Old School Bones (11 page)

HE wants to run.
Cristo Salvador,
he wants to run. As soon as the first rays of the sun cut through the gap in her curtains. As soon as he knows the sun will rise again. God, he should be fishing. At the canyons right now with his father and Tio Tommy, setting out the gear. Not here. Not with her.

But she holds him in this bed, her bed, her apartment. Hibernia House. Her legs a vice on his waist. So he lies still, looks at her face. A fine face. A sleeping face. All the worry locked away in those legs. Yet the peace of honey and cinnamon in those high cheeks, the thin nose, the crest of the brows. Full, bowed lips to make a man forget he ever felt the harpoon of loss pierce his heart.

She stirs. Eyes opening one at a time. “Tell me this didn’t really happen.”

He kisses her forehead, has no clue why.

“If it’s any consolation, we still have our clothes on.”

She grabs the comforter with her left hand and tosses it off them, looks to see his jeans and knit shirt, her red sweats. Her legs release his waist, then tighten around him again. He feels something contract in her loins. Then his. A testing. A shift of mud.

“You got me drunk on thirty-year-old schnapps.”

“We found someone dead in the attic. I’d say we had a right to do whatever it takes not to just wither up like those bones.”

“Danny’s going to kill me.”

“Who’s Danny?”

“Another fool.”

“Come on, Awasha.”

“You think those bones have something to do with Liberty’s death?”

She has already gone off to work when he gets Lou Votolatto on the line.

“Jesus Christ, Rambo! You didn’t touch anything did you?”

“No way.”

“Good.”

“But I saw. One second I was down on my knees staring into this garment bag, looking at this coat sleeve, the dried-up hand. Next thing I know it’s like something is watching me from back under the folds of that bag. Then I see the eye sockets, teeth, what’s left of a face all tangled up with the uniform.”

“Uniform?”

“Yeah, the Tolchester school uniform: navy blazer, pinstripe shirt, necktie, gray flannel pants, penny loafers.”

“Another kid. A student?”

“Yeah I’d say so. Seems like a little fellow. You know, like maybe just a first former.”

“What?”

“Ninth grader.”

“A boy you say?”

“We’re talking mostly bones here, some skin.”

“Dead that long, huh? Long-ass fingernails?”

“I didn’t look that carefully. Awasha was in pretty bad shape.”

“Pocahontas? The Indian chick was with you, huh? Jesus, Rambo, you are a real fucking piece of work. You go digging around in other people’s attics for dead bodies and you take a date?!”

“She used to live in this place. She was the house monitor, remember? She wanted to know what was in that attic as much as I did.”

“Yeah, right. Don’t kid yourself, Don Juan. She was there for you, not the stiff. Middle of the night. Tell me you weren’t drinking.”

“What’s that have to do with anything?”

“I’m just trying to get the whole picture. You know, like
Scary Movie 6.9,
the one the D.A. will be featuring for the jury after he hauls you off to trial for murder?”

“Murder? All I did was stumble onto a body.”

“In a house posted for no trespassing, in your girlfriend’s ex-attic, in the middle of the night. The same place another kid got killed less than a month ago. Where she got drugged from a can of Red Bull that has yours and Pocahontas’ prints on it. You getting the picture?”

“But Lou, I—”

“You score a little nookie to chase the fright out of your veins?”

“Screw you, man. No. OK, no. Alright?
Jesús Cristo,
I call you for help, and this is what I get? No! She already has a boyfriend. We didn’t have sex, you sick son of a—”

“Good. Score one for the rookie. One smart move in a cascade of fuck-ups … Don’t freaking touch anything. Get the hell out of there.

Pronto,
pal. Meet me at the McDonalds by the Sagamore Bridge in three hours. This could be the clue you’ve been looking for.”

A warm wind is whipping the rain when he starts for the Cape and Votolatto. The rain and melting snow make a slurry out of the back roads as his jeep winds through the hills of Tolchester toward the interstate.

His mind is only vaguely on the road. It has been almost a year since Filipa dumped him, since Tuki disappeared. Eleven months since he has smelled the scent of a woman on his skin, the taste of her in his mouth. And now he feels a low howl stirring beneath his skin.

Her breasts warm against his chest, her pelvis pressing against his hips. They kiss. Long, slow. Her hand feels for him. His fingers under the hem of her bathing suit, slipping along the curve of her thigh. Long legs struggling to clutch his hips to hers. As he sucks on her neck, lost in the garden of her hair. On the beach in the dark. Nassau. Paradise Island. The sky raining stars on her face. Chocolate cheeks tilting toward Venus. Her body a mermaid’s.
Jesús Cristo.
Surf thundering offshore on a reef. Marley singing from the distant bar, “Turn the Lights Down Low.”

