Bone Valley

by Claire Matturro

“Did you wipe down that truck? If any of your prints—”

  “I wiped down the pickup. I told you.” I heard that shrill tone I don’t much care for kicking into my voice, and I stopped, closed my eyes, and visualized my calming waterfall.

  Apparently Philip didn’t know I was trying to visualize inner calm, and he said, “If that truck is linked to Miguel and the explosion, you don’t want your fingerprints on it.”

  “I know that,” I snapped. Yep, that shrill tone was definitely there. “I know enough to wipe off my prints in a getaway vehicle after fleeing a homicide, okay? I wasn’t raised in Disneyland by Pollyanna.”

  But then I thought—oh, damnation. What difference would wiping off my prints really make? Now in the caffeinated clarity of post-panic, I remembered that Officer Detective Josey knew I had been with Angus and Miguel before the explosion. With Angus dead, the police would surely look for Miguel, as the sailboat’s owner, and Josey would no doubt confer with the city police, putting me smack-dab in the middle of the picture quick enough.

  “Now what?” Philip said, apparently reading my expression correctly.

  “A homicide detective from the sheriff ’s office, Josey Something Farmer, saw me hanging out with Angus and Miguel after the phosphate meeting. She might have seen me leave with them.”

  “Why would she know you?”

  “Because she was asking me questions about M. David Moody’s murder.”

  “Damn it!” he shouted. “How in the hell do you get into these kinds of messes? Are you a suspect?”

  This was the first time Philip had raised his voice to me. I decided to ponder the meaning of this later and to defend my honor in the present. “No. I’m not a suspect.” I hoped that was still true.

  “Please, Lilly, back up. And this time tell me everything.”

  But Philip’s cross-examination was cut off by Bearess’s early-warning barking, and then, sure enough, the doorbell rang.

  Before either of us could react, I heard Jimmie open the door and invite someone in. A woman’s voice, general chatter, dog barking, the sound of something breaking, scramble noises, more female voices. Listening so hard it made my head hurt worse, I finished drinking my coffee. Mostly I wanted to go back to bed very badly, wake up on the previous Friday morning, and tell Olivia, “No thank you, I can’t meet Angus.” He might still be dead, but at least I wouldn’t have pissed him off right before he began his journey in a fiery explosion toward his new incarnation.

  Instead, what I said was, “Well, speak of the devil. That’s Josey. The detective. I recognize her voice.”

  “Hey, Lilly Belle, you might wanta get yourself out here,” Jimmie shouted in my general direction.

  “Please, do not give that woman any information. Not until we have thoroughly discussed all of this,” Philip said.

  Though I bristled at his directive, I had to admit that not only was Philip a criminal-defense attorney, but also he was not suffering from the lagging half-life of Xanax, and he hadn’t recently fled the scene of a murder for no apparent reason. Also, early in my life I’d developed the habit of not telling law-enforcement officials much more than good morning.

  Given all that, I just nodded and we eased out into the kitchen.

  “Guess we’re having a neighborhood brunch,” Dolly said, and helped herself once more to my kitchen and handed Josey a cup of coffee.

  “I kinda stepped on that dog bowl,” Jimmie said. “I sure hope you didn’t set great store by it.”

  “You really shouldn’t use your good china for the dog,” Dolly said, as if she hadn’t been the one who put it on the floor in the first place.

  Bearess was busy waggling and licking Josey as if they had been Timmy and Lassie in a former life together.

  Stepping over the busted china, I pushed aside my phobias of crowds and junk and aimed myself at a second cup of coffee, only to discover that Dolly had poured the last of it for Josey. As much as I wanted to do so, snatching the cup from a homicide detective’s hands didn’t seem like the smart thing to do.

  Not that doing smart things had lately been my specialty.

  I put more water on to heat for the third pot of coffee, then sat down. My new theory was that if I sat still long enough, everyone else would settle themselves into some kind of workable pattern. Or leave.

