Page 131 of If Looks Could Kill
“Will anyone reverence our fleeting bodies?”
“Is any small kindness owed to our bodies?”
“Who will tend to our hunted bodies?’
The final garden is a churchyard, with rain lashing against the stones. Five open graves are dug. But that garden does not last long. In a blink, Pearl floats like a specter in a cold, clinical room, with metal tables, blinding lights, and a smell of antiseptic and decay. The other women float around her, as if each was swimming passively through the same dark pool.
On five tables sit five coffins, each draped in black. Pearl hovers high where she can gaze down upon the sight.
She is not surprised by the arrival of the woman in gray. Each robed woman now stands at the head of one of the coffins.
Pearl can barely whisper. “He killed you all, didn’t he?”
The woman in gray speaks, and at her words, each woman pulls the black drape off a lidless coffin.
“These are our bodies,” says the woman in gray.
Pearl turns away, too late, too late. She cannot unsee the savagery. The mangling of sacred flesh. How even after death, violence to the body is violence to the soul.
She chokes on bile. She vomits it up, and once her mouth is clear, she screams, and screams, and screams.
Stands to Reason(Early Morning, Tuesday, December 4, 1888)
Mr. Michael O’Keeffe, Senior, locked the door, drew the blind, then blew out the front lamps in the taproom at O’Flynn’s. By the dim interior light, he began washing the bar and tables. This was usually Mike’s job, and the older man’s feet were tired from a day’s work.
It was past midnight, and it surprised him that his nephew hadn’t returned home. He was out with that new girl of his, of course, but it was a Monday night, and Mike had already asked his aunt and uncle if she might sleep over one more night. They ought to be back by now.
Sleeping over. What a world. Still, she seemed like a proper and genteel sort of girl, if an outspoken one. Maggie liked her, that was plain, and she ought to know, where young ladies were concerned.
A knock rattled the glass pane of the door. He sighed and dropped his wet rag into a bucket, then poked the day’s cash from the till into the iron safe under the bar. He checked that his pistol was in his pocket. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had attempted an after-hours holdup, if that was what it was. The knocking continued insistently, so the proprietor of O’Flynn’s made his way to the door before this clown could wake his wife.
“We’re closed,” he called through the glass.
“Mr. O’Keeffe,” a voice called. “It’s me. Ron.”
He pulled back the blind. Sure enough, there was bald Ronnie, a faithful patron, squinting through the frosty glass.
Mr. O’Keeffe opened the door. “Come in, Ron,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s Mike,” Ronnie said breathlessly.
Michael O’Keeffe felt a tightness clench in his chest.
“What about him?” he asked quietly.
“I was standing on the corner just now, see, having a smoke, and don’t I see Mike strolling along with that girl, you know, easy as you please—”
“How long ago?”
Ronnie’s eyes were wide. “Not five minutes. I came straight here.”
Good. That was good.
“What happened?”
Ronnie took a deep breath. “So I’m watching him, just for kicks, having a smoke, like I said, when all of a sudden, out of a door pops these two coppers. They’d been in that old rag-and-bone shop, Smitty’s I think they called it? The one on the corner that’s been closed awhile?”
Michael nodded, holding his breath.
