Forgotten Bones

by Vivian Barz

  Her eyes still down. “You with the press?”

  “No,” Eric said and then chuckled nervously. “I’m here because I have some information about the case.”

  That got her to look up and give him a once-over. She didn’t seem too impressed with what she saw. “Is that right?”

  Eric held steady. “Yes. That’s right.”

  Terri gestured lazily to the long bench to her left, where a dozen or so other concerned citizens sat waiting. “So do they. Apparently .” Snide emphasis. “You’ll have to wait. Could be hours.”

  “That’s fine.” Eric offered her a smile, and she rolled her eyes.

  “I’ll need to see your ID,” she challenged, as if expecting to trip him up with the request.

  “No problem.” Eric handed her his driver’s license, and she thrust a clipboard at him.

  She scowled down at the ID, his very existence aggravating her. “You still living in Pennsylvania?”

  “I just moved here.”

  “If you’re living here permanently, you’ll need to get a California ID. You’ll be fined if you’re pulled over without current information.”

  “Oh,” Eric said. “I didn’t know.”

  She shrugged. Whatever .

  She gave him a curt rundown on how to fill out the form. Eric did as he was instructed and then took a seat on the bench, casting surreptitious glances at others who were also waiting. The majority didn’t seem too weird, yet there were certainly some odd ducks in the mix, though he supposed this was a bold outlook for a man about to claim he had psychic dreams.

  He occupied his time by imagining worse places he could be at that precise moment. Deep underground in a sewer. A slaughterhouse in summertime. A shark’s belly. Jim and Maggie’s wedding.

  He wished he had brought a book.

  An officer finally came out for him about an hour later. She looked so different in uniform that initially he didn’t recognize her, but when he got close enough to look into her pretty blue eyes, he knew. The woman from Luna’s.

  Dream Woman Susan.

  CHAPTER 24

  Shit.

  He’d made a huge mistake. Maybe he could bolt before she recog—

  “Hey!” She smiled, as if they were old friends. “Eric the drummer, right?”

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  “That’s right.” He smiled back, wishing that the ground would open up and swallow him whole. He pretended to only just recall her name, as if he hadn’t been thinking about her frequently since their meeting. “Susan, right? I had no idea you were a cop.”

  “Guess we never got around to it last night, huh? I got a call while you guys were playing and had to take off. Bummer.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, bummer. I was looking forward to our talk.”

  “Me too,” she said with a little blush.

  (Let’s see how much she wants to talk to you after she finds out about the dead kid.)

  Susan looked down at the clipboard she’d picked up from Terri. “I’d think you were stalking me, showing up at my work like this,” she joked. “But it says here that you’ve got some information about the case?”

  Eric frantically racked his brain for a way out. If he stayed, this amazing woman would surely come to think that he was out of his mind. But if he left, the dead kid would only continue to haunt him, and he would go completely nuts. He had no way of actually knowing this would happen, but he knew .

  Could he pretend to faint? No, he could only feign a blackout for so long, or else they might call a very real ambulance.

  She was giving him a funny little smile because he still hadn’t answered.

  Eric said, “It isn’t exactly information , per se, but . . .”

  “But?” Susan’s smile was fading fast, replaced with a frown.

  “It still might help,” Eric quickly added. “But if you guys are slammed . . .” He made a show of looking around the station, as if suddenly realizing exactly how busy they were. “You know, maybe I should let those with actual tips talk to—”

  “Hey, you never know what might help,” Susan said brightly. The smile was back, though dimmed. “And you waited your turn, just like everyone else.”

  “Are you the one who will be, uh, taking me back?”

  “Sure am. The FBI’s got us assisting on the case, handling the interviews.”

  “Great.” Fuuuuuuuck.

  She gave him a little wave with the clipboard. They made small talk as they walked along a narrow corridor, ending at a stifling room toward the back of the building. It was furnished with a long table and three folding metal chairs. Eric sat down on one of them and jumped when its legs screeched on the floor as he pulled it closer to the table. Susan offered him a coffee, which he declined because he was already plenty jittery, and then took a seat opposite.

