CHAPTER SIX

It was 5:20 PM when George arrived back at the Civic Center, the cars in the parking lot turning over from employee commuters to minivans. The sounds of whistles and shouts coming from the play fields. She walked past the metal detector. The security guard gone, replaced with a piece of paper that read, “giving a deposition be back in an hour.” She retraced her footsteps back to her mother’s office, pulled the door open and saw there was a portly man who appeared to be in his sixties in the usual elder examiner attire: collared shirt, khaki pants, reading glasses on a lanyard around his neck, along with a UMaine badge. He was looking over Lisa’s shoulder at a computer screen.

Lisa looked up upon hearing the door open. “George, honey! This is Dr. Dale Whitford. Dr. Whitford, this is Dr. George MacDougal, Vivian’s daughter.” He didn’t look up from the screen right away. Most of George’s professional colleagues were like him. Gruff. No nonsense. Wanted to work with limited interruptions and intrusions. She learned a long time ago not to be offended.

“I’m sorry for your loss.” He finished reading whatever was on the screen and looked up at her. “What can I help you with, Dr. MacDougal?”

“I wanted to be here for her autopsy.”

“You of all people should know that’s going to be an awfully long wait. Perhaps you’d be more comfortable back home?”

“I was hoping you’d allow me to sit in on it,” George asked as nicely as she could.

Dr. Whitford crossed his arms across his belly and sighed like an old dog being asked to move. He thought out loud, “There is conflict of interest, evidence contamination and tampering, not to mention I don’t like being hovered over.”

The room went silent for a moment. George tried willing him with her thoughts.

“However, if it were my mother, I’d also want to sit in. I’ll tell you what, you can but you are not allowed to touch, comment, or influence my findings in any way. You’ll need to be added as a consulting examiner, so no one can say this wasn’t above board.”

“I understand. Strictly observation.” She responded as professional-sounding as she could manage.

“Jiwoo has the body prepared. I need to gown up and familiarize myself with your mother’s morgue setup. I’ll send Jiwoo out for you when I’m ready to begin.” He walked back down the hallway towards the autopsy suite.

“Sign here, honey.” Lisa already had the electronic signature pad ready to go.

Thirty minutes later, pacing what she felt to be a loop in the reception area carpet, she followed Jiwoo down the hallway. She scrubbed in and gowned up. As she entered the exam room, she noticed Dr. Whitford was already standing beside the exam table, with an instrument tray at his side. It was the first time she’d seen her mother since she’d received the news. The clothes she had on were from two nights ago, though open at the chest to expose her heart and ribs for CPR. There had been bruising and swelling from where pressure was applied to restart her heart. There was dried blood all throughout her hair, and down onto her jacket and collared shirt. Compared to the bodies that landed on George’s table, her mother looked serene, healthy, intact. But that was her mother on the table, and it took everything within George not to rush over and touch her immediately.

“Dr. MacDougal, are you going to be able to get through this?” George didn’t realize she’d frozen in the middle of the room. She nodded, not being able to find the words or take her eyes off her mother.

“Good, then I’ll need you to stand over there out of the way. Jiwoo, can you help Dr. MacDougal?” George felt Jiwoo slowly lead her next to the table where her presence wouldn’t be an interference. Dr. Whitford adjusted the lamp and started the examination. George was lulled by the cadence of his voice and the steps she knew by heart. Jiwoo assisted him as clothing and personal effects were removed. Her mother’s pockets contained yet another pair of reading glasses, a key card, mints, part of a straw wrapper, lip balm, and a coupon for a buy-one-get-one promotional deal from the opening of the “New” Market Basket. She couldn’t help herself from wishing that her mother would just somehow will herself off the table. Warm. Whole. Alive. The rest of the external and internal trunk findings were clean—the bruising and rib fractures aligning with CPR, no other scrapes or defensive injuries, the heart, lungs and abdominal organs were grossly unremarkable.

Dr. Whitford placed a rubber block under her neck, pushing her chin towards her chest to expose the head wound, rounding the table to examine it more closely while Jiwoo adjusted the lamp. She listened as Whitford said his findings out loud for transcription. “Blunt, slightly curved contusion at the lower base of the skull, just above the neck line. The coloring is blue-purple. The wound appears to be from a standard impact from a fall backward.”

George noted that was unusual. Most natural falls from standing presented with impact above the hat-brim line occurring along the widest part of the head. The chances of her mother falling in such a way to strike that part of the head were slim, but not impossible.

He then proceeded to the part of the exam George needed to steel herself for. With the precision of a man who’d done hundreds of autopsies in his career, he began the incision at the bony prominence behind Vivian’s left ear, sliced cleanly over the crown of the skull and ended behind her right ear. Gripping the cut edges of the scalp, Dr. Whitford then peeled the front half forward over the face, inside out, and the back half backward toward the neck, exposing a bare, white skull. George couldn’t begin to count the number of times she herself had done this, as recently as earlier in the week, but somehow seeing the face of the person who loved her, whose eyes lit up when she walked into a room or whose mouth turned rueful at a joke was more than she could bear. She felt the room spin.

Whitford interrupted her thoughts.

“I’m familiar with your work,” he said, not looking up from the table. “Most of my students follow you on Instagram. I even used one of your papers last semester. The one on postmortem interval estimation in cold-water submersion cases. One of the most engaged classes of my seminar.” He glanced at her once. George saw Jiwoo smile under her mask.

