Bone by Bone

'Somebody moves it, and it isn't my dead brother.'

'Oh, Josh, the spirit guide.' She nodded and smiled. 'Now that part's fake. When Alice asks if his spirit is there, the wooden heart just settles over the letter Y for yes. The witchboard never spelled his name. But one night, the board spelled out the words red comb. It helps if you know that the judge took Josh in for a haircut the day before he disappeared, and the barber gave the boy a red plastic comb.'

'Oh, please.'

Hannah leaned toward him. 'Don't you roll your eyes like that. The barber always gave every customer a black comb. That red one was a fluke. It just turned up in the box with the barbershop's regular order of solid black. Josh was the only boy in town with a red one.'

'And Alice Friday probably heard that from one of her victims. Don't tell me the judge was fooled by-'

'Your father is no fool-and Alice Friday never touches the witchboard. Half the men at that seance were tourists-and the others were regulars at the town barbershop. I'm sure they all heard about the red comb. So, for a while, the judge sat down to play on a regular basis-and the sleepwalking stopped. All that's left of Josh is little snatches of memories, and lots of people have them. When they sit around that witchboard, all those little bits of the boy come out to play. You might say your father was collecting pieces of Josh long before the bones started coming home.'

Oren leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. 'And that's why he never asked for more help-never called in state cops or the feds? The old man was waiting for somebody to drop a clue in a damn seance?'

Did he believe that? Did she? No, and no.

He refilled his shot glass and hers. 'You weren't quite that patient, Hannah. Right after Josh went missing, you asked for help. You got William Swahn to find me an alibi.' He lifted his glass and drained it. 'I always knew who really ran this house-our lives. Was it your idea to send me away that summer?'

'No, I was against it.' The shot glass seemed almost too heavy for her as she lifted it to take a sip. 'I told your father to send Josh away. He didn't listen to me then. After the boy disappeared, the judge probably thought about that all the time. I wish I'd never said a word.'

Now all her words were spent, and so was she. Her eyes were closed by half. Her day was done.

Oren switched on the bedside light and then rose to pull on his jeans. Though he was tired, sleep would not come, and he was grateful. He lacked his father's gift of forgetting every dream. Sometimes acts of nightmare violence broke into his wide-awake mind, but it was worse when he lay helpless, wrapped in sheets, eyes closed in the dark. And some nights he would wake up screaming the soldier's song, Makeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstop!

He sat down at his old desk and wrote a letter to Evelyn Straub. Then he put out the lamp and padded down the stairs in his stocking feet so as not to wake the house. Having no keys to the bolts on the front door, he climbed through the porch window, pulled on his boots and struck out for Coventry on foot.

No need for a flashlight. The moon was back, and it was bright. Oren walked down the road, undisturbed by any traffic. His only company was a dead boy and a dead dog. Josh had walked this same route with him on many a summer morning, and Horatio had trotted along between the brothers. Occasionally, one boy or the other would reach down to ruffle the dog's fur, reassuring their pet that he was still part of the family, though Josh never wanted the dog to come along on trips into town. Horatio had been shameless about kissing strangers and drooling on them, and he had been banned from every store where customers preferred to do their shopping dry and unloved.

One standout day, Josh had locked the poor beast in the kitchen, using his let's-be-reasonable voice to say, 'No, you can't come today.' That had set off the barking tantrum, followed by whining that was almost human. The dog had cried, as if in fear that he would never see his boys again.

Oren remembered his own words. 'I know why you don't want Horatio along. He gives you away. This has to stop. It's creepy.'

Josh had ducked his head under the weight of that comment. Creepy was a word that could turn a boy's high school life into a living hell of derision. Oren had released Horatio from the kitchen, and the dog had jumped his brother, paws on shoulders, kissing and slobbering. All was forgiven. This was followed by the old familiar line, screamed at the top of Josh's lungs, 'Get off me! I'm gonna puke!'

Horatio had done his mad little dance on hind legs, barking to say, Let's go! Let's go! The boys could have set fire to him, and the dog, who was love incarnate, would have assumed that they were only having a difficult day and promptly forgiven them.

Tonight, Oren resolved to get rid of the stuffed carcass on the living room rug, that bad joke on a good old dog.

The lights of town were up ahead, and he pulled the letter from his back pocket. He planned to leave it with the night-shift clerk so that Evelyn could read it first thing in the morning. As he approached the Straub Hotel, it was a surprise to see her sitting on the verandah at this late hour.

Oren walked up the steps and sat down beside her. She never acknowledged him, not even by a nod in his direction. By unspoken agreement, they sat in peaceful silence for a while. The beach could not be seen from this view, only the straight lines of the road, its railing and the broader stripes of sea and sky.

He studied her profile by moonlight, looking there for signs of Evelyn trapped inside that aging stranger's body. Her lean jawline and high cheekbones had disappeared into loose folds of flesh. Her breasts sagged above a thickened waist and protruding belly. Yet he persisted in his search for a clue to her, as if she might be only hiding from him-though that was hardly her nature.

In the younger days of her forties, she had been the aggressor, taking him down with her strong tanned arms, sinking with him deep into a feather bed, her long legs wrapped around him-no escape-and never was it enough, not for him, not for her. And there had been feeling between them, as much as Evelyn had allowed. As a boy, he would never have betrayed her-even if it had meant jail. He would've lied for her, died for her. And was he still tied to her?

