Bone River

by Chance, Megan

  “The way she died?” His voice sharpened. “You know how she died?”

  “She was strangled,” I said, shrugging away the prickle between my shoulder blades, the memory of my dream.

  A quick glance. “Murdered?”

  “Yes, but it could have been ritualized. A sacrifice.”

  “How would you tell that?”

  “Most rituals don’t encourage suffering. Victims are offered things to ease the pain. Plants, mild poisons. Things to numb or even to bring visions. Often there’s evidence of that. Leaves or something.”

  “Have you found that here?”

  I shook my head. “So I don’t know. Maybe it was murder. I wish I knew. Her stomach contents would tell me if she ate something, but—”

  “So you mean to cut her open?”

  I kept my eyes on her, the soft black eyelashes, the browning nubs of teeth, the shine of her hair in the sun, the peek of an ankle beneath a skirt...“It’s why Junius wants to send her to Baird. Because he thinks I’m too sentimental. That I can’t do what needs to be done. My father wouldn’t have hesitated.”

  “So why do you?”

  I met his gaze. “Look at her. If the means of her death was violent, at least she seems at peace now. I can’t ruin that.”

  “Violent?” he asked. “You just said she would have been given things to numb the pain.”

  “If she was, it didn’t work. There are bruises on her arms where she struggled. She was afraid—” I caught myself, swallowing the words. “At least, I imagine she would have been afraid.”

  “What does my father say about her death?”

  “Well...I haven’t told him.”

  He looked confused. “You haven’t? Why not?”

  I couldn’t explain it to him. I couldn’t even explain it to myself. Not why I hadn’t told Junius nor why I’d told his son instead. “I don’t know.”

  “One can see the way she preoccupies you. Your gaze goes to this barn a hundred times a day. Do you know what it looks like to me? It looks like you’re protecting her, but when I ask myself who you’d be protecting her from, the only answer I have is my father.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I think you’re afraid he’ll take the things you’ve learned for himself. That he’ll take credit for your theories.”

  I couldn’t help it; I looked at him with shocked surprise. I had not thought those things, but now that he said them, I realized they were true, or at least they were part of the truth. Protecting her—yes, I wanted that. But why? Because I wanted time to form theories of my own? To not let Junius’s thirst for recognition force what we discovered to fit his theories, instead of the other way around? Or something else? Something more...emotional? The thought troubled me. I tried to bring myself around to rationality, to what I should be thinking and feeling about her.

  “I’m right,” Daniel said with satisfaction.

  I shook my head. “Not really. Or...not just that. It’s...June wants her to prove his theories about the Mound Builders, and—”

  “You don’t want to have to tell him you disagree.” Then, at my further surprise, “You told me, remember? When we first met. You said you didn’t believe it.”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe it. They’ve found beautiful things in those mounds. And this fabric...it’s far too fine.”

  “But?” Daniel urged gently.

  “But I can’t look at those winter ceremony masks and think they’re anything but beautiful. And...and not primitive. The workmanship is too skilled for that, and imaginative. I think...I think she comes from a different culture than Lord Tom’s, but do I think it was a superior one? I don’t know. Junius would send her off right now and tell the world what he thinks if I let him. And then he’d be made a fool if it turned out he was wrong. I won’t let him do that. Baird’s approval means everything to him. He wants to be the preeminent ethnologist in the Northwest.”

  “Even at the expense of his wife?”

  “We’re partners, Daniel. I’m not sacrificing anything.”

  His gaze was thoughtful. “I never said anything about sacrifice.”

  He flustered me. I took a deep breath. “I should get to drawing.”

  “Tell me first how you found her.”

  I hesitated. “It was the morning after a storm. My birthday. The bank had fallen away and there...there was a heron standing there as if it meant to call me over...and I...well—” I laughed a little, embarrassed that I’d revealed the fancy, trying to regain myself.

  “A birthday present,” Daniel said with a smile.

  “That’s how I thought of her,” I admitted. “As if she’d been put there just for me.”

  “You said yesterday that Sanderson’s basket was like the one you found her in.”

  I didn’t want to think about that. I motioned to the basket against the barn wall. “There. She’d been buried in it.”

  “It looks like any other Indian basket.”

  “It isn’t. The designs on it aren’t like any from around here. They’re not Shoalwater, neither Chinook nor Chehalis. I don’t know what they are.” I frowned at him. “Shouldn’t you be writing this down?”

  “It’s your notebook.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I’ll remember it well enough. And you’re here if I need to ask questions to remind myself.”

  I nodded and went on, “In any case, by the time I got it half–dug out, Junius and Lord Tom came home and did the rest. That’s all. I found nothing else to indicate who she was or where she was from. Just her. And the basket.”

  “And now you’re going to draw her and cut her open.”

  I winced. “If I don’t, Baird will.”

  “I wonder...” He looked thoughtful. “Have you ever considered sending her elsewhere?”

  “Elsewhere?”

  “There are places other than the National Museum that would be interested in her, you know. Places that won’t destroy her.”

  I frowned. “Such as...?”

