1 ROWAN
You’ll love me more when I’m dead.
The memory of her daughter’s words makes the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Or perhaps it’s just Black Harbor and the way she can’t help but feel chilled to the bone whenever she finds herself skulking in its shadows. Eighteen years in this purgatory; Rowan would have thought she’d be used to it by now.
It could be that there are some things you never get used to: babies in dumpsters, brains smeared on sidewalks, junkies lying on the lawn, their last needle offering a stiff salute from their basilic vein.
Dead girls in gullies.
Shards of white glint on the river rocks, little snowflake fractals. But it’s only mid-October in Wisconsin, which means it’s too early for anything but hoarfrost. The broken triangles are teeth, knocked out of the skull of her daughter’s best friend.
Madison Caldwell lives just around the bend, a handful of houses down.
Lived.
Rowan shines her flashlight on the corpse. It stares up at a starless sky, head nesting on tendrils of blond hair. The skin is snowy and soft; the eyes float in pools of plum-colored bruises. Crouching low, Rowan flutters the eyelashes and receives no response. She presses two fingers to the victim’s neck, then, and feels nothing. After she lifts them, her prints stay there in white, blanching the skin. Next to them is a red mark. Rowan squints and leans closer. A hickey?
She turns the victim’s head and examines the other side. A second mark peeks from beneath the hood. With her work phone, she snaps a picture of each injury, and hears the sound of leaves shuffling as an evidence technician crouches to place a yellow placard by what appears to be a set of house keys. No chance they belong to the killer. They wouldn’t get that lucky.
The scene is crawling with law enforcement. There are ten officers with flashlights and black memo pads, including the four members of the Violent Crime Task Force. At least two officers must have gone to notify the parents. It’s a responsibility usually reserved for a sergeant or lieutenant, but they’re too shorthanded to be concerned about formalities. A fifteen-year-old girl is dead. Someone has to tell her parents.
Rowan raises the handheld recorder to her mouth. “Time of death, October 19, 2039 hours, mechanical asphyxiation,” she says, when suddenly, the dead girl draws a breath.
A scream catches in Rowan’s throat. She doubles back, scuttling like a crab. The sharp rocks in the gully dig into her palms. Her flashlight rolls away from her, its light diffusing to bathe the entire area in a half-hearted haze. She watches the victim’s chest cavity expand, the head tilt back slightly, and listens to the whisper of air that fills the lungs and fades to silence. There is no muscle movement for an exhale. The postmortem breath will stay there, trapped like oxygen in a balloon, until Liz, the forensic pathologist, cracks open the rib cage and weighs the organs in flat metal trays.
Which could be days from now. The county medical examiner’s office is overwhelmed and understaffed. Only in a place like Black Harbor is the line for the morgue longer than the queue for a Chick-fil-A drive-thru. Too many bodies, not enough of them warm.
“You get spooked or what, Winthorp?” Kole’s voice is nearly drowned out by the waves that slam into the sunken piers. Lake Michigan is less than a hundred feet east.
“Yeah.” Rowan scrubs her palms against her thighs. She looks up to see him handing her a fresh pair of black latex gloves. “Thanks. I hate when they do that.”
“What? Draw one last breath of this noxious air?”
Rowan nods. For a second there, she feared it was Lazarus syndrome, a phenomenon where someone can be clinically dead—no heartbeat, no circulation, no brain activity—and suddenly come back to life. It’s called ROSC: return of spontaneous circulation. She’s seen it twice.
She looks at Kole, who chews the inside of his cheek. He guessed correctly because he hates it, too. There isn’t one person in this field—from patrol officers to medical examiners to investigators—who can honestly say that interacting with a corpse doesn’t unnerve them at least a little bit. Anyone who does is a liar. Death makes existentialists of us all.
