Bone by Bone

13

Though he was off to a late start this morning, Ferris Monty drove his yellow Rolls-Royce into town at the leisurely pace of a longtime Coventry resident. He had sacrificed a night's sleep to review his abandoned notes and false starts, reams of words written many years ago. Fortunately, all the landmarks and most of the people were right where he had left them on the pages of his unfinished opus.

He parked at the curb in front of the public library, a one-room brick building made ludicrous by grand marble pillars and a lintel that overshot the roof. A hundred years ago, when Coventry's only employer had been the sawmill, this building had been the lofty donation-call it a joke- of the town founder, a man who believed that only a handful of his workers could read or have need of more than a few books.

Ferris stepped out of the car, and a small woman with mouse-brown hair caught his eye. She stood on the sidewalk and gaped at him as he turned onto the flagstone path that led to the door. Her hands flew up, fingers fluttering a warning. Ah, but now her eyes turned toward a front window, Perhaps in fear of a watcher, for she thought better of reminding him that no one in Coventry ever goes to the library. He envisioned twitching whiskers when she scurried away, as mice will do when they are in the neighborhood of a cat-or worse.

Oh, definitely worse.

The library door opened onto a room filled with rows of bookshelves, and he walked into a wall of stink. Although the librarian was nowhere to be seen, he knew she was here. The smelly epicenter could only be Mavis Hardy. Her body odor was formidable, even mythic; it was said to have permeated the pages of every book. However, he could hardly neglect to interview a town icon as important as a murderess at large.

He rounded the first bookcase, getting closer-the stink was stronger now-and he resisted the urge to cover his nostrils with a handkerchief. According to legend, Mrs. Hardy took her annual bath on the eve of the birthday ball, but she had not attended one for twenty years. Apparently, the attendant bathing had been allowed to slide.

Ferris Monty still had hopes of going to this year's ball, though the gala's gatekeeper might pose a problem. Well, certainly there would be some fancy tap-dancing around his most recent bad behavior. Addison Winston might wonder why his chosen envoy to the media had sicked reporters on Oren Hobbs-a clear conflict with the lawyer's intentions. But betrayal was mere technicality to an author turned zealot, a born-again writer of real literature. Ferris saw himself as an aging come-back kid and a ruthless Cinderella; he would find a way to go to the ball.

Turning down a narrow aisle of books, he walked slowly, creeping actually, following the sound of heavy breathing. The aisle ended at the center of the room, an open area of tables, chairs and a hulk of flesh wearing a cotton housedress. Ah, there she was in all her smelly unwashed glory, graying brown hair hanging to her shoulders in oily strings. She grunted and glistened with sweat.

What a prize.

He had been told that, though she went barefoot winter and summer, she had always been properly shod for the early birthday balls. It was doubtful that she had worn anything as delicate as high heels. Her well-muscled legs had the girth of tree trunks.

Oh, and now she was turning his way.

His visit to the library-perhaps any visitor at all-must come as a shock. One clue was the woman's slackening jaw. He had never been so close to her, and now he was near enough to count the missing teeth by the gaps in her open mouth-but he had to look up to do it. Mavis Hardy's size was impressive, more muscle than fat, as evidenced by the barbells tightly gripped in her hands. There were other items of bodybuilding equipment on the floor behind her. This argued against the rumor that she was dying, and it gave credence to a theory, oft repeated by the locals, that she could not be killed except by supernatural means.

"Mrs. Hardy, I wonder if I could speak to you?"

"You just did." She held the barbells high above her head.

Did she have it in mind to smash him out of existence? Legs gone to limp noodles, he felt the sudden need for support and sat down at the reader's table. "My name is Ferris Monty."

"I know who you are." The librarian remained standing, lowering and lifting her weights as she counted aloud. "Sixteen. You don't look like the author photos on your book jackets-that true-crime trash. Seventeen. I know they airbrushed those droopy eyes of yours. Eighteen. But damned if I can figure out how they made you look smarter."

He pulled out his bifocals and donned them. "Is that better?"

"Nineteen. Somewhat." On the count of twenty, she set the weights on the floor, then pulled out a chair and sat down next to him, edging closer until he could smell the rot from her mouth of broken and lost teeth.

