Carved in Bone

CHAPTER 5

My truck sat all alone at the far corner of the hospital parking lot. By day, the Body Farm’s weathered, wooden privacy fence — an eight-foot screen that shields the corpses from sightseers, and shields squeamish hospital workers from the corpses — blends into the woods. Now, under the glare of the sodium security lights, it shone a garish yellow-orange.

Unlocking the cab of my truck, I turned back toward the hospital and waved at the surveillance camera mounted high atop the roof. I doubted anyone was scrutinizing the monitor that closely, but just in case, I wanted the campus police to know I appreciated their round-the-clock vigil over my unorthodox extended family.

At this time of night, almost eleven, the highway was practically empty as I crossed the river and swooped down the Kingston Pike exit. Kingston Pike — Knoxville’s main east — west thoroughfare — grazed one edge of the UT campus. If I turned right at the light at the bottom of the exit ramp, I would traverse the lively six-block stretch called “The Strip,” which was lined with crowded restaurants, noisy bars, and inebriated students. Turning left instead, I made for the quieter precincts of Sequoyah Hills, where I threaded my way along the grand median of Cherokee Boulevard for half a mile before diving off into the maze of dark, quiet streets that led to my house.

Most Sequoyah Hills real estate was unaffordable on a college professor’s salary, or even ten professors’ salaries. The riverfront homes had especially astronomical prices, some of them selling for millions. Here and there in the wealthy, wooded enclave, though — like patches of crabgrass in the lawn of an estate — persisted small pockets of ordinary ranch houses, split-levels, even a handful of rental bungalows fronting a tiny park. It was in one such pocket, thirty years before, that Kathleen and I had found a charming 1940s-era cottage. White brick with a stone chimney, a slate roof, a yard brimming with dogwoods and redbuds, and an only slightly ruinous price tag, it looked like a postcard-perfect place for a pair of academics to settle down and start a family. And it was. Then, suddenly, it wasn’t.

Instead, it now hung around my neck like a millstone, and tonight — as always — I fished out the key with a sense of foreboding. The deadbolt slithered open, the door swung into silent darkness, and I knew it had been a mistake to go home. My footsteps clattered on the slate foyer with all the warmth of frozen earth shoveled upon the glinting lid of a steel coffin.

I showered off the mud and grit of Cooke County, and I tried to steam away the ache in my thighs and shoulders. Then — with a mixture of sinking hope and rising dread — I crawled into my unmade bed.

After hours of tossing, I finally slept, and I dreamt of a woman. In the way that is common in dreams, she was a generic, unspecified woman at first, doing something generic and unspecified. Then she looked at me, and suddenly she looked quite specific and very afraid. A hand reached out and stroked her cheek. Then it slid downward and closed around her throat. The woman, I now saw, was my wife, and the hand, I now realized, was my own. A look of pleading filled her eyes, and then a look of sorrow. And then her eyes turned to empty sockets, and her mouth to a vacant oval. But I was the one who gave voice to the scream. “Kathleen!”

Heart pounding, sweat and tears flowing, I awoke — as I had every night for the past two years — to find myself alone in the bed. Alone in our bed. No — alone in my bed. My empty, lifeless bed in my empty, lifeless house in my empty, lifeless life.