Bone by Bone

4

After returning the telephone's receiver to its antique cradle, Oren knew he could count on thirty minutes, maybe a solid hour, before a deputy was dispatched from the county seat. There would be no sirens screaming, no haste. The deputy from Saulburg might even stop for breakfast along the way. The County Sheriff 's Office was long accustomed to similar reports from hikers in the woods, and the remains always turned out to be the bones of animals. Oren had made no mention of the skeleton in the coffin-only the jawbone, but not its dental filling.

He climbed the stairs and returned to his old bedroom, drawn there by the photograph in the silver frame, the shot taken on the day Josh had vanished. That was the only time that his little brother had used a tripod, the only instance of Josh appearing in one of his own pictures. Among the hundred examples of his brother's work on all the walls of the house, this posed composition was a rarity. The boy had favored a handheld camera for candid shots taken on the fly-hit and run. In this picture, there was more than a foot of distance between Oren and his brother, as if Josh were already leaving him in that moment.

Other photographs, more than a dozen, hung on the bedroom walls, and they chronicled five years of Josh's love affair with the camera. Oren stared at his favorite, one of himself and a girl who had only appeared in the summers of his boyhood. He colored her black-and-white image with a memory of long red hair and eyes the color of dark honey. As a boy, he had availed himself of furtive glances to count the freckles on her nose. At the age of twelve, this had been his life's work. In his early teens, he had progressed to a fascination with her red toenail polish.

He might have been thirteen years old when this shot was taken. Boy and girl were pictured walking away from one another, heading toward opposite ends of the frame. Between them yawned a great empty space- nothing but sky. His little brother had never taken a picture without the intention to tell a story or a joke, and this was both. Nothing had ever happened between Oren and the summer girl. They had not exchanged a single word. He had never heard the sound of her voice.

"Isabelle Winston."

"Hannah, don't do that."

She should know better. Creeping up behind people had always been the judge's job. Oren turned around to see the housekeeper eyeing the same photograph. How long had she been standing there?

"Josh was good, wasn't he?" She moved closer to the wall. "A real artist."

Oren reached out to the bureau and picked up her homecoming gift, the picture of two brothers. "I know this shot came from Josh's last roll of film, the one he left behind that day. When was this developed? Was it before or after the judge sent me away?"

"You make it sound like he kicked you out of the house." She smiled, taking no offense at his tone of interrogation. "After Josh went missing, I found a roll of film stashed in his sock drawer. I left it there for a while. The judge didn't want anything disturbed in your brother's room. He had a real bug about that. I don't remember exactly when I took the roll down to the drugstore to get it developed." After a furtive glance at the door, she lowered her voice. "The judge doesn't need to know I did that. He'd pitch a fit." Hannah gave him her best conspirator's grin. "So don't you rat on me, okay?" She returned the photograph to the bureau. "It's a good picture, but I know Josh would've done a better job in his own darkroom."

"That's still in the attic?"

"Just the way he left it."

"Is that where you put the rest of the pictures from his last roll?"

Hannah turned to the window. "There's a car coming."

He did not doubt her, but a few moments passed before he also heard the sound of tires on the gravel driveway. At the hour of a shift change, there would be no deputies on duty in this area, and it was too soon for any official vehicle from Saulburg.

The owner of the pickup truck had streaks of blond hair the light shade of a towhead child's. If Hannah Rice had been in a more charitable mood, she might have credited those highlights to the sun instead of vanity. "The judge says you have to wait until that warrant shows up."

Dave Hardy was hunting for a shovel amid the pile of bags and gardening tools in the bed of his truck. "I give the orders, Hannah."

"Sure you do." She was not convinced that anyone in a rock-'n'-roll T-shirt and blue jeans could have any authority over her; though, even out of uniform, everything about this man announced him as an officer of the law.

