Free Have Mercy (Have a Life #1) by Maddy Wells Page A

come in, but you have to be really quiet.”
                  We followed her through two rooms—she had to unlock both their doors—until we arrived at a room lit by florescent lights with a table in the middle with a dead body lying on it covered with a paper blanket.  I’d only seen dead bodies before in movies.  The place stank like the sulfur kids put on at night to dry up their zits.  It was all pretty creepy and I felt a little nauseous.  I handed Mrs. Kirby the box of pizza.  “Janet said you might be hungry.”
                  “Isn’t that thoughtful,” she said, putting the box on the dead body’s stomach, then changing her mind and putting it on a chair.  It was a woman.  “I’m almost finished with this one.  I’m waiting for the pancake to dry.”
                  She pushed her goggles back over her eyes and applied nail polish to the fingernails of the dead woman’s hands which looked like they were a thousand years old. 
                  “Frosted shell pink,” Captain Kirby said.  “Everyone looks good in frosted shell pink.  Especially if they have ridges in their nails from being sick a long time.”  She obviously had strong opinions about her mother’s work, but I thought she was definitely wrong about the frosted shell pink.  Jane would die—or something—before she would be seen in frosted shell pink.
                  “My mom does their make-up,” Captain Kirby said, answering the question I wasn’t sure how to ask. 
                  A metal make-up case was open on a stainless stand next to the corpse table.  For someone’s mother—and despite the frosted nail polish—Mrs. Kirby had very hip taste in cosmetics: Urban Decay, Mac, Tarte.  She finished the woman’s nails—no need to warn her to let them dry for an hour—and started on her hair.  She pulled a blue-gray extension out of a drawer in the stainless stand and attached it to the woman’s head—cutting it so it fit in with the woman’s bob.  I had stopped feeling nauseous and was thinking that this was like being in a beauty parlor where you didn’t have to make small talk.
                  “If you’re going to watch so closely put on a mask,” Mrs. Kirby said.  She pulled one out her lab coat and handed it to me. 
                  I had never seen a real dead person—two of my grandparents had died but I didn’t go to their funerals because one lived in Akron and the other in Detroit—and I was surprised at how unmoved I felt.  I thought I should be crying my eyes out.  Maybe it was the total stillness of the body—I mean no one alive is that still even when they’re sleeping—that made me feel the woman wasn’t real.  I wanted to touch her forehead to see how it felt, but I knew that would be disrespectful. 
                  “If you’re going to touch, you need gloves.”  Mrs. Kirby was obviously a mind-reader.  “But I wouldn’t.  You have to get used to it like Janet or you’ll have nightmares.”
                  “Do you know who she is?”
                  “Mrs. Joseph McGouldrick is her name,” Mrs. Kirby answered me.  “She had eleven children and thirty-nine grandchildren.”  She finished up with eyebrow pencil and lipstick and blush.  The blush was the only weird note.  “That’s who she was .”
                  Captain Kirby came up next to us and looked at her mother’s handiwork.  “Gorgeous, Mom.  As usual.”
                  Mrs. Kirby washed up and took off her lab coat and goggles, putting them in a locker.  She tossed her hairnet and gloves and mask, gesturing for me to give her mine, in a trash can, then pulled the paper blanket over the woman’s face and turned out the lights.  “Let’s go,” she said.
                  We walked back through the two locked rooms—Mrs. Kirby