Bone by Bone

'Not likely.' Oren drained his beer bottle. 'There might be thirty serials at large in a country of six million square miles.'

'Right. What are the odds of one finding his way to Coventry? Although,' said Swahn, in the tone of an afterthought, 'Josh could've been killed to conceal another murder.'

The man was left to make what he could of the silence. Oren had not come to this house to collaborate with a suspect. After reading the last interview, he laid it down among the others scattered on the floor all around him. 'I don't pull motives out of thin air. I like facts.'

Anyone with a secret could have a motive for murder.' Swahn opened another envelope and pulled out a thin stack of photographs. 'Take your secrets for instance.' One by one, he laid out the glossy prints like cards dealt from a deck.

Oren looked down at pictures of himself at the ages of fifteen and sixteen. In one print, his hair had only covered his ears. In the next, it grazed his shoulders. Each one showed him walking down one street or another, oblivious to the stares of middle-aged women turning his way.

'Now Id say those ladies looked a bit hungry.' Swahn laid out more pictures in a march across the carpet.

Oren's hair grew longer as he turned seventeen. This succession of snapshots had been taken inside the Water Street Cafe. The pictures were ganged together to represent ten seconds of time passing frame by frame. In the first image, Oren saw his younger self walking near a table of matrons. The next shot focused on one of them, a pretty woman in her forties. Evelyn Straub had just raised her head to look up at him. In the last photo, teenage Oren turned her way for only the click of a camera, and this photograph had captured a clandestine passage, something said in a glance that went unnoticed by the other women at the table. Only lovers had these conversations of the eyes. Only Josh had seen it.

And William Swahn.

'I'm sure Mrs. Straub thought she was being discreet,' said Swahn. 'Have I made my point? Maybe Josh stumbled on a bigger secret and sold the negatives with the prints. How do you see your little brother as a blackmailer meeting a mark in the woods?'

'No way. He was a decent kid.'

'I agree. According to your housekeeper, Josh didn't care anything for money. The boy was only a passionate collector of small dramas.'

Oren looked down at the carpet and its covering of Swahn's old interviews with the people of Coventry. There were interesting omissions. 'You never questioned Addison Winston. He's a criminal defense attorney- a man with lots of secrets. And what about his wife? Mrs. Winston was a bird-watcher. She was always out in the woods with a pair of binoculars. But you never talked to either of them.'

'Everyone's a critic.' Swahn, unfazed, ate the last slice from the pizza box and chased it down with beer. 'So, tell me, Mr. Hobbs, how did you know about Mrs. Winston's bird-watching forays? Did you ever meet her in the woods? Did her husband know?'

Isabelle screamed at him. Yet Addison Winston still had no regrets about formally adopting his wife's only child, though he sometimes wished the girl had come with a volume control.

'Do something!' Isabelle yelled.

His wife flew about the room, hands waving, tears running down her face, and Sarah's daughter followed after her as the self-appointed handmaiden to a drunk with delirium tremens.

'There's a doctor coming from Saulburg,' said Addison.

'She needs help now! She's terrified!'

'Of course she is. Your mother's seeing things that aren't there.'

The empty bottle of Scotch was odd. He knew that his wife's secret stash had been restocked. Contrary to what his daughter believed, he did pay attention to Sarah's drinking. By doubling the large tips that the maid received from her mistress, he kept track of the daily consumption of alcohol. However, there was no liquor on Sarah's breath to account for the empty bottle. 'You cut off your mother's booze again, didn't you, Belle? That was naughty.'

She glared at him with hate, but he had grown accustomed to that. It killed him to see it, and he laughed each time she did it.

'Weaning your mother is a gradual process.' He set the bottle down. Hands in his pockets, smiling broadly, he sauntered up to Sarah, who had found the only corner in a circular room, that place where the deep armoire met the wall. She swatted the sleeves of her robe and then raked her fingers through her hair, looking there for bugs that only she could see.

Addison studied his wife as he spoke to her daughter. 'I usually start tapering off the liquor supply a few days before the birthday ball. That way she can get through an entire evening cold sober- and no hallucinated creepy crawlies.' The lawyer looked down at his watch. 'Doctors. They like to make you wait, even when you're paying cash-no taxes.' He winked, and Isabelle seemed to find that obscene. So he did it again.

On the deck outside, hungry rats with wings were feeding at the many seed holders fastened to the railing. In her early schoolgirl days, Isabelle had created a pet name for this avian sanctuary at the top of the house, and the child had always regarded him as an intruder here, the bogeyman of Birdland. He caught his reflection in one wall of glass and smoothed back his hair, finding himself rather handsome for a monster.

'She needs help now! Get an ambulance!'

'You wouldn't like that, Isabelle.' He knew his wide smile was wholly inappropriate, a display of entirely too many teeth. 'They'll put your mother in restraints, and then she won't be able to brush the spiders away. Think of her terror when she's tied down-and the bugs are crawling into her eyes. Is that what you want?' In the ensuing silence, he watched her face turn pale. 'No? I didn't think so. Now the good doctor just gives her a shot and knocks her out cold. No fear, no pain.'

