P. Parrish - An Unquiet Grave

Dr. Seraphin held out the file. “We all fear what we can’t see.”

Louis took the file. Dr. Seraphin extended a hand to Louis. “Good-bye, Mr. Kincaid,” she said.

Louis shook her hand. Her palm was soft, creamy, but ice cold. He watched her walk to her car and slip inside. The Volvo pulled away, and he stood there for a moment, clutching Claudia’s file to his chest.

“I need to see the mortuary.”

Alice stared at Louis for a long time through the open driver’s-side window of her car. Without a word, she reached back to get her tote bag, got out of her car, and shut the door. When she turned back to face him, there was such a look of distress on her face that Louis regretted just blurting things out before she even had a chance to get into the building.

He could almost read her thoughts. That he wasn’t holding up his end of the bargain to help Charlie. That he was some ghoulish voyeur no better than that damn reporter Delp. That she had been wrong about him and shouldn’t have trusted him.

“Alice,” he said quietly, “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important. I know you think I’m-”

She held up a hand. “It’s all right.” She gave him a wary smile. “Is it okay if I go to my office first?”

Louis followed her up the stone steps and waited, stamping his feet against the cold as she unlocked the door. Inside was almost as cold as outside.

“Oh no, they must have shut down the boiler,” Alice said. “We’re going to be without heat from now on, I’m afraid.”

“When do you have to be out of here?” Louis asked.

“December thirty-first.”

“Then what?”

“The demolition people come in. They’re going to start on the western side of the compound and work eastward toward the buildings over by the lake.”

“So there really is a lake?”

She looked at him oddly. “Of course. It’s over by the east edge of the property out by the cemetery. It is quite lovely, really.” She heaved a sigh. “I heard they are going to build condos around it.”

Alice plopped her tote down and pulled out a huge thermos. “Coffee?”

“Alice, I think I love you.”

She smiled and poured out the steaming black brew. Louis was about to ask for sugar when she dug in her desk drawer and tossed out a handful of packets and little restaurant cream cups. “I steal them from McDonald’s,” she said.

For a minute or two, they just stood sipping their coffees as the cold air swirled around them. Then Alice set her cup down and capped the thermos.

“Let’s go get this over with,” she said, pulling out her key ring.

The morning sun was a pale yellow smudge behind the gray scrim of clouds. Alice took him out a back door and they hurried down a cracked concrete walkway heading in the direction of E Building. They passed a small wood building with a COMMISSARY sign above the entrance, and then the power plant. Louis thought again about what Alice had told him that first day, that Hidden Lake had been a city unto itself, with a bakery and laundry, a post office and dairy, even its own farmlands where inmates picked apples and pressed cider for sale to the outside world. It was a place where a person could live, work, die, and be forgotten without ever stepping outside the iron gates.

“That’s the hospital,” Alice said, pointing to a mammoth spired building ahead. “It’s one of the oldest buildings here and was even open to the public during the depression. They charged a dollar eighteen a night for a bed. The mortuary is in the basement.”

The salvage crew had already stripped most of the furnishings, fixtures, and doors, and now the empty halls with their gaping door frames had the desolate look of a place waiting to die.

Louis followed Alice down a long metal staircase and along a plain tiled corridor with many doors and overhead steam pipes. At a door with MORTUARY stenciled on the glass, she slipped in the key and stepped aside to let Louis in.

He bypassed the outer office and headed straight into the working area. Although everything had been stripped, he could guess that this was where the bodies were washed and prepared for burial; there were still pipes in the walls, rusting drains, and holes in the peeling linoleum where tables had once been bolted. The walls were stripped of all shelving and anything that could be sold. A very old and very yellowed hand-lettered sign still hung on one wall: PRIMUM NON NOCERE.

Louis had seen the sign in hospitals before. “First do no harm,” he translated out loud. “Strange thing to put in a morgue.”

“Even the dead deserve respect,” Alice said quietly.

Louis looked back at her. She was standing at the door, shoulders hunched up in her coat. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll wait out in the hall,” she said.

Louis heard Alice’s retreating footsteps and the banging echo of a door. It wasn’t until that moment that he realized what he was going to do. He had the hope that whoever cremated Claudia by mistake had at least been decent enough to provide her an urn. And if he could find it, he was going to just take it.

He went back to the hallway and looked around. All the signs had been taken down, so he went along, opening doors. Broom closets. Offices. Supply rooms. Another one of those heavy steel doors, this one with PASSAGE 7 painted on it but again, with no doorknob or handle.

He moved into a large white-tiled room that he guessed had been used for embalming. There was a small door leading off it. He tried it, and it opened with a wheeze of cold musty air.

Five wooden steps leading into a dim room. He went down two steps and peered into the gloom. Rough stone walls and some wood shelves. Another storage room. He was about to go back up when a glint caught his eye. He reached up and pushed the door open wider for more light. The wood shelves were filled with tin cans. He went down the last three steps.

The shelves completely lined the small stone room, running from the concrete floor to the low ceiling. Each shelf was filled with the tins, each about the size of a paint can. But as Louis came closer he could see they weren’t tins but were made of copper, the once-shiny metal now dull and green with corrosion.

Labels. .

Maybe half the cans had labels, but they were frayed, peeling, or water-spotted. Louis groped for his reading glasses and picked up one of the few cans that had a piece of a legible label.

Large black letters: HIDDEN LAKE HOSPITAL.

And below that in faded typing: 4/12/34 ANDREW. The rest of the label and the rest of the name was gone.

Louis felt a grab to his gut and he threw out a hand to grip the shelf.

These were. . people.

His eyes came up from the can in his hand, and moved over the shelves. Rows and rows of them. His chest drew tight, and the air was suddenly thick with the smell of dirt and decay.

He swallowed back a rush of nausea, but still he could not draw a full breath. He spun away from the shelf and was halfway to the door before he realized he still held a can in his hand.

He stopped and looked down at it, then gently placed it back on the shelf. He turned and left the room, his footsteps growing faster as he made his way back up the steps to the entrance.

Alice was standing outside on the grass. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

He pulled in some cold air, trying to find the words. His head was still thick with the smells of the room, and his thoughts were jumbled.

“Louis,” Alice said, “talk to me. You look sick.”

He told her what he had seen and when she said nothing, he explained what Dr. Seraphin had said about the possible mix-up in bodies and how he had hoped Claudia would be among the cremated remains.