A free story

Party Wall

A free Iris Stellick story, set three winters before Book 1.

A night of ice in the river wards, an old woman dead on her own kitchen floor, and a neighbor who is sure she knows who did it. Iris gets one night to read the room right.

B.M. Chandler

Loretta Kettleby had died sitting down, with her back against the cabinet under her own sink, as if she'd only meant to rest there until her legs came back.

That was the first thing I wrote. The second was the temperature of the kitchen, which was 71 degrees, and the third was the color of her hands, which was wrong.

"Neighbor found her," the officer said. She was young and very upright in the doorway, as if the room might tip if she leaned. Her nameplate said STRELL. "Donna Ruckle, next door. She's got a key. She says somebody did this."

"Did what?"

Officer Jenna Strell was twenty-eight, she told me later, and three months out of field training, and she had the look new officers get on their first dead body that isn't in a car: she wanted it to be a story, because a story has someone to arrest. She pointed with her chin at the table.

A purse had been turned out on it. Wallet, tissues, a church bulletin, a roll of antacids, a comb with a snarl of white hair in it. Beside the purse was a coffee can with a plastic lid, the lid off, the can empty. The back door behind me was unlocked. I'd come in through it.

"Ms. Ruckle says there's usually four hundred dollars in that can," Strell said. "She says the home aide was here at supper."

I looked at the purse, and at the can, and at Loretta Kettleby under her sink in her quilted housecoat and one slipper. Then I took my gloves out of my jacket pocket, the county's blue nitrile ones, and put them on, and did not say her name. I never say their names in the room. I haven't since I was nineteen.

I was twenty-eight that January and in my third winter on nights for the Tallow County Coroner's Office. A death investigator works the scene before the body moves: the room, the temperatures, the position, the medicines, the last thing a person ate, the clock on the stove. The pathologists get the body. We get everything the body leaves behind. I'd been a nurse before that, on paper. I finished the degree and never used it on the living.

The call had come in at 2:20. I was on the rowhouse block by 2:41, two streets in from the flood wall, where the river wards lean their old brick shoulders together as if the wall might fail and they'd rather go down touching. The ice storm had been coming down since dusk. Every branch of every sycamore on the block was cased in glass, and the sodium light off the wall made the whole street look like it had been dipped in orange syrup and left to set. Somewhere downriver a towboat leaned on its horn, one long blast, the way they do at three in the morning when they can't see the bank.

Mrs. Kettleby's house was the left half of a pair. The right half belonged to Donna Ruckle. They shared a stoop, a party wall, a slate roof furred over with ice, and one tall brick chimney with two clay pots on top, each pot capped with a little tin hat.

I noticed the chimney because I always look up. Nobody else does.

The kitchen smelled of nothing much. Old coffee, the gas range, the lemon oil a certain kind of widow uses on a certain kind of table. The windows over the sink were streaming on the inside, wet beads running down to puddle on the sill. Outside it was 19 degrees. Inside, the thermostat on the hall wall said 72 and meant it.

I wrote it all down. I photographed her where she sat, and the purse, and the can, and the back door's lock, which had not been forced. I photographed the saucer of saltines on the counter with two crackers gone, and the open bottle of aspirin beside it, and the dish towel she'd wet and folded and left on the counter edge, as people do when they mean to put it on their forehead and then forget.

Then I knelt down beside her. She was seventy-eight, by the birth date on the blood-pressure pills by her toaster, a small square woman with her white hair still in its pins. My knee cracked on the linoleum and I said "Sorry" to her, out of habit, the way I always do.

Rigor had come into her jaw and her neck, not yet her arms. In a 71-degree room, that put her death somewhere between nine and eleven that evening. I wrote 9:00–11:00 on the back of my left hand with the pen I keep for that, where I'd see it every time I reached for something.

Lividity is what blood does when the heart stops pushing it: it settles, the way silt settles out of river water, to the lowest parts of a body. In most people it's the color of a bruise. In people who die in the cold, or lie in it afterward, it can run pink, because cold holds oxygen in the blood longer than you'd think.

Loretta Kettleby's lividity was pink. Bright pink, the pink of a cheap valentine, the pink of the inside of a conch shell.

And the room was 71 degrees.

I sat back on my heels.

