The Lovely Bones (15 page)

“I’m Artie, from your sister’s grade.”

“I don’t need any coffins,” Lindsey said, moving her tray down the metalwork to where there was orange juice and apple juice
in big plastic pitchers.

“What?”

“Samuel told me you were building balsa wood coffins for the mice this year. I don’t want any.”

“They changed the competition,” he said.

That morning Lindsey had decided she would take the bottom off of Clarissa’s dress. It would be perfect for the mouse couch.

“To what?”

“Do you want to go outside?” Artie used his body to shadow her and block her passage to the utensils. “Lindsey,” he blurted.
“The competition is about murder.”

She stared at him.

Lindsey held on to her tray. She kept her eyes locked on Artie.

“I wanted to tell you before you read the flier,” he said.

Samuel rushed into the tent.

“What’s going on?” Lindsey looked helplessly at Samuel.

“This year’s competition is how to commit the perfect murder,” Samuel said.

Samuel and I saw the tremor. The inside shakeoff of her heart. She was getting so good the cracks and fissures were smaller
and smaller. Soon, like a sleight-of-hand trick perfected, no one would see her do it. She could shut out the whole world,
including herself.

“I’m fine,” she said.

But Samuel knew she wasn’t.

He and Artie watched her back as she departed.

“I was trying to warn her,” Artie said weakly.

Artie returned to his table. He drew hypodermics, one after another. His pen pressed harder and harder as he colored in the
embalming fluid inside, as he perfected the trajectory of the three drops squirting out.

Lonely,
I thought,
on Earth as it is in heaven.

“You kill people by stabbing and cutting and shooting,” Ruth said. “It’s sick.”

“Agreed,” Artie said.

Samuel had taken my sister away to talk. Artie had seen Ruth at one of the outside picnic tables with her big blank book.

“But there are good reasons to kill,” Ruth said.

“Who do you think did it?” Artie asked. He sat on the bench and braced his feet up under the table on the crossbar.

Ruth sat almost motionless, right leg crossed over left, but her foot jiggled ceaselessly.

“How did you hear?” she asked.

“My father told us,” Artie said. “He called my sister and me into the family room and made us sit down.”

“Shit, what did he say?”

“First he said that horrible things happened in the world and my sister said, ‘Vietnam,’ and he was quiet because they always
fight about that whenever it comes up. So he said, ‘No, honey, horrible things happen close to home, to people we know.’ She
thought it was one of her friends.”

Ruth felt a raindrop.

“Then my dad broke down and said a little girl had been killed. I was the one who asked who. I mean, when he said ‘little
girl,’ I pictured
little,
you know. Not us.”

It was a definite drop, and they began to land on the redwood tabletop.

“Do you want to go in?” Artie asked.

“Everyone else will be inside,” Ruth said.

“I know.”

“Let’s get wet.”

They sat still for a while and watched the drops fall around them, heard the sound against the leaves of the tree above.

“I knew she was dead. I sensed it,” Ruth said, “but then I saw a mention of it in my dad’s paper and I was sure. They didn’t
use her name at first. Just ‘Girl, fourteen.’ I asked my dad for the page but he wouldn’t give it to me. I mean, who else and
her sister hadn’t been in school all week?”

“I wonder who told Lindsey?” Artie said. The rain picked up. Artie slipped underneath the table. “We’re going to get soaked,”
he yelled up.

And then as quickly as the rain had started, it ceased. Sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked
up past them. “I think she listens,” she said, too softly to be heard. It became common knowledge at the symposium who my
sister was and how I had died.

“Imagine being stabbed,” someone said.

“No thanks.”

“I think it’s cool.”

“Think of it—she’s famous.”

“Some way to get famous. I’d rather win the Nobel Prize.”

“Does anyone know what she wanted to be?”

“I dare you to ask Lindsey.”

And they listed the dead they knew.

Grandmother, grandfather, uncle, aunt, some had a parent, rarer was a sister or brother lost young to an illness—a heart irregularity—leukemia—an
unpronounceable disease. No one knew anyone who had been murdered. But now they knew me.

Under a rowboat that was too old and worn to float, Lindsey lay down on the earth with Samuel Heckler, and he held her.

“You know I’m okay,” she said, her eyes dry. “I think Artie was trying to help me,” she offered.

