Walking the Bones

by Randall Silvis

  “Grandma was a Methodist,” Jayme said, “so I didn’t know Pastor Royce. But some of the kids I hung around with summers did. And there were stories about him.”

  “Such as?”

  “He liked money, and he liked women. Of all ages. I don’t recall ever hearing that he went after children. Or that he limited himself to any one race.”

  “Was he investigated?”

  “I’m sure he must have been.”

  “The strange thing about Hoyle,” DeMarco said, “is that he knew both of us. You, I understand. But me? He even knew my rank back home. You didn’t see him when you ran past that empty lot?”

  She shook her head no. “But you know who I did see? Rosemary Toomey. The librarian.”

  “The scary one?”

  “She lives a few…let me think…five houses before the empty lot. She was watering her flower bed when I went by. Waved and called out good morning to me.”

  “And then made a call to Hoyle sitting in his air-conditioned car somewhere down by the lot. What do you want to bet?”

  “The question is, why? Why would a librarian and a coroner conspire to engage you in a conversation? Are you sure you weren’t suffering from heatstroke?”

  “It didn’t feel like a conversation as much as a… I don’t know. A test of some kind.”

  DeMarco walked a few paces in silence. Then he asked, “Am I going to look out of place at the funeral? Without a coat and tie?”

  “We do take our funerals seriously down here,” she said.

  “Great. DeMarco the uncouth Yankee.”

  She grinned. “It’s bad enough you’re shagging a former Peach Festival princess. But showing up at a funeral in khakis and loafers and no tie? I bet you didn’t know Grandma was a Daughter of the American Revolution, did you?”

  He said, “I should have worn my American flag bandanna.”

  “Definitely uncouth,” she told him, and took his hand.

  He loved holding her hand. He wished he could hold both of them at the same time and still walk in a straight line. He said, “I think I might have lost a pound or two from all this sweating I’ve been doing.”

  “Like that’s going to help,” she said.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  At brunch with the Matsons, he limited himself to a small helping of scrambled eggs, a bowl of fresh fruit, and three cups of coffee. He asked Bryan about the false wall in the church, which caused Bryan to ask everyone within ten feet if they, unlike him, had had any knowledge, prior to the termite infestation, of the wall’s existence. Nobody did. Nor was Hoyle known to any of them, but after hearing Bryan’s repetition of DeMarco’s description—“sort of like Humpty Dumpty in a faded black suit”—two of the cousins who still lived in Aberdeen thought they might have seen such an individual once or twice, though they could not say where. All admitted that the murder of the seven girls was a heinous act that had tarnished the little town’s good name.

  “You probably don’t know we got us a pair of registered sex offenders living within twenty miles of here,” Cousin William told him.

  “Seriously?” Jayme said.

  “One of them’s up north a bit. Lives in a double-wide on forty-some acres with a woman and his brother. Some kind of antigovernment group. I forget what they call themselves.”

  Another cousin asked, “Is that the bunch had a fifteen-year-old living with them?”

  “She was fourteen,” Cousin William said. “Only one of them took the fall for it. Served six months or something like that. But from what I hear, they were all in on it. The girl too. Share and share alike, you know what I mean?”

  “What happened to the minor?” Jayme asked.

  “Hard to say. This went on when? Four, five years ago?”

  DeMarco asked, “And you say there’s another one in the area too?”

  “Sex offender?” said Cousin William. “He grew up about eight miles out on Lakeview Road.”

  “That’s where we went jogging today!” Jayme said. Then, with a wink to DeMarco, “I did, anyway.”

  “Well,” said Cousin William, “if you went far enough you would have seen a run-down old dairy farm. Except there’s nothing there anymore but for a dozen or so dogs and cats and free-range chickens, plus the two old folks. I don’t know what became of their pedophile son.”

  “All three of them collecting government checks, no doubt,” Cousin William’s wife said.

  “No doubt, darlin’. No doubt.”

  The chatter continued another ten minutes or so, with DeMarco listening closely, noting not only the information dispensed, but also the subtle variations in speech patterns and enunciation. Those of the clan who had moved away from Aberdeen, including all of Jayme’s immediate family, and those older individuals who had not, the senior citizen aunts and uncles, spoke with either no discernible accent or with a more genteel fluidity to their words, almost songlike, not as loud or coarse as the under-fifty locals. Until that moment he had thought of Aberdeen as a kind of Brigadoon, a magical little town caught in a time warp. But it had its ugliness too, he realized. A contemporary darkness encroaching from all directions.

  Bryan held up his cell phone and pointed at the screen. “It’s almost twelve thirty, folks,” he announced. “Better wrap things up here. It’s time to go say goodbye to Grandma.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  After the funeral, the family queued up for one last look at Grandma before the casket was closed. DeMarco, waiting in line with Jayme, looked back to see the librarian seated alone in the fourth row of folding chairs, her piercing eyes fixed on him. When he met her gaze, she gave him a little nod.

  He leaned down and whispered in Jayme’s ear. “Okay if I step away for a minute?”

