Bone Rattle

by Marc Cameron

  It sounded like he’d not been happy with the level of security on the jail run and upped it, ruffling a few feathers of the inspector who’d planned everything. Mim was glad to hear he’d erred on the side of extra security. Frankly, the idea of driving around in a car with a couple of shackled drug dealers in the back seat terrified her. Arliss did that every day.

  The fog and drizzle that had hung over Juneau when they arrived that morning turned into what Ethan used to call “severe clear.” Rainbows graced every waterfall, and impossibly green mountains rose straight up from a sun-dazzled sea. Mim had heard all kinds of stories about Southeast Alaska’s “liquid sunshine,” the endless fog and rain – but today turned out to be the perfect afternoon for a picnic.

  Lola was playing some word game in the back seat with the boys before they’d gone a mile. Mim felt sorry for her. Most of her large and boisterous family had moved back to the Cook Islands, and it was easy to see that she missed their noise. She had the twins call her Auntie Lola, which, Mim hoped, might make her feel more like part of the family.

  Arliss had given each boy a knife to strap to his belt, making them promise to leave them sheathed until he got them set up with some sticks to carve. Fortunately, they made it to Auke Village picnic area before the boys forgot that rule and shredded the upholstery in the back seat of the rental.

  As was his custom, Arliss took a moment to get a lay of the land as soon as they arrived. He made no secret of the fact that each of his four previous wives had chided him for the way he checked out everyone at a restaurant when he walked in the door. Mim had even joked when he’d gone to church with her that it looked like he was trying to find someone to fight before he sat down.

  “Trying to see if there’s anyone there who needs fighting,” he’d said, only half joking.

  Their rental car shared the small, roadside parking area with a lone Toyota. There was a rusted copper van parked a hundred yards away at another pull-off. A quick look through the huge evergreens over the railing showed there were at least two wood pavilions and several fire rings on the gravel beach fifty yards below. A tiny stream tumbled down the steep incline beside a set of expanded metal stairs. Mim’s tolerance for other people was much greater than Arliss’s, which seemed to hover somewhere around immediate family plus… well, just immediate family was best. There seemed to be enough room here for several groups to picnic without bumping into one another. The boys scrambled around the rental, throwing spruce cones at each other. Matthew slid to a sudden stop, trying to sound out the Tlingit name of picnic area number three, written on a sign above the railing.

  “Ts’eegeeni,” he said, surely butchering the pronunciation.

  “Magpie,” Michael read the word above in his usual of-course-itis tone, as if he’d always known that Ts’eegeeni meant magpie.

  The boys raced down the stairs, making it halfway to the ocean before Arliss whistled them back to help with the picnic stuff.

  “What Grumpy Man-Rule am I thinking of?” he said when they came trudging up the metal steps.

  Michael scratched his head.

  Matthew groaned. “A man doesn’t play until the chores are done…”

  Cutter had the boys’ full attention when he let them build the fire – using a fire steel and a couple of cotton balls dipped in Vaseline he’d brought from home for that purpose. He told Mim he’d graduate them to natural tinder like birch bark scrapings, but for now, he wanted them to be successful.

  They inhaled two hot dogs apiece, used their knives to whittle little spears out of some dry spruce sticks, and then went off to explore the beach with Lola, leaving Cutter and Mim sitting in canvas camp chairs by the fire.

  Alone.

  Arliss took out his pocketknife and began to carve on a piece of dry cedar he’d found beneath the trees. Mim leaned forward in her chair, warming open hands at the fire, and thought how much Arliss was like Ethan. Her late husband had doodled in a notebook with a pencil when he was deep in thought. Arliss carved. The little squint of their eyes, the raised brow, and frequent nodding of the head as they worked through some silent problem to their own satisfaction – it was similar enough to bring tears to Mim’s eyes.

