Inherit the Bones

Chapter Thirty

We drove up the canyon in silence. It was too late to get a tow, so I left my car at Chevy’s and reluctantly, but with little choice, accepted Darren’s offer of a ride. The inside of his Subaru was as beat as the outside, with a missing dashboard panel, broken cup holder, and seat covers that were heavy with fraying, fringy threads.

I ran my hand under my thigh and over a small tear in the cloth, poking my finger against the seat’s squishy interior foam cushion.

“You ever think about fixing this up?”

I was in a dark mood. The slashes on my tires were deep and I knew I would have to replace all four. Not only had someone been in my house, and scared me in the dark of the library, now they were messing with my ride. I knew it would be an expensive repair.

Darren glanced at me. “She runs fine, Gemma. I know she’s not much to look at, but the engine’s strong. I can’t really afford a new car right now. Sometimes it’s more important what’s on the inside than the outside.”

How this guy kept making me feel like a jerk, I didn’t know.

“I’m sorry. Thanks again for the ride, I appreciate it.”

He turned on the radio and found an oldies station. The upbeat music of the Temptations filled the car, and I found myself humming along.

“Do you need a lift to the funeral tomorrow?”

I shook my head. “No, thank you. I’ll call Mac Neal-do you know him? He’s got an auto shop on Fifth?”

Darren nodded slowly. “I think I do, that little gray building? Set back from the road?”

“That’s the one. He’s great,” I said. “Oh, up here on the right.”

Darren pulled the car into the driveway. In front of us, the house was dark and quiet. He put the car in park but left the engine running.

“I think I should go in with you.”

He must have seen the look on my face because he rolled his eyes. “Gemma, your tires were slashed. Someone’s been on your property, in your house. Your boyfriend is in Alaska. I don’t think you should go in there alone. This has nothing to do with me wanting to get you in bed.”

My cheeks flushed. He wanted to get me in bed?

“I do have this,” I said, and opened my handbag and flashed him my gun. Before we left the parking lot at Chevy’s, I had grabbed it from the trunk of my car.

Darren looked doubtful. “I don’t know. I’d feel terrible if something happened to you while I sat out here like an idiot.”

“How about I go in, and look around real quick, and I’ll come back and wave at you if everything looks okay?”

I gathered up my things and was out of the car before he could protest. The thought of Darren in my house, this late at night, was somehow more terrifying than the thought of a killer inside waiting. Besides, I was a cop. I was more prepared to take on an intruder than a high school basketball coach ever was.

I strode to the front porch, deliberately not looking back at the Subaru, and fished my keys out of my bag. The cool, heavy weight of them in my hand brought a sense of normalcy to the situation, and I stuck the silver house key, with its purple fob, into the lock and pushed the door open.

As I’d expected, the house was quiet.

I felt, and sensed more than anything, that there was no one, except for Seamus. He looked at me with heavy eyes from his spot by the kitchen door. He stood and passed gas and then waddled over to the back door and sat and waited. I went room to room and turned on a few lights but kept most off; I didn’t like the sense that Darren was out there, watching me walk through my house.

Finally, I went to the front door and waved. He honked twice and backed out of the driveway. I closed the door and slid the wooden chair we keep in the foyer across the tile and angled the back of it up and under the doorknob. It wasn’t much but it would make a racket if anyone tried to get in.

I let Seamus out, watched him do his business, and called him back. I did the same chair trick with the back door, and the door to the garage. The sliding glass doors on the side of the house had Charlie bars that we rarely used, but I engaged them, dropping the bars from their vertical position to horizontal.

Then I went upstairs and pulled off my dress and fell into bed without bothering to brush my teeth. The next thing I knew, the heat of the morning sun was warming my cheek. I cracked an eye open and groaned when I saw the alarm clock.

It was ten in the morning.

Saturday. Nicky’s funeral, his second funeral in three years.

My mouth was dry and tasted of garlic and tomato. I pushed myself up and staggered into the shower and let the hot water shake me from the grogginess that seemed to permeate my brain.

Out of the shower, naked and dripping wet, I stood in front of my closet and cursed. The day would be hot but the church would be cool. Wool was out, as were my printed summer dresses, my dark slacks, and my uniform. Jeans were inappropriate, as was my black cocktail dress, my navy long-sleeved pants suit, and every other damn thing.

