"As I'd imagined might happen, at the funeral there was a great emotional outpouring. The mother was beside herself. The father had become almost violently inconsolable. One of the brothers threw himself against the casket weeping, and one of the sisters became hysterical, insisting it was impossible-insisting that her brother wasn't in the casket, that this was a terrible dream or a mistake, and this got the whole family and even some of the young man's motorcycle gang friends making similar outcries. A fight nearly broke out before the father pushed his other son away and flung open the coffin.

"Perry, Professor, let me tell you that if I'd had that coffin locked or sealed-or, if I hadn't and that young man had been in there in the condition the county morgue had delivered him to me-well, this is the reason I always insist on reconstruction if I am going to have a body in a casket at Dientz Funeral Parlor.

"Because of the reconstruction, the family and the young man's friends were able to gather around his casket and grieve properly. He was the young man they remembered. He was dressed in a decent suit. His hair was combed, and I'd remodeled what I could of his face based on the photograph they'd run in the newspaper.

"Nothing, nothing, makes a death as believable as being able to see, to touch, the loved one's body. We are physical creatures, Perry, Professor." He nodded at Professor Polson. "And although much has been done to ridicule and malign the 'death industry' in America, I can tell you from experience that there is tremendous comfort taken in being able to view a body, in repose, nicely dressed, tastefully remodeled, eyes closed, clearly at peace. And I make it my job to be able to offer that comfort to those who may not know, until the very last moments, that they will need it."

"But Nicole's family?" Professor Polson asked.

Mr. Dientz shook his head. "No," he said. "Nicole's family couldn't bear it." He shrugged, as if to say, you win some, you lose some. "Now," he said. "The photos!"

Mr. Dientz whirled around in his chair with a flourish fit for the unveiling of the Mona Lisa. He waved his hand over his keyboard, took up his mouse, and then clicked a file in the center that read, NWERNER, and then JPEG10, and in less than half a second an image opened and filled the screen, and before Perry even realized that he had seen it, he was scrambling out of his velvet chair and across the room with a hand over his mouth, and then out of the office and into the men's room near the entrance of the funeral home.

86.

"Craig," Perry had said when he left for Bad Axe with Professor Polson. "Just stay here, okay? We'll be back late. Don't do anything stupid."

"Like what?" Craig had asked, forcing Perry to say it: "Like going out looking for Nicole."

Craig had tried not to. He'd paced around the apartment. Turned the TV on and off. He'd eaten a salami sandwich. Taken his second shower of the day. Gotten in bed. Gotten out of bed, combed his hair and gone next door to knock on Deb's door, but there'd been no answer. Finally, he'd sat down next to the phone and willed it to ring, and, incredibly, it had: "h.e.l.lo?"

On the other end of the line, there was no sound.

Craig held the receiver closer to his ear, and said h.e.l.lo again.

Now he could hear something. It was very distant, maybe the sound of a car on a freeway. Maybe, very faintly, there was music playing on the car radio. Or maybe he was just hearing his own heartbeat.

"h.e.l.lo?" he asked again. And then: "Nicole?"

Then the line went dead, and Craig stood up, grabbed his coat, and headed out to do the stupid thing Perry had told him not to do.

It was colder out than Craig had expected it to be. The snow fell in fat flakes that stuck to the sidewalks and to the roofs and windshields of the cars parked beside the curbs, although the traffic was churning it into a slick, wet shadow in the road.

It seemed to Craig that the streets and sidewalks were oddly thronged with students. Had he simply not been outside enough this fall to notice them, or were they out, for some reason, en ma.s.se?

As they pa.s.sed him-walking two or three abreast on the sidewalk and in the streets and at the corners, it felt to Craig as if he knew all of these kids, or had at least seen them all before. They were whooping, slapping each other's backs, pretending to be arguing, telling jokes. Couples were holding hands. Girls had their arms slung around each other's shoulders. Everyone seemed happy. No one was dressed for the cold or even seemed to be noticing it, and Craig was painfully, completely, aware of how separated he was from the lives of his peers. He was like a ghost come back to haunt the scene of his last days. No one seemed to notice him at all.