"I'd like to ask you about Oren Hobbs and his brother, Joshua." On best behavior today-and fearful-Ferris smiled, as if he were dealing with a normal person, a sane person.

The extreme order of military life had been discarded in a single day. The bedroom floor was strewn with cast-off clothes and cowboy boots. Oren's habit of early rising had also been lost. When he stepped out of the shower, it was almost noon-if he could believe the windup alarm clock on his bedside table-the same old clock.

He glanced at Hannah's homecoming gift, the eight-by-ten portrait of two boys in a silver frame, fruit of the purloined roll of film that had been hidden away in his brother's sock drawer. Even if Hannah had not mentioned taking that last roll to the drugstore for development, he would have known that Josh had not printed this picture. Missing was the magic that his brother performed in the attic darkroom. The quality of this print was no match for the ones on the wall.

And where were the other photographs from that last roll of film?

Dressed in the bathrobe he had worn as a teenager, Oren padded barefoot down the hall and entered his brother's bedroom. The last time he was in here, the coffin had been a distraction. Now that it was gone, the room had a timeless quality, and he was in danger of falling into the judge's state of mind-a scary place where old dogs and young boys never died.

The tripod leaned against the wall where Josh had left it on the last day of his life. A pair of sneakers lay on the floor, so casually arranged, as if the boy had just changed into his hiking boots for a walk in the woods. Oren picked up a jacket that had been draped on the back of a chair twenty years ago. He held it to his breast as he lay down upon his brother's bed and lost an hour there, staring at the ceiling.

When he remembered his purpose for coming here-the one odd feature in the bedroom of a teenage boy-he rose from the bed and opened Josh's closet to a familiar mess. The clothes on hangers were jammed together, and the shelf above was packed with magazines, a broken bicycle pump and stacks of cigar boxes favored for catching the smaller items of junk. The jumble seemed about to fall on Oren's head at any second. But the floor of that chaotic space had always been sparsely covered, so orderly As a teenager, he had never found that odd-and now he did.

He knelt down before the closet and took out two pairs of shoes to expose tool marks on the floorboards. He reached up to pull down a coat hanger and used the stiff wire as a pry bar. The boards did not lift easily

It was a few minutes' work to remove them. He reached into Josh's hidey-hole and brought out a thick photograph album.

Private pictures. People's secrets?

Flipping through the pages, he scanned the images and then stopped to linger over one. In this picture, Oren saw himself as a sixteen-year-old boy out walking with the judge on a winter day. Cowboy boots had given him an inch of height, but he had not yet reached the old man's stature. Here, he had been caught in the act of dropping back a step to check out his father's long ponytail, probably measuring it. Though Oren's hair was a good six inches shorter, the judge's hairline had begun to recede in those days, and a bald spot was visible at the back of his head. Oren was smiling in this picture, assured that this was one contest he could not lose.

Come the summer he turned seventeen, Oren was sent away, and his hair was cut off with a razor.

He closed the album.

Why had Josh hidden a roll of film in a sock drawer? Why not stash it with this secret cache in the closet?

Not enough time.

Josh had worn a watch that day; he had been in a hurry to start out for the woods.

The photographs from that last roll were now of greater interest than any film that might be recovered with the rest of his brother's bones.

He lowered the album back into the hole. The boards were replaced, and the closet floor was restored to the way he had found it. Oren returned to his own room to find a clean change of clothes laid out on the bed. Just like old times.

Thank you, Hannah.

But where were the blue jeans he had worn yesterday? He ransacked all the drawers, knowing all the while that this was futile. By now, his dirty clothes had certainly made their way to the laundry room in the basement. Hopping on one foot, then the other, he pulled on the clean pair of jeans as he moved down the hallway. Pants zipped up, he descended the stairs three at a time, calling out, "Hannah!"

"Down here," said a distant voice.

He opened the cellar door and rushed down the cold cement steps to find the housekeeper pulling a load of wash from the dryer. No, no, no!

He bent over her wicker basket and found his jeans still warm from the dryer. He searched the watch pocket for the fur of a yellow dog, his only tie to the grave robber who had left the jawbone on the porch. And, of course, it was gone.

