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He takes two more steps. “You! In the red jacket. I need Yolanda.”
It takes another moment, but then a guy in his forties tentatively steps in our direction. I raise a hand in greeting, and as his gaze goes from me to Storm, he relaxes. The scary guy barking at him from the forest is with a woman and a dog. That’s okay then.
I jog toward him. “Bring Yolanda, please. Tell her Casey and Eric need to speak to her in private.”
“Oh, you’re the folks who came in on the plane. Sure, let me grab her.”
We wait no more than a few minutes before Yolanda comes, alone, at a run.
“You found them?” she says. Before we can answer, she sees the body wrapped on the stretcher, and she falters. “Oh.” A sharp intake of breath, and then another “Oh.”
“It’s Penny,” I say, lowering my voice. “We didn’t find Bruno. We spotted someone vaguely matching his description and gave chase, but then we found Penny.”
“Oh.” She blinks and gives a sharp shake of her head. “I keep saying that, don’t I? This is… It’s not… I didn’t…”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Hopefully, Bruno is still out there and fine, but for now, we really need to quietly get Penny’s body someplace. I was thinking we could put her in our house until we can inform people that there was an accident, and then we’ll transport her to the medical clinic for examination.”
“Yes, that’s…” She trails off, as if losing her train of thought. Then she snaps back to herself. “We can take her directly to the medical clinic. There’s no one working in that quadrant, and there is a rear door, with access to the forest. I’ll go ahead to clear the way. The door should be unlocked.”
“Great. Can you bring the medic? I’m going to need a postmortem examination.”
Her brows knit at that. Penny just suffered an accident, didn’t she? I don’t clarify. Not yet.
After a moment, Yolanda nods and says, “I’ll bring him along.”
We’re in the medical clinic, which will also double as April’s new house. I’d made the mistake of questioning whether my sister actually wanted to live where residents can come banging onher door at 2A.M.for headache meds. That earned me a spreadsheet, where she had calculated projected personal time lost by living above the clinic versus projected personal time gained by not needing to travel back and forth—including weather-related clothing changes—particularly when she has a patient requiring regular check-ins. So April will be living above the clinic and honestly, knowing my sister, I feel kind of sorry for the first person who decides their headache is worth waking her.
We get Penny’s wrapped body onto the table. Then Dalton hands me his phone.
“Take pictures for April.”
“We can’t transmit them to her.”
“I mean pictures of her new clinic.”
“So she can stop asking whether we are absolutely certain we communicated her full list of requirements?”
“Yep. Also to make her happy, which means taking lots and lots of pictures of all the perfectly organized storage areas.”
I laugh under my breath. “Thatwillmake her happy. But I’ll do that later. I don’t want Yolanda and the medic walking in to find me snapping new-homeowner pictures while their architect’s body is on the exam table.”
Yolanda and the medic haven’t arrived, so I undress Penny and place each piece of clothing on a shelf, awaiting proper bags. I’m setting aside her boots—after photographing them being on the wrong feet—when footsteps sound on the front porch.
Hearing the others approach, Dalton shakes out a bedsheet. I take the other end and help him lay it over the corpse. I don’t know how close either Yolanda or the medic was to Penny, but they shouldn’t walk in to see her naked body on an exam table.
Yolanda enters, followed by a burly guy in his late thirties. He’s white, with balding brown hair and a beard, and he’s dressed in short sleeves and wearing a tool belt.
“This is Pierre,” Yolanda says. “He’s a carpenter, but also our medic. He served as an EMT before switching careers.”
I hesitate. Yes, we couldn’t afford a full-time doctor for the crew, but we’d been clear that we wanted someone with as much medical training as possible, even if that meant they’d spend most of their time doing nonskilled labor for physician wages.
“How long were you an EMT?” I ask, as casually as I can.
“About a year,” he says with a light Quebecois accent.
I glance at Yolanda, whose lips tighten. She knows this isn’t what we agreed to, and I don’t think she was cheating us—she just wasn’t about to give up a precious crew spot to a doctor who couldn’t do more than hold boards while someone hammered them in.
“Okay,” I say. “I don’t suppose you have any experience working with medical examiners?”
