The Good Neighbor (34 page)

“Two weeks, at least,” said the medical examiner. “Maybe a lit tle more.”

“Two weeks, maybe a little more,” Colt repeated. “Did the—did the rats get at her?”

They didn’t answer that one.

“All right,” he said. “I’m going to do it now. I’m going to look.

Right now.”

But still he couldn’t bring himself to turn around. He stared at the wall for a while longer. Never, he reflected, had he wished more strongly to be somewhere else. And that was saying something.

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“Look,” said the woman. “Just think of it as something you’re doing for her. A last service. It’ll be over in a minute. If you don’t ID her, she can’t be given a proper burial. She’ll be listed as Jane Doe and cremated. She won’t have anything but a number. You don’t want that, do you?”

“I told you, I don’t care. I don’t owe her anything.” “Not even for giving birth to you?”

He laughed, surprised at how unpleasant his own voice sounded—more like a bark.

“Please,” he said. “I’m sure I was a mistake. An inconvenience. I practically raised myself. Ever since I was little. I had to feed my self, take myself to school. They didn’t want me.” He blew his nose again. “It’s not like they abused me. That almost would have been better. At least that would have showed they knew I was alive.” He paused, thinking. “How did you find out who she was, anyway?”

“Fingerprints,” said the medical examiner. “She—had a criminal record.”

Colt laughed again, this time in astonishment. “Great,” he said. “My mother, the convict. What’d she do?”

“You’d have to ask the police,” the medical examiner said. “That kind of information has no bearing on our investigation. We simply treated her as a human being, and no less.”

Colt sighed.

“Will she have a sheet over her?” he asked. “I don’t want to—I don’t want to see—”

“You’ll only see her face,” said the examiner-in-training. “That’s all.”

“I—I’ve never seen a dead body before. I don’t know—”

“It’s all right,” said the medical examiner. “It’ll be over in a sec ond. You only need to look at her long enough to know that it’s her. We’re sorry about the—her condition. We’ve cleaned her up as much as we could.”

“You did?”

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“Yes, sir.”

“Well,” said Colt. “Okay. Here I go.”

He turned on his heel like an officer on parade. Then he opened his eyes.

The rats had been at her, all right. No amount of cleaning up in the world was going to fix that.

He closed his eyes again.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s my mother.” Then he fell to the floor.

❚ ❚ ❚

The medical examiner caught him in time, but Colt was too big for him to support on his own, and the examiner-in-training, who had not yet dealt with a fainter, was too slow. Colt slumped to the floor, bumping his forehead on the tile.

“You have to be ready for that,” the medical examiner told his protégé. “You never know when they’re going to go, so you al ways stay just behind them. You don’t want them to get hurt when they land.”

“I’m sorry,” said the examiner-in-training. “I haven’t seen that before.” She knelt and took Colt’s head in her lap, patting his face lightly. The medical examiner watched her disapprovingly.

“The poor baby,” the examiner-in-training said, feeling Colt’s smooth cheeks. “He’s barely even old enough to shave.”

“Thing is, they can sue us for not catching them,” the medical examiner said. “If they get hurt.”

He tapped on the window to tell the orderly it was okay to take the body away.

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The Collision

C
olt was behind the wheel again.

They had nearly gotten stuck in the mud heading out of the

dump, and for one terrifying moment he thought Flebberman was going to make him take the bones out of the truck again and carry them. If that had happened, he would have had to kill him right then and there. Or be killed himself. It wouldn’t have mattered, at that point. Bringing them up the hill, armload by armload, nearly had been more than he could take.

The tombstones hadn’t been so bad, but the few mortal re mains of the Musgrove family, stained a deep death-brown by their years in the earth, had clacked sickeningly as he pulled them from the trash and placed them—with a tenderness he did not feel—in the back of the tow truck. He would have preferred to fling them as far from himself as possible. He knew what the con sequences of that would have been—”blammo,” as Flebberman put it. But he almost did it, anyway.

They left the dirt road behind and got back on the county high way. The truck gave a final lurch as it heaved itself up onto the

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pavement, like a sea creature making the evolutionary transition to land. Colt groaned aloud as his stomach protested this latest outrage to his equilibrium.

“Not that I give a shit, but you don’t look so good,” said Fleb berman.

Colt didn’t answer. He was still sweating, not from exertion but nausea. He’d tried to throw up four more times, again with no results. Now his ribs ached as if he’d been in a wrestling match, and his throat burned with stomach acid.

“Please,” he said. “Do you have any water?”

His voice was as ratchety as a bullfrog’s. Flebberman, after a dubious moment, reached behind the seat and retrieved a half- empty plastic bottle of soda. Colt guzzled the entire thing in sec onds. The soda tasted as if it had been in the truck for two or three months, but it was the best thing Colt had ever drunk in his life.

“Whatsa matter with you?” Flebberman asked. “You sick?”

“I told you,” Colt said, tossing the empty bottle to the floor and wiping his mouth. “I have this—thing about bodies. I can’t deal with them. They freak me out.”

“You mean yer scared of ’em.”

