Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (21 page)

“In case you were wondering, Longshanks,” I said, tucking my gloved hands under my armpits for warmth, “This is exactly how I like to spend my Fridays.”

“Hence my invitation,” he said. “Sorry to call you away from your hedonism. Let’s get away from the vermin.”

I cast a curious glance over my shoulder at the media
surrounding
the yellow tape, shoving their cameras at arm’s length over the
barriers. Schenk’s irritation hit me loud and clear.

“I hate reporters,” I confided.
And, oh boy, do they hate me
. “I think
it’s fun to give them the finger. Sometimes they print it, and
sometimes they get in trouble.”

Schenk didn’t audibly agree, but I thought the set of his brow did. The Blue Sense warned me he wasn’t in the mood for witty
banter. We
struck out through the cemetery, passing massive chestnut trees,
stripped of their leaves but still clutching spiked nut cases. Winding our way along the paths plowed for the emergency vehicles, we crossed through the older section of the graveyard. There, the
flagpole vibrated; frozen ropes clattered and pinged against the metal.

I asked, “Found something down in the canal’s overflow pond?”

“You’re gonna tell me what you think this gunk stuff is before the lab guys get their hands on it,” Schenk said as we picked our
way carefully through the churned snow path. Here utility vehicles had plowed a slushy rut through the snow, but it wasn't doing much beyond keeping us headed in the right direction. The ground took several terraced drops toward the pond, and while they were no doubt picturesque during the greener and autumn months, they
were nothing
but frost and treachery this time of year. Schenk indicated with a thumb over his shoulder that I should stay behind him and let him go first. I was tempted to just rappel down the embankment with my scarf thrown over his elbow, then remembered that the media horde could probably still see us, and I had a growing soft spot for Schenk's dignity.

“Yo, Thag, can I get a lift?” I arched my eyebrows and gestured
towards one of his arms. He rolled his eyes and braced his feet, but
as soon as I began twirling my scarf like a lasso he held up a hand that looked like it could stop a bus. When he was sure the footing
was solid
he offered his arm for me to steady myself against as I stepped
down. I'm pretty sure I wasn't grinning, but my chin might have frozen to the inside of my collar. I put my scarf back on.

“So, Constable Clarity, ‘
gunk stuff
?’” I said. “Someone found something gooey and you thought, 'Hey, I should call Marnie'?” I stared up at the side of his face sourly. “Can’t tell you how flattered I
am.”

“I can’t wait for crime scene tests,” he said. “That could take
days. Weeks, depending on the backlog. If you can identify it by sight or touch, I can at least move forward.”

“Dear Diary: I got called on to I.D. and potentially fondle some gunk. Countdown to pudding boycott in T-minus five, four...”

Schenk was cat quiet as he we rounded a copse of snow-capped
pine and walked toward an area of brightly lit activity, studying the ground on either side of the path, missing nothing in the storm-darkened evening. The crowd had thinned considerably by the time we reached the inner cordon; this perimeter had a single officer
manning it, but after glancing at Schenk, he didn’t pay any attention to me.

“I like that you assume I’m an expert on ooze and slime,” I
continued. “That means a lot to me.”

“You’re my weird stuff scientist, right?”

“Hell, yes.” I flexed my brain at him, but since that happened in my head, I’m fairly confident my powerful display went unnoticed. “Stand back. I’m about to science the pants off this case.”

“Did you just use science as a verb?”

“Don’t make me science you too, dude.” Again, I flexed my brain ominously but ineffectually at him. “I will Nye-DeGrasse-
Sagan you like your momma never warned you about.”

He didn’t share my humor, and when we got closer to the warm, glaring ring of floodlights, I saw why. Schenk stopped to talk to one of the crime scene techs. I carried on without him, drawn forward by morbid curiosity, scanning the water with fascinated disgust.

