The lights of town were up ahead, and he pulled the letter from his back pocket. He planned to leave it with the night-shift clerk so that Evelyn could read it first thing in the morning. As he approached the Straub Hotel, it was a surprise to see her sitting on the verandah at this late hour.
Oren walked up the steps and sat down beside her. She never acknowledged him, not even by a nod in his direction. By unspoken agreement, they sat in peaceful silence for a while. The beach could not be seen from this view, only the straight lines of the road, its railing and the broader stripes of sea and sky.
He studied her profile by moonlight, looking there for signs of Evelyn trapped inside that aging stranger’s body. Her lean jawline and high cheekbones had disappeared into loose folds of flesh. Her breasts sagged above a thickened waist and protruding belly. Yet he persisted in his search for a clue to her, as if she might be only hiding from him – though that was hardly her nature.
In the younger days of her forties, she had been the aggressor, taking him down with her strong tanned arms, sinking with him deep into a feather bed, her long legs wrapped around him – no escape – and never was it enough, not for him, not for her. And there had been feeling between them, as much as Evelyn had allowed. As a boy, he would never have betrayed her – even if it had meant jail. He would’ve lied for her, died for her. And was he still tied to her?
Yes. The strings were still there. He could feel a tug in the dark when she said, ‘Good evening, Oren.’
‘Hello, Evelyn.’ He said this as if he had just discovered her – and he had.
‘Glad to see you made it out of the woods tonight.’
When she spoke, it was easier to recognize her. He only had to close his eyes, and there she was. ‘Hannah told me you called the house tonight.’
‘I can guess why you’re here,’ she said. ‘When you see Cable Babitt, you tell that old bastard I know the sound of his jeep. It’s a piece of crap with a skippy motor. I know it like I know the sound of his voice.’ The wicker chair creaked as she turned to face him. ‘I could put Cable’s ass in a legal sling for taking you out to the cabin tonight. But I won’t mess with him – not this time. Satisfied?’
‘That’s not why I’m here.’ He gently laid his letter in her lap. ‘After Josh disappeared, you must have wondered why Swahn came to see you – how he knew. I swear to you, I never told anyone about us.’
‘I know that, Oren.’
‘When you went to the sheriff . . . to give me an alibi . . . why did you lie for me?’
‘Get off my verandah, Oren.’
Upstairs in her bedroom, locked in the safe among her jewels, Evelyn Straub kept a yellowed envelope. Inside it was a photograph that Oren Hobbs had sent to her from a boarding school in New Mexico. The image was a cold nightscape of barren rock formations and vast tracts of sand – so different from the forestlands where he had grown up. Scrawled upon the back of the picture, a brief note had voiced the only complaint of a teenage boy in an alien world far from home: ‘The judge has sent me to live on the moon.’
Alone again, Evelyn resumed her vigilance over that cold ball of light hanging in the sky. She had never read a human face into its surface features, but always saw it for what it was, a sterile and distant chunk of rock. And now, because she refused to recognize the grown man who had come to sit with her tonight, she fell back into her old ritual of the lunar cycles. Her eyes turned upward as she spoke softly, bidding good night to the boy on the moon.
THIRTEEN
Though he was off to a late start this morning, Ferris Monty drove his yellow Rolls-Royce into town at the leisurely pace of a longtime Coventry resident. He had sacrificed a night’s sleep to review his abandoned notes and false starts, reams of words written many years ago. Fortunately, all the landmarks and most of the people were right where he had left them on the pages of his unfinished opus.
He parked at the curb in front of the public library, a one-room brick building made ludicrous by grand marble pillars and a lintel that overshot the roof. A hundred years ago, when Coventry’s only employer had been the sawmill, this building had been the lofty donation – call it a joke – of the town founder, a man who believed that only a handful of his workers could read or have need of more than a few books.
