Phillip took her to the picture window and pointed. “We turned the lights off so we could see outside. See the body? By the mimosa tree?”
I could tell when Susan spotted it, because she took a deep breath. “Go outside to check her, or wait for the EMT?” she asked herself in a whisper. While she tried to remember procedure, the decision was taken out of her hands. The lights of the ambulance flashed across the front windows.
“Susan, there’s a gate into the backyard to the left of the house,” I said. “That will save you time.” She dashed out of the front door to guide the EMTs to the body, her dilemma solved.
“Good thinking,” Phillip said. “They won’t have to come through the house. You better stay down on the couch. You don’t look good, Roe.”
I couldn’t count the times people had told me that during the past two days. I stayed down, and covered myself with the fuzzy afghan I kept thrown across the back of the couch from September through March. Phillip sat by me, his phone in hand, his thumbs flying. He was texting away.
“Who’s up at this hour?” Even as I spoke, I realized it was an absurd question. Phillip slept with his phone, so I had to assume a lot of other teens did.
“You going to call Robin now?” He was trying to sound casual, but I wasn’t fooled. He thought Robin needed to be here.
“Not right now,” I said. “There’s no point waking him up, assuming he’s even left the hotel bar. We don’t really know anything yet.”
“We know there’s a dead woman in the backyard. That’s pretty major.”
I couldn’t deny it. “Robin’s catching a flight at noon tomorrow. I doubt he could get here any faster even if I called him, and he’d just worry the whole time.”
Phillip didn’t look convinced, but he let it go.
The whole sad procedure—with which I was already too familiar—played out in the next forty-five minutes, while the storm advanced with ominous sound effects and dark clouds scudding across the moon. I was surprised the rain had held off this long. I was sure the police were hurrying with whatever they had to accomplish, before the rain washed the yard clean.
The yard was now lit up like a runway. With the curtains open and the inside light dim, I watched a trail of people enter and leave the yard. Most of the visitors wore dark windbreakers with “LPD” in big bright yellow letters on the back. I recognized almost all of them.
Finally, everyone reacted when a man I didn’t know appeared in the yard. His jacket read “CORONER.” I saw a head of dark curly hair, and I caught the glint of a pair of glasses. Arnie Petrosian. I’d voted for him in the last election, but I’d never met him face-to-face.
And I’d sure never imagined he’d be in my backyard.
It was like watching a movie with the sound turned off. The coroner knelt, checked the pulse and respiration, and pulled down the eyelids, which made me squeamish.
“Yuck,” said Phillip.
Petrosian rose, nodded in the general direction of all the police in the yard, and moved out of my sight as briskly as he’d arrived. That formality over, everyone flew into action. The urgency was underlined by a crack of lightning that made everyone jump, myself included. Phillip called up the weather screen on his phone, and we were able to watch the front approach minute by minute.
Soon, the body was removed in a black bag, with a patrolman at each end. The bag hung between the men, limp and formless. What had been a human being was now a limp tube of flesh and bone.
“Where will they take her?” Phillip said.
“To the GBI medical examiners in Decatur,” I told him.
There was a moment of silence, and I thought Phillip might have dozed off. Just then, he glanced at the screen of his phone. “Storm’s almost here,” he said. “I hope they’ve got all their pictures and found all their clues.”
The mimosa tree where we’d found the body was rippling in the wind. Even the short bushes were tossing their heads.
The night actually could get worse.
A quiet knock made my head snap to the front door. Phillip popped up from the couch to answer it.
“Ms. Teagarden available?” said an unfamiliar voice.
Phillip said, “She’s in here. But can you keep it short? She’s been really sick.”
I was surprised—to the extent I could feel surprise anymore—when the coroner himself stepped into my line of vision. He stood by the couch awkwardly. I could see the deep lines around his eyes. I decided he must be close to fifty. He shook my hand very lightly, as though my bones would break if he squeezed.
“Ardos Petrosian,” he said. “Call me Arnie. Ms. Teagarden?”
“Yes. Would you care to sit down?”
“Thanks, I will. You look unwell, if you don’t mind me saying.”
When a coroner says you look bad, that’s pretty dire. “Flu,” I explained.
Phillip silently handed Petrosian a little bottle of hand sanitizer that had been on the side table. It wasn’t mine. Virginia’s? Petrosian, opposite me, lost no time in squirting some on his hands and rubbing it in vigorously. I hoped he’d used some after touching the dead woman.
Phillip sat by my feet, I guess so he could tackle the coroner if he tried to assault me. My brother was earning stars in heaven tonight.
“The police will be in soon to talk to you about your missing person. I’d sure like to put a name to the body. You sure the dead woman is not your babysitter?”
That would have been neat and tidy.
“Definitely not. Virginia is African American, she’s very slim, her hair is short, and she wasn’t dressed anything like the dead woman.”
Arnie Petrosian looked grim. He had a woman’s body without a name, and we were missing a woman whose name we knew. The fact that they didn’t match was baffling.
Petrosian took a long look around him, which I thought was odd. “I used to come here all the time when the previous owners lived here.”
I didn’t know what to do with that, so I simply nodded.
The coroner thanked me, though I wasn’t sure what for, and took his departure.
Our lot had never been lit up like this. I thought, You can probably see our backyard from the moon. A huge exaggeration, of course—but still, it was plenty bright, and crammed with people searching every inch of the ground.
“Maybe they’ll get done in time,” Phillip said, though the last word was drowned out by a roll of thunder. “You want something to eat?”
My growing brother. “No, thanks,” I said. “I wouldn’t turn down a drink, though. Some fruit juice?”
The crime scene investigators and the other official people were not making any effort to keep quiet, naturally enough. This was a death investigation. The termination of a human being took priority over keeping the peace and quiet of the neighborhood. This was not much better than sirens.