"Ms. Stellick?" Strell said behind me. "Ms. Ruckle wants to talk to you. She's in the front room. She's kind of worked up."

"In a minute," I said.

My ears were empty. I noticed that and put it away. I'd spent eighteen years teaching myself that my ears were just ears.

My mother had a thing. She died when I was nine, in our apartment by the river, and it was ruled a suicide, and I knew it wasn't, because I had stood in her bedroom afterward and the room had turned over under me and I'd seen the last of her life the way you'd see it through a window. I couldn't touch anything. I couldn't stop anything. And a man in the corner of that room, a man who should not have been able to see me at all, had turned and looked at me.

I told a detective. Nobody believed me. My grandmother told me never to say it again, and I didn't.

What I'd learned that night, without wanting to, was that murder leaves something behind in the place it happens, and that my ears know before I do. A room that holds a murder presses on them, like a lock chamber filling. A room where somebody only died stays a room.

I'd been in a lot of rooms since, and not one of them had pressed on anything. I'd made a promise anyway, and kept it, and the easiest way to keep it was to believe that the pressure had been a little girl's grief and that the man in the corner had been a little girl's nightmare. Most nights I believed it.

Loretta Kettleby's kitchen was only a kitchen. I didn't write that down. Nobody can put my ears in a report.

But the lividity was wrong, and that I could write down.

Donna Ruckle was forty-four, a big soft-voiced woman in a parka over flannel pajamas, and she had been crying for a long time in the slow, tired way that comes after the loud part. She sat on the edge of Mrs. Kettleby's front-room sofa with her hands between her knees.

"I heard her TV through the wall," she said. "At one-thirty. She never has it on past the news. It was still going and I thought, Loretta fell asleep in her chair, she'll be stiff as a board tomorrow. And then I thought, no. Something's wrong. So I came over in my slippers." She looked at her feet. She was still in them, soaked through. "She's got the purse dumped out, she's got the can empty. That girl was here at supper."

"Kayla Dunholt," Strell said, consulting her notebook. "The aide. Comes mornings and evenings from an agency."

"I'm not saying she's a bad girl," Donna said. "I'm saying four hundred dollars."

She pressed her fingers into her temples as she said it, hard, and shut her eyes.

"Headache?" I said.

"I've had it since I got here. I've had it two days, really. It's the weather." She opened her eyes. "Loretta had it too. She said Monday her head was splitting, she couldn't keep her supper down. I said you've got that bug from church. And that smoke alarm of hers chirping through the wall all Monday night, I could have killed it myself." She heard what she'd said and put a hand over her mouth.

Behind me, Officer Strell yawned, a big jaw-cracking yawn she tried to swallow, and said, "Sorry. Long night."

I looked at her. Then I looked at the ceiling of the front room, where a round white smoke alarm hung by its bracket with its battery door open, like a mouth.

I went back into the kitchen. The nine-volt battery was on the windowsill over the sink, standing up on its end. Next to it, under a magnet shaped like a strawberry, was a grocery list on the back of an envelope, in a big round old-lady hand: eggs, Metamucil, 9 volt, call furnace man FRI.

I counted to myself under my breath, which is a thing I do. One battery. One open alarm. Two days of headaches through a party wall. Three people breathing in this house tonight who were not Loretta Kettleby.

The basement door was off the kitchen. I opened it and went down four steps, far enough to see.

The furnace was an old gravity-fed monster from before anyone now living was born, a squat iron octopus with ducts going up into the floor in every direction, converted to gas at some point and never loved since. Through the little mica window at its base the burner flame was going lazy and yellow, licking up the sides instead of standing blue. There was a dark smudge of soot around the draft hood where the flue pipe left it, and the basement air was close and warm and tasted of metal on the back of the tongue.

I thought of the little tin hats on the chimney pots, cased in ice.

Carbon monoxide has no smell, no color, no taste. It doesn't hurt. It gives you a headache, and then it makes you sick to your stomach, and then it makes you so tired you sit down on your kitchen floor with your back against the cabinet under the sink, meaning to rest until your legs come back. It turns the blood that pink, the pink of a conch shell, even in a warm room. I'd only seen it twice before, and both times in a closed garage.

