A Bone To Pick

Lynn nodded emphatically. Her eyes flew open, and she focused on a point on the wall opposite. Her breathing became ragged for a few moments. “Get yourself together!” I said earnestly. Lynn was the only person who knew what was happening. Lynn seemed to take that as advice offered from compassion, and squeezed my hand till I thought of screaming again.

Suddenly she caught her breath, and her whole body tensed.

I peeked again.

“Oh dear,” I breathed. This was really quite a lot worse than watching Madeleine the cat. I followed my own advice and pulled myself together, despite my desire to run screaming out of this house and never come back. I let go of Lynn’s hand and moved between her legs. There was barely room. It was lucky I was a small person.

Lynn strained again.

“Okay, Lynn,” I said bracingly. “It’s coming. I’ll catch it.”

Lynn seemed to rest for a moment.

“Whose skull?” I asked Torrance. Marcia had sunk to the floor, and they were sitting knee to knee holding hands.

“Oh,” he said as if he’d lost interest. “The skull is Mark. Mark Kaplan. The boy who rented our apartment.”

Lynn gathered herself and pushed again. Her eyes were glazed, and I was scared to death. I hesitantly put my hands where they might do some good.

“Lynn, I see more of the head,” I told her.

Amazingly, Lynn smiled. And she gathered herself. And pushed.

“I’ve got the head, Lynn,” I told her in a shaky voice. I was trying to sound confident, but I failed. Would the baby’s neck break if I let its head flop? Oh dear Jesus, I needed help, I was so inadequate.

Lynn did it again.

“That‘ s the shoulders,” I whispered, holding this tiny, bloody, vulnerable thing. “One more push should do it,” I said bracingly, having no idea at all what I was talking about. But it seemed to hearten Lynn, and she started pulling herself together again. I wished that she could take a break, so I could, but I had told her the truth out of sheer ignorance. Lynn pushed like she was in the Olympics of baby extrusion, and the slippery thing shot out of her like a hurtling football, or so it seemed to me. And I caught it.

“What?” asked Lynn weakly.

It took me a second of sheer stupidity to understand her. I should be doing something! I should make it cry! Wasn’t that important?

“Hold it upside down and whack it on its back,” Marcia said. “That’s what they do on TV.”

Full of terror, I did so. The baby let out a wail. So it was breathing, it was alive! So far so good. Though still hooked up to Lynn, this child was okay for now. Should I do something to the umbilical cord? What? And I heard sirens coming, thank the Lord.

“What?” Lynn asked more urgently.

“Girl!” I said jerkily. “A girl!” I held the little thing as I had seen babies held in pictures and made plans to burn the rose pink nightgown.

“Well,” said Lynn with a tiny smile, as pounding began on the front door, “damn if I’m going to name it after you.”

It took some time to sort out the situation in Jane’s little house, which seemed more crowded than ever with all the policemen in Lawrenceton.

Some of the policemen, seeing Arthur’s former flame kneeling before his new wife, both bloody, assumed I was the person to arrest. They could hardly put cuffs on me or search me, though, since I was holding the baby, who was still attached to Lynn. And when they all realized I was holding a newborn baby and not some piece I’d ripped from Lynn’s insides, they went nuts. No one seemed to remember that there’d been a break-in, that consequently the burglar might be on the scene.

Arthur had been out on a robbery call, but when he arrived he was so scared he was ready to kill someone. He waved his gun around vaguely, and when he spotted Lynn and the blood he began bellowing “Ambulance! Ambulance!” Jack Burns himself pushed right by the Rideouts to use the phone in the bedroom.

Arthur was by me in a flash, babbling. “The baby!” he said. He didn’t know what to do with his gun.

“Put the gun away and take this baby,” I said rather sharply. “It’s still attached to Lynn, and I don’t know what to do about that.”

“Lynn, how are you?” Arthur said in a daze.

“Honey, put a towel over your suit and take your daughter,” Lynn said weakly.

“My-oh.” He holstered his gun and reached down and took a towel off the stack I’d brought out. I wondered if Jane could ever have imagined her monogrammed white cotton towels being used for such a purpose. I handed the baby over with alacrity, and stood up, trembling from a cocktail of fear, pain, and shock. I was more than glad to vacate my position between Lynn’s legs.

One of the ambulance attendants ran up to me then and said, “You the maternity? Or have you been injured?”

I pointed a shaky finger at Lynn. I didn’t blame him for thinking I’d been seriously hurt; I was covered with smears of blood, some of it Lynn’s, some of it Torrance’s, a little of it mine.

“Are you all right?”

I looked to the source of the voice and found I was standing next to Torrance. This was so strange.

“I’ll be okay,” I said wearily.

“I’m sorry. I was never cut out to be a criminal.”

I thought of the inept break-ins, Torrance not even taking anything to make them look like legitimate burglaries. I nodded.

“Why did you do it?” I asked him.

Suddenly his face hardened and tightened all over. “I just did,” he said.

“So when Jane dug up the skull, you dug up the rest of the body and put the bones by the dead end sign?”

“I knew no one would clean up that brush for years,” he said. “And I was right. I was too scared to carry the bones in my trunk, even for a little while. I wailed till the next night when Macon went over to Carey’s, and I carried the bones in a plastic bag through his backyard and up the far side of his house; then it was just a few feet to the brush…no one saw me that time. I was so sure whoever had taken the skull would call the police. I waited. Then I realized whoever had the skull just wanted… to have it. For me to squirm. I had almost forgotten that trouble about the tree. Jane was so ladylike. I never believed…”

“And he never told me about it,” said Marcia, to his left. “He never let me worry, too.” She looked at him fondly.

“So, what did you do it for?” I asked Torrance. “Did he make a pass at Marcia?”

“Well…,” said Torrance hesitantly.

“Oh, honey,” Marcia said reproving. She leaned over to me, smiling a little at a man’s silly gesture. “He didn’t do it,” she told me. “I did it.”

“You killed Mark Kaplan and buried him out in the yard?”

“Oh, Torrance buried him when I told him what I’d done.”

“Oh,” I said inadequately, swallowed by her wide blue eyes. “You killed him because-?”

“He came over while Torrance was gone.” She shook her head sadly as she told me. “And I had thought he was such a nice person. But he wasn’t. He was very dirty.”

I nodded, just to be responding somehow.

“Mike Osland, too,” Marcia ran on, still shaking her head at the perfidy of men.

I felt suddenly very, very cold. Torrance closed his eyes in profound weariness.

“Mike,” I murmured interrogatively.

“He’s under the sun deck, that’s why Torrance built it, I think,” Marcia said earnestly. “Jane didn’t know about him.”

“She’s confessing,” said an incredulous hoarse voice.

I turned from Marcia’s mesmerizing eyes to see that Jack Burns was sitting on his haunches in front of me.

“Did she just confess to a murder?” he asked me.