Inherit the Bones

Chapter Twenty-one

I caught a small break. The one place I needed to visit next was the one place I could theoretically hope to find some peace and quiet: Cedar Valley Public Library. Before I left the station, I grabbed a few of the files on Nicky’s accident three years ago. That’s what we had called it then: an accident.

I had eyeballed the case notes on the investigation yesterday; Finn had been lead, Louis Moriarty, second, and their distinct signatures filled the bottom of each page-standard operating procedure on any documentation. I looked at the table of contents, the first page in the first folder, but saw no mention of the library.

But then, the investigation had been conducted from the start under the assumption that Nicky had gone over the waterfall and died, his body washed down the Arkansas River straight on into the Gulf of Mexico.

There was never a reason to suspect anything else.

I made my way across town to the redbrick building that housed the library. Although it was still early in the day, thunderclouds, dark as charcoal, filled the horizon like ghostly specters, coming in low and fast over the Rockies. Judging from the speed they were moving, and the strange green-blue tint of the sky behind them, there would be rain by noon.

With the windows down, the moisture in the air hit my lungs like a welcome tonic. The humidity was a nice change from the heat we had experienced all week but as I breathed in the cool air, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of dread. Summer storms have a way of bringing more than rain and wind to town.

Before I’d left the station, I’d heard whispers that the Bellingtons planned to hold a memorial service on Saturday for Nicky at Wellshire Presbyterian. At least this time around they’d have a body to bury.

I parked and hurried across the lot, battling wind that blew against my cheeks, teasing up my hair and then releasing the dark strands just as quickly. Inside the library, a kid in baggy Adidas gear answered my questions with a nod. He pointed a finger down a short hallway and at the end of it, at a reference desk cluttered with paperback novels, tape dispensers, assorted stamps and ink pads, I found Tilly Jane Krinkle.

Surprised, I recognized her at once. I had just never known her name. Like most people in town, I simply called her the Bird Lady.

Orange hair stood in tufts on her scalp, as though a child had commandeered her head as an art table and left a mess of paint and cotton balls. She wore a pair of rhinestone cat-eye glasses, and a blue denim jumper over a cotton blouse, upon which was printed dozens of tiny red and green hearts. The jumper stopped at her calves, exposing thin pale legs that ended in red high top sneakers. On her shoulder a stuffed bird sat, a silent sentinel whose eye, at least the one that I could see, was cloudy as a cataract. The parrot’s feet were glued to a thin branch, which in turn was fastened to Tilly’s jumper with an intricate silver clasp and chain set.

The woman wore no socks and smelled of lilacs and talcum powder and glue. She looked up at me, took in my badge, and asked how she could help.

“Ms. Krinkle, my name is Gemma Monroe. I’m with the police department.”

“Well, of course you are,” she answered. Her voice was husky, a smoker’s voice. “Petey told me you were coming. Call me Tilly.”

“Petey?”

“My parrot,” she said, and pointed at the stuffed bird that stood on her right shoulder. “She is very wise.”

“I see. Um, hello, Petey,” I said, and half waved at the bird.

The woman gave me a black look. “Don’t expect a hello back, missy. Petey can be very shy. You’re here about Nicky Bellington, aren’t you?”

I hadn’t told anyone I was coming, not even Finn or Sam.

“How did you know that?”

Tilly said, “I watch the news, girly. I saw the press conference. It was only a matter of time.”

She stood, tsked-tsked, and motioned for me to follow her across the main reading room. The red sneakers squeaked against the linoleum and she walked on her tiptoes as though that would quiet the sound, but it just made her look as though she were about to sneak up on someone. I giggled and an elderly man in a suit at a study table frowned at me over the top of his half-moon glasses.

I shrugged back and mouthed an apology.

“I knew sooner or later someone would come about Nicky. I thought it would be sooner, but here you are,” Tilly whispered. “I’ve been waiting three god dang years.”

“Did the police talk to you after the accident?” I whispered back. “After Nicky fell at Bride’s Veil?”

She shook her head. “Nope, not a one of them. I waited but no one ever came.”

Damn Finn.

But then, would I have done any different? No matter what you think from watching CSI or Law & Order, we don’t tend to go looking for mysteries when there are simpler answers there for the taking. And the simple answer back then was, Nicky died in a tragic accident.

Tilly led me to a locked door at the back of the library. She inserted a stubby silver key into the handle and jiggled it back and forth, cursing up a storm when it wouldn’t catch. She took a deep breath, whispered something to Petey the bird, and then tried the key again. This time, the tumbler flipped back with a gentle click. The door popped open, and I followed the older woman down a wide flight of stairs that ended in a shadowy, cavernous room.

“The town archives,” she whispered to me.

Tilly instructed me to wait at the base of the stairs and then she walked into the dimness, keeping one hand on the wall, disappearing from my sight. She muttered more choice words and then one by one, rows of ceiling-mounted fluorescent lights buzzed on high above me.