The chimney had two pots. Two flues, one stack. Two halves of one house.

I came up the stairs faster than I went down.

"Everybody out," I said. "Now. Out the back, leave the door open. Officer, call the fire department and tell them possible CO, two connected residences, one dead, more exposed."

Strell stared at me. "It's a burglary."

"It's a chimney," I said. "Ms. Ruckle. Who's at your house right now?"

Donna was already on her feet, her face gone the color of paper. "My mother," she said. "Mama's asleep upstairs. My brother does our furnace every fall, he does it every fall—"

The thing about a rowhouse is that next door is nine steps away. I know because I counted them, out loud, on Loretta Kettleby's iced stoop and up Donna's: four down, a turn at the shared railing, five up. I nearly went over on the third. Behind me Donna was saying Mama, Mama, Mama and fumbling at her key ring with fingers that wouldn't do what she told them, which was the gas and not only the fear.

I took the keys out of her hand. The third one I tried turned.

Her side of the wall was the mirror of Loretta's, the same hall, the same stairs, the same thermostat in the same spot reading 74. The windows here were streaming too. I took the stairs two at a time, counting them, thirteen, and the headache I'd been blaming on the middle of the night came up behind my eyes like a fist.

Darlene Drummel was seventy-four, she'd tell me afterward, and she weighed about as much as a bag of feed. She was asleep in a pink chenille bed jacket under three quilts with the television going softly, and when I said "Mrs. Drummel," she didn't wake. When I said it louder and put my hand flat on her breastbone and pressed, the way they teach you, she opened her eyes and said, quite clearly, "Is it Sunday?"

"It's Wednesday," I said. "We're going outside."

"I don't want to go outside."

"I know. Nobody does."

I got her sitting. I got her slippers on, because it was 19 degrees on the stoop and I had a nursing degree, and I put my arm under hers and took her weight. Donna got her other side. We came down the thirteen stairs one at a time. I counted those too, out loud, and Mrs. Drummel, who was a polite woman under everything, started counting along with me at about seven, slurring a little, trying to be helpful.

By the time we got her out onto the stoop, into the ice and the orange light, I could hear the siren coming up from the river.

The Tallow Fire Department captain, a gray, heavy man of about sixty, came through Loretta Kettleby's back door with a meter held up in front of him like a hymnal and backed out again almost at once.

"Four hundred parts per million in that kitchen," he said to nobody, and then to me, "You the coroner's?"

"I'm the investigator."

"Next door?"

"Two-ten in the upstairs hall when your guy went up," a firefighter half his age called down from Donna's stoop.

The captain blew out a breath that hung in the air in front of him and then fell, heavy, in the cold. "Your neighbor's mother sleeps in that till breakfast," he said, "and you're doing two of these tonight."

Two of his crew went up on the roof on a ladder with the ice coming down around them, sparkling in their lights, and broke the ice cap off the chimney pots with a pry bar. It came down off the roof in one piece, a little tin hat in a block of glass, and smashed on the walk. Somebody shut off the gas at both meters. Somebody opened every window on the block.

The medics put oxygen on Darlene Drummel and Donna Ruckle and, after an argument, on Officer Jenna Strell, who kept apologizing for yawning. They tried to put a mask on me and I said I was fine, and the medic, who was fifty if she was a day and had heard that before, said "Sit down, MDI," and I sat down on the ambulance bumper with the mask on my face and the plastic tasting of plastic, and watched the sky over the flood wall not get any lighter.

At ten to five a small gray car came down the block too fast and stopped crooked behind the fire engine. A young woman got out in hospital-blue scrubs with a winter coat over them, unzipped, and ran up the walk until a firefighter caught her by the arm.

Kayla Dunholt was twenty-three. Donna had called her at a quarter to two and screamed at her, she told us, and she lived across the river, and they'd closed the bridges for the ice until four. "I didn't take anything," she kept saying. "I didn't take anything. I'd never take anything from her."

"I know," I said.

