More distant was a black Cadillac hearse from Kirk’s Funeral Home. I was relieved that Sandy Kirk had not already collected the body and departed. I still had time to put the photo of my mother between Dad’s folded hands.
Parked beside the gleaming hearse was a Ford van similar to the paramedics’ vehicle except that it was not fitted with the standard emergency beacons. Both the hearse and the van were facing away from me, just inside the big roll-up door, which was open to the night.
Otherwise, the space was empty, so delivery trucks could pull inside to off-load food, linens, and medical supplies to the freight elevator. At the moment, no deliveries were being made.
The concrete walls were not painted here, and the fluorescent fixtures overhead were fewer and farther apart than in the corridor that I had just left. Nevertheless, this was still not a safe place for me, and I moved quickly toward the hearse and the white van.
The corner of the basement immediately to the left of the roll-up garage door and past those two waiting vehicles was occupied by a room that I knew well. It was the cold-holding chamber, where the dead were kept until they could be transported to mortuaries.
One terrible January night two years ago, by candlelight, my father and I had waited miserably in cold-holding more than half an hour with the body of my mother. We could not bear to leave her there alone.
Dad would have followed her from the hospital to the mortuary and into the crematorium furnace that night—if not for his inability to abandon me. A poet and a scientist, but such similar souls.
She had been brought from the scene of the accident by ambulance and rushed from the emergency room to surgery. She died three minutes after reaching the operating table, without regaining consciousness, even before the full extent of her injuries could be determined.
Now the insulated door to the cold-holding chamber stood open, and as I approached it, I heard men arguing inside. In spite of their anger, they kept their voices low; an emotional note of strenuous disagreement was matched by a tone of urgency and secrecy.
Their circumspection rather than their anger brought me to a stop just before I reached the doorway. In spite of the deadly fluorescent light, I stood for a moment in indecision.
From beyond the door came a voice I recognized. Sandy Kirk said, “So who is this guy I’ll be cremating?”
Another man said, “Nobody. Just a vagrant.”
“You should have brought him to my place, not here,” Sandy complained. “And what happens when he’s missed?”
A third man spoke, and I recognized his voice as that of one of the two orderlies who had collected my father’s body from the room upstairs: “Can we for God’s sake just move this along?”
Suddenly certain that it was dangerous to be encumbered, I set the suitcase against the wall, freeing both hands.
A man appeared in the doorway, but he didn’t see me because he was backing across the threshold, pulling a gurney.
The hearse was eight feet away. Before I was spotted, I slipped to it, crouching by the rear door through which cadavers were loaded.
Peering around the fender, I could still see the entrance to the cold-holding chamber. The man backing out of that room was a stranger: late twenties, six feet, massively built, with a thick neck and a shaved head. He was wearing work shoes, blue jeans, a red-plaid flannel shirt—and one pearl earring.
After he drew the gurney completely across the threshold, he swung it around toward the hearse, ready to push instead of pull.
On the gurney was a corpse in an opaque, zippered vinyl bag. In the cold-holding chamber two years ago, my mother was transferred into a similar bag before being released to the mortician.
Following the stone-bald stranger into the garage, Sandy Kirk gripped the gurney with one hand. Blocking a wheel with his left foot, he asked again, “What happens when he’s missed?”
The bald man frowned and cocked his head. The pearl in his earlobe was luminous. “I told you, he was a vagrant. Everything he owned is in his backpack.”
“So?”
“He disappears—who’s to notice or care?”
Sandy was thirty-two and so good-looking that even his grisly occupation gave no pause to the women who pursued him. Although he was charming and less self-consciously dignified than many in his profession, he made me uneasy. His handsome features seemed to be a mask behind which was not another face but an emptiness—not as though he were a different and less morally motivated man than he pretended to be, but as though he were no man at all.
Sandy said, “What about his hospital records?”
“He didn’t die here,” the bald man said. “I picked him up earlier, out on the state highway. He was hitchhiking.”
I had never voiced my troubling perception of Sandy Kirk to anyone: not to my parents, not to Bobby Halloway, not to Sasha, not even to Orson. So many thoughtless people have made unkind assumptions about me, based on my appearance and my affinity for the night, that I am reluctant to join the club of cruelty and speak ill of anyone without ample reason.