His I-run-the-show attitude had begun to form at the age of eight when he got his first pair of dark glasses. Dave had worn them even in the rain, and some people who had watched him grow up could no longer recall the color of his eyes. When Hannah thought of this man as a child, she always embellished this picture of him with a tiny, fully loaded gun. Today he was not carrying a weapon, and, without his dark glasses, he looked nearly naked. Obviously feeling the need to bolster his credibility with her, he clipped his deputy's star to a belt loop, and then he resumed the chore of ransacking his pickup truck.

The retired judge sat on the porch steps beside Josh's jawbone. Hannah leaned down and lightly touched his arm, her prelude to every strong suggestion. "If you'd just tell Dave what's upstairs in that coffin, he might lose interest in that patch of dirt." She jabbed her thumb in the direction of freshly turned earth at the end of the garden, where the judge had planted his last batch of bulbs.

Henry Hobbs shook his head. No deal. He called out to the deputy, "For the last time-the bone didn't come from my garden!"

"We'll see." Triumphant, Dave Hardy raised a shovel high above his head. "Found it." He climbed down from the truck bed, turned toward the house-and turned to stone.

Hannah looked back over one shoulder to see what had stunned the deputy. Oren stood in the open doorway, only curious at the moment and relaxed in his stance.

The deputy could only stare at him, but everyone stared at Oren Hobbs. It was not merely the good looks of her blue-eyed boy that drew this kind of attention-more like attraction with the pull of gravity. Twenty years ago, in Hannah's estimation, Oren had been interrupted on the way to becoming somebody. She had never forecast the Army in his future. No, she had always seen him at the center of a stage. Indeed, this morning, it was almost like a performance, him standing there, hands in his pockets, wrapped in the aura of a rock star in an idle moment. His audience, Dave Hardy, was spellbound.

Spell undone, Dave rolled back his shoulders and gripped the shovel in both hands. "Odd thing, Oren-that jawbone showing up the same time you do."

The judge rose from the porch steps and walked toward the deputy, eyes on the shovel. "You can't dig up my garden. Those bulbs will never bloom if you-"

"That's enough, old man." Dave freed up one hand to point at the porch. "Now go back and sit down. That's an order!"

The whites of Hannah's eyes got wider. One did not disrespect Judge Henry Hobbs-not in this town. The old man hesitated, and there was confusion in his face, silently asking how this could be happening to him. Hannah's hands went to her hips in a pose that conveyed to Dave Hardy, Now look what you've done.

Dave marched toward the far end of the flower bed and never saw his predictable demise in the eyes of Oren Hobbs, who descended the porch steps-slowly-angry and focused on the deputy.

Poor deputy.

Hannah Rice had always loomed large and mighty, even after Oren and Josh had grown taller than she was. The slightest pressure of the housekeeper's hand on any part of a boy that she could catch had been enough to restrain the two youngsters. And this influence of hers had lasted into their teenage years. It simply had never occurred to either of them that, once caught, they could ever get away from her.

And now he felt Hannah's small hand closing over his right fist, the one he favored for beating the crap out of Dave Hardy. Oren stood very still, powerless to go anywhere. He looked down to catch her brief smile, the equivalent of rolling up her sleeves in anticipation of doing some damage.

Hannah trained her eyes on the deputy and worked her old magic, hurling words across the length of the flower bed with the crack of lightning bolts. "Put that shovel down this instant!"

Dave looked up. The shovel hovered.

The housekeeper lowered her voice for the next salvo. "Don't you make me call your mother."

Run, Dave, run.

Apparently, the deputy's mother still held the office of town monster, a woman in the habit of publicly castrating her own son in ten words or less. Oren recalled that Mrs. Hardy had sometimes rhymed her lines, and, around town, she had been much admired as an obscene poet.

"I can have Mavis over here," said Hannah, snapping her fingers, "just like that."

Once, it had been rumored that Dave's mother was a vessel of demonic possession. More rational townspeople had argued that, in any arrangement of that sort, Mavis Hardy would be the possessor and not the possessed. Dave dropped the shovel.

