Forgotten Bones

by Vivian Barz

  He wondered just what had brought this on.

  The answer came to him quickly enough. Maggie and Jim.

  And let’s not forget the other enchanting activities that had plagued his life as of late: Divorce. Finding a new, lower-paying job. Moving across the country to a state he’d never once traveled to, let alone had any true friends in. These were all major life changes, and he was experiencing them concurrently. It was a wonder he hadn’t lost the plot sooner.

  Hell, even if he had started out stable, he’d probably be questioning his sanity by now.

  At least this incident could be explained as stress induced. It was when an episode came out of left field that he should really start to worry.

  You mean like coming home from band practice to find sugar on your floor but the house locked up tight? Eric shook his head, assuring himself once again that he’d been a victim (an unharmed victim at that) of vandals.

  Besides, just what was he supposed to do about any of it? He wasn’t living in Philly anymore. He was living in a small town on the other side of the country, where he had absolutely no one to vouch for him. People tended to get a little cagey once you dropped the sch-word. They started having all kinds of prejudiced ideas about semiautomatic rifles and clock towers and tinfoil hats, particularly when they didn’t know you from Adam. If word got out that he was seeing a dead kid in the classroom, or an even deader horse in the bedroom (he couldn’t decide which sounded more outrageous), he would become a pariah in no time. Worse, he could jeopardize his job. They might even try locking him up. One trip to the loony bin was already one trip too many in his lifetime, thank you very much, and he had absolutely no interest in going back.

  He wasn’t feeling aggressive, suicidal, or more depressed about his situation than usual. (He wouldn’t dare try to pretend he wasn’t feeling depressed at all .) And he wasn’t a danger to himself or to others. So . . .

  So this was what he was going to do: He’d hold his horses (though probably a poor choice of words at that precise moment) and not jump to ridiculous conclusions about losing his mind. He’d wait it out—give his life some time to regain balance. If after that the situation got any worse, then he’d make a call to his doctor back East and have a talk about switching up his meds.

  Tonight, however, he’d be doing his waiting from the sofa with the lights on, since even he wasn’t crazy enough to believe that he’d be able to catch one wink of sleep back in the bedroom. What he was going to do first, though, was change out of his soggy underwear and take a shower.

  After cleaning himself up, Eric made a cozy little bed on the sofa using spare sheets (electric blue and tropical fish patterned) he’d found mixed in with Doris’s towels. He set the alarm on his cell phone—thankfully, he’d left it charging in the kitchen—and then stretched out, thinking that it would be hours before he’d fall asleep. He was comfortably snoring within minutes.

  Eric woke in the morning with the sun glowing on his face through the front blinds. He was surprised to find that he felt okay, other than having a slightly stiff neck after his night on the sofa. He felt pretty damn great , actually, whether it was the sun or the few hours of sleep that had been responsible for lifting his mood.

  Grinning, he went into the bathroom to start his day.

  Eric’s feelings of optimism continued, and so he tried not to think too much about it when he saw what could have been hoofprints on the hardwood floor as he went in to strip his bed of its pungent sheets. An unfamiliar sensation of positivity had taken him over, and he did not wish to question much of anything for fear that it might go away completely. He whistled his way into the garage, grabbed a broom, and then gave the bedroom floor a few rapid sweeps, overlooking entirely the sun twinkling against a tiny object on the windowsill: a silver jack.

  CHAPTER 18

  Logging on to the computer at her desk, Susan peeped over her shoulder, looking about as guilty as any man would if locked away in a study watching a live webcam-girl show, prim wife tending to the kids in the other room. She saw that there was nobody lingering in close enough proximity to decipher what she was up to.

  Slowly, she relaxed, let her shoulders unravel.

  Most of the station’s officers were gone, off answering calls. Ditto on the FBI, who were out poking around on the Gerald Nichol farm. There were blissfully few civilians as well. The more credible citizens of Perrick had already delivered relevant information about Gerald Nichol during the first few days after the initial discoveries on the farm. Which left mostly crackpots, who, without steady jobs to go to, usually slept in late and didn’t start rolling in with their “tips” until much later in the afternoon.

