Forgotten Bones

by Vivian Barz

  Maggie was a beautiful woman—blonde, curvy, tall—there was no question about it. Most males with a considerable interest in the opposite sex turned their heads to get a better look whenever she approached, but Maggie also had that special something that was impossible to articulate. Despite his determination to forget her, Eric had had a hell of a time scrubbing his ex-wife from his brain. Her Maggie-grin in particular: slight tip of the head—so slight it was nearly indiscernible unless you were looking for it—lips parted halfway over teeth, amused eyes twinkling. Even now that he hated her (now that he was trying to hate her, anyway), it was always that grin he saw whenever he pictured her face.

  It wasn’t just Maggie’s pinup looks that had made her desirable to Eric. It was her acceptance of his schizophrenia. She was okay with him being mentally ill when a lot of women weren’t. She’d accepted his moments of darkness with a straightforwardness Eric found saintly. There are worse things you can be than crazy, she’d told him. He had equated Maggie’s love to winning the marriage lottery, and he’d often pondered why she’d chosen him when she so easily could have had any man she wanted.

  Maggie was also intelligent, which had no doubt come in handy during her manipulation of Eric, though her intelligence extended beyond smarts and into the territory of wit. She was funny and could dish it out just as easily as she could take it, a quality Eric found rare in most people. Her voice was alluringly feminine, like auditory perfume, but it was her laugh that did it: deep and dirty, as if she were visualizing performing a filthy sex act in public. It was what made her truly beautiful. It was also what bugged him most whenever Jim came sniffing around.

  Jim, who was movie-star handsome and always would be, possessed what Eric considered That Guy humor. He was That Guy at parties who was hilarious without trying, never leaving a dry eye in the house. His witticisms often tap-danced around taboo subjects, yet he still managed not to offend, even when he was being a little mean. When Eric was a teenager, he’d tried to emulate Jim’s humor, but he’d always fallen flat. Jim made Maggie laugh a lot harder than he did, which Eric hated, just like he hated the way she would lean into Jim and clap a hand down on his shoulder whenever he’d said something particularly entertaining. Eric would have detected The Affair a lot sooner had he been wary enough to take such things to heart.

  Eric’s humor was not as universal as Jim’s and Maggie’s. His IQ of 138 placed him at a near-genius level, which was reflected in most of his anecdotes. His puns, while extremely clever to those smart enough to understand them, typically referenced science, literature, and pop culture. His geniality rested within his awkwardness and self-deprecation; he was a nerd fortunate enough to have been born attractive, his floppy brown hair and the small gap between his two front teeth only adding to his boyish charm. Thus, he was granted the attention of others more often than not.

  But never, of course, as much as Jim.

  Though Eric had loved teaching geology to undergrads at Warrenton, a small private university in Philadelphia where he and Jim were both employed, he’d voluntarily, albeit bitterly, resigned from his position. Jim, who’d hoarded most of the practical genes in the family, had never once considered stepping down from his position as professor of global economics. Of course he hadn’t.

  Compounding Eric’s bitterness was his loss of colleagues (barring Jim; that went without saying), many of whom he considered family. They, in turn, held Eric in high esteem, often trekking clear across campus to chitchat about music or to get his expert opinion on fossils they’d found on vacation. The problem was that not one of them had seemed surprised when they learned about the divorce. He could see it in their eyes; they knew what Jim had been up to with his wife. How they knew, Eric did not know—he didn’t want to know, though he’d spent many fitful, sheet-soaked nights speculating. A long, lustful look exchanged at the faculty Christmas party, perhaps, or a compromising discovery in Jim’s office after Maggie had forgotten to lock the door. Whatever the case, Eric’s former coworkers pitied him—that was humiliatingly obvious—and had maybe even grappled with telling him about The Affair on more than a few occasions.

  That his wife and brother had shacked up was almost cliché enough to be funny, though Eric hadn’t laughed much when he learned of Jim and Maggie’s recent engagement. He’d found it even less hilarious when Maggie told him she was pregnant, news that had shocked him to the core, since she’d insisted throughout their marriage that she didn’t want children. He was going to be the uncle of his ex-wife’s baby. How sweet.

