made me think of a child playing office. The chair behind the desk looked like a castoff from the waiting room—metal arms and a plastic aqua seat cushion. One of the legs was broken off at the bottom, and the chair sloped sadly to the right.

The desk drawers were locked. A new development. Michael had said they were open before, and full of random clutter. Amaryllis had taken her “office” one step further.

The file cabinets had pens, paper clips, a magnifying glass (for some odd reason), stacks of paper towels, rolls of toilet paper, and one flathead screwdriver with a broken plastic handle. No doubt Michael Borneo had plenty of tools and keys, but there was no point asking him for help getting into the desk. He might object to opening drawers that were locked. It was always best not to ask a question unless you wanted an answer.

The desk lock was easily picked, but the screwdriver slipped and I broke the latch to the center drawer. It gave me a moment of guilt. I was more careful with the other drawers.

The center drawer held a clump of string, balled up with little tacks. Some project or other that hadn't worked out. Pens, paper clips, pencils. Rubber bands, and way at the back, a little cache of order forms preprinted with the clinic's address and phone and account numbers. The deep drawers on the right held mason jars of peanut butter. All of the jars were dated and labeled. Some of them had little stickers of flowers in the corner, and some did not. That interested me. I took two jars, one with a flower label and one without, and tucked them into my overalls. I took pictures of the drawers' contents, and the nameplate on the desk. The bottom-left drawer was stuck, and hard to open, mainly because it was stuffed. Dried flowers, flaking and crumbling, plastic flowers, water-stained and worn, heavy foil balloons that said
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
. Small bedraggled stuffed animals. A plastic Pez dinosaur that looked newer than the rest. Silk flowers with wire and clips made for attaching to the top of gravestones. A weird collection. I took pictures of those too.

I relocked the desk, except for the center drawer, which was broken, and put everything back the way I had found it. I could hear a vacuum from the other side of the building. Michael was hard at work. I wandered down the hallway, past office doors, until I came to one labeled
DR. TUNDRIDGE
. I tried the handle. The door was unlocked. No surprise. Michael likely went through and unlocked all the doors so that he could go in and out freely while he cleaned. So long as he kept the outside doors locked, there was no problem.

The light was on. I went inside.

The office had a heavy feel to it, and there were stacks of papers and books on the desk, the floor, and the buttery-soft brown-leather couch. Clearly, Tundridge spent a lot of time working here. The shelves were crammed with books, some in neat rows, some stacked and shoved in tight. There was a large flat-screen computer on his desk, next to a laptop, and another table held yet another computer, as well as a printer and a fax machine.

I wandered carefully, studying the papers on the desk but not touching. Formulas, chemistry notations that made no sense to me. Nothing in the fax machine. I looked at the desk a long moment, wondering if all of the drawers were locked. I glanced at the file cabinets, the notepad beneath a huge chemical reference book. I was in clear violation of my agreement with Michael Borneo. I backed out of the office and into the hall.

Tundridge's office was right next to a stairwell. Lights on, like everywhere else. The basement or the pathology lab or both. I slipped through the fire door and headed down two flights of steps. Opened the bottom fire door and stepped into complete darkness.

Light switches are never placed for the convenience of short people, and it took me some time to find one. There were three switches, and I flipped them all. The blaze and hum of fluorescent light made me blink.

It was hard to take everything in all at once, though the white tile floors and whitewashed cinder block walls made me remember immediately how Emma had talked about the way her worn shoes had looked against the floor. The lab was sanitized with the sort of aggressive medical cleanliness that smells harsh and makes your eyes ache. I smelled bleach. The black tables were a visual relief beneath the brightness of the lights, a track of fluorescent tubes that ran along the ceiling.

The tables were narrow and long and built in. Some of them were bare. Many of them held microscopes, laptop stations, screens and monitors. It was the white metal shelves that drew me. The jars of formalin, the disturbing shapes. I went closer slowly, curious, my stomach tight with butterflies.