He remembered that life, and what it had been like to be a part of it. He remembered Lucas with a flask in his back pocket, stumbling off to the fourth bar of the night, and Perry, disapproving, walking a few steps ahead of them. He remembered how they'd stopped to shout something stupid up to the Omega Theta Tau house. Something about f.u.c.king virgins.

He remembered loving it.

How dumb and wonderful he had felt.

He remembered that a girl had come out on the porch, and that she was all lit up from behind. Even from that distance he could see how beautiful she was.

He had loved being a stupid, drunk college kid. An a.s.shole shouting up at a sorority house. He loved the girl standing there, looking down at them, and the house, and the sense that, inside the house and behind that girl, some solemn ceremony was taking place in candlelight. Chanting. Holding hands. He'd loved that there would be such a house, such a secret society of beautiful girls, and that he was outside of it, shouting obscenities at it, being a real jerk-an oaf-while a big equally stupid moon was hung over it all, and he was fumbling for the flask in Lucas's back pocket as Perry walked off without them.

But this was all before Nicole. Before she joined this sorority. Before all of it.

Now he was pa.s.sing the first of the terrible landmarks. The stone bench beneath the weeping willow where he'd slipped the amber ring on her finger, and where she'd given him the poem he still kept in his wallet: Time may take us far apart, But you will always be the lover of my heart.

I have not given you my body yet.

But I have given you, forever, What I Am He stopped, looked at the bench, at the layer of snow acc.u.mulating on it, and he was so cold, shaking so hard, that if he hadn't had his jacket zipped, it would have rattled off of him, he thought. He blew a long scarf of frosted breath into the air above the bench before he continued to walk, and he didn't look up again until he'd gotten to the spot where, on Greek Row, you could see the hill from which the brooding Omega Theta Tau house looked down.

How had it gotten so dark so fast?

How long had he been walking?

Craig looked from the house to the sky, where a big blank moon was hanging, and then he looked toward the house again, where, in the light of that moon he saw two dark-haired girls walking down the front steps in puffy winter coats but very short skirts, knee-high boots.

They were still far away, but he could see that they were laughing, tossing s.h.a.ggy wool scarves over their shoulders as they emerged through a scrim of snow.

He took a few steps toward them. They hadn't noticed him, but they were heading in his direction. When they were less than a block away, Craig rubbed his eyes to be sure, but now he had no doubt: One of them was Josie.

Craig would have recognized that black silk hair, that pointed chin, anywhere. He could even hear her familiar laughter as she got closer. That high, sharp cackle. "Oh, my G.o.d!" she was saying. "You are totally kidding me. Tell me you're kidding."

Craig continued to stand in the center of the sidewalk, watching. They were directly ahead of him, and so close now that their shadows, stretched ahead of them on the snowy sidewalk, nearly touched him, would soon envelope him.

Yes.

He knew without a doubt that the one on the left was Josie, but he had to rub his eyes and blink the snowflakes out of them several times, shake his head, before he could be sure of what he was sure of: That the second girl, the dark-haired one walking with Josie, was Nicole.

Nicole.

"Nicole," he said.

She didn't hear him, and she hadn't seen him.

He stood where he was and watched her, taking all of her in. The way she walked and the corners of her mouth. The little folds at the edges of her eyes. The perfect little b.u.mp on the bridge of her nose.

The silky straight hair was dark now, like Josie's.

But the tilt of her head.

The delicate ear behind which her hair was tucked.

Those were the same.

He'd have recognized them anywhere.

She was wearing a leather skirt. And tights with a silver sheen, and high-heeled boots. More eye makeup than she'd ever worn in-in what? In life?-and dark red lipstick. Her skin was pale in the moonlight, but her cheeks were bright, either with cosmetics or the cold, or maybe she'd been drinking. She seemed to stagger a little. She held a hand to her mouth to laugh at something else Josie had said, but Josie's voice shouted over the sound of Nicole's laughter, and Craig was grateful for that, because if he'd heard her voice, her actual voice, he might not have been able to stand it.

"Nicole," he said again, and then he was walking straight toward her, saying her name over and over, shouting it, and he was sliding on the slick cement toward them, and then they saw him, and there was no denying it: Nicole.

She saw him, too. Her eyes filled with alarm. She turned and ran with what seemed like incredible speed back from where she'd come, back up the hill to the OTT house. Craig ran after her, slipping on the sidewalk, stumbling like a drunken man but managing somehow to stay upright, to continue the chase.

