Inherit the Bones

Chapter Eleven

I spent the afternoon at the station, writing up my report and reviewing the initial findings from the interviews conducted on some of the circus workers. The officers’ notes indicated many of the employees were reluctant to talk to the police; accordingly, there wasn’t much to go on: Reed Tolliver had been pleasant, hardworking. He didn’t have enemies. He had a girlfriend, and I made a note to interview her myself, along with Joe Fatone, the general manager.

At four, Finn Nowlin stopped by and dropped a sheet of paper on my desk. “Merry Christmas, Gemma.”

“What’s this? A list of cities, sweet! Are these locations of active restraining orders against you?”

Finn smirked. “You’re hilarious, you know that? It’s all the towns that Fellini’s Circus has been through in the last two years. You might want to put a call out to our colleagues and see what kind of murders they saw around the same time the circus was in town. Maybe we got a serial killer on our hands.”

He knew it was a great idea and he knew that I knew it, too. He also knew it hadn’t even crossed my mind.

“Thank you,” I managed. “Fatone didn’t say anything about any other murders.”

“I know, I read the report. There are two things that jump to mind. One, maybe Fatone is your guy. I’d be careful around him. Two, maybe your killer works for the circus and his other victims have all been, uh, townspeople, you know, going to the circus. Maybe killing his coworker is a first.”

Finn had some good points. He walked off and I started the tedious task of finding contacts for police departments in those cities. It took two hours and when I was finished, I had a list of more than a hundred phone numbers. I left it, with a cover sheet, on Sam’s desk. He could make the calls; cops are notoriously territorial and it would be good for Sam to get some practice at establishing diplomatic relations with our buddies in Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio.

Before I left the station, I made arrangements to meet with Fatone at the fairgrounds the next morning. That would give me an opportunity to review the crime scene, do a walk-around without the presence of the body and all the blood.

I was halfway home when I remembered I said I would stop by and visit my grandmother and Bull. Swearing, I checked my rearview mirror and pulled a 180 in the middle of the canyon.

I headed back into town, back to my childhood home. After my parents died, Julia rented out her property in Denver and moved into the spare bedroom on the first floor. I think she thought she would move back to Denver after I finished high school, but she grew to love Cedar Valley. Then she met Bull, and they married, and he moved in, too.

I always wondered if it was strange for Julia to live in her dead son’s house. I never asked her about it, though. After their wedding, she and Bull took over the master bedroom and sold all my parents’ furniture, replacing it with shabby-chic country-cute stuff. She let me keep a few things, like my mother’s antique jewelry boxes and my father’s art supplies. That had been a fight; seven-year-old Gemma screaming at Julia to allow her to keep the half-empty paint tubes and half-finished canvases, fragments of a half-finished life.

It was Bull who finally stepped in, calmly directing Julia to go for a walk. He helped me pack up the paintbrushes and tubes and canvases, and the jewelry boxes, and then drove them to his storage unit on the other side of town. He promised to hold them for me until I had my own place. Bull was a good man, a fair man. It wasn’t his fault he fell in love late in life with a woman stuck raising her granddaughter. He accepted me as his own and many times, I’ve felt closer to Bull than to Julia.

I parked behind his station wagon and stood for a moment next to my car, staring at the house, taking in the open windows, with their white curtains billowing in the gentle breeze, and the neatly trimmed lawn with the pretty flower beds that held dormant irises and blooming roses. A chubby man in shorts and a too-small tank top started up a lawn mower two houses down. He saw me watching him and he raised a can of Coors in my direction. I didn’t know if he was toasting me or offering an ode to the lovely summer evening. I raised a hand in greeting and he turned away to his mowing.

The smoky smell of barbecue reached me and I entered the backyard through a side gate, calling out as I did so. My grandmother sat at a white wrought-iron table, a glass of juice before her and a paperback in her lap. A plate heaped with pieces of charred and crispy chicken got my stomach rumbling.

I put a hand on her shoulder and she jumped.

“Ah, Gemma, you scared me. You shouldn’t be sneaking up on old people like that,” Julia said. “I’m liable to have a heart attack. Give us a kiss.”

I leaned down and pecked her on the cheek. Her skin was cool and dry and tanned under a large hat with a straw brim.

“You’re not old, Julia. You’re just deaf. I called hello as I came through.”

She furrowed her brow. “Well, if you say so. Did we have an appointment?”

I shook my head. Movement caught my eye and I turned to see Bull pushing through the back door with a platter of biscuits and coleslaw and corn. Despite the heat, he wore a long-sleeve T-shirt and khaki pants. With his black glasses and white mustache and goatee, trailing the smell of barbecue sauce, he was a dead ringer for Colonel Sanders.

He smiled when he saw me. “Hi, honey. Want to join us for dinner? There’s plenty of food,” he said. He set the platter down and leaned in to give me a kiss. As he did, he whispered, “She’s having a good day. Praise the Lord.”

We ate outside, bathed in the dying light of the setting sun, surrounded by the sounds of a summer night in small-town America: the chirp of a cricket, the sporadic lawn mower two houses down, a television turned loud in a neighbor’s living room. At the end of the cul-de-sac, I heard school-age boys playing basketball. They weren’t very good-there were four shouts for one thunk of the ball hitting the basket.

When we were finished, Julia offered to clear the plates and Bull agreed. I could tell he wanted to speak to me alone, and I became worried that something was wrong with Julia, some new symptom. Maybe we would need to look into the home health care sooner than I thought.

