Watermelon

There was a cockerel on top of the barn roof, made of a silvery metal that caught the setting sun and sparkled.  It was a weather-vane, and it swung slowly to point to the North, the direction the wind was coming from.  Nathaniel sat back on his heels, his hands pressing into the small of his aching back, and looked up.  By his side was a tarpaulin set on the short grass in the rows between the vines, and on the tarpaulin were the red-and-brown raggedy weeds that he was pulling out by hand.  Georgette, kneeling next to him and hauling with a stoked ferocity on the stringy weeds, glanced over at him, and then went back to weeding.
"Boreas is coming," said Nathaniel.  "We're going to have to poison the watermelons tonight."
"Tonight?" Georgette's voice was plaintive, perhaps a whine rather than a wail.  "How many did you plant this year?"
"Just shy of eighty hills," said Nathaniel.  "There's two vines to a hill, it's been a good year."
"Sweet Jesus," said Georgette, the words sighing out of her.  She looked at Nathaniel and saw his lips pursing, turning white with the pressure.  "Keep it to yourself, Godbotherer," she said.  "Or you'll be poisoning the watermelons all on your lonesome."
There was a minute of silence while Nathaniel thought the words he wanted to say, and imagined Georgette repenting.  Georgette grunted occasionally with the effort of the weeding, and didn't bother him. She knew what he'd be doing, Nathaniel had been 'Godbotherer' to the whole farm for the last thirty years.
"We'll poison ten," said Nathaniel.  "One hundred and fifty will be plenty for the harvest and the molasses."
"And the brandy," said Georgette.  Nathaniel's face contorted again, and she shook her head.  "You can disapprove all you like, Nat, but I don't see you not spending the money.  I don't see you not planting fewer watermelons to ensure that we choose one or the other.  Your actions speak louder than your words."
"The weeding here will keep until tomorrow."  There were tiny red spots on Nathaniel's cheek, in an otherwise sickly-pallored face, and his voice was the careful tone of someone controlling themselves and taking care not to say what they're actually thinking.  "I shall go and prepare the poison."
Georgette looked along the vines, and sighed.  "You do that, Nat," she said.  "I think I'll need to finish this row, the weeds here are tall enough to throttle a child."
He stood, unfolding into a tall, gaunt scarecrow of a figure, and was silhouetted against the sun.  The wind tugged at his untucked shirt and and bell-bottoms of his jeans, and for a moment she was reminded of the Gaunt Man, a monster from childhood tales.  As he strode away, along the rows to the end of the vines, she considered for a moment that it might not be that far from the truth; they poisoned the watermelons to stop thieves, but at the end of the day, each of those poisoned melons might kill someone, or some animal.  Nathaniel was puritanical about using arsenic instead of anything more creature specific.
She turned to the remainder of the weeds; there was about 6 metres to the end of the row and she figured it would be about 20 minutes to free the vines from the weeds.  She leant in, the mucles in her arms and back bulging as she hauled on stringy, tough stems that grew from a deep-set root bolus and tried, like ivy, to wrap itself around the vines and choke the life from them.  The only important thing, she thought to herself, was to make sure that Nathaniel never poisoned the watermelons alone; the voices he heard might be mostly about punishing himself and the threat of a vengeful God, but they were still voices and he was inclined to act on them.  It wasn't at all unbelievable that he might poisoned the wrong melons, or the wrong number, or fail to note which melons were poisoned and which weren't, just because he thought that God had told him to do that.
Finally the row was done and she stood up with relief, her muscles flooding at last with blood and fresh oxygen, and their screams of delight feeling only a little bit like pain.  She walked, slowly at first as the muscles recovered, and then with an increased pace, through the vines and across the side-yard to the barn.  The door was only slightly ajar, and she tsked to herself; Nathaniel should know better than to work with poisons without proper ventilation.  She pushed it, and it moved a few centimetres and then stopped.  She pushed again, realising that it was catching on something, and put her back into it.  The door opened further, but it was an effort.  One she didn't need after spending the afternoon weeding.  When it was open enough, she stepped inside and looked around the door to see what was obstructing it.
There was Nathaniel, dead as a doornail, with his head jammed firmly in the bucket of arsenic.