I finally settled on a knee-length black skirt, a cream-colored silk blouse, and a printed yellow scarf. I looked like a banker but the clothes fit around my belly and breasts and I wouldn’t be too hot or too cool.

Mac Neal picked me up in his Goblin. The Goblin was a Ford F-150, with a lacquer cherry finish as sleek as freshly painted nails, and cattle horns on the front, and a Right to Life sticker on the back. He helped me up into the cab of the truck and we drove to Wellshire Presbyterian, humming along with Garth Brooks and Kenny Chesney.

Mac dropped me in front, where Sam Birdshead and Finn Nowlin and Chief Chavez were gathered, all solemn in dark suits and sunglasses.

“Thanks, Mac, I owe you a million,” I said, and gave him my keys.

He nodded, his long salt-and-pepper beard shaking with the motion, his thick mustache obscuring his mouth. “I’ll leave the car at the police station, all right, kiddo? Keys under the back tire well?”

“Great. Leave me the bill-like I said, I owe you big time.”

He drove off, leaving a small puff of black smoke in his wake like a calling card.

“Nice ride, Gemma. Brody know you’re tooling around with that old fart?” Finn asked.

I ignored him and instead greeted Sam and Chief Chavez. We headed inside, one by one, into a church that was already full. Most of the crowd seemed to be Cedar Valley’s elite, the families who owned the ski resorts and the city council members. I recognized a few other politicians, like Senator Morrow, and Congresswoman Peters.

A couple of children played in the aisle, dodging out of their mother’s grasping hands, ignoring her whispered threats to get back to their seats.

“Don’t you think that’s weird, bringing kids to a funeral?” Finn said in my ear.

I shrugged. How the hell did I know what was weird these days? I’d spent the last few hours fantasizing about a basketball coach with a Louisiana accent who wanted to get me in bed, in spite of my belly and my not-so-single status.

“I think it’s smart. They’ve got to get used to all of life’s curveballs, the good and the bad,” Sam Birdshead said. He edged into one of the pews and Finn and I scooted in next to him.

“On the reservation, death is celebrated the same as weddings and births,” Sam continued. “I saw my first dead body when I was four years old. There isn’t anything to fear. The mother’s wise to bring them here.”

I realized I didn’t know much about Sam’s upbringing. “Did you grow up on the reservation?”

Sam said, “Nah, not after my parents divorced. Mom took me back to Denver with her, to live with her parents, my grandparents. But every summer, she let me go spend a few months with my dad in Wyoming. Those were the best times of my life, those summers. By then my grandfather was out of prison. He’s nothing like what you’ve heard.”

He started to say more but the big organ, high above us in an alcove, started up and the opening notes of Amazing Grace floated down upon us like snowflakes.

A man in black stood at the pulpit and looked out at us, and he must have seen what I can only imagine was a sea of faces, somber suits and dresses, and a few bold hats. In front of the man, on a low stand, lay a coffin. Its deep mahogany finish shone in the white light that streamed through the high windows of the church. A single bucket of white roses with baby’s breath graced the ground before it, an offering that spoke of innocence and purity and sweetness.

I hadn’t seen the Bellingtons; I could only assume they were seated somewhere up front, in the first pew. Across the aisle, I caught sight of Joe Fatone, and behind him, Tessa O’Leary. She gave me a little wave and I waved back. And a few rows behind her, I saw Lisey. She sat with the same blond girl I’d seen at Tessa’s trapeze show, and the two looked friendly.

In fact, from this angle, it appeared Lisey and Blondie were holding hands.

The man at the altar cleared his throat and began to speak. He was black, and I assumed he must be the Reverend Wyland that Ellen had spoken of. His voice was low and it filled the church like hot fudge poured over ice cream, melting into every nook and cranny of the place. He opened the service with Psalm 23 and I thought once again that if a more reassuring ten sentences existed, I’d never heard them.

He spoke for only a few minutes. What is there to say, really, about someone who was buried three years ago? There was no mention of Nicky’s secret life as Reed Tolliver, or of the circus. It was as though the last three years hadn’t existed, and I wondered if that was a conscious choice on the part of the Bellingtons, or a suggestion from Reverend Wyland.

