The Bone Box

by Gregg Olsen

  “Hey,” he said. “I won’t hurt you. I was trying to stop you from falling. Don’t be afraid of me.”

  “What happened to Anna Jo? What did you do to her?”

  Tommy blinked back the recognition of what his cousin was undoubtedly thinking just then.

  “No. I never. I just found her. Honest. She was at Ponder’s cabin. She was already dead. I promise. I never hurt anyone.”

  Birdy found her footing and got up from the damp, dark earth. Her heart was pounding so hard inside the bony frame of her heaving chest just then, she was certain that she’d have a heart attack. She didn’t want to die and she didn’t want to find out what had happened to Anna Jo. She was too scared. Instead, she turned and ran, leaving the wagon, the chain saw, and her bloody cousin on the trail.

  Twenty years later, as she walked down that same trail, the scene played in her head. Birdy hadn’t thought about what she’d felt that summer day and the role fear had played in what she testified to at trial. She was the witness who had put Tommy on that trail covered in blood. She was the one who had provided the time line that connected the victim to the killer. While it was true that Tommy Freeland had had blood all over his hands and chest, and it was true that he and Anna Jo had had a bitter fight a few days before she died, he’d denied any part of the brutal stabbing that had killed her.

  One of the last things Birdy remembered Tommy saying before they hauled him away after sentencing was, “I loved her. Doesn’t anyone remember that? I loved Anna Jo. I would never have killed her. I didn’t do this.”

  Over the years, in case after case, Dr. Birdy Waterman would hear similar statements from the convicted, but never would they be so personal, so directed at her ears. Tommy had been family. When he went away to Walla Walla, his disappearance caused a rift between sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins. No one who lived on that part of the Makah reservation was ever the same. People didn’t talk about it. Ever.

  Birdy watched a squirrel as it zipped up the craggy bark of a towering Douglas fir. A hawk flew overhead. The wind found its way through the evergreen canopy. The land all around her was as it had been when she was a girl. The place, she knew, should feel like home. But it didn’t. It never could. A place where one feels unwelcome can never feel like home. Thinking of Tommy, Anna Jo, the trial, her mother, she wondered if there would ever be a way to fix any of it.

  She walked back to her car and drove over to her sister Summer’s brand-new mobile home, but no one was there. Same at her brother Ricky’s place—a small wood frame house that he’d built himself. She decided not to let it pass through her mind that they’d avoided her on purpose. She was their sister—their blood. They had to love her too, didn’t they?

  It was dark when she returned to the bungalow on Beach Drive. Birdy had driven all the way through with only a single stop for gas in Port Angeles. It was after nine when she finally pulled up. Too dark, she thought, to feed the neighbor’s cat as she’d promised to do while they were away in Hawaii downing rum-infused tropical drinks—a prospect that seemed more than appealing right then. Birdy made a mental note to get up extra early to feed Jinx before the Coopers got home and found out that their next-door neighbor was an untrustworthy cat sitter.

  Knowing Pat and Donna Frickey, there could be no crime worse.

  Birdy took a beer from the refrigerator and a package of chicken-flavored Top Ramen from the cupboard. She took a drink from the bottle and unwrapped the ramen with no intention of cooking the noodles. She ate it dry, like a big fat brick of crispiness—a habit she’d acquired growing up on the reservation and having to make do with a package of the Asian dried noodles for two out of three meals of the day.

  The message light on her answering machine caught her eye. There were three messages. She pushed PLAY.

  “... Election Day is fast approaching and we want to make sure that the Citizens for a Lovely Port Orchard can count on your support for our transportation levy ...”

  Birdy sighed and pushed DELETE. The Lovely Port Orchard group would be better served by focusing on cleaning up the streets they already had than on building new ones, she thought.

  Then next message came from her mother, probably just after her visit.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. You really caught me off guard about Tommy. I think you should just leave him be, but you never listen to me anyway. Love you.”

