Bone by Bone

9

I found out what they want." Dave Hardy stood at the door to the sheriff's private office. He raised his voice to be heard above the noise from the street-side window. "That maggot, Ferris Monty-he told them you arrested Oren Hobbs."

Traffic in Saulburg was snarling, horns honking. The parking lot was full, and latecomers double-parked in front of the building. One reporter brazenly pulled up onto the sidewalk. Cable Babitt stood at the window, frowning. "I suppose it would be wrong to shoot them." He glanced back at his deputy. "Son? Just make them all go away."

"How?"

Cable joined him at the door and pointed to another deputy in the outer room. "Take John with you. Go out there and ticket the crap out of all those cars and vans. Then you can just let it slip that Oren's gone somewhere else-anyplace that's not Saulburg."

Outside on the street, while writing tickets and slapping them on windshields, the new recruit, Deputy Faulks, flirted with the pretty woman who tagged after him, microphone in hand. When they were within earshot of two other reporters, he answered her twice repeated question. "My guess? Hobbs is probably hiding out in the Coventry Library."

The newswoman tilted her head to one side. "You're kidding, right? Why would he go there?"

Her colleagues were turning their heads, staring at the deputy, and he called out to them, "It's the perfect hideout! Nobody in Coventry ever goes to the library!"

Three reporters raced for their cars. Others in the pack picked up the scent and followed. But one camera was still filming when Deputy Faulks turned around to receive a bloody nose from Dave Hardy's fist.

"Cop fight!" yelled the cameraman.

The radio was tuned to a local jazz station. The delivery boy had come and gone. And civility was provisionally restored at William Swahn's house.

Oren sat on the floor, eating a slice of hot pizza and drinking a second cold beer with his host. He had not given up any details of the sheriff's case, not a word about finding the bones of a second victim. For now, the prospect of a multiple homicide was only a rumor on the radio during the newsbreak.

Swahn appeared to give the idea no weight. "Next, they'll be saying there's a serial killer in the neighborhood."

"Not likely." Oren drained his beer bottle. "There might be thirty serials at large in a country of six million square miles."

"Right. What are the odds of one finding his way to Coventry? Although," said Swahn, in the tone of an afterthought, "Josh could've been killed to conceal another murder."

The man was left to make what he could of the silence. Oren had not come to this house to collaborate with a suspect. After reading the last interview, he laid it down among the others scattered on the floor all around him. "I don't pull motives out of thin air. I like facts."

Anyone with a secret could have a motive for murder." Swahn opened another envelope and pulled out a thin stack of photographs. "Take your secrets for instance." One by one, he laid out the glossy prints like cards dealt from a deck.

Oren looked down at pictures of himself at the ages of fifteen and sixteen. In one print, his hair had only covered his ears. In the next, it grazed his shoulders. Each one showed him walking down one street or another, oblivious to the stares of middle-aged women turning his way.

"Now Id say those ladies looked a bit hungry." Swahn laid out more pictures in a march across the carpet.

Oren's hair grew longer as he turned seventeen. This succession of snapshots had been taken inside the Water Street Cafe. The pictures were ganged together to represent ten seconds of time passing frame by frame. In the first image, Oren saw his younger self walking near a table of matrons. The next shot focused on one of them, a pretty woman in her forties. Evelyn Straub had just raised her head to look up at him. In the last photo, teenage Oren turned her way for only the click of a camera, and this photograph had captured a clandestine passage, something said in a glance that went unnoticed by the other women at the table. Only lovers had these conversations of the eyes. Only Josh had seen it.

And William Swahn.

"I'm sure Mrs. Straub thought she was being discreet," said Swahn. "Have I made my point? Maybe Josh stumbled on a bigger secret and sold the negatives with the prints. How do you see your little brother as a blackmailer meeting a mark in the woods?"

"No way. He was a decent kid."

"I agree. According to your housekeeper, Josh didn't care anything for money. The boy was only a passionate collector of small dramas."

Oren looked down at the carpet and its covering of Swahn's old interviews with the people of Coventry. There were interesting omissions. "You never questioned Addison Winston. He's a criminal defense attorney- a man with lots of secrets. And what about his wife? Mrs. Winston was a bird-watcher. She was always out in the woods with a pair of binoculars. But you never talked to either of them."

