Sing It to Her Bones

6

It was a Marx Brothers movie.

Dennis, Connie, and I reached the kitchen door simultaneously, a confusion of legs, colliding shoulders, and bumped elbows. Dennis straight-armed the kitchen door, but it moved only a few inches, stopping with a hollow thud against some inert object on the other side. When we finally squeezed through, it turned out to be Bill’s broad behind as he stood with his arms around the sobbing Angie, comforting her in the narrow space between the door and a stainless steel counter strewn with chopped vegetables. Angie rocked back and forth, moaning, using a soiled dish towel as a handkerchief, pressed hard against her eyes and completely covering her face.

Bill moved to one side so that Ellie could sidle by and join her daughter. Ellie fussed and cooed while escorting Angie to a folding wooden chair just to the left of the door. Angie sat down heavily beneath a wall-mounted telephone near the spot where a copy of the menu, sheathed in plastic, was tacked to the wall. While Connie and I hung back, leaning against a sink, I could hear Dennis’s voice, deep and reassuring, talking to Angie, arranging an appointment for an interview later in the day. Angie nodded mutely while dabbing at her swollen eyes with the crumpled towel.

“I feel like an intruder here,” Connie whispered. “The worst kind of eavesdropper.”

I, on the other hand, was inclined to stay, even though I could feel that water from the edge of the sink I was leaning against had soaked through the back of my slacks.

Connie tugged at my sleeve. “There’s nothing we can do here. Let’s sneak out the back.” She pointed to a screen door near the french fry cooker. I followed reluctantly, but as we reached the door, I hung back, gazing across the kitchen at the sad tableau: Angie seated, still sobbing; Ellie leaning solicitously over her, rubbing her back; Dennis squatting in front of the two, forearms resting on his thighs; and Bill, looking helpless, wiping the stainless steel counter over and over, even though it was by now thoroughly clean. As far as they were concerned, we were no longer there.

We drove to the farm, sitting in silence most of the way. I thought about all the problems of my own that should have kept me from saddling myself with somebody else’s.

One, I had had cancer. Maybe I still did. Who knew how many microscopic malignant cells had survived the chemicals and were even now cruising around my bloodstream, scouting out a comfortable spot to set up housekeeping?

Two, I was unemployed.

So why did I care so much about these people I had just met and a dead girl I never knew at all? Were they simply a distraction from my own troubles or was it the realization that Emily had been just Katie’s age the night she flounced off to a Phish concert in Washington, D.C., and we didn’t see her again for over three weeks? But unlike the Dunbars, we’d been lucky. Somewhere between Durango and Albuquerque, Emily and her rat-tailed, pierced-eared boyfriend had run out of money and decided to hitchhike home.

I need to go home, too, I told myself. Get some perspective. Sort through my mail, print out my résumé, find some envelopes, and, last but certainly not least, give Paul a sizable piece of my mind.

By three o’clock I had thrown my toothbrush and a few necessities into the car and told Connie I’d call, promising to see her again in a few days. I settled into the driver’s seat and breathed deeply. The overnight rain had cleared the air, leaving it fresh and smelling of clean, damp earth. Plump clouds scudded across an otherwise clear blue sky, and the sun warmed my face as I drove north up 301 toward Annapolis with the car windows rolled down and the wind roaring across my ears, making my gold hoop earrings sing.

Annapolis can be so beautiful in springtime that it almost breaks your heart. Somewhere before Interstate 97 joins Route 50 bringing visitors in from Baltimore and points north, new construction had widened the highway and money had been found, goodness knows where, to face the overpasses with brick. Wildflowers, in a rainbow of brilliant colors, thrived in the median strips and nestled in the Vs formed by the exit ramps.

On Rowe Boulevard, the scenic approach into Annapolis, the city fathers had planted tulips, and as I waited for the light to turn at Melvin Avenue, I had to admire the red and yellow blooms, heads nodding in the light breeze. Nature was doing its best to cheer me up, but I wasn’t buying. It was hard enough to leave Pearson’s Corner with the mystery of Katie’s disappearance still weighing heavily on my mind, but by the time I passed the new courthouse building near the stadium, I had almost convinced myself that Paul must have interrupted a burglary in progress. I worried that I’d find him sprawled on our kitchen floor with his head bashed in, one arm outflung near the off-the-hook phone.

I was going at least twenty miles over the posted limit when I screeched to a halt at the far end of the boulevard where it dead-ends at College Avenue. Late-blooming fat white cherry blossoms had turned the State House before me into a picture postcard. I thanked God for creating spring, giving me something to hang on to in the face of all that I’d gone through. This was my first spring since cancer had turned my life upside down. For poor Katie, though, there would be no more springtimes.

