Inherit the Bones

Chapter Thirty-two

I woke Sunday with an energy I hadn’t felt in weeks. My sleep had been deep and quiet. In the pantry, I spied an old box of Bisquick and I found enough eggs, butter, and oil in the fridge to make a stack of pancakes.

I took the pancakes and a pot of tea and a warm saucer of syrup to the dining-room table and inhaled the first few in a matter of minutes. The Peanut gave a little kick; she liked the sweet, chewy starch. Between bites, I pulled my laptop close and fired it up and waited for my browser to pop open, but when I opened the mailbox icon, there were no new messages.

To be truthful, that wasn’t completely unusual-when Brody was in the field, we sometimes went a few weeks without talking. But I wanted to fill him in on the case, and give him a heads-up that our joint checking account was about to be a few hundred dollars lighter, thanks to my new tires.

I also wanted to ask him point-blank, without any warning, if Pink Parka was Celeste Takashima. If it was… well, as they say in space, Houston, we have a problem.

Seamus nudged my ankle and I looked down into his deep brown eyes. He panted and a thin line of drool fell from his mouth and landed on my toe.

“Gross, buddy,” I muttered. I knew what he wanted and it was disgusting, but I did it often enough that he had come to expect it, so I placed my plate on the floor and watched as his long tongue swept across the surface, slurping the last dregs of syrup and the tiny crumbs that I’d missed. Content, he left the plate and waddled across the room and scratched at the floor, then turned around twice and with a low burp, settled back into his spot.

Replacing the computer with the stack of files I’d brought home with me, I opened the top folder, with its thin tab marked 1985. As I read through the pages, thin and faded with age, I found myself once again asking why.

Why these two boys.

Thomas and Andrew McKenzie. Cousins, thirteen and eleven.

They were average students, well liked by their teachers and classmates. Tommy’s father, John, owned a chain of discount mattress stores across the state, and his wife, Karen, was a stay-at-home mom. Andrew’s father, Mark, was a line cook at a fast-food chain and his wife, Sarah, did day care out of their basement. Her business was spotty, though, and most years she barely made enough to cover her license fees.

All four parents had been thoroughly investigated. Nine times out of ten crimes against children are perpetrated by close relatives such as parents, siblings, or an aunt or uncle. Although you’d never know it listening to the media, abductions, molestations, and murder at the hands of strangers are the very rare exception, not the norm.

The McKenzie families represented about as close to the average slice of life as you could hope to get in small-town America, circa 1985. John and Karen McKenzie were upper-middle class, not extravagantly wealthy but comfortable, especially for Cedar Valley. Mark and Sarah hovered somewhere much closer to the poverty line, but they made do.

Mark and John both smoked. Karen drank, mostly in secret, but sometimes at a ladies’ lunch in town in full sight of anyone who cared. Mark had three prior arrests. Sarah, the day care provider, had at one time been the star of an amateur porn video. All paid their taxes, owned their homes, and had two automobiles registered to each household. They spent Easter and Christmas together, and the rest of the time mostly ignored each other’s families. The boys, though, Tommy and Andrew, had gone up through elementary school together, and shared the same middle school. They were buddies, as close as John and Mark had once been.

Each of the parents was carefully and thoroughly exonerated in the disappearance of their children. They spent most of fall and winter of 1985 in meeting rooms across town, spaces that reeked of despair and curiosity, frequented by psychologists and detectives and reporters.

I pushed the papers away and stood and stretched. There was nothing here that hadn’t been looked at hundreds of times, by the best eyes the state was able to hire. I didn’t know what I hoped to find. I thought that if a sixteen-year-old kid could find an answer in these old papers, I could, too.

In the kitchen, I made a fresh pot of tea and watered the tiny pots of herbs we kept on the narrow ledge of the windowsill that lined the sink. Movement in the backyard caught my eye and as I lifted my head, I saw a fat rabbit hopping around in the grass. He must have crawled under the fence; there were a few spots where the wooden posts didn’t quite meet the ground. He snuffled along, his back quivering, his button nose twitching.

