Body Double (2 page)

They kept moving up the mountain, the road winding in gentle switchbacks. Through the trees she caught occasional glimpses of Fox Harbor far below, the water like battered copper in the afternoon sunlight. Then the trees became too thick, and she could see only the forest, clothed in brilliant reds and oranges. The leaf-strewn road curved ahead of them.

When at last Elijah pedaled to a stop, Alice’s legs were so tired she could barely stand without trembling. Buddy was nowhere in sight; she only hoped he could find his own way home, because she sure wasn’t going to go looking for him. Not now, not with Elijah standing here, smiling at her, his eyes glittering. He leaned his bike up against a tree and hoisted his book bag over his shoulder.

“So where’s your house?” she asked.

“It’s that driveway there.” He pointed down the road, to a mailbox rusting on a post.

“Aren’t we going to your house?”

“Naw, my cousin’s home sick today. She was throwing up all night, so let’s not go in the house. Anyway, my project’s out here, in the woods. Leave your bike. We’re gonna have to walk.”

She propped her bike up next to his and followed him, her legs still wobbly from the ride up the mountain. They tramped into woods. The trees were dense here, the ground thickly carpeted by leaves. Gamely she followed him, waving at mosquitoes. “So your cousin lives with you?” she asked.

“Yeah, she came to stay with us last year. I guess it’s permanent now. Got nowhere else to go.”

“Your parents don’t mind?”

“It’s just my dad. My mom’s dead.”

“Oh.” She didn’t know what to say about that. Finally murmured a simple “I’m sorry,” but he didn’t seem to hear her.

The undergrowth became thicker, and brambles scratched her bare legs. She had trouble keeping up with him. He was pulling ahead of her, leaving her with her skirt snagged on blackberry canes.

“Elijah!”

He didn’t answer. He just kept moving ahead like a bold explorer, his book bag slung over his shoulder.

“Wait!”

“Do you want to see this or don’t you?”

“Yes, but—”

”Then come
on.
” His voice had taken on an impatient edge and it startled her. He stood a few yards ahead, looking back at her, and she noticed that his hands were clenched into fists.

“Okay,” she said meekly. “I’m coming.”

A few yards farther, the woods suddenly opened up into a clearing. She saw an old stone foundation, all that remained of a long-gone farmhouse. Elijah glanced back at her, his face dappled by afternoon light.

“It’s right here,” he said.

“What is?”

He bent down and pulled aside two wooden boards, revealing a deep hole. “Take a look in there,” he said. “I spent three weeks digging that.”

Slowly she approached the pit and stared inside. The afternoon light was slanting low behind the trees, and the bottom of the hole was in shadow. She could make out a layer of dead leaves, which had accumulated at the bottom. A rope was curled over the side.

“Is this to trap a bear, or something?”

“It could. If I laid some branches over it, to hide the opening, I could catch a lot of things. Even a deer.” He pointed into the hole. “Look, you see it?”

She leaned in closer. Something gleamed faintly in the shadows below; chips of white that peeked out from beneath the scattering of leaves.

“What is it?”

“That’s my project.” He reached for the rope and pulled.

At the bottom of the pit, leaves rustled, boiled up. Alice stared as the rope went taut, as Elijah hauled up something from the shadows. A basket. He pulled it out of the hole and set it on the ground. Brushing aside the leaves, he revealed what had gleamed white at the pit’s bottom.

It was a small skull.

As he picked off the leaves, she saw clumps of black fur and spindly ribs. A knobby chain of spine. Leg bones as delicate as twigs.

“Isn’t that something? It doesn’t even smell anymore,” he said. “Been down there almost seven months now. Last time I checked it, there was still some meat on it. Neat how even that disappears. It started to rot real fast after it got warm, back in May.”

“What is it?”

“Can’t you tell?”

“No.”

Picking up the skull, he gave it a little twist, pulling it off the spine. She flinched as he thrust it toward her.

“Don’t!” she squealed.

“Meow!”

“Elijah!”

“Well, you did ask what it was.”

She stared at hollow eye sockets. “It’s a cat?”