He sat down on the floor and covered his eyes with one hand. Of all the screwups he had ever-

"You should have more faith." The housekeeper squatted down beside him. She looked around at the cluttered shelves, an old trunk and storage boxes that had not yet found their way to the attic. "Oh, the memories in this cellar. Do you recall that little tree frog you crammed into your pocket when you were six years old?" She pointed to the small window in the door of the washing machine. "I'll never forget him-plastered to the glass, spinning round and round. That frog looked so surprised." She patted Oren's hand. "I guess that was the only time I didn't go through your jeans before I washed them." She reached into a deep dress pocket and produced some loose change, a few ticket stubs from his travels-and the fur of a yellow dog.

"You're a goddess." He took the ball of fur from her hand and held it up to the light of a basement window. "Do you know anybody who owns a dog this color? I found this on the porch steps right after the-"

"That dog doesn't belong to anybody." She returned to the dryer to load in a fresh batch of wet laundry. "He's a stray. At night, I leave him scraps down by the garden shed."

Now he made sense of the barking on the night when the jawbone was left on the porch. "That stray is your burglar alarm?"

She nodded. "Beats wiring up the house. The judge would never let me do that."

"I'm sure there won't be any more late-night bone deliveries. So I guess you can stop feeding the stray."

"Oh, the dog has other uses. One day the judge will invite that mutt into the house. And I'll be dragging Horatio's stuffed carcass out the back door for a proper burial."

"Good plan." Oren stared at the useless ball of fur in his hand. "I love the photograph you gave me. Did I thank you for it?"

This made her smile.

He carried her laundry basket to the folding table. "I remember the morning Josh took that shot." He watched for signs that Hannah knew it was the day that Josh went missing, but there was nothing in her manner to give this away. "When you had the film developed, the drugstore gave you a pack of standard-size prints, right? Where are they now?"

"Oh, who knows? That was a long time ago. It's not like you're asking me what I did with the morning newspaper."

And now he knew she was hiding something, for Hannah's memory was flawless, archiving even the stunned face of a frog drowned in a washing machine over thirty years ago. "Could those pictures be in the attic?"

"In Josh's darkroom? No, too risky. The judge is always up there looking through old pictures. He would've pitched a fit if he knew I had that last roll developed. I told you he didn't want Josh's things disturbed."

And it was unlike Hannah to repeat herself. She was stalling for time. He could almost see the bright work going on behind her eyes as she hunted for the right response.

And now she had it. I remember this much," she said. "I looked over the pictures before I left the drugstore. That shot of you two boys was the only one I cared about. I ordered the enlargement right then and there. So I would've left the negatives with the druggist. Maybe I left the whole envelope, negatives and prints, too. It's possible I never got them back."

"Do you remember anything about the other pictures?"

She shook her head. "Sorry, Oren. It was so long ago." Then you didn't see anything worth showing to William Swahn?"

She jerked her head to one side, her eyes wary and searching the stairs. Satisfied that they were alone, she turned back to him. Her voice was low, almost a whisper. "The judge doesn't need to know about my business with Mr. Swahn."

"You've known this guy for a long time, but you call him mister? That's not like you. And Swahn calls you Miss Rice. He might be the only one in town to use your last name since I was three."

"So what else did he-"

"I know you gave Swahn all of Josh's negatives when you asked him to find me an alibi witness."

"And he did."

"He overdid it." Oren held up two fingers.

"Two witnesses?" Here she paused, sensing that he was not buying her pretense of surprise. She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her house-dress, Hannah's version of a pout. "I think Mr. Swahn might have mentioned that."

"And he told you their names."

"No, he only told me that two women went to the sheriff with two different stories. Well, I could see where that might be worse than no alibi at all. Then Mr. Swahn called me one day and said everything worked out all right. One of those alibis held up."

"Was Swahn still working on my alibi when you developed Josh's last roll?"

"Oren Hobbs." Her tone carried the threat of no dessert and no television tonight. "Let it be." And now she must have remembered that she could not even stop his allowance anymore. Both hands flew up in surrender, but then she turned her face to the cellar window. "The judge is home."

After a few moments, he heard the sound of tires on the gravel driveway.

Hannah walked to the foot of the stairs, looking up, listening for the front door. She turned to him, silently asking if they could end this now. No, not quite yet.

