‘No, ma’am.’ Oren’s hands tightened around the steering wheel. So Josh had been stalking Mrs Winston, too – a woman who had shown only kindness to his brother.
‘That boy was a born mimic. I’m the one who taught him birdsongs.’ She leaned toward him, surprised again. ‘You didn’t know? He never mentioned that?’
It would have been awkward trying to explain the language of brothers: a nod of the head to say that he had understood what remained unspoken; a hand on his brother’s shoulder to ask, Hurt much? There had been a million gestures to replace a zillion words, and, best of all, they had known how to be silent together – except for that last day in the woods.
Mrs Winston rested one hand on his shoulder. ‘The grief is all new again, isn’t it? . . . Now that you’ve found his grave. Your brother was the dearest boy I ever knew.’ She held up her hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I’ve lost the threads. What was I saying? Oh, of course. Photographs. My favorites are the pictures of my birthday balls. You stopped coming when you were how old? Twelve? Well, you must come to this one. I’m sure Isabelle’s forgiven you by now.’
‘No, ma’am. I don’t think it’s safe yet. Maybe next year.’
She laughed with high bright notes, almost music. Was this how her daughter laughed? He was not likely to find out anytime soon. The front door flew open. Isabelle Winston had caught him in the act of conversation with her mother. She was one angry redhead, hands on hips in fair warning that a lethal weapon could be had at any moment. Oren said a hasty goodbye to Mrs Winston. As he left the car and marched toward the road, a bullet in his back would have come as no surprise.
Near the end of the long driveway, he stopped to listen. The wind had changed, and it carried the sound of angry voices from the direction of Paulson Lane. He peered into the woods and saw fragments of bright light through the leaves.
A scream came from the lodge. He whirled around to look up at the tower. Sarah Winston stood on the deck and pointed the way for him. Oren plunged into the woods with no thought of getting lost tonight. He was guided by the lights, the shouts and the sounds of breaking glass.
With a sidelong view of the mob and the house, he could see William Swahn moving across a lighted room, limping badly as he dodged bottles, rocks and shattering glass. The telephone by the man’s front window might as well be on the moon.
Moving toward the house by way of sheltering trees and deep shadow, Oren stopped beside a cluster of large trash receptacles and ripped one lid from its rubber hinge. The driveway and turnout were jammed with vehicles. As he moved forward, the headlights blinded him. He raised his rubber shield and shaded his eyes with his free hand.
The front door opened and William Swahn hobbled outside to the confusion of his enemies. The catcalls subsided. The drunken silhouettes in the headlights stood very still – deadly quiet. Leaning against a marble pillar and squinting into the light, Swahn raised his cane, and his voice shook with anger. ‘Most of your rocks hit my house instead of the windows! You morons throw like little girls!’
Break time was over.
They answered him with a fresh volley. Most of their missiles went wild. Only by sheer numbers, two struck home. A rock drew blood on Swahn’s face, and a beer bottle slammed into his bad leg. He slid down the pillar to lie flat upon the marble slab.
And Oren came running.
Dave Hardy saw headlights slowing down in his rearview mirror. He had stayed too long on Paulson Lane – and the story was no longer exclusive to the reporter who had paid him. A van with a news-show logo pulled up beside his truck, and he could hear the static chatter of a police scanner. Swahn must have called for help. Highway Patrol cars and deputies in jeeps were en route from all quarters of the county.
The van’s passenger door opened, and a man’s head and shoulders appeared over the roof. His camera was aimed at the pickup truck.
Dave sank down low in his seat.
I’m so screwed.
No matter what road he took, he would run into the law in oncoming traffic.
The van’s driver leaned out the window and extended a microphone. ‘I almost didn’t recognize you out of uniform. You’re a deputy, right?’
Inspiration.
‘Yeah, I’m the first responder.’ Dave gave the man a short salute, then started his engine and put his pickup truck in gear.
Gaining the portico, Oren knelt down beside the fallen William Swahn and whispered, ‘Close your eyes. Don’t move.’ He called out to the anonymous shapes who stood before the lights. ‘He’s dead! You killed him!’
