A/N No copyright infringement is intended. This is very much an A/U story and builds upon my previous two: Bones that Speak and Openings and Closings.
Chapter Seven
"Are you sure you can't just drive my car?" Eric asked as they drove through the heavy autumn rain back to the Kelsey guest house. With every corner, the Corvette skidded and only Eric's considerable skill kept the car in control.
Carly gripped the edge of the seat. "If the rain keeps up, I don't think it's a good idea for me to drive this car. I don't think I can manage."
"Okay, but you'll have to follow me close. I don't want to be too far away from you." Eric let go of the shifter for a moment to grasp Carly's hand.
As soon as they arrived at the house, Carly packed up her paints and most of her clothes into a suitcase, and Eric called Jim Kelsey to let him know that Carly was relocating for the foreseeable future and that they would eventually move the rest of her things to his home.
Kelsey yawned, having been awakened out of a sound sleep, "Phyllis and I had wondered when she was going to shift to you permanently. Carly's been pretty scarce."
Without providing any further information, Eric wished Kelsey an easy path back to sleep and said goodnight.
The two loaded up her Subaru and headed out to Eric's home. As they drove, Carly noticed that the route the two of them took was quiet and clear of any of the tell-tale shimmer of death that would capture her attention. She realized that she probably either would need to start touring the city quadrant by quadrant or rely on the "instant buffet" method that she had used in New York City.
The heavy rain forced her to keep her eyes strained on Eric's tail-lights, so she was grateful that he'd slowed to more reasonable speeds. That meant they would probably drive even faster out to Eric's building to rendezvous with the imperiled vampires of Shreveport who wanted to shelter in the old bank vault.
Her car parked in Eric's garage—he'd made space for her a few weeks before-the two transferred back into the Corvette and covered the distance to the old bank quickly. When they arrived, two dozen vampires emerged from their cars carrying bolsters and pillows, all of which were damp by the time they got to the actual vault. They loaded themselves inside, many of them having to be closer to their fellows than they seemed comfortable. Even though Esther had modified her apartment and converted the secret closet into a locking safe-room, she had agreed to stay with the group in the vault, which included all of the recently made vampires apart from Jimmy. Eric gave her the security code to disengage the building alarm so that they could all leave again safely at sundown the next day.
"You are all welcome to stay here as long as you like. From this point forward, Esther can let you in and out of the building. Please coordinate with her."
Once the crowd was safely ensconced in the vault, Eric and Carly returned home.
Without the need to eat, Carly found that she hungered for only one thing: Eric. As soon as they were inside his home, she put down her easel and the small bag she carried and forced him against a wall.
"I can't be without you one moment longer," she pleaded. "Please..."
Eric gathered her up and tore off at full speed toward his room. By the time they reached the bed, Eric had also pulled them out of their clothes. He kissed her, sucking her lips in one at a time, cradling her head in his hands. But Carly was in no mood for gentleness, or slowness. She pulled him down onto the bed and then rolled over on top of him. Within seconds, she enveloped him and he moaned in appreciation of the sudden closeness. They moved together, changed position, kissed and tugged at each other, rubbed against each other until they climaxed in the most human way.
"I wanted to remember," Carly said, "before..."
"I understand..." Eric pressed his forehead against hers. "You are enough." He grasped the bracelet while he stared into her eyes. The rush of connection hit them again, and she felt it, his sincerity. This is always who we are, even when we are not connected into one. We are one, always. At that moment, Eric's fangs descended and he ripped into the wrist that held her bracelet and brought it to her lips as he bit her other wrist. Linked together, with one consciousness, the two drank.
As their physical essences mingled, they felt as if the boundaries between their bodies melted away and they shared every sensation, each joy, each sorrow, and all of their love.
They rested together until daylight approached. "Lover, I should move to the safe-room."
Where most people would have a second bedroom closet, Eric had a super-secure safe-room, which he generally avoided when they were together so that they could continue to hold one another until far into the day, sometimes until sundown. But it seemed imprudent to forego that additional level of security when he'd just locked the majority of the vampires of Shreveport into a bank vault.
