Sing It to Her Bones

5

It rained all the next night. Great explosions of thunder rattled the windows, followed before I could finish chanting “one one thousand” by zigzags of lightning that sliced through the dark and scented the air with ozone. When I awoke at eight, the rain had stopped, but clouds still plastered the slate gray sky and patches of fog hovered over the low-lying fields. I breathed in the sweet, damp air and felt immensely content. Until I remembered. Rain. The cistern would be full again.

I had planned to spend the day lounging around the house reading one of the paperbacks I had brought with me. A dozen mysteries lay under my bed, jumbled up in a plastic grocery bag. I never dreamed when I packed them up in Annapolis that I’d be walking right into a real-life mystery a few days later. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, browsing through the pile, trying to decide whether to revisit a favorite Dick Francis, Reflex, or to launch into the latest Sue Grafton when Connie tapped lightly on the door.

“Hannah? You up?” The door eased open, and Connie’s tousled head appeared.

“Just picking out the day’s reading material.” I waved the Sue Grafton at her, N Is for Noose. “What do you suppose she’ll do for titles after she gets to the end of the alphabet?”

Connie plucked the book from my outstretched hand and scanned the blurbs on the back flap. “Oh, I don’t know. How about starting over? AA is for Alcoholics Anonymous, BB is for Gun.” She set the book down on top of the dresser. “I gave up on Grafton somewhere around the letter J, I think.” Connie turned apologetic. “Hannah, I was wondering. Could you help me pack up my gourds this morning?”

I saw my nice, quiet day sliding down the tubes. I shrugged. “Sure. Why not?” I tried to sound enthusiastic about helping prepare the shipment, but I really just wanted to get it over with.

A few minutes later, in the kitchen, I grabbed a bagel and a cup of coffee and tried to call Paul at home. I got the message you get when the line is busy, which meant he was either talking on the phone or logged on to the Internet. I suppose the phone could have been off the hook, too, or out of order, but my bet was he was slogging through his E-mail. So what the hell was going on? Paul might have missed seeing the article in the Sun, but there was no way he could have missed my messages. I was becoming seriously annoyed. Too bad Connie didn’t have a computer and a modem. I could have E-mailed my husband a nasty-gram.

In the studio I lounged against the workbench for a few minutes, munched on the bagel, and watched Connie work. My gawd, the woman was disorganized! She’d unfold a box, tape it up, then get distracted by something on one of the pieces she was packing, take it over to the window, turn it from side to side, squint… it drove me nuts.

“You won’t finish until sometime in the next century if you keep checking everything like that. You need to set up an assembly line.” I unfolded six boxes, taped down the flaps, lined them up, and filled each with a layer of plastic peanuts. Then I rolled each precious object in protective bubble wrap and snuggled it down into the bed of peanuts. After an hour of this I was decorated in peanuts. They clung by static electricity to my sweatshirt and jeans and dangled from my chin, but we had ten packed boxes and left a wall of empty shelves.

Colonel, who had been observing all this activity with one eye open, head resting on his paws, a plastic peanut stuck to his right ear, followed us outside and trotted behind Connie as she went to the barn. Connie swung the barn door wide, while I tried to brush the peanuts off my clothes, but they clung stubbornly to my hands and fingers. As I shook my hands vigorously, I heard a door slam and a reluctant engine grind, sputter, and cough into life. I just had time to think, Don’t tell me Connie is still driving my father-in-law’s old Chevy truck when the familiar vehicle, scaled with rust, emerged from the barn. Connie’s head protruded from the window of the ancient truck, looking back over her left shoulder because the side view mirror was long gone. She backed up to the studio door, dismounted, and unhooked the tailgate.

“Isn’t it a mess? I have to keep a trickle charger on the battery.”

I had to agree it was a sorry heap. Once bright red, the finish had faded over the years to a dull pink, and the chassis sat crookedly on four tires, all completely bald.

It took only a few minutes to load the boxes into the back of the truck-they were bulky but quite light-and lock up the house. Soon we were bouncing down the drive-the shock absorbers also belonged in a museum-and I kept looking through the rear window to make sure the boxes were still with us, hoping I’d used enough bubble wrap. As Connie turned right to follow the road into town, I slid sideways on the dry vinyl seats. No seat belts, either.

Just past the Baxter farm, the narrow road curved sharply right and widened into Church Street, named for St. Philip’s Episcopal nearly a half a mile away, at the stoplight where Church Street intersected with High. Church Street wound through a pleasant, tree-lined, residential neighborhood, dominated by large family houses built in the twenties and thirties. About halfway down, Connie slowed and pointed to a modest gray dwelling on our right, with a wraparound porch and neat white trim.

“That’s the Dunbars’,” she said.

A familiar truck was parked at the head of the drive, and behind it sat a black Lexus with Virginia plates. “Wonder who that is?” I asked. Connie shrugged.

At the stoplight Connie turned left on High. Just past the cemetery she spun the wheel sharply to the left and pulled into one of the unmarked parking spaces in front of Ellie’s Country Store.

