Carrion Lullaby: The Smell of Children

Marigolds nodded in clay beds, orange and rust against the pale morning, and the woman kneeling among them had stopped breathing sometime before the sun came up. Dew clung to the petals and to the cuffs of her denim jacket. A small transistor radio rested beside her gloved hand, its antenna extended at a careless angle, tuned to a frequency that played hymns between the static. Children from the Lincoln Street Academy knew her as Ms. Wen, the one who brought seed packets and let them dig in the dirt during recess. Parents knew her as Patrice, the quiet woman who always had a tomato to share. Nobody who saw her now would have recognized either of those names.

Aaden Cole stood at the chain-link gate and watched the crime scene techs work. His shirt stuck to his back. The garden occupied a wedge of land between a community center and a vacant lot, half a city block of raised beds and compost bins, and somebody had tended it with religious devotion. Bean trellises. A scarecrow dressed in a child's sundress. Hand-painted signs that read HERBS and BE PATIENT. Patrice Wen had been patient. Patrice Wen had been smiling when they found her, though nothing about her face suggested joy.

The smile ran too wide. Her lips had been cut at the corners, then sutured into a grin that pulled the skin taut over her teeth, and the incision lines glistened faintly under the work lights the techs had set up. Feathers, dark and iridescent, caught the light whenever the breeze stirred. Aaden counted five before he stopped counting. They had been packed beneath her eyelids, propping them open, and the effect was less grotesque than it should have been. Worse, in some way he could not name. Worse because it looked almost intentional, almost deliberate, almost like care.

"Detective Okafor wants you on the perimeter," a uniformed officer called from the gate. Aaden did not turn. His gaze had settled on Patrice Wen's hands, folded in her lap as though she had been arranging seed trays, and on the soil beneath her knees that bore the imprint of someone who had knelt there a long time. The radio beside her hissed. A hymn resolved into a woman's voice, then dissolved again into white noise. The techs spoke in low, clipped sentences, their words blurred by the wind.

"I'll be there in a minute," Aaden said, though he did not move. His boots had gone damp in the grass. Somewhere beyond the garden, a dog barked twice and fell silent. The smell of the marigolds rose around him, pungent and faintly sweet, and under it came the other smell, the one the techs were pretending not to notice: a copper thickness, a wet rust, the scent of what happened when a body spent the night alone.

Father Idris Vey stood near the raised bed closest to the gate, hands folded around a small prayer book he would not open. He had come because someone from the parish had called him, and he had stayed because the sight of Patrice Wen in her garden had driven the air out of his lungs. He had blessed her children at the school. He had eaten her tomatoes. He did not cross into the taped area. He watched Aaden instead, the way one watches a man approaching a cliff edge, and when their eyes met he gave a small nod that meant nothing and everything.

"They're saying she was alive at midnight," Vey said when Aaden finally approached. "Someone saw her kneeling here, with the radio on. Singing along." He paused. "She was humming, they said. Something I recognized."

Aaden stopped a few feet away. "What did you recognize?"

"A tune." Vey's voice was low, almost swallowed by the wind. "From the children's choir. The one that closed last spring." He looked down at the prayer book, then up again, and his eyes held a quality Aaden had learned to distrust: the look of a man who knew more than he was prepared to say. "She wasn't a member. She wasn't even a churchgoer, really. But the song, Aaden. The song was theirs."

The garden stretched behind them, all that cultivated order, and the woman at its center who had knelt in it like a penitent. Her denim jacket. Her gloves. Her careful, awful smile. Aaden watched the techs lift her into a bag, watched them work around the feathers with a kind of reverence he did not care to examine. The radio clicked off. The silence that followed seemed thicker than the previous one, denser, as though the air had decided to settle.

Saanvi Cole stood at the edge of the crowd that had gathered along the sidewalk. She had heard the news on a scanner her boyfriend kept in the garage, and she had walked the six blocks without telling her mother where she was going. Her sneakers were damp. Her hair was pulled back in a knot she had retied twice. She looked at Aaden across the tape line, and the look she gave him was the one she reserved for moments when the world rearranged itself into shapes she did not want to see.

He lifted a hand, palm outward, a small gesture that meant stay there, don't come closer, and she obeyed. She had learned to obey when it came to this. The garden held her gaze for a long time, and then she looked away, up at the sky, where a hawk circled without sound.

