Bone by Bone

Her suitcase had been unpacked in the upstairs guest room hours before her future employer had even known of her existence, and the judge still had no idea who she was at the close of the funeral supper. That evening, while she cleaned up after the mourners, the judge had thought to ask for her name. Days later, they had come to terms on a salary, but he had never pried into her past.

That would have been rude.

Apart from a core of third- and fourth-generation lifers, there had always been a coming and going of residents. Some were attracted by the raw beauty of the coastline; others sought the privacy of in-country woodlands. One abiding charm of the place was the whole town's lack of curiosity about the outside world-as if a citizen's life had not begun until they set foot in Coventry. A fair number of outsiders had come here to hide themselves away until they could reinvent their lives or rest up from a chase. After a month or a decade, some of these people would decamp with no word of goodbye or forwarding address, but others stayed long enough to be buried in local ground. After thirty-four years, Hannah appeared to have staying power.

Oren had become curious about her past, but he loved that little woman dearly, and he would never ask for her story, nor would he betray the fact that she had surely been a fugitive.

***

Henry Hobbs spoke to his housekeeper's back as she pulled down two coffee mugs from the cupboard. 'Why did you do it, Hannah? I know you convinced the boy to come home. Why now of all times?'

'You have to stop calling him boy.' It was her custom to deflect every rebuke with one of her own. 'I know how you hate change-oh, don't I know it-but boys will grow into men.' She set the mugs on the table and turned to the window that looked out on the meadow. 'At least the reporters are gone.' She sighed. 'That's one small mercy. They're all following Ferris Monty. He took them on a walking tour of Coventry.'

'My idea.' Addison Winston's voice preceded him down the hall, and now he materialized in the doorway. A puff of smoke and a whiff of sulfur would not have surprised Hannah.

'Don't worry about Oren,' said the grinning attorney. 'After all this time, there can't be much of a case against him.'

The judge rose from his chair, knocking it over in his rush to make a stand. 'There's no case-period!' He pounded the table to bring this point home. 'There never was a case against Oren.' The old man stomped out of the kitchen, though the effect of this angry exit was somewhat blunted by the crepe soles of his sandals.

Addison Winston's professional smile never faltered. He stared at the old-fashioned coffeepot percolating on the stove, and then he turned to Hannah, willing her to offer him a cup of her wonderful brew. Hands on hips, her eyes narrowed to tell him that this was not going to happen.

He handed her a business card. 'You never know when you might need a lawyer. The pressure's on. The sheriff will have to arrest somebody.'

She never glanced at his card, but let it hang there in the air. 'How many years have I known you, Addison? I've got your number.' She had taken this man's measure long ago. 'And I know what you do.' Nothing good.

Far from taking umbrage with her tone and a double entendre or two, his eyes lit up, and he was laughing when he left her.

***

'So the sheriff found Josh's body.' Swahn tapped his cane on the floor for punctuation. 'Of course, it's murder. If there were any possibility of an accident, you wouldn't be here, Mr. Hobbs. So there was an obvious cause of death. A bullet wound? A blow to the head?'

Oren shrugged, allowing the other man to believe that he had not yet seen his brother's body. 'The coroner hasn't made a finding yet.'

'That should be interesting. Our new county coroner used to be a dentist.'

'I'd like to see all your interviews with the locals,' said Oren. 'The sheriff won't let me read his.'

'Perfectly understandable. You're his prime suspect.'

'And yours, too?'

Swahn was deaf to this question, or maybe he thought a countering jab just too easy. He reached out for the telephone by his chair and placed a call. The person at the other end of the line must know the sound of his voice, for all he said was, 'The judge's son is here.' After listening for a moment he said, 'If you wish.' He hung up the phone and rose from his chair with a grimace of pain. 'I'll get my files.'

No need to ask who had given the instruction to play nicely with Oren.

Thank you, Hannah.

The older man limped across the room, opened a narrow door and stepped into the cage of a small elevator. The gears clicked and whirred and carried him upward. The ironwork of the cage dated it back to an era long before Swahn's purchase of the house. This conveyance on the premises must have been a great selling point. Climbing stairs would pose a problem for a man who winced as he walked. But an elevator could also be a technology trap for a hermit.

When the former owner was alive, she had two small boys to keep track of her. Who was looking after Swahn?

Oren had his answer when he ran one finger over a tabletop. Not a day's worth of dust had collected there, and the wood floor around the area rug had the shine of fresh waxing. Swahn's wealth and his handicap were two more indications of a full-time cleaning lady on the payroll, and that woman might be worth an interview.

The passing minutes were spent reading book titles in earnest this time. Many were familiar. Most of them related to the field of criminology, an interesting choice for a man whose natural enemy was the police. The sound of gears signaled the return of the elevator. It slowly settled to the floor. The man in the iron cage stood beside a carton piled high with file holders and envelopes. Oren was quick to cross the floor and help with the unloading.

'I hope you plan to stay awhile,' said Swahn. 'None of this material leaves my house.'

'Fair enough.' Oren lifted the box and carried it to the center of the room.

