get access to DNA testingââ She spotted the sign: AnacortesâWhidbey Island. She pulled into the right lane and slowed. âAnd we better talk to Sandroâs colleaguesâfind out how he looked and acted recently.â
They drove west along a two-lane highway, the sun now behind them. Noel said, âThereâs Mrs. Vasiliadisâ comment, âA mother should recognize her own son.â How do you recognize someone?â
âHmm,â Kyra murmured, thinking sheâd recognize any of her three ex-husbands if they popped up in that field among the cows. âItâs the whole picture, the gestalt.â
âBut suppose all you have is appearance, no motion, no gesture, no slouch or stiffness.â
âLike the corpse for Mrs. Vasiliadis?â
âOnce I was Christmas shopping at a mall in Nanaimo, figuring what to get my parents. I kept seeing bits of them in half the seventy-year-old couples around. Then my parents really did appear. Looking like a seventy-year-old couple, but I instantly knew it was them. Now how did I know that? And not the other couples Iâd been turning into them?â
Good question. âYouâll recognize your parents in their coffins because youâll have gone through their deaths with them. Like I will with mine. But this mother didnât, the death was sudden. Nobody in Sandroâs family, or his oldest friend, had seen him for what, months? Years? Why? Just busy?â
Now trees loomed ahead. The flat farmland fell away, the road curved and they swept across a narrow two-lane bridge. Below, maybe a hundred feet down, the waters swirled, ignorant of direction. âDeception Pass,â said Kyra. âThis bridge was a 1930s make-work project.â
âWell now.â Noel examined it. âHow much is an island a real island if the island is connected to the mainland by a bridge?â
âYou mean,â said Kyra, âa bridge can keep an island from being a real island? And if so, maybe Islands Investigations International shouldnât be on this case in the first place?â
âJust wondering.â
âThat logicâs hard on Prince Edward Island with its new Confederation Bridge.â
â  â  â
Claude Martinâs office was spare: two wooden chairs, a bare wooden desk with another chair. No computer, no family pictures, just a phone and blotter. Noel hadnât seen a blotter in years. Impressive-looking certificates hung on the wall. The receptionist had showed him in. Now Martin the mortician was taking his time. Noel sniffed hard. No embalming or other funereal odors. Despite their absence, he shuddered.
He should have insisted: the sheriff! Not that he particularly wanted to chat with some local sheriff, but he didnât want to be in a funeral home. He shifted in the chair. Now his stomach was clenching. They had taken Brendan to Brentwood Gardens in Nanaimoâthe package that had been Brendan, the shell. A bald old gentleman had told Noel he could see Brendan just as long as Noel wanted. Brendanâs body lay in the chapel. Noel entered the chapel. The backs of twelve rows of benches faced him, all empty; an aisle between them, a small raised platform ahead. At the end of the aisle, the coffin. A recorded organ, barely audible, had dirged through the thick chilled air.
Enough. The matter at hand was Claude Martin. Where the hell was he.
Who would decide to become a mortician? Noel could grasp garbage collecting and septic tank cleaning, jobs you needed virtually no training for. Get desperate enough, you can work on a tank-truck that sucks shit out of concrete septics. Going to school for dozens of years to become, say, a dentist, and spend the rest of your life manipulating broken teeth and patching up rotten gums, even that he could figure. But learning to clean a corpse, drain the fluids or whatever, smear makeup on dead skin? In keeping with the
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