“How’s your contraption doing?” Dr. Shade asked Katz.
“I won’t get rich from it.”
“He got a great latent from a pair of panties,” I said.
“He was a latent, all right. Any man who’d dress like that.” Katz smiled. He could be corny now and then.
“Your experiment’s ready, and I’m eager to take a look.” Shade got up from his chair.
“You haven’t looked yet?” I asked.
“No, not today. We wanted you here for the final unveiling.”
“Of course, you always do that,” I said.
“And I always will unless you don’t want to be present. Some people don’t.”
“I will always want to be present. And if I don’t, I think I should change careers,” I said.
“The weather really cooperated,” Katz added.
“It was perfect.” Dr. Shade was pleased to announce.
“It was exactly what it must have been during the interval between when the girl vanished and her body was found. And we got lucky with the bodies because I needed two and thought that was never going to happen at the last minute. You know how it goes. ”
I did.
“Sometimes we get more than we can handle. Then we don’t get any,” Dr. Shade went on.
“The two we got are a sad story,” Katz said, and we were going up the stairs now.
“They’re all a sad story,” I said.
“So true. So true. He had cancer and called to see if he could donate his body to science. We said yes, so he filled out the paperwork. Then he went into the woods and shot himself in the head. The next morning, his wife, who wasn’t well, either, took a bottle of Nembutal.”
“And they’re the ones?” My heart seemed to lose its rhythm for a moment the way it often did when I heard stories like this.
“It happened right after you told me what you wanted to do,” Dr. Shade said.
“It was interesting timing, because I had no fresh bodies. And then the poor man calls. Well. The two of them have done some real good.”
“Yes, they have.” I wished I could somehow thank those poor sick people who had wanted to die because life was leaving in a way that was unbearably painful.
Outside we climbed into the big white truck with university seals and camper shell that Katz and Dr. Shade used to pick up donated or unclaimed bodies and bring them to where we were about to go. It was a clear, crisp morning, and had Calhoun’s not taught me a lesson about the fierce loyalty of football fans, I would have called the sky Carolina blue.
Foothills rolled into the distant Smoky Mountains, trees around us blazed, and I thought of the shacks I had seen on that unpaved road near the Montreal gate. I thought of Deborah with her crossed eyes. I thought of Creed. At moments I could be overwhelmed by a world that was both so splendid and so horrible. Creed Lindsey would go to prison if I did not stop it from happening soon. I was afraid Marino would die, and I did not want my last vision of him to be like the one of Ferguson.
We chatted as we drove and soon passed farms for the veterinary school, and corn and wheat fields used for agricultural research. I wondered about Lucy at Edgehill and was afraid for her, too. I seemed to be afraid for anyone I loved. Yet I was so reserved, so logical. Perhaps my greatest shame was that I could not show what I should, and I worried no one would ever know how much I cared. Crows picked at the roadside, and sunlight breaking through the windshield made me blind.
“What did you think of the photographs I sent?” I asked.
“I’ve got them with me,” said Dr. Shade.
“We put a number of things under his body to see what would happen.”
“Nails and an iron drain,” said Katz.
“A bottle cap. Coins and other metal things.”
“Why metal?”
“I’m pretty sure of that.”
“Did you have an opinion before your experiments?”
“Yes,” said Dr. Shade.
“She lay on something that began to oxidize. Her body did. After she was dead. “