Ferris stepped out of the car, and a small woman with mouse-brown hair caught his eye. She stood on the sidewalk and gaped at him as he turned onto the flagstone path that led to the door. Her hands flew up, fingers fluttering a warning. Ah, but now her eyes turned toward a front window, perhaps in fear of a watcher, for she thought better of reminding him that no one in Coventry ever goes to the library. He envisioned twitching whiskers when she scurried away, as mice will do when they are in the neighborhood of a cat – or worse.
Oh, definitely worse.
The library door opened onto a room filled with rows of bookshelves, and he walked into a wall of stink. Although the librarian was nowhere to be seen, he knew she was here. The smelly epicenter could only be Mavis Hardy. Her body odor was formidable, even mythic; it was said to have permeated the pages of every book. However, he could hardly neglect to interview a town icon as important as a murderess at large.
He rounded the first bookcase, getting closer – the stink was stronger now – and he resisted the urge to cover his nostrils with a handkerchief. According to legend, Mrs Hardy took her annual bath on the eve of the birthday ball, but she had not attended one for twenty years. Apparently, the attendant bathing had been allowed to slide.
Ferris Monty still had hopes of going to this year’s ball, though the gala’s gatekeeper might pose a problem. Well, certainly there would be some fancy tap-dancing around his most recent bad behavior. Addison Winston might wonder why his chosen envoy to the media had sicked reporters on Oren Hobbs – a clear conflict with the lawyer’s intentions. But betrayal was mere technicality to an author turned zealot, a born-again writer of real literature. Ferris saw himself as an aging come-back kid and a ruthless Cinderella; he would find a way to go to the ball.
Turning down a narrow aisle of books, he walked slowly, creeping actually, following the sound of heavy breathing. The aisle ended at the center of the room, an open area of tables, chairs and a hulk of flesh wearing a cotton housedress. Ah, there she was in all her smelly unwashed glory, graying brown hair hanging to her shoulders in oily strings. She grunted and glistened with sweat.
What a prize.
He had been told that, though she went barefoot winter and summer, she had always been properly shod for the early birthday balls. It was doubtful that she had worn anything as delicate as high heels. Her wellmuscled legs had the girth of tree trunks.
Oh, and now she was turning his way.
His visit to the library – perhaps any visitor at all – must come as a shock. One clue was the woman’s slackening jaw. He had never been so close to her, and now he was near enough to count the missing teeth by the gaps in her open mouth – but he had to look up to do it. Mavis Hardy’s size was impressive, more muscle than fat, as evidenced by the barbells tightly gripped in her hands. There were other items of bodybuilding equipment on the floor behind her. This argued against the rumor that she was dying, and it gave credence to a theory, oft repeated by the locals, that she could not be killed except by supernatural means.
‘Mrs Hardy, I wonder if I could speak to you?’
‘You just did.’ She held the barbells high above her head.
Did she have it in mind to smash him out of existence? Legs gone to limp noodles, he felt the sudden need for support and sat down at the reader’s table. ‘My name is Ferris Monty.’
‘I know who you are.’ The librarian remained standing, lowering and lifting her weights as she counted aloud. ‘Sixteen. You don’t look like the author photos on your book jackets – that true-crime trash. Seventeen. I know they airbrushed those droopy eyes of yours. Eighteen. But damned if I can figure out how they made you look smarter.’
He pulled out his bifocals
and donned them. ‘Is that better?’
‘Nineteen. Somewhat.’ On the count of twenty, she set the weights on the floor, then pulled out a chair and sat down next to him, edging closer until he could smell the rot from her mouth of broken and lost teeth.
‘I’d like to ask you about Oren Hobbs and his brother, Joshua.’ On best behavior today – and fearful – Ferris smiled, as if he were dealing with a normal person, a sane person.
The extreme order of military life had been discarded in a single day. The bedroom floor was strewn with cast-off clothes and cowboy boots. Oren’s habit of early rising had also been lost. When he stepped out of the shower, it was almost noon – if he could believe the windup alarm clock on his bedside table – the same old clock.