"Should I bring Pam to you?" Carly asked.
"No," Eric shook his head sleepily. "She has something similar, although it is more a drawer than a room. But it is also fireproof." He kissed her once again before locking himself away. "Please be careful. If you need me, remember, I can survive a few minutes of sunlight."
Although she didn't ever want to risk his safety, she understood what he meant. If she was confronted by a werewolf and couldn't cope with it on her own, she could bring Eric to her side and the creature they became together could tame the beast.
With a few hours until her arrival at the ME's office was necessary, Carly climbed into the shower to wash away as much of the last few days as she could. She still had some of Adele's dust lingering in indelicate places. As the water heated, she recalled her experience at the police station, and decided to set an alarm, hoping that the sound would draw her back to reality if she fell apart again.
The steam rising in the shower around her body, Carly closed her eyes and appreciated Eric's elegant shower with its high-mounted, high pressure shower head that scoured the dust—and the fear—from her, although it didn't seem to touch the guilt.
It acts justly... Eric had assured her, but she wasn't as certain about the monster that they became, the creature that seemed as much of an enigma to her ancestors as it was to her.
And as soon as she thought of them, of the creatures that surrounded the cauldron, bubbling with the memories of billions of dead—from who knows how many realms in the universe—she stood among them. The cave throbbed with energy, even in darkness punctuated only by the flames that licked the bottom of the cauldron.
Hello...nice to see you all again...Carly spoke, but couldn't tell whether she said it with her lips or her mind.
The ancestors, fellows, friends—whatever they were—were uncharacteristically silent, so she could feel the crackle of the flames, the swoosh of the cauldron, and the drips of water—or memory—that fell down the cave walls. Why do you suffer, child? They spoke in unison. You and your vampire are strong, you have weapons few can imagine. Their laughter rose and resonated within the cave. You scorned your visitor but he has given you a gift. As they said "visitor," ravens swept through the cavern and Carly heard the distant echo of a wolf's howl.
The bracelet is from Odin? Carly had suspected that there had to have been some connection, since he appeared in her dreams at the same time that it the bracelet had appeared in her life.
He has many names and many men have followed him. He gave the gift to Eric's ancestor and it passes to him and to you. You have used it wisely.
But we have killed...
Only those who would kill you and others and others and others...
I get it.
A hot wind blew Carly over and she fell onto her face. You may be strong, child, but humility would serve you.
Carly felt rage break her apart and what she was—the vapor, the ravens, the smoke-plunged into the fire and coalesced in the shower as her alarm sounded, bringing her back into her earthly existence. While the alarm continued to sound, she washed her hair and body, holding onto the blaring siren to keep her anchored within Eric's house.
Out of habit, Carly made herself a cup of coffee and ate some toast, which both wound up sitting like a lump in her belly. Resisting the temptation to watch the news, Carly raised the louvres on one window and watched the sun find its way to the treetops. Once she shuttered them again, she headed back to work.
The rains the night before had washed the streets and puddles remained in the grassy medians that separated the two directions of traffic. Despite everything, Carly felt dampened, quieted, restrained—almost sad—and would have credited exhaustion, except she knew she didn't need to sleep.
"Our prodigal child returns!" Tracy called out as Carly passed her office.
Carly laughed at the woman's inexaustible good cheer, especially considering that she had killed Carly's attacker only a week and a half before. "I haven't been here long enough to be a prodigal."
"Well, I think you need to start calling me to let me know you'll be away. It was two days before Ellen told us you weren't coming in."
"Anything else interesting happen while I was away?"
"Well, I haven't killed anyone this week—so far." Tracy reached behind her desk and fished out a baseball bat, "But look at this beautiful bat I got sent from New Orleans. Look at that signature!"
Tracy handed her the substantial bat—it looked older and heavier than her last. Carly spun the bat around to find the signature—"Mamie Peanut Johnson."
"Tracy, I'm sorry, I don't know that much about baseball. Who is this?" Carly handed the bat back to its owner.