Above him, perched on a low-hanging tree branch, a crow watched too, his head cocked, his eye bright. I watched him watch the rabbit for a few minutes and then returned to the files.

I thought about the parents again.

I leaned back and stared at the files before me. I blinked at an irritant in my eye and for a second, my contact lens shifted, leaving the world before me a blur. Then I blinked again, and the table and files came back into clarity, and the thought crossed my mind how different things look when, even for the smallest of seconds, you shift your focus.

The parents. What if they were the link?

What if the children had been chosen not because of who they were, but because of who their parents were?

Somewhere in the other room, my cell phone buzzed against whatever hard surface I’d left it on last. I ignored it and doodled on the back of a file folder, drawing the same circle over and over, letting my mind wander. The phone was silent, then buzzed once more and was still. A voice mail I could check in a few minutes. Some thing, some thought, danced at the edge of my brain like a tiny gnat, big enough to draw my attention but too small for me to see it clearly.

It would have made so much sense… except.

Except in 1985 and again in 2011 every single one of them was cleared as a suspect. And if they weren’t suspects, what on earth would they have in common to cause someone to kill their children? Tommy had two younger sisters, Anna and Jennifer. You’d hope that if the parents had done something to earn the wrath of the Woodsman, whoever he was, they’d have copped to it and sought protection for their other kids.

But the parents had been as mystified as the police.

I skimmed through the first set of interview transcripts. The parents were interviewed multiple times, over the course of a year, until finally the police closed the file on the missing four in late summer of 1986. I paused at the transcript of Sarah McKenzie, Andrew’s mom.

I remembered reading these transcripts in 2011, when we reopened the missing persons investigation as a murder case.

I didn’t think I could stomach it again, especially now, the part of the transcript that describes Sarah screaming at God for taking her son. She’d lain on the floor of the interrogation room, facedown, and beat the concrete until her knuckles left brushstrokes of blood against the gray cement. It took three officers to get her out of the room and into the arms of a physician, who promptly sedated her.

The transcript indicated the interview had to be postponed until the following day.

Everything I’ve read says nothing can prepare you for parenthood, but nothing I’ve read yet prepares you for the scale of worry that begins the moment you discover you have life inside you. I felt the panic creeping in then, the quickening of my breath and heartbeat, the prickling of sweat on my skin. I forced myself to sit still and breathe deeply, and think rationally.

What happened to these children was not going to happen to the Peanut.

Brody and I talked, not seriously at first, then very seriously, when I hit the two-month mark in the pregnancy. The Peanut had been an accident; I’d gotten pregnant in between filling my birth control prescription. Kids-as in our kids-were always something on the horizon: when we had more money, more time, more trust, more stability.

It had taken me a long time to make peace with him after his affair with Celeste Takashima. Things were finally getting back to normal.

The bedroom was warm that night.

I had woken sweating and sobbing from a nightmare, a terrible dream in which the Earth was a series of scorched cities, burnt-out remnants of what had once been great societies. Men walked the land in despair: naked, hungry, crying, hateful.

I’d shaken Brody awake and told him I wanted an abortion, that I couldn’t handle bringing a child up in a world that showed as much whimsy in its cruelty as it did in its beauty. He asked me to wait one week, and if after that week I still wanted to terminate the pregnancy, he would support me.

Of course, by the end of the week I’d come to peace with keeping the baby. What else is a child, but hope? Hope for the future, hope for one’s own salvation, hope for a tomorrow that shines as bright and warm as the best yesterday you can remember.

Hope can be a rare thing. I think when you find hope you must embrace it. You must hold it close and you never, ever give up on it.

But I’m not naive and in my line of work, especially, I’ve seen how easily hope can be stolen. Hope can vanish as quickly and as quietly as it appears.

In the other room, my cell buzzed again, drawing me out of the melancholy that had crept over me like a fog. I checked the caller ID then answered.

Finn was agitated. “Jesus, woman, you on the can, or what?”

“Yeah, you want to hear all about it? What’s going on?”

His voice was high, strung-out. “I think you’re right.”

