I glanced over at my assistant. “Was that you?” We were alone in the morgue, except for the dead bodies, of course, but I was certain I had heard someone cough.
“No,” he replied. “I thought it was you.”
As the coroner in a small town, I rarely have a “full house,” so to speak, but a fatal car crash on the interstate yesterday had me working overtime. “So you heard it too, then.” I looked around the room and said, “Is someone there?”
No answer. I listened intently, leaning forward over the naked body stretched out on the table between my assistant, Matt, and me. Matt whispered, “If it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t you, who in tarnation was it?”
“You think someone’s hiding in the morgue?”
We were still whispering. I motioned toward the bank of stainless steel drawers along the back wall. “Let’s open them, one at a time.”
Matt’s eyes grew as large as silver dollars. I knew he wasn’t too eager to find a live body among the corpses, but it was the only explanation I could think of.
We eased over to the wall. Matt eyed the exit and said, “What if there’s a guy in there with a gun?”
I tried to stay calm. The thought had crossed my mind, too, until I realized that all the bodies in those drawers were naked. Where would he hide a gun?
“Don’t be ridiculous, Matt. Let’s just do this.”
We pulled out the first drawer, exposing the body of a man who had suffered severe head trauma. “Nothing here,” I whispered as we pushed the vault shut and reached for the next.
As the drawer slid open, Matt jumped back. “What the hell?”
I looked down to see what all the excitement was about. I didn’t move back fast enough, and a hand reached up and grabbed me. I had an outrageous thought: I was going to die with five bony, dead fingers locked around my throat. The hand tightened, pulling me close as the corpse’s upper body lifted up, eyes wide, and coughed into my face before loosening his grip.
I stumbled back from the overpowering stench of alcohol. I don’t know what scared me more—the sight of a seemingly dead body rising up like Lazarus, or what to do with a naked drunk in the morgue.
Matt peeked out from behind an empty autopsy table. “He’s alive!”
“No shit!” I yelled. “But he doesn’t exactly smell as fresh as a grove of orange trees.”
The man fell back onto the table and started snoring.
“It’s time to call the cops,” I said.
Matt looked at the guy and asked, “What’s he doing here? Do you think he wanted to steal something?”
“A naked thief?” I said, dialing 9-1-1. “I don’t think so.”
“9-1-1, what’s your emergency?” the voice on the other end of the line asked.
“I need help at the city morgue,” I said. “We’ve got a guy here who broke in; I need police assistance.”
“Are you in danger? Is he still in the building?”
“No, we’re not in danger,” I said. “He’s . . . uh . . . indisposed right now, but I’m not sure how soon he’ll . . . uh . . . wake up.”
She didn’t say a word until I said, “Are you still there?”
“Oh, of course, I’m sorry, sir. I’ve got police on their way to you now. What exactly did you mean when you said your intruder was indisposed? Did you capture him? Cause him bodily harm?”
I stared at the floor, watching a beetle scuttle across the linoleum.
“No, ma’am, he grabbed me by the throat, then passed out.” I heard the police sirens outside the door. “Oh thanks, they’re here,” I said, hanging up the phone.
Two uniformed police officers strode into the room. The first one, who must have been 6’3” and 280 pounds, asked, “What’s your problem, doc?”
I craned my neck to look up into his face, then straight ahead to his embroidered badge, before pointing to the naked man snoring on the slab behind me.
Matt, regaining his courage now that the cops had arrived, stood defiantly next to the body.
“You mind explaining how he got here?” the policeman asked.
“I didn’t have time to get a confession,” I said, “but he got here in a body bag. He’s lucky I didn’t start the autopsy before he woke up.”
The cop marched over and shook the prone man. “Wake up!”
“Where am I?” The man sat up, looking around the morgue, then down at himself. Matt had covered him with a sheet, which was slowly slipping off. He grabbed it, saying “What’s going on? Where’s my horse?”
“Your . . . what?”
“My horse. My clothes. My pumpkin.”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning,” the cop first cop said.
The other officer had pulled out a notebook and pen but he and Matt were rolling eyes at each other and Matt had to turn away to stop from laughing out loud.
“Last thing I remember,” the man said, “I was at the Halloween party by Lake Walleye. My costume was really cool and grisly—the Headless Horseman. I held the pumpkin for my head, and rode onto the beach at full speed. Everyone cheered. Next thing I know, I’m here. How’d this happen?”
“That’s what we’d like to know,” Cop Number One said.
He turned to me. “Have you got something for this guy to wear? I need to take him down to the station and sort this out.”
“I have a pair of sweat pants and an extra lab coat in my locker,” I said.
Once the police had escorted the drunk out, Matt and I sat down. I said, “In all my years as a coroner, I never…”
Matt interrupted with a guffaw. “Do you think they’ll come back and tell us the whole story?” he asked.
“I doubt it,” I said. “We’ll probably never know how that guy ended up in the morgue.”
“All this excitement made me hungry,” Matt said. “Do you want to share this turkey sandwich that’s in the fridge?”
“No thanks,” I said, thinking about the guy’s fingers clamped around my neck. “Now I’m the one who needs a drink. I think I’d rather have a shot of Wild Turkey.”
Book eight in my Belinda Lawrence Classic Mysteries. Mysteries confront amateur sleuths, Belinda Lawrence and Hazel Whitby in the Somerset village of Milford.
Among the eccentrics is the shadowy Madam Malefic.