Fifteen minutes after we’d sat down, John Lennon’s “Imagine” started up and we all stood, followed the coffin as it was carried out on the shoulders of six men, and filed out of the church and made our way to the gravesite.

The cemetery was a sprawling mass of rolling hills and low-hanging trees, offering plenty of shady places to sit and contemplate life in the land of the dead. I found a deserted bench and sat, resting as I watched the mourners make their way to the grave. The Bellingtons hadn’t procured a second site after all; they’d simply dug up Nicky’s original grave and removed the empty coffin, to make room for the full one.

I inhaled deeply. The smell of grass recently cut hung in the air, heavy as a blanket, and in the distance, in some unseen part of the cemetery, a lawn mower roared to life. Above me, the sky was clear save for one cloud, elongated like a stretched-out athletic sock, gray on the bottom, white on the top. On the ground, by my shoe, a small snail slid across the dirt, leaving a trail of slime in its wake. Its shell was the size of a quarter and I watched as its tiny antennae quivered in the air. The snail was a specimen millions of years in the making, its sole protection a thin casing no thicker than my fingernail.

A miracle, in and of itself, and I watched it make its way slowly toward the shade of the bench, each millimeter a triumph of perseverance.

“Want some company?” a voice chirped behind me. I turned around and nodded at the young woman.

“Sure.”

Tessa sat next to me, rearranging her long crimson skirt so it hung straight. She wore a short-sleeved cardigan open over a black top, and a thick gold chain that hung down and came to rest just past her breasts.

Out of the corner of my eye, I studied her. I saw no traces of the angry woman who’d been at the police station, or of the hyper-friendly woman who’d visited me at home, or even of the active acrobat I’d watched yesterday.

Instead, she seemed small and sad and lonely. She played with the pendant on the chain, a gold coin that flashed in the sunlight as she twisted it with her right hand.

I was starting to think maybe she had multiple personalities, and then I remembered being in my early twenties, and the angst, and the awful feeling of not knowing your place in the world, and I decided she was probably absolutely normal.

She’d also just attended her boyfriend’s funeral. There was no acknowledgment of Tessa from the reverend or the Bellingtons, and I wondered if they even knew Nicky had spent the last few months of his life with a pretty and talented young woman who loved him.

“That’s lovely, your necklace,” I offered.

She lifted it and looked at it, then let it drop back to her chest.

“I suppose. My parents gave it to me on my sixteenth birthday. They gave it to me, and I gave them court documents to sign to emancipate me.”

“Was it really that bad?”

She shrugged. “What’s bad? We had food to eat, and clothes on our back, and no one hit me. They put every spare nickel they could into my gym training, and then my bar training. I was their princess. But I knew I was only going to go so far on their dime, in little old Keylock, Idaho.

“Once they signed off on the papers, I couldn’t get out of that trailer fast enough. Without their financial support, I was free to get all sorts of training fees waived, and scholarships, too. And then Papa Joe came along, and well, you know the rest,” she continued. “Now I do everything I can to make sure I’ll never live in poverty again. Hence, all the classes I’m taking, the finance and accounting stuff. I feel like if I can understand how money works, how it really works in the real world, I’ll be that much more ahead of the game.”

I nodded and looked back at the gravesite.

I saw Terence and Ellen Bellington take up places next to the raised coffin. They stood on either side of Annika; all three dressed in black. In front of them, Frank Bellington sat in his wheelchair. Across from the Bellingtons, Darren Chase took a place next to Paul Winters, the founder of the Forward Foundation, the group that had been camping together when Nicky had gone over Bride’s Veil.

The men hugged, and then Darren patted Paul on the back.

I hadn’t realized they were friends.

Whenever I saw Paul Winters I thought of that actor, the one that played George Costanza on Seinfeld, whose real name I could never recall. Paul was short, rotund, and wore wire-rimmed glasses. He was balding on the top of his head-round as a cue ball and rapidly getting sunburnt-but wore the rest of his dark hair in a tidy ponytail that reached his collar.

I watched as Paul leaned toward Darren and spoke into his ear. Darren murmured something in response and then clapped Paul on the back again. The older man had eschewed a suit; instead, he wore dark slacks and a gray short-sleeved dress shirt with a red bolo tie. When he lifted his hand to push his slipping glasses back up the bridge of his nose, his massive watch caught the sunlight and reflected it like a solar panel. The thing was the size of a cell phone and I’d have bet serious money it was fully loaded with every accoutrement you could hope to get into a watch.

