Body and Bone

by LS Hawker

Sunday, June 26

  THE NEXT MORNING, Nessa called Lauren’s husband, Mac. They’d only spoken in person before, when she’d drop Daltrey off to play with Tosh and Ziggy, so he sounded surprised to hear from her.

  “I wonder if you can track some IP addresses for me.” She resisted offering to pay for his time. “I have a very persistent troll on my blog who’s made some nasty comments.”

  “Some reason you think the guy’s local?”

  “Possibly,” she said. “So you can trace an IP address? Find out where it originates?”

  “Sure,” he said. “And it’s not even illegal. Why don’t you email me a list of the IPs and I should be able to pinpoint the basic location within a mile or so, unless he’s using proxies.”

  “Thank you, Mac,” Nessa said.

  He gave her his email address and said he’d get back to her as soon as he could. She hung up and emailed him Isabeau’s spreadsheet of IP addresses.

  Tuesday, June 28

  NESSA TURNED OFF her alarm for the morning after her Monday night shift. Otto had been unusually cooperative and helpful, which made her suspicious. But she was too bone-­weary to think too much about it. It was all she could do to get through the shift.

  Daltrey wasn’t coming home until Thursday, the same day as Isabeau. Nessa felt like part of her had been missing for the past week, and she couldn’t wait to see him. And who knew? Maybe Linda really would have gotten him to talk.

  Nessa went upstairs to change Daltrey’s bedsheets and lingered at the bookcase by all the little ­people treasures John had hidden for their son, picking them up one by one. She had the urge to smash them all, to destroy any good feelings she had left for her sick, increasingly disturbed husband. But if the treasures disappeared, it would devastate Daltrey and wouldn’t do her any good.

  As she walked downstairs, her phone pinged. It was a text from Mac.

  Found the origin of the IP address. There are actually two of them. Manhattan Public Library and the Hilton Garden Inn down on Third Street.

  Nessa stared at her phone. John was staying at the Hilton Garden Inn? She thought again about what Mac had said, wondering if a crack user could do all the things her troll had done. And if he could, where had he gotten the money to stay in the Garden Inn? She hoped she was going to find out in less than an hour. She grabbed her purse and drove to the hotel, where she parked on the street. When she got out of the Pacfica, she had to stop on the sidewalk to get it together. The most bizarre thoughts swam through her brain.

  How do I look? Do I look good?

  What difference did it make? Nessa had more important things to worry about than her appearance.

  She strode into the hotel and up to the front desk. “Can you tell me if a John Donati is registered here?”

  The clerk typed into her computer. “No, ma’am,” she said. “No one by that name.”

  Nessa pulled up the photos of John on her phone. “Maybe you’ve seen this man?” she said.

  The clerk shook her head.

  “He doesn’t look familiar to me,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  She went to the concierge desk and asked the two women there if they’d seen him. They had not. She repeated the same rigamarole in the restaurant and the bar. No one had seen him. After walking the halls of the hotel, looking around and finding nothing, she drove over to the library and repeated the whole process. No one recognized the photos, but how closely did anyone look at the shadows of humans who passed in and out of their lives on a daily basis? Still, it was frustrating. She’d thought that finding the IP addresses meant she would be able to confront John, but she felt like she was chasing a ghost.

  As she headed for the door, she heard someone call her name. She turned and saw a familiar face, a man with two elementary school girls in tow. It was Kevin, her ex-­producer. And these must be the kids he wanted to spend his evenings with.

  “Hi, Kevin,” she said. “How’s it going?”

  “Great,” he said. “Girls, this is Nessa Donati. We work together.”

  They waved uninterestedly, clasping books to their chests.

  “We used to work together,” Nessa said. “So what did Otto offer you to cover for him the other night? If I know him, he didn’t actually offer anything.”

  Kevin looked confused. “Cover for Otto? When?”

  “Thursday before last, I think.”

  “Otto didn’t call me to cover for him,” Kevin said.

  “Dad,” one of the girls said.

  “Just a minute, honey,” Kevin said, then turned his attention back to Nessa. “You mean he didn’t show up for work?”

  “No,” Nessa said, confused herself. “He said . . .” Now she couldn’t remember—­had Otto actually said that Kevin couldn’t come or . . .

  “Well,” Kevin said, “I’m going to check his time card, because if he didn’t work when he said he did, then—­”

  “I think it was just a misunderstanding,” Nessa said. But was it? Or had Otto left her at the station alone on purpose?

  DRIVING HOME, NESSA tried to put Otto together with the information she had. Yes, Otto was jealous. Yes, he was a whiny hipster. But it just didn’t fit.

  When she got home, a police car was parked in front of her house. This was beginning to be a regular occurrence. Nessa parked in the garage, dread building up in her stomach, and went in the back door. The doorbell rang, and Nessa opened the door to Detective Treloar, looking grave and apologetic.

  They must have lifted some of her fingerprints from the truck and run them through NCIC. They knew who she really was, what she had done. She was about to be arrested.