But she was so much faster than he was. She did not slip at all. How was that possible? In those high-heeled boots? In his life, Craig had only ever seen a deer run that gracefully, that quickly, that wildly and swiftly and without a backward glance, across the freeway, into the woods, without a sound. He was, himself, a much clumsier, heavier animal, slipping after her, panting, not with exertion but with panic, excitement, ecstasy.

She was ahead of him, but he was closer to her than he'd ever really believed he'd be again. She wasn't within reach, but she might have been. She might be, eventually. If he could only- But then Josie Reilly had slammed her body fearlessly into his, knocked him to the ground, and then she was on top of him, pummeling him with her fists, straddling his hips with her legs spread, slamming her small, white, balled-up hands against his face, his head, his eyes. She tore off her soft gloves so she could claw at him. "You motherf.u.c.ker. You a.s.shole. You murderer. Get out of here. Get out of our lives. Get off this campus you f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d." He tasted blood, and though he heard the sound of a bone snap somewhere in his face, and although it seemed to Craig that the whole thing lasted for decades, he felt no pain-and suddenly, just as he was getting used to it, he opened his eyes, and she was gone, and he was alone on the sidewalk, staring up at the moon as it seemed to toss cold white flakes down on his throbbing face.

"Holy s.h.i.t," a guy in a Red Sox cap said, looking down at him. "You okay, dude? I hope whatever you did to p.i.s.s her off was worth it."

87.

"Oh, goodness. That certainly wasn't the image I intended to show you," Mr. Dientz said. "I'm sorry." He sounded as if he were apologizing, belatedly, for having absentmindedly forgotten to offer someone sugar for his tea.

Perry had come back from the men's room and was standing with his head against the window, looking out onto the Dientz Funeral Parlor parking lot, which was shadowed by the casket-shaped rectangle of the Dientz Funeral Parlor sign.

Both of these things-the parking lot and the sign-he'd pa.s.sed in cars and on his bike maybe ten thousand times in his life, and yet there was something so unfamiliar, so unreal, about them in that moment that he knew that, if he were asked to, he'd be utterly unable to read the sign, to name the function of a parking lot, to place these things or himself on the surface of the earth. Back in the men's room, he'd rinsed his mouth out, but he could still taste the bile. Professor Polson came up behind him and touched his arm. "Perry." She said it firmly, pulling him back from the window.

"Well, that must have been a shocker for you!"

There was no escaping the amus.e.m.e.nt in Mr. Dientz's voice, and Perry remembered now Mr. Dientz standing over a table of Cub Scouts in the Bad Axe Elementary School cafeteria chuckling as the Scouts tried to pound nails into boards. What had they been building? Birdhouses? Toolboxes? The pine boards had been thick and incredibly hard, and the Scouts were all under the age of ten, and with every smack of the hammer, a nail would bend over dramatically instead of being driven into the wood. "Hah, hah. We aren't too good at boys' work, are we, girls?" Mr. Dientz had teased, and Perry remembered the screwed-up expression on his son Paul's face, the watery glare he kept trained on the nail as he prepared to smack it again with a hammer, and the way, when the nail bent over a fourth or fifth time and his father began to laugh, he didn't throw the hammer down or even drop it, but very carefully placed it next to the boards and walked away as his father watched and continued to laugh.

"This," Mr. Dientz said, "is the image I meant to show you, the post-reconstruction photo. Very good photo, and nice work, if I do say so myself."

"First, let me see," Professor Polson said, letting go of Perry's arm, and leaving him in the corner of the office.

"You can see, Professor," Mr. Dientz said, "how much work went into this, I hope. There's really no resemblance between the first face and this one, is there?"

Professor Polson said nothing. She was looking intently into Mr. Dientz's computer screen. Perry could see that there was a small line of sweat at her spine, gently soaked through the red silk of her shirt. The blouse wasn't tight, but the material clung to her back, and Perry could have counted the vertebrae from where he stood. The electric glow from the computer illuminated the hair around her face, causing it to look both black and blindingly bright. "Perry?" she said gently, turning toward him. "Do you think you can you look?"

