“Hello?” Sara called, opening the door onto the grand hall that went the full length of the house. Audra Brock hadn’t changed much in the way of decorating since her husband had bought the mansion, and the heavy carpeting and drapes still fit the Victorian period. Chairs were scattered down the hall, tables with Kleenex boxes discreetly hidden beside flower arrangements offering respite for mourners.

“Brock?” she asked, setting down her briefcase on one of the chairs so that she could dig out Abigail Bennett’s death certificate. She had promised Paul Ward she would have the paperwork to Brock yesterday, but she’d been too busy to get to it. Carlos had taken a rare day off, and Sara didn’t want to keep the family waiting one more day.

“Brock?” she tried again, looking at her watch, wondering where he was. She was going to be late getting to the clinic.

“Hello?” There hadn’t been any cars parked outside, so Sara assumed there wasn’t a funeral taking place. She walked down the hallway, peering into each of the viewing parlors. She found Brock in the farthest one. He was a tall, gangly man, but he had managed to lean the entire upper part of his body into a casket, the lid resting on his back. A woman’s leg, bent at the knee stuck up beside him, a dainty, high-heel clad foot dangling outside the casket. Sara would have suspected something obscene if she didn’t know him better.

“Brock?”

He jumped, smacking his head against the lid. “Lord a’mighty,” he laughed, clutching his heart as the lid slammed down. “You near about scared me to death.”

“Sorry.”

“Guess I’m in the right place for it!” he joked, slapping his thigh.

Sara made herself laugh. Brock’s sense of humor matched his social skills.

He ran his hand along the shiny edge of the bright yellow casket. “Special order. Nice, huh?”

“Uh, yeah,” she agreed, not knowing what else to say.

“Georgia Tech fan,” he told her, indicating the black pinstriping along the lid. “Say,” he said, beaming a smile, “I hate to ask, but can you give me a hand with her?”

“What’s wrong?”

He opened the lid again, showing her the body of a cherubic woman who was probably around eighty. Her gray hair was styled into a bun, her cheeks slightly rouged to give her a healthy glow. She looked like she belonged in Madame Tussauds instead of a lemon-yellow casket. One of the problems Sara had with embalming was the artifice involved; the blush and mascara, the chemicals that pickled the body to keep it from rotting. She did not relish the thought of dying and having someone- worse yet, Dan Brock- shoving cotton into her various orifices so that she wouldn’t leak embalming fluid.

“I was trying to pull it down,” Brock told her, indicating the woman’s jacket, which was bunched up around her shoulders. “She’s kind of husky. If you could hold up her legs and I could pull…”

She heard herself saying, “Sure,” even though this was the last thing she wanted to do with her morning. She lifted the woman’s legs at the ankles and Brock made quick work pulling down the suit jacket, talking all the while. “I didn’t want to have to tote her back downstairs to the pulley and Mama’s just not up to helping with this kind of thing anymore.”

Sara lowered the legs. “Is she okay?”

“Sciatica,” he whispered, as if his mother might be embarrassed by the affliction. “It’s terrible when they start getting old. Anyway.” He tucked his hand around the coffin, straightening the silk lining. When he was finished, he rubbed his palms together as if to wash his hands of the task. “Thanks for helping me with that. What can I do you for?”

“Oh.” Sara had almost forgotten why she came. She walked back to the front row of chairs where she had put Abby’s paperwork. “I told Paul Ward I’d bring the death certificate over to you by Thursday, but I got tied up.”

“I’m sure that won’t be a problem,” Brock said, flashing a smile. “I don’t even have Chip back from the crematorium yet.”

“Chip?”

“Charles,” he said. “Sorry, Paul called him Chip, but I guess that can’t be his real name.”

“Why would Paul want Charles Donner’s death certificate?”

Brock shrugged, as if the request was the most natural thing in the world. “He always gets the death certificates when people from the farm pass.”

Sara leaned her hand against the back of the chair, feeling the need to grab onto something solid. “How many people die on the farm?”

“No,” Brock laughed, though she didn’t see what was funny. “I’m sorry I gave you the wrong impression. Not a lot. Two earlier this year-Chip makes three. I guess there were a couple last year.”

“That seems like a lot to me,” Sara told him, thinking he had left out Abigail, which would bring the tally to four this year alone.

“Well, I suppose,” Brock said slowly, as if the peculiarity of the circumstances had just occurred to him. “But you have to think about the types of folks they’ve got over there. Derelicts, mostly. I think it’s real Christian of the family to pick up the handling costs.”

“What did they die of?”

“Let’s see,” Brock began, tapping his finger against his chin. “All natural causes, I can tell you that. If you can call drinking and drugging yourself to death natural causes. One of ’em, this guy, was so full of liquor it took less than three hours to render his cremains. Came with his own accelerant. Skinny guy, too. Not a lot of fat.”

Sara knew fat burned more easily than muscle, but she didn’t like being reminded of it so soon after breakfast. “And the others?”

“I’ve got copies of the certificates in the office.”

“They came from Jim Ellers?” Sara asked, meaning Catoogah’s county coroner.

“Yep,” Brock said, waving her back toward the hall.

Sara followed, feeling uneasy. Jim Ellers was a nice man, but like Brock he was a funeral director, not a physician. Jim always sent his more difficult cases to Sara or the state lab. She couldn’t recall anything other than a gunshot wound and a stabbing that had been transferred to her office from Catoogah over the last eight years. Jim must have thought the deaths at the farm were pretty standard. Maybe they were. Brock had a point about the workers being derelicts. Alcoholism and drug addiction were hard diseases to manage, and left untreated, they generally led to catastrophic health problems and eventual death.

Brock opened a set of large wooden pocket doors to the room where the kitchen had once been. The space was now his office, and a massive desk was in the center, paperwork heaped in the in-box.

He apologized: “Mama’s been a little too poorly to straighten up.”

“It’s okay.”

Brock went over to the row of filing cabinets along the back of the room. He put his fingers to his chin again, tapping, not opening any drawers.

“Something wrong?”

“I might need a minute to try to think of their names.” He grinned apologetically. “Mama’s so much better at remembering these things than I am.”

“Brock, this is important,” she told him. “Go get your mother.”