  Acting the host, Jimmie introduced himself to Josey, and then introduced Dolly to Josey, and while everybody was drinking my coffee and shaking hands, he said, “I reckon you know them two lovebirds, over there. That Philip and Lilly, they ain’t been out a the bedroom since they jumped in it last night. I had to turn me up that Garrison Keillor guy loud on the radio, give ’em some privacy. Ain’t love grand?”

  I was astonished by how quickly Jimmie had just alibied me. Or had he? I double-checked Jimmie’s math, which is painful without a sufficient level of caffeine—Angus, Miguel, and I had left the phosphate meeting a little after seven. Then we’d gone out of our way, at my insistence, to get organic food, sparking the snit between Angus and me. Philip had said his mole told him the explosion was at eight-fifteen p.m. So if I had really gone straight home from the phosphate meeting, I could have made it to my house before eight. Garrison Keillor’s radio show was over at eight. Therefore, Jimmie had me home and in bed with Philip before the explosion.

  Damn, Jimmie was not only sweet, he was handy.

  Or, was he just digging the hole deeper?

  I kind of thought that fleeing the scene of a felony is itself a felony—or is that a car wreck you cause?—but I couldn’t ask Philip about that in front of Josey without raising questions in her mind I didn’t currently wish to raise, so I tried to look embarrassed by Jimmie’s story. Saying nothing, I took Philip’s hand. He squeezed it and I assumed that meant “Play along,” so I did.

  “Shall I make us some eggs and toast?” Dolly asked.

  “She ain’t got no bacon,” Jimmie said. “And don’t dare ask her how come, neither, not lests you wants a lecture.”

  “Unless you want a lecture,” Dolly corrected.

  “Well, I don’t wants no lecture on bacon. I already done got one. From both of them, yesterday. But you wants one, go on and ask her how come she don’t got bacon.”

  “Doesn’t have bacon,” Dolly said.

  “I jes’ told you, she ain’t got no bacon.”

  Oh hell. Screw that second cup of coffee, what I really wanted was the rest of that wine. I stood up and peeked in the refrigerator, but the bottle was gone. I peered into my trash, and found the bottle, presumably empty, in with the nonrecyclables.

  “Recycle glass,” I said, glaring at Jimmie.

  “Reckon them pieces of the china bowl what got busted are recyclable?” he asked back at me.

  “Lilly, if you do not mind, could I have a word with you? Alone?” Josey asked.

  “You go on, dearie, and gossip with your friend. I’ll cook us some breakfast and Jimmie will clean up the broken bowl,” Dolly said.

  Ignoring them all, I put the wine bottle in the glass-recycling bin, washed my hands, finished brewing my coffee, poured a cup, got a plate and put one of yesterday’s leftover muffins on it and didn’t offer anyone anything except the back of my head as I walked out of the kitchen and into the dining room.

  I sat down at the dining room table, bowed my head as if in prayer, then reluctantly looked up. Josey and Philip had both followed me.

  “Alone,” Josey said, and looked at Philip.

  “Quite a good idea,” Philip said. “No one could think in that circus in the kitchen.”

  To Josey’s credit, she didn’t push the point of “alone” any further. With Philip still hovering, she asked me if I had left the phosphate meeting with Miguel and Angus last night.

  I crammed my day-old muffin in my mouth to buy time to think. Had Josey seen me get into the red truck with the two of them? And what business was it of Josey’s, anyway, since Angus John’s murder was outside her jurisdiction?

  “May I ask you, wh
at is the reason for this inquiry?” Philip asked in his smooth seduce-the-jury voice and pulled off his glasses and smiled at Josey as if to distract her with his deep, black eyes. Still further to her credit, Josey was having nothing to do with that, and looked back at me and repeated the question.

  Thinking of the safest lie I could on short notice, I swallowed and said, “Miguel drove me back to my car at Philip’s office on Manatee Avenue.” Thank goodness, I thought, that Philip had a satellite office in Bradenton and, that late on a Saturday, he alone would have manned it. So long as he backed me up, this seemed like a pretty good lie.

  Josey looked like she was buying that story, so I sipped more coffee, and then asked, in my best innocent voice, “What’s going on?”

  In terse and unhappy detail, Josey explained about the explosion. Philip and I both acted surprised and distraught.

