The Secrets of Bones

by Kylie Logan

  “Devious. Yeah, I know.” Jazz scraped her palms on the legs of her pants. “Like we’re eavesdropping.”

  “Spying.”

  “Except it might help,” Jazz told Eileen, and before her conscience could stop her she stripped the ribbon from the bundle of cards.

  The notes were arranged by date, all of them at least three years old.

  “‘I hear your grades in English are improving. Good for you,’ this one says.” Jazz showed the oldest of the notes to Eileen. “And there’s another line at the bottom, written smaller, just like in the other note. ‘I see you in gleams pale as star-light on a gray wall.’” Jazz glanced up at Eileen, but the principal looked as confused as Jazz felt.

  “How about the next one?” Eileen asked.

  Jazz read it aloud. “‘Bs in all your classes! Your hard work is really paying off.’ And the bottom line on this one is, ‘And may you happy live, And long us bless; Receiving as you give Great happiness.’ I didn’t realize Bernadette was a poetry lover.”

  “She did like to give her students puzzles to work out as class assignments,” Eileen reminded Jazz. “I don’t suppose…”

  “That the last bits were meant as something for Maddie to figure out?” Her own question sounded weird, even to Jazz’s own ears. “I guess it’s possible.”

  “Look at the rest,” Eileen suggested. “Maybe they’ll help us make more sense of the whole thing.”

  Each note was nearly the same. An encouraging line or two for Maddie. A line at the bottom that sounded like song lyrics. Or poetry.

  Jazz reached for the last note just as another crack of thunder split the air and a streak of lightning brightened the room.

  “Here’s a change. This one doesn’t have a message for Maddie,” Jazz told Eileen. “Just another quote. ‘If I were damned of body and soul, I know whose prayers would make me whole.’”

  CHAPTER 21

  They made copies of the notes and put the originals back in Maddie’s locker so she wouldn’t know they’d ever been missing, and Eileen and Jazz might have puzzled over the mysterious quotes long into the evening if a crash of thunder didn’t shake the building and the power didn’t snap off.

  The emergency lights in the office and out in the hallway flashed on and Eileen grumbled.

  “I’ll call Frank,” she said. “Jazz, you go home. There’s nothing else we can do here tonight.”

  Jazz didn’t leave. Not right away anyway. She waited with Eileen until Frank arrived. Now that Eddie was in the slammer, Frank was the only one on the maintenance staff, an older-than-middle-aged guy who had been livid when he found out what Eddie was up to and, as if he could somehow make amends in the name of maintenance workers everywhere, was only too happy to help Eileen in any way he could.

  The entire neighborhood was without power and Wally wasn’t used to the routine—Jazz’s arrival, treat time, walk, and back home for dinner—getting turned upside down. Jazz took him for a quick potty break in the backyard in the driving rain and came right back in to feed him by the light of the LED lantern her dad had once given her “just in case.” They’d go for their longer walk in a little while, she promised Wally. She didn’t bother to tell him—or admit to herself—that even though Eddie was in police custody and she didn’t have to worry about being followed, being threatened, or getting jumped, she would feel more comfortable walking the neighborhood once the streetlights were back on again.

  It took close to an hour for that to happen, and by that time Wally was a ball of pent-up puppy energy.

  Even though they were pelted with rain while they walked, Wally insisted on sniffing every inch of the ground, every bit of litter, every discarded cigarette butt. He didn’t listen when Jazz told him to sit. He strained at the leash, intent on chasing Marvin, the cat who lived at the house on the corner and had the bad luck of darting out from under a rosebush just as Wally walked past. The dog was, in general, a royal pain, and by the time they got home he was heavy with the scent of wet dog and Jazz was soaked to the bone.

  She put him in his crate (he was not happy about that, either) and took a quick shower, then went downstairs and grabbed a tub of salsa out of the fridge and a bag of chips from the cupboard before she flopped onto the couch.

