The Bone House (18 page)

    'This
isn't just about Mark,' Terri confided, speaking louder as the wind roared and
covered her voice. 'You understand that, right?'

    'What
do you mean?'

    'I
mean, it's about Glory, too. It would be bad with any local girl, but it's
worse because it's Glory. We all felt sorry because of what happened to her.'

    'What
happened?' Hilary said.

    Terri
stopped. 'You don't know about the fire?'

    'No,
what are you talking about?'

    'Oh,
hell.' Terri checked her watch again.

    'Tell
me,' Hilary said. 'Please.'

    'I'll
give you the short version. It was six years ago. Glory was ten. You know that
Delia has an old place over near Kangaroo Lake, right? Well, she and the kids
lived right across the road from a house owned by a man named Harris Bone. Does
that name ring a bell?'

    Hilary
thought about it and shook her head. 'I don't think so.'

    'I'm
surprised. I figured it would have made the papers, even in Chicago, because it
was so horrible.'

    'What
happened?'

    Terri
sighed. 'Harris Bone was married to a local girl named Nettie. She was a native
from a prominent family, the Hoffmans. They go back decades here in Door
County. It was kind of an odd match. Harris was an only child from Sturgeon
Bay, lived with his mom above a little liquor store there. Not exactly a catch,
but he was a good-looking guy, and I think Nettie wanted a mama's boy she could
push around. She was a piece of work. Always treated Harris like crap, but it
got ten times worse after she wound up paralyzed in a car accident. She got
angry at the world and took it out on Harris. I'd hear their kids talk about
what it was like in the house. The arguments. The screaming. Not pretty.'

    'What
does this have to do with Glory?' Hilary asked.

    'Glory
stumbled into the middle of it on the wrong night,' Terri replied. 'She found a
kitten in the Bone garage and began sneaking out at night to feed it. One of
those nights, Harris Bone came home while Glory was hiding in the garage. The
son of a bitch doused the entire house in gasoline, inside and out, lit up the
place like a torch. Nettie and the boys died. Harris sat there and watched them
burn. No shame, no regret, no guilt. I remember Sheriff Reich saying it was
like he was in a trance.'

    'What
about Glory?'

    'Glory
was in the garage, and the fire almost got her, too. She crawled out through a
hole in the wall, but she'd inhaled a lot of smoke. She spent weeks in the
hospital. She made it, but that's the kind of thing that does as much damage to
the head as it does to the body. People always said the fire made Glory the
kind of girl she was. Wild. Reckless. Promiscuous. Like she was running from
the past.'

    Hilary
found it hard to breathe. Terri was right. It would have been bad with any
girl, but she understood now what it meant to this community to lose Glory. She
remembered what Delia had said in Florida.
I almost lost her once, and I
thought I got a second chance.

    This
was the girl that everyone thought Mark had murdered.

    'I'm
sorry,' Hilary murmured. 'Tresa never mentioned it to us.'

    'Well,
I'm not surprised. We all treated it like it had never happened. I think the
idea was, if you didn't talk about it, it didn't exist. Everyone was trying to spare
Glory. Who wants to remember listening to a family burn to death?'

    'Did
she go through therapy?'

    'I
hope so, but people aren't big on that around here. It's like a character flaw
if you have to see a shrink.'

    'It
must have been hard on Tresa, too,' Hilary said.

    'Sure
it was. She became the forgotten sister.'

    Hilary
shook her head as she considered the wreckage of the Fischers and Bones. People
were fragile things. You scratched the surface and found pain everywhere. When
something bad happened to someone, it had a ripple effect, washing away other
lives as the circles got larger.

    The
two women continued walking slowly toward the school building. They were
already late for the next class.

    'So
Mark's paying the price for Harris Bone,' Terri told her. 'That's part of
what's happening here. People around here are sensitive to the idea of a man
getting away with murder. They don't want to see it happening again.'

    Hilary
stopped and put a hand on Terri's shoulder. 'Getting away with murder? What are
you talking about? You said they found Harris Bone at the ruins.'

    'They
did. Harris was tried, and he got life in prison. A lot of people wished we had
the death penalty in Wisconsin. Most of us thought life in prison was too good
for him.'

    'That's
not the same as getting away with it.'

    'I
know, but Harris escaped,' Terri said. 'He got away as they were taking him to
the Supermax facility in Boscobel. He's been on the run ever since. He's out
there somewhere, hiding.'

    Amy
Leigh's room in Downham Hall at the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay looked
out on the remnants of a cornfield from the previous harvest season. Beyond the
rows of broken stalks, she could see the line of barren winter trees marking
the Cofrin Arboretum that ringed the entire campus, isolating it like an island
protected by an enchanted forest. It was late afternoon on Tuesday, but the
ashen sky made the day look later than it was. Classes had begun again, and she
had psychology books piled on her bed that she needed to read, but she was
finding it hard to concentrate. Rather than working, she kept looking outside
at the desolate field and thinking about Glory Fischer and Gary Jensen.

    She'd
thought about nothing else but the two of them since the bus arrived back in
Green Bay: the girl who'd been found dead on the beach in Florida and the coach
who always seemed to be stripping her naked in his head when he looked at her.

    'Gary
and his wife went rock-climbing in Utah in December,' Amy murmured, studying
the article she'd pulled up on the Internet. She wasn't even aware that she'd
spoken aloud until her roommate rolled over on her back on the opposite bed and
groaned.