There were pieces of small children in the jars. The first one I saw held an ear. One tiny ear. Next to it was a slender cylinder that held a ropy mass of some kind of internal organ I could not identify. There was a heart, and next to it what were clearly a set of small and immature lungs. Everything was in miniature, a pediatric chamber of horrors.

It was the floating arm that stopped me. Up until now, every jar had been labeled with a series of numbers and letters, like a code, and a last name next to the age of the child. This one had a strip of yellowed masking tape slapped across the front, and someone had written
BABY ELMO
in capitals. It was my first experience with being offended by someone's off sense of humor. Some things were sacrosanct. Some things were not funny.

The arm was small, infant-sized, and the little fist rested against the top of the lid, as if it wanted out.

Whose child did that little arm belong to? How long had it been in the jar? Did some family actually consent to that arm being put in a jar and kept on a shelf, or had they signed a generalized blanket consent form with no inkling that their child's tiny fist would be labeled Baby Elmo for a stranger's fleeting amusement? The impersonal clinical coding seemed infinitely kinder—benevolent in comparison.

The echo of footsteps made my stomach jump. I looked over my shoulder, expecting Michael, but did not recognize the face I saw behind the wire mesh window.

I began patrolling the lab tables with my trash bag open, and glanced up, trying to seem bored, to stare at the man who walked in. Tundridge was about five six and stocky, his thin dandruffy brown hair cut short. He had green eyes, a narrow worried face, and an air of anxious distraction. He was not what I expected. Not tall or commanding or evil. Just a stocky, average man who looked preoccupied.

I tilted my head, gave him a quick nod, and went back to the patrol, looking for trash cans to empty.

“Excuse me?”

The voice was curt but not particularly unfriendly.

“Garbage cans are through there.” He pointed to a metal door at the back of the room that I hadn't even noticed. Even if he hadn't had a name tag over a creased white coat, I would have known he was Dr. Tundridge. He picked up a printout from one of the machines and turned his back, heading up the stairs. I wondered when he'd arrived and why Michael hadn't warned me. No time, I supposed, and of course Michael hadn't known I was down here.

I spent another twenty minutes in the lab. I did my job, looking at everything I could look at. Some of the things I saw floating in jars still come to me at unexpected moments. I did not like to think of Emma Marsden standing in this lab all alone.

EMMA

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

They left late, Blaine and Emma, late enough that Emma was going to have to write Blaine a note to get into school. Blaine punched one radio station after another, till Emma reached out and turned the radio off. The night before, with Marcus there between them, Emma thought Blaine had taken the news about the details of her half-brother's death surprisingly well. But this morning, enduring the attitude and the atmosphere, and seeing the quick and ready tears when Blaine had dropped one of her old elephant bowls and broken it into three big pieces, she thought maybe not. Blaine was usually at her best around Marcus. Something about having him there lightened the atmosphere in the house and put a cheerful buffer between mother and daughter. It was hard not to be pleased by a man who seemed to adore both of them and had no mission but to please. And there was none of the tension, the odd-man-out feeling around Blaine, not with Marcus. Emily did not realize how strained things had been with Clayton until Marcus came into their lives.

Sad to admit, but her daughter was a hell of a lot easier to get along with when Marcus was around. But they only had to get through a fifteen-minute drive to school.

“We've got the whole weekend,” Emma said. “You want to rent a movie tonight? Order pizza? Or do you have plans?”

Blaine was looking out the window, and she shrugged, and did not answer for a while.

“Can I have somebody sleep over tonight?”

“Ummm …” Emma was tired and the house was a wreck, and she didn't want anybody who wasn't Marcus around. On the other hand, Blaine needed friends, peers, not just parents all the time.

“Never mind,”
Blaine said. “I'll just have a loser night with my loser mom.”

“That's a charming way to get what you want. You can have somebody sleep over if you want, Blaine, you don't have to spend the evening with your loser mom. And Marcus will be here. He's not a loser.”