Page 12 of The Forest of Lost Souls

“What is it you don’t recognize?”

“Kettleton, for one thing. It’s not the same, is it?”

“No.”

“It never will be again, will it?”

“No.”

“It was never before a place that was first about money. Even if I felt safe here, it’s not what I want anymore. I’m leaving. I have this friend in Texas, in this town that’s not small but not so big, either. She says it’s more the way things used to be.”

Intuition has Vida on a high wire, balanced in a stasis between steps, eager to know but afraid to anticipate what might becoming. The past and future are gathered in this moment, the past to be explained, the future to form out of that explanation.

After a silence, Anna says, “There’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing that wouldn’t bring hell down on you.”

“Do about what?”

“If I were you, I’d want to know, even if there was nothing I could do about it. Just to get on with life, I’d want to know. And so I wouldn’t trust the wrong people, wouldn’t unknowingly put my affairs in the hands of the people who did it.”

“Who? Who did what?”

“Just so you understand, if you think you can do anything about it, you’ll be crushed.”

“Tell me, Anna.”

“You’re nothing to them. Promise me.”

To get the woman to continue, Vida says, “I promise. I’ve already been crushed. I don’t want any more.”

“So then, you know my father is also the county coroner.”

“Yes.”

“He performed the autopsy on José Nochelobo.”

“Yes.”

“Except he didn’t.”

Wait without thought,Vida told herself,for you are not ready for thought.

“The EMTs brought the body at ten minutes until five that afternoon,” Anna continues, “and Dad signed for it. I was preparing to help him. I don’t do autopsies, but I’m a licensed mortician. While I was getting the instruments ready, he began examining the subject, starting with the neck injury. He always talks as he works, recording what he finds. Suddenly he went quiet and covered the corpse. The deceased. I’m sorry. José. Dad covered Joséand said he was too important to the town, too well thought of, for us to do anything but a careful postmortem. He wanted to find the EMTs who handled the body, talk to them. Dad said it had been a long day, he was too tired to do the job justice. He wheeled José into the cold-holding room and delayed the autopsy till morning.”

Vida waits. The shadows are growing longer, the air cooler, the sky a deeper blue in the east.

Anna’s hands appear from under her arms and slide slowly from her shoulders to her elbows to her shoulders, up and down, up and down, as though she’s cold and trying to warm herself. Her attention remains on the bike. Clearly, this woman doesn’t want to be here. She is eager to hit the road. In spite of her youth, however, she seems to lack the modern mindset that would allow her to start a new life by leaving her current one as a participant in a lie.

“My father’s not a medical examiner, just the coroner, but he follows the rules of evidence. I never touch the ... the subject of an autopsy. Except to help my father turn over the person on the table. But this was José. I mean, my senior year, he was my history teacher, before he was principal. All the kids liked him. I had, you know, a bit of a crush on him. He was so young, gone so suddenly. It was shocking, and my father’s behavior was odd, andit was José—so when I was alone, I went into the cold-holding room and pulled back the shroud.”

Anna needs a moment.

Vida waits.

“I looked at his face,” Anna continues. “I turned his head, like my father had turned it, and I saw what my father must have seen. The wound.”

Vida repeats, “The wound.” Those two words have a taste like when she has sucked on a paper cut.

“It must have been an air rifle,” Anna says. “Not a pellet gun. It was a puncture wound, like from a needle.”

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