Sing It to Her Bones (6 page)

“I would certainly hope so!”

“Let it rest, Hannah! I can’t believe you’re still standing up asking silly questions after the day you’ve had. It makes me tired just to look at you. Do you want dinner?”

We agreed to let tea substitute for dinner; then I tried calling Paul. When I got the answering machine again, I left him a grumpy message, then collapsed in the living room to watch the seven o’clock news. After Tom Brokaw bade us good night, I let Connie have dibs on the tub because I was too weary to get up. I lay in front of the TV, like a lump, my feet propped up on the arm of the sofa and in sole, proud possession of the remote control. I used it to graze through the channels. Earlier Connie had poured us each a glass of heart medicine: red wine. The stem of my glass rested on my stomach so that the ruby liquid sloshed from side to side as I breathed.

Connie wasn’t much for modern gadgets; she had owned an answering machine once, but could never
figure out how to program it. While she soaked in the tub, I lay on the sofa and grumbled to myself about Connie’s aversion to electronic devices. If she had had an answering machine, I complained, there might have been a message on it from Paul when we returned from the Nichols place. At eight-thirty I switched from a mindless network sitcom to a biography of Shirley Temple on A&E. Surely he’d be calling me soon. I drained my wineglass and settled in for the wait. The last thing I remember was Shirley and her bouncing sausage curls dancing up the steps with Stepin Fetchit.

How I got myself into bed is a mystery. I awoke to the sound of gravel crunching. Socks were still on my feet, and my mouth tasted like old navy soup spoons. I drew aside the lightweight chintz curtains and peered out the window. My green Toyota was rolling down the drive with Connie at the wheel. I had blocked her in. Downstairs a note stuck to the door of the refrigerator with a plastic magnet from Pizza John’s informed me that she’d gone to get a newspaper and that she’d be “back in a few.”

I took the opportunity to bathe. With the tub half full and steam already clouding the mirror, I settled into the water, first resting my back against the cool porcelain, then sliding down until I was lying almost flat. I adjusted the hot-water tap to a trickle and watched as the water level slowly rose to cover my thighs and arms, my feet, my chest, and finally, my breast. The right one had once been small, round, and perky like the left one until cancer and a surgeon’s knife had reduced it to a
rough, red rope across my chest. I ran a finger gently along the knotted scar and thought about the reconstructive surgery I was considering.

I sat up, soaked a washcloth in the hot water from the tap, wrung it out, and placed it over my face, covering it completely, breathing in the hot, moist air, breathing slowly, evenly, feeling my body melt into the water. Under the washcloth scenes from yesterday played and replayed behind my closed eyelids. I tried to clear my mind, but images of that white, floating thing kept swimming to the surface. I flung the washcloth aside and tried to concentrate on Connie’s elaborate floral wallpaper, following the wandering vines as they snaked over the medicine cabinet and curled around the light fixtures, but even that didn’t banish the visions. So I meditated, focusing on my mantra instead.

A knock on the bathroom door jolted me awake. “Hannah, are you all right?”

“Sorry, Connie. I must have fallen asleep. I’ll be right out.”

I emerged, wrapped in an oversize terry-cloth bathrobe I found hanging from a hook on the back of the bathroom door, my skin flushed with the heat. Connie sat at the kitchen table surrounded by paper cups of fresh coffee plus a box of assorted doughnuts she told me she had picked up at Ellie’s.

I peeked inside. “Crullers!” My favorite. I took a bite and mumbled, “You
are
a doll.”

Connie finished the last of a chocolate-covered
doughnut, sipped her coffee, then wiped her mouth with a napkin. “Gawd, just think of the calories!”

“Crullers don’t have any calories,” I said. I showed her the hollow core. “See, they’re full of air.”

“Dream on, Hannah. You might as well just paste it on your thighs.”

Connie had purchased three newspapers and spread them out on the table. “I knew you’d be interested in seeing these.” The
Washington Post
didn’t mention our murder at all, at least not that we could find. The
Baltimore Sun
had a small article in the Maryland section, but we had made it big in the
Chesapeake Times
, with pictures. There it was, solidly occupying the treasured spot on the front page usually reserved for marijuana busts, boat fires, fatal traffic accidents, or farmers who had grown misshapened vegetables resembling Newt Gingrich. “Here.” Connie moved her mug aside and smoothed the paper out.

