“Okay,” I said finally. “Okay. Let’s go.”
“What are we going to do?”
I was punch drunk with lack of sleep and shock.
“Got a Frisbee, Angel?”
“Sure,” she said, as though I’d asked her whether she had a nose.
“Well. Let’s play Frisbee.”
So after a preliminary reconnaissance, we came out into the fresh day. I ignored the shotgun Angel carried out; she put it on the chair on the porch, where she could reach it quickly. Then she got her Frisbee and cocked her wrist to spin it to me, an anticipatory grin stretching her thin lips. I prepared myself for some running.
Ten minutes later I was panting, and even Superwoman was breathing a little heavily. Angel had gotten surprised all over again. I was no mean Frisbee player. But my aerobic exercise videotape hadn’t prepared me for this, and I felt the first trickle of sweat for the summer season gliding down my back and then between my hips. On the whole, I was having a good time. I dashed inside for a drink of water.
Angel must have felt mildly challenged. She had backed out toward the road a little, and as I was coming down the front steps, she flicked her wrist and the red disk took off. A sudden breeze gusting over the open field across the road picked up the Frisbee and wafted it even higher. With a thunk, the Frisbee grazed the top of the first roof peak (the roof of the porch) and rolled into the space under my bedroom windows.
“Aw, shit,” Angel said. “Listen, I’ll be back in a second. Let me go blot my face, the sweat’s getting into my scrapes and making them sting.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be getting the ladder.”
It felt creepy going into the garage and opening the door to the tool shed in the back. I knew the Youngbloods had checked it out and searched everything on the property before it got dark the night before, but in my brief hours of sleep, I’d had nightmares about a dark figure running toward me with an upraised ax.
I maneuvered the long ladder out of the tool shed and shouldered it to get it to the front of the house. Angel descended the apartment steps with a tender look on her face; the sight of Shelby sleeping certainly still rang her bells.
I pushed back the hooks that held the extension down parallel with the base of the ladder, and with Angel’s help ran it up to the roof. Since the house was built up on a high foundation, the climb was no short one.
“Do you mind,” Angel said almost shyly, “I know I threw it up there, but if there’s one thing I can’t handle, it’s heights… now if it bothers you, I’ll go on and do it, or Shelby can get up there when he gets up…”
I gaped at her, before I remembered my manners and nodded matter-of-factly. “No problem,” I said briskly.
She seemed to relax all over. “I’ll brace the ladder,” she said with equal briskness.
So up I started. I am not automatically afraid of heights; I am fairly phobia-free. But it was quite a climb, and since I was showing off for Angel, I found I needed to keep my eyes looking up and my progress steady. Stopping, I had a strong feeling, would not be good.
Actually-come to think of it-I had never been on a roof before. The porch roof was steep. Really steep. Nervously, I transferred from the ladder to the shingles, already warm from the spring sun. I’d never been right next to shingles before; I had a good look at their pebbly gray-ness while I was bracing myself to reach the peak. I stretched and grasped it, and pushed with the sides of my feet, glad I was wearing sturdy rubber-soled hi-tech sneakers. The Frisbee should be on the downslope of this roof, where it joined the roof of the house; I remembered Miss Neecy telling me about the feuding couple who’d built the house, Sarah May Zinsner’s last-minute insistence on a porch.
“I hear a car coming, Roe,” Angel said quietly down below.
I froze. “What should I do?”
“Get over that roofline.”
So I scrambled up and over in no time at all. A little incentive was all I needed. In the valley between the two roofs, formed like a forty-five-degree angle with the wall under my bedroom windows being the straight line and the upward slope of the porch roof being the angle line, lay the bright red Frisbee and an old gray tarp so exactly matching the shingles that I had to land on it to notice it.
I peeked over the roofline to see what Angel was doing. The shotgun was in her hands now, and she was against the inside of the wall of the garage, the far side where Martin’s Mercedes was parked. The car was visible coming closer, thanks to Shelby’s butchery of my forsythia, and it was a white car that was a little familiar. It turned in the driveway, and Angel raised the shotgun. The white car crunched slowly up the drive and pulled to a halt on the gravel a few feet behind my car, in the near side of the garage. The driver’s door opened. Martin stepped out.
I was smiling without even realizing it for a second.
Angel came out of the garage with the shotgun lowered, and though I couldn’t hear what they said, she pointed at the roof.
“Up here!” I called. Martin turned and went to the front of the house, looking up with a quizzical expression. He wasn’t wearing a suit for once, and he needed a shave.
“How are you, Roe?” he asked.
I still loved him.
“I’m all right, Martin. Be down in a minute. Here’s the Frisbee.” I sailed it over the peak down to the them. Martin’s arm shot out and he caught it neatly.
“There’s something else up here,” I called. “There’s a gray plastic tarp.”
Angel’s expression changed to alarm. “Don’t touch it!” she and Martin yelled simultaneously.
“It’s been here for ages,” I reassured them. “There’re pine needles and bird poop and dirt all over it.”
The two faces upturned to me relaxed somewhat.
“What do you think it is, builder’s material?” Martin asked.
“Well, I’m going to find out.” I maneuvered a turn in the little valley in which I found myself. A gutter had been installed in this valley, to carry off rainwater, and the covered bundle had been shoved just clear of it under my bedroom window. In fact it was so closely packed into this one straight stretch of roof that I knew why I hadn’t ever noticed it: It was so close under my window that I would have had to stick out my head and shoulders out and look down to see it.
The tarp was stiff and crackly with age and exposure. It was weighted down with bricks. When I shoved one off the tarp and raised one corner, the whole thing moved, and I was treated to a comprehensive view of what lay beneath.
It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. I tried to believe that someone had been up on the roof eating ribs and had thrown the discarded bones in a heap after he was through. Maybe lots of people; there were so many… I saw the ribs first, you see. They weren’t pretty and white: they were yellowish and had little bits of dried dark stuff on them. But there were other bones, tiny and large, one whole hand with a few strings of tendon still holding it together… the skulls had rolled a little, but I counted them automatically.
“Roe?” Martin called from below. “What’s happening up there? Are you okay?”
The breeze was gusting again. For the first time in over six years, it wafted under the gray plastic. The hair on one of the skulls lifted.
I wanted
I flung myself upward, swung my legs over the peak, and began backing down in record time.
“Roe,” called Martin again, definitely alarmed.
My feet hit the first rung. It seemed like long minutes before my hands could grasp the metal and then my feet flew down once I was totally supported by the ladder.
Martin and Angel were both asking me questions at once. I leaned against the metal, my feet finally on the ground, a safe distance from the horror on the roof.
“They’re there,” I managed to say at last. “They’ve been there all along.”
Martin still looked blank, but Angel, who had helped me look, got the point immediately.
“The Julius family,” she told Martin. “They’re on the roof.”
We did have to tell the police about this. Angel stored away the shotgun and made the phone call. Then I saw her bounding up her apartment steps, presumably to wake Shelby.