That isn’t to say there’s nothing reassuring about them. No matter what you do—a poke, a prod, a bone saw through the cranium—you can’t hurt them. The worst has already happened. As a medical examiner, Rowan’s job is simply to pick up the pieces and zip them into a polyethylene bag.
But this one is different. This is Madison Caldwell. Just yesterday, Rowan waved to her as she rode her bike past their house. And hadn’t she been over not all that long ago, singing karaoke and doing whatever teenage girls do, before Chloe decided to cross over to the dark side?
“Relax, she won’t bite,” says Kole when he notices Rowan tiptoeing cautiously. “What time do you think it actually happened, 18, maybe 1900 hours?”
“Sounds about right,” replies Rowan.
The time of death recorded on the death certificate will be 2039 hours, which is the time she observed the victim was not breathing and did not have a pulse. However, the stiffening of the limbs and the way the blood has settled, pulling color from the victim’s face and pooling at the back of the head and shoulder blades, indicate that the girl was killed at least two hours ago.
She pauses. Chloe left the house around that time to walk to the school’s performing arts center. She had to be there early for hair and makeup—though she’s been in character for weeks now, hiding beneath stormy clothes and stark slashes of eyeliner. “I’m a method actor,” she said defensively, when Rowan had gaped at her transformation, because from her perspective, her blond, sun-kissed daughter had gone into the bathroom and an hour later, an emo teenager emerged. Her hair was dark as midnight, her fingernails beetle-black. A faux leather choker severed her neck. Everything about her had simply darkened, as though whatever flame had burned inside her the past fifteen years had suddenly been snuffed out.
Rowan didn’t recognize this girl. She didn’t like her.
She was moody and antisocial, and brimmed with an umbrage that made her seem more like Chloe’s shadow than Chloe herself.
A seed of dread plants itself in the pit of Rowan’s stomach. What if Chloe is nearby, her body broken and strewn across the river rocks, too?
No. She can’t be. Earlier this evening, Rowan had watched from the kitchen window as Chloe took to the walking trail that stretched from their quiet lakeside neighborhood of Belgrave Circle to Monroe Academy. And hadn’t they just seen her dazzle onstage as Lydia Deetz, the angsty adolescent character who identifies more with the dead than the living?
She must have taken a page out of Rowan’s book to have been so convincing. Long has Rowan mused at how calming it must be to be dead. No more guilt, no more feeling like you’re not enough. You just … are. You have no obligation to anyone but to let them sink you in the ground or burn you to ash.
The call came just before intermission. She remembers the death phone buzzing between her and Axel. They’d slipped out into the hall and she’d pressed her ear to his cheek as together, they listened to Kole’s voice recite the details of the scene: “Homicide … female, white … Patrol found her … asystolic…” Then, he mentioned the name of their small neighborhood nestled near the lake’s crumbling edge. She’d inhaled sharply and texted her best friend, Marnie, asking her to give Chloe a ride home.
Axel pocketed his phone. “Rock Paper Pistol for who’s gotta be the bad guy?”
Rowan tucked the black rose bouquet in her armpit. They shook hands—down, up, down—and then broke apart. Axel pointed at her open hand with his index and middle fingers, thumb cocked. “Pistol shoots paper.”
And that was how she ended up face-to-face with a brokenhearted Chloe, who looked so mature and melancholy in a red lace dress, mascara-dyed tears streaming down her cheeks as Rowan broke the news that Mom and Dad would not be watching the rest of the musical. Not that it was the first time they’d had to leave in the middle of an event, nor would it be the last. People had a nasty habit of dying in Black Harbor, and Chloe was cursed with having both a medical examiner and a homicide detective for parents.
“Sweetie…” She set her hands on Chloe’s shoulders. Something glimmered in Chloe’s ears, she noticed—safety pins. A pained, insistent voice gnawed at Rowan’s brain stem. I don’t know you, she thought. Where is my bright, darling girl?
“Where’s Dad?” Chloe stood on her tiptoes trying to see over Rowan’s shoulder.