  Her throat started to close up. But she walked out the front door and met Treloar on the front porch anyway.

  “Detective,” Nessa said, crossing her arms tight over her chest. “How are you?”

  “Mrs. Donati,” Treloar said. “May I come in? There are some things I’d like to discuss with you.”

  So this wasn’t an arrest house call. This was something else.

  “Please,” she said, mirroring his manners. “Come in.”

  They went into the living room. She sat in the wingback chair and Treloar sat on the couch.

  “I’m here to give you some news,” he said. “We’ve recovered a body from Tuttle Creek Lake that matches the description of your husband.”

  Nessa doubled over. It was as if he’d just pitched a brick into her midsection, knocking the air out of her.

  John couldn’t be dead. He was too real. His imprint on her life and the world was too deep, too DNA-­altering. She knew that other widows—­ex-­widows? What would she call herself?—­probably had that same phantom limb feeling, that itch that couldn’t be scratched because it was separated from her but still somehow connected, through fiber and sinew, soul and spirit, body and bone.

  She stood, trying to remember how to inhale, then found herself walking in a tight circle. She wanted Treloar to reach out with a comforting hand so she could break the bones in his fingers and then tear his eyes from their sockets. She was desperate to inflict pain both on someone else and on herself, because if she let her brain wrap around the thought it was circling, she would fall down a hole and never stop falling.

  As if thought caused action, she dropped to the ground, her head smacking the coffee table, the exquisite agony of it giving expression to what she couldn’t put into words.

  She rose to her hands and knees and smashed her head into the coffee table again.

  Treloar’s hands were on her shoulders, struggling to restrain her, to keep her from crushing her own skull like a melon.

  John was dead, and now knowing this, she was dead too. He’d been pulled from the lake, but she was still down there, tangled in the trees beneath the surface of the water by the cove. And she’d never surface again.

 
; It was as if she’d always known he was dead, since the beginning, and all her railing and fist shaking at him and his imagined abuse of her had only served to beat back the truth, to delay her recognition of the fact that she couldn’t live without him.

  She couldn’t live.

  She couldn’t, didn’t want to, wanted to shut her eyes and sink beneath the surface of the water forever.

  “Mrs. Donati,” Treloar said from a far distance, from the other side of a chasm that had opened up in the world and that she’d never be able to cross again.

  What seemed to be many hours later but was probably only minutes, Nessa reentered her body. Her head pulsated and she came to herself in the middle of whatever Treloar had been saying while she’d been away.

  “The storm on Saturday night knocked a ­couple of the tethered boats loose,” he said, “and they were just trashed over in the cove. The wind was so strong it must have shoved the boats into those submerged trees and actually broken some of the branches, because the body floated up to the surface. He must have been trapped.”

  She took a deep breath. She was coming out of an acid trip, the worst one imaginable. And she was the soccer mom again, composed, calm, normal.

  Sweet denial blossomed in her head. It wasn’t John.

  She gazed at Treloar, feeling a detached sense of pity for him. “So you’re saying that John is dead,” she said, and was overcome with the urge to laugh. Poor guy. He just didn’t know any better.

  “If it’s him, then yes,” Treloar said. “Now, it’s procedure to request that a family member view a photo of the deceased for identification purposes, but the . . . body has been in the water for quite a while, so it’s unrecognizable.”

  She further came back to herself, the impulse to laugh extinguished. “Was he . . . shot?”

  His eyes ticked away from her. “An autopsy is being performed right now. We should know the cause of death soon. We’ll need Mr. Donati’s dental records.”

  “You have DNA though, right?” Nessa said.

  “That’s right, but it takes much longer. If we got his dental records, it would speed things up considerably.”

  She nodded, trying to breathe, her hand pressed against her chest to prevent her heart from bursting through her skin.

  “Can you call today and get those records couriered over to us?”

  “Yes,” she finally said.

  Once again, her worldview had shifted. Once again, she was having to adjust to a new reality. How many times could a person do this without losing her fucking mind?

  “Mrs. Donati,” Treloar said. “I need to let you know that this is being treated as a homicide. I know that’s no surprise, but you’re most likely going to be arrested. Probably on Friday.”

  The bottom dropped out of her stomach. “Are you supposed to be telling me this?”

  “No,” he said, looking away from her. “But you’ve been through a lot lately, and I wanted to make sure you had the chance to make arrangements for your son before it happens. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  She nodded. “Thank you, Detective.”

  “Do you have an attorney?”

  “No. But I’ll get one.”

  Treloar stood to leave.

  Nessa stood also and swayed on her feet. She grabbed hold of the chair arm to steady herself. The detective made a move toward her and she said, “I’m fine.”

  And her brain returned to normal, just as if the previous minutes hadn’t happened.

  Had John been shot? With her gun?

  She was almost certain that he had been.

  But by whom?

  Back to wondering, puzzling, but with a difference. Nothing mattered anymore. Again, that detached, floating feeling, of going through motions that signified nothing.

