Inherit the Bones

Chapter Thirty-one

We agreed to gather at O’Toole’s, a pub on Fifth Street just a few doors down from Mac Neal’s auto shop. Sam Birdshead drove us over in his smoke-gray-colored Audi.

I sat in the front seat and caressed the soft leather under me. “This is a nice ride, Sam.”

He grinned. “It was a graduation present from my grandfather. My sisters call me the Little Prince; I seem to get the brunt of his generosity. Youngest child, only boy, you know how it goes.”

I didn’t, but nodded anyway.

In the backseat, the chief yanked off his tie. “Christ, I’m glad that’s over. It was not as bad as the first time, but God-awful in its own way. Listen, Gemma, how’s it going with Finn? You guys working out together okay?”

“Sure. When he’s not hitting on young women or making fun of the Bird Lady. Or calling me fat.”

“Bird Lady?” Sam said. “Who’s the Bird Lady?”

He took the next corner a tad fast and I gripped the door handle but the Audi’s tires took it like a demon. In the backseat, Chavez cursed and strapped on his seat belt.

I said, “You know the Bird Lady, that woman who stalks around town, with the orange hair and the dead parrot on her shoulder. That’s Tilly, the librarian.”

Chavez said, “Matilda Jane Krinkle.”

“You know her?”

“Of course I know her, I’m the goddamn chief of police. Sam, slow it down a bit.”

“Yes, sir,” Sam said as he downshifted, and the Audi purred in response. Ahead of us, Finn’s Porsche pulled into a spot by the front door. Behind us, Ravi Hussen’s Honda kept a conservative distance. We had run into her at the reception and invited her to join us at the tavern. Actually, I’d invited her while Finn and Sam had stared and drooled. Only Ravi could get away with short sapphire-blue silk at a funeral.

O’Toole’s was mostly empty. The bar was cool and dark and felt apropos after the solemnity of Nicky’s service. A couple of old men sat at the bar, the cool condensation on their beer long since wiped away by the warmth of their hands. They gave Ravi the once-over, completely ignored me, and then returned their focus to each other, and their Coors, and the bowl of peanuts that sat between them.

Their conversation, like their hair, was sparse and thin; they seemed to grunt more than carry on actual sentences.

We took a table in the back, near the dartboard. Sam grabbed our orders and headed to the bar. I sat down next to Ravi, across from Chavez and Finn, whose cell phone buzzed against the grain of the table. He glanced at it.

“Moriarty’s on his way.”

I pulled off my scarf and draped it on the chair then undid the top button on my blouse and fanned myself with an old copy of the local newspaper that I’d grabbed on the way in. I was still warm from the ride over.

“Why’s Moriarty coming?”

Finn gave me a look. “Because he’s one of us, and this is our place. No one wants to be alone today.”

I pushed back. “Was he at the funeral? I didn’t see him.”

“Gemma, just because you don’t see something, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. He was there, he snuck in late and left early,” Finn said. “You’re not this all-seeing, all-powerful being.”

“I know I’m not. I never claimed to be,” I said.

I turned to Ravi. “Do I act like that? Like I know everything?”

She looked from Finn to me and then back again to Finn and exhaled noisily. “Honey, this is one cat fight I’m sitting out. Honestly, you two should screw or call it a day.”

I think both of us turned pale at that. Finn may have gagged a bit.

Sam returned with a waitress, drinks, and promises of potato skins, nachos, and hot wings. The waitress set bottles of beer in front of Finn and Chavez, and a martini before Ravi, and a cranberry juice seltzer next to my hand.

A glass of merlot remained on her tray, and this she set down in front of Sam Birdshead. He looked at it and with a deep breath, picked it up and took a sip. We watched as he swallowed with a wince and then gently set the glass back down.

“Didn’t take you for a wine guy, Sam,” Finn said with a snicker.

Poor Sam. It was so obvious you almost felt sorry for the guy, trying to impress an older woman by requesting what he thought would be a more mature drink.

He blushed and tried not to look at Ravi. “I… I like wine.”

I caught Ravi’s eye and gave a head tilt toward Sam. She smiled gently.

“I like wine, too, Sam. You know they say that beer drinkers are fun, but wine drinkers last longer?”

