Parish the Thought

Deep South Investigators 2

[PARTIAL DRAFT] CHAPTER ONE  

Come the Resurrection

The body’s long cold before I see it.  After I see it, I’m cold, carrion cold.

I’m standing in St. Dunstan’s Sanctuary, at the end of Easter night.  The grandfather clock in the adjacent room — the McDowell Room — begins to toll.  Midnight. It’s not the church bells tolling, and perhaps I shouldn’t think of Hemingway and of Donne, but I do.  

Because I know for whom the clock tolls. 

This poor guy. I stare at him again.  This guy, done. Bullet holes in the back of his jacket.

Here’s the thing — I don’t know who he is, this dead man stretched out in a pool of his own blood, the pool a black stain obscuring the shining wooden floor.  But I know he’s the dead man, dead face-down in a drying Rorschach test. Two Auburn policemen, one in plain clothes, a detective, and a policewoman remain on the scene.  The woman’s taking photographs; I know her only as a forensic specialist in the department.  Each photo flash makes me start like a dabchick, and turns the drying pool from black to red.  The coroner, Jonas Grody, is perched on the end of the pew nearest the corpse, his ankles crossed, jotting in a notepad.  He’s still wearing the blue surgical gloves he donned to inspect the body.

I hear a familiar but rattled voice and look up.  Diana Wentworth, the church’s administrative assistant, comes shuffling into the building, blinking, asking the detective where Father Halsey is.  He studies her for a moment, then shrugs.  She sees me and she crosses the floor, careful to avoid the corpse while not quite acknowledging it.  She’s unzipping her brown woolen jacket as she reaches me, her cheeks are red from the cold, her eyes down.  She lets worry show on her face as she releases the pull tab on her zipper and looks up at me.  She’s positioned herself so that she can see me but not the dead guy. 

She opens her mouth to speak but I hear a man’s voice instead of hers. Another familiar voice, despite the eerie momentary sensation of hearing it from Diana Wentworth’s mouth.  

“Damn it, what’s Merrick doing here, Dalton?”  The accidental ventriloquist is Auburn’s Chief of Police, Brownweather Booth.  

He’s in rumpled pajamas beneath an old, stained green overcoat.  He has an alert thatch of black hair on his balloon head, the same color as his bright, dark eye.  He has no neck, only a cascade of chins, the last resting on his chest. We know each other, of course, although I interact more often with Barry Ziff, who runs the Opelika Department since my office is in the sister city.  

Booth’s pointing at me with a short, wide finger.  I’m not glad to see him, but I’m more unglad to see the man beside him, Doug Certaine, my PI rival, and a longtime favorite of Booth’s. Certaine is staring at me along the line that begins with Booth’s index finger.  He smirks at me when he sees me see him.  

Dalton Piper, the detective who’d shrugged at Diana, answers Booth with a second shrug. “Don’t know.  He just showed up. I thought you’d called him, Chief.”    

Booth glares at the man then spins the glare to me, a rotating lighthouse.  “How are you here, Merrick?” He drops his finger but intensifies his glare.

I don’t like his tone much and Certaine’s backing smirk irks me too.  I grin smugly.  “Well, Brownie,” he hates that nickname, so I accent it, “I got a text.”  I stop there as if the explanation were complete.  Booth’s frown deepens at ‘Brownie’ but he does not otherwise react.  He stares at me, waiting for more, a loud if unspoken demand in the set of his round, wrinkly shoulders.

I’ve told the truth.  I did get a text.  But it was from a number I don’t know, and all it said was “Body at St. D’s.  Hurry.”  Even not knowing the number, I did —  hurry, that is.  But the police were already there.  I left my bride-to-be, Rachel Gunner, at my house.  We’d been having a quiet nightcap after a busy Resurrection.  Rachel’s not just my fiancee, she’s also my partner, but she’d left her work tools — her gun, in particular: she always carries one, I never do — at her uncle’s house.  She wanted me to wait for her, wait until she went and got her gun, but I was worried about Father Halsey, so I refused and rushed to St. Dunstan’s, parting company with her.  I expect Rachel to show up at any moment.  I hope she will.  She wasn’t pleased that I wouldn’t wait for her.