The Absence of Mercy

1

Although it was Friday evening, Ben Stevenson found traffic along Sunset Boulevard heading west out of Steubenville particularly heavy during his commute home. Dr. Coleman’s case had finished earlier than expected, and the last specimen of Mrs. Granch’s partial thyroidectomy had been sent to the lab at 4:40 P.M. The surgically resected margins had been clear of cancer cells, and he’d placed a call to the OR.

“OR Three,” the circulating nurse’s voice answered at the other end.

“Marsha, this is Dr. Stevenson. Can I speak with Dr. Coleman, please?”

“Oh, hello, Dr. Stevenson,” she replied. “One moment—I’ll put you on speaker.”

There was a brief pause, then Coleman’s voice, sounding slightly distant and metallic over the speakerphone. “How does it look, Ben?”

“Margins are clear, Todd,” he replied. “Looks good from my end.”

“All right,” the surgeon responded. “That’s all I’ve got for you today. I’m closing now.”

Closing. That was welcome news on any day, but particularly on a Friday when your eldest son’s high school baseball team was scheduled for a game. Thomas had started the season as a center fielder, but the strength of his arm had drawn the coach’s attention and Thomas had quickly proven to be an even greater asset on the mound. Tonight was his turn in the pitching rotation. The game was scheduled for a 6 P.M. start time, and Ben did not intend to miss it.

He spent the next ten minutes closing up the lab. When he was satisfied that everything was in order, Ben grabbed his jacket, locked the door behind him, and headed for his car. Pulling out of Trinity Medical Center’s parking lot, he flipped on the XM radio and began to hum along with the Beatles as John Lennon proclaimed, “Nothing’s gonna change my world.”

He passed John Scott Highway, and now the traffic began to slow as he approached Wintersville. Ben had moved his family to this small town from Pittsburgh thirteen years ago. He’d met Susan during medical school at Loyola University in Chicago. They’d graduated together, and had both managed to secure residency positions at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He’d trained in pathology, while Susan had pursued a program in family practice. At the end of their first year, they married—a small ceremony attended by immediate family and a few friends. They’d spent the following week hiking and kayaking through a good portion of upstate New York—Susan’s idea, actually—before returning to the exhausting, gut-wrenching grind of medical residency. The week had suited their needs perfectly, providing unhurried time to spend exclusively with one another, far removed from the constant demands and commotion of residency. It had felt good to exercise their bodies, which had already started to become soft with neglect. The fresh air and vibrant green foliage had rejuvenated their senses, and they’d talked with excitement about their plans for the future. Nights had been mostly cloudless, as he recalled, and they’d made love under the stars nearly every evening before retiring to the thin, nylon shelter of their tent. Ben had finished the week with more than a few mosquito bites on compromising areas of his body. Susan had come away from the week pregnant, although they would not realize it for another six weeks. Thomas was born nine months later.

That had been a difficult time for them, so early in their marriage. Medical residency was not the ideal time to try to raise a newborn, of course, and the hospital didn’t lighten the already exhausting work hours simply because there was a crying three-month-old infant at home to attend to. Neither of them had family in the area, and Susan simply couldn’t bring herself to turn Thomas over to day care after her very brief maternity allowance had ended. Ultimately, she’d decided to take a year off to spend with the baby, which, in retrospect, had turned out to be the right choice for all of them.

Canton Road slipped by on his right, and Ben realized just a little too late that he probably should’ve turned there to detour around some of this congestion. Sunset Boulevard, which had now become Main Street, was the primary connector between the towns of Steubenville and Wintersville, small midwestern flecks on the map, lying just west of the Ohio River. Fifty miles to the east was Pittsburgh, and approximately 150 miles to the west was Columbus. Aside from a parade of small towns with equal or lesser populations, there wasn’t much else in between. Certainly not enough to warrant traffic like this—one of the reasons they’d decided to leave such cities as Chicago and Pittsburgh behind them in the first place.

Must be an accident, Ben thought. A bad one from the looks of this backup. Inconvenient and frustrating, of course—and for one guilty moment he resented its presence in yet another way. An accident causing this much of a standstill could mean fatalities. And that often involved a coroner’s investigation, which meant he might be making a trip to the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office this evening or, by the latest, tomorrow morning to perform an autopsy. Great. Absolutely perfect, he thought to himself, and immediately felt another pang of guilt. Life as a small-town pathologist meant one-stop shopping when it came to coroner investigations. There was him, and then there was the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office and Forensic Lab in Pittsburgh, fifty miles to the east. But he had known that, he reminded himself, when he’d signed on to the job here.

The Beatles had yielded to the Band, who were sailing off into the first stanza of “The Weight”—an ominous sign, Ben thought. He switched off the radio. Traffic had slowed to a crawl and he could now see the entrance to Indian Creek High School just ahead on the right. This seemed to be the source of at least some of the congestion. He could identify two police cruisers, an ambulance, and a news truck in the school’s parking lot. On the right-hand shoulder, two cars had pulled off the road to exchange insurance information, apparently the result of a low-speed rear-end collision caused by a little rubbernecking. The drivers were involved in a heated discussion, and a sheriff’s deputy approached to intervene before things escalated further.

Up ahead, the traffic dissipated, and Ben accelerated slowly toward home. There was still enough time to make Thomas’s wrestling meet, although things would be a little tighter than he’d initially anticipated. He flipped back on the radio and smiled to himself. The Band was finishing the final chorus, and just like that, “The Weight” was over.

2

The first thing Ben noticed as he approached the house was that Susan had beaten him home, her gray Saab already parked in their driveway. He pulled in behind her, got out, and retrieved his briefcase from the trunk. Having heard him drive up, his wife had stepped out of the house and was walking down the front steps to greet him. Even after all these years she was still beautiful, Ben thought, with dark black shoulder-length hair and chestnut eyes he had difficulty looking away from. Her tall body had remained slim and agile, despite the two children she had carried. And although Ben himself was of similar athletic build, the years, he felt, had taken a harder toll on him, the responsibilities pulling steadily at the corners of his eyes, his brown hair now speckled generously with strands of gray. He smiled up at her, but the smile faded as she drew nearer.

“Tell me you’ve spoken with Thomas this afternoon,” she entreated, her hands clutching at the sides of her dress.

“Why? What’s wrong?” he asked, his mind automatically flipping through a list of the most catastrophic possibilities. Something was very wrong indeed, he realized as he studied her features. Susan was afraid—but she was much more than that: She was on the brink of hysteria.

“There’s been a death at the school,” she blurted out. “One of the high school kids, they think.”

Ben looked at her, dumbfounded. “What?”

“Someone was killed this afternoon,” she advised him. “Initial news reports said it was one of the high school kids, but they don’t know for sure.” Susan’s voice shook. “Where in the hell is Thomas?! He should’ve been home an hour ago!”

“He has a baseball game at Edison,” Ben reminded her. Edison High was located in the neighboring town of Richmond. A bus was scheduled to transport the team after school. But there were other, more pressing details to be considered. He was still trying to work his mind around what Susan had just told him. “What do you mean someone was killed? There was an accident?”

“An accident? Don’t you listen to the radio?”

“On the ride home,” he answered. “But they didn’t say anything about—”

“Honey, it wasn’t a car accident.” Susan’s voice continued to waver as she spoke, as if it were riding precariously along on one of those small-time roller coasters erected at carnivals. “One of the high school kids was murdered on the way home from school—in the woods along Talbott Drive. Ben, he was stabbed to death and just left there to die. They don’t even know who he is yet.”