"Well," Tracy looked over her glasses, "I guess I can't expect you to know. Peanut was one of the three women to play in the Negro leagues in the 1950s. My momma and daddy saw her play—she replaced Hank Aaron. I had an autographed picture of her up on my wall when I was a girl—I played softball and she was a personal hero of mine." Tracy smiled, "I'm guessing this means that Octavia and that king of yours have finally said hello."
"Wow!" Carly knew that Eric told Godric about the incident in the ME's office and about Tracy's connection to Octavia, but she had no idea that Godric would engineer such a precise gesture of thanks.
"So if I ain't keeping the men around here in line, I'll break a glass ceiling or three!" Tracy stood up. "But come here—" she wrapped Carly in a tight embrace "I know you need a big hug. Andrews told me about all you've had to deal with the last couple of days."
As the two women embraced, Carly felt warmth and love and concern, but she also heard a clear message: Octavia says you can stop them—that you can rip them away from themselves. I don't know what that means, child, but she says you can visit her when you're in New Orleans.
"Thank you, Tracy. I appreciate it," Carly wiped away a tear from her eyes, "I really do. All of it."
Tracy wrote Octavia's address on a piece of paper. "She won't use a phone, so don't even try."
"How does she talk to you?"
"Damn old girl is so dramatic, she sends one of her helpers to a payphone with a message she reads me. But I can never ask any questions. She's just showing off half the time, I think." Tracy laughed again. "I guess she's got a reputation to keep up!"
With that, Tracy shooed her out of the office. "I got orders to track down, so get!"
Carly popped her head into Ellen's office, but neither she nor her coat were there. I guess she's in court...
With the office otherwise silent, Carly went into her own workspace. In her absence, four cartons had accumulated on her workbench along with a number of files. While she was away, the VA had sent Bertrand Phillips's medical records to her, both his army and post-discharge records. He'd had a tooth extracted during boot camp, so she had dental records, and all of his injury and post-injury reports were in the file as well. At some point, all of this material would be digitized, but until then, it had to be printed out and sent. All things considered, she got it quickly.
Now she could write up her positive identification of him and he could be interred properly. Perhaps her acquaintence, Colonel Mays, could give her some advice about getting Betrand – or Bert, as he knew him –buried with military honors in a national cemetary.
The numbered cartons came from the sheriff's department of Catahoula Parish. Before opening the first carton, Carly put on a pair of latex gloves to minimize contact with the bones. Perhaps if she examined them slowly and carefully, she could stretch the work out so that she could claim at least a few day's work in a reasonably human fashion. Once the box was open, she saw that she needed much more equipment than usual. Within the top carton, she discovered fully skeletonized remains that were still covered in thick Louisiana mud. They'd been wrapped in heavy plastic, but they hadn't been cleaned. She'd need the dissection room and a cleaning tank. Looking at just the visible surface of the first carton, she probably would even have to be careful not to destroy physical evidence.
What were they thinking? Where was their county ME?
The report provided didn't offer many answers either.
Remains found during excavation of access road by power utility. Preliminary investigation determined site not a crime scene. Remains transferred to sheriff's custody and stored.
Then she saw the date: February 27, 1998. Nearly a decade. Whoever this was had languished away in a rural sheriff's evidence room until they'd been displaced by a need for additional storage. Even though this wasn't specifically the goal of her grant, Carly was now working on the second case of someone left behind by rural law enforcement's laissez faire practices. Snapping off her gloves in frustration, Carly decided to go looking for Bob. The technician could direct her to an appropriate station to start laying out the bones for examination.
In order to go into the basement autopsy suite and storage facility, Carly had to pass by Ellen's office. She'd arrived and looked stoic seated behind her desk with a green smoothie in her hand and a file in front of her.
"Hi, Ellen, how are you feeling?" Carly greeted her boss.
"Hey, Carly, how are you holding up?" Ellen responded with some sorrow and worry, and tiredness, in her voice.
"I'm good, how about you?"
"Can you sit down a minute?" Ellen gestured to her chair. "We should probably catch up a little bit."
"Sure." Carly was worried about what Ellen was about to disclose. "I've been a bit of an absentee. I'm sorry. I wasn't expecting to be gone except over the weekend."
