She held out her hand and the rain washed it clean. It rained softly at first, then hard, like a punishment. A colony of mushrooms was using the head of a girl as a planter. How else could this be? Beryl closed her eyes for a long minute to give the face a chance to disappear. Someone must have filled her mouth with dirt. She had no experience with long-dead bodies, but no experience was necessary. Beryl knew this when she forced her gaze to rest upon the face. Dealing with a live thing so close to death seemed beyond what she was capable of doing.
With her eyes she followed the long length of the girl - she was tall and very slender. Manually - like turning off the toaster before it popped up the toast on its own - it could be done. Her breath didn't return for so long she thought she would die. It was the shin bone that had caused her to tumble to the ground. A female form lay next to Beryl in the woods she had touched it. I should have stuck to the regular trail, she thought. Beryl removed her shoe and massaged the sore area. With one hand sunk in the boggy soil she boosted herself onto a fallen log where it wasn't quite so wet. She lost her balance and toppled to a sitting position in the drenched forest. Something long, solid and rounded, like a thin baseball bat, caught her hard in the arch of her foot. Mushrooms in June! That's how wet it was. She slogged through long grass and thistles, poison ivy and mushrooms. Vital Park, away from the well-trodden paths. The ground didn't get a chance to dry out between rainfalls. Except maybe that nice Inspector Frank Foote. But she can't even make the call, for the crimes taking place in her yard - someone has been deadheading her lobelia and someone has put a pretty little collar on her cat - will just make the police think she's crazy. Beryl hadn't been of much help to the police in the case of the first dead woman-she'd only tripped over the body, after all - but when things begin happening around her own home, she wishes they could be of some help to her.
As she follows the horrific discoveries in The Winnipeg Free Press, Beryl thinks she sees a pattern emerging. It isn't long, however, before another body turns up and then another.
A badly shaken Beryl is questioned and escorted home. Among the many officers who arrive on the scene is Inspector Frank Foote, whom she has seen around her neighborhood. In a panic, Beryl struggles out to the main road and manages to hail a cellphone-toting passerby who notifies the police. It's a dead woman with mushrooms sprouting in her mouth. Beryl Kyte, a letter carrier who lives in the Winnipeg neighbourhood of Norwood Flats, goes out for a hike one beautiful spring Sunday and literally trips over a body in the woods of the St.
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