I didn’t know much about Paul.

He made a bucket of cash in the dot-com boom and was lucky enough to pull out before Silicon Valley went bust. He tooled around South America for a few years, starting up but never completing schools for orphans, and somehow found his way to Cedar Valley. He’d been here less than a year before opening the Forward Foundation.

Tessa interrupted my thoughts. “Gemma, what do you hope for, most of all, in the whole world?”

She’d resumed playing with her pendant, and her fingers slid the pendant up and down the gold chain, back and forth. I started to answer and then stopped, really considering her question.

What did I hope for, most of all, in the whole world?

“Well, I think hope is a funny thing. It’s not quite want, is it? And it’s not quite desire, either. I guess what I wish for, really, is probably the same as most people. I want my life to count for something good.”

Tessa watched the crowd at the gravesite. “I get terrible insomnia sometimes. I lie in bed and all these thoughts spin around in my head, so fast, and I can’t sleep. I lie there and think and think and think. I just want to be somewhere I can stop thinking. Stop worrying about my routine, my future, having to move back to Keylock, living with my parents in their two-bedroom trailer, failing.”

How do you tell a twenty-two-year-old that the worries only get worse?

You don’t, unless you are the cruelest kind of person.

“Tessa, you seem to have a good head on your shoulders. I think you’ll do fine,” I said. “But, there’s something I want to ask you, and I have a feeling you’re not going to like it. But I’d like the truth, here, right now, just the two of us, woman to woman, okay?”

She looked up at me.

“I heard that Lisey moved out of the cabin. What’s going on with you two? I hear one thing from you, and something else from her,” I said.

I paused and then added, “To be honest, I’m not quite sure who to believe.”

Tessa’s face flushed and she stood up. “What did she say about me? Did she tell you I was a liar? That I’m psycho? She is such a bitch.”

I stood, too, and sighed, and stretched to the side. I couldn’t find a comfortable position anymore. Sitting, standing, walking, laying down, it all hurt these days.

“I’m just asking what happened. Did you two have a fight? When girls fight, especially girls as close as you two, sometimes nasty things get said.”

A winch started up at the gravesite and I glanced over as the coffin was slowly lowered into the ground. The crowd began to disperse, but the Bellingtons, and Darren and Paul, and a few others remained.

“We did have a fight, a really bad one. There’s this girl, Stacey, that Lisey… likes. Not like she loved me, but she just likes her and I don’t know why, I think she’s messed up and fake and gross. And I told Lisey that, and Lisey started screaming at me, that I was psychotic and couldn’t be trusted and-” She trailed off and her face went red again.

“That’s her, over there. Look, see that blond whore? That’s Stacey.”

I looked in the direction Tessa was pointing and saw Lisey with Blondie. Their backs were to us, and we watched in silence as they each threw a rose onto Nicky’s coffin. They held hands as they followed the rest of the crowd back to the church, and then Lisey threw her free hand, her left one, up and over her head and tossed a middle finger in our general direction.

“Whore,” Tessa uttered under her breath. “I’m out of here.”

She took a step and I closed my eyes at the small crunch that followed her heel coming down. She stomped off and I considered how easily death falls on those who are too small, in size or character, to offer resistance.

I’m not an overly sentimental person, but I knelt and covered the crushed shell and sticky remains of the tiny snail with a single, perfect leaf before I made my way to the gravesite.

Roses filled the space around the mahogany coffin, whites and pinks and yellows and a few lilacs. Spring colors in the middle of summer. They had changed the headstone to reflect Nicky’s actual day of death, last Monday. Like the other headstones in the family plot, it was creamy marble run through with rivulets of black and gray. The plot next to his was his grandmother’s, Terence’s mother. Her headstone read Rachel Louisa Wozniak Bellington, beloved mother and wife, followed by the dates of her birth and death, and a single flower. I did the math; she was sixty-five when she died.

I touched Nicky’s headstone and whispered a vow. No one was there to hear my words, except for the grass, and the wind, and the sun, and that was fitting, somehow. Bull used to say that ethics are determined by what you do when no one is watching, and I thought that was about right.

I repeated my vow and left the cemetery, tired of all the death around me.