  Eric asked, “Is it always like this?”

  Susan laughed. “Not at all. Most days it doesn’t even look like we’re open. We’re a small station, but now that the FBI is here . . . well, you saw. The crowd comes and goes. It gets biggest just after the news runs an update.” She leaned forward, as if about to impart privileged information. “Nothing brings out the crazies like an infamous case. I heard they’re now showing Death Farm footage over in Britain. Just once I’d like to see America make international news for something good .”

  Eric cleared his throat. “The crazies?”

  Susan leaned back. “Everyone wants a slice of the action. We’ve had a lot of tips about Gerald Nichol—people who say they know him or where he’s run off to.”

  “I’ve never met the man,” Eric said, “if that disqualifies me as one of the crazies.” Though he’d made the statement jokingly, it sounded a tad defensive.

  Susan, as if suddenly remembering that Eric was there on an official matter, straightened. She studied the clipboard. “Okay, so what’s this tip of yours?”

  Eric sighed and then met her eyes. This is going to go one of two ways: bad or worse. “Let me just preface this by saying that I know what I’m about to tell you is going to sound more than a little strange. I want you to understand that even I get its crackpottiness.”

  She chuckled. “Okay.”

  “It’s . . . I . . . sometimes . . .” He paused to collect himself. “Sometimes I have dreams.”

  She brought her chin down toward her chest and looked up at him, her blue eyes skeptical. “Dreams.”

  “Now, I can already see that you’re starting to think I’m one of the crazies—”

  “Am not!”

  “Please just hear me out.”

  Susan clasped her hands together on the table. “Eric, I can assure you that whatever you have to say is not going to sound even half as insane as some of the other things I’ve heard today.”

  “Oh?”

  “Trust me ,” she said. “I talked to a guy about an hour ago who claimed that his pet parrot told him that Gerald is hiding out in Orange County. He said that we need to send a squad car to Balboa Island stat—and, yes, he actually used the term stat —because Gerald is holed up on a yacht, posing as a millionaire.”

  Eric barked out a laugh, feeling marginally better about the situation. “I can’t say that I’ve talked to any animals recently.”

  “Good.” Susan gave Eric a reassuring smile. “See, you’re already ahead of the game.”

  “I also want you to know,” Eric added, “that I’m not seeking credit or anything for coming forward. Actually, I’d prefer that my name stay out of this completely. I just started a new teaching job over at the college, so I’m not trying to make waves.”

  Susan nodded. “I’ll do my best, but you know that we’ll have to keep your information on file?”

  “Sure, sure,” Eric said. “All that I meant is that I’m not looking for attention. I don’t want or need to be some kind of star witness, or whatever the . . . crazies call it.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me what you know, Eric?”

  “Okay.” He rubbed his chin, h
oping to convey sincerity. “Like I’ve already mentioned, sometimes I have dreams. Many times, my dreams come true in ways that help people.”

  She frowned. “Help people? Like how?”

  “Like . . .” He pretended to recall a memory. “Okay, like this one time, my buddy . . . Tony . . . was flying to New Zealand. Only when he started to pack, he realized he didn’t have any idea where his passport was. He was leaving the next day, so he was frantic, right? No passport, no vacation. He started tearing his house apart, looking for it everywhere , but no go.”

  “Okay,” Susan said, her expression neutral.

  Where am I coming up with this? Eric thought. He knew a guy named Tony, sure—Maggie’s father over in Tennessee—but he was a man few would describe as worldly. Anthony Snider was the sort who appreciated steak and potatoes with lots of ketchup, Sunday football, and Walmart Black Friday sales and was proud to deem any cheese other than cheddar exotic. Eric doubted Tony would have even been able to locate New Zealand on a map, had it not been for his Lord of the Rings obsession.

