Bone by Bone

'Did Oren notice her?'

'You bet. The second he saw Belle, the boy's eyes were glued to the sidewalk, or sometimes he'd find something fascinating to look at on the other side of the street-until she passed him by. The boy always took a deep breath before he turned around to watch her walk away. This went on all summer long for years and years. It was the greatest little love affair that almost happened.'

Done with old memories, the postmaster donned his glasses again, prepared to see the world as it was today. 'You can hear rumors anywhere- and from people who tell them better than me.' He jerked one thumb back at the windowpane. 'But that's the only secret Oren Hobbs ever had that I ever knew about-me and the rest of the town.'

When Ferris Monty turned to the window, it was easy enough to pick out the distinctive copper shingles of the tower atop the Winston lodge. No doubt young Isabelle Winston had used that high ground to keep track of the boy she fancied. He wondered if that habit had lasted into her teenage years. Had she been spying on Oren Hobbs the last time the boy walked into the woods with his little brother?

If Sarah Winston had not been a devoted follower of the birder's life, she might have had a career as an artist; this was the opinion of ornithologist Isabelle Winston. The renderings in her mother's journals were beautiful. Exotic birds with brilliant plumage did not exist in this part of the world, and yet there they were, singing and dancing with common sparrows and crows. These were the guests of the annual birthday ball.

It was a temptation to hurry through these books, but something important might be missed. Invisible spiders had not crept up on her mother in a single day. That kind of damage took years, but Isabelle examined every page with the hope of finding a signal event. She looked up from her reading to glance at the deck beyond the glass wall and the telescopes positioned to see the world from here, if the world be Coventry. Her mother's journals never hinted at life elsewhere.

'Let's see,' she whispered to her sleeping mother, who had passed out after a midday binge. 'When did it all start to go wrong?'

She climbed the tall ladder on wheels and, by one hand, rolled it along the high circular shelf. The dates on the book spines told her she was approaching the largest event in her own reckoning, the vanishing of Joshua Hobbs. She scanned the labels of months and years, then pulled down a volume out of order, a sneak preview of things to come, and she opened it to leaf through the pages. This journal only depicted birds of prey. One stood out from the rest. Isabelle's first thought was borrowed from an old fairy tale-and twisted a bit.

What strange, crazy eyes you have-what long teeth.

On these pages, Coventry had lost its charm and become a nightmare state where monsters roamed, walking birds with fangs and curled knives for talons.

14

That was Ad Winston on the phone.' Hannah's wooden clogs clattered down the cellar stairs. 'He says the reporters won't be bothering us today. They're all joining up with the sheriff's search party.'

Approaching the table, she seemed pleased to find her last batch of laundry folded and neatly stacked by Oren and the judge. Smiling, she inspected their work. 'From the kitchen window, I could see bits and pieces of a long line of trucks and cars moving uphill through the trees.'

The housekeeper frowned at three stray socks with no mates, and Oren waited for the old magic that had made him Hannah's laundry slave when he was six years old. As she rolled the orphan socks, each one became a pair, and he never caught her pulling the mates from her pockets.

'I wonder what Cable uses for brains.' She glanced at the cellar window. 'He should've waited till morning. Not enough daylight left to search a whole mountain.'

No problem. Oren knew it would be a short outing for all concerned, no bivouac, no campfires under the stars. The searchers would stumble upon the rest of his brother's bones long before dark.

William Swahn gripped his cane tighter. Some days, any weight on his twisted leg would cause him pain, and he had pills for that, but medication fogged his mind. He limped across the wide foyer, cursing his mistake in reconnecting the doorbell. Upon opening the center panel, he saw Sarah's redheaded daughter standing on the other side of the iron grille.

'Belle.' What a happy and awkward surprise. How would he explain why he had not paid her a visit since her return to Coventry?

'Hello, William.'

The door opened wide, and the pretty woman in blue jeans entered the foyer, lifting her face to receive a hello kiss. At their last meeting, she had been sixteen years old and had to stand on her toes to kiss him goodbye.

Stepping back a pace, she said, 'So you remembered my name.'

Isabelle's rebukes had never been understated.

He led the way into the library. 'I remember every woman who ever proposed to me.' And now he could see that this occasion had slipped her mind. 'You were shorter then, only four years old.'

'Olden days.' Isabelle settled into an armchair. 'Mom's school days. You were the youngest Latin scholar at UCLA.'

'No, I majored in criminal justice.' He sank down on the couch and laid his cane to one side. 'But I did tutor your mother in Latin. That's how we met.'

'You were her friend. How could you let her marry Addison?'

He laughed for the first time in ages. 'I had nothing to say about it. I was a kid-only ten years older than you were.'

'But you were so smart-a damn genius IQ. Mom listened to you.'