The overflow morgue

The mortician at the overflow morgue lets me have my own key because she got tired of trying to find how I’d broken in again.  She sighed as she threw it at me, and then laughed as I struggled to bend enough to pick it up.  I’d had a particularly difficult time with a particularly tricky case the night before, involving a sadistic acupuncturist, a loose goose and a bag of leaf tea and I really wasn’t set up for bending, stretching, or even moving faster than a stumble.

“Sweet beggared Moses, Mac,” she’d said, without any more malice in her tone than people who don’t know me use, “what have you done to yourself this time?  I don’t know, but you keep coming in here so you may as well call it home.  It’s people you know who keep this place in business, so perhaps I should show some gratitude, however indirectly.”

I hooked the key with a shoe and started to pull it up my leg to where my aching fingers could reach it.  “I like it in here,” I said.  “It’s quiet, no-one tries to bother me or interrupt my thoughts.”

“Who in their right mind would bother you, Mac?”

“People wanting me dead, mostly.”

“So you’re giving them a bit of a head start, eh?  Where better to hide a dead body than a morgue?”

“The graveyard, but it involves digging and a bit of heavy lifting.”  I got my fingertips to the key and tried to straight up again.  It proved painful, and from the sound of her laughter, humorous too.

“Don’t scare my assistant,” she said.  “And try not to let anyone official catch you.  If they come in while you’re thinking hard –,” her tone suggested that she thought I was sleeping, “– don’t sit up and greet them.  Not unless you’re trying to add to the population here yourself.”

I grunted, mostly with the effort of dragging my shoulder up so they were level with one another and she left it at that.  As she walked off I remember thinking that from the rear she was stunning, but when you saw her face she was breath-taking.  As in, she took your breath away so much that you couldn’t even beg for mercy.  She could have given Medusa tips on both make-up and hair-care.

I let myself in to the morgue and sniffed.  There was a strong blast of formaldehyde in the air, but there were the subtle, almost-citrussy notes of chloroform underneath.  I asked Miss Sapphire about it once, wondering if it’s supposed to smell like Japanese lime and she just wrinkled her delicate little nose at me.

“You sniff chloroform, Mac?”  She shook her head and exhaled very gently, a ladylike take on a very masculine gesture.  “How are you even still alive?”

I walked through the little entrance office without signing the visitors book; I figured that this was like a home away from home so I wasn’t really visiting.  And if I wasn’t here there was nothing to explain if someone noticed a trolley out of place, or a roll of bandages borrowed for a while.  In the next room the temperature dropped noticeably.  The overflow morgue is dug into the ground for insulation and they keep it cold enough that it doesn’t smell much except in summer.  The floor sloped steadily downwards as I headed towards the corpse bays where the bodies for autopsy are prepped.  There was pretty much always a free trolley there, and I have faith I’d wake up before they cut too deep; while if I slept in the fridges I might not wake up until I was in the chiller cabinet.  They lock those doors from the outside too.  I asked about it, and the mortician just shrugged her shoulders.

“Mad Frankie went to the city council and insisted,” she said.  “Sat there in the Mayor’s chair, banging his fist on the table and insisting that we put security in, saying that he wanted to know that when he died he wasn’t going to be some necrophiliac’s sex toy.  God only knows what kind of people he hangs out with, Mac.  Well, God and you, from what I hear.”  I had my own opinions about why Mad Frankie might want to be able to lock people into a morgue fridge, and I wasn’t going to speculate.

The corpse bays were unusually crowded, and when I started opening body bags and checking the contents I found that everyone seemed to be missing an arm or a leg, sometimes both.  Then I found the bag that contained all the arms and legs and realised that the mortuary staff would be doing jigsaw puzzles come the morning, and I permitted myself a grim little smile.  This wasn’t Mad Frankie’s style, he was much more direct.  This looked and felt like Natasha Monkeybutt to me, deploying some police weapon without due care and consideration.  I pushed the bag of limbs onto the floor, climbed on to the trolley and lay back.  I exhaled deeply, closed my eyes, and tried to think about all the things that had happened since I went looking for Little Boy Blue.  And I realised that I still hadn’t found out where he was and why someone had dragged a sheep up to his room to slaughter it there.