The Body Farm, page 23
Beatrice was almost too stunned to respond. She managed to bar the door with her foot, keeping him on the porch. He was acting as though they’d never broken up, as though the events of the past two years had slipped his mind. She could not tell if it was a performance or if he really believed they were still together and imagined that she would let him into her home, into her bed.
“Let’s order pizza,” he said. “The plane food was awful.”
“You have to leave,” she gasped out. She did not even know how to argue with him—he was so far from reality as she understood it that there was no common ground on which to stand.
There followed an incoherent shouting match, him declaring that she was acting childish and crazy, her sobbing that he wasn’t her boyfriend anymore. Eventually one of her neighbors called the police. Beatrice felt a swoop of hope when she saw the red and blue lights dancing off the buildings. She still imagined then that the law could help in situations like this.
Two officers clomped onto the porch, both men. Emerson spoke first, explaining that he’d flown across the country to see his girlfriend of six years and for some reason she wasn’t letting him in. The men looked at Beatrice with their eyebrows raised. This would prove to be a tactic of Emerson’s: if he could establish his own version of events with enough confidence right off the bat, anything Beatrice said to contradict him, no matter how true, seemed dubious to their audience. Faltering, she mumbled that she and Emerson broke up years ago. He shouldn’t be here, she said.
“I brought you this.” He reached into his suitcase and handed her a wrapped package. “Open it.”
“I don’t want it,” she said. “I don’t want anything from you. You need to leave.”
Emerson threw a glance at the officers, who nodded back sympathetically. He tore open the wrapping himself, revealing a lacquered plaque with HOME SWEET HOME etched into the wood. Beatrice has always hated that kind of schmaltz, of course. Anything in the vicinity of Live, Laugh, Love leaves her cold. She believes that people who need placards on the wall to remind themselves about affection or comfort or joy are deeply unhappy. In the past, she had said as much to Emerson. Did he listen to her? Ever?
“You have no idea who I am,” she said, with dawning horror.
“I think it’s nice,” one of the officers said, bristling on Emerson’s behalf.
Eventually Beatrice made it clear to everyone that Emerson wasn’t going to enter her house that night. The policemen offered to drive him to a hotel a few blocks away. It wasn’t technically allowed, but they obviously felt such sympathy for this poor jilted Romeo that they broke procedure to give him a ride.
In the morning, Emerson showed up at the coffee shop where Beatrice worked. He followed her to the grocery store on her lunch break and critiqued her purchases. He introduced himself to her coworkers as her long-distance boyfriend. They were all surprised they’d never heard of him, accosting Beatrice in the break room to ask for details. Hadn’t she been dating the clerk from the Taco Bell a few months back? Was she cheating on Emerson? Or did they have an open relationship?
Two weeks later, Beatrice moved to Maine.
○
After Emerson’s letter came, things were fraught for all of us. Beatrice flinched every time her phone rang. One of the cats tripped our new alarm system in the middle of the night and Beatrice seemed to forget how to breathe, wheezing and choking beside me as I threw off the blankets and ran to investigate.
The two of you were affected as well. Four-year-olds are as sensitive as tuning forks, picking up and echoing the vibrations of their parents. You each responded differently—Lucas by sobbing at imaginary injuries and ending each day with dozens of colorful Band-Aids on every limb, Theo by charging around the house with a plastic spear and cardboard armor, fighting pillows and shadows and the poor cats, who took to crouching on top of the tallest furniture.
And I was angry. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt such sustained, slow-burning rage. Teeth gnashing. Fists clenched. Even my dreams were fiery and bloodstained.
Our friends rallied around us, offering to babysit or spend the night on the couch. Several of them made noises about involving the police, but Beatrice, with the weary resignation of painful experience, explained that the electric-blue note wasn’t signed, and anyway it didn’t contain a threat or anything actionable. All her previous restraining orders against Emerson—one in Maine, one in Virginia, and one in Texas—had lapsed.
