Bone Deep

by O'Brien, Kim;

  “That’s not true,” he says.

  “Isn’t it? Other fathers actually like to hang out with their kids. They go to their games. They cook pancakes in the morning and grill dinners. I think you would like me more if I were dead, a skeleton you could examine.”

  “I’m sorry I’m not who you wanted me to be,” he says, and even then his voice isn’t angry, just kind of sad and resigned, as if what I’ve said is true. “Someday, maybe, you’ll figure out that being like everyone else is overrated. Just because I don’t barbeque doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

  “Just forget it, Dr. Patterson. I really don’t care anymore.” He flinches at the coldness in my voice. I feel mean and bad about myself, but don’t let it stop me from walking out of the room.

  Access to the park is restricted, but the ranger recognizes my father and unlocks the gate. The grounds look empty, but then we see a skinny German shepherd sniffing the ground just past the cactus gardens. The handler jogs to keep up with the dog, who runs in increasingly wide loops. I could have told them Emily’s scent would be strongest by the saguaro where we argued about my father and lead to the banks of Otter Creek where we sat eating lunch.

  Inside the information center, the largest conference room is crowded with police, park officials, and rangers. Jalen and his father are there, too, studying a map with Tom Blackstone.

  Jalen leans on the table, bracing himself on his arms, the muscles so clearly defined I could trace each one with my finger. His black T-shirt fits the width of his shoulders, then hangs loosely over his hips. He feels my gaze and looks up. I look away quickly, disgusted with myself for the feelings I shouldn’t have, especially now.

  At the long conference table, Detective Rodriquez sits at the head, an exhausted-looking Mrs. Linton on her right. Dr. Shum, also seated at the table, acknowledges my father with a weary nod. Beside him, Mrs. Shum lays her hand on top of her husband’s.

  “Any word?” my dad asks.

  “No.” Dr. Shum’s eyes have deep purple circles beneath them, and the collar of his green park shirt stands up on one side as if he put it on without looking in the mirror. “The Equine Search and Rescue is on its way, and the search parties will go out as soon as the dogs finish.”

  “Dr. Patterson,” Detective Rodriquez says with exaggerated emphasis on the word doctor. “I was wondering if I could have a word with you privately.” She lifts her heavy body up from the chair and walks toward my father.

  “Of course,” he says. The two of them disappear out the door.

  The minute he’s gone, I’m surrounded by the Lintons. Mrs. Linton links her arm through mine and leans into me, uncomfortably close. “Paige,” she says, “I know this is hard for you, but if you have information, you need to tell us.”

  She smells a little. Not terrible, but sour enough that I don’t want to be near her. Her eyes are terrible—bloodshot and watery. I try not to breathe too deeply, and then I try not to breathe at all. “I told the police everything.”

  “I know. But there’s more, isn’t there?”

  I shift. “What do you mean?”

  “You asked her to talk to him. You even offered to cover for her—that’s why she lied to us. Told us she was spending the night with you. She never would have, otherwise. I can forgive you that, but we need to know where she was going to meet him.”

  My gaze falls to the gray linoleum floor. It looks dirty and soiled, a pattern so trampled it’ll never be clean. I know I should leave, but my legs feel bolted to the floor. “No, it wasn’t like that. I never asked her to talk to him.” My throat closes, and I can’t squeeze out that I didn’t want Emily to get involved.

  “The police are questioning Jeremy Brown right now. I know you know more than you’re telling.”

  I shake my head.

  She closes her eyes as if she’s trying to keep control of herself, but when she opens them, her pupils are as sharp as pencil points. “You were always leading her into trouble. Even as a little girl. I tried to talk to her about you, but she wouldn’t listen.” Her lips quiver, and she doesn’t speak for several seconds. “How could you let her face him when you knew he was a monster?”

  My heart pounds, and my legs start to shake. It feels like she’s growing taller, stronger, while I’m shrinking, dying inside. I try to look away, but the room is a dizzying kaleidoscope of faces.

