Flies were busy in his wounds; the ends of his ribs were already exposed, patches of white beneath the black of dried blood and muscle. Insects had eaten out his eyes. I felt my lunch start to rise up and made it down the steps in time to throw up in the pit by the shed.
I went back to my car on wobbly legs and collapsed on the front seat. I drank some water from the bottle I’d brought with me. It was as hot as the air and tasted rubbery, but it settled my stomach a bit. I sat for some minutes watching a farmer move up and down a remote field, dust billowing around him. He was too far away for me to hear. The only sound came from the wind in the corn, and the crows circling above it.
When my legs and stomach calmed down, I took the big beach towel I use for my dogs from the backseat. In the trunk I found an old T-shirt that I slit open so I could tie it over my nose and mouth. Armed with this makeshift mask, I returned to the house. I waved the towel hard enough to dislodge most of the flies, then covered the dog.
When I stepped over his body, it was into a kitchen from hell. A scarred wooden hutch, once painted white, was filled with spray cans of starter fluid, drain cleaner, jars part-full of ugly-looking liquids, eye droppers, Vicks inhalers, and gallon jugs labeled “muriatic acid.” A makeshift lab hood with an exhaust vent had been constructed over the hutch. Half buried in the filth were a number of industrial face masks.
Whoever had kicked in the door had also pulled linoleum from the floor and pried up some of the rotting boards underneath. I squatted and pointed my flashlight through an opening between the exposed joists. Water heater, furnace, stood on the dirt floor below me, but no bodies as far as I could tell. Cool air rose from the basement, along with a smell of leaf mold that seemed wholesome in contrast to the chemicals around me.
I straightened and played my light around the room. It was hard to tell how much of the shambles had been caused by the dog killers and how much by the natives.
I stepped over jugs that had been knocked to the floor, skirted a couple of plug-in heaters, and moved into the rooms beyond.
It was an old farmhouse, with a front room that had once been a formal parlor, judging by the remnants of decorative tiles around the empty fireplace. These had been pried out of the mantel and shattered. Someone had held target practice against an old rolltop desk. An angry hand had smashed the drawers and scattered papers around the floor.
I stooped to look at them. Most were past-due notices from the county for taxes and for garbage pickup. The Palfry Public Library wanted a copy of Gone With the Wind that Agnes Schlafly had checked out in 1979.
Scraps of photos were all that remained of a savagely mangled album. When I dropped it back on the scrap heap, it dislodged one intact picture. It was an old photo, bleached and scarred from its time in the meth house, which showed a dozen or so people gathered around a large metal egg balanced on a giant tripod. It looked like a cartoon version of a pod landing from outer space, but the group around it stared at the camera with solemn pride. Three women, in the longer skirts and thick-heeled shoes of the 1930s, sat in the middle; five men stood behind them, all in jackets and ties.
I frowned over it, wondering what the metal egg could possibly be. Pipes ran through it; perhaps it was the prototype of a machine to ferry milk from cow to refrigerated storage. Just because it was an oddity, I stuck it into my bag.
The adjacent room contained a couple of card tables and some chairs with broken backs. Empty pizza cartons, chicken bones, and a bowl of cereal that was growing mold: I could see it as a Bosch still life.
A staircase led to a second floor; tucked underneath it was a stopped-up toilet. A better detective than I might have looked inside, but the smell told me more than I wanted to know.
Three bedrooms were built under the eaves at the top of the stairs. Two of them held only mattresses and plastic baskets. These had been upended, spilling dirty clothes over the floor. The mattresses had been slit, so that hunks of batting covered the clothes.
There’d been an actual bed and a dresser in the third bedroom, but these, too, had been ripped apart. An eight-by-ten of a young woman holding a baby had been torn from the frame, which itself had been broken in half and tossed onto the shredded bedclothes.
I picked up the photo, cautiously, by the edges. The print was so faded that I couldn’t make out the woman’s face, but she had a halo of dark curls. I slipped the picture into my shoulder bag along with the one of the milk pod.
A large poster of Judy Garland, with the caption Somewhere Over the Rainbow, hung by one corner over the bedstead, the tape ripped away from the other edges. I wondered if that was the drug user’s joke: “way up high.” It was hard to imagine a meth addict as a purveyor of irony, but it’s easy to be judgmental about people you’ve never met.
The few clothes in the closet—a gold evening gown, a velvet jacket that had once been maroon, and a pair of designer jeans—had also been slit.