Mortal Remains Read online

  MORTAL REMAINS

  MARY ANN FRASER

  STERLING TEEN and the distinctive Sterling Teen logo are trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

  Text © 2021 Mary Ann Fraser

  Cover © 2021 Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-4549-3949-8

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  Cover design by Elizabeth Mihaltse Lindy

  Interior design by Julie Robine

  Cover credit:

  Shutterstock.com: FOX IN THE BOX (rose); JBOY (snow); jessicahyde (background); PawelChrzanowski (blood drop); Pongsak2021 (ivy); Vladimir L. (thorns)

  TO MY HUSBAND, TODD.

  AND TO MY FATHER, NOEL.

  NOT ALL HEROES MAKE IT TO THE END OF THE STORY.

  DEATH SETS A THING SIGNIFICANT

  THE EYE HAD HURRIED BY,

  EXCEPT A PERISHED CREATURE

  ENTREAT US TENDERLY

  TO PONDER LITTLE WORKMANSHIPS

  IN CRAYON OR IN WOOL,

  WITH “THIS WAS LAST HER FINGERS DID”

  INDUSTRIOUS UNTIL

  THE THIMBLE WEIGHED TOO HEAVY,

  THE STITCHES STOPPED THEMSELVES,

  AND THEN ’TWAS PUT AMONG THE DUST

  UPON THE CLOSET SHELVES.

  A BOOK I HAVE, A FRIEND GAVE,

  WHOSE PENCIL, HERE AND THERE,

  HAD NOTCHED THE PLACE THAT PLEASED HIM,—

  AT REST HIS FINGERS ARE.

  NOW, WHEN I READ, I READ NOT,

  FOR INTERRUPTING TEARS

  OBLITERATE THE ETCHINGS

  TOO COSTLY FOR REPAIRS.

  —EMILY DICKINSON, “DEATH SETS A THING SIGNIFICANT”

  Contents

  LILY McCRAE’S RULES OF CONDUCT

  RULE #1: ONLY LET THE DEAD SEE YOU CRY.

  RULE #2: DEATH DOES NOT KEEP HOURS. NEITHER SHOULD YOU.

  RULE #3: MAKE EACH PERSON’S LAST DAY ABOVE GROUND MEMORABLE.

  RULE #4: BE PREPARED FOR THE UNEXPECTED REMOVAL.

  RULE #5: BEFORE PROCEEDING, EXAMINE THE CONDITION OF THE BODY.

  RULE #6: A BLUSH SHOULD BE SUBTLE.

  RULE #7: GET OUT OF THE WAY WHEN PEOPLE ARE GRIEVING.

  RULE #8: YOU’RE ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR GEAR.

  RULE #9: TO AVOID UNRAVELING, MAKE YOUR STITCHES TIGHT, YOUR KNOTS TIGHTER.

  RULE #10: THE CLOTHES MAKE THE CORPSE.

  RULE #11: DON’T MASK THE FACE; GIVE IT LIFE.

  RULE #12: TREAD LIGHTLY ON HALLOWED GROUND.

  RULE #13: TAG, BAG, AND DOCUMENT EVERYTHING.

  RULE #14: LEATHER HAS NO PLACE IN A MORTICIAN’S WARDROBE.

  RULE #15: ALWAYS SET THE BRAKES ON THE GURNEY.

  RULE #16: HANDLE ALL FLUIDS WITH CARE.

  RULE #17: KEEP THE DEAD’S SECRETS, AND THEY’LL KEEP YOURS.

  RULE #18: DON’T GET RUN OVER AT THE CROSSROADS OF LIFE AND DEATH.

  RULE #19: EYES ARE BEST GLUED SHUT.

  RULE #20: MEASURE TWICE, BOX ONCE.

  RULE #21: THERE ARE SOME REQUESTS THAT SHOULD NOT AND CANNOT BE HONORED.

  RULE #22: EMBALMING CAN BUY ONLY SO MUCH TIME.

  RULE #23: TRUST THE DEAD. THEY NEVER LIE.

  RULE #24: WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, WASH THE HEARSE.

  RULE #25: A BIT OF BLING IS THE PERFECT DISTRACTION FROM AN IMPERFECTION.

  RULE #26: EVEN ENDINGS HAVE ENDS. LEARN TO SAY GOODBYE WITH GRACE.

  RULE #27: GET COMFORTABLE WITH DEATH, BUT NOT TOO COMFORTABLE.