For a moment, Ben was too stunned to say anything. What his wife had just told him was so implausible that he felt the urge to argue with her, to tell her that she was being ridiculous. Wintersville was a quiet midwestern town of about five thousand inhabitants. The town’s occupants were mostly middle-income conservative families who presumably preferred the sort of small-town life that could be enjoyed here. Golfing, fishing, and hunting were popular pastimes, and in early December folks came out for the annual Christmas parade. Tax evasion, shoplifting, and the occasional drag race along Kragel Road were the most hardcore criminal activities this town had seen over the past decade. After four years in Pittsburgh, it was one of the things that had initially attracted him. He had decided a long time ago that he did not wish to fall asleep to the sound of sirens. As for the murder of a high school child on his way home from school, it was simply not the type of thing that happened here. Ever.

“They won’t release the victim’s identity until after the family has been notified,” he heard himself reply numbly. “That’s how it’s done.”

Susan came to him then, putting her arms around him tightly. She was trembling, Ben realized, and he hugged her back. He felt sick to his stomach, and his legs were wooden and uncertain beneath him. He was thankful at that moment for someone to hold on to.

His wife looked up at him, and for a moment it seemed as if she was uncertain how to proceed, as if she was struggling with a decision that only partially involved him. Then her eyes cleared and seemed to regain their focus. “Honey,” she said, her voice just above a whisper, “we’ve got to find Thomas. I’ll feel better once he’s home. They would’ve canceled the game, don’t you think? Or at least phoned the parents to let them know what was happening?”

Ben thought this was probably true. Whose number had they given the school as an emergency contact anyway? He separated himself enough from his wife to place his briefcase on the hood of the car, fumbling with the latch. “Where’s Joel?” he asked.

“Inside,” she replied. “I picked him up from Teresa’s on the way home.”

Ben swung the case open to reveal a haphazard array of documents and medical journals. He reached inside one of the interior pockets and retrieved the phone. The digital display indicated that he had two new messages. He flipped the cell open and punched the button to access voice mail. The first message turned out to be from Susan, asking if he had heard from Thomas, and imploring him to call her as soon as possible. The second message was from Phil Stanner, Thomas’s baseball coach.

“Ben, this is Coach Stanner,” the recorded voice announced, and Ben felt a wave of dread rising within him. He put the phone on speaker so that Susan could hear.

“Listen,” Phil’s voice floated up to them from the phone’s tiny speaker. “You’ve probably already heard, but someone was killed this afternoon in the woods close to the school. The police have the whole area cordoned off, which is making it difficult to get into and out of the school parking lot. All after-school activities have obviously been canceled. Thomas is fine, and I’ve got the entire team here with me in the gymnasium. We’re asking parents not to come up to the school to pick up their kids, but instead to wait at the designated bus stop where their child is usually dropped off after school. Buses will be bringing students home starting around six thirty P.M., but kids won’t be let off of the bus unless there’s an adult there to meet them. Thanks for your cooperation. If you have any questions, you can contact the school, but even with four people answering phones, the lines have been pretty tied up this afternoon, so don’t call unless you have to.”

The message ended and Ben closed the phone and placed it in his front pants pocket. Susan’s hand was covering her mouth, and she looked up at him with a mixture of relief and sadness. Her other arm had wrapped itself protectively around her waist. It was 5:52 P.M. Ben put an arm around his wife’s shoulders, pulling her body against him. He looked up at the large bay window that marked the front of their house. It offered a limited visual portal into their family room, and he could just make out the top of Joel’s head, his familiar brown cowlick arching upward like an apostrophe, as he sat on their couch watching television—hopefully not the news, Ben thought.

He kissed the top of Susan’s head, wondering if even at this very moment there was a Sheriff’s Department cruiser pulling into someone’s driveway. In his mind, he could see it clearly: the car rolling slowly to a stop, two uniformed officers stepping out and making that long, awful walk to the front door. He imagined them ringing the doorbell and listening to the sound of shuffling feet approaching from the foyer just beyond, a small voice calling through the closed door: “Who is it?”

“Sheriff’s Department, ma’am.”

A momentary pause, followed by the sound of the voice, already afraid, calling out to someone deeper inside of the dwelling: “They say it’s the Sheriff’s Department.”

A man’s voice, descending down the interior stairs: “Well, what do they want? Jesus, Martha, open the door!”

The sound of the dead bolt sliding back within its metallic housing. The door slowly swinging open to reveal a man and a woman, roughly the same age as Susan and himself, standing just inside the open threshold and looking out onto the cold, gray world and the unfortunate messengers standing in front of them. In this image he has conjured, the couple suddenly appear frail beyond their given years, as if this moment itself has weakened them. In a timorous glance, they take in the grave faces of the two unwelcome men standing before them, who have arrived with news the parents do not want to hear, and whose expressions carry within them all of the information that really matters: I’m terribly sorry. Your boy is gone. He was left dead in the woods, and he lies there still while we try to figure out who might have done this to him. He will never walk through this door again.

In that moment, standing in their own driveway with familiar gravel beneath their feet, Ben offered a silent prayer of gratitude—God forgive him—that he and his wife had not been selected at random to receive that horrible message. It was a prayer of relief and thankfulness for the safety of his family, and a prayer of compassion for the ones who waited even now for the messengers to come.

“Let’s go inside,” he whispered to Susan, and the two walked up the steps together.

3

An hour later, the three of them stood on the sidewalk, impatiently awaiting the arrival of the Indian Creek High School bus. A block to the east, the sound of passing vehicles could be heard as they traveled along Canton Road on their way north toward Route 22. Beside him, Susan fidgeted restlessly. Ben shared the sentiment. A recorded message from the high school baseball coach, after all, could only go so far in placing a parent’s mind at ease.

Ben glanced at his watch. It was seven o’clock. Shouldn’t the bus be here already? he wondered. Perhaps not, considering the traffic and events of the day. Rounding everyone up and making sure that all of the kids were accounted for would take longer than expected. Some of the parents would just now be arriving home from work, and there would be no one waiting to receive the kids at certain stops. It could be another hour, he realized.

Dusk was already beginning to settle upon the neighborhood. In another forty minutes they’d be standing here in the dark. Under the circumstances, he reflected, it was probably not the best plan the school could have come up with: a bunch of families standing around outside in the dark waiting for their kids to be dropped off while somewhere out here a psychopath roamed the streets. He thought about returning home for the car, even though they lived only two blocks away. He didn’t want to leave Susan and Joel standing here alone, however, and he was afraid that if they all went back together the bus would arrive during the time they were gone. Instead, they waited, watching their shadows grow long and lean as the sun continued its rapid descent toward the horizon.

Something the size of a large cicada moved against Ben’s upper leg with a soft buzzing sound, startling him. He nearly cried out, but in a moment it was gone. He shuddered involuntarily, imagining its crunchy, crackling exoskeleton flitting up against him.

Suddenly, it came again, nestling up against his right thigh with a muffled burring noise. He leaped backward. “Shit! What was that?”

Susan looked over at him inquisitively, eyebrows raised. “What’s wrong with you?”

“A giant bug just hit me in the leg,” Ben advised her. “Twice!”

No sooner had he uttered these words than he realized two things: The first was that he had just cursed in front of his highly impressionable eight-year-old son, who would now most assuredly walk around his home, his school, and the local playground for the next week yelling “Shit!” at the top of his lungs. The second was that the flying cicada creature that had struck him—twice!—in the right thigh was nothing more than his own cell phone, which he’d left on vibrate in his front pants pocket. Feeling now like a complete idiot, he reached into his pocket and brought out the phone.

“Shit! That’s no giant bug, Dad. That’s your phone,” Joel pointed out enthusiastically.

