Stephen White: Missing Persons

The door slid right open.

Hannah’s classic black patent-leather purse, as unscuffed as the day it had been crafted, rested on the floor in the middle of the room. It stood up neatly, its arched handles perfectly vertical. But the bag was on the floor.

It shouldn’t have been on the floor.

Diane apparently had the exact same reaction I had to the presence of the purse in the middle of the room. But since the distance between her cortex and her mouth was much shorter than mine, she verbalized her conclusion first: “Hannah would never put her purse there.”

Diane meant on the floor. Nope.

In the middle of the room. Never.

What was certain was that Hannah had a place for her purse. A specific place. A correct place. I didn’t know where she kept it. Probably in a drawer in her desk. Maybe someplace more esoteric, in her filing cabinet under “P.” But in any circumstance that approached ordinary, she absolutely wouldn’t put it on the floor in the middle of the room.

The rest of the office was neat. OCD neat, with one exception: Hannah’s coat was tossed carelessly over the top of the desk. I noted the swirled torn paper from an open roll of LifeSavers licking out of one of the coat pockets.

Hannah’s 6:15, the woman with the cheddar-colored locks, was trying to peer past us into the office, but she was too short to manage a look over our shoulders. I felt her hand on my back and turned toward her.

I said, “Hello, I’m Dr. Alan Gregory, one of Ms. Grant’s colleagues. Why don’t you have a seat in the waiting area while we try to figure out what’s going on?” Not overconfident about her emotional stability, I’d adopted a voice that was as comforting as a hot-water bottle wrapped in fleece.

Neither my words nor my tone had the desired effect, though. “This is my time,” the woman protested, tapping the crystal of a garish purple Swatch on her wrist. I detected more than a little pout in her retort, considered the bag of Cheetos, and gave a momentary thought to the clinical regression that Hannah was confronting in her therapy with this woman.

“I know,” I said even more gently. “I know. But the circumstances today are a little unusual. If you want to leave your name I’ll make sure that Ms. Grant gives you a call as soon as we straighten all this out. I’ll tell her you were here. I promise.”

She wanted none of it. “I’ll just wait,” she said. “It is my time. Though I do hope I’m not being charged.”

I sighed, pausing a moment as the woman retraced her steps and resumed her perch on the velvet settee in the waiting room. As she lowered herself to the sofa her fingertips left bright orange imprints on the forest green velvet upholstery. Once I was sure she was settled, I joined Diane inside the doorway to Hannah’s office.

I said, “I think you should go check the bathroom, Diane. Maybe Hannah fell or something.”

“Oh God!” she said. “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?” She rushed past me and down the hall.

I’m not sure why I did what I did next. Maybe it was because I was standing by myself in the hallway feeling lost and stupid. Maybe it was intuition. Maybe it was because I thought the Cheetos lady might be back and I was looking for a place to hide. I don’t really know.

What I did was that I took half a step across the narrow hall and tried the knob on Mary Black’s office door. To my surprise I discovered it unlocked. Immediately after I let go of the knob the door began to swing open on its own, as though the old building was listing just the slightest bit in that direction.

One look inside and I knew Hannah was dead.

I knew it because living people’s flesh is never that shade of gray and living people can’t, or don’t, hold the posture that Hannah was in. Her body was splayed backward over a leather cube ottoman, her head only a yard from the edge of the open door. Her legs were spread immodestly, her torso twisted forty-five degrees at her waist. A dark pool stained an area the size of a basketball on the dhurrie rug below her legs. My gut reaction was: blood. But my nose said urine.

Hannah’s right arm was bent at the elbow and the thumb of her right hand was hooked in the fabric of the silk blouse near her armpit, as though she’d been thinking about hitchhiking someplace when she died.

Oddly, the left front tail of Hannah’s blouse was tucked up under the front of her bra, exposing a few inches of pale abdomen. Why a woman would tuck her blouse up under her bra, I couldn’t begin to guess.

Hannah’s mouth was open, as were her eyes, and her fine dark hair spilled down, perfectly filling the eight- or nine-inch space that existed between the back of her head and the worn finish of the old pine floor.

I dropped to one knee and touched the smoothly stretched skin on Hannah’s neck with the tips of three fingers. I tried not to look into her dark brown eyes but they drew me in like pools of still water. Despite shifting my fingertips a few times I couldn’t find a carotid pulse. It didn’t matter; the chill of Hannah’s flesh on my own had already confirmed to me that I wouldn’t.

Hannah had been dead a while. I recalled the four notes that had been stuck in the jamb of her office door, and figured that she had fallen into her current posture sometime that morning. The arithmetic was simple. My watch said 6:45 P.M. Hannah’s first known missed appointment had been almost ten hours earlier, at 9 A.M. A brief stint as a coroner’s investigator earlier in my career had taught me the usually trivial fact that, after death, human bodies at room temperature yield core temperature at the rate of about one degree an hour. Ten hours meant ten degrees. I guessed that the flesh that my fingers had just touched was probably a good ten degrees cooler than my own.

But I knew it could have been cooler than that, or warmer than that. My experience touching the flesh of dead people was, admittedly, limited. I allowed for the possibility that Hannah had been dead since the night before and I tried to recall how long a body needed to be dead before the stench of death became apparent. Couldn’t.

I began inhaling slowly and self-consciously, as though I hadn’t already been breathing the air in the room. I thought it tasted stale and sour, but the only foreign odor I detected was that spill of urine.

I knew that medical examiners working to determine time of death also did calculations about flying insects and their eggs and the life cycle of maggots, but I quickly decided that I would leave that entomological arithmetic to them.

I was also self-aware enough to know that I was doing all the distracting contemplating so that I wouldn’t be forced to confront the fact that I was unexpectedly alone in an office with a friend’s dead body.

Behind me I noted the sound of a toilet flushing, followed by the timbre of water running, the click of a door opening, and the cadence of familiar footsteps down the hall. Diane, apparently forgetting that she and I were not alone, called out, “Hannah’s not there, but I really had to pee.”

I backed out of the room and saw Diane retracing her steps down the hallway from the bathroom. Her eyes caught mine, registering wariness that quickly disintegrated into shock as she digested my expression. I blocked her path and took her into my arms before she could reach the entrance to Mary Black’s office. I whispered into her hair, “Your friend is dead. I’m so, so sorry.”

The sound that came from Diane’s throat as she processed my words was plaintive and poignant. Resignation and denial and the first disbelieving chords of grief were all mixed into one long, sad wail.

When I looked up I saw the Cheetos lady standing at the other entrance to the hallway, tears streaming down her face. A bright orange smudge across her cheeks marked the spot where she’d tried to wipe away her grief.