Something that looked like a mannequin, but almost certainly wasn’t, lay covered in a filmy gossamer sheet, floating in the water at the shore. The back of its head was caught up between two rocks, mooring it to land. Its legs bobbed with the subtle undulations of the pond. Its arms hung down in the shallow black water, stirring up the soft muddy bottom. Tendrils of the diaphanous coating spread out
like a hovering jellyfish. Every gust of wind made the silk ripple. A slimy edge had slipped up one pale, bloodless leg; the flesh looked like that of a frozen turkey, permanent goose bumps standing out in
sharp
relief. I’d seen a lot of bodies in my line of work, bodies that were down for the count and bodies that got up and walked again after death. I had never seen a frozen one covered in a blanket of gelid ooze before. If I hadn’t been cold before, I was now.

“I
hate
being the gunk expert,” I said sadly under my breath, mostly to myself.

Heavy boots crunched frosty gravel behind me; Schenk’s even stride. I waited until he got closer, then got out my mini Moleskine diary and read aloud as I wrote, “Dear Diary: I don’t like Canada anymore. I quit, eh.”

“Well, expert? What's this gunk stuff made of?”

“Silken ectoplasmic fibers,” I said. “It’s not dangerous by itself; it’s a harmless residue.”

He blinked. “Ectoplasm?”

“In this case, MUCE: micro-unified chain ectoplasm. Groovy.”

“So now you’re telling me this
is
the work of a ghost?”

I repeated my mantra. “Ghosts don’t kill. But…” I cocked my head and frowned at the silken sheet. “There’s obviously been an entity here. In fact… that’s an awful lot of ectoplasm for one ghost.
Unless it was the ghost of a moose or a polar bear or something. You got any were-moose around here?”

The coroner’s assistant, a pale young woman with an old woman’s untroubled gaze and a whole lot of naturally-curly,
Little
Orphan Annie
orange hair crammed under a black hat, triple-gloved and steadied
her footing as she crouched on the slick rocks close to the head.
Without pause or grimace, she peeled the corner of the silken residue off the body's face. It hung like thick phlegm and tried to escape through her fingers. She pinched with her other hand, using both of them to
draw the sheet back for the coroner – a short, black man with a trim beard, whose close-cropped grey hair was frosted with both snow and age – as he stood nearby in a black suit and trench coat,
reminding me
of an old-timey undertaker. Schenk moved two steps closer, said
something quietly to the coroner, and exhaled unhappily when the corpse’s face was finally revealed.

Pale, stiff skin looked a sickly periwinkle under the floodlights. Open eyes, clouded by death, stared up in shock at the darkening sky above. The mouth was still stretched too wide in a silent scream. Black hair fanned out in all directions, including a lock that spilled across much of the face and had gotten caught among broken teeth; the rest, including the turquoise streak, was matted in a messy snarl across the rocks under the MUCE and tangled in a dead branch that stuck up between the stones. The upper lip had been flayed open, probably by the same force that had shattered each and every front
tooth. A pale blue peasant blouse was ripped open at the neck,
revealing a pallid chest stilled by death’s hand. The cheeks and the flesh beneath the eyes appeared sunken, like something had stuck a straw in her and drained something essential from the body.

I asked the coroner’s assistant, “Can you lift her arm, please?”

She glanced at the coroner, who nodded as he started gloving up. The coroner’s assistant took hold of the body’s left hand and
pulled it toward her gently. It didn’t want to move; the body was in full rigor.
I moved along the shoreline a bit, wary of the icy rocks, so I could get a better view of the corpse’s lymph nodes. There was no
discoloration or visible swelling.

“I’m not seeing any indication of crypt plague, doctor…?” I left it hanging, looking up at the coroner.

“Les Taylor,” he answered in a voice like gravel in a tin pan.

I nodded my hello and added, “I would suggest you run tissue and serology tests for ms-lipotropin and V-telomerase to rule out revenant involvement. I’d also run tests for batrachotoxins to test for mermaid activity, although if a mermaid were responsible for this
we’d find multiple bite marks.” I considered the flickering lights we’d seen in the canal. “Check her eyes for severe damage to the
macula from radiation possibly caused by Will-o’-the-Wisp, though I think it's unlikely. This canal isn’t bog-like enough for Wisps.” Finally, I looked forlornly at Constable Schenk. “In my considered, expert, and
very, totally, for real certified as authoritative opinion, it completely sucks to be Britney Wyatt's corpse.” I’d run out of important
sounding things to say.