“Thank you, Joel,” he said, looking at the phone’s digital display, which simply read: “CO.” It was his assistant calling from the Coroner’s Office, which meant that the body was either on its way to the CO or had already arrived and would soon be ready for autopsy. In a case such as this, they would expect him to perform the autopsy tonight. Answering this call would be the beginning of a long, unpleasant evening.

“Go ahead,” Susan said with a smile as he glanced in her direction. “You’d better answer your cicada.”

Ben flipped the phone open, and took a few steps away from his wife and son. “Yes, hello,” he said.

“Dr. S,” the voice on the other end spoke excitedly. “It’s Nat.”

“Hey. What’s up?”

“You heard about that kid they found dead in the woods this afternoon, I guess. The one who was stabbed to death?”

“Yeah. We heard.”

“Well, the cops have finished with their crime scene investigation, and they’re releasin’ the body to us. I’m about to head over there to pick him up right now.”

“Okay. Just give me a call when you get back to the office and everything’s ready.”

“Sure, Dr. S. No problem. But, hey. There’s a lot of reporters settin’ up outside the CO with their camera crews ’n’ stuff, you know. Body’s not even here yet and they’re startin’ to gather round like they’re expecting an Elvis sighting or somethin’. I mean, this is a big case for us, don’t you think?”

“Nat, listen to me.” Ben kept his voice as calm and as clear as he could. He spoke slowly, hoping that by maintaining his own composure he could exert some positive influence on his overenthusiastic assistant. He doubted that it would do much good, but at least it was worth a try.

“Yeah? What d’ya need me to do?”

Take two Valium and call me in the morning, Ben thought to himself. Instead, he said, “You’re right about this being an important case.”

“Sure ’nough,” Nat exclaimed. “Murder like this—in cold blood and all—ain’t somethin’ you see round here every day. That’s for sure.”

“That’s right,” Ben replied. “It’s not something we see around here every day. It’s big news in a small town, and those reporters are going to want some footage and a nice ten-second sound bite for the eight o’clock news.”

“Ain’t that the truth. Things are about to get a lot more interesting round here. It’s gonna be a regular three-ring circus.”

“You’re probably right,” Ben agreed. “But right now we have a job to do. It’s an important job. A boy was murdered today. He’s lying on the ground surrounded by yellow police tape. And somewhere out there is a family whose son won’t be returning home tonight. Now, our job is to gather as much information as we can about how he died, and the evidence that we have is his body. If we do our job carefully and professionally, we might find something that will help the police track down his killer.”

“That’s right,” Nat agreed excitedly. “Wouldn’t that be somethin’? You think they’d want me to testify in court?”

“Maybe. But I can tell you one thing for sure. If we let our emotions get the best of us—if we allow ourselves to be distracted and start thinking too much about the reporters and the police and the eight o’clock news—well, then we’ll screw it up. We’ll miss something, or allow a break in the chain of custody, or jump to some conclusion that we’ll regret later. But by then, it will be too late.”

“Too damn late,” Nat agreed seriously. His voice was quieter now, more subdued, and although Ben could still detect a hint of the earlier excitement just beneath the surface, the boy’s tone was held in check now by something of even greater significance: a sense of sobering responsibility. He could picture his young assistant standing in the lab’s small office with the phone held tightly in his right hand, the adrenaline-laced muscles of his body filled with purpose and ready to act. Nathan Banks was a good kid. At twenty-two, he was a bit young for the job of pathologist’s assistant. But Ben had known him for most of the boy’s life, and he was also friends with Nat’s father, who’d been flying for United Airlines for the past eighteen years and, as a commercial airline pilot, was away from home more often than not. Nat had taken an early fascination with the Coroner’s Office. He’d started volunteering there at the age of sixteen, helping Ben mostly by preparing and cleaning instruments, attending to certain janitorial duties, and the like. But Nat also enjoyed watching and eventually assisting with the autopsies Ben performed. His mother, Karen, had given her hesitant permission, although she’d expressed some reservations to Ben about the interest her son had taken in the field. One afternoon she’d shown up at the office and had asked Ben with a worried look if he thought it was normal or healthy for a sixteen-year-old boy to want to spend his days working around dead people. Ben, who had entered medical school at the age of twenty-six but had volunteered both in his local hospital’s emergency department as well as the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office since the age of eighteen, explained to Karen that her son’s interest in the work was probably nothing to worry about. It might even serve as a potential career someday, he’d suggested, and over the next two years Nat had slowly been allowed to assume a more hands-on role in the autopsies Ben performed. Eventually, he became skilled enough to be a real asset in the lab, and when Nat graduated from high school Ben had offered to turn his volunteer position into a paid one. Nat had enthusiastically accepted, and he had been working there ever since.

“What you and I have to decide,” Ben now said into the phone, “is whether we want to be part of the three-ring circus, or whether we want to act like professionals and focus on the job in front of us. You can do either one, Nat; but you can’t do both. What I need to know from you now is how you want to handle it.”

“Well, let’s do our J-O-B,” his assistant replied. “Don’t sweat it, Dr. S—I’ve got your back.”

“That’s what I needed to hear.” Ben glanced back at Susan and Joel, who were standing on the sidewalk in the gathering darkness. “Listen, I’ve got something I need to do before heading over there. You think you can go pick up the body and give me a call on my cell once you get back to the CO?”

“No problem.”

“And if the reporters want a few words from you for the evening news, what are you going to tell them?”

“I’ll tell them, ‘No muthafuckin’ comment!’ Excuse my French. We’ve got a job to do.”

“That’s right.” Ben smiled, feeling a modicum of levity for the first time since arriving home that afternoon. “I’ll see you in a little while.”

“Over and out,” Nat saluted, and terminated the connection.

“Over and out,” Ben sighed to himself as he returned the phone to his pocket and turned back to his wife and son. A moment later, he heard the sound of an approaching diesel engine, and as it rounded the corner they were silhouetted in the headlight beams of the approaching bus.

4

Fifty minutes later, Ben found himself sitting in the darkened interior of the Honda as he headed east toward the Coroner’s Office. A tentative drizzle had begun to fall from the sky as his family walked home together from the bus stop, and by now it had progressed to a steady drumming that pattered the car’s rooftop insistently with its heavy, hollow fingers. A light fog clung to the ground, and Ben was forced to negotiate the dark, rain-slickened streets slowly and with exceptional caution. He’d habitually turned on the radio as he started the car, but most of the local stations were running news of the murder, and the more distant ones that he could sometimes pick up on clear days were reduced to static in the mounting storm. He flipped the knob to the off position and decided to simply concentrate on driving.

Thomas had stepped off the bus that evening to the warm embrace of his relieved and grateful parents, and to the boundless questions of his spellbound younger brother. As it turned out, Thomas didn’t have much more information on the identity of the victim or the details of the crime than his parents had already received from Phil Stanner. This stood to reason, since the police were remaining tight-lipped until after they’d had a chance to notify the victim’s family.

What was clear from the moment Thomas stepped off the bus to join them was that he regarded the day’s events with a certain quiet thoughtfulness that Ben had not anticipated. He spoke very little during the walk home, and let his family’s questions wash over him without much comment. Ben wondered whether his son might be in a mild state of shock, or simply trying to wrap his mind around the idea of a violent attack so close to home and school. Ben felt that children of Joel’s age tended to regard death as an obscure and distant entity, far removed from their own daily lives and therefore relatively inconsequential. This view seemed to change as children entered their teenage years and began to explore and sometimes even to court this previously intangible eventuality. Popular movies often romanticized the notion with blazing shoot-outs among beautiful people against an urban backdrop at sunset, or titanic ships that slowly sank in the freezing Atlantic while lovers shared their final fleeting moments together aboard a makeshift life raft only buoyant enough for one. This was not the type of death that Ben encountered as a physician. He supposed it could be described as many things, but mostly his experience with death was that it was impersonal, and seldom graceful.

