Inherit the Bones

Chapter Ten

Annika’s bedroom was on the other side of the house. Mrs. Watkins led me up the stairs and down another long, narrow hallway filled with more of the nausea-inducing paintings. We walked by an open door and at the faint sound of a television turned low I turned my head and looked in the room as we passed. An elderly man sat in a wheelchair, his head bowed, hands clasped in his lap, asleep.

The room was dim but the blue light of the television filled the space with a neon glow. I watched, hypnotized, as a thin line of spit trailed from his chin down to the orange afghan in his lap.

Ahead of me, Mrs. Watkins turned, stepped back, reached around me, and gently pulled the door shut. Her eyes were unreadable and I felt ashamed at peeping into an old man’s private slumber.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“That’s Frank Bellington,” Mrs. Watkins whispered.

“I know. He was a friend of my grandfather, Bull Weston. I don’t think they’ve seen each other in a while, though.”

Mrs. Watkins shrugged and continued down the hall and I quickened my stride to keep pace with her. At the end of the hall, she pointed at a closed door. On the knob was a tag, the kind you see at hotels, that indicates do not disturb. I lifted the pink laminated sign and smiled; it read “perfect angel” on one side and “raging bitch” on the other.

I crossed my fingers it was the angel that was in today, and knocked and pushed the door open.

The room was as warm and inviting as the rest of the Bellington house was cold and sterile. A four-poster bed topped with a plump lavender duvet took up the south wall. On the opposite side of the room, a sprawling wooden desk held computers and stereo equipment and piles of clothes. In the corner, a keyboard and a guitar rested against a tall bookcase crammed with dog-eared paperbacks and thick hardcovers. Tucked in among the books were small ceramic angels, the kind you see in Hallmark stores and Reader’s Digest ads.

“Annika? I’m Detective Monroe,” I said. “You can call me Gemma.”

She sat cross-legged on the bed, playing with the ends of long hair that was two shades fairer than her mother’s. She glanced up and I looked into eyes that were the same pale blue as her twin brother Nicky’s had been, the same blue as her mother’s. I saw no trace of her father in her, until she spoke.

Her cadence, her openness, her friendliness-that was pure Terence Bellington. She’d make a wonderful politician and she wasn’t yet twenty.

“How do you do?” she asked, and bounded from the bed to me in three steps. She shook my hand politely and then stared at my belly. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks. I’m due in three months,” I said. “It’s sort of crazy, really.”

“I bet. I can’t imagine,” Annika replied. She wore dark jeans and a green T-shirt with the word “Hellkat” stitched across the front in fraying red felt letters. The shirt looked homemade but knowing kids these days, it probably cost eighty bucks at Anthropologie.

She noticed me looking and laughed, a lovely sound completely unlike her mother’s harsh bark. “Hellkat is a garage band in New Haven. My boyfriend’s the lead singer. Pete. He’s got this alter ego on stage, with a costume and everything. Hellkat is like a demented superhero cat. Kind of stupid.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, sounds pretty cool. How is Yale? I bet it’s a lot different than the schools out here.”

I said the words but I didn’t believe them. I do that sometimes; the words tumble out of my mouth as my mind is thinking the opposite. College is college, whether you pay ten thousand or a hundred thousand for the privilege of lectures, narrow twin beds, and crappy dorm food.

She shrugged and laughed again. “The boys are the same. They all just want to fuck you and leave you, blow ’em and snow ’em, as they say. That’s why I like Pete, he’s different from the rest. He never forced it.”

I didn’t know if she was trying to shock me with the word she’d used, but somehow, I doubted it. Annika chose the words she used because they were the right words for the situation.

“Is my mom still crying?” she asked. She wandered over to the bed and sat down and patted at the cover.

I joined her. “I don’t know. She wasn’t just now.”

Annika said, “She cried a lot last night. That’s how I knew something was wrong. I heard the phone ring and then I heard her scream and then she was crying, and so was my dad, and no one would tell me anything.”

