I didn’t reply.
“What do bones smell like?” he asked.
“Sort of a subtle, dry, sweet smell. I can only smell it if the bones are what Ben calls ‘greasy.’ ”
“You know about it from the burials up in the mountains?”
“No. Those weren’t just skeletons — there was adipocere and other tissue, and a really overpowering smell of decay. But I’ve visited Ben at his lab at the university on a day when they were working with bones.”
“I’ve been smelling something that’s kind of a sweet, waxy smell. Do bones smell like that?”
“Could be described that way, I guess.”
“So let’s search the van.”
I hesitated, looking back at the Burdens’ house. “Let’s drive away from here to do it, okay? I don’t want to upset them if we do find something.”
He climbed into the driver’s seat, a big grin on his face. When I took the passenger seat, I asked, “What’s so funny?”
“Not funny — just pleased that I’ve finally convinced you that this could be a product of something other than your imagination, or you wouldn’t want to move down the street.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I warned. I looked in the mirror on the visor. The most horrifying thing in that van had to be my face — eyes swollen and nose a la Rudolph. Still looking in the mirror, I opened the glove compartment and reached for my sunglasses.
My hand went into a pile of small objects before the smell hit me.
I screamed.
Jack slammed on the brakes.
Little bones spilled out of the glove compartment, onto my skirt, my feet, everywhere.
44
WEDNESDAY EVENING, SEPTEMBER 13
Las Piernas
“The glove compartment,” I said. “I should have known.”
I was at home, sitting on the couch, being held by my husband. He was stroking my hair. Maybe I wouldn’t go back to work, I thought. Maybe I’d just stay home and sleep and wait for Frank to come home and stroke my hair. I sighed. Not likely.
I had opened the van door and leapt out into the street, a shower of small, straight bones falling all around me. After he managed to calm my hysterics a bit, Jack had used his cellular phone to call Frank.
The van was impounded to collect the fingerprints Nick Parrish blatantly left in it, and also to collect the remaining small bones of Jane Doe’s toes and fingers.
Ben showed up at the police department, with Jo Robinson in tow. I don’t know who had called him, but he had called Jo. My resentment didn’t last long.
I ended up talking to her about vanishing Parrishes, and I learned that people who had been attacked often had this experience of “seeing” their attacker, especially in times of stress or in public places.
When I was no longer shaking, she set up an appointment with me for the next day. For the first time, I looked forward to it.
The police checked out records of stolen dark green Honda Accords, hoping to establish Jane Doe’s identity.
When Frank couldn’t leave right away, Ben agreed to take Jack and me home.
Wondering how I was going to break the news about the van to Travis, I asked Ben why it should take so long to collect ten fingers and ten toes. “Ten? On each foot, it takes fourteen phalanges to make toes — and just the toes, mind you, not the whole foot. On each hand, fourteen to make fingers. That’s fifty-six bones if we find them in whole pieces.”
Trying to tease me into a better mood, Ben noted that he himself was able to get by with forty-two, which did indeed snap me out of thinking about the little bones of Jane Doe’s fingers, wondering what work those fingers might have done, and if they had ever stroked a cat or touched a lover or held something as fragile as they were.
On Ben’s behalf and hers, I let my anger toward Nick Parrish burn away a little more of my fear of him.
But as the evening wore on, even anger gave way to weariness. I was asleep when Frank came home, but woke up to talk to him while he made a late dinner for himself. Afterward, we spent time curled up on the couch.
“You know you can talk to me,” he said, “Yes.”
“Sorry. No more reprimands.”
“I deserve a reprimand for that.”
“No,” he said, pulling me closer. “No.”
In another regard altogether, it actually ended up being yes.
We did sleep then, a solid, deep, and renewing sleep that lasted through the night.
“You’re looking well today,” Jo Robinson said.
“Slept better,” I said, detecting a certain knowing quality in her smile.
At the end of this session, she said, “Your visits to the families of the men who were killed seem to have gone
