I Am Not A Serial Killer (John Cleaver #1)
Dan Wells
1
Mrs, Anderson was dead.
Nothing flashy, just old age—she went to bed one night and never woke up. 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. Her daughter eventually dropped by to check on her and found her corpse three days rotted and stinking like roadkill. 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.
But peaceful? Certainly. She died quietly in her sleep on August thirtieth, according to the coroner, which means she died two days before something tore Jeb Jolley's insides out and left him in a puddle behind the Laundromat. We didn't know it at the time, but that made Mrs. Anderson the last person in Clayton County to die of natural causes for almost six months. The Clayton Killer got the rest.
Well, most of them. All but one.
We got Mrs. 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.
They're the ones who run the mortuary; I'm only fifteen. 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. I slipped in the back just in case my mom was up front. I didn't really want to see her.
No one was in the back yet, just me and Mrs. Anderson's corpse. It was lying perfectly still on the table, under a blue sheet. It smelled like rotten meat and bug spray, and the lone ventilator fan buzzing loudly overhead wasn't doing much to help. I washed my hands quietly in the sink, wondering how long I had, and gently touched the body. Old skin was my favorite—dry and wrinkled, with a texture like antique paper.
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. After three days in endof-summer heat, there had probably been a lot of them.
A 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. I froze, thinking it was my mother, but the woman just glanced at me and walked to a counter.
"Hi John," she said, collecting some sterile rags. 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. Margaret's voice was a little lighter, though, a little more . . . energetic. I figured it was because she'd never been married.
"Hi, Margaret." I took a step back.
"Ron's getting lazier," she said, picking up a squirt bottle of Dis-Spray. "He didn't even clean her, just declared natural causes and shipped her over. Mrs. Anderson deserves better than this." She turned to look at me. "You just gonna stand there or are you gonna help me?"
“Sorry.”
"Wash up."
I rolled up my sleeves eagerly and went back to the sink.
"Honestly," she went on, "I don't even know what they do over there at the coroner's office. It's not like they're busy—we can barely stay in business here."
"Jeb Jolley died," I said, drying my hands. "They found him this morning behind the Wash-n-Dry."
"The mechanic?" asked Margaret, her voice dropping lower. "That's terrible. He's younger than I am. What happened?"
"Murdered," I said, and pulled a mask and apron from a hook on the wall. "They thought maybe it was a wild dog, but his guts were kind of in a pile."
"That's terrible," Margaret said again.
"Well, you're the one worried about going out of business,"
I said. "Two bodies in one weekend is money in the bank."
"Don't even joke like that, John," she said, looking at me sternly. "Death is a sad thing, even when it pays your mortgage.
You ready?"
“Yes”.
"Hold her arm out."
I grabbed the body's right arm and pulled it straight. Rigor mortis makes a body so stiff you can barely move it, but it only lasts about a day and a half and this one had been dead so long the muscles had all relaxed again. Though the skin was papery, the flesh underneath was soft, like dough. Margaret sprayed the arm with disinfectant and began wiping it gently with a cloth.
Even when the coroner does his job and cleans the body, we always wash it ourselves before we start. Embalming's a long process, with a lot of very precise work, and you need a clean slate to start with.
"It stinks pretty bad," I said.
“She.”