She flopped backward on the bed and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “My aunt Hannah was the one who finally told me, you know. Can you believe that? They didn’t even tell me themselves.”

“Your aunt Hannah?”

Annika nodded. “Our nanny, Mrs. Watkins. I’m sure you met her. She’s my father’s sister, my aunt Hannah. She practically raised us. Her husband left her when they found out she couldn’t have kids. My parents were always super busy so she moved in when we were little.”

“I didn’t realize that she was a relative. Does she live here, too, then?”

Annika said yes. “Me, Dad, Mom, Aunt, Grandpa. No brother no more.”

I lay back on the bed next to her and stared up. Tiny green stars dotted the cottage cheese ceiling in random patterns that vaguely resembled constellations. Growing up, my best friend had the same stickers in her room, the kind that glow in the dark once you turn out the lights.

She and I used to lie like this for hours, legs hanging off the bed, flat on our backs, staring at the ceiling and talking about nothing and everything. We’d light blueberry-scented candles and listen to Tracy Chapman and Chris Isaak and wonder if the boys we liked even knew our names.

“I’m really sorry about Nicky, Annika. I know all of this must come as a huge shock,” I said. “Can you think of any reason why he might have done this?”

“You mean disappear? Not get in touch with his family? Let us think he was dead? Or join a circus, work as a clown, and then get himself murdered?”

I sighed. It was an awkward situation; there was no getting around that. “Well, all of that, I suppose.”

She sat up and, looking down at me, gathered her long pale hair up and began furiously twisting it into a bun.

“I have no idea. Nicky was the applesauce to my pork chop, the milk in my cereal. He completed me. What we had was fierce and I don’t mean in some sick, kinky, Flowers in the Attic way. You never met a nicer guy. He made the rest of this fucked-up family better just by sharing our last name. I can’t imagine that if he knew how much he hurt us, that he did it on purpose. There’s got to be some other explanation.”

She bounced off the bed and paced the room with the pent-up fury of a tiger in a cage. “I’m so mad at him I would kill him if he was here right now, Detective.”

“Please, call me Gemma. Annika, can you walk me through that day? Three years ago? I’ve read the reports, of course, but I’d like to hear it from you.”

She laughed. “Well, sure, but obviously we missed something, right? I mean, it’s not the most accurate account anymore, is it? Considering he lived?”

I nodded. “That’s okay. I’d still like to hear it.”

She picked up one of the tiny ceramic angels on the bookshelf and held it a moment before setting it back down. In the sunlight that streamed through the window, she looked younger than her nineteen years.

“We were on a trip, an overnight camping trip up to Mount Wrigley. Paul-Mr. Winters-he asked Nicky and I to come along as mentors for his foundation. I think he thought we would be good role models for the other kids. We hiked up Wednesday night and camped Wednesday and Thursday. Friday morning, we packed up and started the hike down. We stopped for lunch at the top of Bride’s Veil.”

“Whose idea was it to stop at the waterfall?”

She shook her head. “I don’t remember. Maybe it was Paul’s idea… Mr. Winters. Maybe it was Nick’s idea? We were hungry and it was a beautiful day.”

I nodded again. I remembered; it had been a beautiful day.

July 6, a Friday, with temps in the mid-eighties. Paul Winters operated the Forward Foundation; a local youth group whose mission was the empowerment of teens through physical action and decision-making situational activities. Think AmeriCorps meets Outward Bound.

Annika said, “We dropped our bags and set up blankets near the edge of the cliff, but not too close. We weren’t dumb. Paul handed out crackers and cheese and cookies and we ate and then kind of stretched out, you know, to enjoy the sun. Like cats.”

I knew the spot well. I hadn’t been part of the investigation; I’d picked up a stomach bug that week that knocked me on my ass and took ten pounds off my already slim figure, but I’d been up there since, plenty of times. About ten yards off the trail, at the halfway point up to Mount Wrigley, there is an unmarked path that leads to a viewing point for Bride’s Veil. The waterfall is eighty feet high and raging by the middle of summer, when the snowmelt is at its peak, and the Arkansas River rages through the Rockies.