"Like I've said," Ellen reassured, "you're so fast, and you're salaried, so I'm not going to worry about the hours you put in."
"Thank you."
"Can we talk about your friend from the jail?" Ellen got up and closed the office door. "I have some questions. Your answers will stay just between us."
"Ellen," Carly leaned back against her chair, readying herself for the questions and trying all she could to keep from going through Ellen's mind to find them, "I don't know whether I have any answers."
"I'm guessing you do." Ellen returned to her desk and grabbed the file. "I'm going to destroy these records once I sign the death certificate, just so you know." She turned to the outline of the body used by every Medical Examiner to record external injuries and to record the incisions that they make. Ellen shifted the file so that it sat directly in front of Carly. "Where would the heart be in your average male subject?"
Carly pointed to the center left of the diagram's chest between the second and sixth rib.
"Now, where was my case's heart?"
"I'm guessing not there." Carly replied.
"No. Not there." Ellen pointed lower and more centrally in the diagram. "And what parts was he missing?"
"Missing?"
"Carly, yes, missing. He was missing an appendix." Ellen crossed her arms.
"Lots of people have their appendixes removed." Carly laughed a little. "I don't know why that would be significant."
"It is significant because he also had a caecum and his stomach acid was one rather than two or three."
"So he needs a maalox. I don't understand."
Ellen turned the page in the file to a photograph. "And there's the matter of this." Ellen pointed to the photograph of the heart, which was long and narrow, but it was also scorched black, almost as if it had been left out on a barbecue grill.
"Wow."
Silence stretched out between the two women. Ellen crossed her arms and waited for Carly to respond. Carly didn't dare poke around in Ellen's mind, but she could guess what was already there. My forensic artist has lightning hands, and she zapped a werewolf dead. Or something to that effect.
"Genuinely," Carly began, "I don't know..."
"...what to tell me?" Ellen interrupted me. "I'll tell you what you can tell me, Carly. The truth. The unvarnished, unlikely, unnatural truth. That's what you can tell me." Ellen closed the file and shook her head. "Three months ago, every day when I came to work and dissected someone on my table, I was certain I knew what killed them." Ellen held up her fingers and started enumerating: "Accident, disease, homicide, suicide. Vampires were not on that list." Covering her face, Ellen said, "And now, here I am, staring my own mortality in the eye, and I am certain that my world is bigger and scarier than I ever thought. And I'm fairly certain that my friend, who has just come into my life, who seems wiser and sadder and more talented than nearly anyone I've ever met, might actually be the scariest thing of all."
"Really?"
"Yes, really." Ellen reopened the file to a text document. "According to Andrews's report, this man died after he fell on top of you. Your hands were in the center of his chest, he bounced off your hands, and he died."
"So what do you conclude from that?" Carly still didn't want to volunteer more than she had to.
"Given the state of his heart?" Ellen shook her head again and put the document back in the folder. "That you somehow roasted his heart like it was on a spit. Or shot lightning out of your hands."
Carly leaned back, closed her eyes, and tried to conjure up a sense of what to do, of what she should tell Ellen, of how she could tell Ellen what she was. And then it came to her—as clearly and as fully formed and fully realized as if she had planned it for weeks. Her father, somehow, had enjoined her mother never to speak of what he was to anyone else, never to tell his story to his daughter without losing it. Why couldn't she do the same?
Buoyed by this insight, Carly leaned forward in her chair, reached across the desk and grasped Ellen's hand. "Ellen, you're going to have to look right at me."
"Okay, Carly, I don't..." Ellen responded
"You can't talk, Ellen, just listen to me. I will tell you exactly what I am, but if you ever get the impulse to tell anyone else my story, it will disappear from your mind before you can tell it." As Carly spoke, the two women sat within a dry, crackling vortex, not quite smoke, not quite wind, but clearly energy that rose up from the cauldron that fueled Carly's power and gave her access to memory and wisdom. "I don't know what my people call themselves, but others have called us Valkyries, and Erinyes, and Banshees. My father married a human woman, but she is descended from a fairy. I gather up the energy left behind when people die, and I transform it back into life, and that circulates in the world. Somehow, I can also access light and fire, and that is how I defended myself." Carly took her other hand and stretched across the desk even further and touched Ellen's lips. "And you may never, ever tell my story."