During his intern year as a medical resident, Ben had been working his third shift in the emergency department when paramedics brought in a fifty-eight-year-old man with crushing substernal chest pain radiating to his left arm and neck. Ben had examined the patient quickly in the limited time available, and after reviewing the EKG he’d decided that the man was having a heart attack. Emergency treatment for heart attack patients with certain specific EKG changes called for the administration of thrombolytic agents: powerful clot-busting drugs designed to open up the clogged blood vessel and restore adequate blood flow to the heart. The supervising physician was not immediately available, the patient’s clinical condition seemed tenuous, and Ben had given the order for the nursing staff to administer the thrombolytic drug to his patient. The results had been almost immediate. Within five minutes, the patient was complaining of worsening pain, which was now also radiating to his back. Eight minutes later the patient’s blood pressure plummeted, his heart rate increased to 130 beats per minute, and he vomited all over himself and the freshly pressed sleeve of Ben’s previously impeccably clean white coat. Several moments later the patient lost consciousness, and Ben could no longer palpate a pulse. He attempted to place a breathing tube into the patient’s trachea but couldn’t see past a mouthful of emesis. Instead, the tube slipped into the patient’s esophagus, and each squeeze of the resuscitation bag aerated the patient’s stomach instead of his lungs. Ben began CPR, and the first several compressions were accompanied by the sickening feel of cracking ribs beneath his interlaced hands. “Call Dr. Gardner!” he shouted to the charge nurse standing in the doorway, and he soon heard the overhead paging system bellowing: “Dr. Gardner to the ER, stat! Dr. Gardner to the ER, stat!”

For eight minutes Ben pumped up and down on his patient’s chest, attempting to circulate enough blood to generate some sort of blood pressure. Every so often, he paused long enough to look up at the patient’s heart rhythm on the monitor. “Shock him, two hundred joules!” he ordered the nurse, who would charge the paddles, place them on the patient’s chest, yell “CLEAR!,” and press the two buttons that sent a surge of electricity slamming through the patient’s body like an electric sledgehammer. “No response, Doctor,” the nurse reported each time, and Ben would order another round of electricity to be delivered like a mule kick into the patient’s chest before resuming chest compressions over splintering ribs. Somewhere during the nightmare of that resuscitation—Ben’s first resuscitation as a physician—the patient’s bladder sphincter relaxed and about a liter of urine came rushing out of the man’s body and onto the bedsheets. A small rivulet of urine began trickling steadily onto the floor. Ben continued his compressions on the patient’s mottled chest, which was now tattooed with burn marks from the defibrillator paddles, as the nurse had failed to place enough conductive gel on the paddles before delivering each shock. The room stunk of burnt flesh and a repugnant potpourri of human sweat, urine, and the vomited remains of a tuna fish sandwich that the patient had apparently eaten shortly prior to his arrival. The endotracheal tube, temporarily forgotten, slipped out of the patient’s esophagus and fell onto the floor with a resounding splat.

“What in the hell is going on here, Dr. Stevenson?!” Dr. Jason Gardner, Ben’s supervising physician, stood in the doorway, gaping in disbelief at the scene. He appeared to be moderately out of breath from having run across the hospital from the cafeteria on the other side of the building. Ben noticed a small bit of pasta clinging like a frightened animal to his yellow necktie.

“Heart attack.” Ben’s voice was hollow and uncertain, small and desperately apologetic, and his words fell from his mouth in a rush as he tried to explain. “He came in with chest pain radiating to his arm, neck, and back. Only history was hypertension. He had EKG changes—an ST-elevation MI, I thought. I gave him thrombolytics. I was going to call you, but I didn’t think there was enough time. He coded shortly after I gave the ’lytics. I tried CPR and defibrillation, but I couldn’t get him back. I don’t understand it. I had the nurse call for you as soon as he lost his pulses, but—”

“What did his chest X-ray look like?”

“His chest X-ray?” Ben thought for a moment. Had he ordered one? “I… I don’t know. I think they got one when he first came in, but I didn’t get a chance to look at it.”

“What do you mean you didn’t get a chance to look at it?”

“I just… he started crashing, and there wasn’t enough time…”

“For God’s sake, Stevenson! Stop doing compressions and go get me the goddamn chest X-ray!”

Ben looked down at his hands, surprised to see that they were still pressing up and down on the patient’s chest. He forced them to stop. “Maybe if we tried another shock… ,” he suggested hopefully.

“The patient’s dead,” Gardner growled. “You can shock him all you want, and he’s still going to be just as dead. Now, go get that X-ray. Let’s see what you missed.”

Ben left the room and walked across the hallway to the viewing box. A wooden repository hung on the wall containing several manila sleeves of radiographic images. He shuffled through them, found the appropriate one, and returned with it to the resuscitation room. Dr. Gardner stood next to the cooling body, leafing through the patient’s chart. Ben noticed that the dead man’s eyes remained open, staring lifelessly at the door through which he’d recently entered. Throughout the course of his career, Ben would never forget the look of those eyes, which were not accusatory or vengeful, but simply, unabashedly dead. For some reason, that was the worst of it—the detached finality of that look. It was the first thing he learned that day: When things go bad in this line of work and someone dies, there is always plenty of blame to go around; but there is only one soul who truly no longer cares.

“Let’s see that film,” Gardner grunted, and Ben handed him the envelope. He watched the man remove the X-ray from its sleeve and slap it onto the resuscitation room’s viewing box. The seasoned physician studied it for a minute, then queried, “Well, what do you make of it, Dr. Stevenson?”

Ben cleared his throat hesitantly. “The lung fields are somewhat hyperinflated. Cardiac silhouette appears slightly enlarged, although that can be an artifact of a single AP view. Costophrenic margins are well visualized. No evidence of an infiltrate or pneumothorax.”

“Uh-huh. And how would you describe the mediastinum?”

“Widened. The aortic knob is poorly visualized.”

“Exactly. What comes to mind, Dr. Stevenson, in a fifty-eight-year-old gentleman with a history of hypertension, who presents with chest pain radiating to his arm and back and has a widened mediastinum on chest X-ray?”

“Aortic dissection?” Ben ventured. “But what about the ST elevation on the patient’s EKG?”

Gardner snatched up the EKG, glanced at it perfunctorily, then handed it to Ben. “Inferior ST elevation consistent with a Stanford type A aortic tear dissecting into the right coronary artery. Pushing thrombolytics on this man was a death sentence. He bled into his chest and pericardial sac within minutes. He would’ve stood a better chance if you’d just walked up to him and shot him in the head with a .38.”

Those last words—Dr. Gardner’s final commentary on the case—hung in the air, defying objection. Ben stood in the room between his boss and the dead man, unable to conjure any sort of meaningful response. His face burned with anguish and humiliation. In the corner of the room, a nurse pretended to scribble notes on the patient’s resuscitation sheet. She glanced up briefly in Ben’s direction, her face cautiously guarded.

“Notify the medical examiner, and submit this case to M & M conference on Friday,” Dr. Gardner instructed him. “Get back to work. You’ve got three patients in the rack still waiting to be seen. Oh, and Stevenson?”

“Yes?” Ben looked up, needing to hear some token of consolation from his mentor, this man he respected.

“Try your best not to kill the rest of them,” Gardner advised him blandly, and left the room without looking back.

