The Bone House (34 page)

    Hoffman
rooted his feet so Mark couldn't pass. 'Nobody thinks I've got the courage, but
I do. I'm going to make sure you get what's coming to you.'

    Mark
tried to keep a lid on his temper, which raced to a boil. He felt trapped as
people closed in between the aisles. 'My wife and I almost died yesterday, Mr
Hoffman. I'll tell you this only once. If anyone comes after us again, it will
be the last thing they ever do.'

    'You
can't threaten me, and you can't scare me.'

    'I'm
promising you,' Mark said.

    'I'm
not afraid of someone who messes with teenage girls.'

    Mark
was tired of denying it. Tired of protesting his innocence. Angry with the
world. 'Get the hell out of my way,' he snapped.

    'Your
wife knows the truth. I told her. She knows what kind of man you are.'

    Something
snapped in Mark. He couldn't stop himself. By mentioning

    Hilary,
Peter Hoffman stepped across a line that no one could cross. Mark's muscles
wound up into knots, ready to burst. He backhanded his left arm like a club into
Hoffman's chest and shoulder. Despite his military bearing, Hoffman was no
match for Mark's strength. The blow lifted the man off his feet and drove him
sideways, where he crumpled into a card table that collapsed under his weight.
Hoffman dropped, hitting the floor hard. Broken glass scored the man's face and
drew blood.

    'Shit,'
Mark hissed under his breath.

    The
older man squirmed to get up, but he couldn't get his balance. Mark bent over
with an outstretched hand to help the man up, but Hoffman swatted the hand
away. Mark saw rage and humiliation in his face.

    The
crowd closed in on all sides, rumbling with menace around him. Mark's
claustrophobia increased, and the store suddenly felt small. He needed to get
out. He needed a chance to breathe in the open air. He felt arms grasping for
him, trying to wrestle him to the ground like a prisoner, but he pushed past
the people in the store and bolted for his truck.

    Hilary
hung up her phone with a pang of worry. She'd tried to reach Amy Leigh in Green
Bay half a dozen times since the previous night, and each time, the call had
gone straight into voicemail.

    Wherever
Amy was, she wasn't answering her phone.

    She
knew it didn't mean that anything was wrong. The girl had sounded drunk during
her odd phone call. It was possible that Amy was embarrassed about making the
call and was now ducking Hilary's attempts to reach her. Things like that
happened at college parties. You drank too much, and you no longer knew what
you were doing or why. Even so, that wasn't the girl that Hilary remembered.

    Her
former student had always reminded Hilary of herself in her high school days:
confident, bubbly, determined, and sometimes naive. The girl was self-conscious
about her larger frame and determined to make everyone forget it when she was
on the dance floor. Amy was religious, just as Hilary was, and she came from a
solid Chicago family. On the other hand, she was also young, and fun, and prone
to impetuous mistakes, like any student away from home.

    Hilary
just wanted to make sure that Amy was OK. She dialed again. Voicemail. She left
another message. 'Amy, it's Hilary. Listen, sorry to be a pest, but could you
call me back? I'm a little concerned.'

    She
wouldn't have made a big deal of Amy's strange call, but the girl had talked
about Florida in the midst of her ramblings. More than that, she'd said the one
name that made Hilary sit up and take notice.

    Glory.

    Hadn't
she? It had all happened so fast on the phone, and Amy's voice was a drunken whisper,
and Hilary had barely understood the words. Amy had been talking about her
dance coach, Gary Jensen. Then she'd said it. Glory. Or maybe Hilary had simply
had Glory on her own mind, and when Amy said Gary's name again, she'd heard
Glory instead. Maybe she was hearing what she wanted to hear. Maybe.

    Hilary
padded into the kitchen and poured herself a third cup of coffee from the pot.
She wore a roomy sweatshirt, running shorts, and white socks. Her blond hair
fell loosely about her shoulders; it was clean and wet from her shower. Her
body ached, but it was mostly a pleasant ache now. A post-sex ache. She'd come
home not realizing how badly she and Mark needed each other, like both of them
grasping for a lifeline. The result was a wild, almost animal coupling, the way
it had been in the early days, when they were getting to know each other's
bodies. She could still feel him where he'd held her and been inside her.

    It
made her believe in him all over again. He couldn't fake what he felt for her.
There had been a time when she, like Amy, was naive about relationships, but
she'd left that part of herself far behind in her twenties. She had open eyes
about men and about Mark. If Cab Bolton had a witness, then the witness was
wrong. Whatever had happened in Florida, it wasn't what everyone else thought.

    Florida.
Glory.

    Hilary
was sure that Amy had said Glory's name.

    She
took her coffee into their bedroom, booted up her desktop computer, and logged
into her Facebook home page. When she called up a listing of her online
friends, she found Amy Leigh on the third page. She clicked on Amy's profile
and saw that the girl had updated her status at 6:47 p.m. the previous day.

    
Amy's
status read:
I'm going into the lion's den.

    Hilary
didn't think that Amy sounded like a girl heading for a college party. She
reviewed the rest of the girl's profile page and noticed a comment from another
Green Bay student that had been posted earlier this morning.
Hey, Ames,
missed you in class today.

    Hilary
didn't like that at all.

    She
replayed the brief, hushed phone call from Amy in her head. She didn't know if
there was anything she could glean from it. The call itself had only lasted a
few seconds. Even so, whether Amy had said Gary or Glory, she had definitely
mentioned Florida, and more important than that, Amy had been
in
Florida
when everything had happened. She was a dancer, like Tresa. So maybe she saw
something. Or maybe she knew something. What?

