Disembodied Bones (36 page)

Dust gathered on every inch of the vehicle as
it churned it up in a swirling fog. The recent heat wave had dried
the land to a desiccated desert of dirt. Only the irrigation of the
cotton fields kept her from being completely blinded by the clouds
of powdery earth.

Something itched at her thoughts and Leonie
stopped to consider it.
Gideon
?

What do you want, little Miss Nancy
Drew?

Leonie rolled her eyes.
You want me to
break you out of jail? I could seduce the guard and pass you a gun
made out of soap.

What? What is it that’s troubling you? It’s
like an angry wasp buzzing around inside your head. I can see it’s
never going to be easy with-

This time, Gideon cut himself off with an
abruptness that almost made Leonie gasp. She waited for a second
and then thought,
If Whitechapel had a place to hide you, why
weren’t you there? Why were you in the house instead?

Gideon’s thoughts were troubled himself, a
black mass of churning agitation.
I’d forgotten until now. I
wish I hadn’t remembered. When I saw my parents running across his
yard all I could think of was that I was glad to be free, I was
glad to be alive. I was so happy that I could see my parents. I
pushed everything away. Even what he’d said. Even
you.

Forgotten.
Her thoughts were grim.
The riddle on Olga. The last lines. Even if you perceive me, you
know me not. Before you can tell me…

What I’ve forgotten.
Gideon finished
it.

He didn’t put you in his hidden place
because he had something else there
. Leonie’s face contorted in
the horror of comprehension.
He had another child there
.

He said he had something to do first.
Something to take care of. Something to get rid of.
Gideon’s
horror was equally revealing.
Oh, my God. I hope he was dead
already. They never found anything like that. Roosevelt would have
told me. So perhaps he was dead already so he
didn’t…suffer.

A little child waiting in the darkness,
groggy with drugs, not knowing what was happening, never to
understand why. No one would ever come to discover them. Alone in
the darkness, without food, without water?

Gideon.
Leonie was grim.
What
if-
Then she found herself at the back of the ridge and the
dirt trek immediately terminated.
I’m here. I’ll go and look
around and see if he left us another message. Maybe I can “sense”
something about Keefe.
She wiped the back of her hand across
her face and only then realized that she was crying silent tears
that dribbled like fast running streams down her cheeks. Resolute,
she turned off the ignition of the Explorer and got out, taking the
keys with her.
Try to keep out of my head, Gideon. I don’t need
the distraction.

His thoughts were bleakly grim and Gideon
didn’t answer her.

She didn’t have a flashlight but her eyes
quickly adjusted to the dimness of the night. Glancing at her
watch, she pressed the light button to see the time and saw with a
flash of bright blue illumination that it was after midnight. A
little joke about it being the witching hour died on her lips
because some indefinable thing made her shiver.
And it’s not
even close to being cold.

The moon, just a sliver short of being full
and round, was beginning to rise in the east. The top of it was
intermingled with a distant line of tall trees that edged the far
end of the cotton fields. That and the diffused light from the
stars above would be the only guide she had.

Leonie mounted the ridge, riddled with brush
that hadn’t been cleared in a hundred years; it was a waste
depository for debris from the fields that had slowly developed
into a crest of derelict vegetation. Going slowly and carefully,
she tripped once over some rusting bailing wire and decided that
cotton hadn’t been the only thing grown in these fields.

Previous to leaving her house, she’d
deliberately changed into darker clothing to mask her coming and
going. A black T-shirt hung to mid-thigh, something that had been
left in the cottage by a previous owner. It had a faded Van Halen
motif on the front. In the back of one of the tiny armoires that
she used for closets, she had found her only pair of black pants,
cords that were a little tight in the waist. Leonie had quickly
braided her hair into a thick length that hung down the middle of
her back, not wanting it to get into the way.
Ready for
trouble
, she thought wryly and proceeded toward the bottom of
the ridge.