Detective Roy Okafor arrived in an unmarked car with a dented fender. He walked the perimeter twice before he spoke to anyone, hands in his pockets, eyes on the ground. He paused at each raised bed, reading the hand-painted signs, and he paused at the scarecrow in the sundress, tilting his head as though considering a question. When he reached Aaden he removed a battered notebook from his coat and opened it to a page already marked with a paper clip.

"Patrice Wen," he said. "Forty-three. Taught third grade. Lived alone above a laundromat on Bell Street. No priors. No husband. No enemies anyone will admit to, yet." He clicked the pen twice. "We've got a witness who talked to her at eleven. Said she was planning to plant marigolds before the first frost. Said she seemed happy."

"Happy," Aaden repeated.

"She used the word." Okafor's pen moved across the page in small, careful strokes. "I want to talk to the pathologist before they move the body. Dr. Markham is already at the morgue. She called me twenty minutes ago to say she'd heard about the feathers." He looked up. "She's not happy about the feathers."

Nina Solis arrived on foot, carrying a canvas bag that clinked with the sound of small glass bottles. She had been at the mortuary since four, embalming a man no one would claim, when the call came in. She did not enter the taped area. She stood beside Vey and watched the techs work, and her expression was unreadable except to those who knew her, who would have recognized the slight tightening at the corners of her mouth as grief.

"She brought my grandmother honey once," Nina said. "From a farmer's market. They talked for an hour about tomatillos." Her voice was soft, almost conversational, but her hands had gone still around the neck of one of the bottles. "She didn't know what she was walking into, did she?"

"No," Vey said. "None of us do."

Eli Vargas came last, parking his battered pickup at the curb and walking the rest of the way with his hat in his hands. He had been called by a friend at the department. He had not wanted to come. He had come anyway, because Patrice Wen had taught his nephew to read, and because the case that had taken his sister was beginning to feel less like a memory and more like a pattern. He stood beside Aaden and looked at the garden, and his jaw worked once, twice, before he spoke.

"They're saying it looks like the others," he said. "The smile. The carefulness of it. The fact that she was left where people would find her." He turned his hat in his hands. "Where people who knew her would find her."

Aaden said nothing. The techs zipped the bag. The body disappeared into the morning like a secret folded shut. Okafor closed his notebook and tucked it away. Nina Solis walked toward the gate, her bag still in her hands, and she did not look back. The hawk above them had stopped circling. It had settled on a power line at the edge of the lot, watching the garden with the patient attention of something that understood what had happened there.

The marigolds swayed. The transistor radio sat where it had been left, antenna still extended, tuned to a frequency that no longer played anything at all.

The procession back to the church was quieter than the procession out. Father Idris Vey walked ahead with Aaden and his sister Saanvi, the three of them tracing a line through the waking town while the sun finished its slow climb above the rooftops. The pavement had begun to warm under their feet. Somewhere behind them, a screen door banged shut, and a dog began to bark with the half-hearted rhythm of an animal that meant nothing by it.

Aaden did not look back. He had made a habit, in recent weeks, of not looking back. The habit had not made him feel better. It had only made the road feel longer.

At the church steps, Saanvi excused herself. She touched Aaden's arm as she passed, the briefest pressure of her fingertips against his sleeve, and then she was gone, a dark shape folding itself into the side door that led to the kitchen. He could hear her begin to move among the pots. The clatter of cast iron. The hiss of gas. Saanvi cooked when she could not pray.

Vey paused on the steps and looked at Aaden with the steady, assessing gaze of a man who had spent thirty years sitting across from people who were learning to carry a weight they had not chosen. He did not ask if Aaden was alright. He had learned, years ago, that the question rarely helped.

"The board will want a statement," Vey said.

"I know."

"They will want it to be short. Reassuring. The kind of thing you can put in a bulletin and read from a lectern."

"I know."

Vey studied him for a moment longer. Aaden's hands were steady at his sides. His face was the face he had worn since he was seventeen, the one he had practiced in mirrors after the funeral home, the one that did not reveal anything unless he wanted it to. Vey had seen that face before. He had seen it on soldiers, and on widows, and on the parents of children who had been taken too soon.