Sandy’s father, Frank, had been a fine and well-liked man, and Sandy had never done anything to indicate that he was less admirable than his dad. Until now.
To the man with the gurney, Sandy said, “I’m taking a big risk.”
“You’re untouchable.”
“I wonder.”
“Wonder on your own time,” said the bald man, and he rolled the gurney over Sandy’s blocking foot.
Sandy cursed and scuttled out of the way, and the man with the gurney came directly toward me. The wheels squeaked—as had the wheels of the gurney on which they had taken away my father.
Still crouching, I slipped around the back of the hearse, between it and the white Ford van. A quick glance revealed that no company or institution name adorned the side of the van.
The squeaking gurney was rapidly drawing nearer.
Instinctively, I knew I was in considerable jeopardy. I had caught them in some scheme that I didn’t understand but that clearly involved illegalities. They would especially want to keep it secret from me, of all people.
I dropped facedown on the floor and slid under the hearse, out of sight and also out of the fluorescent glare, into shadows as cool and smooth as silk. My hiding place was barely spacious enough to accommodate me, and when I hunched my back, it pressed against the drive train.
I was facing the rear of the vehicle. I watched the gurney roll past the hearse and continue to the van.
When I turned my head to the right, I saw the threshold of the cold-holding chamber only eight feet beyond the Cadillac. I had an even closer view of Sandy’s highly polished black shoes and the cuffs of his navy-blue suit pants as he stood looking after the bald man with the gurney.
Behind Sandy, against the wall, was my father’s small suitcase. There had been nowhere nearby to conceal it, and if I had kept it with me, I wouldn’t have been able to move quickly enough or slip noiselessly under the hearse.
Apparently no one had noticed the suitcase yet. Maybe they would continue to overlook it.
The two orderlies—whom I could identify by their white shoes and white pants—rolled a second gurney out of the holding room. The wheels on this one did not squeak.
The first gurney, pushed by the bald man, reached the back of the white van. I heard him open the rear cargo doors on that vehicle.
One of the orderlies said to the other, “I better get upstairs before someone starts wondering what’s taking me so long.” He walked away, toward the far end of the garage.
The collapsible legs on the first gurney folded up with a hard clatter as the bald man shoved it into the back of his van.
Sandy opened the rear door on the hearse as the remaining orderly arrived with the second gurney. On this one, evidently, was another opaque vinyl bag containing the body of the nameless vagrant.
A sense of unreality overcame me—that I should find myself in these strange circumstances. I could almost believe that I had somehow fallen into a dream without first falling into sleep.
The cargo-hold doors on the van slammed shut. Turning my head to the left, I watched the bald man’s shoes as he approached the driver’s door.
The orderly would wait here to close the big roll-up after the two vehicles departed. If I stayed under the hearse, I would be discovered when Sandy drove away.
I didn’t know which of the two orderlies had remained behind, but it didn’t matter. I was relatively confident that I could get the better of either of the young men who had wheeled my father away from his deathbed.
If Sandy Kirk glanced at his rear-view mirror as he drove out of the garage, however, he might see me. Then I would have to contend with both him and the orderly.
The engine of the van turned over.
As Sandy and the orderly shoved the gurney into the back of the hearse, I eeled out from under that vehicle. My cap was knocked off. I snatched it up and, without daring to glance toward the rear of the hearse, crabbed eight feet to the open door of the cold-holding chamber.
Inside this bleak room, I scrambled to my feet and hid behind the door, pressing my back to the concrete wall.
No one in the garage cried out in alarm. Evidently I had not been seen.
I realized that I was holding my breath. I let it out with a long hiss between clenched teeth.
My light-stung eyes were watering. I blotted them on the backs of my hands.
Two walls were occupied by over-and-under rows of stainless-steel morgue drawers in which the air was even colder than in the holding chamber itself, where the temperature was low enough to make me shiver. Two cushionless wooden chairs stood to one side. The flooring was white porcelain tile with tight grout joints for easy cleaning if a body bag sprang a leak.
Again, there were overhead fluorescent tubes, too many of them, and I tugged my Mystery Train cap far down on my brow. Surprisingly, the sunglasses in my shirt pocket had not been broken. I shielded my eyes.
