Mrs. Schriever needed to be bathed and made as presentable as a ninety-year-old woman could be made before Theodora showed up to do her hair. That's if she remembered to show up. Theodora played bingo on Wednesday nights, so she wasn't always in top form on Thursday mornings.
"Don't worry about things you can't control," she whispered, feeling the familiar knot form in her stomach like it did whenever she thought of her mother and responsibilities in the same sentence.
A cold blast of air hit her as she opened the embalming room door. It was temperature-controlled to make working with the bodies easier when they were pulled from the refrigeration unit. The pungent smell of chemicals greeted her, and she knew the smell would permeate her clothes in the next couple of hours. In all honesty, she wondered if she ever really got rid of the smell or if she was just so used to it she no longer noticed.
Her hand fumbled for the light switch, and then she stood blinking as the fluorescent lights came on one by one. There was nothing old or antique about this room. It was white and sterile, and the light was painfully bright. It helped when mixing the embalming chemicals and getting just the right amount of color under the skin to make the person look alive. The fluorescent light was unforgiving, so it helped when reconstructive work needed to be done-from skin problems to autopsy sutures-a lot could be done with makeup and putty.
People wanted to remember their loved ones as they were when they were living, so she worked from photographs and anything else she could find to help make it easier on the families. It was easy enough to add the dye to the embalming solution so the skin took on a lifelike glow instead of the gray pallor of death.
The room was a large rectangle. The wall closest to the door on the right had cabinets and a granite countertop with a large farmhouse sink in the center. The wall directly across from the door was floor-to-ceiling sturdy metal shelves that held every piece of equipment imaginable. Sometimes mortuary work required being creative, depending on how a person had died.
The far wall was where the walk-in refrigeration unit was. The industrial door was large and stainless steel, and it locked from the outside with a lever. It could hold several bodies comfortably, though she'd never had occasion to use it that way. The wall to her left had more shelves and hanging racks, for the deceased's personal belongings. But it was the center of the room that held her attention.
There were moments in time when what the eye saw didn't necessarily compute with the brain. She'd taken three steps into the room before she really grasped what the body on the embalming table meant. Especially since it wasn't Delores Schriever, who was supposed to be the only body in the room.
It looked like she'd solved the mystery of why they'd taken her transport van.
But who was the man laying on her table?
CHAPTER THREE
Tess had worked with the dead for a lot of years, so nothing much surprised her. She'd once had a man's hand jerk up and hit her in the side of the face just as she was about to embalm him. It had certainly gotten her blood pumping a little faster, but dead bodies did weird things sometimes.
What they didn't do was appear out of nowhere and end up on her embalming table.
"Think this through, Tess," she said out loud, creeping closer to the body.
Her grandmother had always told her she needed to be more Russian. Logic always trumped emotion.
"Obviously they took the van to make a pickup. The question is, why didn't they tell me? And where did the body come from?"
There was no paperwork that she could see. And paperwork was absolutely a necessity. There had been more than one occasion when the hospital had tried to give her the wrong body. And without paperwork, she couldn't legally take the body into possession.
"Idiots," she muttered.
There was still no sign of anyone else-at least anyone living-in the house. Maybe they'd just crossed paths while she was looking through the house. It was a big house. Maybe right at this very moment one of them was knocking on her bedroom door-preferably Deacon, because good God those shoulders-letting her know they'd picked up a dead body and he had all the correctly signed paperwork right in his hand.
"Because they're super-thoughtful like that," she said, blowing out a breath.
And now she was thinking of Deacon's shoulders. And the rest of him. Which was about the most horrible thing she could do because on a scale of one to ten, he was a twenty-two, and she had the feeling he had the ability to make all her Russian logic fly right out the window.