Elijah Gleason said, “You’d be surprised. We get at least two deaths a summer from the tourists. Of course, those are usually just getting the remains ready to send to their home mortuary, but it all adds up.”

I could think of nothing to say to that, so I just nodded. I reminded myself to stay away from Sarne in the summer. It was somehow embarrassing to think of these people dressing up to imitate a past that was hotter, smellier, more ignorant, and chock-full of deaths that nowadays could be easily prevented. Women in childbirth, kids with polio, babies with conflicting Rh factors, men whose fingers turned septic after little accidents with a saw . . . I’d seen all these during my little outing at the cemetery. Most people didn’t think about this aspect of living in the past when they tried to imagine how it must have been. They saw the absence of what they perceived as modern ills: abortion, homosexuality, television, divorce. They saw the past in terms of Friday evening fiddling with the neighbors on the front porch, shoofly pie, gospel singing, long happy marriages.

I saw sudden, needless death.

Soon enough we were in the new part of the funeral home, and the director was showing us Helen. Hollis had asked him to do it, after assuring Gleason I wouldn’t faint or throw up at the sight of the body. I like funeral homes. I like the attempt to make death presentable and palatable. It’s a cushion to life. It’s like the pretty padded lining to the coffin. The dead sure don’t care, but makes the living feel better.

The buzzing in my head steadily increased as we grew closer to the room with the closed door. It reached a high drone when I stepped into the bright white sterility of the modern embalming room.

“I haven’t started on her yet,” Elijah Gleason said. “I just got her back from the state crime lab. It’ll take them months to finish the toxicology, they told me, they’re hundreds of cases behind.”

“Would you stay outside?” Tolliver asked. “It’s just that my sister has a pretty startling reaction sometimes, and it might alarm you.”

“Sorry,” Gleason said firmly. “Helen’s body’s under my care, and I’m staying with her.”

Well, I hadn’t expected much different. I nodded, all my attention focused on the form on the tilted table. I held up a hand to ask the two men not to speak.