Our house is an old brick colonial on Prince George Street, tucked between two similar houses not too far from historic William Paca House. On a clear day from our bedroom on the top floor you can see the Naval Academy chapel dome. In the winter, when the trees are bare, we even claim a water view of Spa Creek.

Parking is always a problem in the historic district, particularly in summer when hordes of tourists clog the town, so I sometimes sneak my car into the Naval Academy visitors’ lot and walk home. Today I had the luck of a cop in a made-for-TV movie; someone was pulling out of a space just as I circled the block for the second time.

In our entrance hall, ignoring the mail that had piled up-a staggering amount in just four days-I threw my keys on the table and called, “Paul, it’s me. I’m home!” I listened, hardly daring to breathe, until I heard his familiar voice.

“Out here!” I found Paul sitting on the patio, a sweating bottle of Coors Light in his hand and the Sunday section of Saturday’s Baltimore Sun strewn about on the patio table, its pages fluttering in the wind. Paul had anchored them to the table with a flat rock from my garden. He wasn’t reading. He was talking on the cell phone. “Later, Murray. Hannah’s just here.” Murray Simon was an old college friend, a lawyer with a small practice up Route 2 in Glen Burnie, near Baltimore.

Paul punched the talk button with his thumb and turned to smile at me. It was the same crooked grin I loved so well, but today it didn’t match his eyes.

“I’ve been trying to call you for two whole days, Paul. I left messages on the machine. Why didn’t you return my calls?”

He set the phone aside, caught my hand, and pulled me into his lap, surrounding me with his arms and squeezing tight. I pulled away slightly so I could see his face.

“Goodness! You’d think I’d been away for a week instead of just a few days.” He kissed me on the mouth, and I relaxed into him, savoring the familiar tickle of his mustache as it brushed my lips and trailed along my cheek.

“Missed you,” he whispered into my neck. “More than you know.”

I leaned back, one hand flat against his chest. “You didn’t answer my question, Paul. Why didn’t you call me back?” There were tiny worry lines around his eyes. I stood and dragged a patio chair around from the other side of the table and sat down, facing him.

Paul set his beer down on the table and put both his hands together between his knees. He leaned toward me, but before he could say anything, I erupted, words tumbling out of my mouth at one hundred miles per hour, “It’s even in the paper!” I pointed to the table. “I needed to tell you that I found a body in the cistern on the old Nichols place!”

Paul’s eyebrows disappeared into his hair. A look I couldn’t read momentarily lit his eyes. “What? My God. I hadn’t gotten to the newspaper yet!”

“Actually it was Colonel who found the body.” I described my walk, the headlong dash back to the house, our return to the crime scene, Dennis’s visit with Connie, and the disturbing events of this morning. Thinking about Paul’s ties to the community, I asked, “Do you remember a girl named Katie Dunbar?”

He shook his head. “Should I?”

“I just thought you might. Small town and all. Connie and I were in Ellie’s Country Store mailing some packages when Dennis Rutherford stopped in for a soda. He told us the body was hers. She disappeared eight years ago, Paul. Dennis said she’d been murdered.”

Paul opened his mouth, but I’ll never know what he was going to say because the phone rang just then. Paul said it was a wrong number.

A few minutes later the blasted thing rang again, but this time Paul ignored it. “Jeez, honey, I feel like an insensitive clod. Sitting here, drinking beer and feeling sorry for myself, after what you’ve just been through. Are you okay?”

The phone continued to ring-four, five times-making a sound like a strangling turkey-six, seven. “I might be, if you’d pick up the damn phone. Aren’t you going to answer that?”

“Let it ring, Hannah. We need to talk.”

“I’ll say we do. Didn’t I just say I’ve been trying to reach you for days?”

Paul caressed my cheek with the back of his fingers. “I am sorry, honey. I should have been there for you.” His face took on a look of such infinite sadness that my heart seemed to turn in my chest. Suddenly he was not looking at me, and I panicked.

“Paul, what’s wrong?” A cold fist of fear began to form in my stomach. Mom? The last time I’d talked to her, she’d had a persistent cough that she’d promised to see the doctor about.

“Not Mother?” I struggled to my feet. “Don’t tell me there’s something wrong with my mother?”

Paul stood and began to pace back and forth on the slate slabs that formed the patio. “No, it’s not your mother.” Then, seeing the look of alarm in my eyes, he quickly added, “Or Emily.” He ran a hand through his hair and looked at me. “God, Hannah, I don’t know how to tell you this.”

“What?” I grabbed his upper arms and shook him. “What? For Christ’s sake, Paul! Tell me, what?” The knot in my stomach had grown so huge that I thought I would throw up.

