Page 34 of The Dead Come to Stay

When the knock came, it startled Jo out of heavy slumber. She fumbled about, forgetting she was on the sofa, and craned her

neck to catch a glimpse of the clock. Was it Gwilym already, picking her up for dinner? The knock repeated. She should jump

up and answer it, but the particular couch crevice in which she found herself seemed too good to endanger.

“It’s open,” she said.

“ Why is it open, Jo?” asked... James MacAdams.

Jo rolled herself to sitting and blinked sleep out of her eyes. He was standing in her doorway in short sleeves. She’d never

seen him in short sleeves and stared like he’d walked in naked.

“Well, I’m home and it’s daytime,” she started.

“And asleep. With the door unlocked.” He crossed the room and crouched to be at eye level. “You said you’d quit that.”

Jo wasn’t sure she’d promised, in fact. She got to her feet instead of answering and pointed to the kitchen. “Tea?”

“Yes. No—actually. I brought you something.” He held up a paper bag. “In thanks. For yesterday.”

Jo peered inside. A whiskey bottle. Caol Ila, it said. She wanted to say thank you. Did you thank you for a thank you? She blinked her eyes a few more times and decided she, at least, needed caffeine.

“How about coffee?” she asked, putting the whiskey on the kitchen counter. “How’s your head?”

“Fuzzy and tired,” he admitted, taking his usual seat in the wicker rocking chair.

“Mine, too.”

“Adrenaline leaving the system,” he suggested.

Jo ground beans and put the kettle on before trying to talk again. For some reason she was struggling with her mouth-words—so

much so that MacAdams, of all people, took the lead.

“We are still looking for the Geordie van driver and his associates,” he said over the gentle creak of the rocker. “But I

think we’ve sorted the vanishing hiker for you.”

“Really?” Jo wondered if she should tell him about the semihallucinated version, but decided to keep mum for the minute.

“Not hill-walkers at all,” he said. “Foley seems to have been selling stolen artifacts out of the vans. Using kids as couriers.”

Jo absorbed this while watching the French press timer, a minihourglass she’d bought at a curio shop. “If he had a van, why

did he need couriers?”

“Small, local deliveries, we think,” MacAdams went on. “We picked up a youth, about sixteen. Blond, around your height.”

“That one’s not my hiker. Mine had dark hair. And a yellow raincoat. And she wasn’t carrying a pack or anything.”

“Well, we gather they used quite a lot of different people,” MacAdams assured her. She brought him a mug. No biscuits. After

Foley, those felt like bad luck.

“So what’s next?” she asked, settling into the peacock-blue chaise.

“For the investigation? Going back to Newcastle tomorrow to follow some leads.” MacAdams tilted his head as though looking at her stairs. “Back to Hammersmith—see if the CEO rec ognizes a drawing of... Jo? Did you tell me that Foley took towels and soap?”

“Hand towels, a bath towel and all the soap. Why?”

MacAdams hovered the coffee halfway to his lips but was still looking up at the ceiling. Thinking of her “murder room,” she

guessed.

“Have you used the sink up there since all this started?” he asked.

“No.” Jo already put her cup down, because she could see where this was going. “You want to check something?”

MacAdams was on his feet already. Jo led the way into the vaulted attic with its lovely afternoon light (watery light, given

the weather). First, he investigated the little WC sink, then hovered over the roll-top bath, sliding a finger along the porcelain.

Jo was suddenly grateful that her method of dealing with stress involved serious housekeeping.

“What are you looking for, exactly?” she asked. MacAdams sat down on the tub edge and leaned his arms upon his knees. After

a moment, he gave an inward sort of chuckle.

“Ignore me. I just can’t turn it off, sometimes.”

“Oh God, I get it.”

“I came here to thank you, not chase up loose ends.” He ran a hand through his hair. “This case is a million tiny details

that don’t add up, and I can’t tell which are important.”

“Such as?” Jo asked, pulling up the nearby chair.

“Soap residue. There isn’t any. Foley took soap and towels, but he didn’t wash up. What did he want them for? Where did they

go?”

“Like the missing raincoat and towels and the question of the car,” Jo added. MacAdams gave her a weary smile.

“Exactly. Could add you to the CID. This case is all shoes and ice burn.” He’d started to get up, but Jo waved her hands at

him.

“Whoa, whoa! You don’t just drop in things like that without an explanation. Shoes. And ice?”

“I shouldn’t have said.”

“You did, though.”

“Fair,” he sighed. First he explained the expensive shoes they found at Foley’s flat. The second bit was definitely stranger.

“The body was packed in ice. We don’t know why.”