  “A curiosity museum, for one,” he said. “I imagine one might pay well for something like this. And she’d remain intact.”

  “A curiosity museum? But...but that’s not science.”

  “It’s entertainment,” he agreed. “But you’ve already had plenty of men out here to stare at her, so I don’t think you’re that averse to it, and wouldn’t it be better to not have to cut her apart? With the story you’ve just told me about how she died, people would be fascinated. If you like, I could make inquiries...I might know of one or two in San Francisco that would be interested.”

  “But that’s even worse, isn’t it?” I said quietly. “To have people gawking at her? She’s...she’s very rare, Daniel. She’s so much more than a curiosity.”

  “But you don’t want her cut up.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I want. Science makes its own demands. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t...if I couldn’t...” I trailed off, looking at her, imagining her in a glass case, people pointing and making faces, a show of oddities. It wasn’t what she wanted, I knew. “She was alive once. It’s...something like this is sacred.”

  “I thought you said you were a scientist. That you didn’t believe in the sacred. You said her soul had passed over.”

  I said, “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “I do understand,” he said. “She’s remarkable. I’d have to be a fool not to see that. And your devotion to finding the truth of her is remarkable as well. I’m not suggesting you give up your research. I just think a curiosity museum might be the answer when you’re done.”

  “Junius would never permit it.”

  “So you’ll send it off and let him take credit because it’s what he wants. I wonder...what is it you want, Leonie?”

  His voice was low and intent. When I looked at him I saw that strange tension in him again, the same I’d seen yesterday, and I was wary. I said, “I think you want the answers to be simple, Dan
iel. But they aren’t.”

  “I don’t think they’re as complicated as you pretend, either,” he said.

  But I’d had enough. I held out my hand for the notebook. “I really must get to drawing.”

  Silently he handed it back to me, along with the pencil. I looked down at the page, at his handwriting listing my measurements—how neat was his penmanship, clean and precise, the reflection of a well-ordered mind, one where everything had its place, boxed and stacked and labeled. Which was what he was trying to do with me, I realized. And Junius.

  Well, let him. He would learn the truth of things soon enough. Twenty-seven was not so old; he had years to discover that there were pieces of one’s life that could still surprise, dreams unrealized, regrets one had never thought to keep.

  But as I settled down to draw and he leaned back against the barn post to watch, arms crossed, and the silence stretched between us, I felt the questions he’d asked hovering, the conclusions he’d made, and there was an insistence in them that would not fade, even after the minutes passed and I was lost in my drawing and I forgot he was there. I saw only the lines of my pencil, the broad strokes and shading beneath his precisely drawn numbers, her foot taking shape upon the page, and yet the things he’d said remained, whispering in my ear, soft as the brush of abalone charms against my skin.

  CHAPTER 10

  I WAS BRUSHING out my hair when Junius came into the bedroom, shutting the door softly behind him. The night was very dark beyond the windows, the reflection of the candlelight haloing against the glass, reflecting Junius too, so I saw the dim image of him pausing, watching me as I pulled the brush through the wild, tight curls of my hair, straightening it only for it to spring back when released, forming a cloud around my face.

  I asked, “Are you and Lord Tom on speaking terms again?”

  He came back to me as if he’d been lost in reverie, slowly, blinking. “Seemingly. Apparently he’s forgiven me for McKenna’s skull. Thank God he doesn’t know about those Stony Point skeletons, or he might be silent a year. How’d the day go with the boy?”

  “Daniel is his name. And the day went well.” I put aside the brush and began to braid my hair. “He was a good assistant. He has very neat handwriting.”

  Junius nodded. He unbuttoned his shirt and drew it off, and then he went to the basin and splashed his face. “Discover anything new?”

  I felt the words lodge in my throat, the fervency of reluctance.

  You’re afraid he’ll take your ideas as his own.

  But my worries were groundless—why should I expect Junius to do what he’d told me he would not? What reason had I? Quickly, before I could think better of it, I forced myself to say, “I’ve discovered how she died.”

  Junius straightened and reached for the towel. “You did? And how’s that? Disease, as I suspected?”

  “She was strangled,” I said.

  He paused in the midst of drying his face and looked at me over the edge of the towel. “Strangled?”

  “Garroted, actually. With something very thin.”

  “A sacrifice?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t look like it. There were bruises on her arms, as if she fought it. I think it was murder.”

  “Then why mummify her?”

  “I don’t know that they did, June. Perhaps it was just...a natural...phenomenon.”

  He shook his head. “Doubtful. It’s too perfect. I’m certain there are signs of deliberate mummification to be found. Did you check for holes in the septum? Incisions in the chest?”

  “I haven’t got that far—”

  “Just because they didn’t wrap her doesn’t mean she’s not stuffed with herbs and rags. You can’t make assumptions like that until you’ve cut her open, Lea.”

  Uncertainly, I said, “No, of course not, but—it seems odd, don’t you think, that there were no funerary relics buried with her? There’s nothing at all in the ground where we found her.”

  “How long did you spend out there? A day? There’s more digging to be done.”

  “I was very thorough.”