A jeep rounded a stand of trees by the driveway and parked in front of the house. The star of the County Sheriff 's Office was painted on the vehicle's door, and Cable Babitt was behind the wheel. The sheriff cut the engine and climbed out. He was grayer now, but still shaped like a pear with a moustache. He wore an amiable smile while he slammed the jeep's door-the only warning of things to come. In his quiet, almost genteel, manner he lowered a hammer on the deputy without raising his voice. "You're late for work."

"No, sir." The deputy stood at attention, his back ramrod straight. "I picked up the call before I left the house this morning. I'm on the job."

"Out of uniform? I don't think so, Dave."

The younger lawman picked up his shovel, his proof of innocence. "I'll get changed right after I dig up this-"

"No, no, no!" the judge called out from the porch steps. He was more his old self again when he shook one fist at the deputy. "There're no bones buried in my garden!"

Cable Babitt strolled over to the porch and tipped his hat to the retired judge, a greeting of friends, both local boys grown into old men, though Henry Hobbs was senior by twelve years. "Morning, Henry. What've you got here?" The sheriff picked up the jawbone and turned it over in his hand. He held it up high as a lure to draw his deputy closer. "Well, Dave, you're half right. There's no sign of exposure-lots of staining. This bone was buried all right, but not around here. You see this reddish coloring? It comes from iron-rich soil. That puts the burial site to the north and straight up." He pointed to the high mountainside of deep woods tapering to bald rock. "There's a streak of iron ore up there."

Iron ore?

Oren wondered how the sheriff had come by that bit of arcane knowledge. Coventry had its roots in a small mill town. There had never been a mining operation within a hundred miles of here, nor even a hint of iron deposits in this northern neighborhood of California.

Sheriff Babitt jerked one thumb toward the deputy's pickup truck, and this was enough to send Dave Hardy on his way.

When the truck had disappeared around the stand of trees, Oren stood toe-to-toe with the sheriff. "Iron ore? You knew about that jawbone before I called it in." This was more than an accusation; it was bait. He studied the older man's face, looking there for signs of a lie in the making. "Maybe you already had one of Josh's bones. You'd need a sample to get a soil analysis for-"

"That's enough, Oren. I've got a few questions for you."

Showdown-or maybe not.

Hannah, an experienced wrangler of boys and men, worked her way between them. "Oren, I need you to run an errand in town." She pressed an empty pharmacy bottle into his hand, then faced the porch and shouted to the judge, as if he might be deaf, "I'm sending Oren into town for your pills-your heart medication!"

Henry Hobbs, who was not deaf, nodded with some puzzlement. "No idea where the car keys are."

"I do," said Hannah.

Oren followed her inside and down the hall to a room with Dutch-blue walls and white cabinets. Like the rest of the house, the kitchen was unchanged except for a new refrigerator of stainless steel and a matching dishwasher. Apparently, the judge was a failure at patching up worn appliances, and here he had fallen short of his insane mission to stop time.

"You might've guessed-it's the same old car in the garage." Hannah retrieved a stepladder from the broom closet. "But the judge keeps the engine in real good condition. If you ask me, I think it runs better than brand-new models." She kicked off her wooden clogs and mounted the metal steps to climb on top of the counter. "Even the poor white trash in this town drive those cars. They never die-they just get passed down and around." Bare feet firmly planted on the countertop, she opened a cupboard door. "I swear if Coventry had a town flag, the emblem would be a Mercedes hood ornament."

The tiny woman rose up on her toes to reach a high shelf. After moving a few canisters out of her way, she pulled out a tea tin, extracted the car keys and handed them down to him. "It's still a one-drugstore town. You know the way."

Startled, Oren wondered if Hannah did this each time she took the car out, but he only pocketed the keys, asking no questions. It was that kind of a day.

