The Bone Box

CHAPTER THREE

Summer weather along the Pacific is governed by a kind of strange roulette wheel, one that makes anyone with concrete plans on the all-but-certain losing end of things. Not until the moment one ventures outside to experience the world of nature is it apparent if it is sunny or rainy or a mix of both. Its unpredictability is the only sure thing.

Three days after her fourteenth birthday, Birdy Waterman dragged a wagon down the coast trail to gather kindling. This was something she did nearly every day in the summer, and most weekend days during the school year. In the rain. In the snow. In the most blustery of autumn days. It didn’t matter. Birdy’s family heated their little aluminum box of a house with a woodstove. Wood was free if one was skilled with a chainsaw. She wore two layers of clothing, a T-shirt and a sweatshirt that she’d undoubtedly peel off once she got down to the business at hand.

Birdy was small for her age, fearless when it came to the noisy saw, and just hungry enough to help her mother and father in any way that she could. Helping each other was not only the tribal way, but the way of the Watermans. Natalie made money doing what she considered bogus crafts for the tribal gift shop, and Mackie Waterman fished for salmon up and down Neah Bay and over to West Port. Tribal fishing rights didn’t always guarantee a good income-no matter what the non-Native fishermen said. So there, on that summer day, Birdy did what she always did: forage for deadfall along the coast trail that wound its way from the hillside down to the rocky beach populated by sea stacks and smelly sea lions.

She was on the east fork of the trail when she first heard the noise. It came at her like a locomotive, pushing, huffing, and puffing. Each breath was a gasp for air. At first, it didn’t seem human. Birdy idled her chainsaw, then shut it off. She turned in the direction of the noise.

“Hey!” a familiar voice came at her. “Birdy!”

She looked through the tunnel-like pathway and strained to see who it was.

“Birdy!” It came again.

Coming toward her was her cousin, Tommy Freeland. He was in the darkness coming toward her. The ground thumped under his frantic feet. She set down the saw. Then, like a strobe light, his face was suddenly illuminated. It wasn’t the handsome face of a much loved relative, despite the familiar flinty black eyes and handsome broad nose.

The twenty-year-old’s face was dripping in red.

“Tommy!” Birdy cried out, and moved closer. “Are you okay?”

“Birdy!” he called again, stopping and dropping his elbows to his knees. “Help me.”

By then she was close enough to see that the coloring on his coffee skin wasn’t just any red. It was the dark iron red of blood. Tommy’s T-shirt had been splattered with what instinctively Birdy Waterman, only fourteen, knew was human blood.

“Are you hurt?” she said, almost upon him.

His eyes were wild with fear. “No, no,” he said as he tried to catch his breath. “I don’t think so…. I think I’m okay.” He looked down at his bloody hands and wiped them on his blue jeans, also dark and wet with blood.

Birdy shook a little as fear undermined her normally calm demeanor. “What happened? Who’s hurt?” she asked.

Tommy, breathing as hard as a marathon runner at the finish line, swallowed. He started to cry and his words tumbled over his trembling lips. “Anna Jo. Birdy, I’m pretty sure Anna Jo’s dead.”

Anna Jo was a beautiful young girl, the kind other girls of the reservation aspired to be. She had a job, her own car, and she was kind. No one thought anything but the best of Anna Jo Bonners.

Did he say dead? The question rolled around in her head, but she didn’t say it out loud. Something held her back. Maybe it was because she didn’t want confirmation of something so terrible. Birdy took a step backward and fell onto the black, damp earth. Tommy lunged at her and she screamed.

“Hey,” he said. “I won’t hurt you. I was trying to stop you from falling. Don’t be afraid of me.”

“What happened to Anna Jo? What did you do to her?”

Tommy blinked back the recognition of what his cousin was undoubtedly thinking just then.

“No. I never. I just found her. Honest. She was at Ponder’s cabin. She was already dead. I promise. I never hurt anyone.”

Birdy found her footing and got up from the damp, dark earth. Her heart was pounding so hard inside the bony frame of her heaving chest just then, she was certain that she’d have a heart attack. She didn’t want to die and she didn’t want to find out what had happened to Anna Jo. She was too scared. Instead, she turned and ran, leaving the wagon, the chain saw, and her bloody cousin on the trail.