  The word “love” came out of her mother’s mouth in a cough. The voice message was so like her mother that it brought a smile to Birdy’s face. While Natalie Waterman hadn’t invented passive-aggressive behavior, few would dispute that she had perfected it.

  The last message sent a chill through Birdy’s bones.

  “Dr. Waterman, if this is you, I want you to know that you’ve caused enough trouble for Tommy and his family. If you know what’s good for you—and I bet you do—you’ll stay away from him.”

  The voice was unfamiliar. Birdy played it again. It was hard to determine if the caller was male or female. It was breathy and soft, the kind of voice that required concentration in order to fully comprehend.

  She scrolled back on the caller ID function of her machine. The call had come from a pay phone at the tribal center—which wasn’t much of a surprise. After telegraph, tele-native was the fastest mode of communication known to man. Someone from the Makahs had heard from her mother that she was going to see Tommy, and not only that, they didn’t want her to.

  Not at all.

  “If you know what’s good for you ...”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Tommy was barely forty, but he looked closer to sixty. Maybe even older. If DOC Inmate 44435-099 had once been the most handsome boy on the reservation, years behind bars—more years than he’d lived free—had stolen that from him. It wasn’t merely that his jet-black hair had receded or that his once-clear skin was now loose and somewhat sallow. His eyes nestled in dark hollows. It was also obvious from across the poorly lit visitation room that whatever charisma he’d had, whatever inner light had radiated through him, was gone. Pfft. Out like a soggy match.

  Birdy Waterman almost had to steady herself when she saw Tommy. While she realized that two decades had come and gone, she hadn’t expected Tommy to look so old. Certainly in her job, she’d been around prisons and jails all her adult life. Most inmates seemed to make the best of their time on the inside by pumping iron in the yard. There wasn’t much else to do. They looked like health-club regulars. Tommy, by contrast, seemed alarmingly frail.

  She walked toward him, quickly so as not to show any hesitation. He was, after all, family.

  Tommy, in a dingy gray T-shirt and off-brand dungarees that seemed a size too big for him, stood to greet her. “You look almost the same,” he said, a broad smile of recognition coming over his face. It was disarming, the way she remembered Tommy Freeland could be. Maybe a part of him is still there, somewhere hidden under the hard veneer of prison life?

  Tommy nodded for her to sit, and Birdy slid into a bolted-to-the-floor steel frame chair. “You too. But you’re a liar,” she added, trying to hide her obvious surprise.

  Tommy eyed her, taking in everything. It was a fast and unequivocal search, the kind of once-over that an inmate might employ to figure out that instant of life or death in the laundry room, in deciding who to trust.

  “Well, you have filled out,” he said. “Not in a bad way. But you know, you’re no longer Birdy Legs.”

  Birdy’s face reddened. No one had called her that in eons, and it made her feel good. It was funny how the mention of a once-hated nickname elicited fond memories. Back on the reservation it had been a nickname meant to torment her. Time changes everything.

  “Thanks,” she said, changing the subject. “I’m glad you asked me to come.”

  He frowned slightly. “You were never not invited, Birdy. It hasn’t been like you didn’t know where I was.”

  “That isn’t fair,” she said.

  “Well, from my knothole, there isn’t anything about the last
twenty years that has been particularly fair.”

  Birdy nodded. There was no arguing that.

  “Do you want a pop or something? I brought quarters,” she said offering up her Ziploc bag of quarters.

  Tommy smiled. Actually, it was not really a smile, but a kind of grimace. “No. I’m good. I’ve learned to do without. You know, without friends, family. Pretty much without a life. A lot of people played a part in making that happen.”

  He left those words to dangle in the air of the visiting room.

  “I didn’t lie,” Birdy said, her tone more defensive than she’d intended.

  Tommy leaned back and crossed his arms. As he did, Birdy noticed a series of jagged scars, some faint, others far more recent. Her eyes hovered over the scars, but she didn’t remark on them.