"You don't have to carry this one alone," Vey said.

Aaden almost smiled. Almost. The expression flickered across his features and was gone, replaced by something harder and more familiar. "I've been carrying it alone for a while now, Father."

"Carrying alone is not the same as carrying well."

Aaden said nothing. He looked past Vey at the church door, at the worn brass handle that caught the morning light, at the small cross etched into the wood above the frame. He had walked through that door a hundred times as a child, his hand in his mother's, the hymns still strange in his mouth. He had walked through it as a teenager with questions that no one had been able to answer. He had walked through it as a young man, the week after the funeral home, when the world had felt like a place that had been rearranged in the night while he slept.

He had never walked through it as what he was now.

"I should go with Roy," Aaden said. "He wanted to talk to Eli. I should be there."

Vey nodded slowly. He did not try to talk Aaden out of it. He had learned, years ago, that the only way to help a man who needed to move was to step out of his way and pray that he was walking in the right direction.

"Then go," Vey said. "But come back to the kitchen before you leave. Saanvi is going to make enough food for an army, and she will not forgive either of us if we let it go to waste."

Aaden walked the two blocks to Okafor's car in silence. He passed the small park where the children sometimes played after school, the empty bandstand that had not hosted a concert in twenty years, the shuttered windows of the hardware store that had been put up for sale and never sold. He knew every crack in this pavement. He knew every shadow that the buildings cast at this hour. He had grown up here. He had left. He had come back.

He had come back because the leaving had not saved him.

Okafor was waiting in the car with the window rolled down and a cup of coffee balanced on the dashboard. He had not started the engine. He was sitting with his hands loose on the wheel, watching the street with the patient attention of a man who had learned that most of what he needed to know about a town could be found in the way it behaved on a morning like this one.

"Climb in," Okafor said.

Aaden opened the passenger door and got in. The seat was warm from the sun. The coffee smelled of something cheap and bitter, the kind of coffee that gas stations kept in styrofoam cups, the kind of coffee that detectives drank because they had stopped caring about the small pleasures a long time ago.

"Eli's at the old feed store," Okafor said. "The one off Route 9. He wanted to walk the lot before he talked. Said it helps him think."

Aaden nodded. He knew the feed store. He had bought his first horse there, when he was nineteen, with money he had earned picking cotton in the fields south of town. The horse had been a sway-backed chestnut mare with a white blaze and a habit of biting. He had loved her immediately, the way you love a thing that does not pretend to be anything other than what it is.

They drove in silence for a while. The town thinned out around them, the houses giving way to scrub and wire and the long flat stretch of road that led toward the interstate. The sun had climbed higher now, and the fields on either side had begun to shimmer with the first heat of the day. Aaden watched the fence posts slide past the window, counting them without meaning to, the way you count anything when you are trying not to count the things that matter.

"You knew Patrice," Okafor said. It was not a question.

"She taught my nephew to read," Aaden said. "She taught my sister to be brave. She was at the church every Sunday, even when the rest of us couldn't be bothered."

"And her family?"

"They're from Palomas. Her mother moved down here after the husband died. Worked at the cannery for fifteen years. Retired last spring."

"Any connection to Harrowgate?"

Aaden shook his head. "None. Her mother didn't know anyone there. Patrice didn't either. She never had a reason to go."

Okafor was quiet for a moment. He took a sip of his coffee and made a face that suggested he had remembered, too late, why he had stopped drinking it.

"That's the problem, isn't it," Okafor said. "The first three were all Harrowgate. Old families. Old grudges. Old blood. You could almost make a case for it being local. Almost. But Patrice..."

"Patrice didn't belong," Aaden said.

"No," Okafor said. "She didn't."

The feed store appeared around the bend, a long low building with a tin roof and a hand-painted sign that had faded to the color of old bone. Eli was standing in the gravel lot with his hat pushed back on his head and his hands in his pockets. He looked like he had been there for a while. He looked like he had been doing some of the math that Aaden had been trying not to do.

Okafor pulled in beside him and killed the engine. The three of them stood in the lot for a moment without speaking, looking at the feed store, at the empty pens out back, at the rusted tractor that had been parked beside the loading dock for as long as anyone could remember. The air smelled of dust and creosote and the faint sweet rot of something that had died in the walls and never been cleaned out.