He pulled a grocery sack out of his book bag and began placing the bones in the sack.

“What are you going to do with the skeleton?”

“It’s my science project. From kitty to skeleton in seven months.”

“Where did you get the cat?”

“Found it.”

“You just
found
a dead cat?”

He looked up. His blue eyes were smiling. But these were no longer Tony Curtis eyes anymore; these eyes scared her. “Who said it was dead?”

Her heart was suddenly pounding. She took a step back. “You know, I think I have to go home now.”

“Why?”

“Homework. I’ve got homework.”

He was on his feet now, had sprung there effortlessly. The smile was gone, replaced by a look of quiet expectation.

“I’ll . . . see you at school,” she said. She backed away, glancing left and right at woods that looked the same in every direction. Which way had they come from? Which way should she go?

“But you just got here, Alice,” he said. He was holding something in his hand. Only as he raised it over his head did she see what it was.

A rock.

The blow sent her to her knees. She crouched in the dirt, her vision almost black, her limbs numb. She felt no pain, just dumb disbelief that he had hit her. She started to crawl, but could not see where she was going. Then he grabbed her ankles and yanked her backward. Her face scraped against the ground as he dragged her by her feet. She tried to kick free, tried to scream, but her mouth filled with dirt and twigs as he pulled her toward the pit. Just as her feet dropped over the edge, she grabbed a sapling and held on, her legs dangling into the hole.

“Let go, Alice,” he said.

“Pull me up! Pull me up!”

“I said, let
go.
” He lifted a rock and brought it down on her hand.

She shrieked and lost her grip. Slid feetfirst into the hole, landing on a bed of dead leaves.

“Alice. Alice.”

Stunned by the fall, she looked up at the circle of sky above, and saw the silhouette of his head, leaning forward, peering down at her.

“Why are you doing this?” she sobbed.
“Why?”

“It’s nothing personal. I just want to see how long it takes. Seven months for a kitty. How long do you think it’ll take you?”

“You can’t do this to me!”

“Bye-bye, Alice.”

“Elijah!
Elijah!
”

The wooden boards slid across the opening, eclipsing the circle of light. Her last glimpse of sky vanished. This isn’t real, she thought. This is a joke. He’s just trying to scare me. He’ll leave me down here for a few minutes, and then he’ll come back and let me out. Of course he’ll come back.

Then she heard something thud onto the well cover.
Rocks. He’s piling rocks on top.

She stood up and tried to climb out of the hole. Found a dry wisp of vine that immediately disintegrated in her hands. She clawed at the dirt, but could not find a handhold, could not pull herself even a few inches without sliding back. Her screams pierced the darkness.

“Elijah!” she shrieked.

Her only answer was stones thudding onto wood.

ONE

Pesez le matin que vous n’irez peut-être pas jusqu’au soir,

Et au soir que vous n’irez peut-être pas jusqu’au matin.

Be aware every morning that you may not last the day,

And every evening that you may not last the night.

—E
NGRAVED PLAQUE IN THE CATACOMBS OF
P
ARIS

A
ROW OF SKULLS
glared from atop a wall of intricately stacked femurs and tibias. Though it was June, and she knew the sun was shining on the streets of Paris sixty feet above her, Dr. Maura Isles felt chilled as she walked down the dim passageway, its walls lined almost to the ceiling with human remains. She was familiar, even intimate, with death, and had confronted its face countless times on her autopsy table, but she was stunned by the scale of this display, by the sheer number of bones stored in this network of tunnels beneath the City of Light. The one-kilometer tour took her through only a small section of the catacombs. Off-limits to tourists were numerous side tunnels and bone-filled chambers, their dark mouths gaping seductively behind locked gates. Here were the remains of six million Parisians who had once felt the sun on their faces, who had hungered and thirsted and loved, who had felt the beating of their own hearts in their chests, the rush of air in and out of their lungs. They could never have imagined that one day their bones would be unearthed from their cemetery resting places, and moved to this grim ossuary beneath the city.

That one day they would be on display, to be gawked at by hordes of tourists.

