Bone by Bone

by Carol O'Connell

  After a few moments, he heard the sound of tires on the gravel driveway.

  Hannah walked to the foot of the stairs, looking up, listening for the front door. She turned to him, silently asking if they could end this now.

  No, not quite yet.

  The librarian’s madness appeared to have an off-switch.

  The barbells sat on the floor, and Mavis Hardy sat in a chair, her hands folded in a ladylike fashion, as she answered a question for Ferris Monty. ‘Both of the Hobbs boys were readers, but the judge had a bigger library than this one. I think they came here because their father had better taste in literature – no science fiction or horror genre.’

  Ferris noticed that her hands were clenched tightly, as if holding on to something precious, or merely holding on. After scribbling a line of shorthand in his notebook, he lowered his reading glasses. ‘Did the boys get along well?’

  ‘They did. Oren had a few years on his brother, but that didn’t matter. In some ways, Josh was a hundred years older. That little boy listened to people like he really cared about what was going on in their lives. I miss that child. I didn’t see much of him after he turned ten – except from a distance . . . the way I see everyone now.’

  And this must be the marker for the year when life had soured for the librarian.

  There was no need to consult his old notes. By the time Joshua Hobbs turned ten years old, Mavis Hardy had evolved into the monster of the public library. Ferris remembered that year very clearly. The librarian was the one who had drawn him to Coventry in hopes of covering a sensational murder trial. Her homicide case had ended too soon and too softly, a few words spoken in open court for the public record and a quiet dismissal of charges.

  And five years later, she had not figured as a suspect when a young boy disappeared.

  Now that Ferris had become accustomed to her body odor, he could at least endure it, and he leaned toward her in the manner of inviting a confidence. ‘When Josh first disappeared, did you think he was a runaway – or did you suspect foul play?’

  As if she were a perfectly rational person who had never done a murder of her own, Mavis Hardy paused to give this some thought. ‘Well, that’s what kids do in this town. They run off as soon as they’re able – usually older kids right out of high school. They just can’t leave Coventry fast enough. My own son ran off. But Josh Hobbs was barely fifteen – way too young. No, I don’t suppose I ever saw him as a runaway.’

  ‘So other teenagers have disappeared?’

  ‘A few, but it’s not like they dropped off the face of the earth. They packed bags. Josh didn’t. And most kids drift back to town after a while, like my son, Dave – he came back.’

  ‘I heard a rumor that there was more than one set of bones found yesterday. Can you think of anyone else who might have gone missing around the same time?’

  ‘Mr Monty, you’ve lived here for a good long while.’ She pointed to the window with a view of the foothills. ‘You know what we’ve got out there in the woods – people nobody wants to keep track of. I imagine they disappear all the time, and who’d ever know?’

  ‘You think one of those people could’ve murdered Josh? Maybe someone with a criminal background?’

  ‘Not likely,’ she said. ‘Not one of our criminals. In my experience, outlaws make the best citizens. They pay their bills on time – in cash – and they never get speeding tickets.’

  Her eyes took on a crafty look as she rose from her chair. Ferris feared that the interlude of sanity might be drawing to a close.

  She loomed over him. ‘You think I’ve got an inside track? I know what they say about me around town. Parents tell their children to behave or they’ll be sent to the library, and I bet those kids don’t sleep well at night. Do I figure into your nightmares, too, Mr Monty?’ She leaned down and placed both hands flat on the table. ‘If you’ve got a question to ask – ask.’

  ‘You haven’t attended a birthday ball since the Hobbs boy disappeared.’ He looked up at her with expectation.

  The librarian coughed up a mouthful of mucus and let it fly. So good was her aim that she hit one lens of Ferris’s spectacles on the first try. He rose from his chair and fled the library.

  Oren stood beside Hannah at the laundry table in the cellar. He rolled a pair of socks and added them to the pile, having already amazed her with his skill in smoothly folding T-shirts. ‘So you still go to the library.’