He glanced at Hannah’s homecoming gift, the eight-by-ten portrait of two boys in a silver frame, fruit of the purloined roll of film that had been hidden away in his brother’s sock drawer. Even if Hannah had not mentioned taking that last roll to the drugstore for development, he would have known that Josh had not printed this picture. Missing was the magic that his brother performed in the attic darkroom. The quality of this print was no match for the ones on the wall.
And where were the other photographs from that last roll of film?
Dressed in the bathrobe he had worn as a teenager, Oren padded barefoot down the hall and entered his brother’s bedroom. The last time he was in here, the coffin had been a distraction. Now that it was gone, the room had a timeless quality, and he was in danger of falling into the judge’s state of mind – a scary place where old dogs and young boys never died.
The tripod leaned against the wall where Josh had left it on the last day of his life. A pair of sneakers lay on the floor, so casually arranged, as if the boy had just changed into his hiking boots for a walk in the woods. Oren picked up a jacket that had been draped on the back of a chair twenty years ago. He held it to his breast as he lay down upon his brother’s bed and lost an hour there, staring at the ceiling.
When he remembered his purpose for coming here – the one odd feature in the bedroom of a teenage boy – he rose from the bed and opened Josh’s closet to a familiar mess. The clothes on hangers were jammed together, and the shelf above was packed with magazines, a broken bicycle pump and stacks of cigar boxes favored for catching the smaller items of junk. The jumble seemed about to fall on Oren’s head at any second. But the floor of that chaotic space had always been sparsely covered, so orderly. As a teenager, he had never found that odd – and now he did.
He knelt down before the closet and took out two pairs of shoes to expose tool marks on the floorboards. He reached up to pull down a coat hanger and used the stiff wire as a pry bar. The boards did not lift easily. It was a few minutes’ work to remove them. He reached into Josh’s hidey-hole and brought out a thick photograph album.
Private pictures. People ’s secrets?
Flipping through the pages, he scanned the images and then stopped to linger over one. In this picture, Oren saw himself as a sixteen-year-old boy out walking with the judge on a winter day. Cowboy boots had given him an inch of height, but he had not yet reached the old man’s stature. Here, he had been caught in the act of dropping back a step to check out his father’s long ponytail, probably measuring it. Though Oren’s hair was a good six inches shorter, the judge’s hairline had begun to recede in those days, and a bald spot was visible at the back of his head. Oren was smiling in this picture, assured that this was one contest he could not lose.
Come the summer he turned seventeen, Oren was sent away, and his hair was cut off with a razor.
He closed the album.
Why had Josh hidden a roll of film in a sock drawer? Why not stash it with this secret cache in the closet?
Not enough time.
Josh had worn a watch that day; he had been in a hurry to start out for the woods.
The photographs from that last roll were now of greater interest than any film that might be recovered with the rest of his brother’s bones.
He lowered the album back into the hole. The boards were replaced, and the closet floor was restored to the way he had found it. Oren returned to his own room to find a clean change of clothes laid out on the bed. Just like old times.
Thank you, Hannah.
But where were the blue jeans he had worn yesterday? He ransacked all the drawers, knowing all the while that this was futile. By now, his dirty clothes had certainly made their way to the laundry room in the basement. Hopping on one foot, then the other, he pulled on the clean pair of jeans as he moved down the hallway. Pants zipped up, he descended the stairs three at a time, calling out, ‘Hannah!’
‘Down here,’ said a distant voice.
He opened the cellar door and rushed down the cold cement steps to find the housekeeper pulling a load of wash from the dryer.
No, no, no!
He bent over her wicker basket and found his jeans still warm from the dryer. He searched the watch pocket for the fur of a yellow dog, his only tie to the grave robber who had left the jawbone on the porch. And, of course, it was gone.
He sat down on the floor and covered his eyes with one hand. Of all the screwups he had ever—
‘You should have more faith.’ The housekeeper squatted down beside him. She looked around at the cluttered shelves, an old trunk and storage boxes that had not yet found their way to the attic. ‘Oh, the memories in this cellar. Do you recall that little tree frog you crammed into your pocket when you were six years old?’ She pointed to the small window in the door of the washing machine. ‘I’ll never forget him – plastered to the glass, spinning round and round. That frog looked so surprised.’ She patted Oren’s hand. ‘I guess that was the only time I didn’t go through your jeans before I washed them.’ She reached into a deep dress pocket and produced some loose change, a few ticket stubs from his travels – and the fur of a yellow dog.