"I was thinking," Eli said. He had not looked up. He was studying a patch of gravel near his boot as if it contained the answer to a question he had not yet asked. "About the first one. The Harrow girl. The way she was left."

Okafor waited.

"It was deliberate," Eli said. "The placement. The smile. The fact that she was facing the road. Whoever did it wanted us to see her. Wanted us to understand that she had been chosen."

"And Patrice?" Aaden said.

Eli looked up then. His eyes were the color of river water, pale and steady, and they held the kind of tired that comes from years of looking at things you wish you hadn't seen.

"Patrice wasn't chosen," Eli said. "Patrice was taken. There's a difference. Whoever did this one wasn't sending a message. They were feeding."

The word sat in the air between them like a stone dropped into still water. Okafor did not flinch. Aaden felt something cold move through his chest, a slow familiar chill that he had learned to recognize years ago, the chill that meant the ground beneath his feet was no longer solid.

"We can't say that," Okafor said. "Not yet. Not until Dr. Markham has had a chance to look."

"I'm not saying it officially," Eli said. "I'm saying it here. Between the three of us. Whoever did the first three was angry. Whoever did Patrice was hungry."

Aaden looked at the feed store. He looked at the empty pens. He looked at the rusted tractor and the faded sign and the long flat stretch of road that led back toward town. He thought about the marigolds in Patrice Wen's garden. He thought about the transistor radio. He thought about the hawk on the power line, watching the garden with the patient attention of something that understood what had happened there.

He thought about his sister, and the way she had looked in the mirror the morning after the funeral home, and the way she had not looked at him for three days after.

"Eli," Aaden said. "The first three. Were any of them from outside Harrowgate?"

"No."

"And Patrice?"

"No."

"So the pattern just broke," Aaden said. "Whoever was doing this learned to roam."

Eli nodded slowly. He pulled his hat off and held it in his hands the way he always did when he was thinking, turning the brim between his fingers, working the leather with his thumbs.

"That's what scares me," Eli said. "Patterns can be predicted. A thing that roams is a thing that decides."

He pressed his palm flat against the feed store's corrugated wall, the metal cool against his skin, and tried to remember how his hands used to feel steady. Somewhere in the back of his throat, something was moving. He swallowed once. Twice. The taste came anyway: iron and something older, something that lived in the bottoms of wells and the bellies of stones.

"Eli," Aaden said. "Eli, sit down."

"I'm fine."

"You're pale."

"I'm always pale. I'm from Arizona. It's a sun thing."

"Mr. Vargas." Okafor's voice had shifted into the register Aaden had learned to recognize as the one he used when he stopped asking and started telling. "The ground is right there."

Eli looked at the dirt. He looked at Okafor. He lowered himself to the edge of the empty feed trough and sat there with his hat in his lap, turning the brim between his thumbs, and the afternoon light made a kind of halo of the dust motes drifting off his shoulders.

Aaden crouched in front of him. "When did you last eat?"

"Yesterday."

"When yesterday?"

"Morning. There was a thing in town. A woman had a stand. Eggs."

"You ate one egg yesterday and nothing since."

"I had coffee."

"Eli."

"Coffee counts. It has a bean. Beans are a legume. Legumes are a protein."

"That's not how any nutritionist would frame it."

"I'm not a nutritionist. I'm a man who forgot how his kitchen works."

Okafor moved a few feet away, speaking low into his phone, his back half-turned. Aaden stayed where he was, watching Eli watch the empty pens. The angle of the sun had shifted. The shadows of the fence posts were longer now, and the rusted tractor threw a kind of jagged crown across the dirt.

"Eli," Aaden said quietly. "What did you mean, hungry?"

Eli's thumbs went still on the hat brim.

"When you talked about the first three. Whoever did them was angry. Whoever did Patrice was hungry. What did you mean?"

Eli didn't answer for a long time. Somewhere across the road, a dog started barking, then stopped, as if it had been told.

"I don't know what I mean," Eli said finally. "I've been doing this job a long time. You see things. You see patterns. Sometimes the patterns are just patterns, and sometimes they're the shadows of something you can't see the edges of. Patrice Wen was not angry. Her body was not angry. It was eaten."