I'd found the envelope by then, while the captain was having the house aired. It was in the pocket of Loretta Kettleby's good wool coat on the hook by the back door, a plain bank envelope with FURNACE written on the front in the same big round hand as the grocery list, and inside it was $400 in twenties, counted and folded once. She'd taken the money out of the can so she'd be ready when the furnace man came on Friday. She'd taken the battery out of the alarm because it chirped all Monday night and she couldn't sleep. She'd dumped out her purse on the table looking for something, aspirin or her reading glasses or the furnace man's card, at the stage of the night when she couldn't remember what she was looking for. She'd unlocked the back door, Kayla told me, every night of her life, so the aide wouldn't have to ring in the morning and make her get up.

Nobody had done anything to Loretta Kettleby. That was the whole of it. A winter had come down on a chimney, and an old house had breathed back into itself, and a woman had sat down to rest.

Officer Strell looked at the envelope a long time. Then she went and got Kayla Dunholt a cup of coffee from the engine crew's thermos and stood with her by the gray car while Kayla cried, and she didn't once take her notebook out. That spring she left the police for the fire department. I've always thought it was that night that did it.

I wrote it all down. That's what I'm for.

I typed the report at my desk in the coroner's office as the sky over the jail went from black to iron. Name, age, address. Location found. Position of body. Ambient temperature, 71 degrees. Rigor, jaw and neck. Lividity, bright pink, inconsistent with ambient temperature. Smoke and CO alarm, battery removed, battery located on the kitchen windowsill. Fire department readings attached. Chimney flue caps obstructed by ice, per fire department. Furnace burner flame yellow, soot at the draft hood. Cash located in an envelope in the decedent's coat, labeled in what appears to be the decedent's hand.

In the box at the bottom marked Investigator's impression, I wrote: Findings consistent with accidental carbon monoxide exposure. No indication of the involvement of another person.

I read it back twice and didn't change a word.

Then, because it had been on the whiteboard for a month with nobody's name beside it, I picked up the desk phone and recorded the new greeting for the night line. The old one was in the voice of an investigator who'd retired before I was hired, and people kept asking for him.

"You've reached the Tallow County Coroner's Office," I said into the receiver. "If this is an emergency, hang up and dial 911. Our investigators are out on a call. Please leave your name, your number and the name of the person you're calling about, and someone will call you back."

I played it back. I sounded like someone reading a parking ticket out loud. I sounded, I thought, like someone you could leave a message for. I left it.

At seven I walked down to the High Water Diner under the flood wall, the way I do every morning, and sat at the counter under the painted high-water marks that go back to the big flood, each one a line and a year in red, climbing the back wall higher than my head.

My grandmother, Mae Stellick, was seventy-one that winter and five feet nothing, and she had been running that grill since before my mother was born. She put a cup of coffee in front of me and then leaned across the counter and sniffed.

"You smell like somebody's basement," she said.

"Somebody's furnace."

"Anybody I know?"

"Loretta Kettleby."

Mae set the pot down. "Oh, honey," she said. "She used to make the rolls at the elementary school. Every one of you kids ate Loretta's rolls." She stood there a minute with her hand flat on the counter. Then she picked the pot up again, because people were waiting. "Was it quick?"

It's the question everybody asks. I answered it the way I always do, with the true thing. "She sat down and went to sleep."

In his cage by the pie case, my mother's old African grey, Gospel, thirty-five years old that winter, shifted on his perch and said in my mother's voice, the way he had since before I could remember, "Well, hell."

Mae threw a dish towel over the cage without looking at it.

I drank my coffee. I ate my eggs. Outside, the ice was letting go of the sycamores in long glittering ribbons, and the gulls were back on the grain elevator, and the river ran brown and fast and full of slush behind the wall, the way it does just before it decides to freeze.

My ears had stayed empty all night. They'd been empty for eighteen years. I'd almost stopped listening.

It would be nearly three years, the winter the river froze, before a room pressed on them again: a slow, deep pressure from the inside, like standing in a lock chamber as it fills. Then another room. Then a third. And the third time, I would not keep my promise. I would hold something the dead woman had held, in my bare hand, and say her whole name out loud, and the room would turn over under me.

And somewhere in the city, a man who had done a murder would go still, with his eyes open, and look up.

And see me.

Iris Stellick returns in Before Marisol Kade Died, the first Iris Stellick Thriller.

This is a work of fiction. Tallow, Tallow County and every agency, business and place in this story are invented. Names, characters, businesses, places and events are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or institutions is coincidental.