  “Why couldn’t you just leave her alone?”

  Dr. Linton pulls ineffectively at his wife’s arm. “Sarah,” he says quietly. “Don’t.”

  “It’s her fault,” Mrs. Linton insists. She leans closer, and her voice drops to a sour whisper. “It should have been you. Whatever happened to her should have happened to you. It’s all your fault.”

  The venom in her voice is like poison in my bloodstream. Heart pounding, I turn, knocking into someone and spilling their coffee and pushing past, out of the room. Running down the hallway, Mrs. Linton’s voice repeats clearly in my head. Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.

  I run through the maze of exhibits. Where can I go where I won’t see Mrs. Linton’s accusing eyes? Where do you go when the person you most want to avoid is yourself?

  I race past the taxidermy display, the wall of bronze tools, the shelves of pottery, and the curtained-off area, and then I’m in the gift shop.

  I veer away from the floor-to-ceiling windows that face the cliffs and then push my way past the racks of T-shirts, the postcard stand, and the shelves of stuffed animals to a corner where an ancient-looking soda machine stands along the wall. I lean forward against it, breathing hard, absorbing the heat coming off its surface.

  A voice makes me jump. “So what kind do you want?”

  I turn slowly. Jalen is standing behind me, still as a shadow. His eyes are black, serious.

  When I don’t answer, he takes a dollar bill out of a worn brown wallet and peers past me at the selections, although he probably already knows most have been empty since the day I arrived.

  “Water, water…or water?”

  “Nothing. I’m fine.” I shift an inch backward and feel the heat of the machine at my back.

  He leans around me and feeds the limp dollar into the slot. A bottle bounces to the bottom with a thump.

  His hand looks huge as he twists off the cap. As he gives it to me, our fingers touch. The contact startles me. A spark. I almost laugh, not because it’s funny, but because it’s either laugh or cry. His hand moves away abruptly, leaving me with the cold weight of the plastic bottle.

  I take a small swallow of the icy water and mumble “thanks.” I hope he’ll go away.

  I lift my chin. “You didn’t have to come after me. You don’t have to try and make me feel better.”

  “I know,” he says.

  But he doesn’t know, or he wouldn’t keep standing there as the seconds tick by. I want to ask why he came after me, why he never says my name, and why he’s still standing there. And yet I say nothing at all.

  Yet there’s something comforting about his presence, as if he’s a wall between me and the rest of the world. But as much as I’d like to hide behind him, I can’t let myself do that.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I know.”

  I lift my gaze from the slimy blue label around the water bottle. “You can go.”

  “I know.” The hint of a smile softens the straight line of his lips.

  “So why don’t you?” I would cringe at the coldness in my voice if I didn’t need it so badly to hide how scared I am. How guilty I feel.

  He shrugs. “Because you’re so pleasant to be around?”

  His face is so serious I have to study him hard to see if he’s joking or not, and even then I’m not completely sure.

  “I’m not going to fall apart.”

  He nods as if this is a given but then doesn’t budge an inch. “Good. You want to sit down?”

  “Are you babysitting me?

  He smiles. “A little. There’s a bench just outside the door in the cactus gard
en. It’s quiet there.”

  “You’re trying to keep me away from the Lintons.”

  His smile fades. “They’ve been up all night. Their daughter is missing. You can’t take anything she says seriously.”

  But I can. And I do. Because she’s right. It should be me who’s missing. Me who should fight her own fights.

  It isn’t until we step outside of the information center and into the heat of the morning that I realize how cold I am. How welcome the sun rays feel, soaking into my skin as if they’re going all the way to the bone.

  We take a seat on some wooden benches that face the cliffs. The police dogs are gone, and the landscape stretches out as far as I can see, empty of people, empty of any birds or animals. I don’t know if I’m more terrified that they’ll find her body, or that they’ll find nothing at all.