I hadn’t been there for several years, but I was pleased to see that Ellie had made an effort to retain the old-fashioned cracker barrel atmosphere of the place. Outside, a wooden porch extended across the front of the building, decorated with turn-of-the-century farm implements, milk cans, and painted metal signs advertising Nu grape, Dad’s root beer, Norka ginger ale (Tastes Better!), Glendora coffee, and various brands of chewing tobacco. Inside, Ellie had added a wood-burning stove since the last time I had stopped by and had scattered a few solid-looking wooden crates about, sturdy enough for customers to sit on. Between two of the crates sat an old nail keg that served as a table for a well-worn chess set. A modest selection of groceries and sundries occupied shelves that ranged out to the right of the door, and on the left a counter ran the length of the room. Behind the counter double doors led to the kitchen. I heard the chink and clink of dishes and glasses being washed.

Ellie had an alcove in the back where she handled UPS. When we came in, she was standing there with a customer, weighing a large box.

“It’s going all the way to California, Mrs. Foster. That’s why it’s so expensive. They go by zones.”

Mrs. Foster, a scrawny woman wearing blue jeans and a turtleneck shirt, simply said, “Oh,” and opened up her wallet to extract two new ten-dollar bills.

We were almost up to the counter before Ellie noticed us. “Oh, hi, you two.”

“I’ve got some boxes for you, Ellie.”

“Okay. I’ll be with you in a minute.” She leaned over the counter and shouted toward the kitchen, “Bill! We need your help out here unloading some boxes!”

Bill, whom I took to be in his mid-twenties, appeared immediately. He wore khaki bermuda shorts, a T-shirt covered in food stains, and a five o’clock shadow. “No problem,” he grunted. A man of few words.

While Bill slapped back and forth in his cheap rubber sandals, helping Ellie and Connie get the boxes ready for UPS, I selected a bottled iced tea from one of the upright glass-fronted coolers standing near the window. I took it to the cash register just as a heavyset woman I assumed was Ellie’s daughter, Angie, emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel that she had tucked into the waistband of her jeans. She had Ellie’s unruly light brown hair, and I noticed a certain resemblance around the eyes and mouth.

“Hi, there. Can I help you?”

“I’m just waiting for my sister-in-law over there.” I pointed with my drink.

“Oh, you must be Hannah.” She squinted at me. “Sorry! I didn’t recognize you at first.”

I noticed her checking out my wig and decided I’d make it easy for her. “I’ve lost some weight lately.”

“Lucky you!” Angie, who had a good thirty pounds on her mother, gathered up a roll of fat at her waist and pinched it between her thumb and index finger. “I could stand to lose some myself.”

I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say to that. Darn right? I covered the silence by examining the candy bars and packs of gum displayed prominently near the cash register. I selected a Milky Way Dark, one of my vices, and laid it on the counter. “Want a candy bar, Connie?”

Connie didn’t even turn around. “After those doughnuts? Are you nuts?”

“Just having a fading spell. You work me too hard.”

“Why don’t you order us some lunch?”

Angie took our order for two crab cake sandwiches and a single order of fries on the side-they were for Connie-writing it down with a nubby pencil on a green order pad. She tore off the page and shoved it into the kitchen through a square window that had been cut in the wall, where Bill, who apparently served as cook as well as UPS assistant, picked it up.

While I gulped my iced tea, Angie rang up a bottle of dish soap and a box of raisin bran for a bearded sailor who looked as if he had just returned from a round-the-world cruise. After he left, letting the screen door bang shut behind him, she perched behind the counter on a tall stool.

“My mom tells me that you found that body yesterday.”

I nodded without taking my mouth from the bottle.

“Mom thinks it’s Katie Dunbar.”

“That’s what everyone thinks, Angie, but that’s because she’s the only person who ever went missing from Pearson’s Corner. It could certainly be somebody else, you know. Anybody could have dumped a body out here.”

“I hope it isn’t. Katie, I mean. I’d hate to think of her lying all alone down there in that cold, cold water.” She stared at her hands, which lay folded in her lap. “Course I’d hate to think of anyone ending up like that. But Katie… well, she was my best friend.”

“She was?”

“Oh, yes! We were on the cheerleading squad together. Everyone said we looked like twins.”

I studied this doughy young woman who was sliding into middle age far too early and tried to reconcile what I saw sitting before me with a perky blond youngster shaking pom-poms and shouting “Gimme a J, Gimme an O!” I couldn’t do it.

Angie began twisting the towel. “I still remember Katie at the homecoming dance. She was so happy! She couldn’t sit still. Just flying around the room in a gorgeous satin dress, blue like the sky. It cost the earth, too. Three hundred dollars! Katie showed me the receipt.” Her voice was a husky whisper, as if she were sharing a great secret. “She danced with all the guys on the basketball team, even though she came with Chip.” Angie reached behind her to rearrange a tin box of crackers that must have been cutting into her back.

