Read Twisted for Free Online

inexorable tug drawing him toward the coffin.
    At last he went over, and he spent one last moment with his friend.
    Â 
    Â 
    That’s not Moses De Lourde.
    That was the first impression that struck Grove as he stared down at the shriveled husk of a human being that lay nestled in the elaborate sarcophagus, wrapped in seersucker and silk, painted in grease pencil and rouge. But of course, it was De Lourde, or at least what was left of him. Offerings of all sorts had been tucked around the slender remains—a package of pastel cigarettes, a small volume of Rilke poems, a packet of chickory coffee, a broken 78 rpm recording of Louis Armstrong’s “Basin Street Blues.” But the professor’s kind, regal face—still full of cavernous wrinkles and baggy flesh—now looked empty, barren, antithetical to the vigorous De Lourde whom Grove had known and loved. Caked with so much concealing powder and reconstructive putty that it looked papery and hollow, the faux face simply broke Grove’s heart. The real De Lourde would have been appalled at such a mediocre makeup job. It would not even have been worthy of an after-hours Mardi Gras party.
    A wave of sorrow sliced through Grove, as sudden and sharp as a blade thrust through him. How could they do this to him? How could they take him to his final soiree looking so déclassé? Tears burned Grove’s eyes, and he took out his handkerchief and held it to his mouth, when the second impression struck him: His eye is gone.
    Sure enough, the old man’s papery, wrinkled left eyelid—upon closer scrutiny—appeared concave . It was a detail most people would certainly have missed. But Grove was not most people. To Grove, the missing eyeball was as glaring as if they had put his nose on his forehead. The other eye was clearly apparent beneath its drawn lid. But the left was conspicuously absent, which led Grove to make a third observation: Those bumps on the professor’s chin and forehead look suspicious.
    The sad fact was, Grove could not shut off his forensic mind, his morbid expertise. He knew death the way a botanist knows the rings of a tree trunk, and now he began to profile the poor bundle of remains.
    Grove had initially thought the bumps were moles but now realized they were wounds—appearing like small bubbles spackled over with heavy mortician’s powder—and they combined with the missing eye to begin to strum the chords of Grove’s nervous system. The regularity of the abrasions under the makeup—especially the fissures around his mouth and brow—called out to Grove, screamed in his brain, and sent high-voltage signals across his synapses.
    Without even knowing it, Grove was doing what he always did, what he was born to do: sniffing something out, adding up seemingly disparate facts of an event or a situation to form the early skeletal outlines of a deduction. Over the last twenty-four hours he had absorbed enough random detail to fill an entire file.
    But there was something else now adding to his frisson of suspicion. Grove had first noticed it when he had entered the chapel. Initially he had written it off as mere nervous tension, perhaps some kind of residual angst from attending Hannah’s funeral. But he noticed it again when he had approached the coffin for his final communion with De Lourde’s remains—a powerful feeling of being watched.
    Ordinarily he would have ignored it. After all, this was a funeral. People watched. Mourners kept tabs on other mourners. But after the events of the previous night—the thwarted intruder, and the carabineer left at the scene—Grove was hyperattuned to such feelings. And he could not remember ever having such a strong sense of being watched. It bored into the back of his skull like drill holes, raising gooseflesh on his scalp and neck.
    He turned away from the casket, and he searched the huddled mourners for Maura.
    She was standing over by the