“Yes. Could you hold up your jacket so that it covers my hands and the leopard?”
“I guess so. You’re not going to ruin it, are you?”
“No, sir.”
As he unfolds his jacket, I carefully examine Lena. Parting the orange-and-black fur beneath her jaw, I can still see the stitching where Pearlie repaired her after the night my father died.
“Like this?” asks Mr. McDonough, making a tent of his jacket.
“Perfect.” I hold Lena under the tent with my left hand and spray some orthotolidine on her coat with my right. Then I turn her in my hands and cover her other side with the chemical.
“What happens now?” asks Mr. McDonough.
“We wait.”
Photographers once used suit jackets as portable darkrooms in the field. The advent of digital photography has probably made that practice a thing of the past, but on this day, the knowledge serves me well.
“Can you turn on some AC?” Mr. McDonough asks.
“No. We don’t want this chemical blowing around the car.”
“Is it toxic or something?”
“No,” I lie.
“Huh. Well, what’s supposed to happen?”
“If there’s blood, it’ll glow blue.”
“How long does it take?”
“A minute or two.”
Mr. McDonough looks interested. “Can I see?”
“Yes, if we get anything. I want you to witness it.”
After two minutes pass, I raise the tail of the jacket and peer into the darkness. Lena’s head is glowing as though painted with blue-dyed phosphorous.
My heart is pounding. Grandpapa never mentioned Lena in any version of the story he told me of the night my father died. But he definitely told me to put her into the coffin. And soon, I may know why.
“What do you see?” asks the funeral director.
“Blood.”
“Can I look?” He sounds like an excited four-year-old.
“In a minute.”
I carefully turn Lena in my hands and examine her head. Though smeared quite a bit-probably from cleaning by Pearlie-the blood appears to have been deposited in small gouts. There’s also some fine spray that Pearlie apparently missed with her cleaning rag. Most of the blood seems to have been deposited on Lena’s head, while very little touched her body. It’s almost as though her head was stuffed into a wound to try to stanch severe bleeding. Did Daddy shove my favorite stuffed animal into his chest to try to save himself? It’s certainly possible, though with the large exit wound in his back, that measure wouldn’t have saved him.
The blue glow is stronger now. Slowly, I turn Lena’s head and examine it from every angle. I study the stitches beneath her chin. Why was she torn there? If Daddy stuffed her head into a bullet wound, what could have torn her cloth covering? A smashed rib? Possibly. As I turn Lena’s head to examine her nose, the answer hits me like ice water thrown in my face.
On top of Lena’s snout is a perfect arch of glowing blue, almost exactly the size of the maxillary arch in an adult human being. There’s not enough detail to make a comparison with individual teeth, but I know without checking that the arch on Lena’s fur will perfectly match the arch of Daddy’s upper teeth.
My father suffocated to death.
For the first time, the reality of that night plays out in my mind’s eye exactly as it happened. Grandpapa shoved Lena into Daddy’s mouth, possibly to muffle his screams of pain, but more probably to finish the job of murdering him. While Daddy lay bleeding on the floor like a gutshot deer, while Pearlie ran down from the big house to the slave quarters, my grandfather shoved my favorite companion down Daddy’s throat and held his nose to finish him off. To silence him forever.
But my father will be silent no longer. Like the blood of Abel, Daddy’s blood is crying out from the ground. And like Abel’s murderer, my grandfather will soon be marked. Marked and punished.
“Can I look now?” asks Mr. McDonough.
I nod absently.
He lifts the jacket and stares into the darkness. “I’ll be damned. Just like
“Just like that,” I murmur. “I need to see the body again, sir.”
He rolls down the window and cranes his neck to look around. “Van’s already carried it back to the home.”
“I need to see it before it goes to Jackson.”
“You’d better get going, then. The van from the medical examiner’s office could already be waiting there. They’ll just transfer the coffin between vehicles without ever taking it into the prep room.”
I crank the engine, back the car onto the asphalt lane, and accelerate toward the cemetery gate four hundred yards away.
“You got to drop me at my car, remember?” says Mr. McDonough.
“I can’t take the time. I’ll bring you right back.”
He glares at me. “You stop this car right now, young lady.”
“This is a murder investigation, sir. An FBI matter. Please sit back in your seat.”
I don’t know if Mr. McDonough believes me or not, but he sits back and shuts up. Thank God for small favors.
Chapter 56
Outside McDonough’s Funeral Home, cars are parked along the street for two blocks in all directions. It’s a Natchez tradition: you see the parked cars along here and you know someone has died. Someone white. Blacks have their own funeral homes. Their own cemeteries, too. Some things take a long time to change.
“Turn at the railroad tracks,” says Mr. McDonough. “The prep room’s just inside the garage door.”
I turn left, then left again, and pull into a long vehicle bay. A tall black hearse stands gleaming in the sun, with several expensive sedans parked behind it. They probably belong to the family of the decedent having his service inside.
“This way,” says McDonough.
He walks into an enclosed garage, past a Dodge Caravan fitted with rollers in the back. Beyond that stands the Econoline van that was at the cemetery. A teenager is washing mud out of it with a green garden hose.
“Man from Jackson come yet?” McDonough asks the boy.
“No, sir.”
“Your lucky day,” he says over his shoulder.
Past the garage door, a short corridor lined with upended caskets wrapped in plastic leads to a door marked with a biohazard symbol. McDonough knocks, but no one answers. He pushes open the door.
My father’s coffin lies on the floor of the prep room. The bronze has been wiped down, probably to keep mud out of the prep room rather than from any gesture of respect. This time I don’t wait for McDonough. I go to the coffin and open the lid myself.
“Do you suture the gums shut?” I ask. “Or do you use the needle injector system?”
“You know your business,” he says. “We’ve been using needle injectors since they come out.”
Steeling myself against the emotions boiling in my chest, I don a pair of latex gloves from a box on the counter, then bend over my father and touch the line of his mouth. Gentle pressure does not part his lips.
“Sometimes we have to use Super Glue,” says McDonough. “To keep them closed. Other times Vaseline does