With both hands gripping the cane, Swahn lowered himself to the floor and sat down in an awkward pose, one leg drawn in and the twisted one sticking out, unable to bend at the knee. The two men emptied the contents of the carton to cover the surrounding carpet with manila folders, large envelopes and banded bundles of paper.

Oren leafed through a stack of typed interviews. Each one was clipped to a photograph. 'My brother took these pictures.' Some of these same compositions were framed on the walls of the judge's house. 'But Josh didn't make any of these prints.'

They lacked the crisp perfection that Josh had achieved by manipulating his negatives. The boy's attic darkroom had been a place with a language of its own, words like dodging and burning to play down bright lights and coax lost details from areas of gray. Other things came back to Oren, a memory of that room bathed in red light and the array of bottles, some of them intensifying chemicals. And there were special grades of paper and filters to push the contrast of every picture into the darkest shadows, the brightest highlights.

Almost magic.

He looked down at the print in his hand. This was-ordinary.

'It's a bad job, I know,' said Swahn. 'Miss Rice loaned me the negatives, and I ordered these prints from the drugstore in town. No comparison to Josh's work. He was gifted in a dying art form. I don't think he would've cared for the age of digital cameras.'

Oren picked up a photograph of a birthday ball. In this shot, the stout hotelier, Evelyn Straub, was in her thirties, still lean and fine, her short skirt showing the endless long legs of a former Las Vegas showgirl.

Swahn leaned over to glance at it. 'Your brother was probably ten when he took that one, and I'm not just guessing by Mrs. Straub's age. It's the perspective of a child looking upward. That angle changes subtly as he gets taller.' He looked down at the other pictures spread out on the rug. 'Even though Josh doesn't appear in any of these pictures, it's like watching the boy grow up.'

Oren noticed that only his brother was referred to by his given name. Even Hannah, a longtime acquaintance, was always called, more formally, Miss Rice. Was Swahn only comfortable with the dead, or had he lied about never meeting Josh?

'I think your brother knew his killer.'

The photograph fell from Oren's hand.

'According to your housekeeper, the boy was carrying a camera the last time she saw him.'

'He always took one of his cameras when he left the house.'

'But this one wasn't his pocket camera,' said Swahn. 'It was the old Canon FTB, the heavy one. Why would he carry that dead weight on a hike in the woods? The boy wasn't a nature photographer. Look at these images-only people. That was his subject. Did he take pictures of you that day?'

No.' Oren saw no need to mention the picture Josh had taken before they left the house, the portrait of two brothers that Hannah had framed in silver.

Miss Rice said she packed a lunch in Josh's knapsack… but nothing for you.' Swahn waited a moment for the explanation. It never came. 'I understand that you and your brother went your separate ways after a while. So Josh had his own plans for the day. And he obviously intended to take pictures in the woods-but the boy only photographed people.' Swahn allowed the import to settle in for a moment, and then he said, 'Beer?' Without waiting for a reply, he slowly rose to his feet, using the cane as a climbing pole, and limped out of the room.

Oren emptied a bulky envelope containing pictures that had not been married up with interviews. Nowhere in this lot was a standard print of the photograph that Hannah had enlarged for his homecoming present. Every detail pictured in that silver frame was fixed in memory, and it brought to mind the interview with Cable Babitt shortly after Josh had gone missing.

'Talk to me, son,' the sheriff had said to him then. 'I need to account for your time.' The judge had answered for Oren, saying, 'Cable, you can't expect the boy to know where he was at this hour or that hour. What teenager wears a watch on a Saturday?'

In the silver-framed portrait of two brothers, Josh had been wearing a wristwatch.

Swahn returned with two bottles. He leaned down and handed one to his guest. Oren accepted the cold beer, but hesitated to pop the cap and drink with the man-given his errand in this house. He stared at the telephone, as if this would make it ring.

'Expecting a call, Mr. Hobbs? Oh, shot in the dark, a call from Sheriff Babitt?'

One casual wave of Oren's hand took in the surrounding paper storm. 'Did you share all of this with the sheriff?'

Swahn set his own bottle on a table by a chair, but he remained standing. 'I gave him everything that might help with the investigation.'

'But not everything, right? You held out on him.'

'Is that what Babitt told you? I suppose this means I'm on his shortlist.'

'I'm sure you are.' Oren glanced at the phone. How long did it take the sheriff to make a simple call? He chose his next words carefully, aiming to rattle and topple a cripple. He studied the man's face, hoping for giveaway tics and other tells when he said, 'A cane makes a good weapon.'

Swahn never blinked, nor did he miss a beat. 'That it does.' He leaned his walking stick against a small table and made an effort to stand up straight, though it caused him pain, and he could not quite achieve it. One shoulder was lower than the other because of one leg twisted inward. The hand that had held his cane was empty but still frozen in a curl. Beginning with the scarred face, all the damage ran down the left side of Swahn, a man broken by half. 'You thought I might do a lot of hiking in the woods?'

'If my brother's grave is near a road-you'll make my shortlist.'