Inherit the Bones

Chapter Twelve

I slept little that night. The Peanut was active and every jab and kick felt like a personal attack against any hope of slumber. When I did sleep, my dreams were vivid. Twice I woke, heart pounding, my body covered in a film of sweat that simultaneously chilled and fevered me.

I dreamed I stood at the edge of a great precipice.

Below me, miles below me, a narrow ribbon of indigo water wound its way through a rust-colored canyon. I raised my arms in a swan dive and pushed off the ground, lifting up and over and then I was falling, falling down through the air. What seemed like an eternity passed, and suddenly the river was rushing up to greet me and my face hit the water with a sharp slap.

The green light on the tiny alarm clock next to my bedside read two in the morning. I walked downstairs and got a glass of milk and then splashed cool water from the kitchen sink on my face. After a few stretches, I lay down on the living-room couch. Although the couch wasn’t as comfortable as the bed, the room was cooler.

The windows had no curtains and I watched as the pale moonlight made fantastical shapes and shadows on the pine floor: a witch on a broom, then a headless horse, then a silo that shifted and slid into a nameless blob.

I remembered Dr. Pabst’s explanation of nightmares as being one of the mind’s ways to work through traumatic events. He also said they are a common reaction to stress. My grandmother used to tell me that nightmares were the result of too much sugar and not enough love. When I woke crying from a bad dream, which was a common occurrence in my youth, she would lie with me and shower my forehead with kisses.

Curled up on my side, I called for Seamus. He waddled over from his doggy bed in the kitchen and with a groan, jumped up on the couch. He lay at my feet and passed a squeak of gas and was soon snoring. He was no replacement for my grandmother but he was a comfort nonetheless.

I fell asleep to his snorts and grunts and funny little sighs.

I woke a few hours later from my second dream, one that was as familiar to me as the thin cotton quilt, hand-stitched by my other grandmother, my mother’s mother, that lay jumbled in a heap at my feet. I’d been having this same dream for years; it started a few weeks after I found the skull in the woods.

If I was lucky, I went a full month between the dreams.

If I was unlucky, they haunted me three or four times a week.

I stand in a meadow in the middle of a dense forest. The air is cool and silent and still; the pine boughs do not so much as move. I’m in a nightgown, an old-fashioned dress with long sleeves and delicate lace trim, what they used to call a granny gown. The white fabric glows in the moonlight.

I’m a beacon in the dark woods.

The children creep toward me from opposite directions, emerging from the black forest like wraiths. They form points on a compass: Tommy from the north and Andrew from the south. One after the other, they fall to their knees around me, their hands together in supplication, in prayer.

We are the dead, they whisper.

Do not forget us, they chant.

Tommy is closest and I put my hand on his head in a gesture of comfort, but he is mere ether and my hand passes through his face like a hand through a cobweb.

A noise emerges from the woods, a dragging, clanking, terrible sound. The children rise to their haunches and scuttle backward, their eyes never leaving my face. As they slip back into the darkness at the edge of the trees, a man emerges. He stays out of the moonlight, but I can tell he is a big man, over six feet tall, and strong.

He drags a sleigh. Something lies on the sleigh, something small and shrouded and still.

Strapped to the man’s back are tools: A pick-ax. A shovel. A handsaw.

They are a woodsman’s tools.

As the old kettle began to babble with the sounds of boiling water, I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and scanned the fridge. The Peanut had taken a liking to cinnamon rolls in the morning and I wasn’t going to fight her (although I was a little pissed about all the kicking she’d done during the night). I popped a frozen bun in the microwave and snipped open the corner of the tiny frosting package that had come with it.

Sticky white icing leaked from the plastic wrapper and I licked my fingers and felt the sugar hit my bloodstream.

On the kitchen table, my MacBook beeped. I opened it to see a Skype call waiting so I logged in and Brody’s face, slightly hazy and out of focus, greeted me. I waved at him and waited for the connection to improve. His beard looked full and his hair seemed to have grown inches since we’d last Skyped.

“Morning my sweet one, how are my girls?”

I was grateful for the technology that allowed us to not only talk but see each other as well, but I hated how close he looked and how far away he actually was. Anchorage could have been on the moon for all the miles between us.

“We miss you. Four more days, I don’t know if we’ll make it,” I told him. The microwave beeped and my belly growled. “Hang on a sec.”

I grabbed the cinnamon roll and a decaf tea and sat down in front of the computer screen. I held up the pastry and mug. “See what you’re missing? Momma’s on a sugar rush.”

He laughed, his smile appearing a millisecond before the sound came through the line. “That looks almost as good as all the salmon I’m eating. It is so beautiful here, Gemma. You’d love it. We’ll be back in Denali for a few days, then back to Anchorage at the end of the week and then I’ll be home.”

This was his third trip to Alaska in six months. He was a contract geologist for the federal government, doing all sorts of technical scientific things I didn’t pretend to understand. At the moment, his work involved a top-secret mineral deposit that had been discovered in some ridge or another in Denali National Park. Apparently Brody was one of about five people in the world that could understand its importance.

“I miss you. It’s been a rough few days,” I said.

Brody’s face blurred in and out of focus and I heard something that sounded like “mumble mumble line mumble gee.”

“Uh-oh, hon? Are you there?”

I tipped the laptop screen back and forth and he reappeared for a split-second. He was talking over his shoulder to someone behind him, someone I couldn’t see, and then he came back to me. I caught a glimpse of a bright pink parka, feminine and fitted, and then Brody’s face filled the computer screen. “Honey, I gotta go. Love you both.”

“Hey, is that Celeste? Jesus Christ, Brody, is that Celeste Takashima?”

He touched his fingers to his lips and then to the screen. Then he was gone.

And… the days just keep getting worse. If that was Celeste Takashima, I was going to kill Brody when he got home.

My mood foul, I finished my breakfast and then I showered and dressed, all the while trying to give Brody the benefit of the doubt. Pink Parka could have been anyone: the bush pilot, the bush pilot’s wife, some other world-renowned, highly specialized female scientist that I’d never heard of. Maybe Brody was surrounded with snow bunnies all eager to service the man.

Bull’s words came back to me: people change. I pushed down the terrible thoughts trying to claw their way out of my heart and tried to focus on the job at hand.

Seamus followed me around, and I explained to him how frustrating it was to struggle with the buttons on my shirt, a struggle I hadn’t had a few days ago. The baby was growing by the minute. I was already in the largest women’s size the station stocked. I’d be moving into the men’s sizes in another week.

After that I might as well wear a muumuu. God, Finn Nowlin would have a field day if I walked into the station in a muumuu, my handgun on one hip and a radio on the other. If it came to that I was just going to retire and journal my eating habits on a blog. I’ve heard people can make big bucks doing that, taking pictures of their meals and posting it for the whole world to see.

I headed out of town, my thoughts dancing between two big questions: Who killed Nicky? And what really happened on that beautiful July day three years ago?

It didn’t make sense, any of it.

The story of Nicky Bellington for three long years has been one of fate. A tragic slip and a long fall; a matter of timing and improper footwear and recent rains and whatever else you could attribute to the cause of the accident.

But Nicky didn’t die. And that changed everything: how we looked at the accident; his family; his life. I thought about Ellen’s strange question: is it different, being the parent of a murdered child as opposed to a child who’s died in an accident? I thought there was a difference there, but I couldn’t see what it was worth, or what it meant. It seemed to me that with murder comes intent, whereas with an accident comes fate.

I realized, as I took a hard right on the steering wheel and headed to the south part of town, there was another question that needed to be answered. Who was the real victim here: Reed? Or Nicky?