The Groaning Board

evening news.
Music. The throb of rock that made your heart beat raster. Here and there a
whiff of fried onions. Cabbage. Cigarettes. People sneaking puffs behind closed
doors since the City had gone smoke-free almost everywhere.
    When they reached the fourth floor,
Wetzon got wicked pleasure in seeing that Silvestri was breathing harder than
she was. He handed her a pair of latex gloves, then crouched. She put one foot
and then the other into the booties he held for her. He tied them around her
ankles. A glancing caress of her knee let her know he wasn’t angry anymore.
    She reached out to touch him, but he
was pulling on his own booties. When he straightened, all he said was “Cloves.”
The door still wore the tattered remnants of the police seal, which presumably
Metzger had broken.
    A gloved and bootied Metzger opened
the door. He glanced at Wetzon. “I thought you were taking her home.“
    “Her refused,” Wetzon said. “I won’t
touch anything.” jg Metzger held the door for them without a word. He had
powder dust—some white, some black—on his trousers.
    The apartment was a railroad flat, so
called because one room opened into another. The overlay of Lysol couldn’t
quite cover the sour odor of vomit. And something else, more powerful.
Something feral. Something evil.
    Wetzon stood in the middle of the
living room watching Silvestri and Metzger methodically go over every square
inch, starting with the kitchen on the right. When they finished the living
room they moved on to the bedroom, leaving Wetzon still standing in the same
place. She studied the cozy room and then began to move around, getting
acquainted. White powder covered every surface indiscriminately.
    The apartment had a used, though
loved quality to it. Even the background sound: the plop, plop, plop of
a dripping faucet.
    The furnishings were worn except for
the sofa, which, looked fairly new and was inset on a bookcase wall. The books
looked read. In a corner near the doorless kitchen, a small oak dining-room
table and four chairs were positioned under an opaque white globe. The table
held a box of tea bags and a mug, bills: a doctor, a dentist, Macy’s, Con
Edison, and NYNEX, as well as an empty clasp envelope. A nice, somewhat worn
kilim covered the floor.
    On a glass-topped table in front of
the sofa was an open manila folder which held what looked liked exams. Sheila
must have gotten sick early on and quickly, because her red pencil was still
sharp and it lay on top of a large stack of uncorrected papers, alongside a
smaller stack of those that had been corrected. Wetzon leafed through them. The
Romantic Poets. Shelley, Byron, and Keats. There was a yellowish stain on the
carpet near the coffee table and a denser smell of Lysol.
    Either someone had been in to clean
up or maybe Sheila herself had tried to when she first got sick.
    Wetzon wandered into the kitchen. The
odor here was gross, sour, putrid. Black powder on refrigerator door and
countertops.
    “Who unplugged the answering
machine?” she heard Silvestri say.
    “That’s the way it was. No tape. You
think Sheila unplugged it?” Metzger sounded weary.
    “Maybe. If the messages were being
left on the machine... She didn’t say anything to you or Judy about it?”
    An old Waring blender, a toaster
oven, and a bread machine crowded the narrow counter. In the stainless-steel
sink, under a dripping faucet, was a small plate washed clean, except for a few
crumbs, of whatever it had contained. Wetzon tned to tighten the faucet. It was
already tight. And she’d broken her promise; she’d begun to touch things.
    “ No,” Metzger
told Silvestri. “Jess was here when Sheila played back one of them. That’s how
she knew. Sheila told her the calls were just an annoyance that would stop if
no one tesponded to them.”
    Okay, Sheila unplugged the goddam
machine,” Silvestri said. “Where would she have put the tape?”
    Wetzon thought, where would you have
put a tape if you Wanted to hold on to it, but not have to see it every
day? Put lr on ice, so to speak?
    The refrigerator was like Wetzon’s in
that its freezing compartment was on top. She opened the door and a soft white
fog floated out at her. Everything inside was neatly layered and labeled. Two
shell steaks, three chicken breasts, a foil package marked “4 muffins,” but by
the look of it Sheila’d eaten one of them. A plastic sandwich box, unlabeled.
Wetzon shook it. What was inside