  Eric continued, “I went home after seeing Tony that day and took a nap—he was still searching for his passport when I left. Anyway, while I was sleeping, I dreamed that Tony’s passport was under a car mat.”

  “A car mat?”

  Eric made a rectangle in the air with his fingers. “You know, those rubber thingies you put in cars to keep the carpet clean?”

  “Right, that’s what I thought you meant.”

  “Anyway, as soon as I woke up, I called Tony. I was sort of like I am now—I told him that it was going to sound crazy, but I had a feeling his passport was in his car under a mat.”

  “Was it?”

  “Yep.” Eric was stunned by how natural his story sounded, with every word of it being utter bullshit. “He went out to his car and checked while I was still on the phone. Apparently, he’d lost his driver’s license a few weeks prior, so he’d been using his passport as ID. He’d run a few errands after going to the bank one day but didn’t want to keep carrying his passport. He was driving his convertible around with the top down, and he was worried that somebody would steal it from his car—”

  “So he stuck it under the mat to hide it,” Susan finished.

  “That’s exactly right,” Eric said. “He’d forgotten all about it because his new driver’s license arrived in the mail that day.” He shrugged. “So that’s how my dream helped.”

  “That’s . . . quite a story,” Susan said, but not unkindly.

  “It is. But sometimes stuff like that just happens to me. I have no idea why, but it does.”

  Susan clicked her pen. “So you had a dream about the case?”

  “Maybe. I think so.” Eric sat back in his seat in a manner he hoped looked relaxed. “Lately, I’ve been having dreams about a little boy.”

  “A little boy,” she said, jotting down the information. “Can you describe him in a bit more detail?”

  “Sure. He’s young, about five or six, with brown hair and blue eyes. Lots of freckles.”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “He always wears the same outfit in my dreams, blue overalls.”

  Susan’s pen stopped moving. “Blue overalls, you said. Like denim?”

  “That’s right. You know, like what a farm kid would wear? But they look old. Denim is denim, I guess, but they always make me think of the past, like Leave It to Beaver era.”

  “You said always . How many times have you dreamed about him?”

  Eric pretended to mull the question over. “Oh, I don’t know, two or three times.”

  Susan made a few more notes. “And when did you start having these dreams?”

  “I started having them before those kids were found on that farm, if that’s what you’re asking.” Eric laughed, nervous. “This must sound so ridiculous to you.”

  “No, not at all,” she said, maintaining eye contact, and Eric thought, I bet she cleans up at poker . “I’m just wondering how the boy ties in with the farm.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen it in the dream—the farm in the background.” Okay, it was in a newscast on a television that turned on by itself. Oh, and I also heard a crowd of children screaming there.

  “Right.”

  Eric clasped his hands together on the table. “The more I talk, the more embarrassed I feel.” And the more I worry that I’ve blown any chance I might have had with you. “I hope you don’t think badly of me.”

  “No, really, Eric, you don’t sound that bad,” she said genuinely enough. “And the fact that you’re worried about what I think shows me how normal you actually are. It’s the whack-jobs who don’t stop to consider how insane they might sound.”

  “I appreciate that,” Eric told her, though he wondered how far her definition of “whack-job” extended. Would she think differently of him if she knew he would be taking pills for the rest of his life to control an incurable mental illness? “I almost didn’t come here, but I would feel terrible if something bad happened to some poor kid because I didn’t speak up.”

  “Want to know what I think?” she asked, and he nodded. “I have no doubt that you had those dreams. You seem like a nice guy, and I’m sure you do want to help.”

  “That’s all I want to do.”

  “I believe you.” She made a reaching-out gesture, as if intending to touch his hand, but then quickly retracted. “But maybe you’re connecting your dreams with the murders because you saw a story about it on the news. You want to help, and that doesn’t make you crazy. It makes you a good person.”

  Eric almost left it at that, but he’d already come this far. “There’s more that I haven’t told you.”

  Susan clicked her pen. “Oh?”

  “The boy in my dreams keeps telling me a name: Milton.”

  Susan’s head jerked up. “Milton?”

