June had a white mark under her chin from falling against the bath when she was four. Elia checked the first twelve girls, then one from the middle and end of every aisle. The mark waited under every chin she lifted.
Her right front tooth leaned slightly over the left. So did theirs.
She bit the nail of her middle finger, disliked the skins on warm milk, and wrote the number five from the bottom upward. Elia found bitten nails on every hand. There was no milk to test. On scraps of paper in eleven different pockets, every five rose from the bottom.
“Those happened before this morning,” Hal said.
Elia wanted to hit him for saying it gently.
She tried the rhyme June used when she skipped rope. Elia sang the first four words beside each row and waited for a toe to twitch on the missing beat. Fifty-seven feet moved. Some tapped early, some late. One dead girl shaped a rude extra verse with her lips. It was exactly the sort of thing June would have learned before telling her mother she had invented it.
Lunches offered no help. Nearly every coat held toast because June had left home with toast. After that came the branches: toast traded for an apple, dropped into a gutter, fed to a dog, packed around a cracked bird's egg. Elia found one crust wrapped in a spelling test. Across the top, June had written in pencil, MUM SIGN THIS, then covered the words with six careful black boxes.
Elia knew the shape of the shame. All the girls had inherited it.
They worked by aisles. Hal opened one mouth near the start, middle, and end of each, checking beneath tongues for the faint blue light that sometimes marked a chosen body's return path. Elia hated the ease of his hands. She moved faster until the girls became coats, labels, elbows, cowlicks. Then she slowed down.
At eleven twelve, the chapel bell rang by itself. It had never rung before noon.
The dead Junes answered.
At first came breath passing through teeth. Then words rose all around the room, too soft to belong to any single mouth.
“I thought the ice was thick.”
“I didn't touch the red wire.”
“It looked like a door.”
Elia pressed both hands over her ears. The voices entered through the bones of her wrists.
Hal struck the bell with his rake. Its tongue snapped sideways, and the chapel fell quiet.
“Last intentions,” he said. “They loosen when the fire gets hungry.”
“Do they know?”
“I don't ask them.”
“One of them is my daughter.”
“Then ask only what helps.”
Elia knelt beside the nearest June. The child had a red marble in one nostril and a fine dusting of salt across her coat. Elia took her hand.
“Where did you go after breakfast?”
The lips remained grey and closed.
She tried the next aisle. A whisper came from somewhere near the flower cooler.
“Down.”
From beneath the broken bell came another: “Where the pigeons sleep.”
At the end of the row, a June sat up.
Her eyes opened. Milk-white film covered both irises. She pointed toward the laundry room and said, in a voice full of water, “The inside scratches.”
Then she folded in half and lay still again.
Elia looked at her own hands.
On Monday night, June had brought her a grey wool mitten with a hole beside the thumb. Elia kept her sewing things in the funeral home's washroom because the light was better there than in their kitchen. She had chosen red thread when she could not find grey.
“Put the knot outside,” June had said. “The inside scratches.”
Elia had made five short stitches. June complained that the red looked like a wound. Elia told her wounds rarely came so neat. She left a tail long enough to pull out later, once she bought matching thread.
The red spool still stood beside the mending basket in the washroom.
Elia ran.
The spool looked ordinary among the white and black thread. She snatched it up. A needle remained tucked beneath the outer winding, and a length of red trailed where she had bitten it off that morning while repairing a shroud.
In the chapel, every June wore mittens or carried them in a pocket. Wherever the right mitten remained, Elia found the same five red stitches beside the thumb. The same small knot sat outside. The dead had copied Monday night perfectly.
Elia held up the spool. A copied stitch could look right. Only one length of thread in the building had actually been cut from what she held.
Elia set the spool on the floor.
It rolled.
The loose end lifted first. It turned toward the rows of bodies with the slow attention of a worm testing rain. Then the spool crossed the tile, unwinding a narrow red line behind it.
Hal stepped aside.
The spool rolled past the first row. Its loose end lifted toward each repaired mitten, then dropped and continued. It passed the girl who had spoken. It went beneath a pew, around the foot of the broken bell stand, and into the ironing room.
Three more dead Junes lay under pressed white sheets there. Overflow, Hal had called them. The spool passed the first pair of boots, then the second, then the third.
It kept going.
The red line slipped beneath the linen press and drew tight against the wall. Elia dropped to her knees. There was a gap behind the machine where fallen socks, lost pins, and years of blue lint had gathered. A fourth child lay curled in that gap without a sheet or cart.
Three hundred and thirteenth.
The red thread rose from the floor and tightened. Inside the child's right mitten, five stitches drew together beside the thumb. The knot sat on the outside. A short tail curled against the girl's wrist.
Elia dragged her gently into the light.
June looked untouched. No soot, no feathers, no salt. A crumb of toast clung to the corner of her mouth. Her schoolbag was pinned under one shoulder.
Elia pressed her cheek to June's lips. The skin gave no warmth. Then the thread in her hand moved. A tiny pull, a pause, another pull.
Five red stitches tightened and relaxed.
Breathing.
“Found you,” Elia said.
At the word you, the pipes struck inside the walls.
Every door belowstairs slammed at once.
The clock read eleven forty-six.
Hal did not celebrate. He crouched, followed the red thread from spool to mitten, and rubbed ash between his finger and thumb.
“Finding is half.”
“Then do the other half.”
“You made the road. I can't burn it for you.”
Elia lifted June. The girl weighed exactly what she had weighed asleep on Sunday, when Elia carried her from the sofa to bed. That fact struck harder than any of the bodies in the chapel.
“Tell me where.”
Hal pointed with the furnace rake toward the narrow stair descending beneath the washroom.