  Susan had no idea where Ed might be lurking, so she had to be especially careful. For as old and achy as he complained of being, the man was surprisingly nimble; he could sneak up on a person as quietly as a ninja.

  Not that she necessarily had to hide what she was doing.

  Not exactly.

  Ed had told Susan that all information that pertained to the Overalls Boy case now belonged predominantly to the FBI and that she needed to cease interviewing any witnesses who might be tied to Gerald Nichol.

  Okay, she was forbidden , if you wanted to get technical about it.

  He had not, however, forbidden her from learning about local history. Which, for all Ed and the FBI knew, could be a hobby of hers. She was on her lunch break as well, so it was really of no concern to anyone other than herself how she perused the internet. If she wanted to spend her downtime studying the blog of a local historian who just so happened to know a thing or two about the 1960s disappearance of a certain overalls-wearing boy named Lenny Lincoln, so be it.

  Susan clicked through Ben Pepper’s blog until she located the contact section. It featured a photograph of Pepper standing on an ocean cliff at sunset with a gargantuan Saint Bernard at his side, as well as a brief bio: I’m Ben Pepper (but you can just call me Pepper—all my friends do), a Perrick lifer with my finger on the pulse of the town since 1944! He was, it seemed, quite the busybody. If 1944 was indeed the year he was born, that made Pepper a ripe seventy-five, though he was fit enough to pass for fifty. Susan imagined there must be more than a few town secrets locked within Pepper’s brain, lots of skeletons rattling around in his skull. She filled in all the required information on the contact form, providing her personal email and cell number. She also added a quick note about why she wished to speak to him, deliberately omitting that she was a police officer. She hit send. Pepper’s last post on the main page had been only the day before, so she was hopeful that she’d hear back from him relatively soon.

  After another look over her shoulder, she pulled from her handbag the stack of Perrick Weekly articles she’d printed from Pepper’s blog earlier that week. Highlighter in hand, she began reading each article over again, a lot more slowly this time. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, but she suspected that there was a vital piece of information that she was overlooking in the pages.

  It struck her once she got to the section marked with all the asterisks. As Pepper had notated, Lenny Lincoln’s mother and father were both deceased. But there was nothing on the status of Lenny’s brother, Milton, whom Lenny had been playing hide-and-seek with on the day he’d disappeared. At the top of the page, Susan jotted a note: Milton Lincoln still alive / living in town? Possible interview?

  If Milton was in town, she wouldn’t need to search too hard to find him. Interviewing him would be a little trickier. If Ed and the FBI found out, she’d likely—no, she would —be in serious hot water. Meeting up with a historian to discuss the good old days she could explain away easily enough, but she drew a blank on what line of BS she could possibly use to justify meeting with the man who was—oh, what a coinkydink—the brother to the boy she suspected the R&G guys had unearthed.

  If she were caught this time, she suspected Ed might even go as far as formally reprimanding her. He’d been acting as if her interest in the case were s
ome kind of personal slight against him, which was ridiculous, since she was only trying to do her job. She was disappointed that he’d assumed that she would give up so easily.

  She was even more disappointed that Ed was behaving so apathetically toward the murdered children of his town. Where was his sense of duty to the community that he’d been living in his entire life? The FBI were on the case, but they hadn’t taken over Perrick PD like rogue Viking invaders. Which Ed, himself, had gone out of his way to clarify. Had Ed asked to work with them, they most likely would have obliged or, at a minimum, kept him abreast of what was happening. But Ed, it seemed, wanted to be kept out of things completely.

  Susan tried to be fair by putting herself in Ed’s shoes. She hadn’t even racked up ten years on the force, so it was only natural that she veered toward the gung ho side of crime fighting. After a few decades of police work, her perspective might change. Maybe instead of feeling a rush when catching a criminal, she would feel sickened by the state of humanity. Perhaps, like Ed, she’d finally reach a point where she’d had enough.

