“No way an ex-con has the money for this,” Occam said.
“So does the canning equipment, and this shed, belong to Holy Bear or has it been repurposed from elsewhere?” I said, thinking.
“Holy Bear?” FireWind asked.
“The farmer. It’s his nickname. His mama gave it to him when he was a baby,” I said.
Occam shook his head, sucked in a deep breath from near the door, and walked over to the bigger cooker. “Namin’ a kid that was jist mean.”
“Maybe not Holy Bear,” I said. “We mighta crossed a property line at the gate. Someone else may own this land.”
“Yes,” FireWind said. “But it’s convenient and too coincidental for the death and decay energies to be here unless planted by someone to kill Cale Nowell, or planted here by Cale Nowell.”
“Is there a cannery around here where used equipment might come available every so often?” I asked. “Or maybe Holy Bear puts up commercial vegetables? Maybe to sell canned produce or soups at a local farmer’s market?”
FireWind, who seemed unaffected by the smell, toed a pile of bags in the corner and said, “Several pounds of lye: both sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide.”
“Maybe making soap?” I asked. “That’s what I thought when I first walked in and smelled it, but I don’t see tins for pouring soap bars. And I don’t see canning facilities, no table, no jars, no spoons, strainers. No . . .” I stopped, my eyes on the bags of lye. A memory struggled up from the darks of my mind. “Strong bases can . . .” I tilted my head, making sure I remembered what I thought I did. The memory rose through me slowly and solidified. “. . . Can dissolve bodies.”
FireWind looked at me, waiting, so I went on. “At three hundred degrees, a pressurized lye solution can turn a human body into a liquid in three hours.” I studied the kettle and more slowly I said, “This kettle isn’t pressurized. It won’t heat much above the boiling point of water, two hundred twelve degrees or so. It might take an additional hour or two to complete the process.”
“Nell, sugar. That don’t sound much like Spook School teaching. That sounds like, well, like something else,” Occam said, trying not to bring up the church, but then, where else would I have learned what I was talking about?
I frowned hard at the oversized stainless-steel kettle.
FireWind asked, “Are you saying that you think this is part of the recipe for the death and decay energies?”
Recipe . . . That word brought up more memories. “We used to make bone broth with the bones of beef cattle, pigs, eggshells, chicken bones.” I stopped, dredging through my memory for more. “Vinegar. Some apples, if I remember right. Once, just before I left with the Ingrams, some of the men were dumping in the bones for the broth and talking. One of them said that about the lye. About dissolving bodies. They laughed. They said a full-grown man would come out pure liquid with the consistency of mineral oil.”
A tan liquid, they had said, thick and almost creamy. The men had known all that for certain, which meant they had dissolved a body to get rid of it. And they had been laughing until they saw me standing behind the door, listening. My head had been painful, my scalp aching because my hair had been bunned up for the first time. I had just started my first period and . . . and the man talking had been the Colonel. The man who had come for me, demanding that I become his wife or concubine. Had he come because he hoped to keep me from talking about what they had said? “Ohhh,” I breathed, too many thoughts and memories dumping into the forefront of my brain.
“Nell. Why would they know that?” Occam asked gently.
“What? Oh. Um. I could guess, but I don’t know the answer to that.”
“Are you okay?” he asked me.
“No. Not really. But I’ll hold for a bit longer.” I glanced at my boss. “I don’t have any idea what this has to do with the recipe for death and decay.”
“But it is conceivable that there is a body inside,” FireWind said, looking from the lye bags to the big kettle.
My mouth had gone dry and I tried to wet my lips, but my tongue dragged along, tearing them. “I think we’re gonna have to open it and see. And if it’s lye, it’ll be caustic.”