His expression sobered as he looked in on his wife's invisible world, watching as Sarah brushed small bugs from her nightgown. Ah, and now she batted her hands at a particularly large one. He could always gauge the size of the imagined spiders by the wideness of her eyes. She lapsed into one of her brief intermissions from the horror show in her head. Exhausted, she sank to the floor and covered her face with both hands.

Smiling again, Addison turned to the younger woman, so like Sarah at the same age, though not a stunning beauty-merely pretty. 'After the doctor gives her a shot, your mother will sleep for the rest of the day. Tonight, when she wakes up for dinner, she'll drink as much as she likes. You won't even count her shots. Is that clear?'

Isabelle seemed a bit less ruthless now, and he knew that the reason was guilt. She was beginning to understand her own folly, her fault in this- damage. He strolled through the open doors to the outside deck, and she trailed after him.

Addison bent down to look through the eyepiece of a telescope. 'Dangerous toy.' There was no need to focus the lens. 'And powerful. Do you know where this thing is pointing, Belle?' She was Belle to him again, now that she was contrite and more manageable. 'This morning, your mother had a perfect view of that jawbone sitting on the judge's porch.' Smile in place, he looked up at his daughter. 'On a typical day, the most startling thing in Sarah's world is a confused bird migrating in the wrong direction.'

All along the curving deck, wings flapped, and pointy beaks sprayed seed in all directions-greedy feeders. He had learned to hate birds.

'Mom didn't even know about the bones until I-'

'No matter. Any change in her routine would stress her out. Even the sight of Oren Hobbs would've been a shock after all these years. But you know that didn't cause your mother's hallucinations.' And now, to drive the point home, he said, 'In fact, a drink might have helped. Too bad you poured out her bottle. And then you gave her those sleeping pills on the nightstand. Where did those pills come from, Belle? Is that your prescription? You wanted your mother to rest, to sleep-while you went into town… so you drugged her. What a good girl.'

He walked back into the room and looked at more damning evidence, the carafe of coffee, the second one today, so said the maid, his spy in Bird-land. 'Cold turkey withdrawal-always a mistake- then sedatives and caffeine. What were you thinking, Belle? Your doctorate is in ornithology-not medicine, not chemistry!'

Sarah screamed and ran across the room, as if she could outrun her small tormentors, hands fluttering in a panic, eyes full of fear. Left to her own devices, his wife would have gotten through this day with a pleasant buzz. As usual, she would've passed out after dinner. That was why Sarah was such an early riser. She awoke with the light and the songs of filthy, winged vermin come to feed outside her glass walls-and a good-morning drink to kill the pain.

Addison Winston dropped his smile. 'Leave your mother's care to me.'

You're not helping her.'

'I'm not the one who did this to her.' Well, that shut her up. And now, verbal spanking done, he left Isabelle alone with her handiwork, her weeping, frightened mother.

***

Only three people remained on the Coventry street outside the library. The rest of the reporters and their news crews had departed after failing to construct a jailbreak from Deputy Faulks's offhand comment.

'This is a waste of time,' said the young segment producer, and she was not referring to the useless phone as she folded it into the back pocket of her jeans. There was no cell-phone tower within twenty miles of this backward town. She stared at the foothills, perhaps looking there for dinosaurs- something, anything, to film. She turned back to face the middle-aged reporter and attempted to reason with him one last time. 'The sheriff told you Oren Hobbs was never under arrest.'

'And that's what we lead with,' said Reggie Mason. 'A hot denial.' He closed the door of what might be the last telephone booth in America. It even had a rotary dial-a charming artifact from his youth.

The producer banged on the booth's glass wall.

What the hell was the girl's name?

All of his segment producers were interchangeable, and none of them looked a day over thirteen years of age. This one-deluded child-truly believed that she was in charge of production.

'We're leaving!' she yelled. 'Right now!' Turning her back on the phone booth, she climbed into the van and closed the sliding door behind her.

The cameraman would have followed the girl, but Reggie grabbed his arm. 'Hold on. The operator's back.' He had been placed on hold by a 9-1-1 operator, and now the woman resumed their telephone conversation. 'Yes, ma'am… That's right… Yes, it smells.'

Reggie cupped the phone's receiver with one hand when the cameraman leaned into the booth and asked, 'Is she laughing?'

From the window of the van, the sullen child producer yelled, 'Hey, it's time to pack it in!'

The cameraman stared at the small brick building. 'Did you read the hours posted on the door? There's nobody in there.'

'But the smell.' Inspired now, Reggie reopened his dialogue with the

laughing 9-1-1 operator. 'I think there's a dead body in the library… Well, it smells like death… So you'll send the sheriff?' After a few seconds, he placed the receiver back on its cradle. 'She hung up on me.'

The cameraman unstrapped his equipment and laid it down, final notice that his workday was done. 'Do you know what a dead body smells like? I don't. You can't make something out of nothing.'

Oh, contraire.

Reggie pointed at the library. 'Did you see that?'

'What?'

'Something moved in that window.'

'Reggie, are you making this up?'

'Where's that lame producer when I need her?' He banged his fist on the side of the van. 'Hey, sweetheart. The wind's blowing our way again. I want you to smell something.'