  Next to me, Jalen is quiet. His eyes are watchful, fixed on something in the distance. If as much as a rabbit moved, I think he’d see it. I have the feeling he can sit this way for hours, not speaking but soaking up thoughts. I take a sip of water and hear myself ask. “What do you think happened to her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I start peeling the label off the bottle and ask the question that haunts me. “Do you think she’s alive?”

  He takes a long time to answer the question. “I hope so.”

  “I hope so,” I mimic in frustration. “You must have heard something. Last night, or earlier before I got here. What did the police say?”

  His lips tighten. “The dogs keep following a scent into the park, but there’s still a possibility that she was abducted from the parking lot.”

  I compare this to my own theory, and it comes up short. “Mrs. Linton said the police were questioning Jeremy Brown. Do you know anything about that?”

  He shakes his head. “No. But Detective Rodriquez questioned me about him. What happened on Tuesday afternoon between you and him.”

  I hold his gaze. “What did you tell them?”

  “That I heard noises coming from Chamber One and when I called out if everyone was okay, you came up the ladder looking upset.”

  He had pulled me up the last few rungs. I still remember the power of his grip, the strength of his hand lifting me. For the first time, however, I realize that the story didn’t end with me running out of the ruins. “Did you see Jeremy?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  He shrugs. “Nothing.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “He was in a hurry. He asked which way you’d gone.”

  “Did he seem…mad?”

  “No. When I asked him what was going on, he told me to stay out of it.”

  “And then what happened?”

  He turns to meet my gaze and blinks a couple of times. “I told him you climbed up into the third level.”

  He lied for me. He saw me run through the doorway out into the open. Although nothing in his face moves, something in his stillness gives him away. He’s holding back. “That’s it?”

  My suspicions are confirmed when Jalen does another series of slow blinks. “Well, he was kind of in a hurry to get to the ladder and he accidentally tripped over my feet. I helped him up and told him that he should be more careful, that accidents like that could happen pretty easily around here.”

  I don’t know what to say. I’m not even sure how I feel about him defending me. Part of me feels glad, and yet I also realize that, once again, I’ve let someone else stand up for me. It’s like I’m five again and Emily is explaining the rules of fear—it either helps you grow or makes you less of yourself. Maybe there’s more truth in that than either of us thought.

  Before I can either say thank you or tell him that I can look after myself, the door to the information center opens. John Yazzi sticks his head out of the opening.

  “Jalen,” he snaps, “we need you inside.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Paige

  For the next several days the park stays closed to the general public as the search for Emily Linton intensifies. The days are cloudless, searing hot, over a hundred degrees, but it doesn’t stop volunteers from showing up before dawn and staying until the rangers make them leave.

  Equine rescue teams arrive from Scottsdale and Houston. The riders divide the park into grids and search in pairs. Although they cover more ground, at the end of the day the riders return, like me, sunburned and exhausted.

  I spend an afternoon watching a team of divers search Tacoma Well. When they break the surface, the black hoods of their wetsuits remind me of the heads of turtles I used to feed in the pond near my house in New Jersey.

  The dogs find a faint trail that leads from the parking lot to the base of the cliffs. The dogs, of course, can’t climb the ladders to follow the scent, and for a while there’s talk of men carrying them up into the ruins, but that doesn’t happen. Instead, Dr. Shum and my father lead teams of officers up the cliffs. They spend several days prowling around the honeycomb of rooms, jagged stone corridors, and hollowed-out crevices in the walls.

  Rumors fly. Emily has run away and is sunning herself on the sandy beaches of Southern California. Emily was the victim of a serial killer who preys on girls at national parks. Emily’s disappearance is part of a publicity stunt to bring more tourism to the park. Emily met the same fate as the hundreds of Native Americans who vanished from the cliffs more than six hundred years ago.

  One night, as my father and I eat our respective microwave dinners in front of the television, the news flashes the same photo of Emily and the reporter repeats the story of her disappearance and the discouraging news that there are no developments.

