as a "ghost talker," appears to summon Victorian
There’s a commercial kitchen utility counter and sink against one wall, which some people mistake for an autopsy table. The morgue was probably a pantry, but for the few years of Norman Baker’s Cancer is Curable Hospital, the dead were brought down here to wait for the hearse from the local funeral home.
On the day Germany invaded Poland, September 1, 1939, Norman Baker was arrested for mail fraud. That’s how they got him: the brochures. He was tried and convicted and sent to Leavenworth. Norman Baker was a charlatan in the long terrible tradition of American charlatans. A liar and a thief who sold broken promises. Norman Baker died a Florida retiree in 1958. He had cirrhosis. And cancer.
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“I think they’re pig parts,” Scales says of the contents of the specimen jars. Not surgical excisions. Not even human bits cribbed from the local mortician. Pickled trims and ends bought from the local butcher, maybe; or specimens ordered from a medical school supply house. We’ll get the results once the university tests.
