Free Come Little Children by D. Melhoff

veranda, and Moira was outside speaking to a woman with gaunt, ghostly features and bloodshot eyes.
    The six-year-old had been standing in between the two women, completely fine, bored if anything. He kept fidgeting with the buttons on his Toronto Blue Jays jersey, but drained as his mother looked, she kept her arms locked around his neck so tightly that the two of them may as well have been attached by umbilical cord again.
    “Neither of you like baseball, do you?” Camilla had asked Peter and Lucas out of nowhere. Both said no, just as she’dpredicted. The boy’s jersey was too new, the jeans fit too well.
His mother must have brought them with her
.
    It was feasible. No, it was better than feasible—it was likely—and it was an important piece of the puzzle that she could use to fit the previous night together in a way that made perfect sense. The boy had been dared by a group of friends to go for a swim in the Vincents’ pond, simple as that. His gang of accomplices had hoisted him over the iron fence, giggling most likely, as he stripped down to his underwear and went tearing across the yard to the edge of the water. But when he came back, soaked, his partners in crime had made off with his clothes and left him trapped in the yard by himself.
    Little twats, leaving a poor kid hung out to dry like that
.
    It was so obvious it hurt. Kids would be kids, and when little boys were too old to be guarded every second of the day and too young to be chasing around short skirts and ponytails, impish stunts like trespassing on haunted houses and graveyards and funeral homes was just in their nature.
No wonder he didn’t say anything when I opened the back door. I’d be scared shitless too if I had to knock on anyone’s door—let alone Moira Vincent’s—in my soaking wet undies
.
    Camilla bit her lip and picked at her last streaks of nail polish.
    Logically, that scenario made sense. It covered the main points perfectly: the missing clothes, the boy’s reason for being in the backyard, his all-around bashfulness. But something about it still didn’t sit right. It was too tidy, almost. Too clean for something that had seemed so viscerally amiss. After all, she hadn’t actually
seen
or
heard
any other children that night. There was the subject of the towels too, which were already stacked in the cupboard.
Like someone was expecting him
. And what about Moira’sreaction? Not surprised, but…worried. Worried, perhaps, that someone had seen something they weren’t supposed to see…
    No!
Camilla shot a gust of breath through her nostrils.
Don’t be an idiot; they’re not hiding anything. The funeral home had nothing to do with it
.
    She shook her head and forced the recrimination away.
Mystery or no mystery—prankster kids or…or whatever—there’s one thing I’m absolutely positive about: this goddamn corpse’s goddamn coat is not going on
.
    Camilla’s arm was still wrapped around the cadaver’s waist, keeping it upright, while their faces were so close that their noses were almost touching. The smell was pungent—a whiff of flesh and Clorox masked by a faint puff of cinnamon-scented fabric freshener. Craning her head away, she let out a sudden giggle. The tableau looked and felt surprisingly like a scene from the only high school dance that she had ever went to: there was clumsy Mike Ferris again, his ogre limbs swaying to the wrong beat of the music as he tried to lean in and lip-rape her with his worming tongue, his breath drenched with the cinnamon Scope that the hockey team had chugged to get their cheap Walmart buzz.
    Maddock looked up from a bowl of plaster and shot Camilla the stink eye. She cleared her throat and wiped her smile away.
    Eva Braun could be back any second, I need to get this coat on
.
    Her eyes scanned the room and spotted a pair of shears hanging on the far wall.
    Perfect
.
    She lowered Frankenstein’s monster onto the gurney again and waited until Maddock went back to whisking his