  After the story ends, my father turns off the television. “Listen, honey, I know Emily’s disappearance is disturbing, but there’s something else we need to talk about. Ray came by my office today.” He pauses. His blue eyes are intent behind the black frames of his glasses. My stomach tightens. “The police have cleared Jeremy.”

  A bite of Stouffers’s lasagna lodges itself in my throat. “What?”

  “He has an alibi. He was home all night with his mother.”

  “That’s impossible. He’s lying.”

  “He was home with his parents. The story checks out.”

  “He could have slipped out, met Emily at the park.”

  His eyes look skeptical behind his glasses. “The odds of that are small.” He pauses, pushes the skin on his face as if he dreads delivering the next bit of news. “Ray and I talked about you and Jeremy.” He pauses, giving me a long, dreadful moment to imagine them discussing the details, maybe even passing back and forth the pictures the police took at the hospital. “We’re going to temporarily suspend Jeremy from the university. Dr. Shum is going to talk to him and the other interns before he makes a final decision.”

  “Great. Maybe he can make copies of my photos from the hospital and pass them around.” Or they could post them, I think bitterly, next to the flyers of Emily.

  “He promises to be discreet, but this is a serious charge against Jeremy. The university has a very strict sexual harassment policy.”

  “I don’t want to press charges. I just think that he isn’t who he seems. He comes across as nice, but he has a temper, Dad. Don’t you think it’s more than a coincidence that Emily disappears the day after I told her what happened to me?”

  My father cleans his glasses with the hem of his shirt and then replaces them. “I don’t know what to think,” he admits. “It’s still possible she’ll turn up.”

  “And it’s also possible that Jeremy’s mother lied to protect him. Wouldn’t you lie to protect me?”

  He shakes his head. “I hope I would never be in a position to have to answer that.”

  It isn’t the answer I want, and I shift impatiently on the couch. “Come on, Dad. He’s lying. I want to talk to him.”

  “No,” my father say in a tone of voice that says the conversation is finished.

  “I’ll know if he’s lying
.” I know the taste, touch, and scent of him. I know both more and less than I want.

  “No, Paige. This is for the police. Stay out of this.”

  “Are you kidding me? Emily is missing and you don’t want to get involved?”

  “Of course I want to help. Look, Emily’s disappearance—it’s terrible…” He mutes the television and shifts on the couch to face me. “It’s beyond terrible, actually. But you’re my priority. He hurt you. You need to stay away from him.”

  “But he might know something.”

  “Paige. This whole…incident between the two of you is serious. The Browns have spoken with Dr. Shum. They’re hiring a lawyer. They say…the statements you’re making about their son are false and inflammatory. Until everything is resolved, any communication has to go through the university.”

  “What if there’s still a chance Emily’s alive and he knows where she is?”

  “He doesn’t know, Paige. If he did, the police would have found out.”

  “The police don’t know him. I do.”

  My father shakes his head. “When I pictured you coming here, I thought it might be like when you were little. You loved going on-site with me. I thought it…” His voice trails off, and for a moment I think he’s going to say that he hoped it would bring us together. His eyes fix on me, unblinking. “Maybe it would be best if you went back to New Jersey.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I want to do what’s right for you.”

  My fingers trace a small dark stain on the sofa where I spilled grape juice when I was little. I was terrified my father would be mad, but all he said was that I’d given the couch a history, a story, a memory. He said it was a good thing, but Mom always turned the cushions over when we had company.

  “I don’t want to leave—not until I know what happened to Emily.”

  His gaze softens. “We might never know. Sometimes bad things just happen.”

  “I thought you cared about her.”

  “I do care about her. I’m just saying that sometimes things happen and you wonder if you could have changed them if you’d done something differently.” His brow furrows, and his face forms that faraway look he gets when he slips into professor mode. “You can second-guess the choices you make, but you can’t change anything. The truth is that sometimes it is our fault and sometimes it isn’t. Ultimately, either way, you have to let go and move on.”