  “No,” he said, biting off his words. “You saw what you saw, but God, Birdy, you know me. You know I couldn’t have hurt Anna Jo. It isn’t in me to hurt anyone, least of all her.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” she asked, though she knew he had. At least to her. He had told her on that sodden trail just after it happened.

  “You mean take the stand to testify? Like anyone would believe an unemployed drug user like me? That would have been pretty useless, don’t you think?”

  Birdy wanted to disagree with her long-lost cousin just then, but she knew he was probably right.

  “Do you hear from your family?” she asked, regretting the question almost the instant it came from her lips. Birdy hadn’t meant it to hurt him, she just wanted to know. Tommy’s mother, her aunt, had pretty much iced her out of that side of the family—payback for her testimony.

  He looked away at a little girl playing a card game with her father and Birdy answered for him.

  “I’m sorry. I thought ...” she said.

  “Mom’s been married twice now. Somewhere along the way she’s been too busy for me,” he said. “Not like I’m a kid anyway.”

  Birdy didn’t say so, but she understood. “I think I’ll get a Coke. Sure you don’t want one?” She looked at Tommy and a guard one table away. The man with a faint moustache and eager-beaver eyes nodded that it was okay for her to get up and go to the vending machines. Tommy followed her across the room filled with wives and girlfriends mostly, a few kids. Some passed the time playing checkers. Others read books in tandem like they were in some library for criminals.

  Birdy inserted three quarters and the change tumbled to the coin return.

  “Damn,” she said. “Must be out of soda.”

  “Just tricky,” Tommy said. “I’m not allowed to touch the machine, but I’m told you have to drop the change in very slowly. One, then the next, then the last.”

  Birdy did as he suggested and was rewarded with a cold can of diet soda.

  “I’ll take one, too,” he said.

  She looked over at the guard watching them. He nodded that it was all right for her to hand him the pop. She dropped three more coins and retrieved another can.

  As Birdy turned, Tommy leaned a little closer and whispered, “I don’t want anyone to hear me. Please, Birdy. I need you to believe in me.”

  “Are you being mistreated?” she asked, her voice as quiet as possible.

  “Please return to the table,” the faintly mustachioed guard said.

  Birdy felt a chill and it wasn’t from the icy cold soda.

  “You’ve been up for parole twice,” she said. “Just tell them you’re sorry.”

  “I didn’t do it. And if you don’t get me out of here, I’ll probably die here. I don’t want to die in this place.”

  “You’ve served your time,” she repeated.

  “Here’s something that might not have occurred to you. Prison is more than bars and the guards. Prison is how people see you. I have some honor, Birdy. Help me get home as a free man, a man who didn’t kill the girl. I never would have done that. Tell me you understand that.”

  “I do. That’s why I’m here. I came because of your letter.”

  Tommy looked confused. “What letter?”

  “The letter you sent me. The reason I’m here.”

  Tommy shook his head. “I’m glad you’re here, but I didn’t send a letter to you. I mean, I did write to you years ago, like I wrote to everyone. You know, asking forgiveness for what I’ve done. Part of the program.”

  “I never got that letter,” she said. “The letter I’m talking about came last week.”

  Tommy touched his chest with his forefinger. “Not from me it didn’t.”

  They sat back down and faced each other. She hadn’t dreamt it. She’d read the letter. She’d come all that way. But if Tommy didn’t send it, then who did?

  Birdy knew that she’d carried Tommy’s case in the Bone Box all those years for a reason. Deep down, she didn’t believe he really could have killed Anna Jo Bonners.

  At the same time she wondered just why it was that he—or someone—called on her to help now. It would take only moments for that answer to come to her.

  An alarm sounded and the visit was over. Just like that. There was an awkward quiet, like the conclusion of a first date when both parties know there will never be a second. Birdy wasn’t certain what she could really do, or why she should do it. Tommy and the other inmates stayed at their tables as the visitors filed out. Outside the visitation room, the forensic pathologist from the other side of the mountains lined up with the friends and families of Washington state’s most notorious.