The grins faded from Finn and Chavez’s faces.

“I’ve never heard that,” the chief scowled.

“Oh yes, it’s very true. Wine drinkers are proven to have a longer lifespan than beer drinkers. All those antioxidants, you know,” Ravi said, and sipped her martini. “What did you think I meant?”

At the front of the pub, the door opened and Moriarty came through. He looked at me and I thought I saw him grimace, but the room was dim. By the time he reached our table, he was all smiles and handshakes.

The waitress brought our food, and a beer for Moriarty, and we talked shop.

“Anything new with the reports, Ravi?” Chavez asked between a potato skin and a sip of pale ale.

“Unfortunately, no. The tests all came back negative. We don’t have fibers, hairs, prints, anything,” she said.

Moriarty signaled the waitress and asked for another round for everyone. “So we got jack shit.”

It was going to be one of those nights, then. My mouth was open and the words out before I could help myself. “I wouldn’t say we have nothing. In fact, I think someone’s worried that we’re getting too close.”

Chavez asked, “What are you talking about?”

He double-dipped a celery stick into the small pot of ranch dressing and Finn muttered something under his breath.

“Well,” I began, “well, my tires were slashed last night. At Chevy’s.”

“And?” Moriarty said.

“And I don’t think it was the football star feeling up his girlfriend in the car next to mine.”

Chavez held up a hand. “Whoa. Whoa. Just hold on a damn second. Your tires got slashed and you’re only just now telling me?”

“Did you want me to tell you before, at the funeral? I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”

Chavez said, “Anything else going on that I should be aware of?”

If I didn’t tell him now about the message on my mirror, he’d probably find out anyway, and then be pissed I hadn’t told him. I gave them an abbreviated version of Thursday night’s events and ended with “So, I’ll forward you the pictures, and we can start a file, but honestly, I don’t think there’s much else we can do. Maybe it’s all a prank, someone playing a sick joke at the expense of a murder case.”

Chavez slammed his hand down on the table and we all jumped. Sam was sipping from his wine and he jumped so hard he spilled the rest of it all over the front of his shirt.

Chavez said, “Goddamn it, Gemma. Why am I always the last to find out about these things? We should have had a squad car parked at your house for the last day. We could have dusted for prints.”

I found a lone chip with cheese and no beans and scooped it from the platter. I ate it and waited for Chavez to calm down.

“Chief, the last thing we need is a cop sitting in my driveway twiddling his thumbs. We can’t spare that kind of manpower,” I said. “Besides, I hardly think the Woodsman is going around slashing tires and sneaking around houses. I’d have heard him. And I didn’t hear anything. So, like I said, I think it’s just some local kid fooling around. The tires and the message on my mirror probably aren’t even related.”

With his beer bottle halfway to his mouth, Louis Moriarty froze. “What the hell does the Woodsman have to do with the murder of Nicky Bellington?”

Shit. I hadn’t meant to bring up the Woodsman yet. The rest of the crew didn’t know about that angle. I glanced at Finn but he refused to meet my eyes.

So I was on my own, then. Some partner.

“Well, you might as well all know. At the time he went over Bride’s Veil, Nicky had just wrapped up three or four months of intense-and I mean intense-research on the Woodsman murders. Intense as in consumed.”

Silence.

Moriarty, Chavez, and Ravi stared at me.

Sam shook his head slowly and continued to wipe at his shirt.

Finn stared at the plate of slowly congealing nachos.

Finally Moriarty muttered, “Is this another part of your, uh, obsession with that case, Gemma? Because this is getting kind of old.”

“This has nothing to do with me. Nicky was down in these archives at the library almost every day, digging through wads of old newspaper articles and reports. He spends more than three months down there and then all of a sudden, announces to the librarian that he’s done. And a few days later, the world thinks he’s dead.” I stared at Moriarty. “You were there. Finn told me you had your suspicions. You thought suicide, didn’t you? Why? In a perfectly normal kid with no prior history of depression, why would you think suicide?”

Chavez, Ravi, and Sam looked from me to Moriarty and back again like they were watching a Ping-Pong game. Finn stood and mumbled “men’s room” and made his way to the back of the bar and ducked through a dark curtain that hung at an angle.