‘You’re a goddess.’ He took the ball of fur from her hand and held it up to the light of a basement window. ‘Do you know anybody who owns a dog this color? I found this on the porch steps right after the—’
‘That dog doesn’t belong to anybody.’ She returned to the dryer to load in a fresh batch of wet laundry. ‘He’s a stray. At night, I leave him scraps down by the garden shed.’
Now he made sense of the barking on the night when the jawbone was left on the porch. ‘That stray is your burglar alarm?’
She nodded. ‘Beats wiring up the house. The judge would never let me do that.’
‘I’m sure there won’t be any more late-night bone deliveries. So I guess you can stop feeding the stray.’
‘Oh, the dog has other uses. One day the judge will invite that mutt into the house. And I’ll be dragging Horatio’s stuffed carcass out the back door for a proper burial.’
‘Good plan.’ Oren stared at the useless ball of fur in his hand. ‘I love the photograph you gave me. Did I thank you for it?’
This made her smile.
He carried her laundry basket to the folding table. ‘I remember the morning Josh took that shot.’ He watched for signs that Hannah knew it was the day that Josh went missing, but there was nothing in her manner to give this away. ‘When you had the film developed, the drugstore gave you a pack of standard-size prints, right? Where are they now?’
‘Oh, who knows? That was a long time ago. It ’s not like you’re asking me what I did with the morning newspaper.’
And now he knew she was hiding something, for Hannah’s memory was flawless, archiving even the stunned face of a frog drowned in a washing machine over thirty years ago. ‘Could those pictures be in the attic?’
‘In Josh’s darkroom? No, too risky. The judge is always up there looking through old pictures. He would’ve pitched a fit if he knew I had that last roll developed. I told you he didn’t want Josh’s things disturbed.’
And it was unlike Hannah to repeat herself. She was stalling for time. He could almost see the bright work going on behind her eyes
as she hunted for the right response.
And now she had it.
‘I remember this much,’ she said. ‘I looked over the pictures before I left the drugstore. That shot of you two boys was the only one I cared about. I ordered the enlargement right then and there. So I would ’ve left the negatives with the druggist. Maybe I left the whole envelope, negatives and prints, too. It’s possible I never got them back.’
‘Do you remember anything about the other pictures?’
She shook her head. ‘Sorry, Oren. It was so long ago.’
‘Then you didn’t see anything worth showing to William Swahn?’
She jerked her head to one side, her eyes wary and searching the stairs. Satisfied that they were alone, she turned back to him. Her voice was low, almost a whisper. ‘The judge doesn’t need to know about my business with Mr Swahn.’
‘You’ve known this guy for a long time, but you call him mister? That’s not like you. And Swahn calls you Miss Rice. He might be the only one in town to use your last name since I was three.’
‘So what else did he—’
‘I know you gave Swahn all of Josh’s negatives when you asked him to find me an alibi witness.’
‘And he did.’
‘He overdid it.’ Oren held up two fingers.
‘Two witnesses?’ Here she paused, sensing that he was not buying her pretense of surprise. She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her housedress, Hannah’s version of a pout. ‘I think Mr Swahn might have mentioned that.’
‘And he told you their names.’
‘No, he only told me that two women went to the sheriff with two different stories. Well, I could see where that might be worse than no alibi at all. Then Mr Swahn called me one day and said everything worked out all right. One of those alibis held up.’
‘Was Swahn still working on my alibi when you developed Josh’s last roll?’
‘Oren Hobbs.’ Her tone carried the threat of no dessert and no television tonight. ‘Let it be.’ And now she must have remembered that she could not even stop his allowance anymore. Both hands flew up in surrender, but then she turned her face to the cellar window. ‘The judge is home.’
Bone by Bone Page 12