  When Wally whined, she took pity on him and let him out of his crate. But not enough pity to share her salsa.

  “You sit and be good,” she told him. “If you remember how.”

  He was good, at least for a few minutes, and Jazz took the time to let her mind wander.

  “‘If I were damned of body and soul, I know whose prayers would make me whole.’” She scooped up salsa with a chip before she glanced to where Wally was stretched out at her feet. “Odd, huh? Maybe Bernadette was thinking about how she didn’t believe in the angel voices anymore?”

  Wally didn’t offer an opinion.

  “Except…”

  Jazz thought about all the notes. Bernadette had started writing them long before she realized she was fooled into thinking the angels were talking to her in the chapel. So that last note—dated just before Bernadette died—might have had something to do with her angelic illusions being shattered.

  But the earlier notes?

  Jazz might know everything there was to know about training dogs to find the dead, but she knew less than nothing about poetry.

  She’d brought home the copies they’d made of the notes—“Better than someone finding them here at school,” Eileen had said—and she pulled them out and got onto Google.

  She started with the oldest note and discovered that the line Bernadette quoted, the one about pale starlight on a gray wall, was from a poem by someone named Lola Ridge. It was published in 1920 and titled “Mother.”

  “Not very helpful,” Jazz grumbled, and Wally might have actually cared if he wasn’t sound asleep and snoring softly.

  She got to work on the second quote, reading it out loud while she keyed in the words.

  “‘And may you happy live, And long us bless; Receiving as you give Great happiness.’”

  Another easy search. The poet was Christina Rossetti. The poem, “To My Mother.”

  “Well, obviously Maddie wasn’t Bernadette’s mother,” Jazz told Wally. “Maybe Bernadette might have been talking about her own mother. Or maybe about Doctor Parker. Or about something else completely different.”

  She tried the disturbing quote, the one about being damned.

  “Rudyard Kipling,” Jazz said. “And in case you’re interested, Wally…” She looked down at him. He was not interested. “The poem is ‘Mother o’ Mine.’”

  A coherent theory hadn’t formed in her brain yet. Not completely. But Jazz knew it was coming. She could feel the buzz in her blood, the rush in her veins. She sat up as straight as if the lightning that flashed outside sizzled up her spine. And she keyed in the last quote.

  “‘Come from the silence so long and so deep.’” The poem was by Elizabeth Akers Allen and called “Rock Me to Sleep.” It was about the poet’s mother.

  This time, Jazz swore the lightning wasn’t outside. It was right there in her living room, right there inside her, and Wally felt it, too. He sat up and barked just as Jazz grabbed her phone and called Eileen.

  There was no answer.

  “Sorry, buddy.” She looped a hand around Wally’s collar and piloted him into the kitchen to his crate, grabbed her keys, and headed out.

  The first place she checked was St. Catherine’s, but Eileen’s car wasn’t in the parking lot.

  Frank’s was gone, too.

  She tried Eileen’s phone again, and this time when she got no answer she wheeled out of the school parking lot and drove toward the boundary of the neighborhood.

  When St. Catherine’s first opened, one of the girls’ parents was working on a development of new condos in the area. The condos he built were spacious, stylish—and pricey. He gave one to the school, but only on the condition that Eileen would live in it. It was no surprise that she turne
d him down, but he persisted and they worked out a deal. Eileen would live there rent-free until he found a buyer. Once the condo was sold, the money would go to the school.

  Funny that in fifteen years, no buyer had ever come forward.

  The complex had been built to make the new construction look just right in the historic district. Rows of condos in muted colors, pole lamps along the sidewalks, their light fizzy and muted by the rain. The back of the condos on this particular street looked out over Cleveland’s steel mills, but from the front every time Jazz visited she thought she just as well could have been in Mayberry.

  She parked as close to Eileen’s place as she could and raced through the rain to the front door, where she rang the bell. When Eileen didn’t answer, she pounded on the door.

