Inherit the Bones

Chapter Twenty-five

I couldn’t figure out when the message had been written.

I would have heard the intruder on the stairs, or Seamus would have. That dog still barked at the mailman, and poor Mr. Ellis had done our route for years.

I took a picture of the note with my digital camera, and careful not to touch the edges of the smooth tube, sealed up the lipstick in a plastic baggie. When I held the bag up to the light, I saw faint ridges on the tube from a fingerprint almost touching the small label at the bottom.

I did another round of the house and checked every closet, under the guest bed, and in the garage, pulling out the bikes, camping gear, and stacks of junk that piled up month by month, year by year. There was nothing out of the ordinary. The only disturbing thing I found was a mouse taking the big sleep in an old ski boot.

At midnight, I grabbed a pile of blankets and made up a bed on the living-room couch. I set the gun on the floor, and put my cell phone under the pillow. My sleep was deep, free of dreams, and when I woke, I found myself in a twisted, sweaty heap of blankets and loose cushions.

The rain had stopped sometime around dawn. I stumbled into the kitchen and tripped over Seamus’s water bowl, as I did most mornings, and swore. Later, on the back patio, I sipped from a pot of hot tea and scarfed down a plate of bacon and eggs and toast.

The sun was shining and already the dozen or so puddles of muddy water that dotted the yard like miniature ponds were beginning to dry up. Two matronly robins, their breasts plump and rosy hued, picked at fat worms that had drowned in the storm. Their sharp beaks picked up the thick pink tubes and neatly sucked them down like housewives at an oyster bar.

In the light of day, the sun warming the air and my skin, it was hard to believe the previous night’s events. Other than the lipstick and the photos I’d taken of the message, there was no sign of my visitor. I took a look in the front yard, but the tire treads I saw were my own and those from Tessa’s car.

After a shower and quick check of my e-mail, I locked up and carefully backed out of the driveway. The mud was thick, and the west-facing front of the house was deep in shadows, not yet graced by the sun’s heat.

Driving down the canyon, I saw evidence of the storm’s destruction everywhere. The creek ran fast and high, racing over tree limbs and submerged boulders that two days ago had stood dry. Ahead of me, a silver Honda minivan slowed to a crawl and then carefully maneuvered around a pine tree that lay across the road like a felled giant.

Perched delicately on one of the pine’s limbs, a single crow, its feathers black as ink, bobbed his head up and down into the tree’s nooks and crannies. A pickup truck from the local utility company was parked just beyond the tree, and as I drove by, the driver gave me a halfhearted wave.

I passed the turnoff to Scarecrow Road, a winding stretch of dirt and cement that culminated, four curvy miles away, in an abandoned mine shaft. The signpost’s sketch of a once-friendly scarecrow had faded over the years. Vandals had gouged out his cheery eyes and widened his mouth into more of a leer than a grin.

Someone had taken a red Sharpie to the figure, drawing devil horns on the scarecrow’s head, and a protruding tongue from his mouth, lascivious, its tip forked like a snake’s. The scarecrow’s crotch was filled with crude, obscene sketches that only vaguely resembled anything like standard male equipment.

I drove past the turnoff, making a note to talk to the county about a replacement sign.

I drove, and I remembered.

In March, before the forest fires came, before school let out for spring break, but after the last big snowfall, and after the junior prom had come and gone, a group of six teenagers, two boys, four girls, sat in a basement, bored out of their minds. Inspiration struck and they piled into Greta Tobias’s father’s minivan-a van identical to the silver Honda I’d been caught behind just a few minutes before-and headed to Scarecrow Road.

Their final destination was the old mine shaft four miles beyond the turnoff.

As teenagers are apt to do, they drove distracted, half of them texting, the other half hollering at one another to change the radio station. But Greta was a good driver, and she tuned out her friends and concentrated on the icy road. The two fatal errors the group made on their way out of town could hardly be blamed on these distractions.