Perry swallowed. He crossed the mauve carpeting again, took the seat beside her, rubbed his eyes, which were watery and blurred from vomiting, and then he leaned toward the computer screen.

"You can see," Mr. Dientz said, "that it's truly like sculpting, the kind of work that has to be done on a face in the kind of condition in which this particular decedent was delivered to me. Luckily, the skull was mostly intact, and provided in its entirety, so that the fragmented sections could be glued back to their original places." Mr. Dientz inhaled, as if reexperiencing the exhausting task in his memory. "I was then able to use something we call mortician's putty to cover the bone, and then of course, because of the burning and discoloration, I needed to use mortuary wax as a kind of masking. But after that, with some cosmetic work, she was really almost finished. The hair needed only some styling and a synthetic addition or two. That was lucky, considering the damage from the fire to her skin. In total, maybe five hours work? Sadly, until the two of you, no one except me has ever seen her."

Perry leaned in closer.

The face of the girl in the digital photograph was like no human face he had ever seen.

She radiated something so purely radiant that he wanted to close his eyes and lean forward at the same time, to disappear inside it. He had the feeling that, if he put his hand to the computer screen and touched her, she might wake up. She would be startled, confused, perhaps, but she would be more alive than anyone else in this room.

She had her eyes closed, this dead girl in the photo, but Perry didn't have the sense that she couldn't see. He had the sense that she no longer needed to have her eyes open to be able to see. She was seeing everything. She was everything. He had to lean back in the plush velvet chair and close his own eyes, and then open them again, and then he looked from Professor Polson to Mr. Dientz, and back to the girl.

"Perry?" Professor Polson asked.

"It isn't her," he said, shaking his head. "That's not Nicole."

88.

She took only the things she'd need for a night in a motel-she couldn't stay at Rosemary's, not with her children there, not in the state she was in-but when Sh.e.l.ly closed the door behind her, she felt an intense moment of grief for the things inside the house: the teacups and the comforter and the prints on the walls and her shelf of CDs, things she felt she might possibly never see again. No one ever knew, did they?

She didn't bother to lock the front door. It was such a safe neighborhood, she'd never bothered-a fact she'd shared with Josie.

Her hands were still cramped and shaking from the shovel, the hard early winter ground. As she buried Jeremy (with a blanket, because it was unbearable to think of him in the cold, in the dirt) and wept, she thought about whether she should call the police, and decided that, if she ever did, it could not be now.

The darkness was pale on the lawn.

The moon was full.

The snow was falling fast, and it made a webby froth on the gra.s.s.

There was what seemed to be an unusually large number of students out, walking in small groups or in pairs, girls in ridiculously high heels leaning against one another, slipping around, making their way to bars, she supposed, and parties, where exciting and terrible things would happen to them. There would be kisses, and accidents, and endearments, and bitter words exchanged. Someone would fall in love. Someone would dance all night. Someone would get drunk, get raped, get hurt.

Sh.e.l.ly had to wait for a couple kissing in the middle of her street to break apart (two beautiful blondes, the girl on tiptoes to reach the mouth of the boy) before she could pull out of her driveway. They noticed her taillights eventually, and laughed, and moved with their arms still around each other, to the sidewalk. When Sh.e.l.ly backed up and pa.s.sed a few feet from them, separated by the rivulets of melting snow on the gla.s.s of her pa.s.senger window, the girl (whose scarlet lips were parted over her white teeth) gave Sh.e.l.ly the finger, and then the couple let go of each other, doubling over with laughter, slipping around on the sidewalk, headed away, lit up in the moonlight-two incredibly beautiful, pointless human beings with no idea what awaited them-and Sh.e.l.ly had no choice but to drive past them again, trying not to stare, willing herself not even to glance at them in her rearview mirror, but watching them anyway.

They had nothing to do with her.

She knew that.

She could stand out in the snow all night and lecture those two about the fleetingness of youth, the dangers of this world, the acc.u.mulating importance of every act in this life, the thin thread, so easily snapped, between death and life, or simply the importance of being respectful of one's elders, and they would never hear a word.

89.

"Go," Professor Polson said, and handed Perry the keys to Professor Blackhawk's car. "I'm going to stay and talk to Ted Dientz here about possibilities. Identification. That sort of thing. He seems willing to work with us. He seems intrigued."