“What does it say?” I leaned forward, still licking the sticky glaze from my fingers.

In the
Sun
I was described as “a woman visiting from Annapolis,” but the
Times
mentioned my name and my hometown and had a small picture of me and Connie, talking to Ellie. I peered at it. “Connie, why didn’t you tell me I looked so dreadful? My wig is crooked.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s your imagination. You look fine.”

“Liar!” I tossed my empty cup into the trash. “Does it say anything about Chip Lambert?”

Connie adjusted her reading glasses and leaned over the page. “Let’s see. ‘The partially calcified body
of a young woman’ blah-de-blah-de-blah. Oh, here we are. ‘Katherine Dunbar was last seen on October 13, 1990, leaving a dance at Jonas Green High School with her date, Charles “Chip” Lambert, also sixteen. Police are awaiting a positive identification of the body before reopening the case.’ ”

I turned the paper slightly toward me.
BODY FOUND IN CISTERN
, shouted the headline, and in smaller type below,
FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED
. Another photograph filled most of the page below the headline: Mrs. Dunbar gazed out from the window of her husband’s truck with sad, unfocused eyes. He stood outside the door, holding her hand.

“I think that image will haunt me forever, Connie. It’s the personification of grief. Even though it’s been a long time since Emily put us through hell on earth by running off after that rock band, one doesn’t easily forget. I know exactly what is running through that poor woman’s mind.” I pushed the newspaper back toward my sister-in-law. “It could have been Emily lying down there at the bottom of that cistern.” My eyes stung with tears. “Eight years she’s been living this nightmare, Connie. Eight years.” I touched the photograph of Mrs. Dunbar. “But by the time this is all over, at least she’ll know, one way or the other.”

While Connie did the laundry and painted, I spent the rest of the day trying to make sense out of her accounts, which consisted of a spiral-bound notebook full of nearly indecipherable scribbles and a shoe box stuffed full of invoices, check stubs, and receipts. I was
so caught up alternately worrying about Connie’s slovenly bookkeeping habits and the poor Dunbar family that I forgot to worry about why Paul still hadn’t returned my call.

chapter

5

It rained all the next night. Great explosions
of thunder rattled the windows, followed before I could finish chanting “one one thousand” by zigzags of lightning that sliced through the dark and scented the air with ozone. When I awoke at eight, the rain had stopped, but clouds still plastered the slate gray sky and patches of fog hovered over the low-lying fields. I breathed in the sweet, damp air and felt immensely content. Until I remembered. Rain. The cistern would be full again.

I had planned to spend the day lounging around the house reading one of the paperbacks I had brought with me. A dozen mysteries lay under my bed, jumbled up in a plastic grocery bag. I never dreamed when I packed them up in Annapolis that I’d be walking right into a real-life mystery a few days later. I was sitting
cross-legged on the floor, browsing through the pile, trying to decide whether to revisit a favorite Dick Francis,
Reflex
, or to launch into the latest Sue Grafton when Connie tapped lightly on the door.

“Hannah? You up?” The door eased open, and Connie’s tousled head appeared.

“Just picking out the day’s reading material.” I waved the Sue Grafton at her,
N
Is for Noose
. “What do you suppose she’ll do for titles after she gets to the end of the alphabet?”

Connie plucked the book from my outstretched hand and scanned the blurbs on the back flap. “Oh, I don’t know. How about starting over? AA is for Alcoholics Anonymous, BB is for Gun.” She set the book down on top of the dresser. “I gave up on Grafton somewhere around the letter J, I think.” Connie turned apologetic. “Hannah, I was wondering. Could you help me pack up my gourds this morning?”

I saw my nice, quiet day sliding down the tubes. I shrugged. “Sure. Why not?” I tried to sound enthusiastic about helping prepare the shipment, but I really just wanted to get it over with.