In the distance the shape of the house could
be seen silhouetted against the stars. A weak yellow light
glittered in the front. Two of the windows had lights in them but
the shades were pulled down. Either someone was still in the house
or the sheriff’s deputies had simply forgotten to turn off the
lights. Leonie was counting on the latter.

To one side of the house sat the barn.
Several other small buildings dotted the landscape behind the
house. Leonie knew one of these was where a cotton gin would have
been located at one time; its weathered gray boards were splintered
with disrepair and neglect. Another building off of the barn looked
to be an old chicken coop. A third that was closer to her was a
small simple one with metal walls that covered the controls to the
irrigation systems.

Leonie threaded her way through the cotton
fields. She kept to the side of one of the irrigation canals and
was relatively unmolested by the prickly cotton bushes. Slowly the
sounds of the night resumed and she abruptly was aware that the
world had been eerily silent while she had made her way down the
ridge to the fields. An owl hooted in the distance, counseling the
nightlife that he was actively seeking his next meal and let all
field mice beware. The crickets began to howl with mating calls to
their potential partners. Then a warm mischievous breeze blew in
from the west with a low whistling hum, whipping her braid up over
her shoulder.

Passing the irrigation building, Leonie
paused for only a moment. It was dead and empty. She could sense
that Gideon was paying close attention to her now, his mind focused
on what she was doing. His thoughts were thankfully kept to
himself.

Keefe.
She thought. The name drew
itself out like a plea to the gods.
Has Keefe ever been
here?

Never. I visited them in Shreveport. But
they were going to come later this year. When it gets cooler.

Leonie tilted her head.
Wherever he
is
, she closed her eyes and let her mind go,
he’s not here
and he’s never been here.
It was the punctuation to what she’d
already decided. That little boy who had pulled at her and most
likely saved her life as surely as she had saved his, wouldn’t have
been transformed into the monster that had tainted his young
life.

Gideon’s thoughts were grimly sarcastic.
That certainly doesn’t mean I didn’t take him. It just means I
didn’t bring him there.

Leonie sighed
. What am I looking
for
?

The forgotten
. It slid out of Gideon’s
head as if attached to an anchor dropped into a bottomless well of
water, dropping endlessly into nothingness.
We’re looking for
something forgotten
. His hesitation held puzzlement with
himself.
I… I... Oh, shit. I don’t know where that came
from.

Leonie entered the shadow of the house and it
enveloped her like the wide arms of a long missing loved one,
desperate to see her and never let her go. She silently went around
one side of the house and kept in the darkest parts where light was
never allowed to go.

Gideon’s thought came to her, a whisper of
consciousness on a gentle breeze
. Careful.

Deciding against using the wraparound porch,
Leonie kept to the ground and cautiously picked her way around so
that she could see the front of the house. The feeble yellow light
in front illuminated a pool that showed a gravel driveway that
culminated in a gentle circle. The stone columns of the porch were
cool under her touch as she peeped around the last corner, seeking
something or someone that she fully expected to be there.

Nothing moved. The breeze from the west
stopped as abruptly as it had started, leaving naught in its wake.
Her eyes scanned the road and she blinked as someone suddenly
flicked a cigarette lighter. A deputy was sitting in a patrol car,
lighting a cigarette and smoking while he watched from a hundred
yards up the road, parked beside one of the massive cottonwoods
that lined the last part of the driveway. While the lighter was on
she saw that he sat with the door open and the car’s interior light
disengaged, his legs hanging out the side of the departmental car.
Bored and restless he fiddled with the lighter and finally lit the
cigarette dangling out of the side of his mouth.

Leonie blinked again and the light was gone.
If she hadn’t been looking at that particular spot at that
particular time she wouldn’t have seen him. She wouldn’t have known
she wasn’t alone. She didn’t know what would happen to her if she
were caught on Gideon’s property, but it couldn’t look good for
Gideon at all, or for her. And Scott would most likely have fits,
if he believed anything at all coming out of her mouth.

