Read Online Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson - Free Book Online Page B

explain? What could he say to others? There was no longer any speaking for the hell of it, no opening one’s mouth just to have it open, and if others would read darkness into his silence, well then, darkness was there, wasn’t it? There’d beenthe darkness of the war in Carl Heine, as there was in Horace himself.
    But – the deceased. He must think of Carl as the deceased, a bag of guts, a sack of parts, and not as the man who had so recently brought his son in; otherwise the job could not be done.
    Horace Whaley placed the heel of his right hand against the solar plexus of the dead man. He placed his left hand over it and began to pump in the manner of someone attempting to resuscitate a drowning victim. And as he did so a foam, something like shaving cream though flecked with pink-hued blood from the lungs, mushroomed at the deceased’s mouth and nose.
    Horace stopped and inspected this. He leaned down over the deceased man’s face, scrutinizing the foam closely. His gloved hands were still clean, they had touched nothing except the chilled skin of the deceased’s chest, and so he took from beside his instrument tray a pad and pencil and noted for himself the color and texture of this extruded foam that was abundant enough to cover the deceased’s bearded chin and his mustache almost entirely. It was a result, Horace knew, of air, mucus, and seawater all mingled by respiration, which meant the deceased had been alive at submersion. He had not died first and then been cast beneath the waves. Carl Heine had gone in breathing.
    But anoxia, like Alec Vilderling, or a waterlogged, choking asphyxiation? Like most people, Horace felt the need not merely to know but to envision clearly whatever had happened; furthermore it was his obligation to envision it clearly so that in the official register of Island County deaths the truth, however painful, might be permanently inscribed. Carl Heine’s dark struggle, his effort to hold his breath, the volume of water that had filled the vacuum of his gut, his profound unconsciousness and final convulsions, his terminal gasps in the grip of death as the last of the air leaked out of him and his heart halted and his brain ceased to consider anything – they were all recorded, or not recorded, in the slab of flesh thatlay on Horace Whaley’s examination table. It was his duty to find out the truth.
    For a moment Horace stood with his hands linked across his belly and debated silently the merits of opening the deceased man’s chest so as to get at the evidence in the heart and lungs. It was in this posture that he noted – how had he missed it before? – the wound to the skull over the dead man’s left ear. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said aloud.
    With a pair of barber’s shears he cut hair out of the way until the outlines of this wound emerged cleanly. The bone had fractured and caved in considerably over an area of about four inches. The skin had split open, and from the laceration of the scalp a tiny strand of pink brain material protruded. Whatever had caused this wound – a narrow, flat object about two inches wide – had left its telltale outline behind in the deceased man’s head. It was precisely the sort of lethal impression Horace had seen at least two dozen times in the Pacific war, the result of close-in combat, hand to hand, and made by a powerfully wielded gun butt. The Japanese field soldier, trained in the art of kendo, or stick fighting, was exceptionally proficient at killing in this manner. And the majority of Japs, Horace recalled, inflicted death over the left ear, swinging in from the right.
    Horace inserted a razor into one of his scalpels and poked it into the deceased’s head. He pressed the razor to the bone and guided it through the hair, describing an arc across the top of the deceased’s skull literally from ear to ear. It was a skillful and steady incision, like drawing a curved line with a pencil across the crown of the head, a fluid and