When Carly let go of Ellen's hand, she knew that "the charm was firm and good," and Ellen's silence was guaranteed.
"Okay, so your story...I get it. But his?" Ellen pointed at his heart again. "Why is he human on the outside but a dog on the inside?"
"Maybe I'll get demoted from scariest." Carly laughed for a second before disclosing, "He was a werewolf."
"Like change into a wolf werewolf?"
"Is there another kind?"
"I hoped it was a 'I'm kind of crazy and I think I've got hair on the inside and I dig up graveyards' kind of thing." Ellen took the photograph and shredded it.
"No. Really turn into wolves."
"Have you seen it happen?" Ellen asked with horrified curiosity.
"Yes, it isn't pretty." Carly crossed her arms, "So do I get demoted or not?"
"Can they?" Ellen put her hands to her throat suddenly. "Ooh, not even to you, huh?"
"Not even to me." Carly wasn't entirely certain what kind of sensation Ellen felt, but apparently there was some built-in warning mechanism.
Ellen smiled sadly. "No, sorry, Carly. You're still scarier."
With Carly's secret disclosed and sealed away, the two women discussed Ellen's prognosis. It wasn't good, but it also wasn't the worst.
"I'm scheduled for surgery next week, so I'm glad that you came in today and that we had a chance to talk. The retired Baton Rouge ME is going to come in and fill in for me while I recover from surgery—so that will be two months—and then I'll see how I do with chemo. He says he's willing to stay on for six months before his boat starts calling again."
"What's he like?" Carly was very nervous about how much she would have to disclose about herself again, about how many people she'd have to bespell, or whatever it was called.
"Dr. Clovis Thibodaeux, the seventh," Ellen began, but couldn't finish.
"Clovis? Are you sure he's not a vampire?" Carly chuckled.
"Not entirely, although I've seen him in daylight, and I've seen him eat—selectively." Ellen continued, "He's the seventh as a doctor as well. His great-great-whatever was a Confederate surgeon who was supposedly haunted by the limbs he'd amputated and drowned himself in the bayou."
"Good grief!"
"Yes, but he's a good man. Despite that pedigree, he's the most anti-racist professional I've met in Louisiana. He only retired because his wife got Parkinson's and he wanted to take care of her himself. She died last year, so when Cassandra called him to ask for help—"
"You didn't call?" Carly interrupted.
"No," Ellen paused, "It's been a little hard to admit that I needed help so quickly. But the doctors don't want to wait." She pulled at her fingers. "I guess my odds of five year survival go down forty percent if they can't contain it."
"I'm really sorry." Carly squeezed Ellen's hand. "I wish I could do something."
"Not your office, right?"
"No."
"Well, make sure you're here tomorrow so that you can meet him. He's met Tracy and Bob."
"And he has Tracy's seal of approval?"
"He brought her chocolates." Ellen added, "He also said he promised not to give her reason to bat him down."
"So he knows that story..." Carly felt her challenge growing by the minute.
"Thanks to Cassandra and Andrews, I think that everyone in the state has knows the story." Ellen stood up, her hips stiffened by her prolonged sitting, "I've got to go downstairs and finish up the externals on those two poor officers. And the third assailant—clearly he was attacked by the other two."
Carly stayed silent again.
"Don't worry. That's what is in Andrews's report. I'm not supplying it."
Despite the gory remains that awaited the Medical Examiner in the dissection suite, Carly followed her, so that she could set up a table and a cleaning tank in one of the smaller rooms. Once Carly had everything set up, she brought the cartons down in the elevator on a cart, along with her camera and a laptop computer.
Gloves back on, and a long paper sheet laid out on the table, with plastic evidence bags at the ready, Carly laid out the remains carton by carton. The sheriff's office hadn't provided any guide to the contents or explained how the cartons corresponded to the site excavated. The only helpful information that the sheriff included were the GPS coordinates of the site where the remains were found.