So there was nothing we could do but wait, all of us, Beatrice terrified, me furious, and both of you keyed up. Tender Lucas. Warlike Theo. We did not know what would come next. It was like waiting for a meteor to fall to earth without having a clue when or where it would land.
In the past, Emerson had sent texts, selfies, handwritten sonnets with improper scansion, and an engagement ring in a velvet box. Whenever Beatrice changed her phone number, he eventually discovered the new one. He lurked outside her previous apartments in his car, smiling up at her window. He sent flowers to each of her workplaces. Once he slashed her tires. He no longer claimed to be suicidal, not since she’d had him involuntarily committed. Sometimes he threatened her, but never in any way she could substantiate to others. He might send an anonymous note saying he’d kill her if she didn’t stop sleeping with that trashy line cook from the diner. He might leave a knife on her porch steps. He stayed just on the legal side of things. She couldn’t prove he’d been the one to slash her tires. She couldn’t explain to the officer behind the desk why it was so alarming that he’d sent her a diamond ring.
Each time she moved to a new town, a new state, there would be a grace period before Emerson caught up. Beatrice could breathe again. She could begin to hope that the last time might have been the last time. Maybe he wouldn’t discover her new locale. Maybe she had finally proven to be too much trouble for him to pursue. She would find a job and rent an apartment. She might tumble into a crush, into bed with someone new. She even dated men, which to me seems rather like visiting grizzly territory after having been mauled by a bear. As time passed, she would relax, sleeping through the night again, not looking over her shoulder every time she turned a corner.
And then the call, the knock on the door, the bouquet sent to her desk at work. Can you imagine her fear and dismay? I couldn’t, not until it happened under my roof.
○
At the Body Farm, I sat at my desk with the lights off, spinning in circles in my wheelie chair. Would the meteor strike today, while I was out of the house? Armando and Joe—longtime friends of ours, a dear married couple in their sixties—were spending the morning with you and Beatrice, teaching you to grow herbs in pots, which could then be transferred to the garden when spring came. But I wasn’t sure this was sufficient protection. Joe was frail, requiring a cane to walk more than a few feet, and I didn’t like the bulbous appearance of Armando’s nose lately, the distinct thickening and reddening caused by alcohol overuse. Sometimes it’s hard for me not to look for a cause of death in the making.
A knock at my office door startled me. Hyo stepped into the room, holding a canister of specimen jars. Her expression was quizzical, her eyes as bright as a bird’s.
“Let’s go,” she said. “It’s a perfect morning.”
“What?”
She leaned over and flipped on the light. “How long have you been sitting here? Come on, there’s work to be done.”
“Right.”
“You okay?”
“Yes. Fine. It’s nothing.”
We strolled down the hill, both of us in down coats and latex gloves and surgical masks, muffling our voices as we chatted. We had worked together for years, and our small talk was as comfortable as breathing: slime, larvae, mildew, blowflies. Hyo sported a sunflower-yellow shower cap, incongruous in the wintry air. In theory, this would keep the smell of death out of her dark mane. I wore my own hair pixie-short. Easier to scrub clean at the end of the day.
As we walked, I was surprised by my ability to perform normalcy. My mind was not there, on the grounds; it was back home, hovering around my family like an avenging angel. And yet I made notes on my clipboard and conversed casually with Hyo about the humidity, the cloud cover, and the corpse lying in grass: a man in his thirties, his face melted like candle wax. Despite the cold, phorid flies droned around his torso. Hyo leaned over him and began gathering specimens. I watched her label each jar in her tiny scribble before dropping it into her bag. Beneath her mask, her cheeks were pink from the chill.
“Remember when we first started?” she said. “You always used to put the bodies on their bellies. You didn’t like to see their faces.”
“That was a long time ago.”
She brushed a stray lock of hair off her cheek with her forearm. We were all conditioned never to touch our faces with our gloved hands out in the field.
“I was worse than you,” she said. “I couldn’t use the word murder. Remember? I’d say ‘dispatched’ like we were in a Jane Austen novel.”