The same song playing now on the jeep stereo. Well almost the same song. It’s a remake on the
Chant Down Babylon
CD, Lauren Hill singing a duet with the long-dead Marley.

Hill is just easing into her last chorus, pleading for love, when he sees the SUV or truck in his rearview mirror round the curve behind him. Its paint gleaming in the rain. Silver or maybe white.

Barreling down on his little jeep at twice the speed. The headlights magnesium flares. The pale face of its driver, grinning with wide-eyed delight.

He hears the thud of impact with a guardrail … just before his head snaps forward, his face slams into the airbag.

The green jeep vaults off the road, rolls on its side, plows down a snowy embankment, and settles into a wood of young, white birch.

SHE bites her lip and tells herself it’s not that bad. She can look at him. Must look. He’s alive at least. The bruised and swollen nose and lips will heal. The long, jagged gash on his right cheek, where the gearshift handle ripped him open, will someday just add character to a face that may have been just a touch too pretty before. The broken left wrist secure in its cast.

But the look in his eyes makes her stomach churn. Gone are the soft come-hither eyes. He looks up at her from his bed in Brigham & Women’s Hospital with a gaze that seems a cross between regret and rage.

“Someone tried to kill me.”

“Just try to rest.”

“I want to tell you—”

“It has only been a few hours.” She turns away, cannot look at that devastated face a second longer, stares out the window of his fourth floor room. Rain is still coming down. The piles of snow along the curbs down in the street almost gone now.

“But I need to tell you. Listen!”

“Just listen, sister. Don’t judge me. I have to tell you something, Awasha … Promise not to tell another living soul. Promise! By the Great Spirit, the Medicine Circle, Maushop, and the soul of our father.

She looks up at her twin’s face. The sunburn. The short-and-high cut hair. The slick black stalks just beginning to curl again. He is tall like their father Micah, Strong Deer, was. But thinner. A toy soldier knit of wires and fish bones, unraveling beneath that dress green uniform. Specialist First Class Ronald, Water Bear, Patterson, mustering out of First Battalion, Ninth Cavalry. Right here, right now, on the Vineyard. On the shores of Manemsha Pond. On his own terms.

Saying fuck you to the master sergeants, the generals, the president. Fuck you to FBO Camp Headhunter. Fuck you to sand and MREs. Fuck you to Baghdad. Fuck you Haifa St. Fuck you Talil Square. Fuck you M-16. Fuck you CLP gun oil. Fuck you Camp Independence.

THIS is his independence. He is not going back there, he tells her. No second tour. No more scorching lungs. No more desert. No more land of Allah. Land of flaring wells, skies weeping oil, weeping sin too dark to name. His sin!

“I’m sorry, sister. I have done a terrible thing. I have …”

She sees his lower lip quivering, the tears starting to overflow his eyes. The southwest wind, the breath of Maushop, blowing tears across his cheeks. He tries to wipe them away, but the thin, jagged lines of fluid keep coming, soaking his skin. And hers … as she draws his face close, wraps him in her arms, shudders with his convulsions. Her twin.

“Everything’s going to be all right.”

She says it again. Things will be OK.

“I don’t think so,” he says. “A white truck hit me, ran me off the road. He was laying for me. Do you understand?”

“Maybe it just seemed that way.”

“The driver had this look. Like he knew me. Knew what I had found in the attic. Knew that I’m on the trail of Liberty Baker’s killer. And he was shredding me. I had this weird thought that I could already be dead. That you might already be gone … Gracie too.”

She takes his good hand.

“We’re OK. Don’t worry about us. Get some sleep, Michael. I’ve called your aunt in New Bedford. Your uncle and your father are due back from their fishing trip in two days. You’re safe here. I’ll see you in the morning.”

She presses her head against Danny’s shoulder, smells the subtle scent of ewe in the sweater’s wool as the arms of her lover draw her in.

“Just hold me, please!”

Even at this time of the night, even after the hospital visiting hours are over, the parking garage at the Brigham is full of cars. None moving. When she looks out through the windshield of Danny’s car the place seems a tomb, complete with transports for the afterlife. Florescent lights cast violet pools. But mostly the shadows rule. The mist, the ceiling leaking rain, the concrete walls slimy with dampness.

“Can we go now?”

“Not yet, I need this touching. I’ve been through hell.”

“You know I’m here for you.” She nuzzles Danny’s neck, chest.

“But I’m feeling a little—I don’t know—stupid, I guess.”

“Why?”

“What kind of fool sits in a parking garage at night, for hours, waiting … for a girlfriend who’s off mooning over someone else?”

She lifts her head, searches for Danny’s eyes, finds them. “That’s not fair. Someone tried to kill him. You know that?”