In Coventry 's insular idea of geography, the northwestern town perched on a cliff at world's end, where the earth fell away in a wicked drop to a rocky coastline. An elderly man posed close to the edge as a companion photographed him against blue California sky and the Pacific Ocean; he leaned one shaky hand upon a metal rail installed to prevent witless tourists from falling to their deaths. Across the street, a pastel row of small art galleries and boutiques was waking up to the morning trade, opening shutters and raising shades. These buildings were dwarfed by the Straub Hotel with its four flights of windows capped by attic gables.

Every street was lined with the cars of weekend travelers, and it was Oren's good luck to find a parking space.

On the hotel verandah, a stout gray-haired woman was ensconced in a high-back wicker chair. Deep frown lines gave her the air of one who took offense at all that she surveyed, and her ample flesh hung in jowls and a double chin. Imperious, she presided over the comings and goings of hotel guests, giving each a curt nod, as if to say, Okay, I've acknowledged you. Now move on! And they did.

He should know this senior citizen. She knew him.

Though the lady wore sunglasses, he sensed that her eyes were tracking him when he left the car and stepped onto the sidewalk. As he came closer, she graced him with a smile and lowered the dark glasses. Her smile quickly slipped away, and Oren knew that he had failed a test of some kind. The woman raised one clenched fist and slowly extended her middle finger as an invitation for him to perform an unnatural act upon himself. And by this hand gesture alone, he recognized her. He had been a teenager the last time they met. Then, she had been a woman in her forties with a lean body and long hair the color of lions.

Then and now were different creatures.

He approached the hotel steps, calling up to her, "Hello, Mrs. Straub."

She leaned forward, causing the wicker to creak with the sudden shift of her bulk. Her voice had the husky quality of booze and cigarettes when she said, "Oren Hobbs, we've had sex in half the rooms of my hotel. I think it's time you called me Evelyn." Impervious to the peasants, a startled pair of guests, Evelyn Straub donned her sunglasses. She sat well back in her chair and turned her face away from him.

This audience was clearly over.

Thus dismissed, he gave her a wave, almost a salute, and continued down the sidewalk toward the drugstore. As always, the traffic moved slowly, not even close to the posted twenty-five miles per hour. By some mystical agreement of tourists and residents alike, all the drivers slowed down at the sign that welcomed them to town. Yet Oren was mindful of the slowest car, the one keeping pace with him. In sidelong vision, he noted only that it was black and low-slung, for his eyes were fixed on the pharmacy bottle in his hand.

This was not the judge's medication.

Another name was printed on the label. He recognized the drug, and he knew why it was prescribed. When had Hannah's days become so stressful? High anxiety and three strong locks on the front door-what else had changed during all the years of his exile?

The black car still crawled beside him. Now it put on a short burst of speed to capture a freshly vacated parking space up the street. Oren raised his eyes as the car door slammed-and he missed a step.

The summer girl always had that effect on him.

Isabelle Winston left her black sports car to face him down on the sidewalk half a block away. There was great purpose in her stride as she moved toward him. Though the morning was a cool one, a light, white cotton dress swirled above her knees, and he saw the flash of red toenails on sandaled feet. Her hair was shorter but still the color of raw carrots. Her freckles could not be seen at this distance; Oren took them on faith. He slowly released all the breath in his lungs.

The first time he had come near her, she had smelled of horses and, in later summers, a succession of perfumes, a different scent each time they met. Now she was almost close enough to inhale. As the gap between them narrowed, he averted his eyes and edged closer to the storefront side of the pavement, unwilling to risk touching her in passing.

And so they fell into their old childhood dance, the look-away two-step.

He watched her reflection in a shop window as she came abreast of him. In the glass, he saw her pause just long enough for her left foot to lash out in his direction.

A direct hit to one shin!

His legs tangled, and he was tripping, falling. The ground flew up to meet him with the painful crack of his kneecap on the cement and the vision of stars that came with a bang to the head.

First contact.

Oren rolled onto his back and raised himself up on one elbow to watch the summer girl, now a woman in her thirties, as she moved on down the sidewalk. There was never a backward glance to gloat over the damage she had done to him, and he thought that spoke well of her character.