  One of the chief reasons she’d gotten along so well with Ethan was his propensity to sit quietly in the same room, just being. Arliss had that quality in spades. They talked on the phone now all the time whenever he was away on assignment. She whined about her shift at the hospital. He’d ask about the kids, checked on the house when there were problems with the water heater or dishwasher. They were like a married couple. Sort of. But when they were together, in those quiet moments in the living room or at the kitchen table when the kids were asleep, they spent great swaths of time going about their own business, content to sit in the same room without a word. She loved that about him. That he gave her space – but still occupied that same space himself, quietly, without demands.

  The resin in a spruce log popped like a firecracker, causing Arliss to look up from his carving and poke at the coals. He smiled, which often looked forced when he did it for other people, but appeared to come naturally with Mim. She started to ask him what he was thinking, but decided she didn’t really want to know.

  Pocketknife in one hand, hunk of wood in the other, Cutter rolled his shoulders – just like Ethan used to do. He looked around, checking out his surroundings as he did every few minutes.

  A group of three women – all on the large side, though Mim was not one to judge – sat in folding chairs down the shore watching their small children splash in the chilly water. They were maybe fifty feet away, just within earshot when the breeze was right. The rough language they used made Mim happy Lola had taken the boys in the other direction. A couple of guys in leather vests sat at the picnic table above them, drinking beer. They laughed periodically – and loudly, in the way that drunk people laugh when they’ve washed away the inhibitions that help them get along with those around them.

  Arliss didn’t say anything, but Mim could tell he was keeping an eye on the men at the table.

  Another woman, this one looked like she might be Native, with dark hair and bronze skin, walked toward them on the beach. A child of seven or eight meandered beside her. The child, Mim thought it was a boy, though he had incredibly long, curly hair that hung well past his shoulders – kicked a soccer ball as he slogged along in cheap black gumboots. Every so often, he’d get a burst of energy and dribble the ball forward, kicking it at a rock or piece of driftwood.

  “I saw her in court today,” Arliss observed, nodding toward the Native woman, his knife poised above the carved wood. “She’s a reporter, I think—”

  Just then, the boy kicked his soccer ball directly into the women. It bounced off a camp chair, went airborne, and then beaned one of the kids playing in the surf.

  One of the seated women, who wore a sleeveless T-shirt and an extra-wide pair of Daisy Dukes, wallowed up and out of her chair to retrieve the ball. She threw it back to the little boy, frowning and shouting something Mim couldn’t hear.

  The boy took the ball and dropped it to the gravel.

  The heavyset women turned back to whatever they were doing. The men at the table picked up their beers and started laughing again.

  Mim sighed. “What are we doing, Arliss?”

  Cutter, already carving again, glanced up from the chunk of cedar. “We’re… What do you mean?”

  Mim leaned back in her chair, facing the sky, feeling the breeze and sun on her cheeks. “I don’t know, I just think—”

  A startled cry from the beach cut her off.

  Apparently, the little boy with long hair had done something to anger the woman in Daisy Dukes again. She began to scream curses at the smaller woman, then grabbed the ball and threw it into the water. Hands on her hips, she watched the ball long enough to be satisfied it was going out with the waves, then wheeled and marched up the gravel beach so she was face to face with the Native woman. The men at the picnic table were up too,
beer bottles in hand, making their way out to surround the cowering woman.

  Mim’s first instinct was to check on her boys, who thankfully were a couple hundred feet down the beach in the other direction, hunting for shells. By the time she turned back toward the brewing conflict, Arliss was sprinting that way.

  Of course he would go. There was about to be violence. He wouldn’t want to miss that.

  Chapter 18

  Lori Maycomb walked the gravel beach, deep in thought. She liked coming to the Auke Village picnic areas with her seven-year-old son and think. Locked in a semi-fugue state, she was only vaguely aware of the other woman, and paid just enough attention to Joseph to make sure he didn’t get in trouble – almost. She was thinking about her novel, which was to say that she was thinking about her failures. It would be a compelling dumpster fire of a book to be sure. Every journalist she’d ever met wanted to write a book, but most seemed to struggle to find something to write about. Lori was sure the tragic soap opera that was her own miserable life would make for a New York Times bestseller. It was the nature of human beings to want to stand and watch other people’s misery – and her sad sack of a life could certainly provide readers with plenty of that. The trouble was, other than her journal, she’d never written anything longer than the copy for a radio story. In the end, she thought she might be able to fictionalize the journal – not make it more sensational. Oh, hell no. She’d have to tone it down from reality. No one would believe that one life could be so raw.

  Joseph dribbled his soccer ball a few yards ahead, pitting himself against the periodic rock that stuck up from the gravel. Every now and then, he stooped to study some interesting tidbit on the beach, often popping them in his mouth. Like her, he was a person of the water. He’d been able to identify limpets, oyster grass, and the tiny holes in the sand from the digging foot of the razor clam by the time he was four. When the tide was out, the table was set, and despite her many shortcomings as a mother, Lori had worked very hard to pass on the knowledge of her ancestors. She’d fed Joseph from the water since he was old enough to chew. His father had been grossed out the first time Lori pried a little hat-shaped limpet shell off a rock, dug out the sweet flesh inside, and fed it to their son. But he’d come around – like he always did.

  Joseph was remarkable at soccer, but his oversize gumboots wreaked havoc on his aim.

  Lori apologized to a crazy-eyed lady when he sent the ball flying her way, and had just settled back into her novel-writing stupor when she heard Joseph yelp. Apparently, the woman decided she wasn’t done with her screaming fit.

  Lori shielded Joseph with her hip and stammered out another apology. It went against her nature to grovel, but there were three women, each easily half again her size, and she had her own child to think about. It was a soccer ball for crying out loud. People kicked them. But this woman had the scrunched-up face of a person who was looking for something to be pissed about. The two cows sitting beside her and the meth-head-looking dudes who’d come over from the picnic table all looked too twitchy for her to say what she was really thinking. Sometimes it was better to bite your tongue and offer the verbal equivalent of rolling over and showing your belly.

  The crazy-eyed lady continued to curse over the top of Lori’s apology. She picked up the soccer ball with two beefy hands, grunting at the effort of bending at the waist, and then threw it as far as she could into the ocean. She didn’t have much of an arm, but the water got deep enough fast.

  The men from the table egged the big woman on, taunting Lori with jibes because she was Indian. It was bizarre behavior, out of place in Juneau even for a couple of meth-heads. The men edged closer, crowding within a few feet of Lori, goading the other woman not to “put up with her Native shit.”

  And then a very large blond man came running down the beach, directly toward them, growling like an enraged bear.

  Startled by this stranger’s sudden appearance, Lori assumed he would stop a dozen yards out. She recognized him from court, one of the deputy marshals. He was obviously the chivalrous sort, and having seen the others gang up on her, he would now try to deescalate.

  But he kept coming, on a collision course with the two men.

  The marshal appeared to home in on the largest of the men, who at six-two was about the same size. He slowed to a walk a dozen yards out but didn’t stop advancing.

  “Get behind me,” he said. Not the least bit out of breath, his voice was as calm as if he’d just walked up to ask the time.

  The larger of the two meth-heads took the man’s slowing for a stutter in his resolve. “You’re kinda outnumbered here. This bitch disrespected our friend and—”

  “I saw what happened,” the marshal said. “You all need to step back.”

  The big woman in short shorts scoffed. “Or what?”

  The marshal motioned to Lori. “How about you go wait with my friend by the fire?”

  The tall meth-head took a tentative step forward, looking like he might shove the marshal in the chest. He was sorely mistaken. He believed they were still in the dance-like, posturing stage of a conflict, but the marshal wasn’t the sort to dance. The marshal established his dominance with a straight jab to the tip of the tall aggressor’s nose, hitting the staggering man twice more in the face before he slumped to his knees.

  Meth-head number two bowed his head and rushed forward, bellowing something nonsensical, and earned himself a knee to the face, which laid him out flat in the gravel.

  One of the women had started to take a video with her phone.

