“Other than being shot in the one case and hanged in the other.”
“Yes. Other than that.”
“I didn’t even know she was in Vermont.”
The shelf on the wall behind his desk was awash in Beanie Babies, small plush animals filled with plastic pellets instead of traditional stuffing. His two daughters, when they had been little girls, insisted on giving him the creatures because they had a vague idea that the office of a man who spent his life taking cadavers apart and putting them back together could use a little cheer. For the first time I noticed that two of them-a zebra and a lavender dachshund-were each wearing a doctor’s white coat. The dachshund even had a stethoscope, which struck me as ironic only because I didn’t imagine that David listened to a lot of beating hearts most days. I wanted to pick one up and throw it at him.
“Don’t worry: The tour I gave her was seriously abridged.”
“I can’t effing believe you gave her any tour at all. You’re the one who’s the lunatic-not her. Are you embarrassed? I sure as shit hope you are.”
His face was a little square and usually rather regal-especially given how early he’d grayed. But now he looked like a scolded child, and his eyes, always a bit drawn, grew small. “I think you’re making too much of this,” he said defensively.
“Emmet hasn’t even interviewed her yet! We didn’t even know she was here!”
“Well, now we know.”
“Where is she?”
He paused. “She went home. To Manhattan.”
“Lovely. Did she say why she was here?”
“I told you, she wanted to learn what had probably happened to her parents’ bodies.”
“I mean in Vermont: Why was she in Vermont?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“We were too busy talking about why she had dropped by my office-though she did say she had just come from seeing Katie Hayward at the high school.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“I know-”
“Did she say what she and Katie had talked about?”
“No.”
I was irked and felt a little flushed. I took a deep breath. “So: How extensive was this tour you gave her?”
“Not extensive at all. It’s not like I was going to walk her through the chain of custody for the Haywards-for any of the bodies that arrive here. I showed her my office, an autopsy room, and the tissue donation room. Since it was the reason she’d come here, I told her what I presumed had been done with her parents.”
“And then she left.”
“That’s right.”
“What did she say about the Haywards?”
“She was saddened.”
“Oh, please.”
“And she wanted to know about the nightgown Alice Hayward had been wearing when she’d been killed.”
“Did she say why?”
“She said she was curious and caught me off guard. So I told her.”
“You told her?”
“I did, I’m sorry. I was walking her to the door and it just slipped out. Later it crossed my mind that she wanted an alibi: You know, a moment when someone-i.e., yours truly-could testify that she had asked him what color it was. But I’m being paranoid, right?”
“One can hope.”
“I really am sorry.”
“Her buddy, Pastor Drew? Did she say anything about him?”
“Not her buddy any longer.”
I sat forward in my chair. “Really?”
He shook his head. “No. You didn’t know?”
“We’re not exactly girls in the hood, David. No. I did not know. What did she say?”
“I was talking to her about her own parents and what sorts of things the medical examiner-and, I added, the mortician-had probably done with them. I was being very vague.”
“Sensitive,” I said sarcastically. “That’s you.”
“Thank you. I really was telling her only the basics, but she kept wanting to know things about how her own parents had died. The physiological specifics. It was, in her opinion, the exact reverse of the Haywards. In the Haywards’ case, it was the male who was shot and the female who was strangled; in the case of her own mom and dad, it was the female who was shot and the male who was strangled.”
I nodded, simultaneously interested and a little disappointed in myself that I hadn’t made this association on my own. I wasn’t sure if it mattered, but it was a connection of some sort. “Go on.”
“So I was explaining to her the differences between ligature strangulation-you know, with a scarf or a rope-and manual strangulation. I was babbling on about strap-muscle hemorrhages and the likely calcification of bone in her father’s neck-”
“All things she needed to know.”
He raised an eyebrow but otherwise ignored me and continued, “-and Heather interrupted me. ‘Manual strangulation is much more personal,’ she said. ‘You’re staring into your victim’s eyes. You have to be very angry.’ I thought that was a wee bit of an understatement. Very angry? You have to be a fuel tank that just exploded! But I was polite and agreed. And that’s when she said, ‘I just don’t see how Stephen Drew could have missed the rage that must have been consuming George Hayward.’”
“And you said?”
He shrugged. “I was evasive. I said people are human. They miss things. And that’s when she let on that she and the minister weren’t real tight. Her response? ‘And some people only see what they want to see. Some people’s hearts are harder and more selfish than others’. They resist the more virtuous angels among us.’”
“Wow. Does that mean there are angels that aren’t virtuous?”
“Possibly.”
“Did you press her on what she meant?”
“I asked her if she meant Pastor Drew, and she said she did. Then she looked away. Right out that window. And she looked totally disgusted-which wasn’t a look I had seen on her face until that very second.”
“But she didn’t say anything more. She didn’t elaborate.”
“Nope. Maybe just as well. Most of the things she said were pretty loopy. At one point when I was showing her the autopsy room, one of the lab techs happened to come in with a Tupperware container full of hearts for the medical school. The lid was off. They were old and had bleached out over time, and so they looked more like headless chickens than human hearts. Heather didn’t recognize what they were and asked. I told her. And her response? ‘Why is it we always want the heart of a lion-and not the heart of an angel? An angel’s heart is as strong as a lion’s but has the benefits of acumen and history.’ I didn’t tell her that the only history in most of the hearts I see is too little exercise and too many Quarter Pounders with cheese. Then, a few minutes later, she noticed the bags of bones.” Reflexively he glanced down at his shoes when he said that. No one wants to talk about the bags of bones: They are the human remains-the femurs like clubs and the mandibles that remind one of scoops, the occasional pelvic girdle-that have been unearthed at construction sites or excavations around the state. Most of them, we presume, are Abenaki remains from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and we will never attach a name to any one of them. But we have no precedent about how or where to reinter them, and the last thing we want to do is dispose of them with the hazardous waste that is part and parcel of any mortuary (or morgue). And so they sit in massive, Ziploc plastic bags on a couple of shelves in a far corner of one of the autopsy rooms.
“And what did she have to say about the bones?” I asked.
“They’re why humans can’t fly.”