"Everyone's a critic." Swahn, unfazed, ate the last slice from the pizza box and chased it down with beer. "So, tell me, Mr. Hobbs, how did you know about Mrs. Winston's bird-watching forays? Did you ever meet her in the woods? Did her husband know?"

Isabelle screamed at him. Yet Addison Winston still had no regrets about formally adopting his wife's only child, though he sometimes wished the girl had come with a volume control.

"Do something!" Isabelle yelled.

His wife flew about the room, hands waving, tears running down her face, and Sarah's daughter followed after her as the self-appointed handmaiden to a drunk with delirium tremens.

"There's a doctor coming from Saulburg," said Addison.

"She needs help now! She's terrified!"

"Of course she is. Your mother's seeing things that aren't there."

The empty bottle of Scotch was odd. He knew that his wife's secret stash had been restocked. Contrary to what his daughter believed, he did pay attention to Sarah's drinking. By doubling the large tips that the maid received from her mistress, he kept track of the daily consumption of alcohol. However, there was no liquor on Sarah's breath to account for the empty bottle. "You cut off your mother's booze again, didn't you, Belle? That was naughty."

She glared at him with hate, but he had grown accustomed to that. It killed him to see it, and he laughed each time she did it.

"Weaning your mother is a gradual process." He set the bottle down. Hands in his pockets, smiling broadly, he sauntered up to Sarah, who had found the only corner in a circular room, that place where the deep armoire met the wall. She swatted the sleeves of her robe and then raked her fingers through her hair, looking there for bugs that only she could see.

Addison studied his wife as he spoke to her daughter. "I usually start tapering off the liquor supply a few days before the birthday ball. That way she can get through an entire evening cold sober-and no hallucinated creepy crawlies." The lawyer looked down at his watch. "Doctors. They like to make you wait, even when you're paying cash-no taxes." He winked, and Isabelle seemed to find that obscene. So he did it again.

On the deck outside, hungry rats with wings were feeding at the many seed holders fastened to the railing. In her early schoolgirl days, Isabelle had created a pet name for this avian sanctuary at the top of the house, and the child had always regarded him as an intruder here, the bogeyman of Birdland. He caught his reflection in one wall of glass and smoothed back his hair, finding himself rather handsome for a monster.

"She needs help now! Get an ambulance!"

"You wouldn't like that, Isabelle." He knew his wide smile was wholly inappropriate, a display of entirely too many teeth. "They'll put your mother in restraints, and then she won't be able to brush the spiders away. Think of her terror when she's tied down-and the bugs are crawling into her eyes. Is that what you want?" In the ensuing silence, he watched her face turn pale. "No? I didn't think so. Now the good doctor just gives her a shot and knocks her out cold. No fear, no pain."

His expression sobered as he looked in on his wife's invisible world, watching as Sarah brushed small bugs from her nightgown. Ah, and now she batted her hands at a particularly large one. He could always gauge the size of the imagined spiders by the wideness of her eyes. She lapsed into one of her brief intermissions from the horror show in her head. Exhausted, she sank to the floor and covered her face with both hands.

Smiling again, Addison turned to the younger woman, so like Sarah at the same age, though not a stunning beauty-merely pretty. "After the doctor gives her a shot, your mother will sleep for the rest of the day. Tonight, when she wakes up for dinner, she'll drink as much as she likes. You won't even count her shots. Is that clear?"

Isabelle seemed a bit less ruthless now, and he knew that the reason was guilt. She was beginning to understand her own folly, her fault in this- damage. He strolled through the open doors to the outside deck, and she trailed after him.

Addison bent down to look through the eyepiece of a telescope. "Dangerous toy." There was no need to focus the lens. "And powerful. Do you know where this thing is pointing, Belle?" She was Belle to him again, now that she was contrite and more manageable. "This morning, your mother had a perfect view of that jawbone sitting on the judge's porch." Smile in place, he looked up at his daughter. "On a typical day, the most startling thing in Sarah's world is a confused bird migrating in the wrong direction."

All along the curving deck, wings flapped, and pointy beaks sprayed seed in all directions-greedy feeders. He had learned to hate birds.