A percentage of ultraviolet radiation penetrates even a highly rated sunscreen. I had sustained more exposure to hard light in the past hour than during the entire previous year. Like the hoofbeats of a fearsome black horse, the perils of cumulative exposure thundered through my mind.
From beyond the open door, the van’s engine roared. The roar swiftly receded, fading to a grumble, and the grumble became a dying murmur.
The Cadillac hearse followed the van into the night. The big motorized garage door rolled down and met the sill with a solid blow that echoed through the hospital’s subterranean realms, and in its wake, the echo shook a trembling silence out of the concrete walls.
I tensed, balling my hands into fists.
Although he was surely still in the garage, the orderly made no sound. I imagined him, head cocked with curiosity, staring at my father’s suitcase.
A minute ago I had been sure that I could overpower this man. Now my confidence ebbed. Physically, I was more than his equal—but he might possess a ruthlessness that I did not.
I didn’t hear him approaching. He was on the other side of the open door, inches from me, and I became aware of him only because the rubber soles of his shoes squeaked on the porcelain tile when he crossed the threshold.
If he came all the way inside, a confrontation was inevitable. My nerves were coiled as tight as clockwork mainsprings.
After a disconcertingly long hesitation, the orderly switched off the lights. He pulled the door shut as he backed out of the room.
I heard him insert a key in the lock. The dead bolt snapped into place with a sound like the hammer of a heavy-caliber revolver driving the firing pin into an empty chamber.
I doubted that any corpses occupied the chilled morgue drawers. Mercy Hospital—in quiet Moonlight Bay—doesn’t crank out the dead at the frenetic pace with which the big institutions process them in the violence-ridden cities.
Even if breathless sleepers were nestled in all these stainless-steel bunks, however, I wasn’t nervous about being with them. I will one day be as dead as any resident of a graveyard—no doubt sooner than will other men of my age. The dead are merely the countrymen of my future.
I did dread the light, and now the perfect darkness of this cool windowless room was, to me, like quenching water to a man dying of thirst. For a minute or longer I relished the absolute blackness that bathed my skin, my eyes.
Reluctant to move, I remained beside the door, my back against the wall. I half expected the orderly to return at any moment.
Finally I took off my sunglasses and slipped them into my shirt pocket again.
Although I stood in blackness, through my mind spun bright pinwheels of anxious speculation.
My father’s body was in the white van. Bound for a destination that I could not guess. In the custody of people whose motivations were utterly incomprehensible to me.
I couldn’t imagine any logical reason for this bizarre corpse swap—except that the cause of Dad’s death must not have been as straightforward as cancer. Yet if my father’s poor dead bones could somehow incriminate someone, why wouldn’t the guilty party let Sandy Kirk’s crematorium destroy the evidence?
Apparently they needed his body.
For what?
A cold dew had formed inside my clenched fists, and the back of my neck was damp.
The more I thought about the scene that I had witnessed in the garage, the less comfortable I felt in this lightless way station for the dead. These peculiar events stirred primitive fears so deep in my mind that I could not even discern their shape as they swam and circled in the murk.
A murdered hitchhiker would be cremated in my father’s place. But why kill a harmless vagrant for this purpose? Sandy could have filled the bronze memorial urn with ordinary wood ashes, and I would have been convinced that they were human. Besides, it was unlikely in the extreme that I would ever pry open the sealed urn once I received it—unlikelier still that I would submit the powdery contents for laboratory testing to determine their composition and true source.
My thoughts seemed tangled in a tightly woven mesh. I couldn’t thrash loose.
Shakily, I withdrew the lighter from my pocket. I hesitated, listening for furtive sounds on the far side of the locked door, and then I struck a flame.
I would not have been surprised to see an alabaster corpse silently risen from its steel sarcophagus, standing before me, face greasy with death and glimmering in the butane lambency, eyes wide but blind, mouth working to impart secrets but producing not even a whisper. No cadaver confronted me, but serpents of light and shadow slipped from the fluttering flame and purled across the steel panels, imparting an illusion of movement to the drawers, so that each receptacle appeared to be inching outward.
Turning to the door, I discovered that to prevent anyone from being accidentally locked in the cold-holding room, the dead bolt could be disengaged from within. On this side, no key was required; the lock could be operated with a simple thumbturn.