'He didn't even clean her, just declared natural causes and shipped her over. 'Ron's getting lazier,' she said, picking up a squirt bottle of Dis-Spray. I figured it was because she'd never been married. Margaret's voice was a little lighter, though, a little more. It wasn't my mom at all, it was her sister Margaret-they were twins, and when their faces were masked I could barely tell the difference. 'Hi John,' she said, collecting some sterile rags. I froze, thinking it was my mother, but the woman just glanced at me and walked to a counter. After three days in end-of-summer heat, there had probably been a lot of them.Ī woman swung open the door from the front end of the mortuary and came in, looking like a surgeon in her green scrubs and mask. The coroner hadn't done much to clean up the body, probably because they were busy with Jeb, but the smell told me that at least they'd thought to kill the bugs. Old skin was my favorite-dry and wrinkled, with a texture like antique paper.

I washed my hands quietly in the sink, wondering how long I had, and gently touched the body. It smelled like rotten meat and bug spray, and the lone ventilator fan buzzing loudly overhead wasn't doing much to help. It was lying perfectly still on the table, under a blue sheet. No one was in the back yet, just me and Mrs. I slipped in the back just in case my mom was up front. I'd been in town most of the day, watching the police clean up the mess with Jeb, and came back just as the sun was beginning to go down. They're the ones who run the mortuary I'm only fifteen. Anderson's body on Saturday, September Second, after the coroner was done with it-or, I guess I should say that my mom and Aunt Margaret got the body, not me. Anderson the last person in Clayton County to die of natural causes for almost six months. We didn't know it at the time, but that made Mrs.

She died quietly in her sleep on August thirtieth, according to the coroner, which means she died two days before the something tore Jeb Jolley's insides out and left him in a puddle behind the laundromat. And the worst part isn't the rotting, it's the three days-three whole days before anyone cared enough to say, 'Wait, where's that old lady that lives down by the canal?' There's not a lot of dignity in that.īut peaceful? Certainly. Her daughter eventually dropped by to check on her and found her corpse three days rotted and stinking like roadkill. They say it was a peaceful, dignified way to die, which I suppose is technically true, but the three days it took for someone to realize they hadn't seen her in a while removed most of the dignity from the situation. Nothing flashy, just old age-she went to bed one night and never woke up.

Books by dan wells