Inherit the Bones

Chapter Seventeen

By the time I dropped Sam back at the station, I was so tired I didn’t think I was going to make it up the canyon. As I watched him walk into the building, his short blond hair turning amber in the setting sun, I was struck by a powerful sense of déjà vu, and for a moment, I waited to see if he would come back, and tell me that Ravi Hussen was on the phone, and the whole damn thing would start over like that Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day.

But he didn’t come out and I headed home. The last swatches of sunlight were chased across the sky by the deepening twilight. A couple of bats flitted high above me, on their way out for an evening meal. I pulled into our gravel driveway and stared at the house. It was, as it should have been, dark and silent. Immense woods flanked the narrow two-story house on three sides like an open mouth, gaping and black and ready to swallow up the place at any moment.

As I got out of the car, the chilly mountain air hit my bare forearms and I shivered; the intense heat of the day was already a distant memory. I hurried inside and got the lights on and some potatoes and salmon in the oven. I let Seamus out into the yard and left the back door open for him.

We’d spent a grand building the fence; it was nine feet high and reinforced with discreet steel planks hidden behind pine panels. Since its completion a year ago, we hadn’t had a single problem with bears in the garbage. And I had stopped worrying that Seamus would become a snack for a mountain lion.

The house was quiet save for the ticking of the timer I used for the fish and potatoes, and the sound of Seamus coming and going through the back door. He’d come in, whine a bit, and then go back out. After his fourth rotation, I pushed myself off the couch and went to the door.

“Seamus?” I called to him. “What is it, boy?”

The backyard was dark and I heard him snuffling in the garden at the side of the house. I flipped the switch for the porch light and waited for the thing to come on but it didn’t and I flipped it up and down and then cursed, remembering. The bulb had burned out during a dinner party we’d thrown a month ago.

I thought Brody replaced the light but he must have forgotten.

“Seamus! C’mon boy, come here,” I called. The snuffling stopped, and then started up again with another funny little whine. “Seamus! Get in here.”

He emerged from the dark with dirt on his nose and a guilty look on his face, and as I pulled the back door shut behind him, I got the sense that something, or someone, was in the yard.

I don’t scare easily but the silence was eerie and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I held my breath and listened and heard none of the usual nighttime sounds of the forests: the screech of crickets, the breeze in the pine boughs or the scratch of rodents.

A deep silence descended over the yard, so deep I could hear my heart thudding in my chest. I stepped back into the kitchen and bolted the back door and drew the curtains on the windows above the sink. I thought of going upstairs and getting my gun but the feeling passed. It was likely a raccoon or bobcat up the street; the prey all seem to play freeze when they sense a predator in the neighborhood.

I ate my dinner on a tray in front of the television and with every news story, grew more and more depressed. Another war in a faraway country, another parent doing something horrible to their child, more bloodshed, more sadness. I switched to a local news station and saw Terence and Ellen Bellington standing at a podium, holding hands, and I upped the volume.

They were in the pressroom at City Hall; I recognized the heavy velvet indigo curtains that hung behind them, embroidered in gold and scarlet thread with the state and town crests. The mayor’s chief of staff, a somber old bird whose name I couldn’t remember, stood to his left. To his right stood Chief Chavez.

I didn’t see Annika. Perhaps she was in the audience.

Mayor Bellington raised a hand for silence and then spoke. “Thank you all for coming, I know the late notice was a surprise. I’m going to read a short statement that my wife and I have prepared. We won’t be taking any questions tonight. You can contact my office, or the police department, in the morning for further information.”

He cleared his throat and I watched as Ellen gave his hand a squeeze. She wore a navy suit that made her pale hair and skin look ghostly. In contrast, the mayor wore dark slacks and a light blue V-neck sweater, with a pastel tie. Somehow it all worked.

“As many of you know, the body of a young man was found Monday afternoon at the fairgrounds. The victim was a clown, an employee of the Fellini Brothers’ Circus. What began as a routine murder investigation took a surprising turn when it was discovered that the young man is none other than our son, Nicholas Patrick Bellington.”

The mayor raised his hands again at the chatter that burst forth from the audience, waiting until the room was quiet again before speaking.

“Three years ago, the good citizens of Cedar Valley granted my family privacy and respect as we grieved for our son, Nicky. I ask you now, not as your mayor, but as your neighbor, and I hope your friend, for that same courtesy once again,” he said.

