Inherit the Bones

Chapter Forty-eight

Annika laughed, that musical laugh of hers that sounded like wind chimes. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

She was just a few feet from me, in jeans and a hoodie sweatshirt. Her feet were bare and her toenails painted a scarlet red.

It’s odd what we notice.

“Annika, go back upstairs,” Mrs. Watkins said. “Finish packing.”

Annika paced the edge of the room, shaking her head. She moved in and out of the candlelight, there one minute, gone the next. Maybe she was a kind of a ghost, after all. Maybe I’d been living in a horror story all these long days and nights.

“Gemma’s here. I need to know why.”

I said the first thing that came to mind. “I talked to Pete this morning. He wants his claw back.”

Annika stopped pacing on the other side of the island and gave another laugh. “He’s such a child. You wouldn’t believe the things I let him do, and now he wants his little prop back?”

“He sounds like a nice guy, you should give him another chance. Although I don’t think he’d take you back.”

“I broke up with him,” she shouted, and resumed pacing.

Mrs. Watkins sipped her tea, watching the two of us. “What claw, Annie? What is Gemma talking about?”

Annika stopped pacing and stared at me with pleading eyes. I looked at the older woman, confused.

“Wait, what?” I asked.

Annika said, “Gemma, don’t… Pete doesn’t have anything to do with this. I just want my money; money that I would have gotten anyway, so I can leave. This family, this town… I need to get away!”

“And you will, my love, you will,” Mrs. Watkins said.

She moved toward Annika, her arms outstretched, pleading. “But you must hurry. You need to be packed and gone before your parents get home. That’s the only way this plan works.”

Understanding bloomed in my head.

“You don’t know, do you?” I asked Mrs. Watkins.

Behind her, Annika was frantically shaking her head and making shushing motions. Unbelievable.

The older woman stared at me. She glanced back at Annika, then at me again.

“Know what?”

“Annika killed Nicky. And she tried to kill my partner, Sam Birdshead, with your car.”

The mug fell from Mrs. Watkins’s hands and shattered on the kitchen tile with a sound as sharp as a shotgun’s blast. She staggered forward, her hand on her heart.

“You’re lying,” she gasped. She reached the edge of the island and gripped it as though holding on for dear life. “Tell me she’s lying, Annika.”

Annika was silent, chewing on a fingernail.

“Annika!” Mrs. Watkins shouted. “Answer me this minute.”

Annika sighed and said, “You know I can’t lie to you, Aunt Hannah. I never could.” She kneeled down and began picking up the shards of the broken mug. She worked quickly and carelessly and when she stood up, bright spots of blood bloomed on her fingertips.

Mrs. Watkins stared at her in shock. “I don’t… I don’t understand. You killed your brother? And ran that police officer off the road? Why?”

“Sit down, Aunt Hannah, before you stroke out. You thought we didn’t know about your heart pills, but we do. You don’t have to hide them, you know,” Annika said.

She stood there, bleeding, until her aunt obeyed and took a seat on the other stool, next to me. Only then did Annika move to the trash can, dump the broken mug, and yank a bunch of paper towels off the paper towel holder. She held them to her bleeding hands.

“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Watkins said. She trembled and I took a good look at her face. Her skin was pale, with sweat beginning to bead at her temple. I thought back to my first aid classes and remembered sudden news-good or bad-could cause shock in a person. The adrenaline rush could be fatal to someone with heart problems.

Annika looked at me.

I shrugged in response and said, “I don’t understand either, Annika. Why don’t you explain things for us?”

She blew a strand of loose hair from her forehead and bit her lip. She was quiet, thinking, and then came to some decision.

“Nicky had a hard time keeping secrets. The rest of us are pretty good at it. He held it in for a day or two, and then he burst on that camping trip, up at Bride’s Veil. He told me everything that night. How he was messing around with some old articles at the school library, and came across a story about that dead woman, Rose Noonan. He didn’t pay much attention, until he saw the photograph. She was wearing the same necklace our Granny always wore! Nicky couldn’t believe it. Granny used to call it her ‘good luck’ charm, and said wearing a flower at her throat was like carrying springtime in her heart. So, Nicky decided to play detective. He went to ‘investigate’ the cold case at the public library. He decided Grandpa must have killed the lady, and then given the necklace to Granny,” Annika said. “He got sick while he was telling me about it. He puked in an empty plastic bag in our tent.”

What were the chances, I thought to myself? A thousand to one? A million to one? That one day, a killer’s grandson would see an old photograph and both solve a murder mystery and start a terrible chain of events?

Annika peeked under the paper towels on her hands and nodded, satisfied with what she saw. She said, “I stopped the bleeding. Just a little pressure, like they taught us in Girl Scouts. I was a great scout, Gemma. The uniforms just got too ugly for me to keep going.”

“Do they also teach you about shock? I’m worried about your aunt.”

At my side, Mrs. Watkins groaned. She leaned forward and put her head in her hands.

Annika ignored my question. She continued with her story. Once started, she wouldn’t or couldn’t stop. “Our father was running for office. Our family is one of the most respected in the state. I’d never get into Yale if people knew my grandfather was a killer. Jesus, we’d be like the Manson family.”

“But Nicky wasn’t worried about those things, was he?”

Annika nodded. “You’re right. Nicky wanted to tell Mom and Dad. He wanted to go to the police. He mentioned you by name; he remembered you from some Career Day fair. Nicky said we owed it to the woman, Rose Noonan.”

“God, dear God, what have I done,” Mrs. Watkins murmured. “Oh, please. Please, make this stop.”