  ‘At least once a week. Mavis taught me how to work the computer, and sometimes she special-orders books from other libraries.’

  ‘Then you weren’t kidding yesterday – when you told Dave you could get his mother over here to ream him out.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t have done that. I just wanted Dave to drop that damn shovel. You know how the judge feels about his flower garden.’

  ‘So nothing’s changed. Mrs Hardy still—’

  ‘Everything has changed,’ said the judge from the top of the basement staircase. He walked briskly down the steps and joined them at the folding table. One hand ran back over his bald scalp in a loving memory of a time when he had hair.

  Back in the days of the old man’s long ponytail, most people would have taken him for an aging hippie. But Oren knew the judge ’s favorite poet was Ferlinghetti, and there was more evidence to date his father back to the Beatnik generation – medals of the Korean War stored in the pacifist ’s attic. The judge must sometimes wonder if joining the Army had been Oren’s idea of teenage revolt – or revenge. The question would never be asked by this quintessential gentleman.

  The judge picked through a pile of unmatched socks. ‘So what ’s this about Mavis Hardy? You think the press is going to dredge up that old business again?’

  Oren rolled another pair. ‘You mean her murder case?’

  The judge did not rise to this old bait. He placidly hunted the sock pile for a match to the one he held in his hand.

  ‘Premeditated murder.’ Oren smiled.

  And the judge countered with, ‘Justifiable homicide.’

  Murder.

  Oren leaned closer to his father. ‘How long do you think it took Mrs Hardy to lay her plans? I’d say a year at least.’

  The judge turned his full attention on a hole found in the toe of one sock. ‘I came down here to tell you that your trunk arrived. I had the delivery man haul it up to your room. Did you pack a good suit in there?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I packed everything I own.’

  ‘Good. Sarah Winston’s birthday ball is only a few days away.’

  ‘I’m not going,’ said Oren. And this should have ended the conversation by the old man’s own rules of debate. His father would never resort to the obvious question. It would diminish the twin arts of conversation and manners to ask, Why not?

  ‘Why not?’ Hannah stepped between them as the judge ’s foil. ‘What is it with you and Isabelle Winston? The pharmacist told me that girl kicked you all the way down the sidewalk yesterday. Now why would she do that?’

  Oren shrugged to tell her that he didn’t know and ‘She didn’t say.’

  Why ruin a perfectly good rumor by trimming it back to a single act of minor violence? In the next telling of this story, it was predictable that Isabelle would have shot him once and stabbed him twice.

  Collecting gossip was sometimes a trial of endurance. Ferris Monty pretended to take notes on the postmaster’s lecture, which – if there was a God in heaven – was winding to a close.

  ‘I bought these three pictures from Josh and framed them with my own money – not one dime from the taxpayers’ pockets,’ said Jim Web. ‘I intend to leave them behind when I retire next year. My gift to the town.’

  Ferris nodded absently as he studied Joshua Hobbs’s triptych. The boy had taken shots of postal patrons in a waiting line. The people appeared to move as the viewer’s eye made the jump from one frame to the next. He stepped closer, the better to study the primary subject, the one at the center who posed with a silver-handled cane. Though Ferris
had seen this person around town, he had only registered the scar and a peculiar limp in memory. But Joshua had focused upon the undamaged, unmemorable side of the man, and that was curious. A view of the wrack-and-ruin side would have been a more worthy angle.

  Pointing to this image, he said, ‘I don’t recall this man’s name. He’s lived in Coventry for a long time, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah, but not as long as I have. I started as a clerk thirty-five years ago,’ said the postmaster in the mistaken belief that his interviewer might care. ‘That ’s Mr Swahn. I can’t say I actually know him. He’s a hermit. Hasn’t been in here since we started rural delivery, but he does show up for all the birthday balls. Will I see you at the Winston lodge this year?’

  ‘I think you might.’

