Bone River

by Chance, Megan

  I motioned to the table and rose. “Good morning. Have some breakfast. Would you like coffee?”

  He stopped me with a gesture. “I can get it,” he said, going to the stove, pouring his coffee, getting the mush, sitting down. I watched as he doctored the cornmeal with a large hunk of butter, jam and syrup, no milk.

  He ate slowly and thoughtfully, sipping his coffee in silence, as if I were not there. I’d nearly decided to leave him to himself when he said, “What did she really say to you last night? That Indian woman?”

  Whatever I had expected, this was not it. “What?”

  “What did she say?”

  “I told you already. She wanted to talk to me about a bracelet she gave me a few weeks ago. A sort of Indian charm, like a rabbit’s foot, or a four-leaf clover. For good luck.”

  “Yes, that’s what you told my father,” he said. “But you didn’t tell him the truth, did you? Why was that?”

  I was flabbergasted. “Why would you say such a thing? Of course I told him the truth.”

  He didn’t shift his gaze from mine. “I was watching you last night when you were talking with her. You seemed...dismayed.”

  “You were across the room. How could you possibly have seen anything?”

  “Were you talking about me?”

  I tried to laugh—it sounded hollow and unconvincing even to myself. “What makes you think we would talk about you?”

  He raised a brow. “I felt my ears burning, how else? And then, of course, you gave it away when you both turned to look at me.”

  I said, “She asked who you were, that was all.”

  “And it distressed you to tell her I was your stepson?”

  “That wasn’t what distressed me.”

  “So something did distress you.”

  I glared at him. “No. It was no more than I said last night, Daniel. She wanted me to wear the bracelet. She wanted to know who you were. Why would either of those things distress me?”

  “I don’t know,” he said calmly. He toyed with his spoon, but he didn’t take his eyes from me, and I felt again that disconcerting fear from last night, when the moonlight had hit him so oddly and I’d felt there was something hidden in him, something of which to be wary.

  Daniel trailed his spoon through the pale yellow mush, making red ribbons of the jam and glistening tracks of sorghum, raising steam. “Do you know what interests me most? That he didn’t notice. You’ve been together twenty years and he didn’t notice you were lying.”

  “That’s easy to explain. He didn’t notice because I wasn’t.”

  “Or perhaps it’s only that it’s a habit. I mean, he was already an old man when he married you, and you were just a girl. What could you have had in common, really? Why, he probably hardly listened to you at all.”

  I clenched my cup hard in my hand. “That isn’t how it was.”

  “Except when it came to some things, I would think,” he went on. “Then my guess is he was all ears. Bedtime, for example.”

  I stared at him in disbelief and anger. “How dare you—”

  I heard the telltale squeak of my bedroom door upstairs, and I choked back the rest of the words, my anger fading in sudden guilt as I remembered the reasons Daniel had to be angry, the reasons he obviously wanted to punish me.

  I heard Junius’s footsteps, and I looked down into my bowl, trying to tame my emotions.

  Junius said, “Good morning,” as he came into the kitchen. “How companionable you both look. What gets you up so early this morning, boy?”

  “A woodpecker,” Daniel said, as easily as if we had just been as companionable as Junius said. “At least that’s what I think it was. In those trees just beyond.”

  Junius came over, leaning to kiss the top of my head before he went to the stove, and I was still disconcerted. He didn’t seem to notice. I was grateful for that but at the same time it needled me to know that Daniel would see it too, and it would prove his words even more right than they already were. Because I had lied to Junius about my conversation with Bibi, and June hadn’t realized it, and I was unsettled by his son’s sharp-eyed observation.

  I rose, taking up my bowl, only half-empty, and my coffee cup, putting them in the wash barrel.

  Junius took his breakfast and sat down. “I thought I’d go over to Oysterville after I unload the oysters. Look into that collection Boone was talking about last night. I’ll need your help, boy. Lord Tom’s still sleeping off the whiskey.”

  Daniel said, “I’d hoped to take another look at that mummy today. Maybe even lend a hand with it.”