Well, he didn’t arrest you to begin with.
What does that tell you?

The unexpected thought from Gideon made
Leonie start
. Stay out of my head for the time being. I’m
already nervous enough.

I know. It’s like a beacon. Its making you
broadcast like a floodlight. Don’t think I’m going to sleep much
tonight. All right. I’m quiet from here on out.

Leonie retraced her steps around the back of
the house and went on the other side toward the barn. She was
mentally calculating the odds of two deputies being put on Gideon’s
property to watch the place. Budgetary problems would prevent Scott
from doing that. The county commissioners were already bitching
about last Saturday’s expenses from the evidence team out of
Dallas. It was expensive to track down criminals. But Scott was
weighing the costs against another child being taken and worse.

The barn. Something in the barn.

It was an involuntary thought. Leonie was
dazed. She wasn’t sure if it were Gideon or she who had made the
thought, but there was something about the barn that was drawing
her inexplicably toward it. There was a back entrance that had a
rusting padlock on it. Her fingers touched it for a moment and
hesitated.

Just pull the whole thing off.
Gideon
had lost any remaining sarcasm. All that was left was intense
concentration on what she was doing. Concentration and anticipation
of what she might be able to find.
The woodscrews were stripped
probably before we were born. And I never had the key.

It clanked as Leonie did just that. She
lowered the heavy padlock and attached hardware to the ground and
left it there. The simply made wooden door pulled back with a faint
protest of rusted hinges and revealed nothing but the blackness
inside the barn.

Leonie took a breath and stepped inside. She
waited for her eyes to adjust but the darkness was overwhelming
inside.

You’re in the narrow part of the back. Don’t
go to the left or right too far or you’ll trip over old tools. If
you can just feel your way into the main barn there’s a light over
the workbenches. I don’t think it can be seen from the road and the
deputy is facing the wrong way.

Gideon’s thoughts were reassuring in the
tremendous gloom that surrounded her. The door behind her clunked
shut and made her jump again. Another deep breath and she steeled
herself. This time he was leading her through the darkness,
although no one was chasing her through the shadows of a distant
attic.

Leonie slowly made progress, barking her
skins once on something metallic and causing her to bite her
tongue. The coppery taste of blood filled her mouth and she wiped
her mouth nervously before inching forward again. Then she had a
thought.

I can use the little blue light on my
watch. It won’t be much, but it’ll be better than nothing.
She
raised her wrist up and used the index finger of her other hand to
press the little button.

And someone in a deputy’s uniform was
standing in front of her, less than a foot away, his face cast in
defining blue shadows, a smile cutting across his face. Before
Leonie had time to shriek, his arms were around her, spinning her,
carrying to the ground, crushing her into decaying hay and
earth.

Gideon’s thoughts were frantic.
Leonie?
Leonie! What is it?

But on top of the thoughts in her head,
Leonie heard the other words. His words were whispered into her
ear, his voice low and unidentifiable through the clash of her
flailing limbs. He wasn’t even breathing hard as he held her into
the harsh grime below. “I thought it would be you. Luckily for me,
I’m a boy scout. Always prepared.”

Something very sharp was driven into the
fleshy part of her shoulder, right through the T-shirt, and Leonie
swallowed a mouthful of dirt while she was struggling to break free
and scream. Whatever it was burned into her bloodstream and she
fought harder to rend herself free, but failure was a bitter taste
of blood and earth as her body rapidly began to weaken.

Gideon. Oh, I messed up.

Leonie! Keep fighting! Keep fighting!
Gideon’s desperation colored his thoughts and she knew that he
wasn’t just thinking the thoughts, but that he was screaming them
aloud.

The thoughts began to fade, just as Leonie’s
strength increasingly faded. The unknown man in the uniform held
her to the ground, with her face in the dirt, and waited for her to
lose consciousness, either from the drug he had just injected into
her system or from lack of air. He didn’t really care which
one.