  The author followed the postmaster into a small office, where he endured Web’s version of high tea: a fig bar and a cup of Earl Grey dosed with honey. The man looked out a window that faced the narrow street and watched cars crawl by. Ferris imagined this as the prime activity of Jim Web’s day – watching. ‘So you knew Oren Hobbs as a boy.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. And by nine o’clock yesterday morning I knew he’d come back to town. That ’s a perk of the job. I get the gossip earlier than most.’

  Ah, gold.

  ‘I understand that Oren Hobbs had a thing for older women – married women.’

  ‘Is that what you heard?’ Postmaster Web pretended to find a spot of dirt on one lens of his perfectly clean eyeglasses, and he polished it with a tissue. For the first time in the past half-hour, the man seemed oddly reticent to gossip. Spectacles restored to the bridge of his nose, he smiled at his visitor. ‘If there’s any truth to that rumor, I’d have to say it was the other way around. Older women had a thing for Oren. Understandable. You’ve seen him?’

  ‘Yes, a very handsome young man.’

  ‘When he was a teenager, my wife described him as beautiful – and inadvertently charming. Or did she say accidentally? Something about his smile. No, I’m wrong. She said it was his eyes. When my wife spoke to Oren, he made her feel like the center of the universe. She said I didn’t come off well by comparison.’

  ‘So it wouldn’t surprise your wife . . . those rumors of an accidentally charming boy accidentally falling into strange beds when school was out – but the husbands were still at work.’

  ‘I can’t say what’s true or not.’ Jim Web turned to the window. ‘All I ever saw with my own eyes was a bad case of twisted puppy love.’

  Ferris leaned forward. ‘You mean the Winston girl?’ This was another bit of Coventry lore that he had collected two decades ago, just the snatch of a story that had no beginning and no end.

  The postmaster removed his bifocals and turned to the window, his watery eyes in soft focus, looking at some middle ground of memory. ‘Isabelle and Oren, they made me feel young again at least three times a week. You see, the judge’s boys used to switch off on picking up the mail. This was before we had rural delivery. Back then, I knew the faces of everyone in this town, even the ones that lived out in the woods. Everybody picked up their mail at the post office – except for Mrs Underwood, the old lady who used to live in Mr Swahn’s house. The boys would pick up her mail, too – not that there was much.

  ‘Anyway, it ’s not like Josh and Oren had a schedule. I never knew which boy it would be or when he ’d show up. But little Belle Winston always knew, and she always beat Oren Hobbs into town. Now this only happened in the summer. The rest of the year she went to a boarding school in the East. Belle was about eleven, I’d say. On fine summer days, she ’d come flying into town, little legs churning up dust, long hair flying. She ’d run in the door and ask for her mail like it was a matter of life or death – and couldn’t my clerk understand that speed was everything to her? And then she’d just stand by the lobby window, watching the street. Sometimes ten, fifteen minutes would go by. Such a patient little girl.’

  ‘She was waiting for Oren Hobbs.’

  The postmaster nodded, never taking his eyes from the window. ‘The minute she saw him coming, she ’d slowly open the front door like she had all the time in the world.’ Smiling, he tapped the window glass, as though he might be watching this story play out. ‘She’d saunter down the stairs and pass him on the sidewalk out there – like she didn’t notice that boy was alive.’

  ‘Did Oren notice her?’

  ‘You bet. The second he saw Belle, the boy’s eyes were glued to the sidewalk, or sometimes he ’d find something fascinating to look at on the other side of the street – until she passed him by. The boy always took a deep breath before he turned around to watch her walk away. This went on all summer long for years and years. It was the greatest little love affair that almost happened.’

  Done with old memories, the postmaster donned his glasses again, prepared to see the world as it was today. ‘You can hear rumors anywhere – and from people who tell them better than me.’ He jerked one thumb back at the windowpane. ‘But that’s the only secret Oren Hobbs ever had that I ever knew about – me and the rest of the town.’

  When Ferris Monty turned to the window, it was easy enough to pick out the distinctive copper shingles of the tower atop the Winston lodge. No doubt young Isabelle Winston had used that high ground to keep track of the boy she fancied. He wondered if that habit had lasted into her teenage years. Had she been spying on Oren Hobbs the last time the boy walked into the woods with his little brother?

