Phantoms

The girl hugged back. Tightly. Fiercely.

“Are you okay, honey?”

Lisa said nothing. She shook uncontrollably.

Just six weeks ago, coming home from an afternoon at the movies, Lisa had found her mother lying on the kitchen floor of the house in Newport Beach, dead of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. The girl had been devastated. Never having known her father, who had died when she was only two years old, Lisa had been especially close to her mother. For a while, that loss had left her deeply shaken, bewildered, depressed. Gradually, she had accepted her mother's death, had discovered how to smile and laugh again. During the past few days, she had seemed like her old self. And now this.

Jenny took the girl to the secretary, urged her to sit down, then squatted in front of her. She pulled a tissue from the box of Kleenex on the desk and blotted Lisa's damp forehead. The girl's flesh was not only as pale as ice; it was ice-cold as well.

“What can I do for you, Sis?”

“I'll b-be okay,” Lisa said shakily.

They held hands. The girl's grip was almost painfully tight.

Eventually, she said, “I thought… When I first saw her there… on the floor like that… I thought… crazy, but I thought… that it was Mom.” Tears shimmered in her eyes, but she held them back, “I kn-know Mom's gone. And this woman here doesn't even look like her. But it was… a surprise… such a shock… and so confusing.”

They continued to hold hands, and slowly Lisa's grip relaxed.

After a while, Jenny said, “Feeling better?”

“Yeah. A little.”

“Want to lie down?”

“No.” She let go of Jenny's hand in order to pluck a tissue from the box of Kleenex. She wiped at her nose. She looked at the cooking island, beyond which lay the body. “Is it Hilda?”

“Yes,” Jenny said.

“I'm sorry.”

Jenny had liked Hilda Beck enormously. She felt sick at heart about the woman's death, but right now she was more concerned about Lisa about anything else. “Sis, I think it would be better if we got you out of here. How about waiting in my office while I take a closer look at the body. Then I've got to call the sheriff's office and the county coroner.”

“I'll wait here with you.”

“It would be better if”

“No!” Lisa said, suddenly breaking into shivers again, “I don't want to be alone.”

“All right,” Jenny said soothingly, “You can sit right here.”

“Oh, Jeez,” Lisa said miserably, “The way she looked… all swollen… all black and b-blue. And the expression on her face…” She wiped at her eyes with the back of one hand.

“Why's she all dark and puffed up like that?”

“Well, she's obviously been dead for a few days,” Jenny said, “But listen, you've got to try not to think about things like—”

“If she's been dead for a few days,” Lisa said quaveringly, “why doesn't it stink in here? Wouldn't it stink?”

Jenny frowned. Of course, it should stink in here if Hilda Beck had been dead long enough for her flesh to grow dark and for her body tissues to bloat as much as they had. It should stink. But it didn't.

“Jenny, what happened to her?”

“I don't know yet.”

“I'm scared.”

“Don't be scared. There's no reason to be scared.”

“That expression on her face,” Lisa said, “It's awful.”

“However she died, it must have been quick. She doesn't seem to have been sick or to have struggled. She couldn't have suffered much pain.”

“But… it looks like she died in the middle of a scream.”

Chapter 3 The Dead Woman

Jenny Paige had never seen a corpse like this one. Nothing in medical school or in her own practice of medicine had prepared her for the peculiar condition of the body. She crouched beside the corpse and examined it with sadness and distaste but also with considerable curiosity and with steadily increasing bewilderment.

The dead woman's face was swollen; it was now a round, smooth, and somewhat shiny caricature of the countenance she had worn in life. Her body was bloated, too, and in some places it strained against the seams of her gray and yellow housedress. Where flesh was visible — the neck, lower waist, hands, calves, ankles — it had a soft, overripe look. However, this did not appear to be the gaseous bloat that was the consequence of decomposition. For one thing, the stomach should have been grossly distended with gas, far more bloated than any other part of the body, but it was only moderately expanded. Besides, there was no odor of decay.

On close inspection, the dark, mottled skin did not appear to be the result of tissue deterioration. Jenny couldn't locate any certain, visible signs of ongoing decomposition: no lesions, no blistering, no weeping pustules. Because they were composed of comparatively soft tissue, a corpse's eyes usually bore evidence of physical degeneration before most other parts of the body. But Hilda Beck's eyes — wide open, staring — were perfect specimens. The whites of her eyes were clear, neither yellowish nor discolored by burst blood vessels. The irises were clear as well; there were not even milky, postmortem cataracts to obscure the warm, blue color.

In life, there had usually been merriment and kindness in Hilda's eyes. She had been sixty-two, a gray-haired woman with a sweet face and a grandmotherly way about herself. She spoke with a slight German accent and had a surprisingly lovely singing voice. She had often sung while cleaning house or cooking, and she had found joy in the most simple things.

Jenny was stricken by a sharp pang of grief as she realized how very much she would miss Hilda. She closed her eyes for a moment, unable to look at the corpse. She collected herself, suppressed her tears.

Finally, when she had reestablished her professional detachment, she opened her eyes and went on with the examination.

The longer she looked at the body, the more the skin seemed bruised. The coloration was indicative of severe bruising: black, blue, and a deep sour yellow, the colors blending in and out of one another. But this was unlike any contusion Jenny had ever seen. As far as she could tell, it was universal; not even one square inch of visible skin was free of it. She carefully took hold of one sleeve of the dead woman's housedress and pulled it up the swollen arm as far as it would easily slide. Under the sleeve, the skin was also dark, and Jenny suspected that the entire body was covered with an incredible series of contiguous bruises.

She looked again at Mrs. Beck's face. Every last centimeter of skin was contusive. Sometimes, a victim of a serious auto accident sustained injuries that left him with bruises over most of his face, but such a severe condition was always accompanied by worse trauma, such as a broken nose, split lips, a broken jaw… How could Mrs. Beck have acquired bruises as grotesque as these without also suffering other, more serious injuries?

“Jenny?” Lisa said, “Why're you taking so long?”

“I'll only be a minute. You stay there.”

So… perhaps the contusions that covered Mrs. Beck's body were not the result of externally administered blows. Was it possible that the discoloration of the skin was caused, instead, by internal pressure, by the swelling of subcutaneous tissue? That swelling was, after all, vividly present. But surely, in order to have caused such thorough bruising, the swelling would have had to have taken place suddenly, with incredible violence. Which didn't