“So did I—rebel I mean. Or at least I wanted to and quite honestly believed I had. My parents—my poor mother particularly—hoped and prayed that I would marry a doctor. I was determined not to, precisely because she did. I went out with all kinds of men, an engineer, a policeman, an athlete, a young businessman who seemed so dishonest that I felt he was sure to become rich, and so forth. The engineer bored me, the policeman married somebody else, the athlete thought much too well of himself, and the businessman was indicted and tried to borrow money from my father.
“Eventually chance led me to Barry. He and his brother Simon taught at the university in Spice Grove. Barry was handsome, personable, intelligent, and kind; I thought of him as a professor. By the time I realized that he taught in the medical school, I was deeply in love with him. Smitten! I felt certain that I would never find a finer man. We were actually on our honeymoon before I learned that he was a doctor of medicine, an M.D.” Adah Fevre laughed, a self-mocking titter. “Fate makes fools of us all, long before the end. Have you noticed?”
I admitted I had. Though I wanted to explain that I had once been married, I did not.
“Not so long ago, I was a great reader, Mr. Smithe. Now that I have unlimited time in which to read and a tablet that will make the type so large that even I can read it without my contacts, it holds no savor for me. As a child I used to read in bed when my parents thought me asleep. Stolen fruit’s sweetest, you know. Tell me a story, Mr. Smithe. Will you tell me a story? Please?”
“I’d rather have you tell me a great deal more about Dr. Barry Fevre. Is this where he taught in the medical school? When you married, did you live here in Polly’s Cove?”
She smiled. “No, not at all. I—I doubt that you’ll understand, Mr. Smithe.”
“Perhaps not. May I venture a wild guess? I expect to be wrong, but I’d like to try even so.” Certain that I was right, I paused to build a little suspense. “Did you grow up in High Plains?”
“We … I suppose I must have told the old copy that.” Adah Fevre’s voice held a slight tremor. “I didn’t think I had, but I suppose I must have.”
“Perhaps you didn’t. As I said, I haven’t spoken to him. You loved Dr. Barry Fevre and married him—you just said so. What happened then?”
“We were married for three years. Barry taught and I worked in my father’s business, then Barry’s sabbatical year came. Do you know about those, Mr. Smithe?”
I shook my head. “Tell me.”
“Tenured academics get every seventh year off—a year in which they can do anything they wish. It’s a year-long paid vacation, really, although the university expects them to make good use of the time.”
“I understand. Please continue.”
“We had just learned that I was pregnant. The baby wouldn’t come for another twenty weeks or so. Barry told me he was going to leave me while he went away to do research; he wouldn’t be gone for more than six weeks at most. I could have a nice long visit with my parents—do I sound bitter, Mr. Smithe?”
“A little bitter, perhaps.”
“I am. I told him he had to stay home or take me with him. I was amenable to either one of those; but if he went away leaving me alone, I would file for divorce and swear that he had deserted me. He agreed to take me with him, but he refused to tell me where we were going. He was rarely like iron, but he was then; he insisted that he didn’t know the name of the place himself. It was a lie—I knew it was a lie, and he knew I knew it—but no matter what I said he stuck to it.”
I found that interesting and told her so.
“Mysterious, you mean.” Her voice held self-contempt. “It was. It was very mysterious, but I thought about it a lot, and eventually I got an idea. Do you want to hear it? You’ll think I’ve gone mad, I’m sure, and it was hardly more than a—well, than intuition. A woman’s intuition, and I would much prefer that we skip right over it.”
I smiled. “Still, you must have confided in the old copy.”
“No, Mr. Smithe, I did not. Let’s forget about it. Barry explained that he was going to have to hire a boat, so we flew to the coast—”
I had raised my hand. “We’ve skipped over your hunch. I’d like to hear it.”
Slowly, Mrs. Fevre rolled her head back and forth upon the pillow. “I’d rather not.”
“You teased me with it. It may be important, and I’d like to hear it.”
“All right, but please don’t laugh. For some reason I felt quite sure that he was looking for cadavers.”
No doubt I stared at her. “You’re going to have to explain that, Mrs. Fevre.”
“I shall. Barry taught anatomy, among other things. You’ve seen drawings of the human body. Here’s where the heart is, here are the lungs, here’s the stomach, and so forth. Everybody has.”
I leaned forward, straining to hear.
“What the books don’t tell you is that every real human body is different. The spleen may or may not be in the normal position. The small intestine may be unusually long or unusually short. You can’t lick your own forehead and neither can I, but there are people who can. Doctors have to learn all that, not just where everything ought to be according to some reference, but that you can never count on its actually being there and looking the way you think it ought to look. Am I making myself clear?”
I said, “Yes. Perfectly.”
“It’s taught to medical students by having them dissect cadavers. This is distasteful, I know.”
I agreed and urged her to go ahead with it anyway.
“Obtaining cadavers is always difficult. Some cities will allow nearby medical schools to take the corpses of derelicts—corpses that cannot be identified and do not appear to have died by violence. It would be possible, of course, to grow and sacrifice clones or even reclones, but it would be ruinously costly.”
Mrs. Fevre fell silent for so long that I was afraid she would not speak again. At last she asked, “Do you know about Burke and Hare, Mr. Smithe?”
I nodded to gain a little time. “I believe I’ve heard of them. They pretended to be resurrection men, grave robbers who dug up fresh corpses in cemeteries and sold them to medical schools. It was a dangerous occupation, because friends and relatives of the deceased often guarded their graves. To obviate that danger, Burke and Hare murdered people in order to sell their corpses. They were caught when they killed a girl who had been flirting with some of the medical students a few hours before she turned up—still warm—on their dissection table.” Talking about that centuries-old classic crime woke the memory of a bit of verse, and I managed to chant it without stumbling.
“Through the close
And up the stair,
Butt an’ ben wi’ Burke and Hare.
Burke’s the butcher,
Hare’s the thief,
And Knox the boy who buys the beef.”
Mrs. Fevre nodded. “For years my husband had been unable to obtain as many cadavers as he needed. Very few people are willing to donate their bodies after death, although Barry and I signed the paper some years ago. People are living longer and longer, and the days when derelicts might starve in the streets are long past—there are pantries distributing surplus food and free kitchens, a great many of both. I’m told that some of the food is really quite good, and the worst of it will keep you alive.” She paused, tired and discontent. “You … know about all that, I’m sure.”