Paul took me gently by the shoulders and eased me back into my chair. He sat down, too, and pulled his chair up to mine until our knees touched. I remember thinking that the last time he’d done this was at the doctor’s office, the Friday before my mastectomy, a few moments after Dr. Wilkins had told us the results of the biopsy and reported that the fast-growing tumor was already six centimeters long. The doctor had scheduled my surgery for the following Monday, and I was in shock, hardly feeling the molded plastic chair underneath my legs or the warmth of Paul’s hands as they cradled both of mine.

Now I sat in my own backyard, rigid again with fear, feeling the gentle pressure of Paul’s hands and waiting for him to say something, thinking, Three. My mother always said that bad luck comes in threes.

“I’m in trouble, Hannah.” Paul cleared his throat. “It could be big trouble. One of my students has accused me of sexual harassment.”

I felt the world shift on its axis. Sexual harassment! After the Tailhook fiasco sexual harassment was one of the few things that could get a tenured professor at the Naval Academy booted out on his ear.

Paul studied my face, as if searching it for understanding. “It’s not true, of course.”

I sat frozen, momentarily unable to speak. My breath came in rapid gasps, and I felt light-headed. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this!”

“It may be all right, Hannah. Simon Westlake’s this year’s division head, and I’ve been meeting with him. He says he doesn’t believe a word of it, but he has to treat her complaint seriously.”

“Her?” I repeated numbly. It crossed my mind to be relieved that at least it wasn’t a he. “Her who?”

“Jennifer Goodall, a firstie. She told her company officer that we were”-he took a ragged breath-“she says we were intimate and that I promised her a higher grade in Probability Theory if she would-oh, God, Hannah.” He covered his eyes with his left hand. “She’s failing the course. She claims I’m flunking her in retaliation for her decision to break off our so-called affair.”

I didn’t know Jennifer Goodall, but I could imagine her: a “firstie,” a senior, and, like all midshipmen, a perfect physical specimen. I pictured lustrous blond hair done up in an intricate braid and impossibly blue eyes, a crisp white uniform fitting smoothly and snugly around firm, young breasts. Big tears began to slide down my cheeks and drip, unchecked, onto my T-shirt, a T-shirt I had chosen because it was loose and tended not to emphasis what little there was in the way of breasts underneath.

“Hannah. Hannah.” He reached for me. “You know it’s not true! Not a word of it! She’s desperate, Hannah. As a poly sci major she needs my course to graduate.”

I took two deep breaths and tried to think reasonably. This was serious. If Midshipman Goodall were to flunk out at this late date, the navy could send her to the fleet as a lowly enlisted person for two years.

I recalled Paul’s grueling teaching schedule, the days at work giving extra instruction, the long hours he spent each night at home grading papers and found the girl’s accusation hard to believe. “When is all this supposed to have happened?”

“At the Army-Navy game. At the Sheraton Hotel near the Meadowlands, where a bunch of us were staying.”

“But that was last December, Paul! This is May! Even if her story was true, why did she wait so long to report it?”

“I don’t know, honey. I can’t explain it. The only truth I know is that I spent the night at the Sheraton and that I slept alone.”

Just as I had slept alone. Too sick from chemo to attend the annual football rivalry, I had passed that chilly autumn evening alternately watching the game on TV and miserably hugging the toilet bowl.

“What about her roommate?”

“She didn’t sleep with her roommate. Apparently they’d had a fight. No one seems to have any idea where Midshipman Goodall spent the night, Hannah, but it certainly wasn’t with me.” Paul poked at the beer bottle with his index finger, toppling it onto its side. Half a bottle of tepid liquid dripped through the holes in the wrought iron table onto the slate below. “We had one drink together-”

“You had a drink with her?” I couldn’t believe my ears. “How could you have been so incredibly stupid?”

“I didn’t invite her to, for Christ’s sake, Hannah. I was sitting alone in the lobby bar, nursing a beer and reading a paperback, when she walked up and spoke to me. I recognized her from Differential Equations her plebe year. She sat down. We ordered a round of drinks. Then, when I realized how drunk she was, I tried to convince her to go back to her room. She refused saying, ‘no, no,’ she was fine, so I left her sitting in the bar and went back to my room.”

“But someone must have seen her! Another mid. A waitress. Hotel staff. Maybe she slept on a couch in the lobby.” I shook my head, trying to clear it.

“You could end up in the Washington Post,” I muttered. “You could lose your job.”

“I know.” There was a long silence. Wind rustled the newspapers. A blue jay somewhere nearby jeered at the neighbor’s cat.