Here and there, rocks and bottles thudded to the ground.
Oren understood the ugliest things about mobs. This one had just lost its reason for being. Cohesion was dissolving as some edged away from the pack, a sign that self-preservation had trumped herd instinct. But the mob might rise again as one body, one mind – in seconds. The window for action was small.
The time was now.
He picked up Swahn’s cane and held it high as he walked toward the lights. ‘I’m the law!’ he yelled. ‘And now I’m gonna start cracking heads, and every man I mark is going to jail!’
Though blinded by headlights, his eyes were wide open as he walked into the fray with the slow resolution of a tank. Swinging the cane in wide circles, he connected with flesh and bone. Beyond the bright lights, car doors were opening. One engine starting up and then another. Twin balls of light were backing away, men walking away, and some were on the run.
Squinting now, blurred sight returning, his cane hit a man’s skull and felled him, and this one crawled away. Other men were frozen, some of them weaving, easy targets. One stood before him, witless. Oren made a mighty swing to bring him down. A tight group of figures were moving toward him – the resurrection of the mob, though a smaller pack, a tinier brain. He turned on them, using the trash-can lid to fend off rocks. His shield and lance were ripped away, and their hands were on him.
Above their heads was a flash of gunfire and a shotgun blast. Standing atop the cabin of a pickup truck, Dave Hardy yelled, ‘Nobody move!’
And now the last of them scattered, feet running, engines revving, wheels spinning.
All gone.
Broken bottles and a trampled baseball cap, scattered rocks and a lost shoe were lit by the headlights of official vehicles, county and state. Reporters had been corralled at the other end of the driveway, where they screamed about their freedom of the press as their cameras were confiscated. And three men sat on the steps of the portico.
Dave Hardy sacrificed the last two beers in his six-pack. He handed a bottle to William Swahn and one to Oren, apologizing because it was no longer cold. ‘But it’ll do for medicinal purposes. You know you’re bleeding, right?’
Swahn, still dazed, was slow to lift one hand to his face, touching the wound to his cheek. And now he stared at the blood on his fingers. ‘I suppose it’s bad form to mock people while they’re chucking rocks and bottles.’
And by a nod, Oren agreed that this was so.
Dave Hardy grinned at the bleeding man. ‘You did that? Well, good for you.’ He turned to Oren and jingled his car keys. ‘The sheriff ’s gonna be here any minute. I gotta go. If Cable catches me driving drunk one more time, I’m toast.’
When the deputy’s pickup truck had rolled off down the driveway, Swahn lifted his beer to clink bottles with Oren.
When Sarah Winston was sober, the tower room was only a circle. On toward evening, it was a wheel, spinning, spinning, taking her nowhere and leaving her with motion sickness. She straightened picture frames on the sections of wall that were not made of glass. It had taken courage to hang photographs and drawings on the walls of a house that rested upon a planet spinning madly while revolving round the sun.
She walked out onto the deck and looked up at the stars. They moved for her. She had that combination of insanity and patience that allowed her to follow their trek across the sky. Spreading the sleeves of her robe on an evening breeze,
she reached out to them.
No, not yet. Not tonight.
Sarah lowered her arms, as a bird would fold its wings. It was an act of will to stay when fear argued for leaving, when she need only let go of the earth and let the ether take her. The notion of flight, like the motion of stars, was seductive. She wrapped her arms close about her body, though not for comfort, but to save her own life – for the sake of Isabelle, who came softly rapping at the door, calling, ‘Mom?’
‘Yes, Belle. I’m here.’ Still here. By an act of will, she stayed.
‘Maybe she ’ll feel more like talking in the morning,’ said Addison Winston. ‘Sarah’s a bit shaken up.’
‘Not surprising,’ said Cable Babitt. ‘You’d never expect a thing like that to happen in Coventry.’ The sheriff donned his hat as he walked to the door. ‘Mr Swahn said to thank your wife for calling it in.’ And now he tipped his hat to Isabelle. ‘Lucky thing Oren Hobbs happened to be in the neighborhood tonight.’