  I glanced quickly at him. “Lend a hand? How? What do you know about mummies?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing really. But I thought I could take notes for you. You’ll be doing measurements, won’t you? Or have you already measured the skull?”

  Again, I found myself discomfited. “Not yet. I thought you said you knew nothing about ethnology.”

  “I don’t, but isn’t that the usual procedure? I’ve read about craniometry, just like everyone else.”

  Junius laughed. “Like everyone else? I’d forgotten what a store your mother set by education.”

  “Not that it mattered, given that I had to quit school to work,” Daniel said dryly.

  Junius seemed unmoved, and I wondered if I was the only one who felt the guilt Daniel meant us to feel. I turned back to the wash barrel. “I’ll be fine working alone. I’ll let you know what I discover.”

  “We’ll be back before nightfall. If Lea’s still at it, you can help her then,” Junius said.

  I set the dishes to dry and untied my apron, hanging it on the nail by the sink. “I suppose I’d best get to it,” I said, trying not to look as anxious to flee the kitchen as I felt.

  Quickly I grabbed my notebook and pencil, put on my coat and boots and went to the barn. The key to the trunk was still in my pocket. I took the lantern from its nail and lit it, and then I opened the trunk. At last. Her presence enveloped me, bringing with it urgency—that push to find the answers, that sense that I somehow needed them. The lamplight played over the mummy’s skin; I had that strange notion of flickering movement, a held breath ready to exhale. I put the lamp onto the board of the sawhorse table and then I lifted out the mummy, laying her on the table, pulling the notebook and pencil from my pocket, opening to the page where my notes ended.

  And once again, the urge to touch her was impossible to resist. I laid my hand upon her hair, coarse and thick and dry as straw. I parted it, looking at the scalp, searching for injuries, telltale bumps, obvious discolorations that might be unhealed bruises. In my hurry to leave the house I had forgotten the measuring tape. By now Junius and Daniel would be gone, but I found myself strangely reluctant to go get it, as if a cranial measurement might tell me something I didn’t want to know. If she were Caucasoid, Junius would be pleased, but if the measurements said she was Indian, then Junius’s theory that she belonged to a more advanced race would be disproved. Unless...she was both Indian and from a more advanced culture.

  I heard my father’s voice in my head. Impossible. And Junius’s. An advanced Indian culture? Are you mad, Lea? They were right, of course. The idea was ridiculous. I would be laughed out of scientific circles if I dared suggest it. But I stared down at her thoughtfully, taking in the skillfully woven cloth, the leather headband decorated with broken porcupine quills, and my dream intruded: brown, sturdy ankles, a softly rounded cheek, hair rustling in a breeze as she lay on the riverbank before the fear had come and the shriveling began...

  I shook away the thought and the shiver that came with it, but I couldn’t help thinking how alive she’d been once, how she had moved as I moved, felt as I felt. Again, I heard myself whispering, “Who were you?”

  No, Leonie. Be objective.

  I took a deep breath and pulled the lamp closer. I ran my fingers over her skull, the rounded bone of her forehead, the ridge of her cheekbones, the hinge of her jaw, looking for something—I wasn’t certain what.
Anything, I supposed. Anything that gave me answers, and touching her this way seemed right, as if I were being somehow led to it.

  I slipped behind the dried shell of her ear, and that was when I felt it. A cut of some kind, a...rut. Narrow and faint. I paused in surprise, and then carefully, I felt again. I ran my fingers over it, trying to determine where it ended, but it didn’t. It kept going, beneath her jaw, her chin, a line that stretched from ear to ear. A slit throat, I thought, and my fingers trembled when I drew them away, when I brought the lamp closer to see what I had not seen before. It was too narrow; a thin cut. This was no slit throat, no knife wound. The light played over her skin, making shadows beneath her jaw that loomed large. I cursed beneath my breath and angled the lamp again, and it was then that I saw what I could not feel. A mark, a deep bruise beneath the mummified skin, something that had pressed so deeply into her throat it had left an abrasion.

  She’d been garroted.