"Mom didn't even know about the bones until I-"

"No matter. Any change in her routine would stress her out. Even the sight of Oren Hobbs would've been a shock after all these years. But you know that didn't cause your mother's hallucinations." And now, to drive the point home, he said, "In fact, a drink might have helped. Too bad you poured out her bottle. And then you gave her those sleeping pills on the nightstand. Where did those pills come from, Belle? Is that your prescription? You wanted your mother to rest, to sleep-while you went into town… so you drugged her. What a good girl."

He walked back into the room and looked at more damning evidence, the carafe of coffee, the second one today, so said the maid, his spy in Bird-land. "Cold turkey withdrawal-always a mistake-then sedatives and caffeine. What were you thinking, Belle? Your doctorate is in ornithology-not medicine, not chemistry!'

Sarah screamed and ran across the room, as if she could outrun her small tormentors, hands fluttering in a panic, eyes full of fear. Left to her own devices, his wife would have gotten through this day with a pleasant buzz. As usual, she would've passed out after dinner. That was why Sarah was such an early riser. She awoke with the light and the songs of filthy, winged vermin come to feed outside her glass walls-and a good-morning drink to kill the pain.

Addison Winston dropped his smile. "Leave your mother's care to me."

You're not helping her."

"I'm not the one who did this to her." Well, that shut her up. And now, verbal spanking done, he left Isabelle alone with her handiwork, her weeping, frightened mother.

Only three people remained on the Coventry street outside the library. The rest of the reporters and their news crews had departed after failing to construct a jailbreak from Deputy Faulks's offhand comment.

"This is a waste of time," said the young segment producer, and she was not referring to the useless phone as she folded it into the back pocket of her jeans. There was no cell-phone tower within twenty miles of this backward town. She stared at the foothills, perhaps looking there for dinosaurs- something, anything, to film. She turned back to face the middle-aged reporter and attempted to reason with him one last time. "The sheriff told you Oren Hobbs was never under arrest."

"And that's what we lead with," said Reggie Mason. "A hot denial." He closed the door of what might be the last telephone booth in America. It even had a rotary dial-a charming artifact from his youth.

The producer banged on the booth's glass wall.

What the hell was the girl's name?

All of his segment producers were interchangeable, and none of them looked a day over thirteen years of age. This one-deluded child-truly believed that she was in charge of production.

"We're leaving!" she yelled. "Right now!" Turning her back on the phone booth, she climbed into the van and closed the sliding door behind her.

The cameraman would have followed the girl, but Reggie grabbed his arm. "Hold on. The operator's back." He had been placed on hold by a 9-1-1 operator, and now the woman resumed their telephone conversation. "Yes, ma'am… That's right… Yes, it smells."

Reggie cupped the phone's receiver with one hand when the cameraman leaned into the booth and asked, "Is she laughing?"

From the window of the van, the sullen child producer yelled, "Hey, it's time to pack it in!"

The cameraman stared at the small brick building. "Did you read the hours posted on the door? There's nobody in there."

"But the smell." Inspired now, Reggie reopened his dialogue with the

laughing 9-1-1 operator. "I think there's a dead body in the library… Well, it smells like death… So you'll send the sheriff?" After a few seconds, he placed the receiver back on its cradle. "She hung up on me."

The cameraman unstrapped his equipment and laid it down, final notice that his workday was done. "Do you know what a dead body smells like? I don't. You can't make something out of nothing."

Oh, contraire.

Reggie pointed at the library. "Did you see that?"

"What?"

"Something moved in that window."

"Reggie, are you making this up?"

"Where's that lame producer when I need her?" He banged his fist on the side of the van. "Hey, sweetheart. The wind's blowing our way again. I want you to smell something."

"I know Ad Winston was your lawyer," said Oren. "All that settlement money. You must've been a grateful client. Is that why you never interviewed him or his wife?"

After calmly wiping his hands on a napkin, Swahn finished his beer. "He was your lawyer, too, Mr. Hobbs."

What?

"You didn't know?" Swahn wore a satisfied smile. "Judge Hobbs retained him for you right after Josh disappeared. Wise move. You wouldn't give a reason for leaving your little brother alone in the woods. And you wouldn't tell anyone where you were all day and half that night. Your father was probably holding his breath, waiting for the sheriff to turn up at the door every second of every day. He wanted to be ready if it came to a trial. So he hired the best lawyer in the state. That's why I didn't interview either of the Winstons. They couldn't talk to me."