‘Yes, very lucky.’ She stopped smiling after closing the door on the sheriff.
Oren’s luck was about to run out.
She opened the hall closet and ripped her jacket from a hanger. She intended to make dead certain that he understood the instructions attached to the birder journals. He was not to go joyriding with her mother one more time. It was going to be so satisfying to hear Oren Hobbs scream in high soprano notes when she—
‘Does your mother have another bottle up there?’ Addison was facing the staircase.
Isabelle crept up behind him, saying softly, ‘I know what you did.’
He turned around, startled for the split second before he recognized this old routine begun in her childhood. Addison had taught it to her, and most often he had been the one ferreting out secrets with those same words. He glanced at the jacket in her hand. ‘I’d rather you didn’t go down to William’s place tonight. I might need help with your mother.’
‘I know Mom started drinking the year Josh Hobbs disappeared. The other night – after dinner – were you joking when you wondered if she had an affair with Oren? It’s so hard to tell with you, Addison. You’ve got such an ugly sense of humor.’
‘If I’m supposed to be making a connection here, shouldn’t you—’
‘From the back, Oren and Josh looked a lot alike. Same kind of clothes, and they even had the same walk. Oren was taller, but if you came up behind his brother – alone – in the woods . . .’ She let the rest of her accusation dangle unspoken.
He laughed. He roared. He showed her all his teeth – wide smile ‘Why don’t you ask your mother about Josh? She ’s the one who buried the boy.’
Isabelle’s jacket fell from her hand.
Addison picked it up from the floor and returned it to the closet, still grinning as he arranged the garment on a hanger. ‘So you’ll stay. Well, good.’
TWENTY-FIVE
William Swahn refused an ambulance ride to the hospital, and a paramedic led the man indoors to patch his wounds. Oren sat alone on the front steps, watching the show as he nursed his beer.
Men and women in troopers’ uniforms bagged the empty bottles found outside and inside the house. Every glass surface was a fingerprint examiner’s wet dream.
A few yards away, Cable Babitt stood beside Sally Polk, saying to her, ‘Your guys are welcome to all the bottles they can carry. I don’t need them. I’ve got the whole damn thing on film.’
‘I like a nice tight case,’ said the CBI agent. ‘The beer bottle I’d most like to have has a set of prints that might surprise you. Oh, and that film? That ’s mine now.’
In answer to Cable’s sputtered, ‘You can’t do that!’ Sally Polk explained that, yes, she could – now that she had charged a Los Angeles TV producer with conspiracy to incite a riot via some creative film editing.
‘You can’t make that stick,’ said Cable. ‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Oh, dear. You think I overstepped my authority? Well, maybe you’re right. But it ’s gonna take a while to sort out the blame. Meanwhile the scope of the case extends across county lines.’ She surveyed the crime scene brightly lit by lights on poles. ‘And all of this belongs to me.’
Oren decided that he liked Sally Polk.
Morning came with the smell of furniture polish and the sound of a vacuum cleaner. Oren woke up on a couch in the front room of the house on Paulson Lane. Every shard of broken glass was gone, and glaziers stood on long ladders to replace the broken windowpanes.
Swahn’s cleaning lady was the mother of one of his old classmates, and now Mrs Snow reintroduced herself as she worked around his stretched-out body. ‘What a night,’ she said. ‘What a mess.’ As he rose from the couch, she brushed him down with a whisk broom. ‘Can’t have you tracking glass splinters through the house.’
Pronounced clean, she released him, saying, ‘Hannah’s upstairs in Mr Swahn’s room.’ As he climbed the steps, she called out, ‘Second door on your right. He’s been through a lot, so don’t you tire him out.’
‘No, ma’am, I won’t.’
When he came to the open door of the bedroom, he hung back to watch Hannah changing a bandage on William Swahn’s right cheek, exposing a patch of skin that was red and raw. This fresh injury paled the older damage to the other side of his face. Oren backed away from the door and lingered in the hall to listen to a conversation of two old friends, who called each other Miss Rice and Mr Swahn.