  “I’m sure you were, sweetheart, but you haven’t the strength to be exhaustive. I’ll send Lord Tom out there as soon as the rain lets up. He’ll dig so you don’t have to wear yourself out.”

  I felt a little sting of resentment.

  “Perhaps you should go through it yourself, then,” I said a little meanly.

  Junius said, “You’re better at sifting than I am. More patience.” He put the towel aside and came up behind me, bending to kiss my shoulder. “Your father used to say it, I remember. That there was no one better for detail work.”

  Detail work. It seemed too little praise, an insult in some strange way, though I knew he hadn’t meant it so. And I was good at detail. I’d always been proud of that. I forced the thought aside and tried again. “I remember hearing a story about a settler out here who was buried in a trunk. When they dug him up a year later to plant a garden, he was mummified.”

  Junius laughed. “What kind of a story was it? An Indian myth?”

  “No. Someone told me. I don’t remember who—”

  “It didn’t happen.” He was so certain. “Trust me, Lea. Cut her open and you’ll see. Unless you’re too squeamish.”

  I thought I heard challenge there, a dare. “I don’t know that it will be necessary.”

  “You mean you don’t want to do it,” he said. He unbuttoned his trousers, pushing them off his lean hips, revealing his long underwear that went dark and wet from the knees down where his boots had not protected him from the water. “It’s fine to admit it. You’re tenderhearted. No one faults you for it. Women are meant to be sentimental. It’s what makes them good mothers—”

  “I’m not a mother,” I said, too sharply, disbelieving that he’d even said it.

  “You’re a stepmother,” he said, as if that proved his point, as if being the stepmother to a twenty-seven-year-old was the same as raising a child from infancy. “And you’re proving to be a good one too, Lea. I would have sent the boy on his way, but you...I should have realized he would appeal to your natural sympathies.”

  “Why did you marry me, Junius?” The words came out before I was even aware of thinking them.

  His gaze met mine in the mirror. “What?”

  Now was the time to take it back, to say never mind, to let it go unmentioned. But I twisted to face him. Again, I said, quietly this time, “Why did you marry me?”

  “You know why,” he said.

  “You promised my father,” I said. “But you had another wife. You had a child. Why did you choose me over them?”

  Junius’s face softened, and suddenly I wished I had not asked the question. There was no reason for it, after all. Land. The whacks. And a pretty little seventeen-year-old on top of it. I knew Daniel’s suspicions for being the worst sort of bias. Junius was the one I knew, the man I had loved for twenty years. I had never before questioned his love for me.

  But the question was there now and it could not be unsaid, so I waited.

  He motioned for me to come to him where he sat on the edge of the bed, and when I stepped between his legs, he wrapped his arms about my hips, pulling me close, and his expression when he looked up at me was frank. “Why did I marry you? I’ve told you. Because you needed me, sweetheart, and Mary and the boy didn’t. When Teddy died...” He paused, glancing away as if too moved to keep my gaze. “You were so bereft. I couldn’t bear to see it, to tell you the truth. And then, when you said you wanted to marry me...well, there was so much hope in your face. How could I say no?”

  “You should have,” I whispered.

  His smile was wry. “Really? Who knows what would have happened to you here alone, prey for every idiot who set foot upon these shores? I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.”

  “But you could live with walking away from your son.”

  “I told you, I thought he’d be better off. He had his mother to love him. You had no one.”r />
  “I had Lord Tom.”

  Junius shrugged as if that meant nothing. “The boy means to make you feel guilty, Lea, but it wasn’t your fault. None of it. Let him blame me, if he wants. That’s deserved, at least.”

  His arms tightened about me, pulling me close enough so he could press his face against my stomach. I felt the warmth of him, the heat of his breath through my nightclothes. “Don’t let him come between us.”

  “Why would he? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  He drew away and looked up at me again. “It’s not ridiculous. Where are these questions coming from, if not him?”

  “I was only wondering—”

  “Because he said something to you about it, didn’t he? About how this land was worth something, about the oysters, about you being young and pretty.”

  I squirmed a little. “No—”

  “He did. I can see it.” He jerked me closer, holding me hard in place. “He wasn’t there, Lea. He doesn’t know. He’s angry and bitter and he has every right to be. But he doesn’t know anything about the two of us, and he has no right to make you doubt me.”

  “I don’t doubt you,” I said, and in that moment, it was true. I didn’t doubt him, and I was annoyed with Daniel for planting those suspicions, and angry with myself for being so susceptible to them, for forgetting so easily and well my own reasons for wariness. You will regret it now he is here.

  “I wish you’d let me send him away.”

  “No,” I said firmly. I would stay on guard, but until Daniel proved he was unworthy, I would stay the course. “He needs to know the truth of you. I want him to know who you really are.”

  “For what reason?”

  I threaded my hand through my husband’s hair and looked at him affectionately. “Because he needs to know. For himself. He’s getting married soon, and I think it would ease his mind to know you’re not the ogre he thinks you are. And I know you say you don’t care, but I think you would rest easier too, knowing that you have a son who doesn’t hate you.”

  He laughed a little and buried his face in me again, his voice muffled as he said, “You know me too well.”