Free Come Little Children by D. Melhoff Page A

bowl of plaster before making her way across the room. Just as shereached up and grabbed the shears off their peg, Maddock called out, “Bring that jar, will you?”
    Camilla glanced back and saw the chief embalmer aiming his spatula at a glass jar of tongue depressors. They reminded her of oversized popsicle sticks, like the ones she used to get from Dandy’s Corner Store when her mom would take her for Fudgsicles in the summer. She picked up the jar and carried it over to Maddock’s work station, setting it down beside Ms. Beaudry’s right hand.
    Except Ms. Beaudry’s hand wasn’t attached to Ms. Beaudry’s body anymore. Neither of her hands were. They were lying like hunks of butcher’s meat a few inches from each of her severed wrists.
    Maddock opened the jar and picked out two depressors. He lifted Ms. Beaudry’s arm—gently guiding the old woman’s corpse up as he did so—and then with one violent stab, he drove a popsicle stick directly into the stump where her left wrist used to be. Next he picked up the corresponding hand and popped it on the other end of the depressor, then seized his spatula and started slathering plaster around the gaps in the skin. His eyes were electric, like a kid on Christmas morning with a new Play-Doh playset.
    Camilla smirked.
Tongue depressors for limb attachments. Genius
.
    As Maddock continued reconstructing Ms. Beaudry, Camilla went back to her gurney, shears in hand.
Time for a shortcut
. She stuck the fabric in between the open blades and clamped down. Just as the shears made a loud
snip!
up the back of the coat, the embalming room doors burst open and Lucas came barreling in with another gurney.
    “Make way!”
    The smell that accompanied Lucas was much sharper than Ms. Beaudry’s watered-down flesh or Mike Ferris’s cinnamon breath. It was rancid death, a sack of curdled organs that made Camilla gag as soon as it hit her nostrils. Maddock didn’t flinch; his olfactory bulb must have burned out long ago.
    “Sorry,” Lucas grunted as he heaved the body bag onto a table. “No coffee breaks today.”
    “Or lunch,” Moira’s voice filled the room as she strode inside. “The Beaudrys just pulled in. We’ll need a table empty in five and Mr. Yule dressed by half past.”
    “What happened here?” Maddock motioned at the new arrival.
    “Suicide.”
    “Pills?”
    “Rat poison.” Moira set down the autopsy report. She dipped a hand into her blouse and withdrew a tin of Vicks VapoRub. “From his cellblock.”
    She spun the lid off the tin and dabbed a finger in the jelly, then smeared a streak above her upper lip and tossed the rub to Lucas, who did the same. Lucas tossed it to Camilla—who hurriedly copycatted—and as soon as the cream touched her skin, her sinus passages flew open with the sharp rush of cold, mentholated air.
    “Lucas,” Moira said, “start stripping Mr. Gall. Carleton, when was the last time you did a six-point injection? Never mind. Take a trocar, and we’ll go from there.”
    Camilla gave a sharp nod, eager to earn some approval, and turned to the wall of instruments.
    Trocar cabinet, trocar cabinet, trocar cabinet. Damn
.
    She knew she knew where it was, but the sudden jolt of pressure had scared the memory away. Her eyes flew back and forth over the cabinets as panic welled up.
    There it is—to the right!
    She yanked open a cabinet and took out a long needle attached to the end of a light, dentist-like drill. As she jogged back to the embalming station, Lucas was already pulling the body bag away.
    Camilla froze at the sight of the remains.
    Dear. God
.
    The man—what was left of him, at least—was in his late forties. There was a modesty cloth draped over his genitalia and two ID tags latched around his right ankle, one from the hospital morgue and one from the Vincents’ funeral home. But it wasn’t the nudity or putrefaction that made her shrink back.
    It was the scar.
    A large
Y
was carved into his torso, the arms of the