  RULE #28: PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THE LIPS.

  RULE #29: NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE MAGIC OF GOOD LIGHTING.

  RULE #30: LEAVE NO TRACE OF BLOOD.

  RULE #31: LOSS COMES IN STAGES. DEAL WITH IT.

  RULE #32: DEATH IS THE ALMIGHTY LEVELER.

  RULE #33: NO TIME LIKE MOURNING FOR DECIDING WHAT REALLY MATTERS.

  RULE #34: DON’T LOSE YOURSELF IN THE NARRATIVE OF DEATH AND DYING.

  RULE #35: THERE’S A PERFECT VESSEL FOR EVERY BODY.

  RULE #36: THE CLOTHES MAKE THE CORPSE.

  RULE #37: GRAVES—WHEN IN DOUBT, DIG DEEPER.

  RULE #38: DON’T FEAR THE DEAD. FEAR THE LIVING.

  RULE #39: LEARN TO ACCEPT THAT SOME BODILY DAMAGE IS BEYOND FIXING.

  RULE #40: EACH DEATH HELPS TO MAKE US MORE HUMAN.

  RULE #41: THE LAST AND MOST IMPORTANT RULE: RULES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LILY McCRAE’S

  RULES OF CONDUCT

  RULE #1

  ONLY LET THE DEAD SEE YOU CRY.

  No one listens like the dead. Not in my house, anyway.

  Take Helen Delaney. She arrived a week into summer, and after two days I was confessing things to her—the dark private things, the self-incriminating fragments of my life that I’d never told another living soul. But, like most people who entered through our back doors, her time with us was coming to a swift end. With organ music as our soundtrack and converted gas lamps to light our way, we caromed down the hall to the cold room for the last time. The warped flooring my great-grandfather had salvaged from the town’s infamous hanging tree at the edge of our property creaked rhythmically. It was the house’s way of reminding me that it still breathed with the echoes of my ancestors’ footsteps.

  “Hang on,” I told Helen. The shimmying gurney collided against the chair rail with a bonk that jolted her arm over the side. I was running late, but what were a few minutes to put things right? Helen was in no rush.

  I placed her fallen limb back across her midsection and rearranged the plastic strand of pearls caught on a button, all while noting how the Caribbean Coral lip stain I selected perfectly framed Helen’s unwavering smile and complemented her peachy complexion.

  People often ask, “Doesn’t it gross you out to work on cadavers? What if a corpse comes back to life? Aren’t you afraid of ghosts?” None of that frightened me. Truth is only the living can hurt you, but I also knew dead isn’t necessarily gone. That day six years earlier, when I somersaulted out of a tree, proved as much.

  So no, corpses didn’t bother me. Never had. I accept that bodies come with expiration dates. It’s their stories that haunt me, and there’s no end to stories when your family owns a funeral home. Helen’s story was like too many—seventy-one, living out of her car, and, if the trash in the back seat was any indication, surviving on Spudnuts and Big Macs. A whole day had gone by before someone found her slumped over her steering wheel at the far end of a Walmart parking lot, a crumpled wad of photos in her hand. It was the many images of a scruffy little boy that convinced me at least one person would come to her viewing to say goodbye. I was wrong. That’s how Helen became one more in a growing tally of people I’ve washed and dressed in preparation for the grave, and in the end, it changed nothing.

  I straightened the oil painting of Eilean Donan Castle—the gurney nearly knocked it from its hook—and noted the trail of scuffs and gouges I’d added to the wainscoting behind me. “Dad’s going to take that out of my pay for sure.” It wouldn’t have happened at all if I’d been upstairs changing instead of keeping Helen company. Mallory would be here any minute, and I was still dressed as if I were on my way to one of my parents’ Rotary Club luncheons instead of to a party.

  Party? More like an intervention. It was all part of Mal’s summer plan t
o reinvent herself—and me, too, while she was at it. But Mal had stuck by me when I was a broken mess, so if she wanted to go to this party, then I needed to go to this party. Ugh. I would rather chill in the cold room with Helen.

  I popped into the office only long enough to unpin my name tag, which read LILY MCCRAE, MCCRAE FAMILY FUNERAL HOME, and drop it with a clink into my Life Is Good, It’s Death That Sucks mug—a birthday gift from my stepbrother, Evan. Back in the hall with Helen I undid the top button of my blouse and finger-combed my hair. It was the most I was willing to do.

