That was me, a thousand years ago. Kris could still picture her father driving, his hands obediently at ten and two, and her mother reading by the soft glow of a penlight.
Back then, they’d always waited until her father was done with work before hitting the road. It was less than a two-hour drive, so leaving their home in Blantonville at seven or eight in the evening did not seem like such a big deal. They would hear his key in the lock, and Krissy would leap up from the beanbag chair in front of the living room television and race to throw her arms around his waist. It was Daddy, still in his work clothes, the perfect pleats of his slacks, the smooth brown leather of his belt, the stiff, starched shirt and wide, striped tie. As a child, Kris grappled to understand exactly what her father did for a living.
“I sell insurance,” he had told her on more than one occasion. “It’s like the promise that someone will be there if things go wrong.”
Now she knew the truth. Insurance meant hours of phone calls and stacks of paperwork. It meant dealing with a company that searched for any conceivable loophole to get out of paying what they had promised. It meant waiting months, sometimes even years, before the check arrived, if it ever did.
Kris knew the people who were there in an instant when things went wrong, and the insurance company was not one of them.
Not that she had wanted anyone there. Not the neighbors who arrived on her doorstep with still-warm casserole dishes in their hands, as if potatoes covered in cheese and corn flakes could resurrect a loved one. Not the parents from Sadie’s school, who secretly hoped for the destruction of others’ happiness to prove that their own miserable existences were not as bad as they feared. Not the relatives who’d never thought she was good enough in the first place, the ones who’d placed him on that pedestal and convinced her that she had to rise up to his level.
They had not seen what she had seen. None of them were there when the police called in the middle of the night. They did not know the ice-cold panic of realizing your entire life had just been shattered into a million jagged pieces by the ring of a cell phone.
She knew. She knew the uncanny artificiality as she arrived at the Lake County Coroner’s Office in downtown Black Ridge, Colorado. The reception area could have been the front desk of any small-town motel. A fake plastic plant, its warped green leaves covered in dust, stood in the corner beside an oddly placed wooden chair, white stuffing peeking out at the seat cushion’s edge. A random collection of fashion and outdoor magazines lay spread across a glass coffee table, as if anyone there to identify a body would want to first flip through a six-month-old issue of Guns & Ammo. The beige walls of the room did not appear to have been painted that color; rather, the original white had curdled over the years, aged by the medicinal stench of embalming chemicals and the dread of those who walked through the front door.
This is a waiting room, she thought. This is purgatory.
No one had been there to greet her. Not the officer who had woken her at three in the morning, when Jonah should have been home, snoring beside her. Not whoever had left the front door unlocked in anticipation of her arrival. She was welcomed only by the soft rattle of a loose air-conditioning vent and the noxious aroma of chemicals and raw meat seeping in from another room.
Kris blinked, and the highway was once again before her.
She could hear the steady hum of tires skimming across asphalt, hundreds of miles of rough, uneven surface peeling tiny bits of rubber away like sunburned skin.
She knew there was no use searching the radio for music. On the open prairie, closer to dawn than dusk, she would find only static and the rabid shouts of a fire-and-brimstone preacher.
Reaching to the center console, she felt for the charging cord leading to her cell phone. For a moment, her thumb traced the edges of the home button as she considered opening Spotify or Audible, anything to fill the silence.
Behind her, Sadie whimpered softly.
Kris took her eyes off the road just long enough to glance over her shoulder. Sadie had shifted, but her eyes were still closed, head slumped, her curly red hair draped over her face.
Kris let the phone slip from her hand.
Don’t wake her. Let her sleep. We’ll be there in a few hours.
Far off in the distance, she could barely see the headlights of an approaching car, two pinpricks hovering like the eyes of an animal stalking through the night.
A raccoon.
Or a fox.
Fox.
That had been his name.
Howard Fox.
She had seen the name before she saw the man. It was printed in a large, sweeping script at the center of a very official-looking certificate adorned with a gold-leaf stamp and a thick, shimmery blue border:
THE COLORADO CORONER-MEDICAL EXAMINER ASSOCIATION HEREBY CERTIFIES THAT
HOWARD FOX
HAS COMPLETED THE REQUIRED CURRICULUM FOR DEATH INVESTIGATION
The term had plucked a sour chord from her already frayed nerves.
“Death Investigation.”
The sudden opening of a door had startled her, and she had felt her entire body stiffen.
Like the bodies that were growing ever more rigid in the back room.
Like Jonah’s body.
A plain, slightly doughy man wearing round, wire-rimmed glasses was standing in the doorway. His mouth was frozen in the habitual hint of a compassionate smile, the exact same expression he offered every confused, distraught visitor who stumbled through the front entrance.
“I’m so sorry,” Howard Fox said. His voice had a strange, thin quality to it, as if he were constantly fighting a sneeze. “I didn’t expect you so quickly. I thought you were coming from farther away or I would have been here to greet you.”
“I live—” Kris’s words caught in her throat. She swallowed and tried again. “I live in town. I’ve seen this place before, but I’ve never been inside …”
“No reason for you to,” Howard replied, his brow furrowing in a robotic attempt to convey sympathy. “Please, follow me. If you’re ready.”
He did not wait for confirmation before turning and disappearing through the open doorway. Perhaps he knew that if he left the decision to Kris, she would freeze in place, her muscles refusing every command to keep her from entering that room.
From seeing Jonah.
No, not Jonah. The thing that had been Jonah. The mangled shell he had left behind.
Instead, she took a step without realizing it. And then another. And another.
A waft of frigid air greeted her, and she shivered, her entire body prickling with gooseflesh.
Howard waited off to her left until Kris was well into the room, then he swung the door shut behind her. The door latched into place with a dull thud that echoed softly off the surfaces of the hard, cold room. This place was not for the living. It was a place of dissection, of splitting rib cages and weighing organs like lettuce at the supermarket.
Metal shelves were crowded with plastic bottles full of instruments soaking in neon blue and yellow liquids. Several cabinets made from sleek stainless steel lined the other walls. A massive LED spotlight stretched down from the ceiling on a hinged arm like the staring, cyclopean eye of an alien creature, projecting a cone of bright, pristine light onto the black plastic sheet that rose into a vaguely human shape.
“I know this is a very difficult thing to do,” Howard said from just over her shoulder.
Kris flinched. She had forgotten he was in the room with her.