  As aggravated as Susan was about Ed’s apathy and refusal to let her help out, she could understand his stress over her meddling. When subordinates ignored orders and went off on their own half-cocked missions, it made him look bad. Ed had done a lot for her. Apathetic as he was, he still deserved to retire with the dignity he’d earned during all his years on the job. The last thing she wanted was to cause him disgrace in front of her fellow officers and the FBI.

  Which was why she had absolutely zero intention of getting caught.

  Susan was just logging off her computer when her phone chimed with an email alert. It was Pepper. He was out of town for the day, but he had some free time later in the evening. If she fancied a chat, he could meet up with her at, say, Coolie’s Coffee Shop downtown around eightish? If it worked for her, he could give her a buzz when he got closer to town limits.

  Susan wasted no time replying. Yes, it certainly worked.

  “Shit ,” she muttered as soon as she set her phone down on the desk. She’d all but forgotten about the Augustine Grifters show she’d meant to catch after work. She shot off a quick text to her friend Cyndi, with whom she was attending the show at Luna’s, and let her know that she would be leaving the bar early. She didn’t think Cyndi would mind in the slightest being left on her own, as she was the type who regularly went to watch movies alone in the theater. And it wasn’t as if they wouldn’t know half the people in the crowd anyway, which reflected less on their regular attendance at bars and more on exactly how small a town Perrick actually was.

  She would have postponed with Pepper, but she knew how it went when trying to question the public. You had to strike while the iron was hot, or else the interview might never happen. Schedules changed, leads left town, and people suddenly stopped feeling so chatty. She didn’t know quite what yet, but she sensed Pepper might have some valuable information to impart—though she had no doubt that much of what he’d have to say would be based on speculation and rumors.

  But sometimes, a grain of truth could be found in even the most outrageous of tales.

  CHAPTER 19

  Based on Jake’s description of its “vibe” (Eric had found that many Californians openly conversed about things that would likely be considered fruitcakey around his old stomping grounds—vibes, energies, auras), the inside of Luna’s Pub looked exactly as Eric had predicted. West Coast cool met East Coast blue blood: heavy, dark wooden tables; brushed-chrome stools; industrial light fixtures. It smelled rich and boozy, but not unpleasantly so—more aged whiskey barrel than dirty frat house.

  Eric liked the place and was hoping it would like him and his drumming in return.

  As Eric had come to learn while playing in the Complete, there really is no limit to a drunk’s assholery potential. While onstage, the Complete had had drunks heckle them, throw bottles onstage, and grab at their instruments. The weirdest of all was the stumbling middle-aged woman who’d demanded the all-male group to “Show me your tits, you sluts!” before jumping onstage to flash the crowd her own. Still, he probably needn’t worry; Luna’s was considerably more upscale than most of the dives his college band had frequented.

  The crowd at Luna’s behaved itself. People cheered when appropriate, bought the band endless drinks, and even hollered song requests. Apparently, Augustine Grifters had quite the local following. A few of those followers were even cute women, duly noted by Eric and Jake.

  After a few minutes onstage, Eric started to feel a markedly unfamiliar sensation of contentment coursing through his veins. What struck him most was exactly how foreign it felt. It had been months since he’d felt so good, so weightless.

  So alive .

  Unfortunately, Eric’s eyes had fouler ideas about how the night should play out. They were just two songs into the set when he had his first vision, a lightning-fast flicker across the tall mirrors that ran along the back wall of the bar.

  Eric, who was accustomed to dark flashes in his vision—his floppy brown hair—was not alarmed. His natural assumption was that a lock of it had fallen over an eye, his aggravation being that he was using both his hands to drum. Jake, who could plainly see that Eric’s sweat-dampened hair was pasted back from his face, looked over as Eric puckered his lips and began to blow upward. He caught Eric’s eye and threw him the classic What the hell you doing, man? expression. It made Eric laugh.

  But then . . .