  A lean to the right got the gurney running straight again, but I still managed to clip the doorjamb on the way into the prep room. I looked to the regulator clock to bolster my courage. My stepmother, Rachel, claimed the old timekeeper had the steady beat of a dependable heart. “Something we don’t hear enough around here,” she liked to say. That always used to make Dad laugh. Now, when I needed it most, the ailing mechanism hung ominously mute—probably because no one bothered to wind it.

  “I can’t do it,” I told Helen. “I can’t face the loneliness of another crowded party, not even for Mal.” I pulled out my phone and started texting.

  ME: Go without me.

  MAL: R U sure?

  ME: Very.

  MAL: But everyone’s going to be there.

  ME: Exactly.

  I pocketed my phone, hoping she’d forgive me one more time. Then I gave Helen’s stiff hand a gentle squeeze. “That’s what I like about you, Helen. You aren’t going to waste your breath telling me to lighten up and go have a good time when it’ll be more of the same.” After all, I was the “mortician’s daughter,” a title that had made me the target of more sick jokes and lame pranks than there were thorns on a briar rose.

  The cold-room door seal made a sucking sound as I pulled open the latch. I pushed in the gurney and parked it. With each lock of a wheel, Helen’s salt-and-pepper curls bounced lightly over the pillow I’d stitched for her. I pulled out my embroidery snips, the pride of my scissor collection, and clipped a loose thread. Now the pillow was perfect. Of course in cases like Helen’s, the county covered the basic costs. According to my parents, anything above and beyond was something we couldn’t afford. But life is humbling enough. As the resident apprentice and makeup artist, the least I could do is dignify the departure.

  And wasn’t the family motto “Take care of the dead and they’ll take care of you”? Okay, maybe sometimes I took it too far. Like arranging a viewing for Helen. And so what if I commandeered one of our rental caskets or “borrowed” flowers from a prior service? So what if I stitched angel wings onto Helen’s headrest and picked out a cheery little ensemble from the nearest thrift shop? It was my money, my way of letting her know at least one person cared.

  But helping the grieving? Nope. Not my job. I’d felt the vacuum the departed left in their wake. That was one vortex of misery I refused to get pulled into, especially when my father already insisted I was too sensitive. It’s not like I didn’t try to check my emotions. I just sucked at it. Even more reason, I liked to point out, why Evan was the better candidate for taking over the family business when my father retired. And with my dad’s hypertension being what it was, that day was coming sooner than any of us was willing to accept—that was, of course, if the McCrae Family Funeral Home didn’t go belly-up first.

  As much as I appreciated Helen’s company, it was time to let her go. I adjusted her body bag, pulled up the sides, and patted her hand one last time. It was the same hand that had held the fistful of photos now waiting in our safe for someone—anyone—to claim. It took all my effort to swallow back my sorrow for yet another forgotten soul. “It’s not professional,” Dad would have said—had been saying since the day I first toddled into a memorial service. “Look it up,” he’d add, “page twenty-one in your grandpa Ted’s book, The Funeral Director’s Rules of Conduct. Twenty thousand copies sold.” I loved my grandpa Ted, but damn that book. I’d write my own rules, thank you very much.

  For Helen’s sake, I bowed my head and offered a moment of silence marred by only a few stifled sniffles. Then, bending close to her ear, I whispered, “I know you had people you loved. And what did that get you? A pine box.” I took Helen’s smile to mean she agreed, but it was small consolation since I was the one who put it there. “Goodbye, Helen Delaney. Rest in peace. I won’t forget you. I promise.”

  Zipper teeth ground together as I sealed the bag over Helen’s stiff, upturned lips. That’s as far as I got when an enormous concussive blast slammed the house, pitching me into the gurney. I scrabbled for the door and flung it open. Outside, brakes squealed. Car alarms blared. Dogs howled.

  I turned back to the cold room. “Wait here, Helen.”

  RULE #2

  DEATH DOES NOT KEEP HOURS.

  NEITHER SHOULD YOU.

  Charging from the cold room, I collided with Evan in the hall and stumbled backward, landing on my butt. He jerked me onto my feet and dragged me along behind him.

  “What the hell was that?” Nana Jo intercepted us by the front parlor, waving hands stained terra-cotta from sculpting class earlier in the day.

  Sirens pealed through the sultry night air.