“You can stop now, Lindsey,” he said. “We’ll just lie here and wait until things quiet down.”

Samuel’s back was flush against the ground, and he brought my sister close into his body to protect her from the dampness of
the quick summer rain. Their breath began to heat the small space beneath the boat, and he could not stop it—his penis stiffened
inside his jeans.

Lindsey reached her hand over.

“I’m sorry…” he began.

“I’m ready,” my sister said.

At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood,
in the walls of hers there were windows.

“How to Commit the Perfect Murder” was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.

W
hen my father woke up at four
A.M.,
the house was quiet. My mother lay beside him, lightly snoring. My brother, the only child, what with my sister attending
the symposium, was like a rock with a sheet pulled up over him. My father marveled at what a sound sleeper he was—just like
me. While I was still alive, Lindsey and I had had fun with that, clapping, dropping books, and even banging pot lids to see
if Buckley would wake up.

Before leaving the house, my father checked on Buckley—to make sure, to feel the warm breath against his palm. Then he suited
up in his thin-soled sneakers and light jogging outfit. His last task was to put Holiday’s collar on.

It was still early enough that he could almost see his breath. He could pretend at that early hour that it was still winter.
That the seasons had not advanced.

The morning dog walk gave him an excuse to pass by Mr. Harvey’s house. He slowed only slightly—no one would have noticed save
me or, if he had been awake, Mr. Harvey. My father was sure that if he just stared hard enough, just looked long enough, he
would find the clues he needed in the casements of the windows, in the green paint coating the shingles, or along the driveway,
where two large stones sat, painted white.

By late summer 1974, there had been no movement on my case. No body. No killer. Nothing.

My father thought of Ruana Singh: “When I was sure, I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him.” He had not told this to
Abigail because the advice made a sort of baseline sense that would frighten her into telling someone, and he suspected that
someone might be Len.

Ever since the day he’d seen Ruana Singh and then had come home to find Len waiting for him, he’d felt my mother leaning heavily
on the police. If my father said something that contradicted the police theories—or, as he saw them, the lack of them—my mother
would immediately rush to fill the hole left open by my father’s idea. “Len says that doesn’t mean anything,” or, “I trust
the police to find out what happened.”

Why, my father wondered, did people trust the police so much? Why not trust instinct? It was Mr. Harvey and he knew it. But
what Ruana had said was
when I was sure.
Knowing, the deep-soul knowing that my father had, was not, in the law’s more literal mind, incontrovertible proof.

The house that I grew up in was the same house where I was born. Like Mr. Harvey’s, it was a box, and because of this I nurtured
useless envies whenever I visited other people’s homes. I dreamed about bay windows and cupolas, balconies, and slanted attic
ceilings in a bedroom. I loved the idea that there could be trees in a yard taller and stronger than people, slanted spaces
under stairs, thick hedges grown so large that inside there were hollows of dead branches where you could crawl and sit. In
my heaven there were verandas and circular staircases, window ledges with iron rails, and a campanile housing a bell that
tolled the hour.

I knew the floor plan of Mr. Harvey’s by heart. I had made a warm spot on the floor of the garage until I cooled. He had brought
my blood into the house with him on his clothes and skin. I knew the bathroom. Knew how in my house my mother had tried to
decorate it to accommodate Buckley’s late arrival by stenciling battleships along the top of the pink walls. In Mr. Harvey’s
house the bathroom and kitchen were spotless. The porcelain was yellow and the tile on the floor was green. He kept it cold.
Upstairs, where Buckley, Lindsey, and I had our rooms, he had almost nothing. He had a straight chair where he would go to
sit sometimes and stare out the window over at the high school, listen for the sound of band practice wafting over from the
field, but mostly he spent his hours in the back on the first floor, in the kitchen building dollhouses, in the living room listening
to the radio or, as his lust set in, sketching blueprints for follies like the hole or the tent.

No one had bothered him about me for several months. By that summer he only occasionally saw a squad car slow in front of
his house. He was smart enough not to alter his pattern. If he was walking out to the garage or the mailbox, he kept on going.