Moriarty pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “Yup, he was perfectly normal. Normal kids do stupid shit all the time, screwing around things they shouldn’t, daring one another, showing off for the ladies. One false step, a loose rock, and bam, it’s over, just like that. Except Nick wasn’t that guy. No one remembers him messing around like that. He wasn’t a risk taker. One minute they’re eating Cheetos, the next he’s gone over a waterfall. There wasn’t anything normal about that.”

Finn returned from the men’s room and took his seat. A single hot wing remained on the platter in the middle of the table and he picked it up and sucked the meat from the bone with a smack.

I thought back on the reports I’d read three years ago, the transcripts of the kids, the other campers and the statements they’d given the police. But my memory was hazy. Sam had the reports in his possession, but I didn’t want to alert Moriarty to that.

“Did anyone actually see him go over?”

Moriarty glanced at Finn then shook his head. “Not a single person.”

“And everyone’s first thought is that he’d fallen off the cliff?” I asked. “Did anyone search the woods? What if he’d waited for the perfect moment and simply snuck away?”

The chief interrupted me. “Gemma, you’re forgetting two things. We found his Windbreaker the next day, five miles downstream. He’d worn it tied around his waist all weekend. One of the searchers spotted it, tangled on the banks of the river. And we found footprints in the dirt, right at the edge of the cliff. Size eight Adidas. Nicky’s shoes.”

Anybody could toss a Windbreaker in a river.

And anybody could leave prints.

Maybe Nicky had survived his big fall over Bride’s Veil by not falling at all.

Moriarty said, “You ever stop to think this is all one big, fat coincidence? You’re so busy chasing after your damn old demons you’ve already made up your mind on this. Leave the past alone, Gemma. There’s nothing there worth kicking up.”

He tilted the tip of his beer bottle in my direction and continued. “Did Finn tell you how many Stephen King books we found in Nicky’s room? And the posters, Christ, with what’s his face, that Manson rocker. I think the Woodsman murders were just one more dark, spooky thing that kid was into. I bet you a hundred dollars, none of this old shit has anything to do with the fact that a week ago his throat was torn open.”

Moriarty polished off his beer and set the bottle on the table hard enough to rattle the empty platters of food. He stood and clapped Sam on the back of the neck and squeezed. “How ’bout a game of darts, son? I got ten bucks that says I beat you in best of three.”

I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip while I tried to make sense of the tangled webs this case was bringing to light. The others chatted and drank and let me alone with my thoughts.

Louis Moriarty had just told me to leave the past alone.

The same words my visitor had left on my bathroom mirror in a scarlet shade of lipstick that had taken ten minutes to scrub clean.

Louis Moriarty’s son Danny was at one time considered a suspect in the McKenzie murders.

Louis Moriarty had been close to Frank Bellington and Bull Weston.

What it all meant, I wasn’t sure.

Frank Bellington was a man taking a long, slow slide into the big sleep. Bull Weston had lied to me the other night, I was sure of it, about not remembering what made their friendship die all those years ago. Louis Moriarty was a fellow cop-a brother of my extended family.

At the moment, I didn’t trust a single one of them.

Moriarty bested Sam in three rounds and then left without a good-bye. Finn announced he was walking Ravi to her car and she followed him with a roll of her eyes and a peck on my cheek. Sam looked at a loss but perked up when a trio of curvy grad students took a table near ours. A brunette with turquoise eyes caught his attention and within five minutes, he was in a game of pool with the beauty and her friends.

Chavez muttered something. He was on his fourth beer and I hoped Sam was still planning on driving both of us home. Or at least back to the station so I could pick up my car.

“What did you say?”

He groaned. “I shouldn’t have said that, what I said before.”

“Said what?”

“You know what. About Ellen,” the chief said.

He rolled the half-full bottle back and forth in his hands. They were big hands, rough with calluses formed years ago working the land on his parents’ farm in eastern Colorado.

“I’m not really in love with her. It was a long time ago.”

“What happened?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know but when life hands you answers, you take them, no matter how uncomfortable the telling.

“Terry happened.”

Chavez took a long sip and then belched into his fist. “We were best friends, you know, at Harvard. Roommates freshman year, cocaptains of the tennis team, study buddies. And then one day this stunningly beautiful creature walked across the cafeteria and that was it, man. Ellen freaking Nystrom.”