  “Sounds like incoming business to me,” quipped Evan. Nana and I exchanged eye rolls, knowing any scolding would be a waste of time. Evan was Evan.

  A second later Dad and Rachel joined us on the front porch, and together we gaped, trancelike, at the firestorm funneling skyward only a few blocks away. Huge, billowing black clouds smudged out the waxing moon as sparks rained on neighboring wood-shingle roofs dry as kindling, making the scene both mesmerizing and threatening.

  Evan joined the parade of onlookers marching toward the inferno while Rachel, Dad, and Nana Jo collected with neighbors by the weedy, trash-strewn parkway to speculate in hushed voices over possible causes. News vans crowded the streets, and a helicopter circled overhead, the chop chop of its rotors adding to the already frenzied pulse of activity.

  I didn’t budge from the porch. I couldn’t. My feet were glued to its knotty planks as one thought crowded out all others: Please, oh please, don’t be the Lassiter house. But my gut already told me it was. A fire needs a lot of dry wood to burn that hot, that high.

  It had been years since I last visited the Lassiter property. In all that time my guilty conscience had struggled to wipe that place, that family, from memory. Some things had been easier to erase—the walnut-shell boats with twigs for masts and leaves for sails that we raced in the irrigation ditch, the baby owlet returned to its nest, the tree hollows stuffed with small gifts for me to find. But it was those somber eyes—deep brown with gold flecks—that I could not forget.

  His name was Adam—the boy at the heart of my darkest secret. Deserting him was certainly not for my benefit, and since then his memory had become like the phantom pain after an amputation. In my defense, I deserted him for his own sake. My desperate hope, my prayer, if I were the praying kind, was that he moved away years ago. I’d seen what fire does to flesh.

  Two hours later the flames had abandoned the sky and everyone had retreated indoors but me. I lingered on the front steps, waiting for the inevitable. Then the thing I’d been dreading turned the corner: the county coroner’s white van. I shuddered. Someone was dead. What if it was Adam? His father’s words still haunted me: “Say anything to anyone, or come here again, and it will be Adam who pays.”

  Within days of the explosion, my night terrors returned with a vengeance. In them I was falling, always falling, until I heard the crack of bone and woke screaming, my hair plastered to my sweat-drenched cheeks. I knew I’d only find peace when I put the question of Adam’s fate to rest once and for all. It became my obsession. For the next two weeks I scoured the paper and the internet, but the police weren’t releasing any information about the blast, its cause, or the names of victims. Sooner than seemed right, the entire event vanished from the news, as though it had never happened. I’d have to find answers somewhere else
. I’d have to call in a favor.

  Alone in the office, I gave our county coroner, Marty, a ring.

  “Hey, Lily. What’s up?” he said, in a voice that sounded much too chipper considering what he did for a living.

  “Marty, you remember that fire at the old Lassiter place a couple weeks back? What can you tell me about the deceased?”

  “Not much. We recovered a body. Male.”

  I gulped. “How old?”

  “Not enough left to determine age or identity, I’m afraid. No matching dental records, either. Why you askin’?”

  “I used to know someone who lived there, is all. A friend.”

  I thanked Marty, hung up, and dropped my head onto my desk, aware that I might never know whether Adam was there the night that old shack of a house blew sky-high. And whose fault was that? Mine.

  “Sleeping on the job?”

  I jumped half out of my skin.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.” Mallory squinted at me. “You all right? You look like you haven’t slept in days.”

  “I haven’t. Not much, anyway.” I left it at that. Mal knew me well enough not to bother pushing for anything more.

  We met at a funeral. Surprise. Seven-year-old Mallory had taken one look at her aunt Aurelia lying in a coffin and bolted for the garden. My dad sent me to track her down. I found her huddled behind a hydrangea, her black-velvet dress pulled up to her chin to keep it out of the mud. To coax her back inside, I’d explained how each flower in the memorial wreath had a special meaning, like a secret code you could read. In the end, it worked. After that Mal began sitting with me during lunch at school, and she took a lot of crap for it, too.

  “You didn’t answer my text,” I said, sounding needier than I intended.

  “Yeah, been busy.”

  Right. Except, according to Evan, she had plenty of time for her other friends. But she was here now. That gave me hope. “Does this mean you forgive me for bailing on the party?”

  “Don’t I always? But seriously, Lils, you need to escape this place once in a while. It’s so depressing.”