Twenty years later, as she walked down that same trail, the scene played in her head. Birdy hadn’t thought about what she’d felt that summer day and the role fear had played in what she testified to at trial. She was the witness who had put Tommy on that trail covered in blood. She was the one who had provided the time line that connected the victim to the killer. While it was true that Tommy Freeland had had blood all over his hands and chest, and it was true that he and Anna Jo had had a bitter fight a few days before she died, he’d denied any part of the brutal stabbing that had killed her.

One of the last things Birdy remembered Tommy saying before they hauled him away after sentencing was, “I loved her. Doesn’t anyone remember that? I loved Anna Jo. I would never have killed her. I didn’t do this.”

Over the years, in case after case, Dr. Birdy Waterman would hear similar statements from the convicted, but never would they be so personal, so directed at her ears. Tommy had been family. When he went away to Walla Walla, his disappearance caused a rift between sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins. No one who lived on that part of the Makah reservation was ever the same. People didn’t talk about it. Ever.

Birdy watched a squirrel as it zipped up the craggy bark of a towering Douglas fir. A hawk flew overhead. The wind found its way through the evergreen canopy. The land all around her was as it had been when she was a girl. The place, she knew, should feel like home. But it didn’t. It never could. A place where one feels unwelcome can never feel like home. Thinking of Tommy, Anna Jo, the trial, her mother, she wondered if there would ever be a way to fix any of it.

She walked back to her car and drove over to her sister Summer’s brand-new mobile home, but no one was there. Same at her brother Ricky’s place-a small wood frame house that he’d built himself. She decided not to let it pass through her mind that they’d avoided her on purpose. She was their sister-their blood. They had to love her too, didn’t they?

It was dark when she returned to the bungalow on Beach Drive. Birdy had driven all the way through with only a single stop for gas in Port Angeles. It was after nine when she finally pulled up. Too dark, she thought, to feed the neighbor’s cat as she’d promised to do while they were away in Hawaii downing rum-infused tropical drinks-a prospect that seemed more than appealing right then. Birdy made a mental note to get up extra early to feed Jinx before the Coopers got home and found out that their next-door neighbor was an untrustworthy cat sitter.

Knowing Pat and Donna Frickey, there could be no crime worse.

Birdy took a beer from the refrigerator and a package of chicken-flavored Top Ramen from the cupboard. She took a drink from the bottle and unwrapped the ramen with no intention of cooking the noodles. She ate it dry, like a big fat brick of crispiness-a habit she’d acquired growing up on the reservation and having to make do with a package of the Asian dried noodles for two out of three meals of the day.

The message light on her answering machine caught her eye. There were three messages. She pushed PLAY.

“… Election Day is fast approaching and we want to make sure that the Citizens for a Lovely Port Orchard can count on your support for our transportation levy …”

Birdy sighed and pushed DELETE. The Lovely Port Orchard group would be better served by focusing on cleaning up the streets they already had than on building new ones, she thought.

Then next message came from her mother, probably just after her visit.

“I’m sorry, sweetie. You really caught me off guard about Tommy. I think you should just leave him be, but you never listen to me anyway. Love you.”

The word “love” came out of her mother’s mouth in a cough. The voice message was so like her mother that it brought a smile to Birdy’s face. While Natalie Waterman hadn’t invented passive-aggressive behavior, few would dispute that she had perfected it.

The last message sent a chill through Birdy’s bones.

“Dr. Waterman, if this is you, I want you to know that you’ve caused enough trouble for Tommy and his family. If you know what’s good for you-and I bet you do-you’ll stay away from him.”

The voice was unfamiliar. Birdy played it again. It was hard to determine if the caller was male or female. It was breathy and soft, the kind of voice that required concentration in order to fully comprehend.

She scrolled back on the caller ID function of her machine. The call had come from a pay phone at the tribal center-which wasn’t much of a surprise. After telegraph, tele-native was the fastest mode of communication known to man. Someone from the Makahs had heard from her mother that she was going to see Tommy, and not only that, they didn’t want her to.

Not at all.

“If you know what’s good for you …”