  The disgrace of it all was nearly too much for Eric to bear, and for the initial weeks following The Affair, there had been days when keeping a grasp on his sanity had been a task akin to wrestling a greased pig. The colors around him had started to seem just a little too bright, the sounds too loud, the strangers too close. He failed to recall what day it was, sometimes even what month. He’d been sharing a bed with schizophrenia long enough to grasp that he needed to act fast, or else he might just lose control of his senses completely. And so he’d found a new teaching job at a small community college in Northern California, over three thousand miles away from what he would later come to think of as his past life in Philadelphia. It was a massive step down, both in prestige and pay, but Perrick City College had hired him swiftly and was thrilled to have someone with his expertise.

  Most important, they knew nothing of the scandal he’d suffered at the hands of Maggie and Jim.

  A fresh start.

  CHAPTER 3

  Susan found Police Chief Ed Bender in the station’s break room, hunched over the latest copy of Perrick Weekly and slurping black coffee. A traditional man, he’d sooner cut off his own hand than use it to supply a coffeehouse with a few bucks of his hard-earned money for something he could easily make himself for a couple of dimes.

  Ed’s mug was cracked on the handle, stained with layers of age like the rings of a redwood’s ancient interior. He’d been using it back when Susan had volunteered at the station as a teenager—probably had used it even back when he’d volunteered at the station some thirty-odd years ago. Ed was a man who strictly abided by the old axiom about fixing things only if they’re broken, though Susan suspected he simply didn’t like change.

  Ed glanced up at Susan as she entered. “You’re looking a little worse for wear, kid.” He nudged a chair out for her from underneath the table, which she gratefully accepted.

  She wasn’t offended—she probably did look rough. “Long night. Sun’ll be up soon,” Susan commented as she lifted her chin toward the clock on the wall. Her adrenaline depleted, she was crashing hard, so exhausted that she was practically slurring. “Flynn’s on-site now, holding everything down.”

  Ed nodded at the clock in acknowledgment. Ed and Susan regularly communicated in gestures, unarticulated insinuations. Neither were particularly chatty, though Ed was certainly the quieter of the two, as if he’d used up all his words during his decades on the job and had only silence left until his impending retirement.

  Ed sat back and folded his hands atop the paper. “How are you holding up?” He may have been mildly apathetic toward crime fighting as of late, but they could never say he wasn’t unfailingly available to his underlings.

  Susan offered Ed a half smile. “I’ve been better. Upright and breathing, though, so I guess I can’t complain.” She could feel his eyes taking her in. His fatherly concern for her was a double-edged sword that could sometimes blur professional boundaries, providing both comfort and frustration on the job.

  “It’s always rough when kids’re involved.”

  “Yep. Sure is.”

  Susan knew what Ed was getting at, but he was too respectful to come right out and say it—unfortunately, the corpse by the telephone pole wasn’t the only dead child she’d encountered on the job. Shortly after Susan had joined the force, she’d been sent to a squatter’s den—there were surprisingly many in a town as seemingly wholesome as Perrick—on a noise complaint. It was there that
she stumbled across baby girl Gaby. The toddler had been dead for nearly two whole days. Gaby’s mother, Darla, was so out of her head on whatever cocktail of chemicals she’d injected into her flat veins that she hadn’t spotted Gaby mistaking a sandwich bag of prescription downers for candy. Later, sobered by lockup, Darla had gone so hysterical after she learned of her daughter’s death that it had taken three officers to get her under control. Darla overdosed on a speedball, provided by her pimp / occasional boyfriend, before the case was brought to trial.

  Susan was far too tired to engage in any Dr. Phil–type conversations about the deceased. One of Ed’s finer attributes, Susan felt, was that he didn’t pry. Some of the more jaded officers at the station suspected this was mainly due to near-retirement apathy, but Susan didn’t agree, at least not when it came to her job performance. Ed trusted her competency, she knew. Changing the subject, she said, “Still no sign of Gerald Nichol.”

  Ed sipped his coffee. “No big shock there. This time, they’ll lock him up and throw away the key. He knows that.”

