I 've Heard That Song Before

36

Sometimes, when I held a storytelling hour for young children at the library, I would recite one of my favorite poems to them. It was “The Children’s Hour” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and begins like this: “Between the dark and the daylight, when the night is beginning to lower…”

The daylight was just fading away when I heard the cadaver dogs barking outside, the sound coming from the west side of the grounds. Peter had gone to the lawyers’ office in Manhattan again, but I had elected to stay home. I felt overwhelmingly tired, and actually spent a good part of the day in bed, napping off and on.

It was four o’clock when I finally got up. Then I showered and dressed and went down to Peter’s library and sat reading in his comfortable chair, waiting for him to get home.

At the sound of the barking, I hurried back to the kitchen. Jane was coming in from the gatehouse to prepare dinner. “There are more police cars at the gate, Mrs. Carrington,” she told me nervously. “Gary went over to see what’s going on.”

The dogs must have found something, I thought. Not bothering with a coat, I raced out into the cold twilight and followed the footpath that led to the yelping. Detectives were already taping off an area on the near side of the pond that in the summer was stocked with fish. Squad cars were racing across the frozen lawn, their lights flashing.

“One of the dogs dug up a leg bone,” Gary Barr whispered to me.

“A leg bone! Do they think it’s human?” I asked. Standing there in a light sweater, my teeth were chattering from the cold.

“I’m pretty sure they do.”

I heard the sound of approaching sirens. More police are coming, I thought. The media will follow them. Who could be buried there? This whole area was once lived in by Indian tribes. Evidence of their graves has been found from time to time. Maybe it was the bone of one of those early natives they had found.

Then I overheard one of the dog handlers say, “…and it was wrapped in the same kind of plastic bags as the girl.”

I felt my legs crumbling, and heard someone yelling, “Grab her.” I didn’t faint, but a detective held one arm and Gary Barr the other, as they led me back to the house. I asked them to take me to Peter’s library. I was shivering when I sank down into his chair, so Jane got a blanket and wrapped it around me. I told Gary to stay outside and report on what was happening. Eventually he came back to tell me that he heard them saying they had found a complete human skeleton, and that there had been a chain with a locket around the victim’s neck.

A locket! I had already suspected that the remains might be those of my father. When I heard about the locket, I knew that it had to be the one my father always wore, with my mother’s picture inside. At that moment I knew with certainty that the remains the dogs had dug up had been flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone.