Lovely In Her Bones

“I can take you in the patrol car,” Pilot offered.

“Nah. You ride with me. I have my kit in the trunk. Never know what we might need in the way of equipment.” He turned to Hamp McKenna. “You’re welcome to ride along too. Just watch where you sit in the back seat.”

Hamp blinked. “Why? Evidence?”

“There’s a model airplane back there. Belongs to my kid.”

“So you’re going to investigate this anyway?” asked Pilot.

“Sure. Why not? Maybe I can help you out with information on your suspects. You said they were from out of state, didn’t you?”

“Most of them.”

“No problem. We’ll run their names through the computer and see what we get. Fingerprints, too, if you want.”

Pilot nodded gratefully. He decided that Agent Garrett looked like a regular FBI person-tall, slender, well groomed, and dressed in sensible but fashionable outdoor clothes. He was sure that the car would also be an appropriately dark and expensive sedan. Once the deputy had recovered from the shock of the phone call, he had accepted this rural version of the FBI without too much trouble. Everything in the country was a little out of kilter as far as stereotypes went. The mailmen didn’t dress in blue uniforms and drive white postal vans, the firemen drove their own cars to the fire, and FBI headquarters was a brick house with a carport. It just proved what Pilot had always known: he didn’t live in the America you saw on television. He straightened his hat and followed the agent outside.

Milo entered the motel room like one entering a shrine. Alex’s coffee cup still sat on the desk top beside the computer, and his scribbled notes littered the bed. It looked haphazard, but it wasn’t. Alex would have known the location of every page of it. Mechanically Milo began to collect them into a pile. He supposed that they were his now, professionally speaking. Tessa would not want Alex’s technical notes. Even now she must be parceling out his clothes and books, packing away the memory of Alex in little cardboard boxes for the Goodwill.

“You’re dead, Alex,” he said, as if there were someone there to be told.

It was Milo’s first feeling of death as a personal loss; before, he had always reacted selfishly to the news of a death in his parents’ circle of friends, affronted that his childhood world was changing irretrievably. When he was away at school, preoccupied with his own life, he subconsciously expected his hometown, his childhood acquaintances to stay the same. The death of his mother’s cousin, the kind lady on the farm, had annoyed him not because he would miss her-he had not seen her since he was ten-but because it pushed his childhood farther into an unredeemable past. One by one his grade school teachers and parents’ friends would die, until one day he would go home to find the small town urbanlized beyond recognition and peopled by strangers. He remembered the feeling of isolation that that ralization brought; it had come back. Alex had closed a door to Milo’s college life, placing it firmly in the past tense, beyond recall. The present seemed arrower than ever.

What would he do now? Back at the university here would be a restrained meeting. Temporary measures would be taken to cover Alex’s fall classes, and the dean would claim to be “taking the matter under advisement.” Milo hoped it wouldn’t mean starting over at another university. He banished the unworthy thought, wondering why even genuine grief must be tempered with selfishness. With a sigh, he sat down at the desk and flipped on the computer to finish Alex’s project. That was a species of grief.

The screen was a luminous void. Milo opened the notebook to the columns of figures recorded in Elizabeth’s spiky handwriting. She wanted Milo to confide in her. He could tell by the way she acted; but he wouldn’t parade his grief to further a romance. What would she expect of him in the name of intimacy? Tears? A stirring resolution to track down the killer? Would Alex want that if it were someone he cared about? Would he want his death avenged? Absently, Milo typed: “Should we catch the murderer?”

The words flashed on the screen in precise glowing letters. The machine hummed, and flashed its response: “Invalid command. Please try again or enter Help.”

Agent Garrett frowned at the recently scrubbed camp table, still streaked with soaked-in blood. “A tomahawk, huh? I wonder what that means?”

“No fingerprints on a bark handle, for one thing,” said Pilot Barnes.

Garrett nodded. “Okay. That might indicate premeditation. A tomahawk… Didn’t you say there were Indians around here?”

“There are Cullowhees,” the deputy replied. “Some people don’t think it’s the same thing.”

“Anyway they don’t use tomahawks,” Hamp pointed out. “They don’t use much of nothing Indian.”

“It wasn’t an old one. It was one of the ones they sell at Cherokee, made in Taiwan, with plastic cords and dyed chicken feathers. But the rock was the real thing. It took a chunk out of the back of his head like grease going through a goose.”

“Have you been able to trace ownership?” asked Garrett, ignoring the deputy’s colorful bravado.

“Nope.”

“I guess that isn’t a job for a two-man force. There must be a couple of thousand tourists in and out of Cherokee every day, and every store on the strip sells them. My kids have one. But you might let me take it up to the lab anyway. They might be able to find something. But it’s slim. I’d say your best bet would be to go for cui bono.”

“Motive, you mean,” said Pilot, trying not to make it sound like a guess.

“Sure. Was there any particular reason for eliminating this individual?”

“When it comes to motive, we got too much of a good thing. The guy was working on a project to give this land to the Cullowhees, and keep some people from making a killing selling this land to a strip-mining company.”

The FBI man smiled. “Maybe they made their killing anyway.”

“Huh? Oh, I see. A real killing, you mean. Then, on a personal level, this fellow seems to have been having an affair with one of his assistants.”

“Which one?”

“The girl. Her name is Mary Clare Gitlin. She was present at the time of the murder.”

“Here, you mean?”

Pilot shrugged. “Claims she was out walking in the woods. The wife was here, too. And the deceased further gummed up the works by having a fight with one of the male students over some bones in a museum.”

“Don’t forget the Cullowhees,” Hamp reminded him.

“The Indians? I thought he was helping them. Why should they kill him?”

“Because they’re Cullowhees,” said Pilot with a tight smile. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

Garrett sighed. “Everybody says that. And no, I’m not. It’s FBI policy not to assign anyone to his own hometown.”

“Too bad. Sometimes it helps to know the background things,” said Pilot. “Take the Cullowhees, for instance. Those folks are so mean they must’ve been weaned on snake venom. Ain’t a man in the valley that hasn’t seen the inside of our jail two or three times. Summer’s the worst. They get so likkered up they’d stab their own mothers.”

“Tell him about the parade that time,” Hamp prompted.

“That was a few years back, but I don’t reckon folks’ll ever forget it. Bunch of Cullowhees got piss-eyed drunk at a poker game up here and killed some joker they claimed was cheating. He was a white man, too. Lord knows how he got in the game in the first place.”

“Likely they figured to take his money,” said Hamp.

“Yeah. Well, they stabbed him in the belly, and went on with the game while he bled to death. And then they strung him up in chains behind a pickup truck and drug him down the highway to Laurel Cove.”

“Right down Main Street,” said Hamp. “And there was about ten of them a-sitting in the back of that pickup, waving like it was the Easter parade.”

“I heard it was four,” frowned Pilot.

“Well, whatever,” said Garrett quickly. “I guess those people aren’t around any more after that.”

Hamp laughed. “You’d be wrong, then. They got the driver of the truck by his license number, but he claimed not to remember who the others were. Never did charge anybody with the murder.”

The agent shook his head. “Okay,” he said at last. “Who do you think did it?”

Pilot hesitated. “Well… seeing as how it happened in Sarvice Valley, I’d have said the Cullowhees right off, but