One of the hardest things about being a physician, Ben now thought as he recollected this horrendous experience in the ER as a young intern, was forcing yourself to continue along in the wake of such catastrophic events as if nothing had happened. The three patients still waiting to be seen turned out to be a child with a common cold, a drunk teenager who was brought to the emergency department by her friends, and a forty-two-year-old man with a wrist fracture. Routine, mundane cases, in other words. Ben attempted to clear his head as best he could, and he interviewed and examined them all carefully and professionally. But while looking into the child’s ears with an otoscope, he thought to himself, I just killed a man. While ordering an anti-emetic for the teenager now puking through the slots between the side rails of her gurney, he thought, There’s a man in Resuscitation Room 2 covered by a white sheet because I was in too much of a hurry to look at a simple chest X-ray. In the middle of examining the man’s broken wrist, he recalled holding the wrist of the dead man in his hands as he searched for a pulse that was no longer there. During these moments, his patients were aware of none of this. Two more people arrived in the department during the time he took to examine and treat the previous three patients. After that, an ambulance showed up with a moderately severe asthmatic, and four more people checked in to triage.

In most jobs, when something horrible and traumatic happens to an employee, they are instructed to take the rest of the day off and are possibly sent for counseling. There is time to process what has happened, to remove oneself from the environment. There is time to take a breath, to discuss the incident with your spouse, or to simply get wasted at the local pub. In medical training, you are instructed to notify the medical examiner and to get back to work. You are given the helpful advice “Try not to kill the next one,” and you are desperately afraid that you will. Recovery from such events occurs on your own time, in private, once you’ve fulfilled all of your other duties and obligations. And in medicine, those duties are never truly fulfilled. There is always another patient, another conference, another presentation, another emergency in the middle of the night, another fire to be put out. Always.

The night’s precipitation continued to fall on the darkened street ahead. Neon headlights cast their artificial glare on a hundred tiny rivers of water racing desperately toward the town’s sewers, and wherever they might lead beyond that. Four miles from here, Nat was preparing the body of a young boy for his final medical examination. It was going to be a long and exhausting night, and Ben was pretty sure there would be more to follow. Things would get worse before they got better. Things like this always did. He didn’t want to be here, driving away from his family on a night like this. It didn’t feel like the right thing to do, and he wondered to himself, not for the first time, exactly where his allegiances were. He could feel the storm tugging at the hole inside of him, another chunk of earth pulled loose by the water’s greedy fingers. He imagined himself being swept away into the sewers, one nearly imperceptible piece at a time. What will it feel like when there’s nothing left? he asked himself. And will I even know when that moment comes? Within the car there was only silence, except for the steady thrum of the rain falling all around him.

5

Nat had been right about one thing: The press was going to have a field day with this one—a regular three-ring circus. Ben could make out the congregation near the front entrance to the Coroner’s Office from a quarter mile away. The usually dimly illuminated front steps of the CO were now bathed in bright artificial light as at least three different television crews jostled for position. Two patrol cars were parked just across the street, and a third one blocked the left lane of traffic to allow room for the news crews to set up their equipment without running the risk of being plowed over by a distracted motorist. Ben quickly decided there was no way he’d attempt to enter through the CO’s front entrance; instead, he turned left on Broadway and right on Oregon Avenue, hoping to sneak in through the building’s rear delivery access.

He parked the car on Oregon and hopped out. Shielding himself from the downpour with his jacket as much as possible, he trotted the half block through the gathering puddles toward Brady Circle. The rear of the CO stood mostly in darkness. The parking lot behind the building was vacant except for two vehicles. One was the coroner’s van that Nat had used to transport the body. Beside it, a second van, which Ben didn’t recognize, sat idling, a white plume of exhaust rising up in a dissipating cloud from its tailpipe. As he approached, the side door of the vehicle slid open and two men stepped out, making their way toward him across the parking lot.

“Dr. Stevenson?” one of them asked from the darkness.

“Yes?” he replied cautiously.

Ben was suddenly bathed in the bright light of a television camera.

“Dr. Stevenson, is it true the victim was stabbed forty-seven times? Has a positive identification been made yet?” asked the reporter, thrusting a microphone in his face.

“I haven’t examined the victim yet. That’s what I’m here to do now.”

The man with the microphone didn’t seem to appreciate the finer points of Ben’s statement, for he continued to fire off questions one after the other. “Is the victim a resident of the town, Dr. Stevenson? Someone you happen to know? Was there any weapon found at the scene?”

“How am I supposed to know that? You should be talking to the police.” Ben fumbled for the keys in his pocket.

“What was the last homicide of this nature that you investigated, Doctor? Have you spoken with the County Coroner’s Office or the state police?”

“I haven’t spoken to anyone except my assistant.” Ben turned the key in the dead bolt and swung the door open just wide enough to step inside. “Now if you’ll excuse me…”

“Dr. Stevenson, you have a son of your own that attends Indian Creek High School. How did he take the news of a murder only a few blocks away from the school?”

“He seems to be handling it much better than you are,” Ben replied, then closed the door against the deluge of questions from the overzealous reporter. He flipped on the light in the back hallway. It was blessedly quiet inside the building. He could hear the faint sounds of Nat moving around in the autopsy room beyond the door at the end of the hall. His assistant had the habit of humming softly to himself as he went about the task of laying out the equipment and preparing the body for examination. It was mildly endearing, although Ben could never recognize the melodies, which belonged to a musical generation that was not his own. Ben hung up his jacket on the coatrack to his left and proceeded down the hallway.

“Hi, Nat,” he said as he entered the room.

“What’s up?” Nat responded cheerfully. “Did you get hit by the reporter brigade on your way in?”

“Of course,” Ben replied. “I thought that I might outsmart them by coming in the back way, but they had their sentries waiting for me.”

“No doubt, no doubt. They were on me like flies on sh—, like flies at a picnic, you know, as soon as I pulled the wagon into the back parkin’ lot. ‘Tell us this! Tell us that!’ Those guys are pretty damn…”

“Importunate? Unremitting?” Ben offered.

“Pretty damn annoying, if you ask me. Hell, I don’ know the answers to any of those questions. Might as well be askin’ me who’s gonna win the Kentucky Derby. And if I did know, I wouldn’t be tellin’ ’em nothin’ anyway. Just like you said, Dr. S: ‘No muthafuckin’ comment!’ Right?”

“I think that was actually you who said that.” Ben glanced at the shape on the examination table, still zipped up inside of the black cadaver bag. “How are we doing?”

“I just got back about ten minutes ago. Fog’s gettin’ thick out there, and the wagon’s front windshield defroster ain’t workin’ so hot. Rainy days—and rainy nights especially—you’ve got to drive slow, or else you might find yourself joinin’ the gentleman in back, if you catch my meaning.”

His assistant continued to move about the room as he spoke, laying out instruments and checking connections. He was a study in controlled chaos: his light blond hair eternally tussled as if he had just recently climbed out of bed, the tail of his shirt tucked into his pants in some places but left free to fend for itself in others, one shoelace frequently loose and on the brink of coming untied—and yet within the autopsy room he was highly organized and efficient, as if the manner with which he conducted his personal life did not apply here.

“I’ll ask Jim Ducket to take a look at it,” Ben told him. “If you’re having trouble with the wagon, maybe we can get a replacement from the county until we get it fixed.”

“Aw, the wagon ain’t no trouble. Just needs a little kick in the nuts every now and then. If you want Jimmy Ducket to take a look at anything, have him check out the radio. Hell, half the stations were set to classic rock when I climbed in it tonight. I take one five-day vacation and the whole place has gone to hell.”