  The wide woman who’d started it all bent to help the taller meth-head to his feet. “Get up and kick his ass, Gino—”

  A Polynesian woman with her T-shirt rolled above her muscular arms trotted up and stood beside the blond man.

  “Police,” the Polynesian woman said. “US Marshals. Recommend you stay down, Gino.” She strode toward the gaggle of women who were crowding in around Lori again. Like her blond friend, this Polynesian marshal plowed ahead, flat handing two of the big women when they came at her. Her raw power at once cleared a path for Lori to move away and displayed her strength to the cursing women. “Go!” the lady marshal snapped at Lori, shoving the woman shooting video in the chest, ordering her to move away. The phone flew out of her hand. For a second, Lori thought it was going in the water, but the Polynesian woman snatched it out of midair. “Don’t want to lose the evidence of your asshole-ness,” she said.

  Two boys about Joseph’s age ran up behind the lady marshal. One clenched his fist, the other, a little blond boy, held a big piece of driftwood like a sword and glared at the men on the ground like he wasn’t beyond bashing them in the head. His frown looked remarkably like the marshal’s. A woman in a ponytail rushed in a moment later. She grabbed both little boys and dragged them away by their shoulders. Lori took her own son’s hand and followed her.

  Of all the people gathered on the rocky beach, the woman in the ponytail looked the most ferocious – a mother bear protecting her cubs.

  Chapter 19

  Anchorage

  Constance’s eyes grew wide at the sound of all the chimes. Even the doorbell in the Liptons’ house sounded rich. It was one of those long, drawn-out things like you’d hear at a church or from a fancy grandfather clock. The girls weren’t supposed to have anyone else over. Three was the limit. Audrey’s mom had said so before she went to catch her flight and left them to their own devices.

  Audrey looked at her watch – an Omega, expensive for a high school girl, but not unheard of in south Anchorage. “Right on time,” she said. She was sixteen and knew things.

  Evelyn Brant moved her dark eyebrows up and down, then shivered in anticipation. “This is going to be so awesome.”

  Constance smiled and bounced a clenched fist on her knee, hoping she looked as excited to be there as the girls expected her to be.

  The doorbell chimed again and Audrey got up from her spot on the floor, careful not to spill her glass of wine. Her pajama
pants were pushed up above her calves – she was volleyball captain at South High, so she had great calves. Cotton balls separated freshly painted toes, and she did an exaggerated heel walk, shaking her butt like there were boys in the room as she went to answer the door.

  All three girls’ parents knew where they were – but had no idea of their plans. What Constance’s mom called getting into trouble and what Audrey Lipton’s mom called getting into trouble were miles apart. Ms. Lipton didn’t want her daughter to do anything that would get her arrested. Constance was sure her mom would think not going to jail was a pretty low bar.

  Constance’s mother often warned her to stay away from Mountain View or Spenard – parroting her Uncle Arliss with dire warnings of midnight murders, gang violence, and… insert ominously heavy music… drugs. What a joke. There were as many drugs to be had in the neighborhoods around Huffman and O’Malley as there were in Mountain View or midtown. Everything was just more expensive.

  The midnight murder part – well, that was true about those parts of town, so Constance was happy to cool her heels at her new friend Audrey Lipton’s bajillion-dollar house, surrounded by woods but still in south Anchorage. And anyway, for all Constance knew, her Uncle Arliss had installed some government tracking app on her cell phone. It was usually such a pain to have a law enforcement uncle, but Evelyn Brant had told her parents she was staying over with Audrey and Constance – playing the “her uncle is a US marshal” card to get them to sign off on the deal. She left out the part about Audrey’s mom flying out of the country.

  Audrey’s mom was some kind of bigwig with an international shipping company. She was divorced and traveled a lot, mistakenly believing that because sixteen-year-old Audrey was an honor student at South High School, she could manage a couple of days at home alone without getting into trouble. No more than two friends over at once. That was the rule. It made Constance wonder if Audrey’s mom had ever been a kid herself. Did she really believe that three teenage girls left to their own devices for two days and two nights over spring break could possibly keep from getting into trouble?