56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard
Today
Lee pushes the bathroom door back just enough to get past it, ignoring the horror that lies on the other side of it for now.
She knows that that’s there. What she needs is to check if anything else is too, first.
If anyone else is.
She tells herself to ignore the smell that is tickling her gag reflex, to focus on the scene, to log the details—and to move fast because she isn’t going to be able to do that for very long.
Three more doors lead off the hall, each one standing open.
On her right, after the bathroom: a small, sparse bedroom. The narrow wardrobes are built-in—and empty—and the only furniture is a bare box-spring pushed up against the far wall and what looks like a dining table that has been commandeered as a desk.
Sitting on it is a closed laptop, some loose papers and pens. The laptop wears a sticker that says KB Studios. A printer sits on the floor underneath the desk, unplugged.
The roller blinds on the room’s single window are all the way up, offering a view of the courtyard.
At the end of the hall, facing the front door: the master bedroom. The double bed is unmade, the charcoal-gray sheets thrown back from the side closest to the door but left undisturbed on the other. She opens the drawer in the bedside table and finds it empty except for dust. Inside the wardrobe sit two suitcases, one large and one small, empty going by the weight of them; a small pile of folded jeans; a row of hanging suits and shirts; a drawer of socks and underwear.
All men’s, all a similar size. Someone in their twenties or thirties, she’d guess, going by the style. There’s also some running gear and a washbag with deodorant, men’s moisturizer, and a blue bottle of Acqua di Parma.
She estimates that only about a third of the wardrobe space is being used.
There is another window to the courtyard in here, a larger one, with its blinds pulled all the way down. A lamp by the bed is turned on.
Through the door off the left of the hall: an open-plan living space. At one end is the kind of kitchen Lee is used to seeing in Instagram ads for new developments in Dublin but never actually in anyone’s home: smooth, white, and clinically glossy.
It has an empty, unused look. She figures there must be fourteen feet of counter space in its L shape, but there’s nothing sitting out except for one of those George Clooney coffee machines, a lone oven mitt, and a set of keys with a plastic fob attached.
The keys are on a ring printed with a Viva Property logo.
A breakfast bar marks the end of the kitchen and the start of the living room, which is furnished only with a large, brown leather couch and a small coffee table. A flat-screen TV hangs on the wall above a faux fire. The walls are painted white and hung with the kind of meaningless abstract prints that chain hotels buy in volume, the type that achieve an exact balance of not drawing the eye but also sufficiently breaking up bare-wall blankness.
The thin privacy curtains are pulled across the sliding doors that lead to the little terrace outside; when she makes a gap in them with a single finger, she sees a table and two chairs out there, and the remains of a citronella candle. The door is closed but when she pulls on it, it opens easily.
One of the living room’s two ceiling lights is on.
This survey has taken her about forty seconds and she figures she can do another twenty or so before the coffee she drank for breakfast threatens a reappearance.
Lee goes back out into the hall and opens the bathroom door all the way so that it folds back against the hall wall, but doesn’t actually touch it, just in case there’s something of evidentiary value on the handle that they’ll need to collect in due course.
As she does this, she glimpses what awaits her and feels something flex right at the back of her throat.
She breathes in through her nose, trying to find any remnant of the mints, trying to convince her brain that menthol is all she can smell. Upchucking inside a face mask in the middle of a scene really wouldn’t be a good look.
Let’s just get this over with.
Lee looks down.
The bathroom has no windows and the ceiling light is on. The body is kneeling on the floor. Face pressed against the tiles, arms by the sides, directly beneath the showerhead. Clothed in what looks like jeans and a T-shirt. Barefoot. Short, light-brown hair. Facing away from her. A male, she thinks, but she couldn’t swear to it: she doesn’t have a great view and won’t get one without disturbing the scene, and parts of the body are oddly misshapen. Bloated in some areas, sunken in others. An advanced stage of decomposition. No obvious wounds or blood, at least from her vantage point. A putrid sludge of fluid surrounds the body and connects it to the plughole like a speech bubble. The skin—
She swallows hard, forcing back bile, and steadies herself.
She can only see the skin on the soles of the feet, the back of the neck, and the nearest arm—the deceased’s right one—from the elbow on down, but that much is bad enough. It’s puckered on the feet and a deep purple color, and the arm is showing evidence of skin slippage: the top layer has become separated, as if peeling after a particularly bad sunburn.
At least there are no flies, she tells herself. If that sliding door had been left open . . . she’d already be back outside, trying to find a not-terrible place to throw up.
The bathroom is wet-room style, with an even floor of marbled black tiles throughout. A glass shower panel stands in a black metal frame next to the former site of a matching glass door, now in a thousand little diamond-like nuggets that lie strewn all over the floor. She can see a few pieces glinting in the deceased’s hair.
She turns to look behind her.
There’s a mirrored medicine cabinet on the wall. She opens it, scans the contents. It doesn’t take long; like the rest of the apartment, it’s mostly empty.
Some disposable face masks, loosely stacked on a shelf. A bottle of thickening shampoo. A box of plasters and a blister pack of small, green pills.
Careful where she steps, she moves closer to see if she can make out what’s stamped on them. 542, she thinks it says, confirming that they are what they look like: Rohypnol, the date-rape drug.
She closes the cabinet and turns to the sink.
There’s a small shelf above it but otherwise no storage, so it doesn’t take long to determine that there’s nothing else in the bathroom except toothbrushing supplies (one toothbrush), a few rolls of toilet paper, and a bottle of hand soap. Plus one bath towel, hanging on a hook by the door.
The smell is steadily drawing the coffee up into her esophagus.
Lee turns back to the body. Moving any closer to it will disturb the glass on the floor and God knows what else, but she does her best to lean over to see if she can get a better look at the head and—
She gags when this new angle reveals a fist-sized cluster of maggots wriggling in and around what looks like a head wound near the left temple.
She wants to run.
She wants to throw up.
She wants to run out of here right now while throwing up, but she tells her brain to remain calm, just a few more seconds, that’s all she needs . . .
She fixes her gaze on the wall tiles directly across from the wound and starts moving it upward in a straight line—
There.
At about chest-height, above the head: a smudge of brown. Dried blood.
Contact.