“And?”

“What do you mean ‘and’? And nothing. She chose Terry. After, of course, she gave me a night to remember her by. You know I was a virgin? Twenty years old and I was a virgin. Christ,” he said. The chief lifted his beer then set it back down. “Christ.”

“Chief-” I began. I didn’t need to hear any more.

He waved a hand in my direction. “What the hell, bygones are bygones, right? We got over it. I met Lydia the next year. And when I got recruited for this job, I honest to God never made the connection between the small dust hole Terry spoke of and the booming ski town I came to in the late nineties.”

“Does Lydia know? About Ellen?”

Angel Chavez gave a deep laugh, the kind that starts in your belly and comes out somewhere at the crown of your skull. “Gemma, you don’t get to be married for twenty years and not know every damn thing about your spouse. ’Course she knows. She also knows that I’d never trade what we have for even a minute for life with that Nordic devil. That woman has more angles than a geometry book. Not all bad, of course, but angles and sides you never want to see.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, but Chavez was done. He shook his head and watched Sam move a few inches closer to the grad student with the turquoise eyes.

“That kid’s got his whole life in front of him, doesn’t he? Do you remember being that young? ’Course you do, what am I saying,” he said. “Christ. What a week.”

I stifled a yawn and waved at the waitress and signaled for the check.

“It was surreal when I got here, though. I’d heard so many stories from Terry, about how screwed up his family was, especially his dad, Frank,” Chavez said. “His mom was a bit of a head case, too. She was born in Poland, just after the shit hit the fan. Her parents were Jews, wealthy, and they managed to get the family across the border and into Switzerland. Two years later they arrived in New York.”

That explained the Polish surname I’d seen on her gravestone-Wozniak.

The chief continued. “Anyway, Terry’s mom was real quiet, sneaking around the house like a mouse, always popping up right behind you when you least expected it. Like Terry’s sister, Hannah, that old bag of a housekeeper. Jeez, but she was a beautiful lady, looked like Elizabeth Taylor. But to hear Terry tell it, Frank Bellington was a real son of a bitch. Quite the racist; n word this, n word that. But I never saw it. I don’t know. Maybe that sort of thing fades with age.”

I couldn’t agree. The worst racists I’d ever met were older folks who had years to deepen their hatred for the Jews, the blacks, the Asians, the gays. The bigotry never faded; the bigots just got better at hiding it as the rest of society evolved around them.

I tried to reconcile Chavez’s words with the jokester who used to pull my pigtails and sneak me butterscotch candies, with the old man I’d seen slurping pudding from a spoon, his gaze on some distant horizon that would never get any closer.

We untangled Sam from the grad student as they were bumping iPhones. It used to be you exchanged a business card, maybe a phone number. Now you had to do cell number, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter handle, blog address, and any other number of social networking tools. How anyone found the energy to hook up after all that, I didn’t know.

At Sam’s car, we did an awkward shuffle of courtesy and practicality that ended with Chavez in the front seat, Sam driving, and myself in the back. Our drive took us past the edge of the forest and I watched through the window as the trees streaked by like ghosts, their gangly branches like outstretched arms linked to one another for all time.

Sam dropped me at the station, where I found my car, as promised, the tires gleaming with the shine of rubber that’s barely been around the block. As the Audi pulled away, the passenger-side window rolled down and the chief stuck his head out.

“You were wrong about something tonight, kid,” Chavez said. He raised a hand to his forehead and rubbed at the skin between his eyes. I saw creases there I hadn’t noticed a week ago.

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“When you said you didn’t think the Woodsman was running around slashing tires, and breaking into your house. You’re already presuming there’s a connection between Nicky and the Woodsman. Don’t confuse one with the other. There’s absolutely nothing linking them. All you’ve got is one young man’s obsession with a sad bit of local history.”

The Audi pulled away with a squeal.

I stood in the dark lot; the moon had grown shy and hid somewhere up in that great black sky. The stars were few and far between, sprinkled like garnish against the darkness. Somewhere in the distance a coyote howled, its cry as plaintive as a newborn’s, and still I stood, thinking about Chavez’s words.