The Bones of Old Carlisle (13 page)

The figure seemed to be female, although there was so much damage
and so much blood Arrowroot couldn’t be sure. The blood had dried
black over her gray-blue skin, caked deeply where the destruction was
most severe. One arm was raised over her head, the other down by her
hip, the fingers still splayed as if, until her last moment, she were
trying to defend herself from something. Arrowroot glanced at the face
and quickly looked away, staring down at the grass between his feet as
Dr. Schaumberg stood up, waved her fingers over her smartphone and
started recording. There was a faint odor of something terrible,
assaulting Arrowroot’s senses intermittently depending on which way
the wind blew through the netting.

“She’s female, unclothed” Schaumberg said, in a thin voice that
sounded frightened, or world-weary, or merely tired. “Died probably
within a day or two. Late teens or early 20s, well-muscled, in
exceptionally good shape. Extensive signs of deep-tissue injury, as
well as numerous small, superficial wounds, especially to the legs,
consistent with animal bites. Vertical patterns of blood release
indicate she was still standing after receiving at least some of her
injuries.

“Deepest injuries seem to have been to muscle mass – upper arms,
thighs, and—“ Schaumberg peered under the corpse “buttocks.”
Looking at the grass made Arrowroot feel better. So did
Schaumberg’s voice, as horrible as her words were. Schaumberg’s
attention became, in Arrowroot’s mind, the first stop in a terrible
but necessary and entirely modern process. People used to die in awful
ways and they were left to rot, or they were buried and forgotten.
Today, no death was allowed to go unstudied. People still did terrible
things to each other, intentionally or by negligence or ignorance or
apathy, but now each body became like the raw material for a new kind
of factory, a factory with a strange new mission.
“We’ll want to examine these small marks for saliva,” Schaumberg
said. “But I’m not sure I should have said animal.”
Arrowroot raised his eyes carefully, focusing on the lower end of
the corpse, staring only at her legs. At the moment of death, she had
raised them, it seemed, perhaps brought them to her chest, and they’d
stayed about halfway up after she died, so it looked as if she had
died sitting on a motorcycle.
All over her lower legs, little squares of skin had been removed.
The pinches seemed to have been done methodically, the marks made a
half inch apart in diagonal lines, concentrated near her calf muscles,
and thickest along the edges of the deep wounds where the muscle was
completely exposed and, in many places, ripped away. Thick, jagged
beads of blood had run toward her feet from every wound, and Arrowroot
imagined her running, terrified of the pain and of whatever it was
attacking her.
In the factory of Arrowroot’s imagining, bodies entered at one
end, examined first by people like Dr. Schaumberg before passing to
other specialists, investigators and law enforcement officials. The
ultimate objective of it all, the final output, Arrowroot thought, was
a better understanding of what had happened, so it would not happen
again. This was the nature of civilization, and it was a good thing,
Arrowroot reminded himself. It was a good thing.
“Teeth show a peculiar lack of aging or use,” Schaumberg
continued, peering into the corpse’s gaping mouth. “No fillings, no
cracks or chips, no wear. Eyes have been completely removed, and the
sphenoid bone behind them is also gone.” Schaumberg pulled a penlight
from her front pocket and clicked it on. “We need additional forensics
to learn how that bone was taken out – drilled, pounded out, dug out.
Much of the brain matter has also been removed.”
Schaumberg stopped and looked up at Watell, and Arrowroot
followed her gaze. Watell had been standing with his back to the
tent’s netting, his hand cupped over his mouth, his eyes
expressionless, but something he was doing was bothering the doctor.
“Did you have an observation?” she asked.
“No, Ma’am,” Watell replied.
“So those chirps and giggles, that wasn’t your attempt at helping
me?” Schaumberg persisted.
“No, Ma’am, didn’t chirp,” Watell said.
“And you think this is funny, then?” Schaumberg inquired. “What
happened to her is funny?”
Watell was silent, and for a long moment, the two stared each
other down, Schaumberg’s age and maturity vs. Watell’s youth and
irreverence.
Finally, Demizu intervened. “Let’s get the next body,” he said.
“Doctor, you ready for the next one?”
“Yeah,” she said, “the other one by the front door, then the one
in the barn.”
Demizu pointed at Watell and he departed with the other soldiers.
Schaumberg looked back at her corpse until they were out of earshot,
and then addressed Demizu.
“Do we need him here?” she asked.
“Unfortunately, Doctor,” Demizu replied, “we’ll always need
people like that.” He turned to the whiteboard and uncapped a marker.
On the far left side of the board, he wrote down the first name of
everyone there, except his own. Next to Watell’s name, he put an “X.”
Then he wrote, “Body 1: An eye for an eye?” and “Sphenoid! How? Why?