Two hours later, Carly had the blocks of dried mud—with bones embedded in them—arranged in generally appropriate order—with one problem. There were two sets of remains—or at least most of two sets of remains in the cartons. And, to make things even more complicated, there was one extra femur...so slightly more than two people in one "grave" presented to her without excavation records, retrieved a decade ago.
"Oh, good grief," Carly sighed. "It's like they're all laughing at me."
Even though she knew she could keep working without eating, Carly thought that she would start to get conspicuous. For one, she hadn't even visited the restroom the whole time she'd been in the office, nor had she drunk any water or paused in any way.
Ellen was still working with her external examinations, so Carly didn't interrupt. She could go the rest of time without seeing those bodies again, especially since she knew she would inevitably see something just as horrific, or even worse. When Carly got to the top of the stairs, she found Tracy in the hallway, stretching her legs.
"I've got to stop sitting so much, Carly." Tracy did a side bend and stretched her arm over her head. "Maybe I need to join a gym. Or do some Jazzercise. What do you think? What would be good for an old lady like me?"
"You are far from being an old lady, Tracy." Carly smiled, "Do you want to start with a walk and go get some lunch?"
"Ooh, that sounds like a good idea. We can walk and I can get something healthy." The two women gathered up their purses and headed out across the street to the little luncheonette, which had started to fill up with office workers and law enforcement.
As Carly ordered her lunch (her decidedly unhealthy but certainly tasty lunch of a waffle covered in whipped cream and cherry pie filling), she overheard whispering from two booths behind her.
"She was with those vampires last night..."
"No, you can't be right, Brad."
"Yeah, and she helped them, they walked right in there. Andrews barfed..."
Tracy sucked her teeth in disapproval—clearly, her ears were also not old—and stomped over to the four officers.
"Gentlemen, could you please confine your gossip to the squadroom?" Tracy put her hands on her hips. "Let my friend eat in peace!"
Carly didn't turn. She knew exactly what they were thinking, and knew exactly what Brad wanted to say out loud but didn't dare to, not in front of his Black co-worker. She also knew how she was going to report "Brad" to his superior officer for his participation in a white supremacist group and that he was already attending the Sunday morning movie theater screenings of the Fellowship of the Sun services.
The Black officer in the group walked over to Carly. "Ma'am, I'm sorry if we upset you."
Carly smiled weakly, "Thank you for your apology. I accept it." As she looked at him, she tuned into his thoughts. If she was hanging out with that little one who laid that guy flat—the one who tore down the holding cell-I'll be on her side any day of the week. Brad can suck it with his racist bullshit and that goddamned cult of his.
Carly extended her hand to him and shook his. She looked at his name plate. "Officer Jones, it's nice to meet you. If I'm not mistaken, you didn't say a word. It was 'Brad.'" Perhaps she could make some mischief for dear Brad: "He has such a distinctive voice. But I tend to overhear a lot at my boyfriend's bar—and yes, he is the vampire last night where those officers were killed. A couple of shady customers have even asked if he's 'on their side', you know, Turner Diaries shit. But he isn't."
"Is that so?" Office Jones almost looked over his shoulder, but restrained himself.
"Yeah. Brad has a really distinctive voice, don't you think?" Carly smiled again at the young officer. And then said loudly, "You know, now that I think of it, I don't think this is the first time I've heard him. But I could be mistaken."
"You could be." Jones smiled.
Carly tuned into him again. I think she's telling me he's some kind of nazi militia crazy. Huh...well now, I wonder if the captain is thinking about doing a shakedown of our lockers any time soon. It's been a while—not since that evidence went missing. Smith's been acting weird lately too... Jones thought of Officers Brad Davis and Elliott Smith and a particularly brutal arrest they'd made in front of him two weeks before.
Only when Tracy popped back into the booth did Carly become aware of how long she'd been gone. Officer Jones nodded to her. "Ma'am. My apologies to you too."
"Jamal, you know you can call me Auntie any time you want." Tracy smiled widely at him.