“You believe him? You sure he didn’t just make this up?”

“Why would someone ever invent such a thing? I mean, the poor guy almost died. I don’t think you’re being exactly …”

“Hey, why was he even in Tolchester? Shouldn’t he be fishing or something?”

She takes a deep breath, not sure she wants to tell about the Club Tropical. Or the rest.

“We heard a rumor about a kind of clubhouse for a secret society in Hibernia House.”

“You went looking?”

“Yes.”

“You and him. He’s gotten to be kind of a nosy guy, don’t you think?”

“I wasn’t going in that place alone.”

“You could have taken me.”

She kisses the heal of Danny’s jaw. “You’re right. It was a really dumb idea, but …”

“But. But you didn’t find anything, right? He was going back to wherever. To New Bedford?”

“We found a room. In the attic. A hidden crawl space with loose floor boards. There was a body.”

“No way!”

“Mostly bones. And a school uniform like they used to wear when Tolchie was a boys school.”

“Another dead kid?”

“This one sure wasn’t suicide.”

“Did you call the police?”

“We were going to do that today, but now.”

“Don’t do it.”

“What?”

“Maybe the fisherman’s right. Maybe someone really did try to kill him. Maybe keeping that room and that body a secret is important enough to kill for.”

“You think this has something to do with Liberty, too? This body’s a clue to who killed her?”

“My advice is to leave it alone. Unless you want to end up like Liberty or your pal Michael.”

“What do you mean?”

“If anything happened to you, I … Can you just let Liberty rest in peace?”

“But—”

“Walk away from that house for good. Leave that room the way you found it. Close up the floor on those bones. I’ll give you a hand.”

“But after what has happened, how can we be sure any of us is safe? I mean, Liberty and another child are dead. Look what happened to Mi—”

“Did you let him make love to you?”

GRACIE hears the shouting even before she reaches the side door to Beedle Cottage. She has forgotten the novel
Heart of Darkness
in her bedroom. Needs the book for English class, has hiked all the way across campus in the rain to get it.

Now this. Shrill women’s voices. And Bumbledork’s bark.

She can see him through the living room window, pacing in front of the dean and Doc P who sit side-by-side on the couch. She knows that scowl on the headmaster’s face. The bully, the dickhead.

But she is not used to seeing fear in the eyes of these women, a gray pall on their faces.

She backs away from the window so they cannot see her.

Something’s going down in there. Like maybe this is about her little excursion on the Red Line, and that Brazilian bar, yesterday. Maybe Bumbledork thinks the dean and the doc have not been aggressive enough in their supervision, punishment.

She wants to listen. But from outside, all she can hear are the high and low notes of the voices. No words.

When she reaches the side door of Beedle Cottage that enters into the back stairwell, she squeezes the latch slowly, softly, until it releases. She unlaces her Doc Martens, leaves them and her black umbrella on the threshold. Slips inside in her stocking feet. Does not move until the voices swell in fierce debate. Then she tiptoes up the back stairs to her room, grabs the novel she needs off the floor by her bed, starts down the stairs again. Voices in the living room swell and fade, her ears a cheap radio tuned to a distant station.

Until she hears Bumbledork’s posh Midlands accent utter Liberty’s name and launch into a tirade.

She stops halfway down the stairs, puts her right ear to the wall separating the stairs from the living room. Listens.

“Do you have any idea the kind of things that child wrote in her journal?”

One of the women groans.

“Well, I’ll bloody well tell you. Enough dynamite to make the three of us look like fools and knaves and … You get the picture?”

A long silence. She feels sweat starting to bloom on the back of her neck. The rain makes a low drumming sound on the roof and the half-frozen ground outside.

Finally a woman clears her throat. The dean speaks.

“Don’t worry, Malcolm. Everything is under control. What happens behind closed door stays behind closed doors.”

He says something under his breath she can’t understand until he clears his throat, booms, “Dr. Patterson, do you think you can let sleeping dogs lie? Can we all be on the same page here? For the good of the school?”

Gracie gags at his clichés, calls him a filthy prick in her mind. Holds her breath until her mentor breaks the silence.

“Why not, Dr. Sufridge?! Sure. But maybe Gracie Liu and I have over-stayed Denise’s hospitality here at Beedle Cottage. We should find permanent accommodations, don’t you think? Say, back in Hibernia House?”

She pictures Bumbledork’s face scalded red with Doc P’s proposal. Her
quid pro quo.

Then she slips into her shoes, slides out the door, heads for English class. Wondering whether Doc P wants to move back to Hibernia House to take a longer look at the Club Tropical, to investigate it in depth, to protect the evidence. The clues to Liberty’s killer. Maybe stuff she doesn’t even know about.