One old mystery was solved for Oren. This explained why he had been left alone after one brief and fruitless interrogation by the sheriff-after time had been allowed for the scratches on his face to heal.

Swahn picked up a sheet of paper attached to a photograph of Evelyn Straub. "You probably noticed-this interviews very short. I'm sure you wondered why. When did this woman ever censor a thought in her head? Absolutely fearless. It took me an hour to find her soft spots and break her."

Evelyn? Oren suppressed a smile. He wanted to laugh at this man, this amateur. Interrogation was not a criminologist's game, and he would pit Evelyn Straub against the best of the best in his own trade. The lady was made of unbreakable stuff. He waved off the proffered piece of paper. "I read it. Seems light."

"Most of her conversation was never typed up for my files." Swahn pulled out a small notebook. "However, I do have a more complete version. It concerns your lack of an alibi for the day your brother disappeared." He fanned the pages to show the handwritten lines-so many.

Oren was backing up in his mind, bracing.

Swahn glanced at the first page of his notes. "I had the feeling that Mrs. Straub knew all your secrets." He looked up and paused for a beat. "And she probably knew about the other women you were sleeping with."

Oren sipped his beer, appearing only mildly curious and keeping to a boyhood habit of never confirming or denying those rumors.

Leaning back against the side of a chair, Swahn dragged out this lull. "Mrs. Straub was very attractive in those days. These past twenty years, she hasn't aged well. And that's odd. You know she has the money to stay young forever."

Absently turning a page in his notebook, the man never took his eyes off Oren. "Your housekeeper asked me to find you an alibi witness. That was my job. She had no inside information about your affairs, but she had eyes. Miss Rice knew the effect you had on females. When she first came to me, her focus was on your refusal to say anything in your own defense. It was her theory that you might keep silent to protect a married woman. So I didn't just single out Mrs. Straub. I talked to all the women posed with you in Josh's photographs. Unfortunately, my efforts backfired. Two women came forward. The two alibis should've cancelled each other out. But the sheriff believed one of those stories. Hers." Swahn tapped the photograph of Evelyn Straub.

"You had good taste, Mr. Hobbs. She was a pretty woman in those days. I liked her. Very jaded-very hip. I figured she was only in it for the sex. A teenage boy never runs out of juice. No real emotion in play. That's why I thought the sheriff believed her when she told him you spent the whole day in her bed. But I was wrong. Later, I discovered she had a prenuptial agreement. If she was caught cheating on her husband, she'd get nothing in a divorce settlement. Mr. Straub was an old man-good as dead. His wife only had to bide her time for another year. But she put everything on the line for you."

Swahn flipped another page, though he never looked down at the lines written there. "I never told Mrs. Straub how I found out about her affair with you. I suppose she assumed that you betrayed her. For all I know, she still believes that. But after I talked to her, she went to the sheriff anyway. You were only seventeen-probably younger the first time she took you to bed-the underage son of a judge. That woman risked a lot more than money." He leaned forward, the better to study the younger man's face when he asked, "Did she tell the truth? Or did she risk everything to lie for you?… Did she love you, Mr. Hobbs?"

Oren looked at his watch. "Time to go." He brushed pizza crumbs from his jeans as he stood up. Extending a hand down to his host, he helped the man to rise from the floor.

Swahn seemed deeply disappointed. He had dug his hole, his trap of words, and covered it over with twigs and branches, but Oren had not fallen in.

That wasn't an idle question." Swahn's limp worsened as he followed his guest into the foyer. "It doesn't matter if Mrs. Straub lied or not. Just consider what she stood to lose."

Oren opened the front door.

Mr. Hobbs, either this woman loved you-or she needed an alibi as much as you did."

"Thanks for the beer and pizza." Oren stepped outside, escaping. He was walking down the driveway when he glanced back.

Swahn had followed to the edge of the portico and now called out to him, "When you report back to the sheriff, ask him about Mrs. Straub's séances in the woods. The judge and Miss Puce go out there to commune with your dead brother."

Oren stumbled and then moved on.