"Yes, ma'am." The officer left to return to his group, who were scrambling to divvy up their bill.
"Can I call you Auntie?" Carly asked.
"Any time." Tracy punctuated her utterance by raising her glass to signal for more tea. "Any time."
Once the group of patrolmen had departed, Carly asked, "Did you do that because you knew Jamal?"
"A little bit." Tracy looked out the window as the men climbed into their cars. "I worry about him. There aren't many Black officers on the force. And I figured that man was trying to stir the pot a little bit."
"I think if he stirs it, he wears a sheet while he does it." Carly responded quietly.
"Oh, there are lots of different kinds of bigots and some of them wear badges, some judges' robes." Tracy pointed to the office buildings outside the window. "Some run businesses."
"What about our replacement ME?"
"Clovie!" Tracy smiled and laughed. "He's one of the good ones. Easy on the eyes too, although a little old for you." As soon as she said it, Tracy started to chuckle deep in her belly. "Although I don't know! You like 'em a little long in the tooth."
"Funny." Carly glowered a little. She never responded well to teasing, although she could tell that Tracy wasn't being malicious.
"I'm just kidding. Clovie's a southern gentleman in the best sense. He's chivalrous—loved the hell out of his wife."
"How do you know him?" Carly wondered.
"I've worked for this office forever, and I always went down to Baton Rouge for the meetings—all the Medical Examiners get together once a quarter." Tracy looked a little judgemental. "Ellen hasn't asked me along, but the old ones always did. They liked the company on the drive and liked me to take notes while they slept off their night before."
Through the rest of their meal, Tracy regaled Carly with stories of coroners past—the one who made a pass and was rewarded by Tracy's husband hiding in a drawer and sitting up in the dissection room to scare the piss out of him; the drunk who slept through every meeting but somehow managed to keep meticulous notes and give unshakable (and honest) testimony; the medical examiner who dropped dead on his own dissection table; and Ellen, the first woman to hold the post in Louisiana, and the only one to refuse to call herself "the coroner," even if that was what was on her letterhead.
Tracy concluded, "The only thing that Clovie might ask for is more regular hours or meetings—I'm guessing he'll want the investigator here instead of in the DA's office. So that will take some getting used to." Sucking her teeth again, Tracy said, "I'm not particularly taken with Ambrose, so I like it just fine that he works down there with Cassandra. Or comes in the back when he needs to come in here."
Carly realized that she'd never even met the chief investigator for the office—or at least she'd never been introduced. He was probably present the night before at Jimmy's house along with the rest of the crime scene team.
"Why?"
"Oh, he's a ghoul, Carly." Tracy stopped at the steps of the office. "Bob's, well, you know, he's a little awkward. But Ellen, you wouldn't know what kind of work she did if you met her in the store. Ambrose, he just likes to be around dead people just a little too much for my taste, and I've worked in a building with coolers full of them since I was seventeen years old!"
Carly didn't even try to hear her, but Tracy thought, And you're a sweet girl too.
"Could it hurt you to have said it out loud?" Carly bumped her with a shoulder.
"I said you could call me, Auntie, didn't I?"
With one more laugh, they entered the building and got back to work.
By the end of the day, Carly had photographed the remains, bagged the fragments of metal wire, wood, and stone that were part of the accretions around the bones, and cleaned about a quarter of the them, which she'd laid out on a second, folding table she'd found in a storage closet.
When she turned off the light in the small room, she saw a faint, rippling glow from the newly cleaned bones and felt her stomach turn with desire. What the hell? Where did that come from? she thought. Before she stepped into the energy field, which had been invisible to her until that point, Carly rebooted her computer and opened a document. Once she'd gathered whatever information accompanied the energy, she'd write it up.
With gloves discarded, Carly moved into the energy field and felt a sharp rush as she took it in. She felt herself running through the darkness, through the darkness of the last of the waning moon, her bare feet cut by sticks and thorns, her dress torn away, the new dress her mother had just bought her for church that week, her cousin's confirmation, the mass overwhelmed by mourning for Bobby Kennedy dead two weeks before, for her cousin Mary Louise, the cousin she'd always resented since her name was so much more euphonious than her Mary Dolores Pecararo, but she ran, and she could hear the panting that followed her and then the impact. And then death.