There is a small meadow by the viewing point, and this had been where the eleven teenagers and Paul Winters stopped for a bite to eat. The ground is flat, but begins to erode the closer you get to the edge of the cliff. Nicky wasn’t the first to fall there; in fact, since the late 1800s, three other people had died, either by suicide or accident, at Bride’s Veil.

Annika continued. “At some point, I fell asleep. I’d been up all night, too cold to get much rest, and the lunch and sunshine were so nice that when I closed my eyes, I fell into a deep sleep. Do you know what I mean? The kind of oblivion where you wake and you can’t even figure out where you are?”

“Sure.”

Annika took a deep breath and stopped pacing and sat back down next to me on the bed. Her skin was unlined and her blue eyes like two crystals, and I felt a moment of sadness at the speed with which time sneaks over us all. My own face, less than a dozen years older, had an ever-increasing map of the worries that had crept my way, and the hours spent in the sunshine, and the laughs I’d had, and the tears.

“I woke up because someone was screaming. Then there was shouting, and more screaming. When I sat up, I saw everyone at the viewing point, looking down. Everyone was there except Nicky. And I knew.”

“You knew what?”

“I knew he was gone. Gemma, when we were born, we were holding hands. That’s how close we were.”

Annika laughed at my look of surprise and I was struck again by the musical tinkle her laugh held, like wind chimes dancing in a breeze. “My mom had a C-section. When the doctors pulled us out, Nicky and I were facing each other, holding hands. They took a photograph of us, it’s around here somewhere. I think we were even in some magazine.”

She leaned over the bed and started pulling picture albums out. “When we were little, I called Nicky my shadow. He always said he wasn’t my shadow but my mirror. When I was about to do something bad, Nicky would appear in front of me and reflect back the naughtiness, even if he wasn’t physically there. Does that make sense? He was like my ethics barometer. Weird, huh?”

The bedroom door opened a few inches and we both looked up, startled. Mrs. Watkins-Aunt Hannah-peeked her head in. “The others are finished downstairs, Detective.”

“Thanks, I’ll be down in a minute,” I told her, and stood. Annika rose, too, and to my surprise, gave me a hug. Her body felt thin but strong, like a whippet.

“Thanks for talking to me. It helps,” she said. She went to the corner and picked up the guitar.

“They never talk to me about the serious stuff. My parents, I mean. They think I’m weak, fragile. That I can’t handle it.”

She strummed the chords, her notes deliberate and melodic. “Did you take any languages in college, Gemma?”

I nodded. “French. I haven’t spoken a word of it in years.”

She continued strumming and I recognized the melody, one I was sure I’d be singing myself very shortly.

Rock-a-Bye, baby…

“I’m a philosophy major, so I have to take Greek. We’re on prefixes right now. Did you know that the Greek prefix A means without? As in, lacking?”

In the treetop…

I said, “That does ring a bell, yes.”

When the wind blows, the cradle will rock…

Annika strummed and hummed, and the rest of the words came to me, words that all of a sudden seemed menacing for a nursery song: Rock-a-bye, baby, in the treetop, when the wind blows, the cradle will rock, when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, and down will go baby, cradle and all.

Down will go Nicky…

Annika stopped strumming and laid the guitar down. “My mother was a philosophy major. She’s fluent in ancient Greek, Latin… all the languages of the dead. I asked my dad the other day which of them named us, Nicky and me. He said it was my mom.”

“Nicholas and Annika,” I said. A chill crept down my back and I shivered.

I understood but I didn’t understand.

“Annika: without Nika, without Nick. I am without Nick. It’s like my mom knew that someday, he’d be gone, and so she cursed me with this stupid name so I’ll always remember. I’ll always be without Nick.”