    'Are
you on about this again?' Katie asked.

    Amy
took the pen from her mouth. 'His wife died. She lost her grip during the climb
and fell more than two hundred feet. There was no one in that area of the park
but the two of them. If you wanted to murder someone and get away with it, can
you think of a better way to do it? Who knows what really happened out there?'

    Katie
laid the textbook on her bare stomach. She wore a sports bra and loose-fitting
sweatpants. 'I remember you telling me that Gary looked devastated when you saw
him on campus in January.'

    'People
can fake that. What if she found out the kind of man he was?'

    'What
kind of man is he?'

    'He's
a pig. He comes on to all the girls.'

    'So
do half the older men in the world.'

    'It
was in the papers after she died,' Amy said. 'The police in Utah investigated
her death.'

    'The
police are going to investigate any time somebody falls off a cliff. They
didn't charge him with anything, did they?'

    'No.'

    Katie
sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. 'Look, Ames, just because your
coach is a jerk doesn't mean he's some kind of serial killer. First he kills
his wife and now some girl in Florida he doesn't even know? Does that make any
sense?'

    'I
just wonder if I should tell someone. I mean, I think I saw Gary with Glory
Fischer.'

    'You
think?'

    'OK,
I'm not sure.' She added, 'This is personal for me now. Because of Hilary.'

    'She
was your coach. You haven't seen her in years.'

    'Yes,
but you saw the news,' Amy said. 'They're looking at her husband. He's the
prime suspect.'

    'Well,
he knew the girl, and he had a room right near where she was killed, and he had
a grudge against the family. Sounds like he deserves to be a suspect.'

    Amy
took a strand of her curly blond hair and twisted it between her fingers. She
shook her head. 'I remember him. He was a nice guy. Hilary wouldn't marry
anyone who could do something like that. She's way too smart.'

    'Wow,
don't tell me you're that naive,' Katie said. 'If you're going to be a
psychologist, you better learn real fast that you can't trust people just by
looking at them, you know?'

    'Yeah,
I know.'

    Her
roommate got off the bed and grabbed a Green Bay sweatshirt from the top of her
laundry basket and shrugged it over her skinny torso. She peeled off her sweatpants
and squeezed her bare legs into a tight pair of jeans. Sitting on the bed
again, she laced up her sneakers. As she bent over, her glasses skidded down
her nose.

    'I'm
going to dinner,' she told Amy. 'You want to come with me?'

    'I'm
not hungry.'

    'You
sure?'

    'Yeah.
You go.'

    'OK,
whatever. See you later.'

    Katie
left Amy alone in the room. Amy got up and paced back and forth between the
walls, then tried to clear her mind with a series of yoga positions. It didn't help.
She sat down at the desk again and reread the story in the Green Bay paper
about the death of Gary Jensen's wife four months earlier. It was the kind of
accidental tragedy that happened every day. There was nothing suspicious about
it. She was making Gary into a monster in her head for no good reason.

    Amy
called up the home page of Facebook on her computer. She had almost four
hundred friends on the network, including everyone from her high school class
and dozens of dancers she'd met from schools across the country. She did a
search and found the profile for Hilary Bradley, who was one of her friends,
and clicked over to her former coach's home page.

    Hilary's
profile photo showed her on a bicycle somewhere on a tree- lined road. She had
a big smile, her long hair blew behind her, and her blue eyes were hidden
behind sunglasses. She looked happy. Amy figured the photo had been taken where
she lived now, in the rural lands of Door County. Hilary didn't look as if she
had changed much in the three years since Amy had known her in high school in
Chicago. She was pretty and blonde, like Amy, and she was tall and full-bodied,
which was also like Amy. That was one of the things she'd liked most about
Hilary. She wasn't a stick. She didn't make any apologies for her figure. She'd
always told Amy that you could be a big girl and still be graceful and sexy.

    Amy
read Hilary's status on Facebook, which had been posted from a cell phone only
a few minutes earlier. Hilary had written:
I'm having the same bad dream,
and I'd really like to wake up.

    She
didn't have any trouble understanding what Hilary meant. The previous year, she
had followed the trail of events on Hilary's page as her husband faced
accusations of having an affair with a student. Now it was deja vu.

    Amy
clicked on one of the photos on Hilary's profile, which showed Mark Bradley
painting on a Door County beach. Amy had barely known Mark in Chicago, but the
girls who had had him as a substitute teacher had all fallen for him. He was
the kind of teacher who inspired crushes. The strong, sensitive type. Handsome.
Creative. He had it all. You wanted romance, but you also wanted someone who
would make you feel safe in a dark alley. That was Mark Bradley.

    Amy
thought about what her roommate had said. You can't judge people just by
looking at them. She hated to think that her head was upside down about Glory's
death. Gary Jensen might be nothing more than an innocent man whose wife had
died in an accident, leaving him alone and bereft. Mark Bradley, solid, sexy,
married to Amy's idol, might be the evil one. The killer. That was the obvious
answer, and the obvious answer was usually the truth.

    You
can't trust your instincts. Katie was probably right about that, too. Amy
didn't have anything except her instincts to tell her what to think. She knew
Hilary. Through her, she felt as if she knew Mark. She knew Gary, too.