The Backwoods

around the room, to any place away from the corpse. Her mind was ticking with questions. But then something snagged an eye: something on the counter, at the other side of the room.

Two clear plastic bags, one large, one smaller.

“What’s that? In those bags?”

Baker looked over, uninterested. “Oh, that’s some stuff the EMTs brought over; some of it was in his pockets or near the corpse on the floor. I bagged it as evidence.”

Patricia walked over; she was pretty sure she noticed what was in the larger bag. “But what is it exactly?”

“Looks like a couple of pieces of crystal meth in the little bag, and—”

“An envelope in the other bag?”

“Yes.”

Patricia leaned over and saw the outside of the envelope. Junior Caudill’s name and address, in craggy handwriting.

“Don’t open the bags,” Baker reminded her. “You don’t want your fingerprints on police evidence.”

No, of course not . . . Patricia came back toward the table. “What was in the envelope?”

“Just a piece of paper with a weird word written on it,” Baker replied. “Wend-something. I’m not sure.”

Just like the letter to Dwayne. Patricia already knew.

“So,” the coroner continued. She stood up with an exasperated sigh. “I might as well show you what I already know.” And next she skimmed off her lab coat, flapped on a rubberized apron, and snapped on rubber gloves.

She’s as confused about this as I am, Patricia realized, and she’s getting mad.

Now Baker donned a clear-visored face shield and flipped the shield down, blond hair shimmering around the straps. She snatched up a silver device that looked like a metal can lid fixed to the top of an electric toothbrush. A brand name could clearly be made out on the tool’s body—STRYKER—and a moment later Patricia realized with a jolt of adrenaline that this tool was an autopsy saw.

Patricia’s hands shot up. “Oh, no, really, it’s not necessary for you to show me. . . .” But her plea was too late.

Her skin crawled as if aswarm with cockroaches, and her shoulders contracted when the extraordinarily genteel and preposterously attractive coroner revved the saw like the most monstrous dentist’s drill and began to cut a straight line from Junior Caudill’s pubic bone to the bottom of his sternum. With the saw’s grisly whine, flecks of clotted blood flew out of the groove and specked her apron and face shield. As the blade continued to cut upward, Junior’s dead, pallid body fat jiggled on the slab.

I’ve got to get out of here, I’ve got to . . . Patricia began to feel faint. This was not a place for her. She liked to think of herself as a realist—and this was indeed reality—but by now she’d simply had enough. Just as she would have turned around and run out of the morgue suite, though, the saw’s awful whine stopped.

It was obvious now that the coroner’s perplexion and sheer rage at the anomaly had been building up within the constraints of her temper, and now those constraints were snapping.

She threw the saw down on the counter, flipped up her visor, then slapped her gloved hands down onto the corpse. She pulled open the great rift sawed into Junior’s belly, then thrust a hand in and felt around like someone searching for a lost object under the bed. “See? See? I’m showing you what we already know. Look!”

Patricia ground her teeth, her eyelids appalled slits, and she leaned over and glimpse into the absolutely vacant area of space that was Junior Caudill’s abdominal vault.

“There are no fuckin’ organs inside this fat fuckin’ redneck!” the coroner nearly wailed.

Patricia turned away, stumbled to a lab table, and sat down, exhausted.

Moments of silence passed. Baker was now finished with the outburst that had obviously been mounting all morning; she daintily hung up her apron and face shield, and dropped her rubber gloves into a pedal-operated garbage can that read, HAZARDOUS WASTE ONLY. At once she was demure-voiced again, totally out of place here with her tight jeans, magnificent body, and lilting Southern accent.

“So much for that,” she said.

Patricia struggled to banish the imagery from her mind. She looked up wearily at the other woman. “So what will you put on the death certificate as a cause of death?”

“Undetermined and curious,” Baker said.

(II)

“Magic, huh?” Pam asked, looking over her shoulder from the coffee machine.

“That’s right,” Ricky Caudill sputtered back at her. Through the jail bars he looked like exactly what he was: a busted, washed-up, no-account rube. “It’s that Squatter voodoo they got goin’ on,” he assured her. All morning long, in fact, he’d elaborated on the details of last night, leaving out the part about killing David Eald and his daughter and then burning their shack down. “Everybody knows that Everd ’n’ that nutty wife a’ his are into it. Fucker cursed me right in my own house, and it was that magic a’ his that he used to kill my brother.”

“Ricky, it was alcoholism that killed your brother,” Pam replied. “Same thing that’ll kill you someday.”

“Shee-it.”

Pam traipsed back to her desk, perky as ever. These redneck losers are just so funny! They’d blame anybody and everything for their dysfunctional lives. She’d heard it all from similar folk sitting in that cell. At least this dolt is original. He’s not blaming the police or his wife or his boss for his problems. He’s blaming the Squatters! He’s telling me that Everd Stanherd is a warlock and he’s cursed him!

“And if y’all ain’t careful, Everd’ll curse the whole town; then you’ll all really be in the shit.”

“Ricky, you already are in the shit. You’re in jail.”

“Only safe place for me. You’ll see.”

“Sounds to me like you’re just scared,” Pam challenged him. She loved to toy with these local white-trash hooligans, play on their phony macho self-concepts. “Big, tough, strong man like you, scared of a bunch of hillbilly mumbo-jumbo. Scared like a little baby. Any minute now you’ll be curled up in there sucking your thumb and crying for your mama.” Pam fully expected the big moron to talk down her challenge, to assert his masculine bravado.

Instead, Ricky replied, “You’re right,” very quietly. “I am scared.”

Pam shook her head. How do you like that? He really is spooked. He was the last guy on earth she’d expect that from, especially admitting it so plainly. Must be serious DTs, she supposed, and got back to filing the week’s DORs and expenditure invoices. And he hasn’t looked at my boobs once today. The low-cut sleeveless summer dress she wore always had the male heads turning. But not this one.

Ricky Caudill was genuinely preoccupied with his fear.

Charlie the postman wasn’t preoccupied, though, and when the bell clanged and he walked in with his mailbag, his eyes darted immediately to her cleavage. “Howdy, Pam,” he greeted her. His baldhead and small mustache always reminded her of some of the Nazi honchos she remembered from history classes. Ernst Rohm. Heinrich Himmler. “How’s the purdiest woman in all of Agan’s Point?”

“I don’t know, Charlie. How’s the biggest bullshit artist in Agan’s Point?”

“God!” he said. “I love it when you talk dirty!”

He was such a card. “You should’ve been an airline pilot, so you could bullshit all those bimbo stewardesses.”

“You’d always fly first-class with me, baby.”

“You want some coffee before you leave?”

“Naw, you know what I want. A date with you.”