  Finally, a light flicked on in the front hallway and Eileen pressed her nose to the window to the right of the door.

  “What…?” She opened the door and stepped back to let Jazz in. She was wearing a white terry cloth robe and she had a towel in one hand. She scrubbed it over her wet hair. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure.” Jazz rushed into the living room. Though the condos were prime Tremont real estate and most were inhabited by young professionals who cared about things like interior design, Eileen lived simply. The living room was furnished with a gray couch with a coffee table in front of it and a chair across from it. On the table next to the chair was a book and a light for reading.

  Jazz had thrown on a rain slicker, and before she could soak the furniture or the carpeting with the raindrops that cascaded off it she stripped it off and carried it into the kitchen. She came back and waved the file folder that she’d kept dry by tucking it inside the slicker. Inside were the copies of the notes.

  “I’ve been Googling,” she told Eileen.

  “The notes from Bernadette? Those lyrics?”

  Jazz shook her head. “Not lyrics. They’re all lines from poems. Poems about motherhood.”

  Her head cocked, Eileen considered this, and Jazz knew exactly when the same idea that had rocked her to the core hit the principal. As if she’d been flash frozen, Eileen stood as still as a statue, then slowly, slowly, sank onto the couch.

  “You think Bernadette is—”

  “It makes so darned much sense, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner!” Jazz was too hyped to sit. She paced the living room. “It explains why Bernadette was so obsessed with Maddie. And it explains…” She would have slapped a palm to her forehead if she thought it would do any good. “Mark Mercer told me Bernadette broke up with him over the whole Maddie thing. And that seems weird, doesn’t it? Why would you feel more strongly about a student at school than you do about the man who wants to marry you? And at the convent in Canada, Sister Veronica told us that before Bernadette left there she was sick. She wasn’t sleeping. She wasn’t eating. She cried a lot.”

  “It happens, of course.” Eileen’s voice was as quiet as the patter of the rain on the windows. “Never to any of the nuns I’ve known, but I’ve heard stories. Bernadette took her vows, then she met someone, and…” Eileen’s shoulders rose and fell along with the deep breath she drew in and let out in a whoosh.

  “She loved to give her students puzzles and games. She left Maddie the clues.” As if there was any chance Eileen might have forgotten about them, Jazz opened up the file folder, and the copies of the cream and blue note cards spilled out on the coffee table.

  “What if Bernadette was Maddie’s biological mother?”

  * * *

  Jazz knew Nick was at a meeting of the Cleveland Police Patrolman’s Association that night. She was grateful he picked up the phone.

  “Say it again.” There was chatter in the background and she imagined Nick folded into one corner of the room, his phone pressed to one ear, his finger in the other, just so he could hear her better. “You think Bernadette was—”

  “Maddie’s mother. Yes. I think we found proof.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t sound convinced, and Jazz couldn’t blame him. She would lay out her theory in detail when he had more time to listen and a better chance to hear. For now, she had a request. “Can you ask the coroner, Nick? Can you find out if they can tell if a woman has had a child? I mean from the skeleton. Would they know from her remains if Bernadette had given birth?”

  He said they’d had a guest speaker at the meeting and then she heard his voice raised, the phone away from his mouth. “Fred!”

  Whoever Fred was, he must have come over when Nick yelled for him, because the next thing Jazz knew Fred was on the phone.

  “Fred Crile. Nick says you want to know—”

  “If there’s a way to tell if a woman’s given birth. From her remains.”

  Fred must have been a scientist. Or a cop. She knew this because he took his time answering. He was thoughtful. Careful. He wanted to be sure what he told her was accurate.

  He cleared his throat. “There are different theories, of course,” he began. “And some pathologists do dispute it. But if we were to study the presence of any dorsal pitting and the shape of the preauricular groove in conjunction with the marking of the interosseous ligament of the joint—”

  Scientist.

  Jazz groaned. “In English, please!”