  I drew back, my own throat tightening, feeling again as if I were being watched. I glanced over my shoulder—no one, nothing, and yet the feeling didn’t go away. I heard Lord Tom’s words again. His insistence that she had a restless spirit. One that meant harm. It made sense now, in a way, his superstition at last supported by...well, if not reason, then at least motive. This had been murder, and, if one believed ghost stories, murder begat vengeful spirits.

  But he could not have known the body was a murder victim. None of us had. Not until today.

  I shook away my unease and picked up the notebook. I wrote: strangulation abrasion running from ear to ear. Bruising. Clearly intentional death. Sacrificial? Or criminal? I felt suddenly out of my depth. I knew enough about sacrifice rituals to know there were things to look for. Leaves or something else chewed to bring on the narcotic trance and painlessness that most societies dealing in human sacrifice used. But I could not really know without cutting her open to study her stomach contents. It was what Baird and the museum would do. It was what any scientist would do. My father would not have hesitated.

  I tried to ease the sudden lump in my throat. I drew back, studying her again, the fetal position, the slight forward tilt of her head that had hid the garroting wound so well. The way her arms were twined about knees pulled nearly to her chest. The position she’d held in the basket, trapped and suffocating while darkness pressed in and in and in...

  I blinked, shuddering. No. That was only my imagination. Facts, Leonie. Determinedly I pushed aside her hair to see the back of her neck, to feel if the force of the strangulation had broken it. I traced from the knob on the back of her skull down the vertebrae. Her skin had shrunk to the bones, they were easy to feel, none broken that I could tell. So she’d suffocated, which would have been a hard death, perhaps one that involved struggle, unless her executioner had been kind and drugged her.

  I looked for bruising, cuts, something to show whether she’d submitted quietly or fought. Now that I knew what I was looking for, I found those things easily. Discoloration on her wrists that could have been bruising. Tentatively, I pushed the skirt up over her legs as far as I could before her arms around her knees stopped me. Her legs were bare. I ran my fingers over the bony cap of her ankle, her sticklike calf. Nothing.

  I hesitated, and then carefully I turned her onto the other side so she faced the open barn door. When I moved the lantern close I saw a discoloration on her wrist that matched the other, another on her elbow, one on her bared upper arm, just below the shoulder, where there were three small discolorations in a line like fingerprints. I set my own fingers to them. Whoever had held her had bigger hands than mine, but that she had been held, I didn’t doubt. She had been held, and she had struggled. This had been no peaceful murder; she had not wanted to die nor accepted it. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t a sacrifice, only that it had not been kind.

  I stepped away. Lord Tom’s warnings, and Bibi’s, seemed now to ring in my ears. I tried to ignore them and picked up the notebook again, writing down my observations, and then I felt again that prickling sense of being watched. I looked over my shoulder, into dim shadows filled with the familiar, hay and straw, barrels, a small garden plow. There was nothing else. No one there but her.

  But the feeling would not go away, and with it came fear, the same fear from my dreams, time slipping away and waiting and horror...

  She wants you. Why, I do not know, but it is you she wants.

  I could not stay there another moment. I threw down the notebook and the pencil and hurried from the barn, and the feeling pursued me into the daylight, across the salt marsh, to the porch. It didn’t ease until I was inside the house, and the door was closed, and I was leaning against it as if I’d been chased, my heart racing, my breath coming fast.

  I pressed my palms flat against the door and pushed myself from it. I tried to laugh it away—hollow, too hearty, edged with the vestiges of my fear. “You’re a fool, Leonie Russell,” I said—aloud, though it only made me feel more absurd. And now I had left the mummy exposed in the barn, and I would have to turn around and put her in the trunk. I would have to go back.

  But I could not make myself turn around. A few more moments, I told myself. Just until I had composed myself. And before I knew it, I was climbing the stairs to our bedroom. There was my dresser, with its little horn bowl, and without conscious thought, almost without volition, I dug through the buttons and hairpins until I found the abalone charms on a piece of store-bought twine. I picked it up, dangling it in my fingers, telling myself to put it down again. This was stupid. One of the most absurd things I’d ever done. There could be no magic in this. There was no danger and nothing to watch out for and there was no spirit troubling me.

