Her doctor had ordered plenty of heavy-duty drugs to keep the pain at bay. Those drugs eventually sent her into a sleep from which she never awakened…
Someone else may have thought she was just sleeping, but as soon as Mason saw her, he knew something was wrong. The essence he knew of as Jo wasn't there.
He didn't call anybody for two days.
He kept thinking maybe something would happen. Maybe he would step into the bedroom and she'd be sitting there, smiling at him. He kept vigil. Several times throughout the day he would leave the room, then return in order to give her the chance to come back, to start over.
She never woke up.
He didn't know a body could go bad so quickly.
She began to smell. He heard a buzzing at the window near the bed, and when he pulled back the curtain he saw what had to be thousands of flies clustered on the glass, piled up where the wooden frame met metal, trying to squeeze in the small cracks.
They were the shiny kind of flies, fat-bodied black ones he associated with the dead rabbits and squirrels he sometimes came across. Behind him, he heard more buzzing. He swung around. The sheet that covered Jo seemed to be moving. He lifted it. A rotten smell hit him in the face. At the same time, a cloud of flies swarmed him, going for his mouth and nose. He ran from the room, picked up the phone, and dialed 911.
It would end up being one of those calls paramedics talked about over beers whenever stories were being shared.
All they knew as they headed for the secluded farmhouse was that the patient was an elderly woman who was thought to be dead.
The smell hit them before they reached the door. Hands held to their mouths weren't enough. They had to retreat and pull out carbon filter masks.
The door was covered with flies. They opened it, shaking them loose. A black cloud unfurled and then immediately settled back down, sticking to the flesh, biting.
Inside the house a man stood wringing his hands, his eyes red. "She's in there," he said, pointing to a room off the living room. "I think she might be dead."
The paramedics looked at each other but didn't say anything. In the bedroom they glanced at the body, which had passed out of rigor long ago. "I ain't driving back with that in the van," one said to the other. "We'll never get the smell outta there."
In the ambulance, they put in a call to the coroner's office, which sent a plain truck with a topper-the vehicle used for the stinky cases. Without lingering, they whisked the body away to the mortuary, where it was pumped with four times the recommended amount of embalming fluid.
The mortician had a bad habit of shorting his clients when it came to such things, but in this case cheating wasn't even an option.
Laid out in the casket, her cheeks rosy, wearing a dress with a brooch at the throat, she waited. She didn't have many visitors, and the ones who came did so out of morbid curiosity.
Mason stayed with her morning and night until the mortician had to pry him away, telling him it was time to let her go, time to bury her.
"NO!" Mason had screamed. "NO!"
When Sheriff David Vance got the call telling him a grave at Poplar Grove Cemetery had been vandalized, he immediately thought of a group of kids that had gone around last year, digging up old graves and carrying bones around with them in their backpacks. They hadn't meant any harm. They'd just been inquisitive.
But when David reached the cemetery and saw that an entire body had been stolen, he dismissed his earlier assessment and recalled the story told to him by Harvey Blake, the local mortician.
He called him. "Harvey, you remember that kid you were telling me about last year? The one who didn't want to bury his sister?"
"Yeah."
"What was her name?" he asked, staring at the headstone.
"Von Bryant. Josephine Von Bryant."
"You remember the kid's name?"
"Uh… Mason. Mason, that's it."
"Thanks, Harvey." After hanging up, David asked the first officer on the scene if the crime lab was on its way.
"Should be here any minute."
"I'm going to let you handle it from this end," he said. "I've got a stop to make."
It was a small county, and he'd heard about the woman and kid who had moved in years ago. People said they were strange, but that's how it was in rural settings. Nobody liked anybody new. He felt sorry for outsiders who moved into the area. They always came excited about the beauty. Almost every one of them left within a few years, moving back to where they came from or to a place with influx and a higher population. The Von Bryants stayed on.
He knocked on the door. Nobody answered. The windowless garage was shut; he couldn't see whether a car was inside or not. He walked around the property. The sky was dark. A storm was blowing in, bringing wind and rain that was supposed to turn to snow. He hoped the lakes froze early this year. He'd spent the summer building a new fishing house, and he was anxious to get it set up.
The farm was a nice little place. He remembered when old Samuel Griffin had lived there. Sam had died while feeding his hogs, and the hogs ate him. Nothing left for anybody to find but bones.
Hogs were weird that way. Especially in a feedlot situation. He knew a guy who'd just slipped and fallen. Before he could get up, a hog bit off his ear.
There was no sign of activity. Maybe it was better this way. Take him by surprise with a search warrant. That was if his suspicions were enough for a search warrant. He'd made some bad calls in the past, and the judge was getting reluctant to spit warrants out the way she used to. Damn woman.
From a crack in the living room drapes, Mason watched the police car drive away, smoke from the rapidly blown-out candles burning his throat. The girl-Gillian-was lying on the floor, unconscious from a blow to the head. Her fault. She shouldn't have tried to run for the door.
He'd known the police would come. He just hadn't thought it would be so soon.
Chapter 33
Anthony sat hunched over a desk in the corner of Elliot Senatra's office, going over the matches they'd come up with from the list of rose propagators. They'd narrowed it down to twenty-three men, not a figure Anthony was happy with, but they couldn't risk dismissing the remotest possibility. Mary, who Anthony didn't think had slept in days, was on the phone with Detective Wakefield. Time was their enemy, and she was desperately trying to pull together forty-six people in order to simultaneously send teams to the twenty-three remaining addresses.
The door flew open, and Elliot stuck his head inside. "A grave in Poplar Grove's been robbed," he announced. "And get this-the missing body belongs to Josephine Von Bryant."
Von Bryant. One of the names on the propagator list.
"Does she have a husband?" Mary asked. "Or a son?"
Elliot smiled broadly. "A brother. Mason Von Bryant."
The rental car flew down the country road, gravel and mud hitting the undercarriage.
"The turn should be coming up on the left." Mary leaned forward in the passenger seat. It was raining hard, and the rapidly clicking wipers could barely keep up.
Mason Von Bryant's house was located on the top of a hill, with an unobstructed view of the half-mile lane leading to it and the connecting highway. When planning their strategy, they'd decided it would be too risky for a parade of patrol cars to approach the house. Instead, Mary and Anthony were going in and would call for backup when needed. Parked along the highway two miles away was Elliot, along with four BCA agents, four police officers, six members of the SWAT team, and an ambulance. Even though it wasn't his jurisdiction, John Wakefield was also on hand.