Ben smiled. Nat had gone on a ski trip to Utah with his father last week, and Ben had been left making the pickups himself, just as he’d done before his assistant had come on board with him full-time several years ago. A few radio station adjustments had been the first order of business on his way out to pick up Kendra Fields, who’d died in her home last week of a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. When Ben arrived at the residence, Kendra’s husband, John, had been waiting for him at the front door. “Guess she’s gone and done it this time, doc,” the old man had said matter-of-factly. John was eighty-nine and belonged to the congregation at Ben’s church. Kendra had been three years his elder, and during the course of her life had survived two heart attacks, a serious stroke, breast cancer, and a small plane crash. All things considered, it was time for her to pack up and head for home. Ben had chatted with John for a half hour. Then he’d loaded Kendra’s body into the back of the wagon and had treated her to some Creedence Clearwater Revival on the short ride back to the CO, cranking the volume up enough to turn people’s heads as he drove past. Hell, on top of everything else, Kendra Fields had also been a touch deaf during her final ten years on this earth.

“Well, that’s what you get when you skip town and leave us old farts to drive the wagon,” he advised his young colleague.

“Yeah? Well, never again,” Nat assured him. “Next time I leave town I’m takin’ the keys to the wagon with me. You can use that old beat-up jalopy of yours to pick up folks if you have to. Stuff ’em in the trunk, for all I care.”

Ben crossed the room and pulled a plastic apron down from the hook on the wall where it hung. He donned an eye shield, head cap, shoe covers, and latex gloves, and approached the awaiting corpse. He was glad that Nat was here to assist him and to keep him company with his incessant, irreverent chatter. Ben filled his lungs with a deep breath, and let it out slowly through his nose. With his right hand he grasped the bag’s zipper and pulled it down.

The first thing he noticed was that the subject was young, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old. His skin was smooth and slightly freckled around the face. His eyes, still open, were dark brown, interlaced with a touch of mahogany. His hair was also brown, but several shades lighter than his eyes. A long lock hung partially across his forehead, tapering to a point and ending just shy of his left cheek, above the first of several obvious facial wounds. The flesh in this area had been torn completely away, leaving a jagged vacancy.

“Jeeeesus,” Nat commented. “That’s one hell of a chunk gone from his face, Dr. S. What do you think he hit him with?”

Ben studied the gaping wound for a moment, peering closely at its serrated edges. “That’s a bite wound,” he said quietly. “Hand me the camera.”

Nat walked across the room, opened a cabinet, and returned with the lab’s digital camera. “Bit him,” he repeated softly to himself, mulling it over. “Now, that’s messed up.”

Ben snapped off several pictures of the facial wound. “In multiple places.” He pointed to the right side of the boy’s lower neck. “See here?”

A second, wider piece of flesh was missing at the spot Ben was indicating. The boy was still dressed in the clothes he had died in, and the collar of his black, loosely fitting T-shirt was torn in this area and caked with dried blood. Ben inspected the wound carefully, using forceps to pull back a flap of skin that hung limply across the opening, partially obscuring it. A voice-activated recorder hung around Ben’s neck, and he spoke into it in a neutral, practiced tone as he worked:

“Dr. Ben Stevenson; March 29th, 2013; case number—” He looked at the large dry erase board hanging on the wall. “Case number 127: John Doe. Received directly from the crime scene, custody transferred from Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department.” He took a breath. “Subject is a Caucasian male, approximately fourteen years of age, dressed in a T-shirt and blue jeans. Inspection of the face and cranium demonstrates a 3.6-by-4.1 centimeter soft tissue avulsion injury beginning superficial to the left zygomatic arch and extending inferiorly to involve the lateral portion of the orbicularis oris. Avulsions of the zygomaticus major and minor are noted, with wound depth extending through the masseteric fascia.” He lifted the boy’s chin slightly with one gloved finger, using a thin metal instrument to probe a penetrating wound noted there. “Inspection of the submental region demonstrates a puncture wound measuring 0.75 by 0.9 centimeters, which extends through the mylohyoid and hyoglossus muscles, continuing superiorly and dorsally through the body of the tongue, soft palate, and nasopharynx. There are seven—correction, eight—similar puncture wounds to the cranium that extend through the scalp, underlying musculature, and galea aponeurotica. Two of the eight wounds penetrate the skull and enter the cranial vault. A second avulsion injury is noted at the right inferolateral aspect of the neck 5.3 centimeters medial to the acromioclavicular junction and involving the inferior platysma, lateral trapezius, and sternocleidomastoid muscles, as well as the right external jugular vein.”

This part of the examination—the initial inspection and description of the body—was the portion of the necropsy Ben always found most interesting. Every corpse, he found, had a tale to tell, and the details of one’s life were often prominently revealed by the compilation of physical marks collected along the way, like scrapes and gouges on the underside of a boat. Prior scars, both surgical and traumatic; tattoos; track marks from a lifetime of IV drug abuse; burns; calluses; fat and muscle mass distribution; exaggerated spinal curvature from decades of stooped physical labor; tan lines; nicotine-stained fingertips; chewed fingernails; and even the state of a person’s teeth often spoke volumes about the course of their life. In Ben’s opinion, these were not only the most interesting details of the examination, but also the most aesthetically beautiful—strange words to describe the physical blemishes of a corpse, perhaps, but he was a pathologist, after all. These marks and imperfections represented more than simple anatomy. They had been born from action, behavior, and life experiences, and were therefore the most human, the most in touch with the life they had left behind.

In the case of traumatic deaths, however, it was different. One’s eye is inexorably drawn to the fatal injury—that which has extinguished the flame of life so abruptly. Especially in the case of young people, the autopsy ceases to be about discovering the marks left behind from a life richly experienced, and rather is about bearing witness to the end of a life barely begun. Such was the case here, as Ben moved from one disfiguring injury to the other, each one denoting a blatant disrespect for the life of this young man, and for human life in general. It was a tragedy to behold. He wanted simply to stop, to cover the form in front of him with cloth, to save it from this last final disgrace. Instead, he continued, using practiced and precise descriptive terminology like a shield to defend himself from what was real.

“Inspection of the thorax demonstrates puncture wounds to the right fourth and sixth intercostal spaces anteriorly, and to the right fifth, seventh, and eighth intercostal spaces along the midaxillary line. There is a 4.1-by-3.8 centimeter serrated avulsion of the left areola and underlying pectoralis muscle, similar in appearance to those of the face and neck, described above. There is a displaced fracture of the xiphoid process. Inspection of the abdomen demonstrates a 0.8-by-0.9 centimeter puncture wound to the right upper quadrant, and two similar puncture wounds to the right flank. There is a 35-centimeter diagonal incision extending from the right upper quadrant of the abdomen to the suprapubic region, penetrating the rectus abdominus and peritoneal fascia. There is evisceration of the small bowel. The genitalia are… missing.”

He paused for a moment, looking up at Nat, who was positioned across the table on the other side of the body. Most of the color had run out of his round, boyish face as he stood bolt upright and unmoving, eyes transfixed upon the body. Ben was suddenly embarrassed. He should’ve had enough sense to send Nat home as soon as he’d unzipped the bag. This was not something a twenty-two-year-old needed to watch, regardless of his chosen occupation. When Karen Banks had agreed to allow Nat to volunteer at the CO, she had done so with an implicit understanding that Ben would watch out for her son’s physical and psychological welfare, and he regarded the trust and deference Nat’s parents had extended to him seriously. During his time at the CO, Nat had taken part in scores of autopsies, in cases ranging from the ravages of metastatic cancer, to self-inflicted gunshot wounds, to the death of young adults involved in motor vehicle accidents. He had even assisted during pediatric autopsies: cases of SIDS and child abuse. The boy was no novice at witnessing some of the trauma and unpleasantness that could descend upon the human body. But this… well, this was a different matter altogether.