Who?”
Schaumberg, scowling, covered the body with a thin sheet, and
everyone was silent for a time, even Arrowroot. Subdued by what he had
just seen and by a mix of difficult older memories, he leaned back and
closed his eyes. The air was becoming more restless, blowing through
the screen walls of the tent and making them undulate and rattle.
If they hadn’t failed or been evicted, Arrowroot thought, perhaps
the Carlisles would have added a gazebo to their estate. Maybe right
here, where this tent is standing and ruined corpses are being carried
in one by one and examined.
Arrowroot opened his eyes and looked to the left, through the
screen and back across the valley to Heligaux.
Downtown and the Promenade were hidden behind the treeline, but
he could see the upper parts of the town, including his neighborhood
in High Heligaux. He saw the glint of a car’s reflection as it passed
among the homes, although the vehicles themselves were too small to
perceive. Yes, he said to himself, with a telescope or an
exceptionally powerful pair of eyes, you could see the Carlisle place
and much of the grounds around it from his bedroom window. What had
Tamani seen that made her scream? Maybe she saw the soldiers poking
around here this morning. Maybe, but Arrowroot wasn’t satisfied with
that theory. She knew what soldiers looked like. They wouldn’t have
surprised her just because they had appeared at the Carlisle place.
Watell pulled upon the tent flap for the other two soldiers and
they stepped in with the second corpse, setting it on another table.
Arrowroot looked over with dread, but this one seemed to be far more
intact. However, blood had escaped through his nose, ears and eyes,
and his eyes had remained open, so Arrowroot made a point of not
looking at his face.
He was supremely fit, muscles bulging from his chest, arms and
legs, and he was oddly dressed, in a sort of form-fitting gray
coverall, long-sleeved and extending down over his feet. A hood was
bunched up behind his neck. His arms were raised above his head and
his legs were laid straight out.
Schaumberg pushed against the bones of his face and head, then
looked at Demizu. “I’m guessing blunt force trauma to the left
temporal,” she said. “Consistent with a blow from in front by a righthanded person. Something heavy. Baseball bat, crowbar. We’ll want to
x-ray it.”
Arrowroot took a cautious glance at the new corpse. His hair was
long and wavy, like a poet’s, and Arrowroot felt a sudden sorrow for
the man he couldn’t summon for the eyeless woman. There was something
sad about him, and Arrowroot wondered if he’d suffered much in his
last moments, and if he’d always been downcast.
Schaumberg pulled the corpse’s mouth open. “Again, no fillings,
no damage, no wear,” she said. “It’s like they all just got their
teeth last week.” She paused, then added, “I’m thinking he was killed
in the house.”
“How do you figure?” Demizu asked.
“Just a theory” the doctor replied, “but if he were killed in the
house, and if the killers didn’t want his remains to stay in the
house, they would have dragged him out. I’m not thinking these were
real sentimental people. Just past the front door would have been good
enough.”
Arrowroot laughed despite himself. “I’m sorry, Dr. Schaumberg,”
he said, fearful of provoking her wrath the way Watell had, “but I
think you hit the nail on the head about not being sentimental.”
Schaumberg smiled for the first time since they’d met. “Just a
guess,” she said. “If they were living in the house, taking out the
dead bodies might have been the extent of their housekeeping.”
“So what about the girl here?” Arrowroot asked. “Think she died
in the house too?”
“No,” Schaumberg replied, and her smile vanished. “My hunch is
she was trying to get into the house, to get away from something, and
they wouldn’t let her in. Ed, didn’t you say there was a lot of blood
near her remains?”
“All over the grass and the front door,” Demizu confirmed.
Schaumberg pulled out a pair of surgical scissors and applied
them to the fabric at the man’s neck. She squeezed, but the cloth
would not part, so she pulled at it and it yielded without tearing.
“This is a peculiar fabric,” Schaumberg said, sliding the garment
down the man’s legs and completely off his body. “Impossible to cut
but easy to manipulate.”
The man had on no underwear, and Arrowroot looked away, out of a
sense of respect or sympathy, he wasn’t sure which.
Schaumberg gave the gray corpse a quick once over. “No scars,”
she said. “No moles, no flaws.”
“What about the brother’s buttocks here?” asked Watell with
feigned seriousness.
“Is there a reason you’re interested in that part of the victim’s
anatomy?” Schaumberg inquired without removing her eyes from the
remains.
Watell blinked as he processed her words, then he laughed, a
high-pitched, staccato warble that sounded a little like a bug. “I’m
just messin’, Doc,” he said. “You’re okay, you know that?”
“Go get the one in the barn,” Demizu ordered, and he turned to
his whiteboard and put another “X” beside Watell’s name. “You ready
for the next one, right?”