  “They should’ve done that to begin with,” Susan said. “Locked him up and thrown away the key, I mean.”

  Ed shrugged. What can you do? “I’m surprised you even remember the case. I can hardly remember what I ate for breakfast.”

  “I remember hearing about it on the news back in the day—”

  “Oh, it was a massive story.”

  “I also read through some reports while I was waiting for Flynn. That Gerald Nichol, he’s a real peach.”

  “They never could nail him with any molestation charges, but they got him on plenty else.”

  “I read all about it,” Susan said with a shiver.

  In 2012, the Expressions Studio bust in San Francisco was one of the largest child pornography distribution rings California had ever seen. The kicker—for Gerald, anyway—was that the IRS had initially coordinated the investigation after suspecting Expressions Studio owner Hugh Jarvis of tax evasion; it was during a computer audit that the photographer’s private folders were unearthed. Before the Department of Homeland Security could say thirty years in prison with a $250,000 fine , Jarvis was rolling on his buyers. All fifty-nine of them, including Gerald Nichol.

  Though no evidence had been uncovered to suggest that Gerald had ever physically harmed his victims—not until recently, that was, with the discovery of the boy’s body—there was enough to prosecute him on possession of child pornography. And distribution: he’d traded Jarvis’s photos online the same way baseball fans swapped cards of their favorite players.

  Ed said, “Gerald didn’t stand a chance in court. Don’t even know why they bothered to have a trial. Everyone’s entitled to one, I guess. They got him some public defender straight out of law school—kid was barely tall enough to reach the bench. His contempt for sex offenders was so obvious that he might as well have hired a skywriter on the day of Gerald’s sentencing. That’s pretty bad, when even your own lawyer can’t hide how much they hate you.”

  “And now he’s on the street,” Susan said with a scowl. “Gotta love that overcrowding.”

  California had more inmates than space to keep them. The nonviolent offenders who behaved themselves in lockup sometimes got out early, and the only violence Gerald had encountered in Millstone Penitentiary had been what other inmates had delivered to him. If there was anything convicts hated more than snitches and cops, it was a child predator.

  “I called Gerald’s parole officer, Juno Tomisato.”

  Ed raised his eyebrows. “I’ve dealt with him before—cantankerous on a happy day. Bet he was thrilled to hear from you in the middle of the night.”

  “Beyond. Anyway, Juno wasn’t too surprised that Gerald took off. He said that he’d likely commit suicide before going back to prison.”

  “Good. Save the taxpayers some money.”

  Juno Tomisato’s exact words to Susan were that prison for “kiddie diddlers” was hell. And that was putting it lightly. Gerald’s charges had been kept hush-hush, as they always are for creatures of his ilk, but in lockup people talk. Even in protective custody—PC yard, as it’s known to Millstone cronies—Gerald’s days had been filled with threats of beatings. Rape. Castration. His food was stolen, his cell ransacked, his mattress and sheets doused in assorted fluids from anonymous donors. He’d been violated every way a man could be violated, and in ways no well-balanced human being would ever dream of. One needed to look no further than Gerald’s face to find proof of the savagery his criminal peers had bestowed: a wobbly half-moon razor blade scar along the jawline, ear to chin. A Millstone insignia he would wear forever. The mark of a chester.

  “A man like him can’t hide forever,” Ed said. “No money and no friends. No real family, either—his mother’s up at Emerald Meadows, so you know she’s not keeping him. Eventually that creep’s going to crawl out from whatever rock he’s hiding under, and we’ll nab him.”

  “Speaking of Gerald’s mother, if it’s okay, I’d like to interview Mary Nichol in the morning.”

  “Hell, you won’t get much out of her. She must be close to a hundred now.” Ed tapped his skull. “She’s probably gone a little soft.”

  “She’s ninety-six,” Susan confirmed. “Do you know her?”

  Ed shook his head. “No, but it’s hard not to know a little something about everyone in a town as small as this.”

  Susan rubbed her eyes, blinked the world into focus. Screw the TV marathon; screw the ice cream. It was straight to bed for her. “Oh, well, I’d still like to interview her. Couldn’t hurt, right?”