  After what seemed like the appropriate interval of gasping and dismaying, I asked, “What about Miguel?”

  “Don’t know. Can’t find him or his red truck. Any ideas?” Josey peered into my eyes in a way I didn’t much like.

  “They just dropped me off and didn’t talk about any plans.”

  “Y’all want to come and get it,” Jimmie shouted from the kitchen. “Dolly done got a regular breakfast feast started in here.”

  Taking the distraction for what it was—a gift of time to think—I smiled at Josey. “Please, join us for breakfast?”

  “I could eat,” she said, which turned out to be something of an understatement.

  Fortunately, Dolly had scrambled all of my eggs from free-range, organic-fed chickens—eggs, which, by the way, cost about four dollars a dozen—but I didn’t begrudge the food going down anybody’s throat because while Josey was eating, she wasn’t asking me questions I didn’t want to answer. But Jimmie was flitting around Dolly and saw the price tag on the egg carton. “Why you reckon those free-range eggs cost so much? Seems like if you jes’ let the chickens run around in the yard and fend for they’s self, it’d cost less. Don’t it?”

  I nursed my coffee, declined toast because I wasn’t sure if Dolly had properly washed her hands before handling it, but ate the eggs because, after all, they were cooked and I couldn’t imagine why Dolly would stick her fingers, clean or unclean, in the cooked eggs, and I had to eat something more than a bite of a stale muffin because my supper last night had been wine and Xanax. Which, incidentally, produced a far better night’s sleep than I would have expected given the heart-to-heart discussion Philip had tried to instigate while I was passing out. While we ate, Bearess made soft, growly begging noises until she was stuffed from under-the-table handouts.

  Finally, after more postbreakfast questions and dodges, Josey left, but not before she’d given me her business card and jotted down her home number and her cell phone number. Dolly and Bearess followed her out.

  Jimmie, once prodded by my freely expressed anxiety, volunteered to hightail it down to the community center and move Miguel’s red truck, lest Josey discover it and think it interesting that it was so close to my own house.

  “I left the keys in it under the seat,” I said, and Jimmie took off in an old-man jog toward the community center, leaving me alone, finally, with Philip.

  “Did it ever occur to you to call 911, stay on the pier until law-enforcement officers appeared, and then tell the truth about what had happened?” Philip asked. “See, that way you would not have engaged Jimmie and me in a third-class felony, along with yourself.”

  “Discretion being the better part of valor,” I said. “Besides, it wasn’t like I saw anything helpful.”

  “We need to have a serious discussion about the nature of our relationship,” he said.

  Yeah, he’d mentioned that last night.

  “But first, I need to make sure neither of us is placed in further jeopardy with the law by any oversight on our part in our recent fabrications.”

  That must have been Philip’s way of conceding it was now officially too late to just tell the truth. So we spent the next half hour making sure we hadn’t overlooked something, or contradicted ourselves.

  We were on the arrogant brink of thinking we’d pulled one over on Josey when Jimmie returned to announce that the truck was already gone. “That’s what leaving the keys in it’ll do now days,” he said. “Tell you what, ’n my day, weren’t nothing to leaving keys in the truck, leaving your house doors unlocked.” He shook his head. Then he spread his arms out wide in what I’d come to recognize as the poetry-recital prelude.

  “Like that girl says,” Jimmie said, “‘every time I go back, the island is smaller. Even the iron hills of Alabama slip out beneath me in red circles that end in the Gulf.’”

  What’s erosion got to do with rising crime rates? I wondered. As for the red truck, I just figured some free-range teenagers had found it and were in Coconut Grove by now.

  “What girl?” Philip asked.

  “This girl that wrote herself a book of poems. She’s always losing stuff and feeling real bad. I’m learning all the verses ’fore I gives the book back to Lilly.”

  Philip looked at me oddly. “Back to you? A book of poetry? You like poetry?”

  “Oh, she jes’ loves it,” Jimmie said.

  Then I stopped listening to them. I was thinking about Lenora. Someone with some sensitivity needed to drive out and tell her about Angus.

