Burn Our Bodies Down(44)

I don’t want to look at her. It’s sudden and strong, the certainty that I can’t. Because if I do, and if there’s really no difference, what will that mean? Who will I be then, if I’m a dead girl too?

“Come on,” Connors says. His hand is resting on the handle to one of the berths, stacked in the wall like drawers in a dresser. A clipboard hangs from it, holding what must be the usual forms.

It takes everything, every ounce of will I have, but I force myself to cross the room and stand across from Connors, leaving space for the drawer to slide out between us. What am I nervous about? I’ve seen her. I’ve touched her. But I can’t get rid of the prickle along my skin.

“Now, normally,” Connors says, “I wouldn’t be showing this to you. And normally you’d stay upstairs, instead of breaking into our records room. So I’d say we’re a little past normal, aren’t we, Margot?” I don’t answer. He sighs. “Right. You ready?”

No. Never. But I swallow hard, set my shoulders. “Okay.”

He grips the drawer handle and pulls. The tray inside comes rattling out.

For a second all I see is the white of the sheet. She’s covered. I have that to hold on to, at least. But there are stains, that same black color from the table, leaking through the fabric. My stomach turns. They’re right where her eyes should be.

“What…,” I start, but I don’t get anything else out. Still, Connors must know what I mean.

“Her eyes? Yeah, I don’t know,” he says. “The coroner doesn’t either.”

He reaches for the edge of the sheet, but I beat him to it. I owe her that much, at least. My hand isn’t steady, but Connors thankfully doesn’t mention it as I lift the sheet and ease it back.

The smell of smoke hits the air. I blink hard to get the fire out of my eyes, focus on what I can see. Her hair, dark, smooth, gray threaded through. Just like mine, and I fight the urge to twirl the ends around my finger, the way Mom does sometimes with me. Take a deep breath. Gulp down the cold. I’m here. We’re both here. And I’m alive.

I draw the sheet off her face. Drop it, and stagger back a step. My mouth suddenly dry and sour, throat working.

Her eyes are open. But they’re wrong. Curdled. Black and seeping into her eyelashes, a liquid viscous and clinging. The stain on the sheet. The drips on the metal table. From this.

“What happened to her?” I manage, my voice raw. This isn’t how bodies decompose, and even if it were, it’s been barely a full twenty-four hours since we found her. Her eyes, running out of their sockets like thick black tears. How could that happen? The fire couldn’t have done that. “She didn’t look like that on the highway.”

“No,” Connors agrees. “She didn’t.” He takes the sheet from where I let it fall and lays it over her again, covering her eyes. As if that could keep me from seeing what’s happened to her. My breath is coming too quick. Dizziness creeping in on the edges of my sight. But I can’t look away. I can’t. Because she’ll be there when I do, and she’ll be there forever, with something in her rotting.

“The coroner couldn’t explain it,” Connors says. “She couldn’t explain a lot of things.”

He slides the tray farther out. Her whole body between us, and his hand isn’t steady as he flicks the sheet back from her legs. Pale feet, veins raised and delicate. And above, reaching down her left calf, thin white lines like a lattice of scars. They make a strange pattern, spirals made of spirals, all braided together, and they stand out sharp against the shiny redness of her burned skin.

That’s where the fire touched her. The only place it did. When she came out of the field, the spark catching on her dress, on her skin.

That is not how a body behaves. Her eyes, these marks. Not a body like mine, or like anyone’s. But I don’t know what that means. Or what I’m supposed to do with it.

“You ever seen this happen to someone?” Connors asks. Like the answer should be yes, like I should be able to explain. Like I’ve ever stood over a corpse before and matched its face to mine.

“Of course not,” I say. “Have you?” He shakes his head but doesn’t move, and I can’t stand it another second. “Can you…please, can you put her away?”

He waits a beat, agonizing and endless, before he slides the metal tray back into its berth and shuts the door. The latch clicks. I let out a breath.

“Maybe you haven’t,” he says. “But I think your grandmother might know something about it.”

This, finally, gets me to shut my eyes.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” I tell him. And then, because it’s the only way I know how to ask for someone to take this out of my hands: “I don’t know what you’re waiting for.”

“You read those files,” Connors says. “Your grandmother said Katherine ran away, but she never went looking for her. Why not? What does she know that we don’t?” He leans against the wall, his hands in his pockets, the handle to the body’s berth digging into his arm, the clipboard hanging there jostled to one side. “My bet is that Vera knows more than she’s saying. And she won’t tell me, but she might tell you.”

I stare at the clipboard instead of at him, focus on the words I can read off its report instead of how he won’t move, how he won’t let me out of here, outside into the unbearable heat. Notable conditions: inverted heart position, considered nonessential. Amphetamines: none detected. Barbiturates: none detected. Chemical compounds: detected, pending analysis.