  Another shrug. “If you think it’ll help. Just don’t get your hopes up.” Ed made a move to get up. “Why don’t you head on home. There’s nothing more you can do tonight, anyway. I’m going to pack it in myself, once I hear back from county.”

  “Oh? They going to assist on this one?”

  “Won’t know anything until I hear back. Can’t imagine what the hell they’d be doing over at the sheriff’s office this time of night that’d keep them from returning my call.”

  “Want me to swing by on my way home, see what the holdup is?”

  “Kid, you’re one step away from zombie right now—you’ve got more red in your eyes than blue. They’ll get back to me soon enough.” He gave the Perrick Weekly a shake. “I’ve got the paper to read until then. Now, go on home and get some sleep.”

  He didn’t need to tell her again. Home she went, and sleep she did.

  CHAPTER 4

  Eric had heard that losing everything was cathartic. What he was now beginning to suspect was that this was most likely a claim perpetrated by those who had lost everything and were only telling themselves what they needed to so that they could keep crawling out of bed each day and feel like dying a little less, a little less.

  Losing everything—not just his wife, his home, his brother, his self-esteem, and his prestigious teaching position but also his actual stuff —did not make Eric feel liberated in the slightest. It made him feel like a big fat failure. With his milk crates of records and trash bags of clothes, it gave him the sensation of traveling back in time, like he was more of the directionless college student he’d been at twenty and less of the respectable college professor he supposedly was today. Like each morning he was putting his identity on inside out while dressing in the dark.

  It embarrassed Eric greatly when his nice landlady met him in the driveway of his new rental in Perrick. When she looked over his Jeep, whistling, and said, “Boy, you sure do travel light.” It embarrassed him because what Doris Kirsch was seeing wasn’t just what he was traveling with. It was all that was left of his former life.

  In fairness to Maggie (not that she deserved any), Eric’s forfeiture of possessions had been his doing. He was so beaten down by the end of their separation—just so over it—that he’d told her to keep everything he’d left behind. He didn’t want to argue, he’d said, and she could throw a match on it all and dance in the light of the flames, for all he gave
a shit. He just wanted to move on with his life and forget the whole thing. Forget that he ever knew her too.

  Maggie, out of guilt (no question about her motive there), had tried talking Eric into taking what was rightfully his. Or at the very least splitting everything up, fifty-fifty, right down the middle. For the sake of civility. He wouldn’t hear of it, not only because they were way beyond civility (they’d passed that point in Moonflower Café around the time Eric’s fist touched down on Jim’s face) but also because the notion of getting together with Maggie to haggle over who should get what appliance or which one of them had chipped in more for the sofa was too awful to conceive.

  There was also the intolerable possibility that Maggie might feel less accountable if he were to accept her offer—that she might actually believe that she could atone for her adultery with nonstick cookware and lamps and rugs and books and power tools and bikes and bullshit. Eric couldn’t allow it, being treated like a contestant on some demented game show, where the smiley-slick host, who just so happened to look a lot like Jim, got to bed his ex-wife in exchange for all this slightly used stuff, a job demotion, and a shitty new life in sunny California! To even conceive that Maggie might feel magnanimous for what she perceived as generosity, the act of offering Eric his own property . . . no. Just fucking no.

  And if he wanted to split hairs, he could say that most of it was his property. Though his teaching salary hadn’t made him a rich man in any sense, he’d earned a hell of a lot more than Maggie had as an artist. There were few things inside their quaint (that was the word she always used, quaint ) two-bedroom starter home that she had purchased. So if anyone should feel magnanimous, it was Eric.

  The bright side of having nothing was that he didn’t have too many things to unpack. This was especially convenient because his rental had come furnished. The flip side of this was what it had come furnished with. The motif in Doris’s cottage was particularly bizarre, a style best described as “Victorian whorehouse meets fisherman’s oasis meets gringo Tex-Mex”: shelves cluttered with snow globes, dried starfish, and wooden lobsters; bronze lighthouse bookends; glittery sombreros tacked to the kitchen walls; gold-fringed lampshades; black lace throw pillows; a purple-sequined toilet seat cover. Looking around the place was like an LSD trip gone terribly, terribly wrong.