‘Well, that paramedic did a real nice job cleaning the wound.’
‘Will I look more symmetrical now?’
She laughed. ‘When the swelling goes down and the bruising fades, you won’t have another scar.’
There was a third person in the room. Oren saw the CBI agent reflected in the mirror over Swahn’s bureau.
‘This’ll cheer you up,’ said Sally Polk. ‘I got film of a reporter chucking the first rock, and I got his prints on a beer bottle, too. I figure he was just priming the pump – didn’t want to wait around all night for his big mob scene. But the whole thing started with a nasty piece of editing on the evening news. I’m gonna bring down a TV network just for you, Mr Swahn. Won’t that be fun?’
‘What about the mob? Did you get them all on film?’
‘No, maybe half. But the two Oren Hobbs laid out are awake and talking. They gave up three of their friends, but they didn’t even know the rest of those guys. A barmaid gave us a few more names. And then we got a slew of fingerprints off the beer bottles they tossed through your windows. Idiots. I can promise you I’ll get ’em all.’ The CBI agent said her goodbyes and stepped into the hallway, where she met Oren with a friendly smile.
He was certain that she would seem equally friendly on the business end of a gun. ‘Nice work,’ he said. ‘I mean the way you stole this mob case from the sheriff.’
‘Well, thank you. And when I get six minutes to catch my breath, I’ll find out who killed your brother.’
‘Will that be before or after you wind up an investigation of the sheriff ’s office? I know you’re using Josh to get close to Cable Babitt.’
Her smile was still holding, but she was stalling. Weighing the odds? Would a lie well told beat whatever cards he was holding? Her shoulders squared off, and her feet were firmly planted. The lady was waiting for proof of this theory of his.
Oren nodded his understanding. ‘The CBI has a field office over in Shasta. But here you are in my county, camped out with the Highway Patrol. So I know you’re not investigating them. That leaves the sheriff ’s office. And the investigation has to be department-wide, or you wouldn’t need a gang of troopers for backup.’
Sally Polk adjusted her purse strap, preparing to leave him now. ‘If you give the sheriff a heads-up, I’ll cut your balls into little pieces and feed ’em to the hogs.’ She said this with such warmth, such cheerful goodwill, that she left him smiling.
Oren entered the bedroom, an austere place with no personal items on display. There was a light rectangle on one wall, where a picture frame h
ad been recently taken down, the sign of an extremely private person – or a man with something to hide. That missing picture, once positioned opposite the bed, would have been the last thing Swahn looked at when he put out the lamp at night and the first sight of each new day.
Swahn’s brow furrowed as he, too, stared at that empty space, no doubt recognizing his error.
And, of course, nothing got past Hannah. She held a roll of adhesive tape in one hand and, in the other, a pair of closed shears that might pass for the lance of a tiny knight. She hovered over her patient, prepared to take on all comers – even Oren. There was conflict in her eyes, and it pained him to see it. After pulling a chair close to the bed, he turned to her. ‘Hannah? Give us a minute?’
‘I just gave him a sleeping pill. Can’t this wait?’
‘It won’t take a minute,’ said Oren. ‘I promise.’
Hannah bent down to William Swahn, laying one hand on his shoulder, and they held the silent conversation of friends for life. She asked by a worried look if she should stay and defend him. Swahn smiled in assurance that there was no need to fight for him – but thanks.
When the housekeeper had quit the room, Oren said, ‘I’ve got a question about those pictures of you in the post office. Josh caught you passing an envelope to the librarian. You dropped it into her tote bag. If it was addressed to Mrs Winston, I can see why you couldn’t just mail it. Half the gossip in town comes from the postmaster.’
Swahn closed his eyes and turned his face away. The interview was over.
When Oren came out of the bedroom, he found Hannah sitting on the staircase. She reached up to hand him a prescription. ‘That’s for his pain. Could you have it filled at the drugstore? Your father will be here by the time you get back. So there shouldn’t be any more questions about those pictures of Mr Swahn and Mavis.’
Bone by Bone Page 26