  “Too much coffee?” she said.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  So as not to encourage conversations from those in line behind him, DeMarco kept his gaze at belly-button level as he crossed toward the librarian. He passed numerous well-dressed women in shades of gray, black, and navy blue, and just as many similarly colored suit coats and slacks. Not even the teenagers were dressed in khakis. He made a mental note to buy a black blazer at the next mall they passed. He hoped Jayme would agree to leave Aberdeen by the day after tomorrow at the latest. In the meantime, his curiosity nagged at him.

  “Ms. Toomey,” he said from the end of the row. “Do you mind if I sit for a moment?”

  “Mrs.,” she said. “Please do.” She turned slightly in her chair so as to face him more directly.

  He said, “I had an interesting chat with a Mr. Hoyle this morning.”

  “Dr. Hoyle,” she said.

  “Oh. So he’s actually a medical examiner?”

  “Retired,” she said.

  “Yes, that’s what he told me. What interests me, however—”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, he was waiting for you. I helped to arrange it.”

  “I see. So the only other question I—”

  “Why,” she said.

  “Exactly. Why that conversation? Why me? Why there?”

  “We had hoped you would feel the horrible weight of the crime. They spent several years imprisoned there, you know. Stacked up like firewood. All that misery percolating into the ground. And you did feel it, didn’t you?”

  “I always feel the victims’ misery,” he said.

  “I know,” she answered.

  Her gaze was so unsettling, those blue-gray, unblinking eyes, that he looked away momentarily. When he was a boy, one of the neighbors had kept a dog chained up close to their trailer, a German shepherd–husky mix they called a police dog. The dog never barked, never growled, but always stood alert whenever young Ryan was outside. Always pulled its chain taut and stood leaning forward, its blue-gray eyes fixed on the boy. Ryan had never known
whether the dog wanted to play with him or tear him apart, and he had always been too afraid to venture close enough to find out. The librarian’s gaze chilled DeMarco with the same ambiguity.

  Jayme, he now saw, only two mourners from the casket, was motioning for him to return.

  The librarian put her hand on his knee, startling him. “You have obligations today,” she said. “And tonight. Tomorrow will be fine. There’s a little place on the road to the reservoir. Zia’s Trattoria.”

  “Excuse me?” he said. “What reservoir?”

  She stood. “One thirty will be fine. After the lunch rush.”

  Jayme was motioning more frantically now, and she wasn’t smiling. The librarian made her way between the empty chairs, out the other end, and toward the door.

  DeMarco stood and walked briskly to stand beside Jayme as she leaned over the casket.

  “This is him, Grandma,” she said softly. “Do what you can for him, okay? God knows he needs the help.”

  DeMarco looked down on Grandma’s wrinkled face. As far as he could remember, he had met only his maternal grandmother when he was a boy, and then only twice. He had no memory of his other grandmother. Yet the face of Jayme’s grandmother looked familiar to him, as if this was how a grandmother should look—peaceful, composed, serene, and calming.

  He turned to Jayme then. Her cheeks were streaked with tears. He slipped an arm around her shoulders, and looked at Grandma a final time, and this time saw the striking resemblance between the young woman and the old, the fine angular features, the high cheekbones, and he knew in an instant they had the same green eyes, that Grandma’s hair too had once been strawberry blond verging on honey brown, that her fingers had once been long and thin and elegant too, her tongue sharp, her heart huge with love. And all he could think to tell either of them, and both, was “I’m sorry.”

  THIRTY

  If Ryan happened to be in the same room when his father started laying into her…if his father started out asking some question that could trick you into thinking he was teasing, his voice sounding almost playful with his Hey, this piece of crap refrigerator must’ve drank my last beer!…if Ryan was watching Batman or maybe Get Smart and wasn’t really paying any attention to the arguing that had become like the rumble of big trucks out on the four-lane…and if his father took up a position between him and his bedroom so that Ryan, now sensing the danger, would have to risk squeezing past his father or else heading for the door…in which case his father would probably take a couple long strides and grab him by the scruff of his neck and jerk him off his feet…if this happened as it had many times before, there would come a moment when Ryan would feel the anger turning toward him instead, his mother cowed and whimpering…and then his father would hunker down with his red, sweaty face close to Ryan’s and scream so loud Ryan would think his eardrums would burst, and then it was too late to go anywhere safe and his father’s spit would be hitting him in the face with every word and curse, and then it was only a matter of standing there and counting, one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand…until his father’s big, hairy, dirty-fingernailed hand would bam across his face or boom against his chest or worst of all would grab a handful of Ryan’s hair and drag him dancing on his toes from one end of the room to the other, shaking him like the mewling puppy Ryan had brought home one time and tried unsuccessfully to hide from his father.

  THIRTY-ONE

  After the somber procession to the cemetery, with Jayme and DeMarco riding in the backseat of Bryan’s Altima, and after the solemn thirty minutes at the gravesite, then came a subdued two hours back at Grandma’s house. The brunch table was cleared, the dishes washed, neighbors arrived with more food, wine was opened, and stories shared.

