“It’s Tristan,” Charity said. “He’s dead.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Sabrina
Linda approached the bed in a state of extended déjà vu, each step premeditated along a path she’d already walked. Somehow, she’d already seen Sabrina examine his lifeless body before she pried Marion away and lay two fingers against his well-sunned neck, now darkened and rough.
“It’s hard,” Sabrina said. “Like the thing downstairs.”
Seconds passed like hours, and Deja arrived, stood at the bedside, and sighed as though confronting traffic, not extraordinary death. As Linda, Sabrina, and Charity watched, Deja pressed her fingers against the man’s eyelids and pulled them down. They jammed back open. His big, round gaze remained focused on the ceiling. Deja heaved Marion off the floor and set her in the chair in the corner, arranging her limbs in repose across her chest. Then Deja examined each woman by placing one hand upon their foreheads.
“Marion, you feel ill,” she said when she was finished. “I’ve said this before. I won’t say it again. Get to a bed and stay there.”
When Marion failed to answer, Deja ordered Tatum to carry her into a bedroom. After they left the room, Deja turned toward the other three women.
“You three look half-dead as well. Though I suspect I shouldn’t use that phrasing after—” She gestured at Tristan. “I suggest everyone here takes a long rest in their rooms.”
“And then what?” Linda said.
“Excuse me?” Deja said.
“A good long rest, and then what? What are we going to do with…him?” Linda gesticulated at the corpse. “Do we go home now?”
“I sent Tatum out this morning. The road’s still blocked.” Deja scowled. “We wait until the bus comes and realizes we’re trapped. Then it’s only a matter of hours before they get the forest service up here.”
“The body’ll begin its decomposition within twenty-four to seventy-two hours,” Sabrina said. “In other words, we could risk it, if we wanted the whole manor to smell like Cadaverine.”
“Which means?” Charity said.
“One of the chemicals a dead body gives off. Have you smelled a dead thing before?”
“I have,” Linda said, and the memory came back to her at once, but she caught herself before she said more. “In the walls. Rats. They used to crawl in there and die. At my parents’ place.”
“Lovely, yes.” Deja’s gaze slid, boring into her. “What do you suggest we do about him?”
“We need to at least move him outside,” Sabrina said.
“If, or when, the show bus comes to get us in…forty-eight hours. We can inform them we have a dead body on our hands, see what the network wants.” Sabrina said. “But if we want to keep from getting sick ourselves, from the smell, from any—” She paused as though searching for the words that Linda and the others would accept. “Infectious disease he may have gotten from that rodent, we need to take him into the fresh air, away from our air.”
“Wait. He could be contagious?” Charity wrapped her arms around herself.
“We don’t know that for sure.” Sabrina seemed to consider saying something more. She didn’t. Linda wondered if she was going to tell Deja her suspicions regarding Marion, and what her reasons could be for withholding the information. Maybe Sabrina no longer trusted Deja, or maybe Sabrina no longer trusted her own impression of Marion. “I suggest we take proper precautions before we move the body.”
Linda marveled at the professional demeanor that had descended upon Sabrina over the past day and night. The behavior continued as Sabrina gathered several black trash bags from the kitchen, cut holes into them, and instructed everyone who would help move the body to slip on the black bags like makeshift scrubs—Charity, then Linda, volunteered. Sabrina returned Charity’s gloves, and Charity passed them to Linda. As Linda held them, astonished at the gift, Charity slipped on two oven mitts. They all tied Tatum’s bandannas around their mouths for masks.
Linda had indeed smelled death, though she had lied about the source. The dead body Linda had smelled was her father’s. He passed on a camping retreat, up a mountain that took a solid eight hours to ascend. It was night when Linda’s mother discovered him dead in their tent. Linda’s mother was unsure how long she had slept beside a dead man, but the horror would have been no more or less had she been aware. Linda and her sister awoke to their mother’s screaming, and when they rushed to the tent to check on her, they saw their father’s sallow skin under the glow of flashlights. His eyes were closed like he was sleeping, but no amount of shaking roused him.
At the time, they had no cell phone. Instead, they sent Linda’s older sister down the mountain to locate an authority figure. Linda and her mother waited outside the tent, but as the hours passed, the open flap let enough of her father’s worsening odor out that the memory of the scent of death never left her.
Tristan’s heft groaned as Charity grabbed his feet, Linda grabbed his head, and they lifted him. Light as a feather. They carried the man down the stairs, Charity moving backward. Stiff as a board. Linda tripped over her feet despite being blessed to move forward. They lugged him out the manor’s front door and a few steps farther. They found a space beneath the awning and left the man they had all tried to woo in the dirt.
“Should we—I don’t know—cross his arms over his chest?” Charity said. “Or sit him up?”
“He looks like he’s guarding the place,” Linda said.
“He’s fine as is,” Sabrina said. “It’s important, in the situation we’re in, not to get attached to the body. He’s not the body. The man, he’s gone. The shell is all that remains.”
“You didn’t mention to Deja that you think Marion might have been infected,” Linda said. “Why not?”
Sabrina frowned. “I don’t know. I… What if Deja did something to her?”
“What do you mean?” Charity said. “You don’t trust Deja?”
Sabrina motioned around them. “Where is she right now? Where has been throughout all of this? Where are the crew members who disappeared?”
The three women stood in silence, the carcass of Tristan their only witness, and stared out at the distant expanse of the yard and the trees. Linda went to scratch her nose, then remembered the bags. The smell of her father’s dead flesh had been worse than the possum’s, worse than Tristan’s, worse than any smell she had ever smelled. Would the bodies keep piling until there were none of them left?
“I’m going to check on Marion,” Linda said. She needed to feel something, a reminder that even a broken heart could keep pumping in the wake of losing it all.
• • •
Marion was where she was supposed to be, curled into the shape of a question mark in her bed while Tatum guarded her closed door. The meaty remains of the orchard’s strange apples covered her vanity. She didn’t stir when they crossed the threshold, nor when Linda lay her palm against Marion’s forehead to check for fever. There was none now. She didn’t feel like Tristan had felt. Her skin was softer, more pliable, more living, but there was no escaping the fact she wasn’t herself. The surface of her face felt blemished, rough, as though she’d broken out overnight. When she breathed, her breath rattled.
“Sabrina was right,” Linda said. “Marion’s ill, too.”
“Like Tristan?” Charity said, unwilling to touch her.
“No,” Linda admitted. “This feels like something different.”