Yes. The strings were still there. He could feel a tug in the dark when she said, 'Good evening, Oren.'

'Hello, Evelyn.' He said his as if he had just discovered her-and he had.

'Glad to see you made it out of the woods tonight.'

When she spoke, it was easier to recognize her. He only had to close his eyes, and there she was. 'Hannah told me you called the house tonight.'

'I can guess why you're here,' she said. 'When you see Cable Babitt, you tell that old bastard I know the sound of his jeep. It's a piece of crap with a skippy motor. I know it like I know the sound of his voice.' The wicker chair creaked as she turned to face him. 'I could put Cable's ass in a legal sling for taking you out to the cabin tonight. But I won't mess with him-not this time. Satisfied?'

'That's not why I'm here.' He gently laid his letter in her lap. 'After Josh disappeared, you must have wondered why Swahn came to see you- how he knew. I swear to you, I never told anyone about us.'

'I know that, Oren.'

'When you went to the sheriff… to give me an alibi… why did you lie for me?'

'Get off my verandah, Oren.'

Upstairs in her bedroom, locked in the safe among her jewels, Evelyn Straub kept a yellowed envelope. Inside it was a photograph that Oren Hobbs had sent to her from a boarding school in New Mexico. The image was a cold nightscape of barren rock formations and vast tracts of sand- so different from the forestlands where he had grown up. Scrawled upon the back of the picture, a brief note had voiced the only complaint of a teenage boy in an alien world far from home: 'The judge has sent me to live on the moon.'

Alone again, Evelyn resumed her vigilance over that cold ball of light hanging in the sky. She had never read a human face into its surface features, but always saw it for what it was, a sterile and distant chunk of rock. And now, because she refused to recognize the grown man who had come to sit with her tonight, she fell back into her old ritual of the lunar cycles. Her eyes turned upward as she spoke softly, bidding good night to the boy on the moon.

13

Though he was off to a late start this morning, Ferris Monty drove his yellow Rolls-Royce into town at the leisurely pace of a longtime Coventry resident. He had sacrificed a night's sleep to review his abandoned notes and false starts, reams of words written many years ago. Fortunately, all the landmarks and most of the people were right where he had left them on the pages of his unfinished opus.

He parked at the curb in front of the public library, a one-room brick building made ludicrous by grand marble pillars and a lintel that overshot the roof. A hundred years ago, when Coventry's only employer had been the sawmill, this building had been the lofty donation-call it a joke- of the town founder, a man who believed that only a handful of his workers could read or have need of more than a few books.

Ferris stepped out of the car, and a small woman with mouse-brown hair caught his eye. She stood on the sidewalk and gaped at him as he turned onto the flagstone path that led to the door. Her hands flew up, fingers fluttering a warning. Ah, but now her eyes turned toward a front window, Perhaps in fear of a watcher, for she thought better of reminding him that no one in Coventry ever goes to the library. He envisioned twitching whiskers when she scurried away, as mice will do when they are in the neighborhood of a cat-or worse.

Oh, definitely worse.

The library door opened onto a room filled with rows of bookshelves, and he walked into a wall of stink. Although the librarian was nowhere to be seen, he knew she was here. The smelly epicenter could only be Mavis Hardy. Her body odor was formidable, even mythic; it was said to have permeated the pages of every book. However, he could hardly neglect to interview a town icon as important as a murderess at large.

He rounded the first bookcase, getting closer-the stink was stronger now-and he resisted the urge to cover his nostrils with a handkerchief. According to legend, Mrs. Hardy took her annual bath on the eve of the birthday ball, but she had not attended one for twenty years. Apparently, the attendant bathing had been allowed to slide.

Ferris Monty still had hopes of going to this year's ball, though the gala's gatekeeper might pose a problem. Well, certainly there would be some fancy tap-dancing around his most recent bad behavior. Addison Winston might wonder why his chosen envoy to the media had sicked reporters on Oren Hobbs-a clear conflict with the lawyer's intentions. But betrayal was mere technicality to an author turned zealot, a born-again writer of real literature. Ferris saw himself as an aging come-back kid and a ruthless Cinderella; he would find a way to go to the ball.

Turning down a narrow aisle of books, he walked slowly, creeping actually, following the sound of heavy breathing. The aisle ended at the center of the room, an open area of tables, chairs and a hulk of flesh wearing a cotton housedress. Ah, there she was in all her smelly unwashed glory, graying brown hair hanging to her shoulders in oily strings. She grunted and glistened with sweat.

What a prize.

He had been told that, though she went barefoot winter and summer, she had always been properly shod for the early birthday balls. It was doubtful that she had worn anything as delicate as high heels. Her well-muscled legs had the girth of tree trunks.

Oh, and now she was turning his way.

His visit to the library-perhaps any visitor at all-must come as a shock. One clue was the woman's slackening jaw. He had never been so close to her, and now he was near enough to count the missing teeth by the gaps in her open mouth-but he had to look up to do it. Mavis Hardy's size was impressive, more muscle than fat, as evidenced by the barbells tightly gripped in her hands. There were other items of bodybuilding equipment on the floor behind her. This argued against the rumor that she was dying, and it gave credence to a theory, oft repeated by the locals, that she could not