“Listen, Nat. Why don’t you let me finish up here,” he said. “It’s late, and I’m going to need you in the office early tomorrow to help Tanya man the phones. From the look of Brady Circle out there, I don’t think the press is going to give up that easily, and I imagine that Sam Garston from the Sheriff’s Department will be stopping by bright and early looking for the coroner’s report. The rest of this stuff I can just take care of by—”

“Umm… Dr. S?”

“What is it, Nat?”

“This case here is the most interesting, most important thing we’ve had come through these doors over the six years I’ve been workin’ here.”

“I know. It’s pretty—”

“And if you think… if you think I’m goin’ home in the middle of the autopsy just because some nutjob lopped off the guy’s wiener and chucked it into the woods, well… you can forget it.”

“I wasn’t trying to—”

“You wanna weigh all them organs by yourself, type the report, and spend another forty minutes cleanin’ up afterward?”

“I think I can handle—”

“How many hours you wanna be here tonight anyway, Dr. S?”

“It’s not about—”

“No way. Discussion over. I’m stayin’. Or… or you can find yourself another assistant.”

Nat stood across the table, arms crossed, glaring defiantly back at Ben. The two considered each other in silence, neither flinching, for perhaps twenty seconds. Apparently, Ben realized, his assistant was quite serious. He considered his short list of options: send Nat home and risk losing him as an assistant, or allow him to stay, thereby rendering himself at least partially responsible for the possible long-term effects the experience could have on the boy’s psychological well-being.

“How do you know?” Ben asked. He was buying time while he tried to make up his mind.

“How do I know what?”

“How do you know the assailant chucked his wiener, as you like to put it, into the woods?”

“Oh. Cops found it at the scene. Fifty yards away from the body. Police canine actually tracked it down. It’s in a Ziploc bag taped to his right ankle.”

“I… see,” Ben said.

The two men stood there for a while longer, neither speaking, as they surveyed the mutilated body.

“Well, what’s it gonna be?” Nat challenged, impatient for a decision.

“I don’t know,” Ben sighed, tapping his fingers on the table. “I’m trying to decide whether I want to be responsible for further corrupting your already quite tenuous psychological stability.”

“Too late, Dr. S! I hang out in a Coroner’s Office. My psychological stability is already all blown to hell. Now gimme that scalpel. I’m gonna slice-an’-dice this turkey like a Thanksgiving dinner.”

Ben looked at him incredulously, shaking his head. “That’s so inappropriate I don’t even know where to begin.”

“How ‘bout you begin by pluggin’ in that Stryker saw for me, will ya?”

”Riiigghht.”

“Okay. I’ll do it myself.” Nat bent over and plugged the instrument’s umbilical cord into the outlet on the floor. “You want the chest opened, right? The usual?”

Ben said nothing.

“Great.” Nat nodded, as if he’d been given the green light to proceed. “Now step back, boss. I don’t wanna get shrapnel on your pretty white apron there. You jus’ leave this part to me.”

He picked up the bone saw and went to work.

6

It was nearly 2 A.M. by the time Ben pulled the Honda back into his driveway and set the parking brake. The rain had tapered to a thin drizzle, and the town seemed to have finally resigned itself to sleep. The interior lights of most of the houses Ben passed on the way home had been extinguished, and a fitful state of quietude had settled upon the neighborhood like a fine layer of fresh snow. Ben’s own house sat mostly in darkness, except for the exterior motion-sensor light near the front door, which snapped dutifully on as he approached the dwelling. He turned his key in the door lock, hearing the reassuring click of the dead bolt sliding back within its housing. Placing his hand upon the cold brass knob to which the evening’s precipitation still clung, he opened the door and stepped inside.

The front foyer sat mostly in shadows, and he snapped on a small lamp that rested atop a wooden cabinet to his right. The Stevensons’ massive harlequin Great Dane, Alex (“Alexander the Great,” as Joel lovingly referred to him with reverent, exaggerated bows), ever present at the front door to greet new arrivals, nuzzled Ben’s hand for affection, tail whipping ardently back and forth. True to his typical style, Alex stepped heavily and obliviously onto Ben’s left foot as the dog leaned into him, and Ben was forced backward against the front door. At 180 pounds, the domesticated Goliath didn’t find it necessary to wait to be petted—he simply stood next to the closest person and leaned. The affection lavished upon him was merely an act of self-defense.

Ben ruffled the side of the big dog’s head as Alex buried his face in Ben’s leg. Ben placed his keys on the wall rack and took off his coat, listening to the subtle sounds of the house. The kitchen refrigerator hummed softly, warm air blew steadily from the wall vent to his left, and the grandfather clock in the living room down the hall ticked quietly to itself, keeping its own perpetual rhythm. But it was more than these simple, mechanical sounds that he heard. On a deeper level, the house seemed to breathe of its own accord, shifting slightly as it continued to settle, growing more comfortable and more secure upon the foundation on which it rested. Both practically and figuratively, it held within it the very core of the family that lived here, providing warmth, refuge, and an irrefutable sense of home. In doing so, it seemed infinitely stronger than the material from which it had been constructed. No matter what transpired during the course of the day, coming home to this place filled him with gladness, and helped to put the day’s events in better context. Alexander the Great wagged his tail contentedly from side to side in complete agreement.

Ben trod quietly down the hall and across the living room, Alex padding not so softly behind him. He crossed the family room and ascended the stairs. At the top of the staircase he paused for a moment, then turned right and walked down the short hallway leading to the bedrooms of his two sons. He stood outside their rooms in the darkness for the span of about thirty seconds, simply listening, needing to be close to them for a moment. Then he turned and headed back down the hallway in the opposite direction toward the bedroom he shared with Susan. Having successfully escorted his owner to the appropriate sleeping quarters, Alex turned and descended the stairs to his own bed beside the living room’s front-facing bay window. Ben pushed open the bedroom door and entered quietly, trying not to wake his wife.

For Susan, sleep was often restless and difficult to initiate. She’d suffered from some degree of insomnia for as long as Ben had known her, and had experimented with a multitude of unsuccessful remedies throughout those years. Contrary to the experience of many women, however, she’d managed to sleep well during both of her pregnancies. Even during her third trimester, sleep had come easily to Susan, and she was often breathing slowly and softly within ten minutes after turning out the light. Ironically, it was Ben who seemed to have difficulty initiating and maintaining sleep during that time. He would lie in bed and watch the shadows cast from the swaying branches of the oak tree in their front yard play deftly across their vaulted ceiling. He would listen to the steady respirations of his wife lying blissfully in bed next to him, and he would consider the day’s events: the slow but perpetual ascent of gasoline prices that summer; the upcoming gubernatorial election; the positive gram stain of Mr. Flescher’s cerebrospinal fluid last Thursday. The hours of potential sleep would slip away from him like water over a steep ledge, leaving him befuddled and sluggish the following day, a dull heaviness clinging to his head like a massive barnacle. He would blunder through the day in this hebetudinous state until the sun finally descended once more beyond the horizon. Dinner that evening would be absently eaten and barely tasted, and although he tried to be interested in conversations with his wife, he always seemed to fall behind, finding himself at a break in the dialogue and wondering whether she had just asked him a question or whether it was simply his turn to speak. Excusing himself apologetically, he would head off to bed early in search of the nocturnal respite that had eluded him the previous night. Sometimes sleep would come, mercifully falling upon him like a summer storm. When it did, his dreams would be strange and wild, and he would often awaken in the night, sweating lightly and wondering whether he had cried out and, stupidly, whether he and Susan were alone in the room.

