“What are they?” FireWind asked of the steel devices. It sounded like a rhetorical question, but I knew the answer.
I frowned, not liking the fact that I was about to pull on information I knew from my church background. Not that this had anything to do with the church. I hoped. “They’re commercial-sized cookers. Well, technically they’re called fully jacketed stationary kettles.” I pulled up the info on my cell to refresh my memory. “You can poach, boil, sauté, or steam for canning, making soups, barbecue sauce, whatever, in large batches. Thewhole thing is on a mechanism that allows it to tilt for easy pouring.” I patted the large one and bent over to see the gas burner, which was off. The stench in the room was making my eyes water. “The big one is still hot,” I said, “and the goop at the seal says that whatever was cooking is still inside. This one holds a hundred gallons.”
“Are they expensive?” Occam asked, a strange look on his face.
“The big one sells new for between sixteen and thirty thousand, depending on the extras.”
“Dollars?” FireWind said, startled.
“Dollars. The little one holds six gallons and sells for closer to five.” I patted it too, but it was ambient temp in the overheated shed. I stepped back to the door and breathed in fresh air. Occam followed.
“No way an ex-con has the money for this,” Occam said.
“So does the canning equipment, and this shed, belong to Holy Bear or has it been repurposed from elsewhere?” I said, thinking.
“Holy Bear?” FireWind asked.
“The farmer. It’s his nickname. His mama gave it to him when he was a baby,” I said.
Occam shook his head, sucked in a deep breath from near the door, and walked over to the bigger cooker. “Namin’ a kid that was jist mean.”
“Maybe not Holy Bear,” I said. “We mighta crossed a property line at the gate. Someone else may own this land.”
“Yes,” FireWind said. “But it’s convenient and too coincidental for thedeath and decayenergies to be here unless planted by someone to kill Cale Nowell, or planted herebyCale Nowell.”
“Is there a cannery around here where used equipment might come available every so often?” I asked. “Or maybe Holy Bear puts up commercial vegetables? Maybe to sell canned produce or soups at a local farmer’s market?”
FireWind, who seemed unaffected by the smell, toed a pile of bags in the corner and said, “Several pounds of lye: both sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide.”
“Maybe making soap?” I asked. “That’s what I thought when I first walked in and smelled it, but I don’t see tins for pouringsoap bars. And I don’t see canning facilities, no table, no jars, no spoons, strainers. No...” I stopped, my eyes on the bags of lye. A memory struggled up from the darks of my mind. “Strong bases can...” I tilted my head, making sure I remembered what I thought I did. The memory rose through me slowly and solidified. “... Can dissolve bodies.”
FireWind looked at me, waiting, so I went on. “At three hundred degrees, a pressurized lye solution can turn a human body into a liquid in three hours.” I studied the kettle and more slowly I said, “This kettle isn’t pressurized. It won’t heat much above the boiling point of water, two hundred twelve degrees or so. It might take an additional hour or two to complete the process.”
“Nell, sugar. That don’t sound much like Spook School teaching. That sounds like, well, like something else,” Occam said, trying not to bring up the church, but then, where else would I have learned what I was talking about?
I frowned hard at the oversized stainless-steel kettle.
FireWind asked, “Are you saying that you think this is part of the recipe for thedeath and decayenergies?”
Recipe...That word brought up more memories. “We used to make bone broth with the bones of beef cattle, pigs, eggshells, chicken bones.” I stopped, dredging through my memory for more. “Vinegar. Some apples, if I remember right. Once, just before I left with the Ingrams, some of the men were dumping in the bones for the broth and talking. One of them said that about the lye. About dissolving bodies. They laughed. They said a full-grown man would come out pure liquid with the consistency of mineral oil.”
A tan liquid, they had said, thick and almost creamy. The men had known all that for certain, which meant they had dissolved a body to get rid of it. And they had been laughing until they saw me standing behind the door, listening. My head had been painful, my scalp aching because my hair had been bunned up for the first time. I had just started my first period and... and the man talking had been the Colonel. The man who had come for me, demanding that I become his wife or concubine. Had he come because he hoped to keep me from talking about what they had said? “Ohhh,” I breathed, too many thoughts and memories dumping into the forefront of my brain.
“Nell. Why would they know that?” Occam asked gently.
“What? Oh. Um. I could guess, but I don’t know the answer to that.”
“Are you okay?” he asked me.
“No. Not really. But I’ll hold for a bit longer.” I glanced at my boss. “I don’t have any idea what this has to do with the recipe fordeath and decay.”
“But it is conceivable that there is a body inside,” FireWind said, looking from the lye bags to the big kettle.
My mouth had gone dry and I tried to wet my lips, but my tongue dragged along, tearing them. “I think we’re gonna have to open it and see. And if it’s lye, it’ll be caustic.”
“Do we need breathing equipment?” Occam asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
