Rosenberg leaned forward. “It’s easy to not take Vicodin, when there isn’t any,” she said. “But if you had a few pills in front of you, what would you do then?” She let that sit between them for a minute, and then stood. “I need to fill out some paperwork,” she said. She paused, and Archie thought he saw a glimmer of fear beneath her professional demeanor. “All of this death—it’s far from over, isn’t it?”
Archie sat down in the plastic chair by the window. He could feel the phone vibrate in his pocket. “It’s just starting.”
C H A P T E R 25
Carol Littleton had been going to the Portland Rose Garden three mornings a week for forty years. She had married her husband there. He had been a Royal Rosarian. She had been the 1939 Rose Queen. They had bought a home that faced the garden, and, until her husband had died ten years before, they had routinely strolled the paved paths, past the low, stone walls, through the rose archways, and along the long rows of rosebushes with their plump pungent blooms.
For the last decade, she had had a specific destination in the garden—Neville Chamberlain. All members of the Royal Rosarians were knighted under their chosen variety of rose, their “namesake” rose, and the Neville Chamberlain had been her husband’s.
The Rose Garden had rules about spreading the ashes of loved ones in the garden. Carol understood. That sort of thing piled up, and who wanted to go to a rose garden and see charred bits of people in the topsoil?
There were rules.
But you could get around them.
Carol had been secreting her husband over a few tablespoons at a time since 1997.
There were never many people in the garden at eight in the morning, so she was surprised to see the couple sitting on the bench overlooking the city. It was a nice bench. The Rose Garden was up on a hill and the bench had a nice view of downtown, and Mount Hood beyond it. Carol and her husband had sat on that same bench many times.
She walked down the path toward them, her hand around the Ziploc full of ashes in her pocket. She was still a good forty feet away when the stench hit her.
She didn’t have much of a nose anymore. Too many Lucky Strikes in her younger days. It was why she liked roses—they were one of the few flowers aromatic enough for her to appreciate.
This odor was so foul it seemed to shout at her. She didn’t know how the couple on the bench were standing it. It smelled like something had died. A raccoon maybe, or a squirrel.
As she got closer, Carol lifted a handkerchief from her pocket and put it over her nose.
“Gracious,” she asked the couple, “it smells like the devil, doesn’t it?”
The two were both dressed in long coats and hats—too warm for day, but not out of the question before the sun came up. The summer nights in Portland were still chilly. But the sun had come up, and Carol could see quite clearly that the couple didn’t need coats to stay warm.
The young couple was not a young couple at all.
Carol pressed the handkerchief harder against her face. For a second, a ring of black circled her vision, as her blood pressure dropped, but she took three long, deep breaths and steadied herself. Don’t faint, she told herself.
She’d been a nurse during the war, stationed at an airbase outside London. She had seen corpses. She had even seen corpses worse than these.
Just don’t faint. If you faint, you fall, if you fall, you break your hip, if you break your hip, you give up the house, you give up the walks, you give up Otis.
The bodies on the bench were mostly covered by the long coats and hats, but she could see their faces. They looked like wax dummies that had been left too close to a fire—features just beginning to melt. Their mouths were open, jaws dropped farther than ever possible in life, the inside black, like they’d been drinking oil. Their noses were bent, as if the skin had slipped a little. Horrible.
She looked around the garden and saw no one. The grounds were a maze—hedges and shrubs, walls, and gates. There might be other people there, she just couldn’t see.
“Hello?” she hollered. “Is anyone out there?”
And then, as loud as an old lady could, “Hello?”
She was alone. She wrapped her hand around the sandwich bag of ashes in her pocket, and clutched it.
A bright yellow butterfly fluttered past and alit on the hat of one of the corpses.
No human remains at the park. It was a rule.
Carol Littleton didn’t have a cell phone. But she had a medical alert necklace with a panic button. Stupid thing. Her daughters had made her wear one. It was supposed to have a five-hundred-foot range.
She was a block from the house.
She looked around again, and still saw no one. A thousand feet below, the people and cars and urban kerfuffle of the city made a constant hum. Carol remembered the sound, but she could no longer hear it.
She glanced up the block, toward home. Five hundred feet. It might be close enough.
She lifted the handkerchief from her mouth, her red lipstick smeared on it like blood, found the plastic pendant with a trembling hand, and pushed the button.
C H A P T E R 26