  Then Eric was remembering the time he’d gone skydiving at age twenty. Skip’s Sky Adventures had offered two basic types of jumps for first timers. The first, more conservative option, tandem, entailed jumping from the plane with an instructor strapped to his back. The second, far more reckless option, the AFF—which Eric learned stood for accelerated free fall —entailed Eric pulling his own rip cord, with two instructors at his side instead of attached to him. With the blind impulsivity of youth on his side, Eric jumped at the AFF. He’d had to sign a lot of papers, as there was a risk of splat if he panicked or screwed up. Once in the plane and climbing toward the jump height of fifteen thousand feet above ground level, Eric was seized by a terror that iced him all the way down to his bones. He was compressed by fright, an invisible vise grip cinched down tight across his chest, guts, and groin. Shivering, he’d thought: If I piss my jumpsuit, will it dry before I touch ground?

  Looking at those mirrors now, Eric suddenly felt as if he were back on that plane. Though supremely happy only moments ago, he sensed a foul terror crackling inside his chest, expanding but at the same time compressing. The air was thin and cold, and he was giddy, shivering as if he’d just been shoved into a meat locker and splashed in the face with a bucket of slush.

  The horse-creature.

  He saw its tail first, then its scabbed, maggoty midsection, and then finally its large, dead-eyed head. It was galloping backward within the mirrors on a loop, vanishing between the gaps of wall and then reappearing in each mirror that followed, starting over at the beginning after it reached the last.

  In his shock of seeing his stinky friend, Eric fell off beat. It was only a momentary lapse, but it was drastic enough for Jake to turn around and furnish Eric with yet another classic expression, the old Are you on crack? Madison, the band’s lead singer, also gave Eric a look over her shoulder, though hers was more of the annoyed Will you get it together? variety. Eric didn’t have to observe either look long; it was at that very moment that the lights went out inside the bar.

  The crowd hooted and whistled good-naturedly. Eric did not. Within the throng were glowing children apparently only he could see. So many children, well over a dozen.

  All of them dead.

  They, like the ghostly boy in overalls, who was also in attendance, were in various states of decay. Dressed in clothing from decades ago, they held various childhood memorabilia: girl about seven, baseball glove, blue-and-white-striped uniform, left eye and ear missing; boy about five, Ping-Pong paddle, cowboy costume, skin yellowed and prune
d; girl about four, plastic doll, corduroy bell-bottoms, skull rotting . . .

  All of them, with their sad, dead eyes, were staring directly at Eric.

  With them was an adult woman, whom Eric had initially dismissed as one of the spectators in the crowd because of her wobbly stance. She was swaying, as if still hearing music, like drunks in bars often did long after the band had stopped playing. Now Eric could see that she was as dead as the kids, though she must have been quite beautiful alive. Her long black hair, parted down the center with a daisy tucked behind an ear, draped down to just below her waist in two glossy curtains. Her russet-colored frame filled out her long dress like a song. Unlike the children, she wasn’t paying Eric attention. She was smiling down at the boy at her side, humming to him softly, her tresses obscuring the left side of her face in a screen of dark silk. She was pressing him against her moldy hip, as if to protect him from lurking danger. Her arm was only skeletal from the elbow down, the bones of her fingers tapping the boy’s shoulder in time with her melody.

  Why now? Eric thought. Why, right now, am I seeing this—

  The woman raised her head and caught Eric’s eye. It was then that he saw the black void where the bottom-left part of her face should have been. It was gone—not decayed but utterly gone , as if it had been dissolved, evaporated, blown to smithereens. The remaining right side of her rotten mouth curled up into a hideous sneer. Then came the surge of blood, spurting out from the hollow of her face, showering the living with shards of teeth and gobs of oozing red: blood clumping hair, clouding beers, dribbling into cleavage.

  Nobody noticed.

  But to Eric, it was so bright, so vivid—

  His mouth fell open, and he steeled himself to belt out a good long shriek. I don’t care if people think I’m crazy. I’m losing it, I’m losing it—