He set several clocks. One to tell him when to open the blinds, one when to close them. In conjunction with these alarms,
he would turn lights on and off throughout the house. When an occasional child happened by to sell chocolate bars for a school
competition or inquire if he would like to subscribe to the
Evening Bulletin,
he was friendly but businesslike, unremarkable.

He kept things to count, and this counting reassured him. They were simple things. A wedding ring, a letter sealed in an envelope,
the heel of a shoe, a pair of glasses, an eraser in the shape of a cartoon character, a small bottle of perfume, a plastic
bracelet, my Pennsylvania keystone charm, his mother’s amber pendant. He would take them out at night long after he was certain
that no newsboy or neighbor would knock on his door. He would count them like the beads on a rosary. For some he had forgotten
the names. I knew the names. The heel of the shoe was from a girl named Claire, from Nutley, New Jersey, whom he had convinced
to walk into the back of a van. She was littler than me. (I like to think I wouldn’t have gone into a van. Like to think it
was my curiosity about how he could make a hole in the earth that wouldn’t collapse.) He had ripped the heel off her shoe
before he let Claire go. That was all he did. He got her into the van and took her shoes off. She started crying, and the
sound drove into him like screws. He pleaded with her to be quiet and just leave. Step magically out of the van barefoot and
uncomplaining while he kept her shoes. But she wouldn’t. She cried. He started working on one of the heels of the shoes, prying
it loose with his penknife, until someone pounded on the back of the van. He heard men’s voices and a woman yelling something
about calling the police. He opened the door.

“What the hell are you doing to that kid?” one of the men yelled. This man’s buddy caught the little girl as she flew, bawling,
out of the back.

“I’m trying to repair her shoe.”

The little girl was hysterical. Mr. Harvey was all reason and calm. But Claire had seen what I had—his look bearing down—his
wanting something unspoken that to give him would equal our oblivion.

Hurriedly, as the men and woman stood confused, unable to see what Claire and I knew, Mr. Harvey handed the shoes to one of
the men and said his goodbyes. He kept the heel. He liked to hold the small leather heel and rub it between his thumb and
forefinger—a perfect worry stone.

* * *

I knew the darkest place in our house. I had climbed inside of it and stayed there for what I told Clarissa was a whole day
but was really about forty-five minutes. It was the crawlspace in the basement. Inside ours there were pipes coming down that
I could see with a flashlight and tons and tons of dust. That was it. There were no bugs. My mother, like her own, employed
an exterminator for the slightest infestation of ants.

When the alarm had gone off to tell him to shut the blinds and then the next alarm, which told him to shut off most of the
lights because the suburbs were asleep after that, Mr. Harvey would go down into the basement, where there were no cracks
that light could peek through and people could point to, to say he was strange. By the time he killed me he had tired of visiting
the crawlspace, but he still liked to hang out in the basement in an easy chair that faced the dark hole beginning halfway
up the wall and reaching to the exposed baseboards of his kitchen floor. He would often drift off to sleep there, and there
he was asleep when my father passed the green house at around 4:40
A.M.

Joe Ellis was an ugly little tough. He had pinched Lindsey and me under water in the pool and kept us from going to swim parties
because we hated him so much. He had a dog that he dragged around no matter what the dog wanted. It was a small dog and couldn’t
run very fast, but Ellis didn’t care. He would hit it or lift it painfully by the tail. Then one day it was gone, and so was
a cat that Ellis had been seen taunting. And then animals from all over the neighborhood began disappearing.

What I discovered, when I followed Mr. Harvey’s stare to the crawlspace, were these animals that had gone missing for more
than a year. People thought it stopped because the Ellis boy had been sent to military school. When they let their pets loose
in the morning, they returned in the evening. This they held as proof. No one could imagine an appetite like the one in the
green house. Someone who would spread quicklime on the bodies of cats and dogs, the sooner for him to have nothing left but
their bones. By counting the bones and staying away from the sealed letter, the wedding ring, the bottle of perfume, he tried
to stay away from what he wanted most—from going upstairs in the dark to sit in the straight chair and look out toward the
high school, from imagining the bodies that matched the cheerleaders’ voices, which pulsated in waves on fall days during
football games, or from watching the buses from the grammar school unload two houses down. Once he had taken a long look at
Lindsey, the lone girl on the boys’ soccer team out running laps in our neighborhood near dark.