I put on an upper-crust British accent. “This fellow was dispatched a week ago. The bloat is quite severe. His testicles have swollen to the size of a cricket ball.”
Hyo laughed. “God, how things change. I’ve got no problem with it now. Murder, murder, murder.”
She moved up the hill, toward the next corpse on her list. I stood still, the word echoing in my mind.
○
At three in the morning, Beatrice’s cell phone rang. I heard her turn over in bed and fumble around on the nightstand, knocking the lampshade against the wall.
“Hello?” she muttered into the pillow.
With a lurch, she bolted upright. I did the same. Even in the dark bedroom I could see that her irises were ringed with white all the way around.
“How did you get this number?” she asked. Then, quickly, she placed the phone on the blanket between us and put it on speaker.
“—always do,” a man’s voice was saying. A reedy tenor. Clipped consonants. I reached for Beatrice’s hand and laced her fingers through mine.
“Did you get my letter?” Emerson asked.
“I did. How long have you been in the area?” She gripped my hand so tightly that I felt my bones scrape together.
“Just got here,” he said lazily. “You know, I’ve come to really enjoy this game we play. The thrill of the chase never gets old.”
“It’s not a game,” Beatrice said. “I thought this time—”
“You thought I wouldn’t find you? I’ll always find you, honey.”
She shuddered convulsively at the endearment. I moved closer, laying my cheek against her shoulder.
“You got married,” he said. “You changed your name. I liked your old name better.”
There was an unsettling singsong quality to his speech. I wondered if his voice was always pitched so high or if emotion had altered it.
“I’m going to hang up now,” he said. “I’d rather talk to you when you’re alone.”
“Are you saying—” she began, but he was gone. She checked that the call had ended, then turned her phone off. She tucked it under a pillow, shook her head as though disagreeing with herself, got to her feet, and paced. Finally she carried her phone into the bathroom, holding it between two fingers like a grimy scrap of garbage, and shoved it into a cabinet among the hand towels. Only then, it seemed, could she be sure that no part of Emerson was present.
“Is he watching us somehow?” she murmured to me, climbing back into bed, her eyes darting everywhere. “Is that what he meant? ‘When you’re alone,’ he said. How did he know?”
I stroked her hair out of her face. “He made an educated guess. He assumed I’d be in bed with you. Where else would I be? He’s just trying to scare you.”
Privately, however, I vowed to check and recheck all our new security cameras. Maybe I’d get one of those bug sweepers I’d seen on spy shows. Who knew what this madman was capable of? The rage burned in my chest like a coal.
“It’s never going to stop.” Beatrice buried her face in my throat, wetting my skin with her tears.
○
Ours was a whirlwind courtship. Fleeing Texas, Beatrice moved to Iowa. We met at a summer barbecue hosted by one of her new coworkers. Within the week we were engaged. My queer friends teased me for hitching the U-Haul to the Subaru with such stereotypical swiftness, but nothing about this love felt ordinary to me.
I’d always maintained a distance in relationships before. My work made romance tricky. I would wait a reasonable period of time before telling each new girlfriend about my job, hoping first to enchant them with my wiles and sexual prowess. Usually they broke it off as soon as they learned the truth. Other times they stuck around for a short while but urged me constantly to get into another field, something normal, not quite so horrifying.
It has always been difficult for me to explain why I enjoy this work. Initially I took the job because full-time gigs for entomologists are few and far between, and I have no taste for academia. I figured I would see what the Body Farm was all about, help close a few cold cases, and leave for greener pastures as soon as I got an opportunity for fieldwork, ideally in a rainforest where I could make my name discovering a new species of beetle. There are always more beetles to be found.
Most researchers stay at the Body Farm for either a couple of hours or their entire lives. There was, of course, an adjustment period for me. In my introductory meeting, LaTanya informed me casually that if I needed to throw up or faint, that was fine, as long as I didn’t do it on the corpses themselves. And yes, I vomited once or twice at the start, I admit. But soon it turned out that I had the right mindset. I could focus on the trees instead of the forest. I learned to turn my attention to the details (the timeline of pupation, the movement of larvae through rotting tissue, or the metallic sheen of healthy adult blowflies) while ignoring the bigger picture entirely (existential dread, gut-wrenching repulsion, and my own fear of inescapable death).