The librarian's madness appeared to have an off-switch.

The barbells sat on the floor, and Mavis Hardy sat in a chair, her hands folded in a ladylike fashion, as she answered a question for Ferris Monty. "Both of the Hobbs boys were readers, but the judge had a bigger library than this one. I think they came here because their father had better taste in literature-no science fiction or horror genre."

Ferris noticed that her hands were clenched tightly, as if holding on to something precious, or merely holding on. After scribbling a line of shorthand in his notebook, he lowered his reading glasses. "Did the boys get along well?"

"They did. Oren had a few years on his brother, but that didn't matter. In some ways, Josh was a hundred years older. That little boy listened to people like he really cared about what was going on in their lives. I miss that child. I didn't see much of him after he turned ten-except from a distance… the way I see everyone now."

And this must be the marker for the year when life had soured for the librarian.

There was no need to consult his old notes. By the time Joshua Hobbs turned ten years old, Mavis Hardy had evolved into the monster of the public library. Ferris remembered that year very clearly. The librarian was the one who had drawn him to Coventry in hopes of covering a sensational murder trial. Her homicide case had ended too soon and too softly, a few words spoken in open court for the public record and a quiet dismissal of charges.

And five years later, she had not figured as a suspect when a young boy disappeared.

Now that Ferris had become accustomed to her body odor, he could at least endure it, and he leaned toward her in the manner of inviting a confidence. "When Josh first disappeared, did you think he was a runaway- or did you suspect foul play?"

As if she were a perfectly rational person who had never done a murder of her own, Mavis Hardy paused to give this some thought. "Well, that's what kids do in this town. They run off as soon as they're able-usually older kids right out of high school. They just can't leave Coventry fast enough. My own son ran off. But Josh Hobbs was barely fifteen-way too young. No, I don't suppose I ever saw him as a runaway."

"So other teenagers have disappeared?"

"A few, but it's not like they dropped off the face of the earth. They packed bags. Josh didn't. And most kids drift back to town after a while, like my son, Dave-he came back."

"I heard a rumor that there was more than one set of bones found yesterday. Can you think of anyone else who might have gone missing around the same time?"

"Mr. Monty, you've lived here for a good long while." She pointed to the window with a view of the foothills. "You know what we've got out there in the woods-people nobody wants to keep track of. I imagine they disappear all the time, and who'd ever know?"

"You think one of those people could've murdered Josh? Maybe someone with a criminal background?"

"Not likely," she said. "Not one of our criminals. In my experience, outlaws make the best citizens. They pay their bills on time-in cash-and they never get speeding tickets."

Her eyes took on a crafty look as she rose from her chair. Ferris feared that the interlude of sanity might be drawing to a close.

She loomed over him. "You think I've got an inside track? I know what they say about me around town. Parents tell their children to behave or they'll be sent to the library, and I bet those kids don't sleep well at night. Do I figure into your nightmares, too, Mr. Monty?" She leaned down and placed both hands flat on the table. "If you've got a question to ask-ask."

"You haven't attended a birthday ball since the Hobbs boy disappeared." He looked up at her with expectation.

The librarian coughed up a mouthful of mucus and let it fly. So good was her aim that she hit one lens of Ferris's spectacles on the first try. He rose from his chair and fled the library.

Oren stood beside Hannah at the laundry table in the cellar. He rolled a pair of socks and added them to the pile, having already amazed her with his skill in smoothly folding T-shirts. "So you still go to the library."

"At least once a week. Mavis taught me how to work the computer, and sometimes she special-orders books from other libraries."

"Then you weren't kidding yesterday-when you told Dave you could get his mother over here to ream him out."

"Oh, I wouldn't have done that. I just wanted Dave to drop that damn shovel. You know how the judge feels about his flower garden."

"So nothing's changed. Mrs. Hardy still-"

"Everything has changed," said the judge from the top of the basement staircase. He walked briskly down the steps and joined them at the folding table. One hand ran back over his bald scalp in a loving memory of a time when he had hair.