The mayor stepped back from the microphone and without another word, walked off the stage with Ellen in tow. The room erupted and Chavez took the podium.

“Chief! Chief Chavez! Do you have any leads?” a squeaky voice rang out above the others. I recognized it as that of our local news anchor, Missy Matherson, a bottle blonde with a little too much ambition and not nearly enough empathy.

“Missy, you heard the mayor. We’ll be taking all questions in the morning,” Chavez said. He was comfortable at the podium and his genuine manner seemed to settle the room down. For the first time, I realized that he could easily run for office someday and likely win, and I wondered if the same thought had ever crossed his mind.

He said, “Y’all come down to the station about nine, we’ll have coffee and doughnuts and I’ll tell you everything I can.”

The mayor’s chief of staff, still on stage, leaned over and whispered something in Chavez’s ear. He listened and then nodded.

“The mayor’s office will be available for questions, as well, in the afternoon,” he added.

“Chief! Is the mayor still planning a rumored run on the Senate office in next year’s elections?” Missy Matherson shouted. “What about his cancer, is such traumatic news going to affect his recovery?”

I put down my fork in disgust. The woman was colder than a steak in the freezer.

Chavez had been in the process of stepping away from the podium, but now he came back and leaned into the microphone. If I knew him, he’d have a zinger.

“Folks, it’s been a long couple of days. We’ve got a dead man-a kid, really-and tonight, a good family grieves. I can’t speak for the mayor, but I’d guess politics is the furthest thing from his mind at the moment.”

I turned the TV off and felt a wave of anxiety wash over me. It was a shitty, shitty world at times and here we were, bringing a baby into it. By the time the Peanut was my age, was there going to be a world worth enjoying? What if something happened to me, or Brody? I knew what it was like to grow up loved, protected, cherished, only to have that security ripped away in a few seconds of screeching tires and screaming engines.

I’d had a few of these panic attacks early in the pregnancy and Brody’s response had never wavered. “We’re bringing a baby into this world not with fear, but with love. We can’t be afraid of life.”

I wasn’t afraid of life. I was just terrified of how different life might look for my daughter.

I brushed my teeth and used the restroom and put my nightgown on. I climbed into bed; my body was exhausted but my mind refused to rest. Next to the bed, my cell phone buzzed on top of the nightstand. I checked the caller ID; it was my grandmother.

“Julia? Are you all right? It’s late,” I said.

Silence.

“Julia?”

“We just watched the news. Gemma, listen to me. You’ve got to be careful now, stay away from him. He’s got a sickness. He’s a virus,” my grandmother whispered. She spoke quickly, her words tumbling over one another.

“Stay away from who, Mayor Bellington? What on earth are you talking about?”

Julia sighed. “Think, you little idiot. What do viruses do? They seep in and infect and spread. Oh no, oh no, your grandfather’s done in the can. I’ve got to go, he can’t know I called you. Did you hear me? Stay the hell away from that man.”

She hung up and I slowly set the phone down, chilled to my core. She’d never spoken to me that way, and I was rattled. What man did she mean?

I lay back in bed and pulled the covers up as high as they could go before they’d smother me. Slightly over forty-eight hours had passed since we’d discovered Nicky Bellington, aka Reed Tolliver’s, body. The people in both boys’ lives circled in my thoughts like pieces in a chess game; like vultures in the sky.

There was Joseph Fatone, Fellini’s general manager. He seemed harmless enough, but there was something off about him, his answers had come too easy during our conversation. There was more to the man than met the eye. Reed’s girlfriend, Tessa, was feisty, driven, and beautiful… and complicated. Was it compassionate to live with someone you didn’t love-Lisey-who was in love with you? Or was it a cruel power play, an illusion like the ones Tessa created as she flew through the air on the trapeze bars?

At the circus, surrounding Reed, and Joe, and Tessa and Lisey, were the dozens of supporting characters I’d yet to meet: the glitter and the gassers, and the grunts and peddies. They were a motley crew of nomads, making their way from city to city, anonymous, living under the shadows of the big top and the bright lights.

Not for the first time, I thought what a perfect cesspool a traveling circus could be. I’m sure there were good people in there, honest, decent hard workers, but the very nature of the beast dictated that the players were those who liked living on the fringe of society.

And there was Nicholas, sweet, good-natured Nicky. His father was a decent and ambitious man with aspirations for Washington. His mother, Ellen-beautiful and as cold as an arctic queen in a fairy tale. And like any good fairy tale, there was a princess. Only this princess was as smart as her father and as beautiful as her mother and as sweet as her twin brother.

