Inherit the Bones

Chapter Forty-four

If a circus coming to town is the greatest thing on Earth, a circus leaving must surely be one of the saddest. The workers and performers looked happy to be moving on to their next destination, but there was a sense of finality to the scene, a sense of ending, that made me melancholy.

“Where will you go next?”

Fatone and I walked the perimeter, him stopping every few yards to check on rigging or instruct a worker to change how they were doing something. Decaying food and bits of trash were ground into the dirt below our feet, the remnants of one great, big party.

“We have a contract in Santa Fe, so we’ll make our way down there and stay a few weeks, then head west to Arizona,” Fatone said. “We stayed here too long as it is.”

“I’m sorry. That couldn’t be helped,” I said. “What about Tessa? And Lisey?”

He shrugged. “What about them? They’re like sisters, fighting like cats and dogs one minute, hugging and crying the next. One big family, that’s what we are. They’ll be fine. They always are.”

I wasn’t sure if he meant the girls specifically or the entire lot of them.

“I’ve got big plans for Tessa,” Fatone said. He bent to pick up something sharp and rusty and tossed it into the woods, overhand like a baseball pitcher.

“I want to put her in a one-person act and make her the star. She’s ready.”

“Can you do a trapeze act with just one person?”

Fatone squinted into the distance, looking east toward Kansas. “Do you think those pioneers would have crossed all those thousands of miles if they knew what monstrous mountains awaited them?”

I shrugged. Above us the sun grew higher still, rising up on the waves of the very heat it pulsed down.

“Hell, who knows, but we’re going to try. It might revolutionize circus acts for time immortal,” he said.

“You said you had something for me?”

Fatone nodded and took my elbow, tugging me toward his trailer. “A box of Reed’s-Nicky’s-things. I just found it so your cop friends must have missed it. It was sitting under the bed in his cabin.”

Nicky hid a lot of things under his bed, I thought.

The inside of the trailer was as warm and airless as I remembered. In the window, a fly buzzed against the closed pane, a few fallen comrades like desiccated raisins in the sill beneath it.

Behind me, Fatone gently closed the door. “It’s there, that shoe box, on the table.”

I sat and he leaned across me, pushing open the window. The fly sailed out on the first breeze, and I removed the lid from the box, staring at the objects that lay inside.

“Did you look inside?” I asked Fatone.

I knew he had, he must have, but he shook his head and shrugged.

“It didn’t feel right. I knew it was his, being under the bed and all, and I didn’t want to handle it more than I needed to,” he said, taking a seat across from me. “It’s a dirty business, all around.”

It was an interesting choice of words, considering what the box contained.

There were half a dozen Polaroid shots of Nicky and Tessa in various stages of undress, limbs and clothes draped strategically over their bodies. The pictures didn’t contain anything you wouldn’t see in a bathing suit, but there was a sense of intimacy to them that made me feel as though I was violating something sacred.

Under the photographs was a stack of vintage postcards, from what looked like the 1950s and 1960s, each with a cute saying or cheesy line. They were all addressed to Reed-Nicky-and signed Tessa. None had been mailed, though, and I imagined she collected them, and then left them for him, maybe on his pillow, or in a book.

A surprise, from a girlfriend to her boyfriend, and I wondered who had taken the photographs. The angle seemed impossible for a tripod.

“Do you think I should have given the box to Tessa?” Fatone asked. He pulled a cigar from his front pocket and wet the tip of it with his tongue, but didn’t light it.

I didn’t know what to do with the box. I felt a great sense of fatigue creep over me and I wanted to put my head down and close my eyes and sleep for a hundred years.

“Why don’t I hold on to it for a while,” I said. “If it turns out we don’t need it, I’ll forward it on to Tessa in the mail.”

Fatone nodded. He stared out the window, noticed the dead flies in the sill, and brushed them out with the edge of a magazine. Against my hip, my cell buzzed. I didn’t recognize the number, but it had a Connecticut area code so I answered. When I heard who it was, I excused myself from Fatone’s trailer and stood just beyond it, under the shade of a large pine.

“Pete? Thanks for holding. My name is Gemma Monroe, I’m a detective in Cedar Valley, Colorado.”