Just as I took the first step toward the car cluster and the entrance up into the new building, I heard a faint cat sound, a thin yowl, then a thick, fat, heavy sound that ended the cat cry. It was a whomping thud, as if somebody had dropped a sack of wet sand onto the cat. There was a curious aftersound, a resonating, deep-toned brong, a vibration of the prestressed and reinforced structure overhead. I turned and went out that entrance driveway toward the sidewalk. The building was set back in that area, so that the roofing over the first part of the parking area was but one story high.
There were no pedestrians on the street. At the furthest corner cars were stacked waiting for the light to change. I went over to the temporary wooden walkway, roofed for pedestrian protection. I jumped and caught the wooden edge, pulled myself up onto the rough plywood roofing, and from there clambered up onto the permanent roof over that portion of the parking area underneath.
That roof portion was about fifty feet deep and a hundred and fifty wide. There was a long band of fading red across the western horizon, and the daylight had diminished everything to varying shades of gray. I could see from the construction thus far that doors opened out onto the roof area, and that it was designed to become some sort of patio, perhaps an outdoor dining area for a restaurant lease in the new structure.
Evidently large items of equipment had been derricked up onto that area and uncrated there and taken in through the double doors. The skeletal crates, pried and splintered, and various wrapping and packing materials were piled near the wall of the structure. That wall soared twelve stories straight up to the lighted windows of the top floor. I came upon the body of Maureen Pearson Pike just beyond the jumble of crates and packing materials.
She lay on her back about three feet from the side of the building and almost parallel to it. The upper part of her body was a little closer to the building than her legs were. She wore a gray-blue suit, a white blouse, one blue lizard pump. The other was nearby. I had seen the color of the suit when she and Biddy had gone driving by.
She was ugly, even though her face was undamaged. The impact had jellied her, inside the durable human hide. She was a long sack, roughly tubular, still enclosing all the burst meat and smashed bone, except where pink splinters came through the left sleeve of the suit near the elbow. Her mouth was wide open and unmoving. Her eyes were half open. She was flattened against the roof and bulged wrongly along the contours of her, so that the woman-shape was gone.
She had landed, as if with a purposeful neatness, with most of her on a crumpled sheet of heavy brown packing paper. It was that slightly waxy waterproofed paper they use to wrap pieces of heavy equipment when they are shipped in open crates, bolted down to heavy timber pallets. Where it was torn I could see that it was a sandwich of two layers of brown paper enclosing a black, tarry core.
I sat on my heels beside her. I touched the gloss of her hair, then closed her eyes. I smelled all those sharp familiar odors of sudden death. She was cooling meat, the spoiling process beginning. Still on my heels, I craned my neck and looked up. No row of heads up there, staring in sick fascination down the steep canyon drop to the disastrous impact.
I turned and looked at the building across the street. It was a much older building, an office building four stories high. All the windows were dark. I moved the edge of a crate that pinned the paper down. I gently moved her legs onto the paper. I brought a corner of it up and around her and tucked it under the flattened waist at the far side of her. I moved between her and the building and hesitated, then put my hands against the body and rolled it. That single piece was not big enough. I found another, bigger piece, big as a bed sheet, and swiftly straightened it out, put a corner under her and rolled her halfway up in it, then folded the top and bottom corners in, and rolled her up the rest of the way.