“After she disappeared, I kept thinking about that night. Playing it over and over, trying to remember if I missed anything.” She leaned back against the shelves and closed her eyes. With one graceful hand, she beat out a slow, imaginary rhythm in the air. Suddenly her eyes snapped open, and she stared at me. “We had real bands then, you know, not disk jockeys like they have today who just sit on their duffs all night and play CDs.”

She let out a long sigh. “I broke a strap on my gown that night, and when we went to the rest room to pin it back together, Katie told me she was the happiest girl in the whole, wide world. Later I saw her standing near the punch bowl, holding Chip’s hand. Chip just smiled that sweet, closed-mouth smile of his and looked mysterious.”

“I read in the paper that he was the last person to see her before she disappeared.”

“That’s right, except for whoever…” She shivered. “But Chip could never do anything like that.”

“Maybe they had a fight and something got out of hand.”

“Oh, no! Chip was crazy about Katie. Besides, he’s way too religious, one of those born-again Christians. He attended that all-glass megachurch over near Lanham; still does, for all I know. You’ve probably seen it. It’s the one that looks like a humongous greenhouse.”

I shook my head. Episcopalians like me aren’t usually up on the location of churches with TV ministries and parking lots the size of RFK Stadium. I changed the subject. “I keep thinking about the Dunbars and how tragic it would be for them. Was Katie their only child?”

“Oh, no. They have another daughter, Elizabeth. She’s four years older than Katie. Now that she’s working for some hotshot law firm in D.C., though, she doesn’t come home very often.” She leaned toward me confidentially. “To tell you the truth, I think Liz is a little ashamed of her parents, her father just being a handiman at the local nursery and all. They don’t call him a handiman, or course; he’s head gardener or deputy horticulturalist or something.”

The phone rang, and Angie took a minute to write down a carry-out order for four Italian subs and hand it through to Bill.

While Angie scribbled, I stared at a poster hanging crookedly on the wall and wondered how Katie’s parents could have afforded a three-hundred-dollar dress. I know we couldn’t. For her junior prom, Emily had selected a red leather skirt with a slit from here to Christmas and a strapless black plastic bustier with spangles that cost the earth and would have looked right at home in Madonna’s closet. I absolutely put my foot down, insisting it made her look like a tart. There had been a terrible scene in the dressing room that sent the sales associates scurrying for cover and ended with both of us in tears and not speaking to each other for a week. Shortly after that Emily had run away again, and I tried to convince myself that it hadn’t been my fault.

Angie hung up the phone and stuck the pencil she had been using behind her ear. “Sorry about that. Where was I?”

“You were telling me about Katie’s sister,” I prompted.

“Oh, yeah. Liz is a lot older than Katie. She was a sophomore at the University of Maryland when Katie disappeared.”

“It must have been hard on Liz, too,” I said.

“I suppose.” Angie paused. “But they were never very close. Katie was prettier and more popular than Liz.” She leaned forward, and her folded hands disappeared into her lap. “One time when Katie was a freshman and Liz was a senior, they had a knockdown, hair-pulling, rabbit-punching fight in the girls’ locker room just because Katie got asked to the senior prom by one of Liz’s old boyfriends.” She wiggled off the stool and turned to fetch our sandwiches, which had just appeared in the pass-through window. “I’m sure the police filed that interesting fact away in their little notebooks,” she added. “They talked to Liz, too, you know. She was home that weekend.”

Connie chose that moment to join us and demand what she claimed was a hard-earned lunch. Angie returned to the kitchen, and Ellie busied herself with the UPS delivery truck. Connie and I sat on the wooden crates and balanced our paper plates on our knees. “Gawd, these are good!” Connie mumbled through a mouthful of succulent backfin crab lumps. She offered me some of her fries, but she had ruined them with catsup, and I told her so.

“Picky, picky.” She waggled one under my nose, just to taunt me.

I had finished my sandwich and was standing at the cooler, selecting a fruit drink for Connie, when the screen door slammed and a familiar voice boomed out, “Hey, hey!” Dennis. He made a beeline for Connie. “I knew I’d find you here.” He gestured toward the front porch. “That decrepit heap you’re driving is a dead giveaway. I should give you a ticket just on general principles.”

Connie popped a french fry, loaded with catsup, into her mouth. “I had to put my boxes in something, Dennis. What brings you here?”

“I’m dying of thirst.” He joined me at the cooler, where he picked out a bottle of cranberry juice, twisted off the cap, and finished it in three long gulps. I simply stared.

Dennis put the empty bottle down on the counter and fumbled in his pocket until he found three quarters, which he laid on top of the cash register. He pulled up a crate and sat down next to Connie, his arms resting on his knees. “I’ve just come from the Dunbars.” He looked up at me. “I had the unhappy task of telling them that the body you found has been positively identified as Katherine Louise Dunbar and that she had been murdered.”

From the kitchen came a long, high-pitched wail and the clang of something metallic hitting the floor and rolling, rolling, rolling.