  As soon as Treloar’s car drove away, Nessa got on the phone to the dentist and ordered his records to be sent to the Riley County Sheriff’s Office.

  Then she sat in the wingback chair and stared at nothing.

  Whoever you are, she thought, you win.

  WHEN SHE AWOKE, she didn’t know where she was. The house was dark and silent, and her head ached, which brought back memories of Treloar’s visit. She flicked on the lamp, sending spears of pain through her head.

  John was dead.

  It was now a fact, etched in granite.

  How much time had passed? She looked at her phone and saw that it was eleven-­thirty P.M. She had to talk to someone, so she dialed Marlon.

  “I have some news,” she said. “The detective came here earlier to tell me—­”

  “Did you talk to John about me?” He said it as if he’d been waiting for her to call, waiting to bark out this question.

  Confused, she looked at her phone to make sure she’d dialed the right number. “Marlon?”

  “Did you?” His accusatory inflection scared her.

  “I’m sorry, I just woke up,” she said slowly. “Of course I did. I always told him about the insights you gave me and how many times you saved me from—­”

  “Because I got a call this afternoon from a reporter for the K-­State campus newspaper wanting to write a story about my suicide attempt back in 2002, and how I overcame my substance abuse problems with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.”

  This shocked her out of her stupor. Why did he think she’d called the reporter? “I don’t think I ever—­I can’t be the only person who—­”

  “Anonymous. It’s right in the name. Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s supposed to be anonymous. You get that, right?”

  “Of course I—­”

  “The reporter said it would be nice to get a comment from me, but she’s running the story regardless.”

  Nessa tried to think. Had she ever told John this story?

  John.

  She was certain she hadn’t.

  John’s dead.

  But even if she had, why would John call the student newspaper about it?

  “Marlon, John’s—­”

  “She received an email from NessaDonati@gmail.com.”

  “That’s not my email address, Marlon. You know that.”

  “I know. It’s John. But you told him. You broke a confidence.”

  “But John’s . . .” Nessa trailed off, shaky. “I don’t think I did. It must be someone else.”

  “It can’t be,” he said. “Because you’re the only one around here that I told.”

  This stunned her. Why had he told her, of all ­people?

  “And what about those other things,” Marlon said. “The things I’ve read in the comments on your blog recently?”

  “I need to tell you—­”

  “Prostitution. Auto theft.” He paused meaningfully. “Heroin.”

  He couldn’t hear her. Maybe she really was already a ghost.

  So she didn’t say anything.

  “Are you a heroin addict?”

  She hesitated. “I was, yes.”

  “It’s never was, and you know it,” he said. “Once an addict, always an addict. You’re only in recovery. You’re not cured.”

  She knew her lines. She’d go ahead and say them, because nothing mattered anymore. “I’ll never use again.”

  “It’s that kind of overconfidence that will make you slip and fall. That’s how it happened for me.”

  “I’ll never use again,” she repeated.

  “Good God. You sound like you’re high right now. Since you can’t even be honest with yourself, I know you will use again. This program only works with complete honesty. You know that.”

  A little spark bubbled up, a hint of her former self. Maybe she could still pretend to be alive. “It’s semantics. What difference does it make what I call myself?”

  “It does make a difference. If you say you’re an alcoholic when you’re a
fucking heroin addict that makes you a liar. I told you everything. And you told me nothing.”

  She couldn’t speak.

  “Step number four: ‘Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. This step requires self-­examination that can be uncomfortable, but honesty is essential in this process.’ Honesty is essential, Nessa.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Step number five: ‘Admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.’ ”

  It all flooded in. Nessa began to cry silently.

  “Have you done that?”

  She couldn’t answer out loud. No, she hadn’t.

  But it didn’t matter.

  “Well, you haven’t done it with me. Until you do, Nessa, we have nothing more to say to each other.”

  He hung up.

  Yes. Perfect. This was right. It was all being taken away.

  But not by John, because John was dead.

  Something rose in her gut: anger. And it began to outweigh the nothing that had hijacked her psyche.

  Whoever was doing this was not going to take one more thing away from her. Not one more person. She had to make this right, because she didn’t want to live without Marlon.

  Not one more.

  She had to fix this. Right now.

  She ran out of the house and across the yard to the garage. In the Pacifica, she drove toward town, her heart and head pounding, and played “Use Once and Destroy” by Hole at top volume, screaming along with Courtney Love, fierce and furious, even though it felt like her head would shatter.

  It was nearly midnight, and Marlon’s street was dark and quiet. Too bad. She strode up to his door and rang the bell. No answer. She rang it again. Nothing.

  She went around to the living room window and looked in, her hands cupped around her face. It was too dark to see anything. She went back to the door and rang the doorbell four more times, then knocked on the door.

  “Marlon! I know you’re in there. I’m going to keep ringing and pounding until you let me in or until the police get here, whichever comes first. Open the door! Marlon!”

  When he still didn’t open the door, she backed away from his house and scrolled through the music on her phone until she found the song she wanted—­“Animals” by Nickelback—­and blasted it.