Back in the days of the old man's long ponytail, most people would have taken him for an aging hippie. But Oren knew the judge's favorite poet was Ferlinghetti, and there was more evidence to date his father back to the Beatnik generation-medals of the Korean War stored in the pacifist's attic. The judge must sometimes wonder if joining the Army had been Oren's idea of teenage revolt-or revenge. The question would never be asked by this quintessential gentleman.

The judge picked through a pile of unmatched socks. "So what's this about Mavis Hardy? You think the press is going to dredge up that old business again?"

Oren rolled another pair. "You mean her murder case?"

The judge did not rise to this old bait. He placidly hunted the sock pile for a match to the one he held in his hand.

"Premeditated murder." Oren smiled.

And the judge countered with, "Justifiable homicide."

Murder.

Oren leaned closer to his father. "How long do you think it took Mrs. Hardy to lay her plans? I'd say a year at least."

The judge turned his full attention on a hole found in the toe of one sock. "I came down here to tell you that your trunk arrived. I had the deliveryman haul it up to your room. Did you pack a good suit in there?"

"Yes, sir. I packed everything I own."

"Good. Sarah Winston's birthday ball is only a few days away."

"I'm not going," said Oren. And this should have ended the conversation by the old man's own rules of debate. His father would never resort to the obvious question. It would diminish the twin arts of conversation and manners to ask, Why not?

"Why not?" Hannah stepped between them as the judge's foil. "What is it with you and Isabelle Winston? The pharmacist told me that girl kicked you all the way down the sidewalk yesterday. Now why would she do that?"

Oren shrugged to tell her that he didn't know and "she didn't say."

Why ruin a perfectly good rumor by trimming it back to a single act of minor violence? In the next telling of this story, it was predictable that Isabelle would have shot him once and stabbed him twice.

Collecting gossip was sometimes a trial of endurance. Ferris Monty pretended to take notes on the postmaster's lecture, which-if there was a God in heaven-was winding to a close.

"I bought these three pictures from Josh and framed them with my own money-not one dime from the taxpayers' pockets," said Jim Web. "I intend to leave them behind when I retire next year. My gift to the town.

Ferris nodded absently as he studied Joshua Hobbs's triptych. The boy had taken shots of postal patrons in a waiting line. The people appeared to move as the viewer's eye made the jump from one frame to the next. He stepped closer, the better to study the primary subject, the one at the center who posed with a silver-handled cane. Though Ferris had seen this person around town, he had only registered the scar and a peculiar limp in memory. But Joshua had focused upon the undamaged, unmemorable side of the man, and that was curious. A view of the wrack-and-ruin side would have been a more worthy angle.

Pointing to this image, he said, "I don't recall this man's name. He's lived in Coventry for a long time, hasn't he?"

"Yeah, but not as long as I have. I started as a clerk thirty-five years ago," said the postmaster in the mistaken belief that his interviewer might care. "That's Mr. Swahn. I can't say I actually know him. He's a hermit. Hasn't been in here since we started rural delivery, but he does show up for all the birthday balls. Will I see you at the Winston lodge this year?"

"I think you might."

The author followed the postmaster into a small office, where he endured Web's version of high tea: a fig bar and a cup of Earl Grey dosed with honey. The man looked out a window that faced the narrow street and watched cars crawl by. Ferris imagined this as the prime activity of Jim Web's day-watching. "So you knew Oren Hobbs as a boy."

"Oh, yeah. And by nine o'clock yesterday morning I knew he'd come back to town. That's a perk of the job. I get the gossip earlier than most."

Ah, gold.

"I understand that Oren Hobbs had a thing for older women-married women."

"Is that what you heard?" Postmaster Web pretended to find a spot of dirt on one lens of his perfectly clean eyeglasses, and he polished it with a tissue. For the first time in the past half-hour, the man seemed oddly reticent to gossip. Spectacles restored to the bridge of his nose, he smiled at his visitor. "If there's any truth to that rumor, I'd have to say it was the other way around. Older women had a thing for Oren. Understandable. You've seen him?"

"Yes, a very handsome young man."

"When he was a teenager, my wife described him as beautiful-and inadvertently charming. Or did she say accidentally? Something about his smile. No, I'm wrong. She said it was his eyes. When my wife spoke to Oren, he made her feel like the center of the universe. She said I didn't come off well by comparison."