A few minutes later, in the kitchen, I grabbed a bagel and a cup of coffee and tried to call Paul at home. I got the message you get when the line is busy, which meant he was either talking on the phone or logged on to the Internet. I suppose the phone could have been off the hook, too, or out of order, but my bet was he was slogging through his E-mail. So what the hell was going on? Paul might have missed seeing the article in the
Sun
, but there was no way he could have missed my messages. I was becoming seriously annoyed. Too bad Connie didn’t have a computer and a modem. I could have E-mailed my husband a nasty-gram.

In the studio I lounged against the workbench for a few minutes, munched on the bagel, and watched Connie work. My gawd, the woman was disorganized! She’d unfold a box, tape it up, then get distracted by something on one of the pieces she was packing, take it over to the window, turn it from side to side, squint … it drove me nuts.

“You won’t finish until sometime in the next century if you keep checking everything like that. You need to set up an assembly line.” I unfolded six boxes, taped down the flaps, lined them up, and filled each with a layer of plastic peanuts. Then I rolled each precious object in protective bubble wrap and snuggled it down into the bed of peanuts. After an hour of this I was decorated in peanuts. They clung by static electricity to my sweatshirt and jeans and dangled from my chin, but we had ten packed boxes and left a wall of empty shelves.

Colonel, who had been observing all this activity with one eye open, head resting on his paws, a plastic peanut stuck to his right ear, followed us outside and trotted behind Connie as she went to the barn. Connie swung the barn door wide, while I tried to brush the peanuts off my clothes, but they clung stubbornly to my hands and fingers. As I shook my hands vigorously, I heard a door slam and a reluctant engine
grind, sputter, and cough into life. I just had time to think,
Don’t tell me Connie is still driving my father-in-law’s old Chevy truck
when the familiar vehicle, scaled with rust, emerged from the barn. Connie’s head protruded from the window of the ancient truck, looking back over her left shoulder because the side view mirror was long gone. She backed up to the studio door, dismounted, and unhooked the tailgate.

“Isn’t it a mess? I have to keep a trickle charger on the battery.”

I had to agree it was a sorry heap. Once bright red, the finish had faded over the years to a dull pink, and the chassis sat crookedly on four tires, all completely bald.

It took only a few minutes to load the boxes into the back of the truck—they were bulky but quite light—and lock up the house. Soon we were bouncing down the drive—the shock absorbers also belonged in a museum—and I kept looking through the rear window to make sure the boxes were still with us, hoping I’d used enough bubble wrap. As Connie turned right to follow the road into town, I slid sideways on the dry vinyl seats. No seat belts, either.

Just past the Baxter farm, the narrow road curved sharply right and widened into Church Street, named for St. Philip’s Episcopal nearly a half a mile away, at the stoplight where Church Street intersected with High. Church Street wound through a pleasant, tree-lined, residential neighborhood, dominated by large family houses built in the twenties and thirties. About halfway down, Connie slowed and pointed to a modest
gray dwelling on our right, with a wraparound porch and neat white trim.

“That’s the Dunbars’,” she said.

A familiar truck was parked at the head of the drive, and behind it sat a black Lexus with Virginia plates. “Wonder who that is?” I asked. Connie shrugged.

At the stoplight Connie turned left on High. Just past the cemetery she spun the wheel sharply to the left and pulled into one of the unmarked parking spaces in front of Ellie’s Country Store.

I hadn’t been there for several years, but I was pleased to see that Ellie had made an effort to retain the old-fashioned cracker barrel atmosphere of the place. Outside, a wooden porch extended across the front of the building, decorated with turn-of-the-century farm implements, milk cans, and painted metal signs advertising Nu grape, Dad’s root beer, Norka ginger ale (Tastes Better!), Glendora coffee, and various brands of chewing tobacco. Inside, Ellie had added a wood-burning stove since the last time I had stopped by and had scattered a few solid-looking wooden crates about, sturdy enough for customers to sit on. Between two of the crates sat an old nail keg that served as a table for a well-worn chess set. A modest selection of groceries and sundries occupied shelves that ranged out to the right of the door, and on the left a counter ran the length of the room. Behind the counter double doors led to the kitchen. I heard the chink and clink of dishes and glasses being washed.

Ellie had an alcove in the back where she handled
UPS. When we came in, she was standing there with a customer, weighing a large box.

“It’s going all the way to California, Mrs. Foster. That’s why it’s so expensive. They go by zones.”