  If Sarah Winston had not been a devoted follower of the birder’s life, she might have had a career as an artist; this was the opinion of ornithologist Isabelle Winston. The renderings in her mother’s journals were beautiful. Exotic birds with brilliant plumage did not exist in this part of the world, and yet there they were, singing and dancing with common sparrows and crows. These were the guests of the annual birthday ball.

  It was a temptation to hurry through these books, but something important might be missed. Invisible spiders had not crept up on her mother in a single day. That kind of damage took years, but Isabelle examined every page with the hope of finding a signal event. She looked up from her reading to glance at the deck beyond the glass wall and the telescopes positioned to see the world from here, if the world be Coventry. Her mother’s journals never hinted at life elsewhere.

  ‘Let ’s see,’ she whispered to her sleeping mother, who had passed out after a midday binge. ‘When did it all start to go wrong?’

  She climbed the tall ladder on wheels and, by one hand, rolled it along the high circular shelf. The dates on the book spines told her she was approaching the largest event in her own reckoning, the vanishing of Joshua Hobbs. She scanned the labels of months and years, then pulled down a volume out of order, a sneak preview of things to come, and she opened it to leaf through the pages. This journal only depicted birds of prey. One stood out from the rest. Isabelle’s first thought was borrowed from an old fairy tale – and twisted a bit.

  What strange, crazy eyes you have – what long teeth.

  On these pages, Coventry had lost its charm and become a nightmare state where monsters roamed, walking birds with fangs and curled knives for talons.

  FOURTEEN

  ‘That was Ad Winston on the phone.’ Hannah’s wooden clogs clattered down the cellar stairs. ‘He says the reporters won’t be bothering us today. They’re all joining up with the sheriff ’s search party.’

  Approaching the table, she seemed pleased to find her last batch of laundry folded and neatly stacked by Oren and the judge. Smiling, she inspected their work. ‘From the kitchen window, I could see bits and pieces of a long line of trucks and cars moving uphill through the trees.’

  The housekeeper frowned at three stray socks with no mates, and Oren waited for the old magic that had made him Hannah’s laundry slave when he was six years old. As she rolled the orphan socks, each one became a pair, and he never caught her pulling the mates from her pockets.

  ‘I wonder what Cable uses for brains.’ She glanced at th
e cellar window. ‘He should’ve waited till morning. Not enough daylight left to search a whole mountain.’

  No problem. Oren knew it would be a short outing for all concerned, no bivouac, no campfires under the stars. The searchers would stumble upon the rest of his brother’s bones long before dark.

  William Swahn gripped his cane tighter. Some days, any weight on his twisted leg would cause him pain, and he had pills for that, but medication fogged his mind. He limped across the wide foyer, cursing his mistake in reconnecting the doorbell. Upon opening the center panel, he saw Sarah’s redheaded daughter standing on the other side of the iron grille.

  ‘Belle.’ What a happy and awkward surprise. How would he explain why he had not paid her a visit since her return to Coventry?

  ‘Hello, William.’

  The door opened wide, and the pretty woman in blue jeans entered the foyer, lifting her face to receive a hello kiss. At their last meeting, she had been sixteen years old and had to stand on her toes to kiss him goodbye.

  Stepping back a pace, she said, ‘So you remembered my name.’

  Isabelle ’s rebukes had never been understated.

  He led the way into the library. ‘I remember every woman who ever proposed to me.’ And now he could see that this occasion had slipped her mind. ‘You were shorter then, only four years old.’

  ‘Olden days.’ Isabelle settled into an armchair. ‘Mom’s school days. You were the youngest Latin scholar at UCLA.’

  ‘No, I majored in criminal justice.’ He sank down on the couch and laid his cane to one side. ‘But I did tutor your mother in Latin. That’s how we met.’

  ‘You were her friend. How could you let her marry Addison?’