“Coming from you, that’s a first. Right about what?”

“I got a dead crow nailed to my front door, Gemma, with a ticket stuffed in its mouth,” Finn said. He coughed into the phone. “A goddamn ticket, one of those you grab from the dispenser at the deli, you know the kind? The kind that means your number’s up, baby… Did you get any special deliveries?”

I thought of the bird eyeing the rabbit in my backyard.

“I don’t think so, let me check.”

I pressed the phone to my chest, muffling Finn in the middle of whatever he was muttering. From the middle of the hall that runs through the center of the house, it is possible to see the front and back doors simultaneously. I looked at both, but all I saw was the white light of the sun streaming through the edges of the doors.

“Finn? Hang on, I’m going to open the front door,” I whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” he asked with another cough.

“I don’t know,” I said, and returned the phone to my breast. I grabbed a walking stick from the umbrella stand in the corner, and then opened the door.

I peeked out. “No, there’s nothing here.”

“Well… that’s good. Maybe this prick is more intimidated by me,” Finn said.

I didn’t bother to remind him that I’d already had my own message, inside my house, and my tires slashed.

“Anyway,” he continued, “anyway, it’s disgusting. The thing looks like it’s been dead a few days. The eyeballs, Jesus, the eyeballs look like SpaghettiOs. All mushed up.”

“You said it was nailed to the door? When? Did you hear anything?”

Finn coughed. “It wasn’t there last night, that’s for damn sure. I came home from O’Toole’s, worked out for a while, then went to bed. I didn’t hear a thing.”

Finn lived in the middle of town, on a busy main street in an old Victorian that had been converted into two units. The other Victorians on the block were filled with young couples and families, and there was a corner store with late hours across the street.

“Ask around, maybe someone saw something,” I said, then paused. A dead crow with a deli ticket nailed to a cop’s door sounded like something out of a bad Mafia movie. Come to think of it, so did leaving a message written in lipstick on a woman’s mirror.

“Finn, this all strikes me as a bit over the top. Theatrical almost. And it doesn’t make sense. We’re to believe a hardcore killer-a guy okay with tearing open Nicky’s throat-resorts to silly threatening messages?”

He sneezed into the phone. “I don’t know, I just know it’s creepy as hell. What am I supposed to do with this thing? Fingerprint it?”

I sighed. “Keep the ticket, bag the bird. Bring both to the station tomorrow.”

“Where the hell am I going to put a dead bird?”

“I don’t know, Finn. Put it in a box or something. Jesus. You sound like a twelve-year-old girl. Don’t you have an empty shoe box? Double-bag it and put it on your porch. Maybe the raccoons will ignore it.”

He muttered a few words I chose to ignore, then he was back on the line. “What are you doing anyway? Eating bonbons? Watching Sex and the City?”

I rolled my eyes. “I think we need to take a closer look at the parents.”

“The Bellingtons? The mayor’s a little busy with chemo treatments and collecting votes. He’s hardly out trolling the streets and nailing dead birds on his officers’ doors.”

“No, the McKenzie boys; their parents. Finn, what if… what if the kids were killed because of their parents?”

It sounded so crazy when I said it out loud. This was old history.

Finn was silent.

“Hello?”

“Yeah, I’m thinking. They were all cleared, weren’t they?”

I paced the house, stepping over Seamus, who watched me like I was an idiot. Any walking other than outside was sort of pointless in his mind.

“Yes, they were cleared. And on the surface, they don’t have any one thing in common, not all of them together. But what if there’s something else? What if, I don’t know, there’s some event, something in their past, that ties them and the Woodsman together?”

Another cough. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. What’s with all the hacking, don’t tell me you’re getting sick.”

“Nah, it’s the damn cat. Fucking allergies,” Finn said.

I stopped pacing. “I thought you said it was a bird?”

He replied after the briefest of pauses. “It is a bird. The cat is Kelly’s.”

And then I heard another voice in the background, screechy and squeaky like a tire taking a bad turn, and I laughed.

“Don’t tell me Kelly Clameater is back to Kelly Maneater?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself.