The first error was stopping at Shane Montgomery’s house. While Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery sat in the den watching an old movie on the Turner Classic Movie network, their son-star football player, straight-A student-grabbed a bottle of tequila and a bottle of vodka from the liquor cabinet above the refrigerator.

The second error was poor arithmetic, plain and simple. The van’s gas gauge was broken; it had been for weeks. Greta’s father was a busy man, and he traveled a lot for business. He simply hadn’t had time to get the damn thing fixed. So, he had shown Greta how to do the math-fill it up, drive it down. If you knew how many gallons the tank held, you could estimate how far you could go at any given time.

Only that night, Greta’s math was off.

Of course, when we arrived at the scene, we didn’t know about any of these fatal errors. We only got the details the following day when the five surviving teens told us the gruesome tale, piece by piece.

They had arrived at the mine shaft just fine. They drank by the light of the van’s headlights, passing the vodka and tequila bottles around and around, over and over. Lisa Chang-Hughes dared Shane to strip naked and run through the woods. He did, and then he dared Lisa to climb down into the mine shaft.

It was supposed to be a short trip, a few feet down and then back up again. But her heeled boot caught a rotted rung, and her hands, numbed by the cold and the tequila, were slow to react.

She fell fifteen feet.

Frantic, her friends called her name, but there was no answer. They waved the beams of their flashlights into the pit and saw her legs, and then one hand.

The rest of her body lay in darkness.

In a panic, they tried to dial 911 but not one of their cell phones picked up a signal. They were too far into the woods, out of range of all the satellite towers. They decided to split up, and a couple of them would drive into town and get help.

It was a good plan but it went to shit when the van’s ignition caught and then died. The gas tank was empty.

In darkness and cold, the two boys ran the four miles back to the main road, and then another three into town. But it was past midnight, and store after store was closed, some with dim interior lights cruelly illuminating phones that were just out of reach. It was another twenty minutes before the boys got to the all-night McDonald’s, where they persuaded the manager to make the call.

And it was almost two in the morning by the time we arrived on the scene.

To this day, I can close my eyes and feel the heartbreak that flooded their faces-the boys who’d run seven miles for help, and the girls who sat by the mine shaft, long after their flashlights had died, in the cold, in the dark-when we told them in quiet, gentle voices that Lisa was dead. She had died instantly, breaking her neck when she hit the hard frozen ground of the old shaft.

Hours later, exhausted, I managed to make it to my yearly physical and drug screen, an appointment I had already pushed back twice. The doctor called me at home that night with the news that while my urine test had been negative for narcotics, it had been positive for hCG, a very specific hormone with a very specific purpose.

There is no way for me to drive by Scarecrow Road without remembering that day. A day that opened with the cold, unyielding, unforgiving truth that death comes for us all. A night that closed with the bright, shining truth that with each day comes new life.

I picked Finn Nowlin up at the station and continued downtown, past the coffee joint and the bookstore and the new flower place I’d yet to visit. A young man in cutoff jean shorts and an electric green T-shirt stood just outside the shop door, arranging pink rosebuds in silver buckets that lined the window ledge. He stopped two elderly women as they strolled by, their arms linked, their backs hunched, their hair pulled up in low, matching buns, and handed them each a rose with a dramatic bow. The curves of their backs kept their faces turned to the ground, but I liked to imagine the blush that flooded each cheek was the same shade of pink as the rosebuds they clenched in their gnarled, arthritic hands.

For once, Finn was quiet.

He sipped his coffee and stared out the window, his eyes shaded by dark aviator-style sunglasses. I’d told Finn I wanted to stop at the circus on our way to the library and chat with Tessa.

I didn’t tell him about the message on my mirror. Not for the first time, I cursed Chavez for sticking me with Finn. I wondered if Sam Birdshead was making any progress on the old police files that detailed Nicky’s fall at Bride’s Veil.

We pulled up to the circus grounds a little before ten o’clock and searched vainly for a parking spot in the main lot. Finn finally told me to get out, that he’d park the car up the road. As he pulled away, he muttered in a low voice something about women drivers.