  But still I slid the bracelet on my wrist, and I tightened the knot to keep it there.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table when Lord Tom came in through the back door. He looked wan and sick, his dark eyes bloodshot. I was mending instead of drawing or working on story translations—the mummy had spooked me enough that I knew I shouldn’t be listening to legends today. I’d gone back to the barn to lock her away. The feelings that had driven me out were gone, but I still felt uncomfortable over what had happened, though now I wondered just what had happened. I couldn’t grasp it clearly; it seemed so unreal.

  “You look terrible,” I told him.

  He said, “I feel sick.”

  “It’s your own fault. You shouldn’t drink so much.”

  He went to the stove and poured a cup of coffee, sitting at the table again. He glanced down at my wrist. I realized he was staring at Bibi’s bracelet.

  I pushed it beneath my sleeve, hiding it. “Junius thought it might make her happy if I wore it,” I explained. “And maybe more inclined to trade.”

  “She is no tomawanos woman. Halo latate.”

  “I know it’s stupid. Still, I—”

  “You should take it off. Throw it away, okustee.”

  “Bibi’s as full of nonsense as you are. Bad luck, mesachie memelose—”

  “Why wear it, then?”

  “I...I don’t know. Except today I...Tot, I discovered how she died.”

  Lord Tom went so still he seemed to stop breathing.

  I went on. “She was strangled. I don’t know if it was sacrificial or not, but she struggled. It was...it was a very bad death.”

  He muttered something below his breath, though I couldn’t understand the words.

  I looked up at him. “How did you know...? Why were you so sure the spirit had a reason to be vengeful?”

  He paused. “It is not good to disturb the dead.”

  “But she’s so ancient—”

  “It is best to leave such things alone. Rebury her, okustee. Don’t trust kamosuk given by foolish women. Give the body peace.”

  I looked down at the twine peeking from my sleeve. “Bibi said that the spirit would not rest until she had what she wanted from me.”

  “Okustee—”

  “And I can’t rebury her, tot. I can’t put a disco
very this big back into the ground. You must know that. My father would be ashamed of me. I’d be ashamed of myself.”

  Lord Tom’s upper lip thinned almost to invisibility, and I felt his disapproval like a heavy cloak. “It is bad to fight this, okustee. Skookum tomawanos. It will get worse until you bury her. More dleams. More bad luck.”

  I was surprised at his mention of my dream. Junius must have told him. And then I thought of today, of the menace that had me running, putting on the bracelet. I thought of Daniel—Junius’s warnings and Bibi’s, and my sense of him last night. Bad luck.

  “I don’t believe in bad luck, tot,” I said firmly, as much for myself as for him.

  He opened his mouth to say something, but just then there was a noise on the porch—Junius and Daniel returned. Junius had a heavy bag over his shoulder. As they came inside, he said, “We got it, Lea. The whole McKenna collection—or at least what he had left of it.”

  I forgot bad luck and everything else for the moment. “McKenna—you don’t mean Robert McKenna? You didn’t tell me it was his collection.” Robert McKenna had made a trip to the Bela Coola years ago, and the rumor was that he’d returned with rare ceremonial masks.

  “I didn’t know myself,” Junius said as he set the bag on the floor and pulled off his boots. “Not till we got there. He’s fallen on some hard times.”

  Daniel closed the door behind them. “He was drunk. It looked to be a common thing.”

  “Alas, yes.” Junius didn’t sound the least bit sorry for it as he strode to the stove where there was a pot of oyster stew keeping warm. He ladled some into a bowl. “Sold his whacks to Crellin. Said he was leaving on the first schooner that would take him, but I doubt he’ll be sober enough to recognize when that is.” Junius gestured toward the bag. “Unfortunately, there’s not much there worthwhile. But he did tell me the story of some settler who was in town a few weeks ago. Sanderson or something, up near Stony Point. I guess he’d found a cave full of relics. I thought perhaps we should go talk to him. Maybe tomorrow, if the weather holds.” Junius motioned toward Daniel. “Come and eat, boy. I know you’re hungry.”