The word landed in Aaden's chest like a small dropped stone.

"Eaten," Aaden repeated.

"I'm not saying by a person."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying I don't know what I'm saying, and that's the part that scares me."

Aaden heard Okafor end his call and turn back toward them. The detective's face had the particular careful blankness that Aaden had come to recognize as the look he wore when he had been told something by someone he didn't want to believe.

"Roy," Aaden said.

"There's been another one," Okafor said.

The world didn't stop. The sun kept sliding. The dog started barking again. Aaden heard his own breathing, and Eli heard his own breathing, and the two of them sat with the sound of it for a moment that felt longer than any moment he had ever lived through.

"Where?" Aaden said.

"The old mill. North side of town, past the water tower."

"Who?"

Okafor looked at him. The blankness broke, just a little, around his eyes.

"Saanvi," he said. "Saanvi Cole. Aaden, it's your sister."

The ground came up to meet him, or he went down to meet the ground, Aaden never could figure out which. He felt Eli's hand on his shoulder. He felt the dust of Patrice Wen's feed store on his palms. He heard his own voice, from a long way off, saying the word sister as if he were learning what it meant.

"Drive," he said. "Drive now."

He didn't remember getting to Eli's truck. He remembered the bench seat, cracked gray vinyl that had gone soft in the sun. He remembered the smell of old coffee and gun oil and something underneath, something Aaden would not let himself name. He remembered Eli turning the key, the engine catching on the second try, the way it always caught on the second try, the way Eli had said once that the truck was old enough to be stubborn but not old enough to be sentimental.

"Roy's following," Eli said. "He said stay behind me."

"Go."

The town slid past the windows. The feed store. The gas pump. The post office with the flag hanging limp in the windless afternoon. Aaden watched the buildings the way you watch the face of someone you love when you know you are about to lose them, memorizing the exact angles of the eaves, the exact shade of the paint, the way the sun caught the broken window of the old pharmacy and threw a slow golden ladder across the empty sidewalk.

His sister had walked these streets. His sister had bought coffee at the place with the green awning. His sister had, this morning, walked out of the house where they had grown up together, and she had not come back.

"Eli."

"Yeah."

"How did they find her?"

"Roy didn't say. He doesn't know the details. The call came in twenty minutes ago."

"From who?"

"A jogger. A teenager. He was running the loop past the mill and he saw something through the broken window and he called 911 and he ran back to the high school parking lot and he sat in his car and waited for someone to come."

Aaden closed his eyes. He opened them. The town kept sliding past.

"The old mill," he said. "Saanvi and I used to climb the fence there. Before they put the chain on. There were swallows in the rafters."

"Yeah."

"She was afraid of the dark in there."

"She told you?"

"She told me. She made me go first. Every time."

The truck took the turn onto the north road. The pavement turned to gravel. The water tower rose up over the tree line, a kind of bone-white finger pointing at nothing.

Eli slowed the truck.

"There," he said.

The old mill sat in a clearing at the edge of the trees, just the way Aaden remembered it, the long low building with the broken cupola and the windows that had been boarded and then unboarded and then boarded again. The chain across the gate had been cut. Yellow tape fluttered in the small steady wind that came off the river. Two sheriff's units sat in the gravel lot with their lights off. A coroner's van was parked at an angle near the loading dock, its back doors already open.

Aaden got out of the truck before Eli had cut the engine. He heard Eli swear behind him, a quiet word, the kind a man uses when he is trying to keep from shouting. Aaden didn't look back. He crossed the lot toward the mill. The gravel was loud under his feet. The yellow tape caught his sleeve and he didn't stop.

"Sir. Sir, you can't be here."

"I'm her brother."

"Sir, we need to clear the area until Dr. Markham has had a chance to, "

"I'm her brother."

The deputy looked young. Younger than Aaden. He looked at the badge Aaden wasn't wearing, at the way Aaden held his shoulders, at the name stitched into the leather wallet in Aaden's back pocket that the deputy would have to look at to read, and something in the deputy's face shifted.

"Go," the deputy said. "Mr. Okafor is inside."

Aaden went inside.

The mill opened around him. The rafters were high and dark and full of the small shifts and murmurs of birds he couldn't see. The floor was old planking that gave under his weight. The smell hit him second, after the cold, after the dimness: iron and river water and something sweeter, something that had no name he wanted to know.