He shook his head. “Not just that. Different. I can’t explain it. I just—you know how people have irrational fears of things? Like spiders? Or water?”

“Yeah,” Flebberman said, settling back in his seat with a self- satisfied air. “Yer scared.”

Colt fumed. No, he was not scared of bodies. He just hated them. Ever since that day with his mother ’s body, when he’d had to look at her, he couldn’t even so much as walk into a funeral home without breaking out into a cold sweat. When loved ones of friends passed away, he sent a bunch of flowers and stayed well clear. The only funeral Coltrane Hart would ever attend again was his own.

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The roads were deserted, and wet with melting snow. Colt drove slowly.

“Yep,” said Flebberman. “Not near so big and tough as you think, Fancy Pants. Izzn’t ’at right?”

Colt gritted his teeth and said nothing. He squinted; up ahead, cresting a rise, he could see a car coming in the opposite direction. They had passed plenty of other cars so far, and he had hoped against hope that one of them would be a cop—all to no avail. But this one looked like it had emergency lights on top of it.

Be a cop, he thought. Please be a cop.

Flebberman had seen it, too. He sat up straight and pointed the gun at him again, keeping it low.

“Don’t even think about it,” he said.

Colt turned to look at Flebberman, letting scorn show on his face. Suddenly, he felt as if he really didn’t care what happened to him; he had had it. That was it. He was not going to take any more. Everyone has a breaking point, and Colt had reached his. Now, even though there was still a gun pointed at him, he felt as if he had the upper hand, because he suddenly no longer cared whether he lived or died. He only wanted to make this little man suffer before he missed his chance.

“Is that thing even loaded?” Colt asked.

“What?” Flebberman shouted disbelievingly. “Of course it’s fuckin’ loaded! You wanna find out the hard way?”

Colt grinned. He gunned the engine. “Yeah,” he said. “I sure do.” Flebberman’s eyes grew wide.

“Go ahead, shoot,” said Colt. “I don’t give a shit.”

He stepped harder on the gas and looked again at the car that was coming at them. It was indeed a police car—a state trooper, from the looks of it. Hallelujah. Colt hoped the trooper was wear ing his seat belt, because he was going to need it.

“Hang on, cop,” he muttered. “Sorry about this.”

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In the moments just before the collision, he looked at Flebber man again. The little man’s mouth was open wide with panic. He looked like he was trying to yell, but nothing was coming out. Colt grinned again.

“Who’s afraid now?” he asked.

Then he swung the wheel hard to the left. There was the bone- jarring force of the vehicles colliding, not head-on but front to end, in the shape of a mason’s compass. The noise was so loud that Colt’s ears rang with infernal bells, in the split second before he was knocked out against the side window. This was the last thing he was aware of, for a length of time that he could not mea sure.

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The Confession

L
ater, after the excavators had left, Francie sat in her new wing- back chair, reading the diary in an effort to soothe her nerves. She

had covered most of the early years already, trying to read be tween the understated lines to get a sense of what Marly had ac tually felt, or at least what she had thought about—but there were precious few clues to go by. None, in fact. Marly reported the events of her life as matter-of-factly as if they were happening to someone else, and as far as her inner life went, the world of her emotions was as mysterious as the surface of Pluto. As the years went by, large gaps of time began to appear between entries— they were still made only on Sundays, but intervals began to oc cur: first weeks, then months. Francie, frustrated, skipped ahead in the hopes that some great epiphany would have come over Marly Musgrove, or that some kind of authorial instinct would have finally taken over after her own personal pump had been primed; but there was nothing beyond the usual style of entry. “Chopped wood—planted garden—made butter—mended socks.”

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Francie was beginning to discover, to her disappointment, that there was no literary genius lurking behind the apron, no out pouring of the soul, no feminine wisdom to be passed down through the ages—which was, more than anything, what she’d been hoping for—some kind of connection between hearts that would span the decades and show her how to be a better woman. But there was nothing except socks and butter. Marly Mus-

grove was just a person, nothing more and nothing less.

❚ ❚ ❚

Francie closed the diary and rubbed her eyes, yawning. It had somehow become afternoon, and the orange sunlight angled thinly through the windows and warmed her slippered feet. The house creaked and moaned as usual, as it did every time the wind shifted or the temperature changed. Just like a ship. Weigh anchor, Francie thought. Set a course for the open sea.

On a whim, she opened the diary near the end. Marly had kept the journal for almost twenty years, finally allowing it to peter out in the early 1870s. The date on her tombstone was 1888. So, that was that. Francie was disappointed to realize that she would never know what Marly’s thoughts had been in the days before she died. Nor would she ever know
how
she had died. Would there have been anything revealing in those final moments, perhaps? A deathbed awakening of higher consciousness? Some kind of state ment that it had all been worth it, that one had only to surrender to life’s pain to find its sweet reward?

There was absolutely nothing like that. On the last day Marly had seen fit to record, she had helped a cow give birth to a calf and begun to empty the house in preparation for spring cleaning.

But then Francie saw, to her surprise, that there was one final entry made in a different handwriting. It slanted the other way— which Francie recognized immediately as being made by someone left-handed. She sat up straighter, her interest renewed.