I didn’t stay just for the bugs, however. My work matters. I sleep well at night knowing that I’m helping balance the scales of justice. Even as a child I was a righteous soul, beating up other people’s bullies on the playground and shattering a neighbor boy’s magnifying glass when he used it to fry ants. Now I take on the work that few others are capable of. I look death in the face every day and analyze how it moves, what it wants. I do it for the good of us all.
“I think your work is amazing,” Beatrice told me the night I proposed. No one had ever said anything like this to me before. She even enjoyed my interesting insect facts—or pretended to, anyway, well enough that I never knew the difference.
God, I was smitten—I still am, honestly, all these years later. Your mother is a rare creature. The way she listens with her whole body. The way she radiates calm in a palpable forcefield, softening the mood of an entire room. The way she reacts viscerally and audibly to whatever she’s reading—laughing and nodding and saying “Oh!” alone on the porch swing, as though the author could hear. Her hopefulness is like a kite rising on the wind, carried irresistibly upward. As a grouchy pessimist, I stand in awe of her innate buoyancy. Nothing else could have seen her through Emerson’s madness. Each time she escaped him, she was able to hope, sincerely and completely, that it would finally end.
We married. She took my name. By that point Emerson had been silent for over a year, the longest stretch since college.
He did not make contact when we traveled to Paris for our honeymoon. He did not make contact when we bought our house. He did not make contact when you were born, first Theo, then Lucas, a vaginal delivery, brave Beatrice laboring for thirty-seven hours. You looked like her even then, my angels, with your identical tufts of black fuzz and crumpled faces. Her nose went to Lucas. Her chin went to Theo. Both of you got her perfect tawny skin.
Seven years of peace punctured by a bright blue envelope. I thought Emerson was gone, I really did. To be honest, I figured he was dead.
○
A second electric-blue envelope showed up a few days after Emerson’s late-night phone call. You two found it, rushing to the door at the sound of letters sliding through the mail slot. I’m sorry that I shouted at you. The world dissolved into a crimson haze the moment I glimpsed my babies holding something that monster had touched. I yelled, and then the envelope was in my hands and you both were staring wide-eyed at me from the safety of Beatrice’s embrace on the other side of the room.
“Don’t take it out on them,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I went to you, kneeling down to your eye level. “Mama’s so sorry. Mama was being a jerk.”
“Mama was being a jerk!” you chorused.
“A-plus parenting, babe,” Beatrice said, plucking the blue envelope from my grasp. She gave me a nudge to take the sting out of her words, then slipped from the room.
He had written her a poem, that son of a bitch. I won’t repeat his maudlin little stanzas here. Suffice it to say that after reading it, Beatrice went to bed and cried for the rest of the day.
○
I know a lot about murder. I’ve spent years considering motive, means, and opportunity. There are five classifications of death: homicide, suicide, accidental, natural, and unknown. Though the cadavers we study at the Body Farm usually fall into the “natural” column, our research applies to all the other kinds too. Part of our job is to beat killers at their own game, to think like they do, to think better than they do. The police are fond of saying there’s no such thing as a perfect murder, but I don’t agree. There are flaws in any system. I helped design this particular system, so I’m aware of its flaws.
Toxicology reports, for instance, are far from comprehensive. During an autopsy, the medical examiner studies the victim’s blood. She looks for illegal substances (like heroin and cocaine) and prescription medications (like opiates and amphetamines). But it simply isn’t possible to screen for everything. Nobody checks for jellyfish venom or deadly nightshade, for example—not unless there’s a specific reason to do so. Other poisons melt away upon ingestion, leaving no trace in the body. Cyanide does not linger in the blood; the only indication is a faint smell of almonds, and even that varies. Ricin, too, kills within days and leaves no sign of its presence.