“Mmhmm,” Schenk said.

“Your gunk expert has a request, constable,” I said reluctantly.

He made an inquiring noise.

“It’s time to call Father Scarrow.”

“HE’S ON HIS
way,” Schenk reported, putting his phone back in his pocket. I stepped back to let Dr. Taylor and the forensic team begin their collections. The floodlights' glare turned the pond to black glass. It was only six o’clock, but the early winter darkness made it
feel like midnight. Behind us an ambulance was crunching
cautiously along the path as close as it dared, but extraction of the body would have to wait.

“Tell me what you know about this place,” I said, putting my gloved hands in my pockets. It wasn’t enough to block the wind; I felt it right through the down of the parka, invading my bones. I tried crushing my arms against my torso to hold in my body heat. It didn’t work, so I side stepped to use Schenk’s bulk as a windbreak. A constant shivering had started high in my belly, causing my breath to quiver in and out.

“There was a town here once.” He pointed a thumb east, up the hill. “Built by United Empire Loyalists in the late 1700’s. You can find ruins in the forest there of the old mill wheel, a crumbled wall of a blacksmith. This spot was deeded to the Lutheran church that stood here for use as a burial ground.”

“Red Hook,” I said, nodding, orienting myself. “New Red Hook Cemetery up the hill, Old Red Hook Cemetery down here. Where, exactly?”

He drew out his phone again and pulled up the GPS coordinates
and a satellite map. I was amused to see that the website he was using was a ghost hunter site. He must have noticed my smirk
because he
said, “Only good map of the old town available. Google said
something was fucking up their surveillance vans, and it's not exactly prime spy satellite flyby territory here.”

I was too cold to appreciate his sardonic humor, so I grunted around chattering teeth.

“Right here.” He indicated with his left hand, pointing to the
west. “About five acres. The first cemetery was here.”

I pointed behind us, at the bottom of the hill, where the few old stones jutted out of the snow like crooked teeth. “You mean right there.”

“No, that’s the Old Red Hook Cemetery. I’m talking about
there…” He pointed ahead of us, at the overflow pond. “The
older
one. The original one.”

“Wait, you’re telling me there’s a third? An
Older
Old Red Hook Cemetery? I wonder if the dingleberry who named it is still haunting around here somewhere so I can get up in his ectoplasmic grill for being a clod.”

“It’s just called the Lutheran Cemetery; it was used long after the church was demolished to make room for the third Welland Canal, but abandoned in 1886.”

“Abandoned?” I studied the water. It didn’t look very deep near
the edge; I wondered how deep it was further out, and whether
there were a bunch of six-foot-deeper holes in the bottom.

“In 1928, a call went out in the newspapers to the ancestors of anyone buried here: remove your dead, or here they stay. A couple hundred graves were moved to either the Old Red Hook Cemetery or the new one they were building up the hill. A year later the pond was flooded.”

“How many graves were
not
moved from the original burial ground?”

He referred to the webpage he’d been consulting. “Six hundred sixty-three graves were unclaimed, according to this.”

I tried very hard to ignore the goose flesh crawling between my shoulder blades, but my mind hates me; it promptly offered visions of rotted caskets, forgotten and disrespected, a bunch of yawning, submerged graves, or, worse, occupied ones, the stained skeletons choked with stilled plants, long since denuded by decomposition and fish and leeches and other crawling things that inhabited lake muck. “You’re telling me the remains of over six hundred people are
now submerged under the overflow pond,” I said. “Like, right in
front
of us. Now.” I may have been hyperventilating slightly, but the
thought of it was giving me the serious creeps. “And have been for almost a hundred years? Right there. Just,” I flapped my hands weakly, trying to grasp the immensity of my disquiet, “
left
in the mud.”

“Six hundred sixty-four, if you count Britney Wyatt.”

“I don't; she wasn't buried there and her grave abandoned. She'll get a decent burial after the autopsy.”
At least, if she stays dead. I didn't bring anything that would make her get up and dance with me in my
pockets, right?
My brain hoarked up something half forgotten from my childhood. ”They still drain the canal and pond after Christmas,
right?”