The rest of the space remained dark and it was impossible to get a good sense of the room’s layout.

A tall bookshelf at my left held row after row of thick volumes. I pulled one out at random, sneezing as a layer of dust drifted off the scarlet leather cover. The title on the front read “Congressional Reports, Denver County, 1899-1901.”

“Hokay,” said a low voice behind me. I jumped and sneezed again, my heart pounding.

Tilly grinned at me, exposing all twelve of her remaining teeth.

“Jumpy, are we? Well, come on. I don’t have all day. Wouldn’t you know, I wait three dang years and you come on the day I have got a doctor appointment; it’s the cancer in the breasts. Hereditary. My mother had it. Her mother had it. Our whole dang family has it.”

I murmured some sympathies and followed her down one labyrinthine aisle after another, pausing as she switched on another row of lights. When she did, the lights behind us flickered off. Once, I stopped and turned and saw an emergency exit sign mounted high up, back in the direction of the stairs. The green glow seemed far away.

Then Tilly was telling me to come on, and I hurried to catch up with her.

She stopped abruptly in front of a study carrel. It was a cubicle-size space; the desk piled high with books, binders, folders, boxes of loose-leaf papers, and a magnifying glass, a tablet of paper, and a pencil.

“What is all this?”

Tilly shook her head at me and said to Petey in a low stage whisper “amateur.”

She pointed at the cubicle and said, “That, my dear, is the town’s complete archival materials on the McKenzie boys slash Woodsman murders.”

I swallowed. Research had not been my forte in school. “And this is what Nicky was doing when he came here? Reading all this stuff?”

“Yessiree,” she said. The sequins on her eyeglasses caught the reflection of the ceiling lights and a thousand tiny bulbs sparkled back at me. “That boy spent about four months down here.”

“And when was this? Exactly, I mean?”

“Oh, springtime, early summer of 2012. The last time he came by was two days before he went on that camping trip, in July. You know I’m up there a few times myself every summer? There’s a beautiful camping spot, just near that lookout point. Only place I can ever find some dang peace and quiet. Anyway, he told me I could pack all this up, that he had what he needed and thank you very much but he was all done,” Tilly said.

She stroked the stuffed parrot as she spoke, and I could have sworn I saw its emerald-green wings shudder at her touch.

“Why didn’t you?” I asked. “Pack it up, I mean?”

“Because he died, dummy. And I thought someone would come asking and I sure wasn’t about to put it all away and then go find it again, was I? Do you know how long it took me the first time, to gather all of this for Nicky? A week,” she said.

I looked at the overflowing cubicle and then at her. “Are you telling me this has been here for three years? Untouched? Doesn’t anyone else use this room? Or this material?”

She shook her head sadly. “You’re the first. Oh, I dust it all every week. But no one is interested in the past. If they were smart, they would be, for the past tells us all we need to know, if we listen. But no one takes the god dang time to listen.”

“Why didn’t you call the police and tell them to come check this stuff out?”

Tilly scoffed. “I did. I left a message at the station and no one ever got back to me. Time passed, and then it seemed silly to keep pestering you all. I figured if someone was interested, they would have come.”

I considered that, and Tilly’s age. If she was a native of the area, her answer to my next question might help frame things a bit.

“Did you know them? The McKenzie boys?”

Tilly nodded slowly, her eyes growing wider. She continued caressing the dead bird on her shoulder but her touch slowed, her finger making one long rhythmic stroke from crown to tail, and then beginning again.

“I was forty when they disappeared. Oh, but it was hot that summer. Hotter than a clap infection, so hot you could walk outside and feel like you could lie down and just die. I knew Tommy’s father, peripherally of course. We used the same dentist and we must have been on the same schedule, because every six months like clockwork we’d find ourselves waiting together in the little reception area at the dentist. Dr. Whitman. He’s long dead, by the way. Brain tumor.”

Tilly continued. “I remember the parents, John and Karen McKenzie, and Mark and Sarah McKenzie, they were everywhere that summer. Putting up posters, hosting folks who’d come in from out of town to help search… the newspapers interviewed them every week it seemed.”

She paused and for a moment I thought she was finished. Then she smiled sadly again and said, “And I couldn’t see that it made a damn difference. It was like those boys went up in smoke. They were here and then they were gone.”

She stopped stroking the parrot, her eyes locked on something very faraway, lost in the summer of 1985, the hottest summer on record in Cedar Valley, a summer where the sky was bright and children disappeared.

I asked her the same question I asked Darren Chase. “Did Nicky ever say why he was so interested in the boys?”

Tilly shook her head. “Nope. I’m a librarian. You’re the cop. It’s none of my damn business why people are here. I just show them how to access information and do good research. Nicky was polite and he treated the materials with respect. He was a good boy. This town loses more good boys than it keeps.”