Free The Circle of Blood by Alane Ferguson Page B

see tiny threads of veins at the base of each nostril. She hadn’t remembered seeing them before. There was a redness to his eyes. Squeezing them shut, he pinched the lids with his fingers and said, “I think the day’s finally catching up to me.”

    Just then his phone rang.

    “Why don’t I go on down to the autopsy suite,” she began, but her father held up one finger to signal Cameryn to stop. “Hi, Ma,” Patrick said.

    Cameryn waited, paying close attention to their conversation.

    “We’re down here now. . . . With Cammie. . . . We’re outside X-ray.... No, it’s fine, what is it?” His back was hunched away from her, but suddenly he wheeled around to face Cameryn. “All right, I’ll ask her. . . . No, I’m glad you called. I’ll talk to you later.”

    Something had changed in his voice. Cautious, she looked up and saw that his face was grave. Her father rubbed the back of his head, then raked his hand forward, making tufts. “That was your grandmother.”

    Cameryn shrugged. “Okay. So?”

    “So she said you never came home, that you left from the driveway and she got worried. She called Lyric. Cameryn, did you see Hannah today?”

    Her fingers clenched at the sound of her mother’s name.

    Guessing the truth, Patrick cried, exasperated, “We had an hour-long ride in the car. Why didn’t you tell me?”

    “I don’t know.” Eyes lowered again, she noticed a small nick in one square of the tile. “I guess I didn’t want to get into it.”

    “Did you— Did you talk about Jayne?”

    She planted the tip of her boot onto the notch and pressed it. “Hannah told me what happened.”

    “She did? Can you please look at me?”

    She did. Patrick’s eyes were warm, sad, and full of love. There was so much love in Patrick’s eyes that it was almost impossible to hold his gaze. But she made herself do it. “I—I feel sorry for Hannah,” she said in a thickened voice.

    “You feel sorry for her. Wow.” He blinked hard. “That’s not the reaction I expected.”

    “It’s just, there are worse things . . . worse people . . . than Hannah,” Cameryn tried to explain. “Baby Doe put a bullet in her head. Imagine how screwed up her life must have been. Maybe she had problems and everyone abandoned her and then she killed herself. I’m not going to abandon Hannah,” she told him. “I think I can help.”

    “Cammie . . . there’s more that you don’t know.”

    “But I don’t want to hear any more giant revelations. I think I’ve had enough for one day. Can we just let it lie?”

    The door to X-ray popped open, and Ben pushed Mariah out, feet-first. “All done,” he said.

    For just the barest of seconds, her father held Cameryn in his gaze until, like a cord breaking, he released her. They once again became the coroner and assistant to the coroner, a father/daughter team, the cheerful partners who worked cases together in family harmony. No outsider would ever guess the truth. She wouldn’t let them.

    “You two ready?” Ben asked.

    “Yeah,” she said. “We’re ready.”

    They began to walk down the hallway, the worn heels of Cameryn’s cowboy boots reverberating along the linoleum in rhythm with the soft padding sound of her father’s new shoes. Other than the overheads, most of the lights had been turned off. As she walked, she thought of Lyric and how frightened she would be if she were here. Lyric believed the deceased hovered close to their remains—sometimes, she claimed, unaware they were actually dead. But Cameryn didn’t sense any floating spirits here. No, it was the smell that haunted, a reminder of what really went on inside these plain beige walls. As she got closer to the autopsy suite she inhaled it, the sickly sweet odor scrubbed by bleach and covered by ineffective fresheners. The air in the building hung heavy with death. It had entered into the very pores, weaving its own kind of DNA from the hundreds of bodies dissected inside these walls. The