  It was obvious from their chatter that many knew each other. Regulars. The word fit. For the most part the people leaving their men and boys behind were so very average. There was nothing scary about any of them. Not a single one of them, save for a woman who never managed a smile, looked like they even knew a hardened criminal. They were the other side of a violent crime. They were on the side of the perpetrator, the convicted. Every one of them had come to show an inmate something they could get nowhere else—compassion and love.

  Birdy, at the rear of the line, started for the corridor that would lead her out of the prison, out the door to lives where no one knew they’d spent four hours and a bag of quarters playing table games and talking about the dullest of things. Like anyone. Like people at home. That is, if home included a baby-faced rapist, an axe murderer who ironically worked in the prison kitchen as a meat cutter, and a seventy-year-old man who had strangled his wife of almost fifty years one Christmas morning with the very necktie she’d given him (“Bea knew I hated plaid,” he joked whenever the subject came up).

  For every inmate with a visitor that afternoon, Birdy knew, there were probably scores of others who never had that human contact with anyone from outside. Never had visits with anyone, except maybe the occasional convict groupie or an eager-beaver churchgoer who wanted to save someone’s hardened soul from the system that only existed to make them pay for their sins in an earthly way.

  And then there was Tommy.

  As far as Birdy Waterman knew, until that afternoon when she came calling, he hadn’t had a single visitor. Birdy wondered if someone could be the same person they always were if they had no contact with those who knew him. Wasn’t part of who you were how others related to you, feeding your personality traits, shaping your character with their own? And yet Tommy still seemed like Tommy. A little subdued, certainly thin and haggard, but still Tommy nevertheless. During the visit he occasionally punctuated what he said with a short laugh—even if nothing was funny. When she heard the laugh, she was transported back to the Tommy he was before he became the Tommy who killed Anna Jo.

  Birdy remembered how the two of them had spent one insufferably hot day picking huckleberries. They’d cursed how small the berries were and worried that they’d never get enough to fill that half-gallon container that her mother had insisted was required for a pie. It was a couple weeks before Anna Jo’s murder. Now it seemed like days ago, not decades. She and Tommy had picked and picked and picked for hours. When it looked like they’d never get enough berries, To
mmy had the bright idea of buying some from a vendor.

  “Your mom is too much of a stickler,” he’d said. “So let’s give her what she wants to make her happy.”

  The berries cost him his last dollar, but he didn’t care.

  Natalie Waterman did care. The berries they bought were not huckleberries, but blueberries.

  “Sorry, Aunt Natalie,” Tommy said. “I thought they looked a little large for hucks.” He flashed his bright white smile, gave that little laugh, and shrugged in the way that just made it easy. Everything was easier with Tommy, back then.

  As Birdy followed the queue and turned the corner toward the metal detectors and the glass-walled station where the guards monitored every blink of someone’s eyelash, a finger jabbed at her shoulder. It startled her.

  “I know why you’re here,” a man’s voice said, as she spun around. “Maybe even more than you do.”

  It was the same guard—the one who’d watched her and her cousin as they visited.

  “Excuse me?” she answered, looking him over. She read his ID badge: Ken Holloway. He was smaller there in the corridor than he was when he commanded a chair upfront overlooking the prisoners in his quadrant of the room. He had soft green eyes and a pockmarked face. Not handsome, not ugly. Despite the fact that he carried a gun, worked with the worst of humanity day in and day out, Sgt. Holloway seemed concerned.

  “Your cousin isn’t well,” he said.

  “What do you mean well?” she asked.

  The guard stopped walking. Birdy stayed with him as the other visitors shuffled toward the doorway. “It was all he could do to get out of his cell and get down to see you.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” she asked.

  “It’s none of my business,” Sgt. Holloway said. “But I like the guy. He’s probably the most decent guy in the prison—that includes the guards and the superintendent’s so-called staff. Them for sure.”

  He wasn’t answering her question. She asked again, this time directly. “Is he sick?”