Carly looked up Kennedy's death and then searched for a "moon phase calculator" to examine the phases of the moon for that month.
Date of death: June 23 or June 30, 1968
Name: Mary Dolores Pecararo
Cause: ?
Location: ?
Struggling to access Mary Dolores's memories as she knew she could if she tried, Carly came up with very little—a favorite doll, the smell of her father's aftershave, strawberries...
None of the police records for 1968 would be digitized, so it was time to finish up, to go outside, to let her body and spirit do as they were built to do and transform what little stayed behind with those bones into life to feed the universe.
When she made it outside, she cursed the sun for lingering in its late afternoon slice of the sky, for keeping her from her lover for another hour and a half. Eager with anticipation for reuniting with him, she struggled to keep to the speed limit, grateful that she was driving her hatchback rather than Eric's sportscar. The Subaru's engine screamed in protest every time she climbed over seventy miles an hour, so it was much easier to keep it within inconspicuous limits.
Once she was back to Eric's home, Carly realized that she should probably check in with Jim Kelsey and thank him, let him know how grateful she was for his hospitality.
Carly sat in on Eric's overlong sofa and waited as the phone rang.
"Jim Kelsey. Who's this please?" Kelsey sounded a little panicked.
"Jim, it's Carly, are you okay?"
"My dear," Kelsey relaxed a little, "I should have recognized your phone number. I'm on a different phone."
"You sound a little troubled, Jim."
"I am," Jim admitted. "We've had a lot of strange calls today at the office, and Phyllis complained about some odd noises on the property."
"Have you called the police?"
"No," Kelsey paused. "I thought I would wait for sundown so that I could talk to Eric."
"Well, I'll make sure he gets in touch with you right away."
"Carly," Kelsey added, "we're sad to see you leave, but I kind of guessed that you would be moving in with him eventually."
"I'm really grateful for all you've done for me, Jim. Please know that."
"Oh, I do." Jim laughed lightly. "But like I said, it's all in the family. You take care of family when you need to."
"Yes, you do."
Carly ended the call with Kelsey and went to wait for Eric to emerge from his super secure room. She knew that as soon as he was up, they would be headed over to Jim Kelsey's house to check on everything, to make sure that "family" was safe.
As she waited, she stretched out on Eric's bed—on their bed, she realized—feeling his absence, desperate to hold him, to caress his shoulders, to hold his hand. She closed her eyes and felt her love for him, felt her own temperature rise as she imagined the hills and valleys of his belly as she would caress them, as her hands traced the edges of his girdle to his thigh—and then she found herself naked beside him, locked behind a vault door in a close and nearly airless, darkened room. And she embraced him tightly.
An hour later, he awakened, startled, and then moaned slightly when he realized he felt her breath on his groin.
"Lover, is there no door that can defy you?" He stroked her lips and drew them closer to him.
They played and pleasured each other a few minutes until Eric flipped her over and plunged inside, biting her neck at the same time he wrapped his arm in front of her mouth. They drank from one another, their blood a complete circle between them, her heart pumping blood through his heart, the two of them moving back and forth and around one another until they rose from the bed, encased in flames of every color, finally erupting in a bright blue torch that left burns on the ceiling and melted the edges of Eric's mattress.
They were quiet a few moments as the heat of the tiny room normalized.
"I'm sorry," Carly finally said. "We wrecked the place."
"We should probably consider more fire-proof materials. I never know when we will actually be flammable."
Once Eric let them out, they cleaned themselves up and Carly updated him on the situation at Kelsey's.
"There's something else." Carly added, "Octavia sent another message to Tracy, but it's pretty cryptic. We can 'rip them away from themselves.' But I don't know who the them is, or how one rips someone away from themself."
"Well, I suspect we will have ample opportunity to try. If nothing else, we know that we can rip them apart."
And with that memory, Carly felt a wave of nausea that made her swear off of cherry pie, at least for a while.