Rowan sucked her teeth. If she had a nickel for every time Chloe asked for Axel. “I’m sorry, honey. But listen, it happened close to home, and—”
“So it’s someone we know?”
“I want you to get a ride home with Marnie, okay? I’ll text her and let her know to wait for you.” Marnie was here. She’d seen her jet-black hair and Burberry scarf in the third row, sitting next to Sylvia Halquist. “Chloe?”
Around them, people moved in fast motion. Stagehands pushed brooms and carried props overhead. The main actor, in a green wig and pinstriped suit, chugged a Red Bull. Mr. Cutler skirted around him, yelling at someone to put their phone away. “There are no cell phones in Beetlejuice!” And yet, Rowan and Chloe were in their own bubble.
Rowan suddenly remembered the roses. The cellophane crinkled as she handed them to Chloe. They seemed a cheap consolation now. “These are for you. We love you so much, Chloe. You’re killing it, you really are. But work—”
“Do you?”
Rowan paused. She felt her brows knit. “What?”
Chloe sighed. Her pointed bangs made everything about her look barbed, scary. And then she uttered seven little words that cut Rowan to the bone. You’ll love me more when I’m dead.
The accusation razes her still. She feels scraped, empty inside as she maneuvers around the corpse of someone else’s daughter. They will make it right, she promises. By the time she and Axel get out of here, they could still have time to curl up on the couch with Chloe and watch a movie.
“So, how’d he knock out her teeth?” A cloud of vapor issues from Kole’s mouth as he begins asking the first of a million questions that thicken the air.
“He?” Rowan raises a brow.
“Statistically, you and I both know this was a male.”
While she hates to default to statistics, she knows Kole is right. Of the hundreds of homicides she’s worked, nine times out of ten, the guilty party is male. And this death reeks of a male aggressor. Giving the body a quick scan, she notes the victim’s jeans are still fastened, her jacket still zipped. But then there are the marks on her neck, near her collar. Rowan creeps closer and pulls the hood of the victim’s sweatshirt aside, revealing the inch-long abrasions.
“Hickeys?” Kole kneels beside her and she catches a whiff of his cologne—woodsy and clean—too subtle to mask the stench of decomp all around them: the foliage, the fish carcasses caught in the rocks, the body of Madison Caldwell.
“Could be.” Rowan squints. “Or choke marks. Which would make sense, considering the trauma to her mouth is postmortem.”
“How can you tell?”
She cups the victim’s chin and puts her other hand on top of the head, tilting the skull for a better perspective. The mouth is transmogrified into a broken cavity, sharp little pegs stuck like shrapnel in the gums. No blood. “I’d guess they used a hammer,” she says. “Or a rock. Something to deliver blunt force.”
“Let’s hope it was a rock,” says Kole, and Rowan agrees. A hammer hints at premeditation. She watches his gaze slide toward the darkness, where thousands of rocks litter the creek bed, and she knows what he’s thinking: finding the murder weapon will be as impossible as finding a certain needle in an opium den.
“So, he strangled her to death, then smashed her teeth out? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“That’s what it looks like.” Rowan considers the corpse again. She was someone’s daughter, this empty vessel, now stiffening with rigor. “Have you notified her parents yet?”
“Fletcher and Hayes are at the house now. It’s only a matter of time before they try to cross the tape.” Kole turns, his jaw parallel with his shoulder as though to affirm they aren’t about to be ambushed by hysterical parents. But he and Rowan are alone. The other officers and investigators, including Axel, are a ways up the bank, processing the scene. Yellow evidence placards mark possible DNA, footprints, and anything the killer might have left behind. At the top of the hill, crime scene tape cuts a fragile division between them and the rest of the world. The local news van is parked on the street thirty yards from the little stone bridge that Madison’s body lay beneath.
“I thought you were typically the one to tell the family,” says Rowan.
Copyright © 2023 by Hannah Morrissey