"So it wouldn't surprise your wife… those rumors of an accidentally charming boy accidentally falling into strange beds when school was out- but the husbands were still at work."

"I can't say what's true or not." Jim Web turned to the window. "All I ever saw with my own eyes was a bad case of twisted puppy love."

Ferris leaned forward. "You mean the Winston girl?" This was another bit of Coventry lore that he had collected two decades ago, just the snatch of a story that had no beginning and no end.

The postmaster removed his bifocals and turned to the window, his watery eyes in soft focus, looking at some middle ground of memory. "Isabelle and Oren, they made me feel young again at least three times a week. You see, the judge's boys used to switch off on picking up the mail. This was before we had rural delivery. Back then, I knew the faces of everyone in this town, even the ones that lived out in the woods. Everybody picked up their mail at the post office-except for Mrs. Underwood, the old lady who used to live in Mr. Swahn's house. The boys would pick up her mail, too-not that there was much.

"Anyway, it's not like Josh and Oren had a schedule. I never knew which boy it would be or when he'd show up. But little Belle Winston always knew, and she always beat Oren Hobbs into town. Now this only happened in the summer. The rest of the year she went to a boarding school in the East. Belle was about eleven, I'd say. On fine summer days, she'd come flying into town, little legs churning up dust, long hair flying. She'd run in the door and ask for her mail like it was a matter of life or death- and couldn't my clerk understand that speed was everything to her? And then she'd just stand by the lobby window, watching the street. Sometimes ten, fifteen minutes would go by. Such a patient little girl."

"She was waiting for Oren Hobbs."

The postmaster nodded, never taking his eyes from the window. "The minute she saw him coming, she'd slowly open the front door like she had all the time in the world." Smiling, he tapped the window glass, as though he might be watching this story play out. "She'd saunter down the stairs and pass him on the sidewalk out there-like she didn't notice that boy was alive."

"Did Oren notice her?"

"You bet. The second he saw Belle, the boy's eyes were glued to the sidewalk, or sometimes he'd find something fascinating to look at on the other side of the street-until she passed him by. The boy always took a deep breath before he turned around to watch her walk away. This went on all summer long for years and years. It was the greatest little love affair that almost happened."

Done with old memories, the postmaster donned his glasses again, prepared to see the world as it was today. "You can hear rumors anywhere- and from people who tell them better than me." He jerked one thumb back at the windowpane. "But that's the only secret Oren Hobbs ever had that I ever knew about-me and the rest of the town."

When Ferris Monty turned to the window, it was easy enough to pick out the distinctive copper shingles of the tower atop the Winston lodge. No doubt young Isabelle Winston had used that high ground to keep track of the boy she fancied. He wondered if that habit had lasted into her teenage years. Had she been spying on Oren Hobbs the last time the boy walked into the woods with his little brother?

If Sarah Winston had not been a devoted follower of the birder's life, she might have had a career as an artist; this was the opinion of ornithologist Isabelle Winston. The renderings in her mother's journals were beautiful. Exotic birds with brilliant plumage did not exist in this part of the world, and yet there they were, singing and dancing with common sparrows and crows. These were the guests of the annual birthday ball.

It was a temptation to hurry through these books, but something important might be missed. Invisible spiders had not crept up on her mother in a single day. That kind of damage took years, but Isabelle examined every page with the hope of finding a signal event. She looked up from her reading to glance at the deck beyond the glass wall and the telescopes positioned to see the world from here, if the world be Coventry. Her mother's journals never hinted at life elsewhere.

"Let's see," she whispered to her sleeping mother, who had passed out after a midday binge. "When did it all start to go wrong?"

She climbed the tall ladder on wheels and, by one hand, rolled it along the high circular shelf. The dates on the book spines told her she was approaching the largest event in her own reckoning, the vanishing of Joshua Hobbs. She scanned the labels of months and years, then pulled down a volume out of order, a sneak preview of things to come, and she opened it to leaf through the pages. This journal only depicted birds of prey. One stood out from the rest. Isabelle's first thought was borrowed from an old fairy tale-and twisted a bit.

What strange, crazy eyes you have-what long teeth.

On these pages, Coventry had lost its charm and become a nightmare state where monsters roamed, walking birds with fangs and curled knives for talons.