A century and a half ago, to make room for the steady influx of dead into Paris’s overcrowded cemeteries, the bones had been disinterred and moved into the vast honeycomb of ancient limestone quarries that lay deep beneath the city. The workmen who’d transferred the bones had not carelessly tossed them into piles, but had performed their macabre task with flair, meticulously stacking them to form whimsical designs. Like fussy stonemasons, they had built high walls decorated with alternating layers of skulls and long bones, turning decay into an artistic statement. And they had hung plaques engraved with grim quotations, reminders to all who walked these passageways that Death spares no one.

One of the plaques caught Maura’s eye, and she paused among the flow of tourists to read it. As she struggled to translate the words using her shaky high school French, she heard the incongruous sound of children’s laughter echoing in the dim corridors, and the twang of a man’s Texas accent as he muttered to his wife. “Can you believe this place, Sherry? Gives me the goddamn creeps . . .”

The Texas couple moved on, their voices fading into silence. For a moment Maura was alone in the chamber, breathing in the dust of the centuries. Under the dim glow of the tunnel light, mold had flourished on a cluster of skulls, coating them in a greenish cast. A single bullet hole gaped in the forehead of one skull, like a third eye.

I know how you died.

The chill of the tunnel had seeped into her own bones. But she did not move, determined to translate that plaque, to quell her horror by engaging in a useless intellectual puzzle. Come on, Maura. Three years of high school French, and you can’t figure this out? It was a personal challenge now, all thoughts of mortality temporarily held at bay. Then the words took on meaning, and she felt her blood go cold . . .

Happy is he who is forever faced with the hour of his death

And prepares himself for the end every day.

Suddenly she noticed the silence. No voices, no echoing footsteps. She turned and left that gloomy chamber. How had she fallen so far behind the other tourists? She was alone in this tunnel, alone with the dead. She thought about unexpected power outages, about wandering the wrong way in pitch darkness. She’d heard of Parisian workmen a century ago who had lost their way in the catacombs and died of starvation. Her pace quickened as she sought to catch up with the others, to rejoin the company of the living. She felt Death pressing in too closely in these tunnels. The skulls seemed to stare back at her with resentment, a chorus of six million berating her for her ghoulish curiosity.

We were once as alive as you are. Do you think you can escape the future you see here?

When at last she emerged from the catacombs and stepped into the sunshine on Rue Remy Dumoncel, she took in deep breaths of air. For once she welcomed the noise of traffic, the press of the crowd, as if she had just been granted a second chance at life. The colors seemed brighter, the faces friendlier. My last day in Paris, she thought, and only now do I really appreciate the beauty of this city. She had spent most of the past week trapped in meeting rooms, attending the International Conference of Forensic Pathology. There had been so little time for sightseeing, and even the tours arranged by the conference organizers had been related to death and illness: the medical museum, the old surgical theater.

The catacombs.

Of all the memories to bring back from Paris, how ironic that her most vivid one would be of human remains. That’s not healthy, she thought as she sat at an outdoor café, savoring one last cup of espresso and a strawberry tart. In two days, I’ll be back in my autopsy room, surrounded by stainless steel, shut off from sunlight. Breathing only the cold, filtered air flowing from the vents. This day will seem like a memory of paradise.

She took her time, recording those memories. The smell of coffee, the taste of buttery pastry. The natty businessmen with cell phones pressed to their ears, the intricate knots of the scarves fluttering around women’s throats. She entertained the fantasy that surely danced in the head of every American who had ever visited Paris: What would it be like to miss my plane? To just linger here, in this café, in this glorious city, for the rest of my life?

But in the end, she rose from her table and hailed a taxi to the airport. In the end she walked away from the fantasy, from Paris, but only because she promised herself she would someday return. She just didn’t know when.

Her flight home was delayed three hours. That’s three hours I could have spent walking along the Seine, she thought as she sat disgruntled in Charles de Gaulle. Three hours I could have wandered the Marais or poked around in Les Halles. Instead she was trapped in an airport so crowded with travelers she could find no place to sit. By the time she finally boarded the Air France jet, she was tired and thoroughly cranky. One glass of wine with the in-flight meal was all it took for her to fall into a deep and dreamless sleep.