    
Amy
talked about her coach.
My coach. Do you know him?

    Hilary
knew most of the college coaches who worked with dancers in the Midwest,
because she'd had to counsel students on choosing colleges, mostly in Illinois,
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. She knew the name Gary Jensen, but she'd
never met the man. His name had made its way around the dance grapevine when
he'd been hired as a physical education instructor at Green Bay and been put in
charge of the dance team. She didn't know much about his background, but from
what she'd seen, he'd done well with the girls. She remembered an email from
Amy two years earlier in which Amy talked about the enhanced physical training
regimen their coach had implemented, which was something Hilary always
emphasized herself. It wasn't just about coordination and practice; it was
about conditioning.

    She
also remembered something Amy had said in her email back then. It was the kind
of throwaway line that a college girl would use.
He's a good coach, if you
can get past the creepy factor.
That was the word she'd used. Creepy.

    Hilary
wanted to know more about Gary Jensen.

    She
visited the UWGB web site and drilled down to the athletics page. She found a
link to the coach's biography in the faculty roster. The first thing she
noticed was that, unlike most instructors, Jensen had no photograph posted on
his page. His bio indicated that he'd taught at the school for four years, and
she thought it was odd that he'd managed to duck the photo shoots for so long.

    His
bio said little about his past. He had a bachelor's degree in physical
education and a master's in educational leadership, both from the University of
Alaska at Anchorage. Based on his years of graduation, Hilary calculated that
Jensen was in his mid-forties. At Green Bay, he taught physical education
classes for freshmen and coached dance and wrestling. What was missing from his
bio was detailed information about his work experience prior to his arrival in
Green Bay. The summary was vague: 'Gary has been an adjunct professor and coach
at colleges in Alaska, Oregon, South Dakota, and Canada.'

    Despite
the lack of specifics, his bio raised no red flags. Even so, Hilary kept
digging, looking for more information about Jensen's past. She found references
to him - or to someone with his name - in articles about sports teams in
Anchorage and Portland, but most of the articles were more than ten years old.
The name was also common enough that she found thousands of pages on men named
Gary Jensen who had no connection at all to Amy's coach.

    Then
she found a headline on one of her searches that caught her attention.

    
COACH'S WIFE DIES IN FALL.

    She
read the brief article from the Green Bay newspaper. Not even four months
earlier, Gary Jensen had lost his wife during a rock- climbing vacation in Zion
National Park. The couple had been married only three years. Jensen was
described as devastated. Heartbroken. The Utah Police had investigated the
incident and found no evidence to suggest the death was anything other than
what Jensen described. A terrible, tragic accident.

    Hilary
wondered. Two violent deaths in four months, and both times, Gary Jensen was
nearby. A coincidence?

    She
of all people knew that smoke didn't mean fire when it came to guilt or
innocence. Mark had suffered when others jumped to conclusions. She had nothing
specific to feed her suspicions about Jensen. No connection to Glory. Nothing
in the man's background. Just Amy's unsettling phone call. And a dead wife.

    Hilary
returned to Amy's profile page. She knew that Amy posted photographs
compulsively, and she found an album dedicated to the girl's dance activities.
The album included nearly one hundred pictures of Amy and her college teammates
in performances and competitions over the past three years. Hilary went through
the pictures one by one, eyeing the backgrounds, trying to find a photo in
which she could spot Gary Jensen.

    She
found three pictures. Jensen wasn't the focus in any of them; he was standing
behind the girls. When she enlarged the photos, she was only able to obtain
two-inch by two-inch squares on her screen, not enough to see his face in
detail. She squinted, focusing on his balding crown of hair and his narrow
face. One of the pictures was in profile, and she could see the sharp V-angle
of his nose. He looked fit and fat-free. She printed out the best of the
pictures, and then she ran another search.

    This
time she hunted for a photo of Harris Bone.

    A man
with no identity could be anyone at all,
she reasoned to herself.
Even a
fugitive with another dead wife in his past.

    The
newspapers had all used the same photo of Bone at the time of the fire, a
face-front shot from his arraignment. Hilary printed that photo and compared
the two. The results were inconclusive. There were some similarities between
the two men, but Hilary couldn't be sure if she was looking at a ghost or a
stranger. If Gary Jensen was Harris Bone, then he'd lost weight in the last six
years and probably had some surgical work done to his facial features. The most
she could say was that it wasn't impossible. On the other hand, the faint
resemblance may have been nothing more than her own wishful thinking.

    Hilary
frowned and rocked back in her chair. The only way to be sure was to know what
Gary Jensen was doing six years earlier, before he arrived at Green Bay, when
Harris Bone was burning down his house in Door County. She ran another search,
and this time she found a brief notice about Jensen's hiring. The article was
no more than three paragraphs long, but it provided her with the one fact she
needed. The university had hired Jensen away from a coaching position at a
private high school in Fargo.

    One
of Hilary's best friends at Northwestern was the director of financial affairs
at the same school.

    She
dialed the number. She hadn't spoken to Pamela Frank in almost three years, but
they still sent Christmas cards and the occasional e-mail. When she reached Pam
at her desk, she was relieved to discover that news of Mark's problems hadn't
made its way to Fargo. The last thing she wanted to do was rehash the events of
the past week. Instead, after five minutes of small talk, she got to the point.