I waited for him at the front gates and watched as ticket after ticket was purchased. It was a warm day, getting hotter and more crowded by the minute. Closing the circus for a few days only seemed to whet the town’s appetite; that, or it was morbid curiosity to see the fairgrounds where a murder occurred just a few days before.

Finn joined me and we flashed our badges to the ticket taker and bypassed a line that snaked around the corner of the tent and continued into the parking lot. I knew what our first stop would be and I paused at one of the game booths to get directions. A hand-painted wooden sign read “Toss the Coin in the Bottle-You Pick Your Price.”

For a moment, I was confused, and then I realized “price” was meant to read “prize.”

Behind the counter, a young man in battered jeans and a black leather biker vest and dirty T-shirt leaned against a metal stool that must have once been a shiny red but was now a peeling dull rust the color of a dried scab.

I asked the man where we could find the trapeze artists.

“Ah, lady, you don’t want to watch no trapie show. You want to play the bottles, I can tell these things. Get your boyfriend here to ante up and give us a dollar. You’ll get ten throws with a dollar,” he said.

The man peeled himself off the rusty stool and ambled toward me. His face was marked by an unfortunate eruption of acne, and as he rubbed at his chin, a blister broke open. He drew his hand away and looked down at it with all the introspection of a man watching the traffic roll by, then he slowly wiped it on the back of his jeans and stared at me with eyes that were tiny, birdlike and bloodshot.

Finn pulled his badge. Neither of us was in uniform, and the young man did a double take at the brass. He rubbed his chin again and said, “So this isn’t your woman, huh?” and Finn shook his head.

If he’d shaken it any harder, he’d have gotten whiplash.

The young man grinned at me and I winced at the tobacco-stained Chiclet-like teeth that crowded his mouth. “Well, now, I’m going to be getting off in a few hours, how’s about you and I grab a beer tonight?”

“Listen, that’s tempting but as you can see,” I said, and turning sideways, pointed at my belly with both thumbs, “I’m already taken. Now, my partner has identified us as police officers. If you don’t tell me, with the next words out of your mouth, where I can find the trapeze artists, the only coins you’ll be collecting will be the quarters you’ll need to use the pay phone. At the jail.”

The man sighed. “Ah, I was just having a little bit of sport with you. No harm intended, right? My daddy was a policeman. They’re all up in that tent, up that way… that big blue one, see? They’ll be rehearsing right about now.”

We cut across the grounds toward a blue-and-white-striped tent, dodging strollers and shrieking kids with sticky fingers and tall clowns with bunches of balloons floating like tethered clouds above their wigged and hatted heads.

Next to a hot dog stand, one of the clowns jumped in front of me and I reared back as he stuck his face into mine.

“Wanna buy a balloon?” he whispered. Black paint as thick as axle grease covered his entire face and a large floppy hat was pulled down low over his ears. I said no and moved to go around the clown but he leaned to the side, blocking me.

“Wanna buy a balloon?”

I shook my head and went to the other side and the clown mimed my movement, blocking me again. Ahead, I saw the back of Finn’s head moving farther away as he continued toward the tent. All around me, kids swarmed; their heads brushing against my hips and thighs, their cries and shrieks of laughter piercing my ears like the call of a thousand tiny birds.

They closed in on me, surrounding me, filling the air with their small bodies. So many small bodies! I couldn’t catch my breath.

The clown lowered his bunch of balloons over both of us, blocking my last point of reference, the sky.

I panicked.

My heart hammered and I couldn’t draw enough air into my lungs. I wheezed and the clown seemed to loom closer and then farther away, up and then down and then up and I saw the ground rushing up to meet me and then an arm gripped my elbow.

“Gemma, c’mon. You can get a hot dog later,” Finn hissed in my ear, and pulled me toward the blue tent. I drew in a big breath of air and yanked free of his grip.

I turned around in a circle, scanning the crowd, but the clown, and his balloons, was gone.

I was really starting to dislike clowns.