The Dying Breath: A Forensic Mystery

she admitted.
    “I’ve been lying in this bed, thinking. I’m a patient who just dodged a cancer bullet, who will live to work and teach another day.”
    “Which is so great—”
    “And this amazing young woman is the one I want to pour my knowledge into, teaching her every trick I know.” He fingered a plastic tube that had been taped to the back of his hand. Sounding wistful, he said, “I have tricks . . . well, techniques might be a better word. But what you have is brilliance.” He tapped the side of his head, causing the tubing to dance across the sheets. “You got yourself out of a jam with that Kyle O’Neil by thinking. That kind of intelligent tenacity is hard to come by.”
    “My mammaw calls it stubbornness,” Cameryn replied as she raised an eyebrow.
    He chuckled, pressing the button again to raise himself even farther; the machinery hummed until he stopped at a forty-five-degree angle. “Stubbornness is one facet of your personality, certainly. I like it, if you want to know the truth. But you’re so young. Life comes at you hard when you’re seventeen.”
    “Eighteen. I’m eighteen today.”
    “Congratulations and happy birthday. Life comes at you even harder when you’re eighteen.” He winked, then hesitated, and Cameryn began to wonder if that was all he was going to say, but he trained his blue eyes on hers. “Do you remember what the word autopsy means?”
    Cameryn nodded. “It means ‘to see with one’s own eyes.’”
    “Precisely.” He dropped his chin into his bullfrog neck and peered at her over the rims of his glasses. “With my eyes I’m seeing what you will be if you keep your hand on the rudder. Don’t turn away from your future. An artist isn’t an artist if she doesn’t paint.”
    She thought about this. Today, on her birthday, she had chosen to wear her Mahoney sweater again, even though it was the clothing she’d almost died in. But as she’d reached into her closet in the morning she’d decided it was more than that. It had been knitted with the luck of the Irish, her perfect birthday cloth—the sweater she’d stayed alive in. Kyle O’Neil’s crumpled body lay in the Montrose morgue, while Cameryn was in a hospital with those she cared for, truly ready for the first time in her life for whatever would come. Her future lay wide open, vast with promise, but the new became possible only because of what had taken place before. Facing her own death had made her see that life was a series of threads as intertwined as the Aran yarn. Yet it seemed impossible to express what she’d learned. She sat quiet, thinking there was no way to wrap this knowledge into words.
    “Are you going to tell me that I’m an old geezer who needs to butt out?”
    “No.” Leaning forward so that her elbows drilled her knees, she said, “Do you remember the fortune cookie that predicted your future?”
    He looked at her quizzically. “Yes, I remember sharing that story with you. About the whimsical fortune cookie that pointed me to my life with the dead—the one that showed me which medical path to pursue. It led me to the dark art of forensics.”
    “Yeah, that’s the one. The fortune said You will touch the hearts of many. Remember? And you figured it meant you would go into forensic pathology so you could touch a lot of hearts of decedents when you preformed autopsies.”
    “I’m pleased you were listening.”
    Equally intense, Cameryn told him, “I’ve decided that I can also touch the hearts of many—dead people, but the living, too.”
    He waited a beat before saying, “The living?”
    “Yes, the living. You don’t have to choose one or the other, Dr. Moore. I realized this when I thought I might be going over the side of a cliff, as dramatic as that sounds. I don’t think it would have been forensics that I would have missed, but the people that I love. They were the ones I was fighting to get back to. The living, Dr. Moore, not the dead.”
    Shaking his head grimly, he said, “You sound so young.”
    “And you’re sounding tired so I’m going to let you rest. I promise I’ll keep up my work and be a good student and do everything you want, but I’m going to do everything I want, too. That’s what’s so cool about being eighteen,” she said, rising to her feet. “I can dream big.” She paused. “Oh, I brought this for you.”
    She opened her backpack and pulled out a book, setting it into the doctor’s hands.
    “What’s this?”
    “An art