Paul lifted my chin and tried to look into my eyes, but I turned my head and stared, unfocused, at the stone wall that separated our property from our neighbors, refusing to meet his gaze. “Look at me, Hannah! You’ve got to believe me! I was never alone with her. Never! Not for a single minute!”

“But it doesn’t matter, does it, Paul? In this political climate, who’s going to listen?”

“Simon believes me, and I hope you do, too. You are my rock, Hannah. If I lose you…” He looked as if he were about to cry.

“Does Emily know?” I whispered, wondering if Paul had called our daughter.

“No, and I’m not planning to tell her, unless I have to.”

We sat for a while in silence, each waiting for the other to speak. “What happens now?” I finally asked, after what seemed like hours. “What can we do?”

“Nothing. Simon is handling it, and believe me, he’s going by the book. There’ll be a formal investigation, of course. Until then it’s business as usual. Officially no one knows anything.”

I studied the pin oak tree that Paul had planted on our tenth anniversary. Tiny green buds shimmered on the branches, promising spring. What did the future hold for us? Suddenly I saw it plainly. We were living in a cheap one-bedroom condo off Bestgate Road with Paul writing articles for sailing magazines and me working as a Manpower temp. For richer, for poorer.

“A job,” I heard myself say, as if from a great distance.

“What did you say?”

“A job. I’ll need to get a job.”

“Hannah, I think that consideration is a long way off.”

I shook my head and studied the man who had been my husband for twenty-five years. “Paul, you know I’ll support you one hundred percent. I’ll take on the secretary of the navy if I have to. But I need some time to take all this in.”

I left him sitting in his solitary misery while I shut myself in the bedroom with mine. I lay on the bed and let the tears fall freely. I felt as if some alien from outer space had sucked out all my blood, leaving my bones to rattle around loose inside my skin. I wanted to believe Paul, but I had been so sick. Could I really blame him for wanting a break from all the illness and taking comfort in the arms of a young and healthy woman? Maybe I should have had the reconstruction! The doctor had recommended using a flap of muscle from my abdomen, but I’d decided I could worry about only one thing at a time. “Let’s get rid of the cancer first,” I’d told him. “Why spend all that money on a patient who’s likely to croak?” He told Paul he admired my spunk.

Spunk. That’s what I needed. A bottle of spunk. It would give me the backbone I needed to support Paul, the way he had always supported me. In sickness and in health. But there was a difference, I argued. I couldn’t help getting cancer, for heaven’s sake, but he could have avoided sitting around in hotel bars drinking ill-considered beers with creatures named Jennifer, screwing up our lives.

I must have fallen asleep at some point in the night because the next sound I heard was the front door closing the next morning. Paul’s side of the bed was undisturbed. I splashed cold water on my face, hating the woman on the other side of the bathroom mirror who stared back at me with blotched cheeks and swollen eyes. I extracted a pair of shorts and a faded T-shirt from the heap of clothes lying at the foot of my bed, pulled them on, then padded downstairs in my bare feet.

Before leaving for work, Paul had stuck a Post-It on the microwave-“I love you,” written with black Magic Marker on the yellow square in solid, bold capitals. A tea drinker, he had made me the gift of a fresh pot of coffee. Overcome by new tears and a growing sense of desperation, I carried my coffee to our basement office, to try to take control of the situation the only way I knew how. I typed up my résumé on the PC, and clicked on the print button. I watched while ten copies spewed out, then printed two more for good measure.

Afterward I toasted a bagel and ate it dry, washed down with orange juice. When the morning paper came, I was half afraid to pick it up, expecting to see a screaming headline, NAVAL ACADEMY PROFESSOR CHARGED WITH SEXUAL HARASSMENT, but there was nothing. Just the shenanigans as usual in the District of Columbia. In the Metro section, though, a small story about Katie Dunbar caught my eye. The medical examiner had released her body. Katie’s funeral would be on Wednesday.

Suddenly nothing seemed as important to me as getting back to Pearson’s Corner. There was nothing I could do in Annapolis anyway, except brood about my crumbling marriage and my nonexistent career. I would attend Katie’s funeral, meet her family, talk to her friends. Who among them, I wondered, could have been responsible for her death?

Figuring Paul would never miss them, I packed up the Post and Sun classified sections and stocked up on envelopes and stationery and a roll of stamps from Paul’s desk. I threw some clean underwear and a simple black dress into an overnight bag.

Tomorrow I’d start some serious networking. I’d call all my friends and let them know I was job hunting. In the meantime I’d bunk with Connie. I wondered how much she’d have to know.

But Paul had already called his sister. I knew that the minute I walked into Connie’s studio, two hours later after what seemed the longest drive of my life.

“Hannah,” she said. An open-ended sentence. And I was bawling again, in her arms.