Inherit the Bones

Chapter Forty-seven

The Bellington house was dark and still, a giant glass spaceship asleep for the night. I stood and watched as the rain hit the black windows and gray concrete and thought about the stains in life that can’t be washed away.

To anyone watching me from the house, I would have looked menacing-a hooded figure, cloaked in a black raincoat, hovering about the edge of the forest like a masked killer.

I had parked in a turnoff a quarter of a mile down the road and walked the rest of the way. There was a chance that Mrs. Watkins-Aunt Hannah-might be home. I had the element of surprise on my side and I wanted to keep it that way.

A single light burned above the front door. I knocked heavily, three times, and waited.

Nothing. Maybe I got lucky and Mrs. Watkins was out for the evening, too.

Doubt crept over me and I shivered in the cool, wet air.

I must be insane, to be here.

I walked around the perimeter of the house on a narrow footpath, setting off a motion-sensor light. The sudden brightness made me jump. The rain came down in a light mist that dampened instead of drenching. I adjusted the hood on my rain jacket and passed by a small, fenced-in garden, guarded by a bright blue wheelbarrow, a bag of sod, and an orange hose looped on a hose coil. A pair of gardening gloves lay in the soil, abandoned by their owner.

The strong smell of mint hit me and I had an inexplicable craving for sweet tea. The Peanut gave a single kick and then stilled and I felt another shiver pass through me.

What was I doing here?

You know what you’re doing here, I whispered to myself. You’re searching for goddamn evidence. If my theory was right, once her parents completed the money transfer according to the directions in the kidnappers’ note, Annika would bail. She’d leave Cedar Valley half a million dollars richer. I hoped I was wrong, that Annika didn’t kill her own brother and fake her own kidnapping.

That she hadn’t tried to kill Sam Birdshead.

That her grandfather’s violent, murderous streak hadn’t skipped a generation and blossomed in the charming young woman whose involvement in the case I’d been blind to, since the day I interviewed her in her room.

I kicked at a rock in the middle of the footpath and set it soaring off into the dark air. It landed somewhere with a dull thud and I wished I could kick something more meaningful. I’d been distracted by the Woodsman murders, and by the thought of Brody canoodling with Celeste Takashima in the arctic tundra.

Annika had been there all along, in plain sight.

I’d missed taking the close, hard look that I should have at Nicky’s family; at his sister, his twin sister, the one person closest to him in the whole world. Annika was a narcissist and a bully and a killer.

And somewhere in that house was the evidence.

I reached the end of the path and saw a four-car garage connected to the house by a covered-walkway. Breaking and entering, searching a property without warrant or probable cause… Finn’s words came to me like a permission slip from God himself: the ends justify the means.

I told myself to remember the cliff, the overhang just beyond the house. It would be easy to lose my footing in the dark, easy and fatal. At the garage, I paused by the first door and felt around the front of it, down low, toward the ground. There-a handle.

I twisted and turned it to the side and then heaved and I was rewarded with a squeak that sounded like a gunshot. Pausing, I looked back at the house again. The great glass spaceship was still dark.

The rain began to beat down harder.

I wished Finn was at my side, but he wasn’t, so instead I tried to channel his arrogant Devil-may-care attitude and lifted the door high enough to duck and squeeze under, and I did, emerging into blackness deeper than the night I’d left outside.

On the wall, I found a switch. I flicked it up and down but the power was out. The garage seemed to grow even darker, as though I were in some kind of black hole that was swallowing all and every source of light. My breath seemed to come faster. I forced myself to close my eyes, embrace the quiet rather than fear the dark, and think.

What had I grabbed from the car? My cell phone, my gun… and a tiny flashlight, no more than a penlight really. I pulled it out from the pocket of my rain jacket and turned it on.

The light bounced around in a narrow, thin beam that made the rest of the darkness seem immense. There was enough light, though, to make out three cars and a fourth spot, empty.

If Terry or Ellen drove to the fund-raiser, that meant one car was Annika’s, one car probably belonged to Mrs. Watkins, and one car was either the mayor’s or Ellen’s.

The rain came in through the half-lifted garage door, splashing my lower legs and soaking my tennis shoes. I moved to the front of the cars. There was a space of just a few feet between the cars and the back wall of the garage. Along the back wall were hung bicycles and sporting equipment, hockey sticks and skis and a goalie net, folded up and draped awkwardly like a massive, long-forgotten spider web.

Slowly, I walked down the line of vehicles.

The first one was a black Lexus SUV with a personalized pink breast cancer awareness license plate that read “Elle-1.” Ellen’s car. The exterior was spotless and I shone the light through the driver’s side window. Clean, tan leather seats. A stainless steel coffee tumbler sat in the cup holder. I tested the door; locked.

The second car was a navy blue Honda Accord, maybe two or three years old, with a sheepskin cover over the steering wheel and a Yale license plate holder around out-of-state plates. I figured it must be Annika’s car. It had been recently washed and waxed and it gleamed in the beam of the flashlight. I peeked in the window, and two things gave me pause.

The first was a day planner about the size of a hardcover novel, printed with photographs of different breeds of cats. The second was a receipt from Same Day Clean Way Laundry. The name on the receipt was Hannah Watkins and it had yesterday’s date stamped at the top.