Okafor was standing near the far wall, where the light came in through the broken window in a long pale slant. Nina Solis was beside him, her hands at her sides, her face the particular careful blankness Aaden had come to associate with her work. Dr. Markham was crouched near the loading dock door, her kit open beside her, her movements small and precise.

Saanvi was on the floor.

Aaden crossed the floor. He heard his own footsteps as if they belonged to someone else. He knelt. The wood of the old floor was cold under his knees. Saanvi was lying on her side, her hair across her face, her hand curled loosely against her chest. The marigold was still pinned to her collar. The petals were crushed, but the color held.

"Aaden," Okafor said quietly. "Aaden, don't."

Aaden reached out. He brushed the hair back from his sister's face. Her skin was cold. Her eyes were closed. The look on her face was the look of someone who had been surprised, and then had stopped being surprised, and then had gone somewhere Aaden could not follow.

"She was here," Aaden said. "Why was she here?"

"We don't know yet," Okafor said.

"She was afraid of the dark in here. She told me. She would not have come in alone."

"She may not have come in alone," Dr. Markham said. She did not look up from her work. "Aaden, I'm sorry. I need to ask you to step back."

"I want to see."

"I know you do."

"I want to see what was done to her."

"I know. Please step back."

Aaden stepped back. He stood up. He walked to the broken window and looked out at the water tower and the trees and the long flat stretch of river that ran away from the town toward the place he could not think about. He stood there and he breathed and he did not think.

Behind him, Eli came into the mill. Aaden heard the deputy try to stop him, and heard Eli's voice, low and rough, say something Aaden couldn't make out, and heard the deputy step back. He heard Eli's boots on the old floor. He heard Eli stop.

"Aaden," Eli said.

"She was afraid of the dark in here," Aaden said without turning around.

"I know."

"She told me."

"I know. You told me in the truck."

"She was afraid of the dark, and someone brought her into the dark anyway."

Eli didn't say anything. Aaden heard him cross the floor. He heard him stop a few feet behind him.

"Aaden," Eli said. "Look at me."

Aaden turned. Eli was standing in the slant of light from the broken window, his hat in his hand, his face the color of old paper.

"I am going to find what did this," Eli said. "I am going to find it, and I am going to walk it into the light where it can be seen, and I am going to make sure it cannot do this again. Do you hear me?"

Aaden heard him.

"I hear you."

"Go home. Sit with someone. Father Vey is at the church. He would want to sit with you. Let Roy drive you. Let me do the work here."

"I don't want to go home."

"I know."

"I don't want to sit with anyone."

"I know that too."

Aaden looked at his sister's body on the floor of the mill. He looked at the marigold crushed against her collar. He looked at Eli.

"If you find it," Aaden said, "I want to be there."

"No," Eli said. "You won't."

"Eli."

"You won't be there. That's the deal. I will find it. Roy will do the paperwork. Nina will do the rest. You will not be there. You will not see what I have to do."

Aaden felt the cold come through him again, the slow familiar chill. He let it come. He let it settle.

"Tell me the truth, Eli."

Eli looked at him. The light moved in the broken window. The swallows moved in the unseen rafters.

"I will tell you the truth when I have it," Eli said. "Until then, the truth is that your sister is gone, and you have to live, and I am asking you to let me carry this one for you."

Aaden nodded. He walked past Eli. He walked past Nina. He walked past Dr. Markham, who looked up at him and then looked back down at her work, and he walked out of the mill into the long slant of afternoon.

Okafor was at the door.

"I'll drive you," Okafor said.

Aaden got in the passenger side. He closed the door. The truck smelled of old coffee and gun oil and the river. Okafor started the engine. The sheriff's units pulled out of the lot ahead of them, lights off, slow and quiet, like a procession.

"Eli told me the deal," Okafor said.

"I know."

"He means it."

"I know."

"Aaden."

"Don't."

Okafor pulled out onto the north road. The mill disappeared behind the trees. The water tower rose up over the tree line, white against the late blue of the sky.

"Drive me to the church," Aaden said. "Father Vey will know what to do with the time."

"The time?"

"The time I have to live."

Okafor drove. The town came back to meet them, one street at a time.