“Yes,” Schaumberg replied.
Off marched the three soldiers to retrieve another bundle of
horror on their stretcher. Arrowroot watched them go and then searched
the Carlisle’s front lawn for the other two soldiers, the ones with
the metal detector and the flags. He recalled Watell’s earlier words,
hinting at another body in an area they hadn’t flagged yet. Truth?
Bluster? No way to tell yet. He leaned back, put his hands behind his
head, closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
A few feet away, Arrowroot heard the squeak of Demizu’s writing
on his whiteboard. He opened his eyes and read. “Body 2. Male. A great
temporal smiting! Judgment?”
The silence was finally broken by Bonaventure. “Do you know
anything about rib injuries?” he asked Schaumberg.
She turned to him and asked wearily, “Can you narrow it down?”
“I got hit this morning,” he said. “That freak girl that was out
here. Solar plexus. It still hurts. Cop in town told me I probably got
a broke rib.”
Bonaventure reached down to pull up his shirt but Schaumberg
turned away. “Get checked at the clinic,” she said flatly. “Probably
need an x-ray.”
Bonaventure exposed his belly anyway and continued his selfexamination.
Demizu turned to Arrowroot. “Major Stapleton tells me you have
some knowledge about one of the survivors here?”
“Oh, indeed, Sir, yessir,” Arrowroot said, sitting up. He quickly
shared all he knew, starting with the incident he’d heard over the
police scanner the morning before, then moving on to the episode with
Mr. Franklin, the dinner at the Mace and Helm, teaching her how to
eat, how to read, and her strange preoccupation with the fear that
people eat each other.
He limited his embellishment until he got to the part about
cannibalism.
“Now, here’s the funny thing about people eating other people,”
Arrowroot began. “It just sounds crazy, when you first hear about it,
and you almost want to laugh when the other person says it, except
maybe you don’t want to hurt their feelings. But then you think about
it, and you remember, sort of, that people used to eat each other. And
sometimes they still do, you know, accidental, or even on purpose. And
look at what people, you know, kill each other with, it’s not much
different from what you find in the kitchen, knives and all. And then
there’s, you know, all that about Jesus, and—“
“So,” interrupted Demizu, “you listen to the police scanner a
lot?”
“Yeah,” said Arrowroot.
“Mind if I ask why?” Demizu inquired.
“Well, I’m the mayor,” Arrowroot said, but Demizu kept staring,
so he continued, talking about the disappearance of his son six months
before, and his suspicion Robert might have been kidnapped or harmed
while trespassing at Fort Shergawa. “Vanished without a trace,” he
said. “All I’ve got is the police scanner, so I listen when I can.
“But all this,” he concluded, “whatever it is, I don’t think this
has anything to do with Robert. Not the kind of people he would
associate with.”
Arrowroot looked at Schaumberg and smiled. “He was the
sentimental type, you know. Wrote poetry.”
“Might he have left the area?” Demizu asked. “Would he have had a
reason to do that?”
“Well, he was upset about some things,” Arrowroot confessed,
adding only “some family things” before his voice trailed off.
“How well did you know his friends?” Demizu asked.
“I saw a good number of them,” Arrowroot said. “They’d come to
the house, he’d catch up with them when he was around.”
“Would you recognize any of them if we found their remains out
here?” Demizu asked.
“I can’t promise that,” Arrowroot replied, “but I’ll do my best.
His friends tended to be alive, had all their body parts still, eyes
and whatnot. But I’d say for sure I never met the two you’ve already
brought in. You know, transformed as they were.”
“Very good,” Demizu yodeled, and he nodded to Stapleton.
Stapleton didn’t return his nod. She was seated at a table in the
back of the tent and was looking down, doing something with her hands,
oblivious to anything else. Arrowroot stared at her for a long while
and eventually decided she was replaying the incidents of the morning,
particularly the final confrontation with Tamani. Still in her cap and
sunglasses, with only her mouth to betray any emotion, her lips
tightened and relaxed with what might have been frustration, or fury,
or plans for revenge. Now and then she moved her mouth to form silent
words, and she bent her fingers around each other as if they were
living things, with their own brains, fighting each other as she’d
fought that morning.
Then her head tilted almost imperceptibly, her fingers went
still, and Arrowroot knew she was looking back at him. He smiled,
nodded and turned to the front of the tent.
Watell was back, standing outside the tent in silence, hands
cupped around his face as he pressed it against the screen. His head
was oscillating slowly as he studied the tent’s interior.
“Where is the body?” Demizu demanded.
“We’re gonna need some rope, Sir,” Watell replied. “It’s up on
this thing, we can’t get it down.”