“I, uh, thank you.” Even though it had been less than fifty hours, the events of the past few days had made her own work seem like a different lifetime.

Whitford continued on with his examination. He described a curvilinear contusion, located above the posterior hairline, just right of midline, and a subgaleal hemorrhage underlying the contusion. Consistent with a vital reaction. No additional contusions, lacerations, or hemorrhages of the scalp.

They were all words that George knew by heart and in any other context would be able to visualize without hesitation. But she found herself wading through the technical jargon as if in a fog. The bruise was curved; the blood pooled under the outer layer of the scalp. This made sense. Her mother’s heart was still pumping when the injury occurred. But none of his findings were adding up to “just a fall.” Even though that’s what happened. That’s what her father swore happened. George’s experience taught her that a flat floor tended to leave a broad, rounded impact, and what Whitford was describing was a crisp edge.

By the time George worked through Dr. Whitford’s findings, he had already moved on to the next stage of the examination—the bare bone. “Linear fracture of the occipital bone extending toward the foramen magnum. Margin sharply defined along its inferior edge. Photographs obtained with scale.” She heard the camera in Jiwoo’s hands shutter.

Whitford took up the saw himself. George found herself grateful. Not that Jiwoo would do anything but an excellent job, but there was something in Whitford’s years of experience that George found herself relying on to get through the examination. The Stryker didn’t spin. She’d explained on TikTok videos: the blade shook back and forth, fast enough to cut bone. With the sound of the saw still in her ears, she watched as Jiwoo handed Whitford a chisel with which to remove the skull cap.

His dictation began again. “Calvarium intact, without fracture. Inner table unremarkable. Dura mater intact. No epidural hemorrhage. No subdural hemorrhage.”

Nothing. His findings weren’t answers to any of the multitude of questions that swirled in George’s head. This was the frustrating slog of examinations, when the details started to pour in, but no resolution was in sight. There was a slight “faouph” sound when the brain was removed from the skull and then weighed.

“Subarachnoid hemorrhage over the base. Contusion at the occipital pole.” She heard him say into the recorder. “Frontal and temporal poles free of contusion. Circle of Willis intact. No aneurysm. Vertebral arteries intact.”

George understood. There was no bruising at the front of the brain which meant it hadn’t slammed forward inside the skull. Her head had been still when it was hit.

Whitford returned to the base of the skull and ran a gloved finger along the crack. “Fracture, posterior fossa, full thickness, extending toward the foramen magnum.” Then he went quiet for a long time.

“Doctor MacDougal, would you come look at this?” He motioned for her to stand next to him. “Tell me what you see.”

George crossed to the table. The lamp hung low over the back of her mother’s skull. She struggled to remain focused as she inhaled the familiar floral smell of her mother. One day she might discuss this moment on panels, describing the feeling of being related to the body on one’s table, but today, in the moment, it took everything within her to see just the impact site.

“Here’s what I have,” Whitford said. He counted off his findings: “No aneurysm. Nothing in the heart or the other organs that puts her on the floor. A low impact. A margin I can’t blame on hitting one’s head on the floor. No contrecoup. Nothing on the hands or forearms.”

“Can I get a light on the margin?” George felt more like herself than she had since she closed her laptop and left to get ready for her date on Tuesday.

Jiwoo angled the lamp.

Now with eyes on it, George saw the wound was as he’d dictated: crisp, narrow, the curve of it clean enough to follow with a fingertip. A floor made a different kind of break, wide and ragged, the bone crazed around the crack.

“A floor spreads the force out,” she said. “This is a small area, hit hard.”

“The bottom step has an edge,” Whitford said. “According to the file she was found near the stairs. A backward fall onto a stair nosing could leave a defined margin.”

“True. But none of the evidence you listed aligns with the fall itself being the cause of this wound, which is clearly the cause of death.” She kept her eyes on the skull. “If her head had been moving when it struck the floor, the brain would keep going after the skull stops. It bruises at the front. There’s no bruising present. And she couldn’t have been conscious when she hit anything, or she’d have put her hands out, and according to your examination there aren’t bracing wounds.” Her throat tightened on the next part. “I know those stairs. My father says he found her on the floor at the foot of the stairs. Not on them.”

The hum of the lamp feeling louder, though it probably had remained the same decibel for the entire examination. The room had just gone that still. George puzzled through all the information gathered: a wound too low, too small, and too sharp-edged for any floor. The brain bruised only where the wound was located, and her scalp bled, which meant her heart was still beating when it happened. Something hard and narrow had struck the back of her head, and with enough force to kill her.

“Someone hit her,” George said aloud.

Whitford said nothing for a while. “That makes it homicide.” He dictated into the recorder: “manner of death, homicide; cause, blunt force injury of the head; preliminary, pending histology and toxicology,” then turned back to George. “I’ll have to inform Sheriff Patel of the finding. I’m so sorry.”

The room remained still.

“Since the examination is done, unless he objects we’ll be able to release her in the morning once the paperwork is done.”

George nodded. Numb. She was grateful for the stoicism her medical training had provided. She used every last ounce of strength to maintain her composure. Her mother, undone on the table beside her. And what caused George, everyone in the room in fact, to be in what was now beginning to feel like a very claustrophobic autopsy suite, was a blow to the back of Vivian’s head. None of it made sense. The only other person in the house had been the one who’d found her—Daniel.

Someone had stood in that house and hit her mother hard enough to kill her and hoped it would appear to be an accident.