  Sometime after five Jayme came to the sofa and squeezed in between Cullen and DeMarco. She leaned up against DeMarco and closed her eyes. “Carry me home,” she told him. “I’m exhausted.”

  Cullen said, “You guys need to stay here tonight with the rest of us.”

  “I need a bed,” Jayme told him, “not an air mattress.”

  “We’ll give you our bed tonight.”

  She pulled away from DeMarco, leaned close to Cullen, and kissed his cheek. “I need to be alone with Van Morrison and my trooper man,” she told him.

  Cullen leaned forward to look at DeMarco. “It takes two of you to make my sister happy?”

  “At least,” DeMarco answered. “Sometimes we need Sting too.”

  Cullen nodded. “An Englishman, an Irishman, and an Italian with a Scottish name. No wonder you need a bigger bed.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  They undressed side by side at the foot of the RV’s bed, with only a small reading light illuminating them. He stepped out of his loafers, placed them in the narrow closet, then removed his belt, slid his slacks off and folded them at the crease and hung them with his other clothes. She watched as he faced the bed again and unbuttoned his shirt, finger and thumb moving unhurriedly down his chest, then the right cuff, then the left. He moved back to the closet, turned away from her, and removed his shirt, which he placed in the laundry hamper. Half shielding himself behind the closet door, he leaned close to the shelves to pick out a T-shirt.

  But she came up behind him then and laid her hands around his belly and pressed her breasts to his back. “Don’t wear one tonight,” she said.

  “But you know I’m—”

  “Shhh,” she told him, and turned him toward the bed, her body pressed to his.

  “Then let me turn out the light,” he said, and she said softly, “Just please shut up.”

  And at the bed she moved to his front and sat down and removed her panties quickly and placed her legs outside of his. She drew his boxers down over his thighs and knees and ankles and he stepped out of them and she pulled him close and took him into her mouth, her hands gripping his buttocks. He put his hands on her shoulders and ran his fingers down over her spine as far as he could reach and back up again, and she moaned and arched her back with pleasure like a cat being stroked, and there was a little catch in her breath and then another and he realized she was crying.

  He pulled away and knelt and lifted her face to his, but before he could speak she pulled him forward and atop her and said, “Don’t say anything, please. I want you inside me.”

  “But wait,” he whispered, and she said, “Please. Just please come inside me. Just please.”

  She pulled at him hungrily with legs and hands until he was standing again with her ankles crossed behind him against the base of his spine. He wanted to be gentle because now she was letting the emotion of the day roll out of her and he only wanted to give her what she needed, but she said, “Don’t wait for me, baby, please. I want you to come.”

  “You first,” he said, but she said, “No, don’t wait. I need to feel you come in me.”

  It was not how they usually made love but it was what she wanted. She pushed herself hard against him and increased the pace for him to follow, and soon it was building fast and hard for both of them, and when his breath quickened hers did too, and then he was falling against her, their bodies tight, all muscles tensed, her fingernails and teeth sharp against his skin.

  They held each other until the trembling passed. Then she sniffed and swallowed and turned her mouth to his cheek. “I bit you too hard,” she whispered.

  “No you didn’t,” he said.

  Another minute passed. He said, “I forgot to close the blinds. Richie was probably watching all that.”

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  He wanted to ask if she was all right, to say he understood her grief, to say I know exactly how you feel. But those were useless words and untrue and they could not soothe as well as silence and a lover’s touch. So for a long time he lay motionless and said nothing and felt her tears against his cheek, and he thought of all the people they had buried, and of al
l the sorrow yet to come.

  THIRTY-THREE

  She watched him at the coffeemaker, filling her cup without spilling a drop, adding a splash of almond milk, three stirs with a spoon, the spoon laid on a paper napkin neatly folded in half. He was dressed in sweatpants and a light-blue T-shirt; she, fresh from the bed, with the faux fur blanket wrapped around her as she half sat against the edge of the table.

  He handed her the cup. “I can turn down the air conditioner if you’re cold,” he said.

  “It feels good,” she said, and sipped the coffee. “You been up long?”

  “Thirty minutes or so.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Drinking coffee and waiting for you.”

  She smiled. “What’s it like outside?”

  “Steamy,” he said.

  She took another sip. “I gotta say, Sergeant, you make a fine cup of coffee. And how do you keep that carafe from dripping coffee all over the counter?”

  “You have to hang the lip over the brim of the cup. Then pour slow and steady.”

  “Slow and steady,” she repeated, and smiled again.

  “What?” he said.

  “You remind me of my father and oldest brother, that’s all.”

  He returned to his seat at the corner of the table, and reclaimed his own coffee mug. “Both of them?”

  “We used to call Galen ‘Ed Jr.,’” she said. “Whatever Dad did, he did.”

  “Your mother told me you were very close.”

  “With Galen?” she said, and nodded. “He was eight when Bryan was born. Which made him twelve years older than me. He was my protector.”