Annika said, “Aunt Hannah, don’t worry. Things are going to be fine, once I get my money. You were so right; I do deserve a fresh start somewhere amazing. I have my whole life ahead of me, I shouldn’t have to live it under anyone’s thumb. I’m a fucking Bellington, for God’s sake.”

Mrs. Watkins started weeping into her hands, her shoulders shaking with each sob.

Time seemed to slow down then in the warm, dim kitchen. I needed to know what happened to Nicky, I had to have the whole story. At the same time, I tried to watch Mrs. Watkins out of the corner of my eye. I was worried about her; if she was going into shock, we needed to call for help here in the next few minutes. I shifted in my seat and felt the reassuring weight of both my gun and my cell phone in my rain jacket.

Annika went on. “I told Nicky I’d kill him if he told anyone. I said I’d rip his heart out before he’d ruin our family. He asked me how I could say such a thing, and I said it was easy, that he and I were the same, and while I’d miss him, I’d go on living his life and mine, and it would be just as if he’d never been born at all.”

“How did Nicky survive the fall over Bride’s Veil?”

“I asked him the same thing before I slit his throat,” Annika said. “He’d been playing around the spot a few weeks before our camping trip, and he discovered a deep pool, one without boulders or rocks, just to the left of the waterfall. He decided that night, after we spoke, he would just leave and have nothing more to do with our family. He would forget what he knew, what I had said to him. He could start over; start fresh somewhere. The coward could run away as if all this had never happened. When he saw his chance the next day, he never hesitated. Nicky jumped, knowing if he positioned himself right, he would land in the pool, the one without rocks. And that’s just what he did.”

She stepped forward, into the candlelight, and I saw a strange gleam in her eyes. The little narcissist was proud of her brother.

Keep talking, Annika, keep talking.

“And then three years passed, and what? You recognized him at the circus?”

Annika laughed. “Yes, three years passed. I finished high school, went to college, and started my own life. I came home for the summer and was anxious to get back to Yale. And then I got an e-mail from my dear dead brother, asking to meet behind a tent on the grounds of a circus that would be arriving in a week.”

She went to the trash can and tossed the bloodied paper towels in and then poured herself a glass of water from the kitchen sink. She took a long drag and then wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand. “God, it feels good to tell all this to someone, you know?”

Annika took another long sip of water and then placed the glass inside the dishwasher. Beside me, Mrs. Watkins was still and silent, her weeping stopped. She watched Annika. I tried to watch them both.

“So I met him. He told me how he survived the fall and he begged me to reconsider telling the authorities about Grandpa. He spent three years running from the truth and he couldn’t do it anymore. Nicky read somewhere that Dad was sick and he got it into his head that all these lies and cover-ups were at the root of Dad’s cancer. He was convinced that if he could somehow right the wrong of Rose Noonan’s killing, Dad would be cured. Nicky said he was going to see Dad whether I agreed or not. It was an easy decision. I couldn’t agree, so I killed him.”

“Just like that, you killed your own brother?”

Annika nodded. “In a way, I wasn’t killing him but saving him. I knew he’d never live with himself if he ruined this family. Family is everything, isn’t it, Aunt Hannah? That’s what you’ve always told me. It’s all about the collective good, not what I or you or Nicky or even Mom or Dad want. We must always ask ourselves, ‘What is best for the family?’”

Mrs. Watkins stared at her niece in horror. “Yes, yes I have told you that. But I didn’t mean… you can’t have thought I would condone murder… My, god, your poor brother…”

“How did you get away? There was a lot of blood, Annika,” I asked.

Annika smiled. She said, “In his e-mail, Nicky had explained he’d been working as a clown. So, I took a clown suit with me. It was one of those big jumpsuit style costumes. I pulled the whole thing up and over my bloody clothes and voilà! It covered everything.”

In front of me, one of the candles went out and I moved to relight it with the lighter that lay in the middle of the island. Mrs. Watkins touched a hand to my thigh. I looked at her. Keeping her eyes on Annika, she gave the slightest shake of her head.

Don’t light the candle.

“What about Sam? Why try to kill him?”

“Sam was a diversion. You and your asshole partner, Finn, you guys spooked me when you came to the house. If you knew Nicky was looking into the Woodsman murders, it was only a matter of time before you started connecting the dots.”

“You didn’t know, did you?” I asked.

Annika looked confused. “Know what?”

“Sam was closer than you thought. He had the files of the evidence collected in Nicky’s room. He had a photograph of the necklace, and part of a poem. Finn saw a picture of your grandmother, wearing the necklace, at your house, while we were busting our chops trying to solve your kidnapping.”

Annika said, “Now that is irony. I had no idea. I just figured Sam was the easiest to get to, seeing as he’s not even a real police officer yet. But you sure are, aren’t you Gemma? So now, maybe you can answer something for me. Did my Grandpa kill those boys, the McKenzies?”

I nodded then shook my head.

“Well? Which is it, yes or no?”

“I think he did, but I can’t be sure. There was a third boy there, the day the McKenzies disappeared. He saw the whole thing. Your grandfather was about to dump Rose’s body. He had a partner with him, someone waiting in the car. When Frank saw the boys, he and the partner went after them. They were afraid of witnesses. So, I don’t know who killed the boys-it was either your grandfather, his partner, or both,” I replied.

Outside, a bolt of lightning lit up the sky, followed by a low roll of thunder. For a moment, the entire kitchen was illuminated. I saw Annika, pacing like a caged tiger. She held something in her hand, some small, silver thing that I couldn’t make out.

“Jesus Christ,” Annika said. “Who was his partner?”