Why did you pack anything in ice? Jo thought, her brain doing a quick run through of freezer pops, ice cubes for watering orchids, ice baths for tightening

skin, refrigeration against spoilage. The freezer had failed in their New York apartment while they were on holiday once.

They didn’t need a fumigator; they’d needed an exorcist. Plus bodies—even freshly dead ones—had a funk all their own.

“Maybe to stop it smelling?” Jo offered. MacAdams had got halfway to his feet again, but again returned to sitting. He might

never leave the tub at this point.

“That’s—Why would you say that?”

“Well, if I had a dead person in my trunk on a muggy, rainy night, I might consider some ice.” Jo twitched her nose. Did that

sound callous? “Dead people don’t immediately decay or anything. But stuff happens when you die. Body fluids—let go. It’s

not especially pleasant.”

“You edited a book on anatomy.”

“No, on body farms,” Jo corrected.

MacAdams made it to standing this time. And pacing. Walking his brain, as it was.

“All right; it’s warm and wet, and the victim has a considerable and bloody wound,” he said. “In a trunk, you said.”

“It’s a guess,” Jo admitted. “In a trunk, you could get away with just four or five bags of ice. You can’t pack ice in an

open van or SUV. Or not as well. Also the body might flop around.”

“You’ve a way of putting things.” He said. “Okay, in a trunk. It’s messy. And there’s melting ice. And he still has to be dragged out again.”

Jo had been following the dance of wallpaper flowers as he spoke, but in her mind’s eye she was considering the problems of vehicular upholstery.

“I know it sounds extra complicated, but what if the murderer was fastidious? Someone that worried about the smell isn’t going to just put the body on the mats. If they use a tarpaulin, they could drag him out easier, too. Especially with

a bit of rigor mortis,” she said. MacAdams was following, but waved the last bit away.

“Doubtful he’d been dead that long, as you saw him around eleven thirty, but all fair points. The murderer doesn’t want to

spoil his car.”

“If it is his car,” Jo added.

“Why would you say that?” MacAdams asked. He’d stopped his circuit just in front of her. She instinctively put her hands on

a pretend steering wheel, thinking of their drive back from Newcastle.

“Because you’d be a lot more careful if it was someone else’s. I was in yours .”

“Makes sense.” MacAdams extended her a hand and pulled her to standing. “At least, if it was someone you cared about.” He

blushed and quickly added, “A boss, for example. There would be other eyes looking at it, someone else who would recognize

a smell or a stain.” He backed away to let her out of the room and she returned to her coffee.

“Still doesn’t explain the raincoat, shoes or soap and towel thievery, though,” she said before drinking a good half cup at

a go.

“Maybe the murderer came to the cottage for it so he could scrub down the car,” Jo added. She meant it as a joke, but MacAdams

had just blanched gray enough to make her worry about concussion again.

“I’m kidding—I’m not serious.”

“Jo.” MacAdams walked across the living room to the front door and pushed it open. “The thing is, he could have.”

***

“That’s... wow,” Gwilym said over his vindaloo. “He thinks the murderer was actually here in the cottage, now?”

“It’s a theory, although I’m not sure why they wouldn’t also take Foley’s suitcase with him. Make it look like he really just

ran off,” Jo said, pulling off a bite of naan. Gwilym had come bearing research and an invite to the India Palace. “And I

got a lecture about locking up.”

“You really should do.”

“I know.” Jo winced. How had she gone from New York with ten dead bolts to North Yorkshire and an unlocked door? “I’ve just

got used to leaving it unlocked during the day.”

“No offense, but you are supposed to have a photographic memory,” Gwilym reminded her.

Jo rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t work like that,” she protested (again). “You have the hippocampus, right? And you also have

the frontal cortex. That’s your executive command center—”

“For people who have those,” Gwilym added.

“—and it’s how you sort the important memories from the not-important ones. And you have a neural matrix map for retrieving and rebuilding them, but not everything is episodic.”

“You’ve lost me.”

Jo waggled her fingers, then stuck another piece of bread in her mouth before answering. More slowly.

“You take a prescription, right?”

“Adderall.”

“You take it every day, in the same spot, at the same time. Your brain will compress all those memories of taking it into

a single, long-running episode. Which is why it’s easy to forget whether you did it or not.”

“Which is why I have a Monday-through-Friday pillbox,” Gwilym said, nodding. “What does that have to do with your front door?”

“Memory isn’t stored; it’s re-created,” Jo said. That was partly what made it a fascinating study (and a very well received

book in her once-upon-a-time back catalog). “You have bits and pieces, and you have to pull them together again to make a

coherent picture. Usually with some embellishment from context.”