In real life, perfection like that doesn’t exist, and when you see it, you know there’s something else behind the facade.

Finally, there was Nicky himself. What was he doing three years ago, spending all his free time looking into a thirty-year-old murder mystery? And what, if anything, did that have to do with his death two days ago?

Like actors on a stage, the major players in the case paraded back and forth across my mind, each playing their roles. At my feet, Seamus snored, twitching every few minutes from his doggy dreamland. He shifted and I shifted with him, his body and my legs repositioning themselves until we were both comfortable again.

I must have fallen asleep around midnight, but the Woodsman again haunted my dreams.

I stand in a meadow in the middle of a dense forest. The air is cool and silent and still. I’m in a nightgown, an old-fashioned dress with long sleeves and delicate lace trim at the wrists and hem. When I raise my arms to look at what I’m wearing, the white fabric glows in the moonlight. The lacework is so fragile it looks as though I’ve dipped my wrists in cobwebs.

I’m a beacon in the dark woods.

The children creep toward me, emerging from the black forest like wraiths.

They fall to their knees around me, their hands together in supplication as though to pray. 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 my hand passes through his face and I stumble, losing my balance.

A noise emerges from the woods, a terrible dragging sound, and as the children slip back into the dark edges of the trees, a man emerges. He never steps into the moonlight but I can tell he is large, over six feet tall, and strong. He has the shoulders of a man who spends hours using them, and strapped to his back are the woodsman’s tools: pick-ax, shovel, handsaw, hammers.

Behind him is a sleigh, or a wagon, on which a wrapped object lies. The object is not long, maybe four feet, but something deep within me recognizes its general shape and my stomach clenches in a tight fist of fear.

He stops and for the first time in all my dreams, he looks around the meadow as though he senses my presence.

For a moment, I think he doesn’t see me. I exhale and step backward but my bare feet hit a twig and in the still of the forest, the noise is a crack of thunder. I freeze and the Woodsman’s head slowly turns toward me.

My blood turns to ice in my veins.

My bowels loosen and I tighten my thighs to staunch the flow of urine that I’m about to release. Fear like I’ve never felt before runs through every nerve, every cell in my body, and I sense a scream building in my throat.

“It’s too late,” he whispers. “You’re already dead.”

At six o’clock the angry buzz of the alarm clock jolted me awake. I sat up. The room was cold and quiet; Seamus must have gone downstairs for a sip of water or to commandeer a patch of early morning sunlight on the living-room floor. As I rolled out of bed, my bare leg brushed against a damp spot in the middle of the mattress. Puzzled, I leaned over it and the sharp smell of urine hit me.

I’d wet the bed.

I threw the sheets in the washing machine and left a voice message with Dr. Pabst’s office. He was helpful when I saw him before; perhaps he’d have some new insight into my dreams. I reached a secretary who was delighted to tell me that there had been a cancellation and Pabst could see me that morning.

I tried to ignore the shame that crept over my body when I thought about the wet spot in my bed. Fear is a natural human emotion. My bladder was just full; it was the Peanut’s fault. Maybe I had a UTI.

I told myself these things but I knew who had caused the bed-wetting.

It was the Woodsman.

I showered and made breakfast and let Seamus out into the backyard. In the morning light, from my perch on the patio, I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I thought about crossing the yard and checking the far side of the fence, but my feet were bare and the grass was wet with dew. Seamus did his business and then came right back in, with none of the whining he’d done the night before.

Before I left for the day, I checked my personal e-mail and immediately wished I hadn’t. There was only one message, from Brody, laced with expletives and apologies. The team had run into a snag in Denali; some of their core samplings had degraded and were useless. They would need to re-create most of their research, from the beginning. It didn’t make sense to return to the mainland, and then go back, so they were staying, possibly as long as another three weeks.

Brody wasn’t coming home anytime soon. Celeste Takashima’s perfect face, with her dark almond-shaped eyes and thick black hair, flashed in my mind. Their affair had been brief and intense and was long over. At least that’s what Brody had told me. But he’d also told me that part of his contract included a clause by which he had the ability to vet his team, and avoid ever having to work with the woman again.

Some clause.

“Stay cool, Gemma,” I whispered to myself. “You don’t know that she’s up there.”

I told myself that but I didn’t believe it.