‘Oh, I’ll never forget it. Every punch belonged to Oren. All those people in the bleachers – they all remember Oren’s bloody fists . . . your bloody face . . . not one bruise on your knuckles. But Cable Babitt got the story secondhand. He didn’t see that fight. If he had, he would’ve arrested you twenty years ago.’
Ploff.
The dirt from the caved-in wall had thickened into mud all around the deputy’s body, and he ceased to struggle. He only shivered, and his words were half-hearted. ‘Make him stop? Please, Hannah?’
‘I’ll try.’ She stole a glance at Oren, and then turned her face down to the deputy. ‘But he ’s got this idea in his head that you raped his brother before you murdered him.’
Oren lost his rhythm with the shovel. He turned to stare at her.
‘No, no, no!’ Dave’s voice was breaking, his head shaking. ‘I wasn’t queer for Josh. I never—’
‘You broke that child’s bones. His jaw, his arms – half his ribs.’ There was no recrimination in her voice, only sadness. ‘And then . . . his fingers. . . . You broke them one by one. . . . Oren says only sex perverts do sick things like that.’
‘I’m no pervert!’
‘You hurt that child all day long.’ Hannah’s voice faltered and cracked. ‘And then when Josh was broken and helpless, you took off his—’
‘I’m not a pervert!’ Dave’s voice was growing stronger, louder. His hands were raised fists when he yelled, ‘I killed the woman for money! The wrong woman, all right? But what I did to Josh – that was payback!’ His fists slowly lowered. He was deflating, losing air and will. In a smaller voice, he said, ‘Payback for that beating I took from Oren . . . that night in the gym . . . the whole town watching.’
The shovel dropped from Oren’s hands. His head moved slowly from side to side, lips shaping the word payback and his eyes rolled up to the sky. Payback.
The door of the garden shed creaked open. Oren turned around to watch the CBI agent retrieve a microphone from the ferns near the hole. He had not agreed to that.
Sally Polk nodded to him and mimed the words, Good job.
Their deal was done, the bargain kept – on his end. He had broken a suspect without using his fists. That had always been his way, and once it had been a source of pride, but not this time – not for a long time.
The voice from the pit was faint. ‘Make it stop,’ Dave begged, as if dirt still rained down on him.
Agent Polk led Oren out of earshot and then opened her purse to pull out a small recording device. ‘My tape starts with the splash – him falling into the hole.’ Smiling, she shook her head. ‘That clumsy boy. So all I’ve got is his voice and Hannah’s. Nothing to prove you were ever here.’
‘You can’t use that tape.’ He had agreed to break Dave Hardy, to take him naked to a place where posturing was ludicrous – half the battle, only that and nothing more.
‘I need this.’ Her hand closed on the recorder. ‘You laid out a good case, but it’s all circumstantial evidence and hearsay. Though I did like that part about the money missing from the hotel safe. Now, just in case his lawyer gets picky – when I get the deputy cleaned up, will I find any defensive wounds – anything to back up a fight?’
‘You can’t use a coerced confession in court.’
One hand on her hip, she nodded toward the pit. ‘You call that coercion?’
No. He would call it torture. He always called it by its name. Over the past few years, he had, once or twice, thought to look down at that line he would never cross – as if he could still see it. He could, at least, remember it, but now the only salvage of any value was this one rule of evidence – a law that he could keep.
‘Erase the tape,’ said Oren. ‘It’ll come back on you if you don’t. That’s a promise.’
The set of her jaw and the pugilist stance told him she was taking this as a threat. Good.
Oren turned around to face the pit. ‘After you pull Dave out of there, when he’s wearing dry clothes and drinking tea – when he ’s chewing one of your damn brownies – that’s when you tell him you’ll drop the charge of assault on a child. And word it just that way. Then offer him a deal – one count of murder for hire. He’ll grab it – even if you get him a dozen lawyers. But I don’t think he ’ll lawyer up – not today. Dave ’s ready to talk, and he’ll write it all down if you like. Today, a ten-year-old girl could get his confession.’
Any female would do.
Dubious, the CBI agent walked with him to the edge of the pit and called down to the man below. ‘Dave Hardy? It’s me, Sally Polk.’ Now she remembered to speak her only line, one final lie. ‘Hannah called me to come get you out of there.’
Down in the hole, a mumbling of nonsense words turned to convulsive sobbing. Dirt was piled up to the deputy’s chest. Mud caked his face and covered his eyes. Despite his old hatred of all her kind, blindly, Dave reached up to her – like any crying child seeking comfort from a woman – like every man who believed, at core, that a woman could save him.
The CBI agent hefted the recording device in her hand.
Weighing its value?
‘You’ll get a legal confession.’ Oren said this as an order, wanting no misunderstanding. He was not her cop.
