The rumble of voices signaled people were returning down the path, but slowly. Much slower than the ambulance driver and his partner had rushed down. There was no longer a need to hurry, that’s what their footsteps said. My heart dropped as they emerged, carrying the stretcher, a white sheet covering the form, obscene wet patches soaking the cloth over the still body.
The man at the front stumbled. The corpse’s hand dropped over the side, pulling the sheet off her face, what was once beautiful gone gray and bloated.
CHAPTER 28
“Maureen!” Brenda screamed.
I stumbled forward and melted onto my knees, which put me on level with Maureen’s glassy eyes, open wide, staring at me, a ghost seeing a ghost. She looked as if she’d been pumped full of water, her cheeks stretched, eyes vacant, her mouth a cold black circle that I expected worms to spill out of.
Brenda was gasping like she couldn’t remember how to breathe, but still I couldn’t make a noise.
Maureen, what did they do to you?
But she didn’t answer, her eyes so cold.
Then the sheet was yanked back into place, the blue-gray hand tucked in, and her corpse slid into the back of the ambulance.
“Heather!”
Dad’s voice dropped like a rope in front of me. I grabbed for it, pulled myself up, didn’t fight it when he tugged me into an embrace. He got his arm around Brenda, too, and held us there, weeping into our hair. Brenda matched him, her gasping sobs rocking my body, until finally I found words.
“What happened?” I asked.
Dad held us for a bit longer, until Brenda’s crying subsided to a quiet shudder. Then he gave us both a quick squeeze and stepped back,glancing down the trail. I’d only ever seen my dad break down once before, that time when both me and Mom had to go to the hospital.
I was jolted back to that memory, the quarry sky giving way to harsh hospital lights. Dad had ridden in my ambulance. Mom had been bundled up into her own.
He chose me.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” he’d said all those years ago, standing, gray-faced, at the rear of the ambulance. His stillness had been a jarring contrast to the rapid movements of the paramedic, whose hands had fluttered as gentle as moths, searching my body for burns. “I shouldn’t have done it. I never should have done it.”
That had confused me—Mom had set me on fire, not Dad—but he had been out of his mind with worry. He didn’t know what he was saying.
He was speaking clearly now, in the quarry parking lot, even though his eyes were swollen from crying. He stared at the back of the ambulance driving Maureen away.
“Jerome thinks it might be suicide,” he said.
Brenda’s head swiveled. I saw the truth I knew reflected in her eyes, but I located the words first.
“No,” I said. “Not Maureen.”
Sheriff Nillson and his deputy were emerging from the woods, the sheriff holding what looked like one of the platform shoes Maureen had worn at our concert.
Dad patted my arm. “There’s nothing you could have done.”
But he misunderstood. Maureen was more alive than any of us. She protected kids from bullies. When men catcalled her, she’d catcall back. She’d demanded we pierce her ears firstbecause she was Maureen.
“She wouldn’t kill herself, Dad.”
A breeze kicked the lake-water smell of the quarries toward us. If I squinted, I could see the rocks rimming the edges through the trees,but I wasn’t looking in that direction. I stared at my dad, which was why I saw when the sorrow slipped off his face, replaced with a cold, hard mask.
I clutched my arms to my chest.
“We’ll see what the coroner says, Heather, but there weren’t any wounds on her body.”
CHAPTER 29
I went to work the next day. Nobody would have blinked if I’d taken it off. In fact, Mom had suggested it from her bed when I went to check on her. She seemed normal, for her: eyes clear, mouth curved in a pretty line. It was enough that I felt comfortable leaving Junie at home, but what would I do there myself? Every time I blinked, I saw Maureen, her glossy fish-eyes staring at nothing, her mouth open in a forever scream.
