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The door slid right open.
2
Ha
It shouldn’t have been on the floor.
Diane apparently had the exact same reaction I had to the presence of the purse in the middle of the room. But since the distance between her cortex and her mouth was much shorter than mine, she verbalized her conclusion first: “Ha
Diane meant on the floor. Nope.
In the middle of the room. Never.
What was certain was that Ha
The rest of the office was neat. OCD neat, with one exception: Ha
Ha
I said, “Hello, I’m Dr. Alan Gregory, one of Ms. Grant’s colleagues. Why don’t you have a seat in the waiting area while we try to figure out what’s going on?” Not overconfident about her emotional stability, I’d adopted a voice that was as comforting as a hot-water bottle wrapped in fleece.
Neither my words nor my tone had the desired effect, though. “This is my time,” the woman protested, tapping the crystal of a garish purple Swatch on her wrist. I detected more than a little pout in her retort, considered the bag of Cheetos, and gave a momentary thought to the clinical regression that Ha
“I know,” I said even more gently. “I know. But the circumstances today are a little unusual. If you want to leave your name I’ll make sure that Ms. Grant gives you a call as soon as we straighten all this out. I’ll tell her you were here. I promise.”
She wanted none of it. “I’ll just wait,” she said. “It is my time. Though I do hope I’m not being charged.”
I sighed, pausing a moment as the woman retraced her steps and resumed her perch on the velvet settee in the waiting room. As she lowered herself to the sofa her fingertips left bright orange imprints on the forest green velvet upholstery. Once I was sure she was settled, I joined Diane inside the doorway to Ha
I said, “I think you should go check the bathroom, Diane. Maybe Ha
“Oh God!” she said. “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?” She rushed past me and down the hall.
I’m not sure why I did what I did next. Maybe it was because I was standing by myself in the hallway feeling lost and stupid. Maybe it was intuition. Maybe it was because I thought the Cheetos lady might be back and I was looking for a place to hide. I don’t really know.
What I did was that I took half a step across the narrow hall and tried the knob on Mary Black’s office door. To my surprise I discovered it unlocked. Immediately after I let go of the knob the door began to swing open on its own, as though the old building was listing just the slightest bit in that direction.
One look inside and I knew Ha
I knew it because living people’s flesh is never that shade of gray and living people can’t, or don’t, hold the posture that Ha
Ha
Oddly, the left front tail of Ha
Ha
I dropped to one knee and touched the smoothly stretched skin on Ha
Ha
But I knew it could have been cooler than that, or warmer than that. My experience touching the flesh of dead people was, admittedly, limited. I allowed for the possibility that Ha
I began inhaling slowly and self-consciously, as though I hadn’t already been breathing the air in the room. I thought it tasted stale and sour, but the only foreign odor I detected was that spill of urine.
I knew that medical examiners working to determine time of death also did calculations about flying insects and their eggs and the life cycle of maggots, but I quickly decided that I would leave that entomological arithmetic to them.
I was also self-aware enough to know that I was doing all the distracting contemplating so that I wouldn’t be forced to confront the fact that I was unexpectedly alone in an office with a friend’s dead body.
Behind me I noted the sound of a toilet flushing, followed by the timbre of water ru
I backed out of the room and saw Diane retracing her steps down the hallway from the bathroom. Her eyes caught mine, registering wariness that quickly disintegrated into shock as she digested my expression. I blocked her path and took her into my arms before she could reach the entrance to Mary Black’s office. I whispered into her hair, “Your friend is dead. I’m so, so sorry.”
The sound that came from Diane’s throat as she processed my words was plaintive and poignant. Resignation and denial and the first disbelieving chords of grief were all mixed into one long, sad wail.
When I looked up I saw the Cheetos lady standing at the other entrance to the hallway, tears streaming down her face. A bright orange smudge across her cheeks marked the spot where she’d tried to wipe away her grief.