  At least Fred had a sense of humor. He laughed. “In short, I do think it’s possible to tell if a woman has given birth from her skeletal remains.”

  “Yes!” Jazz punched a fist in the air. “Thank you. Put Nick back on the phone.”

  Fred did.

  “Can you have the folks down at the morgue check?” she asked once she’d told him what Fred told her. Or at least once she’d told him what she thought Fred told her.

  “I can talk to Gary Lindsey,” he replied. “He’d have to put in the request.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Do you think it’s important?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Well, it’s certainly strange to think she just happened to be teaching at the school her biological daughter attended.”

  Jazz held in the screech that would have betrayed her frustration. She couldn’t blame Nick. He was doing his job, getting his facts lined up. There was no way he could understand how finding out something so big made her feel as if they were finally inching their way toward the truth.

  “I’d bet anything it’s exactly why Bernadette applied for the job,” she told Nick. “You saw the photos, Nick. You know Bernadette was stalking Maddie. But what if she was watching her even before she started teaching here? What if she found out Maddie was going to attend St. Catherine’s and that’s why she decided to work here? We might never find that out for sure, but it makes sense, doesn’t it? Just like we might never find out how she located Maddie and her family in the first place. But she did. I’d bet anything that’s why she came to St. Catherine’s, to be close to Maddie.”

  “And you think this might have something to do with what happened to Bernadette?”

  If only she had the answer!

  Before she was obliged to come up with one, Jazz told Nick she’d talk to him soon and ended the call.

  “Well?” Eileen wanted to know.

  “He’s going to talk to Detective Lindsey. Then we’ll see.”

  “And you think—”

  It was only natural for Eileen to ask exactly what Nick thought.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Jazz admitted. “But I’d bet anything there’s something going on, something about Maddie and her parents, something about Bernadette giving a baby up for adoption, that led to her murder.”

  CHAPTER 22

  By the time Nick called the next day, it was after noon. Sitting at school and waiting for the phone to ring, Jazz felt as if she would jump out of her skin. She answered on the first ring and started talking before he even had a chance to say hello.

  “Did you know dyslexia can be inherited? I found that out this morning, Nick. Maddie’s dyslexic and Bernadette told us she wa
s, too. No wonder she was so anxious to help Maddie with her learning disability. She probably felt responsible. There’s another fact that proves my theory. What do you think, huh?”

  Silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Nick?”

  He cleared his throat. “I … uh … I talked to Gary Lindsey. He talked to the people down at the morgue.”

  She was too antsy to keep still and she walked over to her office windows and smiled out at the world. Sometime during the night the rain had ended, and sunlight glinted against the puddles on the sidewalks in the park. “And I bet they’re amazed we’ve come this far and found out so much. What did Lindsey say, huh? Is he jealous?”

  “He … uh…”

  Nick was not the type to hem and haw. He was plainspoken, direct, truthful. Except for the time he was playing ball with Manny in Jazz’s living room and knocked the framed autographed jersey of Omar Vizquel her brothers had given her off the wall. Nick had tried to cover up by cleaning up the broken glass, then hiding the frame and the jersey with the intention of having the whole thing repaired.

  Really, he should have just made the confession from the get-go.

  Instead, when she came home and saw the jersey was missing and demanded to know what happened to one of her most treasured possessions, he’d stammered out some crazy story about how her brothers had stopped by and borrowed it because they wanted to take some pictures of it.

  It wasn’t Jazz’s imagination.

  He sounded just as uncomfortable then as he did now.

  “What?” The single word tasted sour in Jazz’s mouth.

  Nick pulled in a breath. “The people down at the morgue, they told Lindsey they can’t be certain, that there are plenty of factors that go into looking at skeletal remains and determining if a woman has given birth.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Your friend Fred told me. Dorsal somethings and grooves and ligaments.”

  “Yeah, well, they took all that into consideration.”

  “And?”

  He cleared his throat. “As far as they can tell, she never had a child.”