I Am Not a Serial Killer

1

Mrs. Anderson was dead.

Nothing flashy, just old age—she went to bed one night and never woke up. They say it was a peaceful, dignified way to die, which I suppose is technically true, but the three days it took for someone to realize they hadn’t seen her in a while removed most of the dignity from the situation. Her daughter eventually dropped by to check on her and found her corpse three days rotted and stinking like roadkill. And the worst part isn’t the rotting, it’s the three days—three whole days before anyone cared enough to say, "Wait, where’s that old lady that lives down by the canal?" There’s not a lot of dignity in that.

But peaceful? Certainly. She died quietly in her sleep on August thirtieth, according to the coroner, which means she died two days before the something tore Jeb Jolley’s insides out and left him in a puddle behind the laundromat. We didn’t know it at the time, but that made Mrs. Anderson the last person in Clayton County to die of natural causes for almost six months. The Clayton Killer got the rest.

Well, most of them. All but one.

We got Mrs. Anderson’s body on Saturday, September Second, after the coroner was done with it—or, I guess I should say that my mom and Aunt Margaret got the body, not me. They’re the ones who run the mortuary; I’m only fifteen. I’d been in town most of the day, watching the police clean up the mess with Jeb, and came back just as the sun was beginning to go down. I slipped in the back just in case my mom was up front. I didn’t really want to see her.

No one was in the back yet, just me and Mrs. Anderson’s corpse. Itwas lying perfectly still on the table, under a blue sheet. It smelled like rotten meat and bug spray, and the lone ventilator fan buzzing loudly overhead wasn’t doing much to help. I washed my hands quietly in the sink, wondering how long I had, and gently touched the body. Old skin was my favorite—dry and wrinkled, with a texture like antique paper. The coroner hadn’t done much to clean up the body, probably because they were busy with Jeb, but the smell told me that at least they’d thought to kill the bugs. After three days in end-of-summer heat, there had probably been a lot of them.

A woman swung open the door from the front end of the mortuary and came in, looking like a surgeon in her green scrubs and mask. I froze, thinking it was my mother, but the woman just glanced at me and walked to a counter.

"Hi John," she said, collecting some sterile rags. It wasn’t my mom at all, it was her sister Margaret—they were twins, and when their faces were masked I could barely tell the difference. Margaret’s voice was a little lighter, though, a little more . . . energetic. I figured it was because she’d never been married.

"Hi Margaret." I took a step back.

"Ron’s getting lazier," she said, picking up a squirt bottle of Dis-Spray. "He didn’t even clean her, just declared natural causes and shipped her over. Mrs. Anderson deserves better than this." She turned to look at me. "You just gonna stand there, or are you gonna help me?"

"Sorry."

"Wash up."

I rolled up my sleeves eagerly and went back to the sink.

"Honestly," she went on, "I don’t even know what they do over there at the coroner’s office. It’s not like they’re busy—we can barely stay in business here."

"Jeb Jolley died," I said, drying my hands. "They found him this morning behind the Wash-n-Dry."

"The mechanic?" asked Margaret, her voice dropping lower. "That’s terrible. He’s younger than I am. What happened?"

"Murdered," I said, and pulled a mask and apron from a hook on the wall. "They thought maybe it was a wild dog, but his guts were kind of in a pile."

"That’s terrible," Margaret said again.

"Well you’re the one worried about going out of business," I said. "Two bodies in one weekend is money in the bank."

"Don’t even joke like that, John," she said, looking at me sternly. "Death is a sad thing, even when it pays your mortgage. You ready?"

"Yes."

"Hold her arm out."

I grabbed the body’s right arm and pulled it straight. Rigor mortis makes a body so stiff you can barely move it, but it only lasts about a day and a half and this one had been dead so long the muscles had all relaxed again. Though the skin was papery, the flesh underneath was soft, like dough. Margaret sprayed the arm with disinfectant and began wiping it gently with a cloth.

Even when the coroner does his job and cleans the body, we always wash it ourselves before we start. Embalming’s a long pro cess, with a lot of very precise work, and you need a clean slate to start with.

"It stinks pretty bad," I said.

"She."

"She stinks pretty bad," I said. Mom and Margaret were adamant that we be respectful to the deceased, but it seemed a little late at this stage. It wasn’t a person anymore, it was just a body. A thing.

"She does smell," said Margaret. "Poor woman. I wish someone had found her sooner." She looked up at the ventilator fan buzzing behind its grate in the ceiling. "Let’s hope the motor doesn’t burn out on us to night." Margaret said the same thing before every embalming, like a sacred chant. The fan continued creaking overhead.

"Leg," she said. I moved down to the body’s foot and pulled the leg straight while Margaret sprayed it. "Turn your head." I kept my gloved hands on the foot and turned to stare at the wall while Margaret lifted up the sheet to wash the upper thighs. "One good thing that came of this, though," she said, "is that you can bet every widow in the county got a visit today, or is going to get one tomorrow. Everyone who hears about Mrs. Anderson is going to go straight to their own mother, just to make sure. Other leg."

I wanted to say something about how everyone who heard about Jeb would go straight to their auto mechanic, but Margaret never appreciated jokes like that.

We moved around the body, leg to arm, arm to torso, torso to head, until the whole thing was scrubbed and disinfected. The room smelled like death and soap. Margaret tossed the rags in the laundry bin and started gathering the real embalming supplies.

I’d been helping Mom and Margaret at the mortuary since I was a little boy, back before Dad left. My first job had been cleaning up the chapel: picking up programs, dumping out ash trays, vacuuming the floor, and other odd jobs that a six-year-old could do unassisted. I got bigger jobs as I grew older, but I didn’t get to help with the really cool stuff—embalming—until I was twelve. Embalming was like . . . I don’t know how to describe it. It was like playing with a giant doll, dressing it and bathing it and opening it up to see what was inside. I watched Mom once when I was eight, peeking in through the door to see what the big secret was. When I cut open my teddy bear the next week, I don’t think she made the connection.

Margaret handed me a wad of cotton, and I held it at the ready while she packed small tufts carefully under the body’s eyelids. The eyes were beginning to recede, deflating as they lost moisture, and cotton helped keep the right shape for the viewing. It helped keep the eyelids closed as well, but Margaret always added a bit of sealing cream, just in case, to keep the moisture in and the lid closed.

"Get me the needle gun, will you John?" she asked, and I hurried to put down the cotton and grab the gun from a metal table by the wall. The gun is a long metal tube with two fingerholds on the side, like a hypodermic syringe.

"Can I do it this time?"

"Sure," she said, pulling back the body&….