  Eric nodded. “He told me to ‘find Milton.’ I can’t be sure of this—this is just an assumption—but I’m thinking Milton might be one of Gerald’s victims.”

  “Milton,” Susan repeated as she scribbled down the name.

  “Does the name mean anything to you?” Eric asked.

  She shifted uncomfortably. “I can’t really . . .”

  Eric held up his hands in understanding. “I’m guessing you probably aren’t allowed to say. That’s perfectly fine.”

  “Okay, so a little boy in denim overalls and someone named Milton,” Susan summarized. “Anything else?”

  “A couple other things, though I can’t imagine their significance. A woman,” said Eric. “She’s pretty, early twenties . . . dressed like a hippie.”

  Susan held her poker face as she reached up and rubbed the back of her neck. “What about her?”

  “That’s the thing: I don’t know . I’ve only seen this stuff in my dreams, and everything is just so scattered, so . . . nonsensical , you know? But I think she might be connected in some way. I don’t know.” Eric ran a hand through his hair. “Oh, and the numbers twenty-two and twenty-three . . . I can’t imagine what they could possibly mean.”

  “Why those numbers specifically?” Susan asked carefully.

  “I have absolutely no idea. But seeing how you’re gripping that pen, they’re important.”

  “I . . .”

  “Right. You can’t say,” Eric said. “Okay, last thing: jacks—you know, the metal kind used in a kid’s game? And a red ball.”

  Susan sat up very, very straight. “Mm-hmm.”

  Eric cast his eyes skyward and sighed. “Crazy, I know.”

  But Susan didn’t look like she thought it was crazy. She looked like a ghost had crept up behind her and breathed down her neck. Like she wanted to run from the room screaming.

  CHAPTER 25

  Despite her elation at finally, finally being included in the Death Farm case (even if it was just listening to tips), Susan wasn’t entirely ready to go back to interviewing the public just yet.

  She went back to her desk to go over the notes she’d taken during the pe
rplexing interview with Eric Evans. Though she didn’t really buy his whole psychic-dream act, she also couldn’t fathom how he could have possibly known the information he did, not unless he was paying off an employee in the FBI or at the morgue. That did not seem likely, given how high profile the case was.

  She grabbed a handful of Skittles from her desk and crammed them in her mouth, contemplating as she crunched. Despite the puzzlement it caused, the one good thing, she realized, about his statement was that it gave her the fodder she needed to take her theories to higher-ups.

  She felt it wisest to start with Ed.

  Susan let out a long sigh as she entered the break room. As she’d expected, Ed was in there on his own, once again reading Perrick Weekly and sipping coffee. She’d pumped up the fervor of her exhale for his benefit so that he wouldn’t get a sense of her nervousness over the information she was about to deliver. She plopped down heavily on the chair across from him for effect.

  “Those cuckoo bananas got you riled?” Ed asked. That was Ed’s special term for the crazies, and it always got a chuckle out of Susan.

  “They smell delightful—that’s for sure. I’ve found that their stench tends to correlate with their level of crazy. The worse the stench, the cuckooier the banana,” she said sourly. She tapped a finger on the Perrick Weekly . “Anything good?”

  “Same shit, different smell.” Another Bender lyrical gem. “They mentioned you and that R&G guy.” Ed pulled up a corner of the paper, showing Susan the article. A hint of a smile twitched his mouth. “The one who gets all tongue tied around you. Gabe?”

  Susan rolled her eyes.

  “You should go out with him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he likes you.”

  “So? That dirty old man butcher at Safeway also likes me. Should I go out with him too?” she quipped with a snort.

  “If it means free steaks, sure.” Ed wriggled his eyebrows to show that he was kidding.

  With a humph, Susan made a move for the paper.

  Ed moved it out of her reach. “What’s wrong with Gabe?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with Gabe. I’m just not interested.”

  “How do you know if you haven’t gone out with him? You’re never going to find anyone if you don’t stop being so damn picky.”