  Okay, so, yeah, maybe sensitivity wasn’t my strong suit, but I’d give it a whirl. Also, I wanted to see if she knew where Miguel was—perhaps he was even with her. After all, I had some serious questions for that good-looking boy who took me on a date to trespass and nearly got me blown up.

  Chapter 9

  Even with my sharp sense of direction, I had a hell of a time finding Lenora’s backwoods wildlife rescue. But after a few scenic tours of the wrong dirt roads, I bumped my way into her front yard. The same beat-up Volvo I’d noticed on my first visit was parked under a tree.

  Lenora was sitting on the front steps of the porch of the worn-out cracker house, her head bent down, and when I sat beside her and she finally looked up, I figured from her expression she already knew about Angus.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  “I know Angus was a big loss for you.”

  Lenora didn’t speak, but put her head down again. There was such weariness and despair in that gesture that I knew any sensitivity on my part meant waiting before I asked about Miguel.

  We sat there for a long moment. From inside the house, I could hear the baby birds chirping for food. A cool breeze blew over my face, and I caught a whiff of honeysuckle. I took a long stare around the place, at first searching for any hint of Miguel’s presence, past or present. Then I was just looking.

  Everywhere I gazed, I saw something that needed fixing, cleaning, moving, or feeding.

  Lenora needed help.

  I pulled out my cell phone thinking I’d call Jimmie and pay him to do whatever needed doing, but then I took stock again. Lenora needed more than an old man could do, even as spry a one as Jimmie. I punched in the number for my brother Delvon, a born-again, dope-smoking, Jesus-loving man in his prime with a strong back and a good heart, even if he was apt to dress like John the Baptist and speak in tongues at inappropriate times. Delvon was the caretaker of my apple orchard in north Georgia, the haven to which I hoped to retire, sooner being better than later.

  After a long series of rings, my brother said “Praise the Lord” over the phone so loud that Lenora lifted her head and looked over at me, and then, as if that required too much effort, she put her head down again.

  “You need to get somebody to drive you to Atlanta and get on a plane as soon as you can. Fly into Tampa or Sarasota, whichever is quicker. I’ll pay you back for the ticket.”

  “I know Jesus said suffer the little chirren, but he didn’t say nothing ’bout suffering broke-heart fools and I don’t care if Farmer Dave is my best friend on the face of this earth, he’s about
drove me nuts. He brought him back a burro over from the Grand Canyon.”

  This was the first I’d heard that Dave, an old boyfriend from my outlaw adolescence who last year had almost gotten me arrested or killed, or both, was back in Georgia, where he often hid out between adventures, tending my apple orchard with Delvon. I took it as good news that he’d returned to the orchard. “How’d he get the donkey to Georgia?”

  “He hitchhiked with it.”

  I wondered for a moment who in the world would pick up a fifty-one-year-old man with pigtails and a donkey, especially nowadays when everyone is afraid of everyone else.

  “And don’t you be calling it a donkey in front of Dave,” Delvon said. “It’s a burro. He’ll sure tell you that. From the Grand Canyon. Apparently, they’re shooting ’em out there ’cause there’s too many of ’em, and he rescued this one. I know that man is nursing heartache, but, praise Jesus for this lesson in patience, that man is driving me crazy.”

  Passing over the technical point that if one was already crazy, one couldn’t be driven there, I started thinking about Delvon actually getting on a plane. “How long’s your hair?” I asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  “You don’t know how long your hair is?” So, I guess that answered any unspoken question about his current drug consumption. “Well, look at it.”

  There was a clank, and I imagined the phone at the other end hitting something.

  “My brother,” I said to the top of Lenora’s head. “He and his friend Farmer Dave run an apple orchard in north Georgia for me. He’s due for a visit. He likes animals. He’s real handy. I think he could help you out here.”

  Lenora made a grunt that I took for a positive response.

  “Sixteen and a third inches,” Delvon said over the phone.

  “What?”

  “My hair. You forget? You asked me how long it was.”

  I sighed. In addition to being long, Delvon’s hair was red. And, he was tall. There was no overlooking him in a crowd. He’d have to get to the airport a good three hours ahead to clear security. “Do you have a driver’s license?”