He’d continued in this tormented state for most of Susan’s pregnancy, watching her with growing jealousy as she slipped effortlessly into sleep every evening and awoke refreshed and good-spirited the following morning as brilliant sunlight flooded their bedroom. It was as if Ben had somehow taken upon himself all of Susan’s familiar struggles with insomnia and had shouldered them through the course of her pregnancies so that the children could develop unfettered within her. If that were the case, it was a noble yet arduous deed, and he was relieved when—oddly, but almost predictably—the balance returned to its original state within a month of the birth of each of their sons. Suddenly, Ben found himself having to set the alarm clock in order to awaken for the infant’s nightly feedings. On many of these occasions, he would find Susan’s side of the bed empty, and he would get up to investigate only to find her already tending to the baby despite the fact that it was his turn at the helm. “Honey, I can do that,” he would say to her sweetly in a tired voice. “It’s okay,” she’d reply. “I was already up.”

“Tough day at the office, hon?” Susan greeted him from the darkness, startling Ben as he unbuttoned his shirt.

“Jesus, babe. You scared me.”

“Sorry,” she said. “How was the autopsy?”

Ben unlaced his shoes and slipped them off, then pulled off his slacks and placed them in the closet hamper. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness and he could now make out the figure of his wife, propping herself up on one elbow as she surveyed him from their bed.

“Pretty horrible,” he answered. He exhaled deeply and stretched, trying to release as much of the day’s stress from his body as possible. He felt old and tired, and more than a little unnerved by the evening’s events.

“Want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” he said, climbing into bed. He felt utterly exhausted, emotionally as well as physically.

Susan wrapped her arms around him and squeezed tightly, spooning his body with her own. She was warm beneath the covers, her soft breasts pressing up against his skin. “I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too,” Ben replied in a voice that was just above a whisper in the silence of the room. And he did. After seventeen years of marriage, he realized that he loved her more now than in all the days and nights that had come before. It was a love that had grown within him steadily throughout the intimate partnership of their lives, and continued to evolve in ways that surprised and amazed him. He turned to her now and kissed her softly in the darkness. Her hand found his own, and their fingers interlaced with the familiarity of the years between them. Then she was guiding his hand to the bare skin of her left hip. Her body rose to meet him, and this time her kiss was more passionate, more insistent than before.

“I’m glad you’re home,” she whispered, and Ben decided that sleep could wait just a little while longer.

7

That night he dreamed of Thomas, and a trip he and Susan had taken with their oldest son to the circus twelve years before. It had just been the three of them then—Susan’s pregnancy with Joel still three and a half years down the road.

The smell of hot dogs and candy apples hung thickly in the air, intermixed with the less pleasant aroma of animals pacing restlessly in their cages. Hay and broken peanut shells crunched underfoot as they exited the colossal tent. Thomas was four years old, and Ben had stopped to buy him an orange hydrogen-filled balloon from one of the countless vendors. The transaction had taken less than thirty seconds, and he’d assumed that Susan had been holding on to their son’s hand during the process, but by the time he turned around Thomas had vanished into the crowd filing out into the massive parking lot in a great swarm.

Suddenly, everything changed. The music being piped out to small speakers high above them took on a taunting, grating, fun-house air. The faces of the strangers shuffling by seemed to smirk at Ben nastily, their eyes darting to the side to watch him as they passed. A man in a purple vest and lime-green bow tie hawking peanuts (“Fresh peanuts! Get your fresh peanuts here!”) to the exiting patrons turned in Ben’s direction and, covering his mouth halfheartedly, spat something onto the ground that looked like a mixture of mucus and dark blood. His eyes caught Ben’s incredulous gaze, and he grinned up at him through a rotten, toothless mouth. “What about it, mista? Wanna peanut?” he asked, and then burst into a cackling laugh that caused Ben’s skin to break out in gooseflesh.

For twenty endless minutes they looked for Thomas, with Susan anchoring the spot where they’d first lost sight of their son and Ben setting out through the crowd in expanding circles around her, calling out Thomas’s name into an ocean of passing strangers, trying to make his voice heard above the blaring music emanating from the speakers above him. In that short time, his mind discovered the ability to think of every possible evil thing in the world that might have beset his son.

Then, through a small opening momentarily created between the bodies of the shifting crowd, Ben spotted his boy—or at least thought he did.

“Thomas,” he called, pushing his way roughly past a large man clutching an enormous bouquet of cotton candy.

“Hey!” the man protested indignantly, but Ben barely heard. For on that warm August night, with the first tendrils of fall still three weeks away and the trees holding steadfastly to their summer foliage, it had been Thomas, the familiar brown cowlick of hair rising like a question mark from the top of his head as he stood looking up at the unfamiliar faces all around him.

Ben dropped to his knees and swept his startled son into his arms. “Jesus Christ, you scared me!” he scolded him, hugging the boy tightly. The man in the purple vest and lime-green bow tie (“Fresh peanuts! Get your fresh peanuts here!”) glanced over at them suspiciously.

Ben muttered a prayer of gratitude, then stood up, holding Thomas in his arms as he began to make his way toward Susan through the thinning horde.

“They git away from ya, those little ones.”

Ben turned in the direction of the voice, and found himself facing the peanut hawker, whose yellowed eyes stared back at him accusingly.

“Pardon?”

The man considered him for a moment. The olive shirt beneath his purple vest was dark with sweat stains and his black boots were caked with mud and flecks of trodden hay. He sneered at Ben with a rotten, toothless mouth. “Ya oughta watch ya kid more closely nex’ time,” he admonished Ben, and spat another wad of maroon phlegm onto the ground, where it seemed to twist and hiss like a pat of butter on the scorched brown earth before it finally lay quiet and dead. He leered at Ben contemptuously, his buckled jaw listing to the right at an impossible angle as if it were dislocated from his skull. Still, his mandible moved up and down as he chewed, and bits of mashed peanut shells spilled out from between his twisted lips like dead insects and came to rest at his feet. “Kid like that needs ta be watched.”

Ben, not knowing what to say, simply stood there, transfixed, staring back at the man.

“Yaah,” the peanut hawker said to himself after a moment’s consideration, as if suddenly coming to some irrefutable conclusion. He spat again on the ground, then wiped his mouth absently with the back of his hand. “Kid like that jus’ slip away from ya, if ya not careful wit’ ’im.” He paused for a moment, reflectively. Then he unfurled a gnarled, accusatory index finger and held it out in Thomas’s direction. Ben pulled the boy closer against himself, turning slightly so that his own body was between his son and the figure in the purple vest.

“Ya nevah know what a boy gonna do when he git out ’n the world,” the man said, observing Thomas with a predatory gaze. The volume of his voice began to rise now, high above the crowd like a Bible-thumping preacher before a spellbound congregation. “Ya think ’e’s safe, mistah. But ’e ain’t! Ya think ya gotcha boy back now. But ya don’t! You don’ know whe’ah ’e’s been, who ’e’s been consortin’ wit’. Jus’ lookit ’im. ’E’S BEEN EATIN’ PEANUTS! AN’ THE’AH ROTTEN! EV’RY LAS’ ONE!!”

And with that, Ben turned to look at his son, whom he held protectively in his arms. Thomas turned his face upward, glancing at Ben with a doomed expression of guilt and horror. It was obvious now that the boy was sick. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” he said. “I didn’t know.” Then his small body convulsed sharply, and he vomited an enormous torrent of bloody, macerated peanuts onto the ground at Ben’s feet.