'I was just a geeky little boy-an oddity on a college campus.' And Sarah had not listened to him; it had been quite the other way around. She had been his mentor, passing on to him all of her wisdom on the survival of freaks-that woman of freakish beauty. Sarah had been the salvation of a lonely pimple-faced child with a monster-size brain. 'Memories can be treacherous, Belle. I think I like yours better than mine.'

'You loved my mother.' He had worshipped her.

'You moved to Coventry so you could be close to her.'

'No,' said William. 'That was Addison 's idea. He told me this was a good place to hide from the world, a place to lick wounds.' However, in fairness to Isabelle's reckoning, he had looked forward to the reunion with Sarah and her little girl, the two people he loved best in all the world. And he had begun to heal in the early years-while Sarah was still at home to him when he came knocking on her door, while she continued to mentor him on the subject of their mutual freakdom. And what an odd pair they had made in those days, Beauty and the limping Beast.

Isabelle's smile was unsettling. 'You used to come to the lodge once a week. You were the only friend of Mom's who ever came to dinner. Anything wrong with that memory? I know you stopped coming after Josh Hobbs disappeared.'

She sat on the edge of the chair cushion, though not perched there, nothing like a bird but something rather more dangerous. How contrary was this quiet bomb exploding slowly. She continued to smile at him, but she did not breathe-she seethed.

Behind him a clock was ticking, ticking.

Isabelle bolted from the chair and yelled, 'How could you abandon my mother! I counted on you!'

The slope owed its gentle incline to an outcrop of bald rock on the south face of the mountain. There might be two hundred people gathered here- if Oren did not count reporters as people. More volunteers were climbing out of vans and trucks parked along the fire road.

Deputies handed out maps while a young forest ranger addressed the crowd. The bullhorn was unnecessary, but the ranger was new to this part of the world so high in the air, where sound could carry from one mountaintop to another. He explained the process of a grid search, and the citizens of Coventry listened politely, as if they had not done this before and done it well, finding every lost soul-except for Joshua Hobbs. That boy had been their only failure, though this was not their fault, for he had been hiding from them, dead and buried underground. But today they had returned for him-the rest of him, the bones that had not yet been found. Their mission, said the ranger, was to locate a grave. The nameless stranger buried with the hometown boy was only a rumor to these people.

When the bullhorn was laid down, the crowd split into small groups and followed their section leaders off to different compass points. No search party had ever combed this part of the mountain so close to bald rock, reasoning that no one could be lost in an area between a fire road and a well-worn hiking trail, a high place with a view of the town below.

Cable Babitt nodded to a pair of late arrivals with cameras and microphones, and he handed each of them a map. 'Stay with your group, boys. Don't wander off. We haven't got all day to go looking for strays.'

Oren Hobbs pointed these two stragglers toward one of the search parties. When they were out of sight, he said to the man beside him, 'Waste of manpower, isn't it, Sheriff?'

'You shouldn't be here, son. This place is crawling with reporters, and they all want a piece of you.'

'Well, that's disturbing. If reporters can't find me while I'm standing right in front of them, how will they find a hole in the ground?' Oren looked down at his own copy of the map and made a pretense of studying it. 'Damn. You forgot to mark the gravesite for them.'

The sheriff's smile was strained but game as he let this pass for a joke.

Oren spread the map on the hood of his father's car. This copy still bore the stamp of a university geology department. The perimeter lines for the grid search were drawn in odd shapes and restricted to areas where the soil was rich in iron. 'Lucky you just happened to know about these ore deposits.'

'The coroner sent the-'

'You knew where to look before I reported the bones. I was there- standing in my front yard, when you pointed this site out to Dave.' Oren folded his map. 'I'll make sure you get credit for that.'

The sheriff's smile faltered and died. He walked away, trailing behind a group of volunteers. There were no reporters assigned to this party, only townspeople spread out in a long line and walking abreast, eyes to the ground, looking for signs of disturbance in the earth.

Oren caught up to Cable Babitt. For twenty yards of silence, he watched the older man's face for signs of fear. 'Sheriff, I hope you picked the search party that's headed straight for my brother's grave.'

'It shouldn't take long to find,' said Cable, ignoring the innuendo. 'The iron ore is all narrow streaks, real short runs.'

The fire road ran parallel to the path of the searchers marching ahead of him, downhill and deeper into the forest. And this was more evidence against the sheriff. In Oren's experience, even the best-concealed graves of murder victims had been found in close proximity to a road. The volunteers walked at arm's length from one another, some crab-walking sideways to avoid fallen trees and boulders.

As if opining on the weather, Oren said, 'I know you're the one who left the bones on the judge's porch.' And when the sheriff stumbled, then stopped-dead still-Oren added, 'You figured that would bring me home-back to your jurisdiction.'

'I never suspected you.' Cable Babitt looked up at the sky, as if he gave a damn about the gathering clouds. 'But your father was always at the top of my list. A few months ago, I found Josh's skull