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Deputy Zane called me the next morning while I was spooning up Rice Chex—not enjoying them, just gassing up for the day. He said the autopsy had been completed. Alita Bell, wife to Henry, mother to Jacob and Joseph, had died of a heart attack.
“The ME said it was amazing she lived as long as she did. She had ninety per cent blockages, but that wasn’t all. There was cardiac scarring, which means she’d suffered a number of previous heart attacks. Small ones, you know. He also said… well, never mind.”
“No, go ahead. Please.”
Zane cleared his throat. “He said even little heart attacks, ones you might not even feel, impair cognition. That could explain why she sometimes believed her children were still alive.”
I thought of telling him that I knew her children were alive, or half-alive, and I’d never had a heart attack. I think I almost did tell him.
“Mr. Trenton? Vic?”
“Just thinking about that,” I said. “Does this let me off the hook for the inquest?”
“Nope, you still have to be here for that. You found the body.”
“But if it was a heart attack, pure and simple—”
“Oh, it was. But there won’t be a toxicology report for another couple of days. Need to find out what was in her stomach. Just dotting i’s and crossing t’s, you know.”
I thought it might be a little more. I thought Andy Pelley wanted to make sure that Allie Bell’s last-minute legatee hadn’t fed her something. Digoxin in her scrambled eggs at an early breakfast, perhaps. Meanwhile, Zane was talking and I had to ask him to rewind.
“I was saying there’s a problem. Kinda unique. We’ve got a body, but no burial instructions. Andy Pelley says you might be on the hook for that.”
“Wait, what? I’m supposed to plan a funeral?”
“Probably not a funeral,” Zane said, sounding a trifle embarrassed. “Other than the bridge tenders and maybe Lloyd Sunderland—he lives on the other side of the bridge—I don’t know who’d come.”
I think her kids would, I thought. Although no one would see them. Except, maybe, for their surrogate dad.
“Vic? Mr. Trenton? Did I lose you?”
“Right here. I have the name of her lawyer. My lawyer now, I guess, at least until this gets straightened out. I better give him a call once it gets to business hours.”
“That’s a good idea. You do that. And have a good day.”
As if.
I didn’t want the rest of my cereal, which I hadn’t been tasting anyway. I rinsed the bowl in the sink (see us) and put it in the dishwasher (dress us) and wondered what to do next. Like I didn’t know.
Take us for a walk. Roll us!
I held out against the thoughts—partly my thoughts, that was the worst of it—until I got some clothes on, then gave up. I went out to the garage and grasped the handles of the stroller. I felt a sigh of relief, mine or theirs or both, I didn’t know. The rat-run in my head ceased. I thought of rolling the pram down to the swing gate and knew it was a bad idea. Jacob and Joseph had already wedged their way into my consciousness. The more I did what they wanted, the easier it would be for them to control me.
What I had seen in the guest bedroom stayed with me: men’s bodies, children’s heads swollen with poison. They had grown in death; they had stayed the same. They had the will of men and the simple and selfish desires of small children. They were powerful, and that was bad. But they were also psychotic.
That said, that accepted, I could still feel a certain amount of sympathy. They had fallen among rattlesnakes. They had been stung to death by serpents. Who would not be driven insane by such an ending to life? And who would not want to come back and have the childhood that had been denied to them, even if that meant taking someone prisoner to do it?
I rolled the stroller back and forth across the concrete floor of the garage a few times, as if trying to lull colicky, cranky babies to sleep. I wondered if it could have been anyone and guessed it couldn’t have been. I was perfect. A man alone, one suffering his own grief.
I let go of the handles and waited for see us roll us dress us to come back. It didn’t. I left the garage, wanting to feel the warmth of the morning sun on my living face. I lifted my head and closed my eyes, seeing red as the blood in my eyelids lit up. I stood that way, as if in worship or meditation, hoping for a solution to a problem that was beyond existential. One I couldn’t tell anyone about.
I’m supposed to see her into the ground because she has no one… on this side of the veil, at least. But am I not the same? My parents are dead, my older brother is dead, my wife is dead. Who will bury me? And what will those twins from hell do—supposing they get their way and I stay here, a male version of Delta Dawn—when I pass? Given my age and the actuarial tables, it won’t be all that long. Will they shrivel and just fade away? I can bury Allie, but who will bury me?
I opened my eyes and saw Allie’s snake pole lying on the courtyard cobbles, exactly where the stroller had been parked each time it returned. It crossed my mind that it might be another illusion, like the tub full of snakes, and knew it wasn’t. This wasn’t a vision or a visitation. Nor had the twins put it here. The stroller was their thing.
I picked it up. It was real, all right. The steel pole was warm in my hand. If it had lain out here much longer on the shadeless cobbles, it would have been almost too hot to handle. No one had been here, so who had taken it from the garage?
As I held it I realized my parents, brother, and wife weren’t the only loved ones in my life who were dead. There was one more. One who had also died a terrible death at a young age.