“Don’t be crude,” Finn said. “You know her name’s Clambaker.”

Finn must have walked into another room; I couldn’t hear the squawk anymore. Kelly had what you might call a five-alarm set of pipes, the sort of voice that stopped people in their tracks and made them pray to the Lord to just make it stop.

“I thought after she went, um, after she decided she was more into girls, you guys were finished?”

“She’s had a change of mind,” Finn replied, and I could hear the smirk in his voice.

“Uh-huh. She brings her cat?”

“Sometimes.”

“Uh-huh.”

A double beep saved me from any more details. I checked the caller.

“Finn, it’s Sam. Let me call you back,” I said, and changed lines. “What’s going on, Sam?”

“I’m not calling too early, am I?”

His voice was muffled by a low whirring noise that suddenly picked up in intensity.

“No, not all-but Sam, what is that? A blender? Can you turn it off? I can barely hear you.”

The noise stopped. “Sorry, yeah. It’s a juicer; I just bought it. I had one of those coupons for Bed Bath and Beyond. So listen, I was going over the inventory from Nick’s room, you know, the one Moriarty and Finn did? Three years ago?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, back at the dining-room table. I glanced over at the thick stack of files I had yet to go through.

“Everything seems pretty typical, normal, you know, for a kid,” he said. “But under his bed, they found a piece of paper and a gold necklace, both items tucked up into the mattress, sort of hidden. The necklace has a pendant, maybe a daisy. I’ll read you what was on the piece of paper. You got a pen?”

I grabbed my notebook and ripped out a clean spiral-edged sheet. “Go.”

Sam cleared his throat, then said, “I can only see death and more death, till we are black and swollen with death.”

“Is it Nicky’s writing?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Sam said. He chugged something and swallowed thickly. “Creepy, though, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “So they found a necklace and a note under the bed. Anything else?”

“I’m still looking. Oh, and Gemma, I got a message at the station. Some lady called looking for the chief and that new temp, what’s her name, Angie, she passed the message on to me. The lady’s name is Kirshbaum, with a K. She said she’s got important information, for the chief’s ears only. Ring any bells?”

I flipped through a mental Rolodex and paused at the K’s, then kept flipping through. “No, I don’t think so…”

“You sound unsure,” Sam said.

I snapped my fingers. “You know those late-night lawyer commercials, where they get you off a murder charge for two hundred bucks? I swear, that’s the guy’s name. Kirshbaum. Carson, or Kyle. Something like that.”

“Hang on,” Sam said. “I’ll Google it.”

I waited and gnawed at a dry cuticle.

“Canyon Kirshbaum?”

“That’s it. Canyon Kirshbaum. Is there a photo? He’s kind of a big guy.”

Sam grunted. “No photo, just a crappy Web site. What kind of a name is Canyon? So, what? Maybe it’s his wife that called?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Might not even be the same Kirshbaum. I’ll give them a call tomorrow. I’m sure it can wait a day. She’s probably some local busybody playing Agatha Christie.”

“You mean Miss Marple. Agatha Christie was the author,” Sam said.

He grunted again and then in the background I heard a doorbell ring. “Just a sec, Gemma.”

There were voices and then Sam was on the phone again. “Hey, can we talk later? A couple of the guys are here, we’re going fishing.”

“Sure. Have fun. Oh, and Sam-”

“Yeah?”

I was about to tell him to be careful, considering Finn’s dead bird.

“Nothing. Catch a beaut, ok?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and clicked off.

Hours later, I would recall that moment, how the click was like a period at the end of a sentence.

I would recall how I almost called him back and told him fishing could wait, that we should call Kirshbaum right now and make something out of our Sunday.

That’s what cops do, after all. They chase the leads while the leads are white-hot.

But I didn’t. Not that day.

Instead, I picked through the weekend paper and read about war and famine in Africa and a super-strain of malaria resistant to all drugs and George Clooney’s latest blockbuster.

I wondered, later-much later-if I had called Sam, if he would have stayed, and gone with me to Kirshbaum’s house.

I think he might have.