Ray said no before she finished the sentence.
"Kiddo, I won't help you get yourself fired." He had picked up on the second ring, the way he always did, as if he had been sitting beside the phone waiting for her. "Sign you in as a board member to the records basement? On a Friday morning, with you off shift and Gail already looking at your file? Tessie. No."
Tess sat in her car on the third level of the parking garage, still in scrubs, awake since the evening before. The steering wheel was cold under her palms. "I need ten minutes with one microfilm reel."
"Of what?"
"Family stuff."
"Then ask your mother for the family stuff." A cabinet shut on his end, a spoon on a cup. "Come Sunday. Bring nothing, Marian's pie is not coming back from the dead. We'll talk it all through then. All right?"
"All right."
"That's my girl."
She hung up and watched a man push a wheelchair down the ramp. Ray was right. Reading a chart without a work reason was a fireable offense, and a dead man's autopsy was a chart. She had one complaint left in her.
She locked the car and walked to the basement door anyway.
Medical Records sat at the end of a corridor that smelled of toner and floor wax. Dolores Kemp looked up from behind the counter, sixty-something, cardigan buttoned to the throat, and her face did a small, slow thing.
"You're Marian Brody's girl's girl."
"Tess Vance. I need the 1979 autopsy reels, Sable County Memorial. One name."
"Do you have a work request?"
"No."
"Then I can't." Dolores squared a stack of forms that was already square. "You know I can't, hon."
"My grandmother used to bring you tomato plants."
"She did." Dolores didn't look up. "Every June."
"It's my grandfather. Leonard Mahaffey. July of 1979." Tess put both hands flat on the counter, so the woman could see them shake and see them stop. "Everyone in my family has been told how he died by the man who signed for it. I'd like to read it once. That's all."
The wall clock ticked through most of a minute.
"The reader in the back is free," Dolores said finally. "Ten minutes. For Marian's sake." She slid a ledger across the counter and turned it so the signature line faced the wall. "And I never saw you."
The reel was labeled in grease pencil. The reader hummed and threw a gray rectangle of light onto the screen, and Tess cranked until the typed lines came up sharp.
SABLE COUNTY MEMORIAL HOSPITAL. AUTOPSY REPORT. Decedent: MAHAFFEY, LEONARD J. Age 31. Performed July 5, 1979. Herman Pettibone, M.D.
She read it the way she read a lab sheet. Numbers first.
Blood alcohol: 0.02 percent.
She read it again. Two hundredths. A man who had held one beer, maybe, at a picnic, hours before. At every Fourth of July she could remember, she had listened to her family say drunk, and nobody had ever said it with a number.
Lungs: *frothy fluid throughout the airways.* She knew what that was. You did not get froth from a body put in the water after. You got it from someone breathing in, hard, over and over, while still alive.
Tess pressed the heel of her hand against her mouth. Then she moved her finger down the page.
External examination, neck. Four oval contusions, 1 to 1.5 cm, right posterior neck. One contusion, 2 cm, left lateral throat.
Four on the back. One in front.
She set her own hand on her own neck to see it. Fingers behind, thumb under the jaw at the front. It fit, almost, and then it didn't. Something about it sat wrong. She turned her wrist, switched hands, switched back. The right side, the left side. It was important, and she was too tired to hold it, so she let it go and kept reading.
Personal effects. One steel wristwatch, crystal cracked, hands stopped at 9:41.
On her own left wrist the same hands sat where they had always been.
Right fist, clenched at recovery, contents removed: *torn fragment of tan twill cloth, consistent with shirt pocket, one brass snap attached.*
Tan shirt. A deputy.
"He told me tan," she said to the empty room, and her voice came out small.
She thought about the porch. Her mother was six years old on the swing in her sparkler dress, asleep. Lonnie Mahaffey was thirty-one. He had been a Navy swimmer. He had gone into the Kettle breathing and had held on to someone's shirt with all the strength a man like that had, and his daughter had slept through it.
Tess was reading his lungs.
She read the line twice more, because it was the only thing she could do with her face.
At the bottom the summary sat in neat capitals. *Intoxicated. Time of death approximately 10:30 p.m. Accidental drowning.* Under it, a signature block: *Approved, C. Lyle, Deputy Coroner.*
Ten-thirty. The watch said nine forty-one.
Her ten minutes were nearly gone.
Tess went back to the reel index at the head of the roll, to see what else there was. Her finger stopped on the last line.
*Pathologist's handwritten notes, 2 pp.*
Pettibone would have written what he actually saw. She cranked forward past the signature page, past the photographs, and the film slid by in a gray blur, frame after frame, and then she was at the end of the roll.
She wound back. Slower this time. Frame by frame.
There was the summary. There was the stamp. Then the picture jumped. A page of typed inventory ended halfway through a sentence, and the next frame began in the middle of something else.
Tess leaned until her nose nearly touched the glass.
Someone had cut the film, cleanly, at both ends of the gap, and joined what was left with a strip of clear tape. The tape was new. Its edges were still tacky, and a little lint had stuck there, bright in the lamp.