The Bone House

sample and labeled it. They would hunt under Glory's dead fingernails and find skin there, and analyze the tissue, and match it. One name would come out: Mark Bradley.

They'd know he had been there. On the beach. With Glory.

Mark put the bottle down. His taste for beer was gone. He stared through the dormant trees at the gray water of the harbor a hundred yards away. In two months, when the leaves unfurled, the beach would be invisible behind the birches. He couldn't help but wonder if he would be here to see it, or if they would have arrested him by then.

They can prove you were there. They can't prove you killed her.

He wasn't convinced the distinction would sway a jury if it came to that. When a teenage girl died, everyone wanted to see someone pay the price.

Mark felt a wave of anger. It was happening to him more and more now. Moments of rage. He was naturally claustrophobic, and when the walls began to close in, he beat on them and tried to fight his way out. If he couldn't find an escape, he wanted to punish the ones who had put him there.

His phone rang on the table beside him. It was Hilary, and he relaxed when he heard her voice. Sometimes she had a sixth sense for when he needed her.

'I'm in Northport waiting for the ferry,' she told him. 'I'll be home in an hour or so.'

'Good.'

'How's it going?' she asked.

'Better. The house is looking better.'

She listened to his voice. He could feel her divining his mood. 'You OK?'

'Not really.'

'What's up?'

'Not on the phone,' he said. He was already paranoid, wondering if the police were listening in on their calls.

'Let's go out for dinner tonight,' she suggested.

'Are you sure? You know what it'll be like.'

He was reluctant to go out anymore in the midst of other people from the island. He was sick of the dark stares and muttered hostility from people around them.

'Screw everybody else,' Hilary told him. 'We can't let them stop us from living our lives.'

He smiled. 'Damn right.'

'See you soon.'

She hung up. He picked up his beer again and continued drinking. He reminded himself, as he did on most days, how lucky he had been to find Hilary Semper. Some men weren't secure enough to marry a woman who was smarter than they were, but he'd had plenty of experience with women who only wanted him to show him off to their friends. He'd even married one when he was twenty-five, a bubbly brunette who had stalked him on the pro tour and seduced him into bed and then into the courthouse. He was young; she was young. She talked a good game about loving all the same things he did, when all she really wanted was a ring and a husband who made her girlfriends jealous.

It had lasted two long years. When he divorced her, he'd sworn to himself: never again.

Not long after the split, he'd had ten beers too many and driven his car into a median on the Kennedy Expressway. Stupid. He could have died. Instead, surgery gave him back his life, but not his career. After rehab, he had ninety per cent range of motion in his left shoulder, but a pro golfer needed about a hundred and ten per cent. A hundred and twenty if you're Tiger. He wasn't going to play professionally again. Golf was dead to him.

What seemed like a curse at the time turned out to be a blessing. He was insanely competitive when he stepped on to a playing field, but he learned that he was something more than a golfer, a competitor, and an athlete. He went back to something he hadn't done since he was a teenager. Painting. He took up reading again and devoured the classics. He found himself attracted to teaching because it was so unlike his prior life and because it gave him time to become someone he liked a lot better than Mark Bradley, pro golfer.

It made him poor, too. That was the downside.

As the money dried up, he assumed the come-ons would vanish, but he discovered that looks were enough for plenty of women of all ages. He could have slept his way to a comfortable lifestyle, but he'd already been through one loveless marriage. He said yes to the occasional fling, but nothing that ever felt serious for either of them. Not until Hilary. Hilary, who was sexy and didn't even have a clue about it. Hilary, who blew him away because everything she said was so damn interesting, and because she didn't seem to care about what anyone else thought about her.

Hilary. It took his breath away sometimes to think that she married him.

That was why the anger kept coming back. It was the fear that he might lose everything he had. He had already lost his job, and now he worried that he would lose his house, his freedom, and the one woman he'd ever really wanted.

All because he took a walk on the beach. All because of Glory Fischer.

Mark went back into the house, where the sickly sweet air freshener covered the stench of the filth that had been thrown against the walls. He decided to take a run to offload his frustrations. For the first time, he took a key with him and locked the front door as he left the house. This was Washington Island. No one locked their doors. There was no one to fear, because the rest of the world was half an hour away across Death's Door.

Not anymore.

He stretched among the dead leaves in their dirt driveway, loosening his muscles. The forest around him was still. As he bent and touched his fingers to his toes, he noticed his Ford Explorer sagging at a queer angle in the clearing among the trees. When he looked closely, he saw that two of the tires were flat. The rubber had been slashed, and the rusty ax that had done the damage lay next to the truck in the weeds.

They were sending him a message. He could cover it up with paint, but no one was going to let him forget. Killer.

Mark picked up the ax, which was heavy and old. He weighed it in his hand. He felt his anger rush back, and he threw the ax at the flaky white trunk of a young birch tree, where it impaled itself, its handle quivering. He dug the ax out and swung it again, making a deep wound in the side of the tree. He did it again and again, wood and bark flying, until he ran out of breath and the immature tree stood on nothing more than a ragged fraction of its trunk. He wrapped his hands around the tree as if it were someone's throat and pushed until the tree groaned and cracked away from its base and toppled into the forest with a crash.

He staggered backward into his driveway. His chest heaved. His face was flushed. The ax dropped from his hand.

He heard a noise from the road and swung round fiercely, expecting to see them coming for him. The vandals. The punks. He was ready to take them on, hand to hand.

It wasn't anyone from the island.

A purple Corvette was parked at the base of his driveway, looking oddly out of place in the island wilderness. He saw a ridiculously tall man in a business suit standing next to the Corvette's door, leaning on it and watching him from behind sunglasses that made no sense on a dark day. He'd been watching as Mark exploded with rage.

It was Cab Bolton.

Cab climbed back into the rented Corvette under Bradley's hostile glare. He had no interest in having a conversation with Mark Bradley right now, but he wanted the man to know he had followed him home. The investigation wasn't over, and if Bradley thought he had escaped with his freedom that easily, he was wrong. Cab also knew, watching Bradley erupt in fury with the ax, that his original opinion of the man had been correct.

Mark Bradley had a temper. Push him hard enough, and he lost control.

Cab did a U-turn and returned to the road that led past Schoolhouse Beach and out to the island's main highway beyond the cemetery. It occurred to him that he'd been in most corners of the world, and he didn't think he had ever felt quite as remote as he did now, on this island at the tip of the Door County peninsula. The entire stretch of land north of Sturgeon Bay felt as if he were driving through a winter ghost town, with shuttered