This past hour had cost him dearly. Hannah, too. The tiny woman sat on the ground, rocking her body, her head bowed low. She had played her part so well, and now she was spent and crying and sick at heart.
Sally Polk held up her tape recorder and pressed the erase button. ‘I’ll look after Hannah. You should be gone before the troopers get here.’
Oren obliged her and walked away.
On the far side of the meadow, he was swallowed up by dense woods. For the love of Josh, he was a staggering man, feeling every wound to a child’s broken body. He traveled farther into the forest, only stopping when he was certain that no one would find him this time.
Birds flew up from the trees in a whirlwind of spread wings and songs of panic, as though they had heard the bang of a bullet. On the ground, other creatures gave a wide berth to the man with a lost look about him, who sat with a gun in his lap all that day.
Night fell.
THIRTY-THREE
A new Mercedes was parked in the driveway, but Henry Hobbs was on foot today. Striding across the meadow, he was heading for a promising trout stream with his rod and reel and a yellow dog.
The old man never walked in his sleep anymore.
Oren was on his knees, cutting flowers from the judge’s enduring garden. He was nearly done with his term as interim county sheriff. Would he run for election – or lay down his gun like his father before him?
Did it matter?
He had once had a darker idea for that weapon, but he was now trapped in the inertia of life ongoing, one empty hour chaining into the next. Some days, he envied Dave Hardy, who had hung himself on the eve of sentencing.
Shading his eyes from the noon sun, Oren looked up at the tower of the Winston lodge. Birds on the wing circled their old sanctuary with gliding rises, dips and rolls, hungry for seed. After a year of abandonment, someone had begun to feed them again.
No birds sang in the cemetery. There was only the sound of footsteps crunching gravel on a path that wound around headstones and marble angels. Oren stopped before a fenced-in plot of ground where kith and kin were buried, and he laid a profusion of yellow blooms on Josh’s grave.
In answer to an old question once posed by a Ouija board, he said, ‘I still love you.’
Half his flowers were saved out for Hannah Rice. He placed them at the foot of a marble stone that dated her death to the previous summer, when every last question was answered.
Early on an August morning, he had found her on the porch, sitting in her rocking chair, eyes closed, but not in sleep. Pills had spilled across the floorboards, and the label on a fallen bottle had been his first clue to her cancer. More had been read into the smaller print, a date of origin for her prescription. It matched up with a postmark on
an old letter, the first of many that Hannah had written to call him back to Coventry. She had seen death coming, onrushing – with only enough time left to bring him home.
That morning on the porch, Oren had sat down beside her for the last time, and they had passed a quiet hour, the living and the dead. Nothing could have stemmed the flow of his tears – easier to stop the rain.
Armed with an old photograph of her and a notion that she hailed from Tennessee, Oren had used all his skill to find a date of birth for her gravestone. He had located her only official document in the records office of a small town, where he came to understand why she had never cared two cents for proof of her identity: Originally, her name had been a plain one, given to her by the state – after being abandoned in a trash can on the day she was born.
She had renamed herself with no one ’s permission and vanished from the public record. A pilgrim without papers, all that Hannah had ever asked was to be taken on faith alone. Respectful of that, Oren had stolen the birth certificate and burned it. Now, her only proof of life on earth was this stone – these flowers – this man who kept her secret.
‘Hannah, I’m lost,’ he said, as if expecting one more parlor trick to fix him and make him whole.
Retrieving a yellow dahlia from her grave, Oren carried this flower to Miss Rice ’s good friend, Mr Swahn. In the absence of farsighted generations and a family plot, the Winstons and William Swahn had been buried in the last available section of land, a far corner of the cemetery, and a triangle was played out in the position of these three monuments.
He laid Hannah’s flower down.
A bouquet of common weeds sailed past his feet to smash into Ad Winston’s headstone. Without turning around, Oren knew that Isabelle had returned to Coventry.
The pretty redhead showed more decorum when she placed red roses on her mother’s grave, and she also gave flowers to Swahn, laying them down next to Hannah’s yellow token.
Oren and Isabelle stood in silence, side by side. He had yet to hear the sound of her voice.
And then she said, ‘Last summer, Hannah told me that we were always meant to get married and have four children.’
He might have known that this first conversation could not begin with a simple hello. At least, Isabelle had not tried to kill him. ‘In all my life,’ said Oren, ‘I only loved one woman, and it wasn’t you. But we could have dinner sometime.’
She kicked him in the shin – hard. That had been predictable.
Isabelle walked away, pausing once on the gravel path to look back at him, just a brief taunt thrown over one shoulder, a smile for the damage she had done.
Echo of a tango.
Oren’s wounded shinbone hurt like mad, and he chased that redhead down with the ghost of a limp, running for his life. He grabbed her by the hand and held on tight, despite that gleam in her honey-brown eyes that promised him more pain. He held on.
Bone by Bone Page 35