Bull waited until she was inside, then he said, “Gemma, I heard a rumor today. You know you don’t have to confirm or deny, but if I heard it, you know others will have, too.”

“Oh yeah? What kind of rumor?” I asked, toying with my glass of juice.

Bull stared at me over his glasses. “The kind where dead boys come back from the grave.”

“Like Jesus Christ?” I said. I respected Bull’s devotion to Christianity; I told myself it was good for him to defend it every now and then against a heathen like myself.

Bull rolled his eyes. “No, not like Jesus Christ. Like Nicky Bellington.”

I sat up straighter. “What did you hear?”

Bull looked back to the house as Julia came through the back door. She carried a pie in her hands and pride in her eyes.

“Voilà!” She set the pie down and Bull and I stared at it, then at each other. Ice crystals rimmed the edges and the frozen cherries in the middle looked as hard as rocks.

“That looks delicious, Julia. I’m so full though, maybe we could save it for later?” I said.

She shot daggers in my direction. “You are too skinny as it is, Gemma. You’re eating for two these days, damn it. When are you going to start taking care of yourself? I’m going to call your mother and have a word.”

Julia picked up the pie and hustled back inside. She slammed the back door so hard the thermometer on the wall next to it shook.

Bull shrugged. “I hope you weren’t planning on dessert.”

“What did you hear about Nicky?”

“Exactly what I said. He came back. Only he came back as someone else, didn’t he? What makes a kid fake his own death?”

I held up a hand. “We don’t know that’s what happened yet, Bull. Take off your prosecutor hat for a minute, will you?”

Julia came back and sat down at the table. She’d changed into a red nightgown and a pair of slippers I remembered from ten years ago. They were sheepskin, plush, winter slippers. She pulled her knees up and hugged them and looked at Bull and me. Her right hand began to tug at the loose fuzz on her slippers.

“Go on,” she said. “Don’t mind me.”

“What a nightmare. That poor family, first the cancer, now this…” Bull said.

I nodded. “They’re pretty shaken up. I saw them this morning at their big new house up Foxfield Drive. I saw Frank Bellington, too. I hadn’t seen him in years. He’s quite old now, in a wheelchair. I remembered he used to come around quite a bit, didn’t he?”

Bull leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. He pursed his lips but didn’t say anything.

He looked like a man contemplating a lie.

Julia, though, reached across the table and gripped my arm. Surprised, I turned to her. She stared at me. Her eyes were fierce and the color was high in her cheeks.

“You stay away from that man, Gemma Elizabeth Monroe,” she said.

Her grip tightened on my forearm.

“Ow, Julia, you’re hurting me,” I said. I pulled free and rubbed at the red marks she’d left. She slumped backward in her chair and resumed picking at the fuzz on her slippers.

I stared at Bull. “What the hell? I thought you and Frank were these great friends.”

Bull stood and removed his glasses. He folded them carefully and placed them in the breast pocket of his T-shirt. He motioned for me to join him and I did, and I found myself being walked to the side gate.

“Are you escorting me out? What was my grandmother talking about? I do remember Frank coming around, years ago. You two were buddies, you and Louis Moriarty and Jazzy Douglas. You used to play poker every Thursday night. What happened?”

At my car, Bull stopped walking. The lawn mowing man was long gone, as was the sun and the pleasant summer evening. The street was dark and still. Something cramped in my stomach and a sourness rose in my throat. Maybe it was the coleslaw. My arm throbbed where Julia had gripped it.

Bull sighed. “Nothing happened, Gemma. That’s how life goes. You are friends with someone until you aren’t, and it’s usually over some small, silly misunderstanding. I don’t even remember what it was. Go home, honey. Get some sleep; you look exhausted. I don’t like the thought of you in that empty house, all alone, not a neighbor in sight. When is Brody home?”

“A few more days.”

“Are we going to see a wedding before that baby comes?” Bull asked. His tone was gentle. My reaction was prickly; petulant undertones, hated but uncontrollable, crept into my voice. “What, you don’t want a bastard great-grandchild?”

Bull gave me a look. “Gemma, stop it. At some point, you need to crap or get off the can. Brody apologized. You’re having a child together. Forgiveness heals the giver much more than the receiver. Marriage is a great stabilizer, especially for a child.”

“I forgave Brody a long time ago, Bull. Forgive me if I’m still not convinced that marriage is the right choice for us. You know what they say, ‘Once a cheater, always a cheater.’”

“People change, Gem. They grow and mature. You two were young and in love and things turned serious. Brody got scared. He’s a man; at the end of the day everyone knows we’re really the weaker sex. We constantly struggle with our biological need to sow our seeds and our desire for a stable home front with one good woman. He loves you too much to hurt you again.”

“It’s got nothing to do with love. It never has. It has everything to do with Celeste Takashima and all the other beautiful women in the world who turn the heads of men who don’t belong to them.”

“Well, that’s your first problem, Gemma. Brody doesn’t belong to you. You go on thinking that way and sure as spit he’ll up and betray you again,” Bull said.

I didn’t have a response to that, so I shrugged and got in the car. Bull closed the door behind me. I rolled down the window and thanked him for dinner then backed out. He stood in the drive, watching me until I reached the street, then he turned and was swallowed by the dark shadows lining the edge of the house.