The Annika I knew would drop dead if she was spotted carrying that day planner, which begged the question, was Mrs. Watkins borrowing Annika’s car? And if so, why?

Maybe Mrs. Watkins’s car was in the shop. I shrugged and passed by the empty spot. An old fluid spill stained the concrete floor, and I moved on to the third and last car in the garage.

It was about the size of Annika’s Honda Accord, some kind of four-door sedan. I couldn’t tell the make or model or color for the vehicle was completely hidden by a light gray car cover.

I took hold of one corner of the cover and slowly pulled, tugging the cloth until it puddled at my feet in a large heap.

I stared at the car and my heart stopped.

An old white Toyota Camry with a busted right headlight winked at me.

Deep breaths, Gemma, deep breaths.

I pulled out my iPhone and took a picture, using the phone’s flash. I stared at the photograph on my screen and saw something glinting in the broken headlight.

I looked back at the car and didn’t see anything. Another look at the picture-yes, there was definitely something in the headlight.

I crouched down and shone my flashlight in there.

“What the hell is that?”

I stuck my hand into the light’s cavity, mindful of the broken glass, and pulled out a piece of silver rubbery-like material. I held it up and shone the flashlight on it.

And then I realized what it was and I wanted to scream.

It was Lycra, from a pair of biking shorts.

Jesus.

This was the car that hit Sam.

A noise behind me, by the half-open garage door, then the bright white beam of a powerful flashlight hit my eyes and I threw an arm up to block the blinding light.

“Gemma? What are you doing here?”

“Mrs. Watkins, is that you? Turn that light away, please,” I said.

The beam moved off my face to the floor. In the gloom, I saw the tall, older woman standing by the front of Ellen’s black SUV.

“Uh, hi. I know this looks bad but I can explain. I knocked on your door a few minutes ago and didn’t get an answer, so I came around back, thinking someone might be home. I thought I heard a cat, crying, coming from the garage,” I stammered.

I felt the ridiculousness of the lie in the silent space between us.

I felt Mrs. Watkins’s eyes on me, but I couldn’t see her features.

She was quiet a moment then said, “Well, come inside the house. You’ll catch your death out here.”

“Oh, no, really, I should just be going home.”

“Then why knock on the door?” Mrs. Watkins replied. She turned and ducked out of the garage. I sighed and followed her, caught in my own web of deceit.

We moved in silence through the covered walkway, from the garage and into the house. I pulled the hood back from my head and removed my rain jacket, careful to bundle it up so that it didn’t drip all over the polished marble floors.

In darkness, Mrs. Watkins led me to the kitchen.

There she had set up a trio of thick white pillar candles, and she set a kettle of water to boil on the stove by the light of the flickering flames. She directed me to take a seat on one of the two stools that stood next to an island in the middle of the kitchen.

“We lost power an hour ago. If you’re looking for Terry or Ellen, you’re out of luck. They’re in town, attending a fund-raiser. The show must go on, I suppose. Dad’s barely in the ground; Annika’s missing; and they just buried their only son for the second time,” Mrs. Watkins said. “I’ll never understand it.”

She went to a cupboard and opened it and stood, looking at contents I could not see. “Herbal tea? I have chamomile, lemon, or mint. Or I can get you black, decaf or regular.”

The candles cast strange shadows in the large kitchen and I began to feel drowsy in the dim, warm room, out of the cold rain. I struggled to concentrate on Mrs. Watkins’s words.

“I don’t know, some people cope with grief by staying busy, I suppose. If you’ve got sugar or milk, the decaf black tea would be just fine, thank you.”

Mrs. Watkins looked back at me over her shoulder. “The Bellingtons are not ‘copers,’ Gemma. That implies making do with situations. We tackle our problems head-on.”

She pulled two mugs from another cupboard and began opening the tea bags. She whistled as she worked, a funny little smile on her face.

“Speaking of head-on, is that your Toyota in the garage? You’ve got a busted headlight.”

Mrs. Watkins looked up at me. “Why do you think I’ve been using Annika’s car? She took mine out at some point in the last few weeks, God knows why, and returned it in worse condition than she found it. She hit a parking pole, apparently. Until I get it fixed, she said I could use her Honda. I wouldn’t want to get a ticket for the headlight.”

“Ah, I see. Hannah, forgive my bluntness, but you seem rather in a good mood. Have there been any further updates about Annika? Any more word from her kidnappers?” I asked.

On the stove, the kettle began to whistle. Mrs. Watkins turned away without answering me and went and removed the kettle from the burner. When she turned back, she’d stopped smiling.

“No, no word from the kidnappers. Let’s just say I have a feeling Annika is going to be okay. She and I are alike that way. We’re survivors. We do what has to be done,” Mrs. Watkins answered.

She poured the boiling water carefully and then dropped a tea bag into each mug. Something behind me caught her eye and she looked up and then away, quickly, but it was too late. I’d noticed her movement and in the space before I heard anything, I sensed a presence behind me, in the darkness.

“Gemma,” a voice called.

Slowly, I turned around.