House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  “He hasn’t been a cop for years.”

  “Yet he’s a formidable man, is he not?”

  And that was hard to deny, Ben thought, recalling the physical grace Keel had shown at the pool table, the fierce spatial intelligence. He had seemed to see the whole table in a glance, instinctively calculating the complex range of possibilities radiating from each shot: he’d never hesitated the whole time they played, just called his shots and sank them one by one, without a single wasted gesture.

  “Yeah,” he conceded. “I guess he is.”

  Lomax spread his hands. “So there you go. All I’m saying is, if you want personal information on your companions—well, you’ll have to ask them.”

  “What about you, then?” Ben said.

  “What about me?”

  “What’s your stake in this? Your personal stake?”

  Lomax smiled. “As I said, Mr. Prather, I intend to respect the autonomy of everyone involved. You’re free to ask, of course, but no one is under any obligation to answer.”

  He stood, took his coffee cup to the sink, rinsed it, and loaded it into the dishwasher. “It’s been a pleasure chatting with you, Mr. Prather,” he said.

  And then he walked out.

  5

  Fletcher Keel came back to himself with a snap, not out of sleep but out of some deeper and more disturbing state: like surfacing abruptly from a blackout, sweaty, hypervigilant, and bereft of memory, filled with cold dread at what might have passed in the interval between. Ten years ago, in a shabby motel an hour outside of Vegas, he’d woken from the fathomless depths of a blackout to find blood on his clothes—not a lot of blood, true, but a good deal more than he could plausibly account for, especially when a thorough personal inspection revealed not the slightest bruise or abrasion. Enough, in other words. Enough to send him out the door to his car, without sticking around to look into the mystery further. Enough to send him gliding to the shoulder of the highway when the shakes hit half an hour later. Probably a bar fight, he’d told himself, gazing out over the lone and level sands toward the distant line of the Sierra Madres. A bloody nose or a busted mouth, nothing serious, it wouldn’t be the first time. But even now, waking sometimes in the graveyard of the night, he wondered.

  Blackouts had a way of sneaking up on you and wrecking your life.

  Case in point: somehow, he seemed to have come into possession of the pint of Jack. He seemed to be holding it in one hand and its plastic cap in the other, and though he didn’t think matters had progressed quite to the drinking stage—when he eyeballed the level of whiskey, anyway, it looked pretty much unchanged—he didn’t think he’d missed it by much, either.

  Keel laughed—a jagged, panicky laugh that he didn’t much like the sound of.

  Unclenching his fist, he let the cap drop on top of the desk. The beveled edge had dug a bloodless crescent in the fleshy pad of his palm. And judging by the crick in his back and the considerable ache in his ass he’d been sitting here for a while. Hours, maybe—the better part of the day. His stomach churned with acid. His mouth was scaly. His feet felt like paving stones at the bottom of his legs.

  You shouldn’t have come back, Susan said inside his head. You need a meeting every day at this stage of your recovery, she said. Maybe two.

  Which was all very well and good, except that he was already here, there wasn’t a meeting inside a mile’s radius, and he faced the not-inconsiderable problem of persuading his hand to put the pint down on top of the desk so he could cap it off and push it away. The hand seemed to have developed a mind of its own, and what it wanted to do was lift the bottle to his lips and pour a slug of whiskey down his throat. It couldn’t hurt to have just a sip or two, the hand seemed to be saying. Just enough to take the edge off. Because when you thought about it, he had a lot to be edgy about.

  Somehow he’d managed not to think about these things before. Contrived not to notice that he’d come through last night’s little midnight ramble, bare-footed and blind, without so much as a stumble along the way. Chosen not to question his recollection—his imaginary recollection, ha, ha—of a set of blueprints he had not seen in more than twenty-six years, and then on the fly, in nowhere near the detail he seemed to recall. Elected not to examine too deeply the footprints on the dusty checkerboard—a single set of footprints, it was worth noting, which raised all sorts of interesting questions about just who—

  —or what—

  —might have gone down on him in the darkness last night.

  That right there was enough to drive a man to drink. And that wasn’t all, not by a long shot. There was the matter of the blackout itself, too—though you really couldn’t call it that, could you, when you hadn’t had a drink in nearly three months? Keel had an inkling that the doctor would have called it a fugue state, and there was something frightening about those words. They suggested not merely a temporary setback, they suggested total systemic dysfunction. They suggested outright lunacy. And that wasn’t his only symptom. He’d been hearing voices, too. It was a voice that had summoned him here, summoned him not by his own name, the name he had chosen for himself, but by the name he had repudiated, unable to measure up to its legacy of honor. It had summoned him by the name of the imaginary man in black body armor. He was really a memory, that man, a memory of—

  —John, your name is—

  “Fletcher,” he said hoarsely. “My name is Fletcher. It’s always been Fletcher.”

  Rage throbbed in his voice. Resentment.

  Blood hammered at his temples. He dragged in a long breath, trying to calm himself. Then, stronger, his voice pitched low with certainty, he said, “My name is Fletcher Keel. And I’m an alcoholic.”

  The words had a kind of power. Like a talisman, they broke the spell he had fallen under, and he caught a glimpse of himself as someone else might have seen him, pitiful and broken, bent in worship at this paltry altar.

  “My name is Fletcher, and I’m an alcoholic,” he whispered, his voice breaking, and somehow, out of some reservoir he had not known he possessed, he summoned the strength to do what he knew he had to do, what he wanted to do, what Susan Avery and his father both would have wanted him to do. Somehow, if only for an instant, he summoned the strength to be the man they had wanted him to be.

  He set the pint down hard on the desktop, slopping a quarter ounce of aromatic whiskey over his hand. Then, jerkily, a titanic battle raging inside him, he drew his hand away. He fumbled blindly for the bottle cap, felt it squirt from underneath his fingers. It flipped into the shadows on the far side of the desk and rattled down to the tile below. Keel was already bending to retrieve it when he stopped himself. It was fine, right? Fuck it, let it sit. Let it evaporate. Just go. Just get out of here.

  Stiffly, like a clockwork man, he climbed to his feet, pushing the chair into the filing cabinets behind him with a crash. Something fell with a clap, but he didn’t look up. His gaze riveted on the triumvirate of bottles, he backed away like a man who has disturbed something dangerous and possibly deadly: a scorpion or a cobra, hood flared, body weaving.

  The office door drew him up straight.

  Keel stood there, his eyes still fixed on the desk.

  The bottle of Jack glowed with borrowed radiance. The air seemed to ripple around it, like waves of heat rising from baking asphalt, as the projector in his mind treated him to another jerky little snippet of his own hand closing around it and lifting it to his lips.

  Without turning around, Keel fumbled for the doorknob, twisted it, and edged through the door into the darkness beyond. There, the door latched behind him, he turned away at last. His legs rubbery, he slid to the floor, his hands resting on his upraised knees. And even then, safe on the other side, he could still feel the pull of the bottles, steady and certain, like the gravity of an extinguished star.

  6

  “Let’s walk,” Abel said, closing the door behind him.

  Lara didn’t bother with preliminaries. “You lied to me.”

&nbs
p; “Did I?” Abel inquired mildly.

  “You didn’t eat last night.”

  “Mea culpa, Doc. Who are you, my mother?”

  “I’m your doctor,” she said. “For now, anyway.”

  “You planning to drop me as a patient, or something?”

  “You don’t take my advice, I might.”

  “Tell you what,” he said, wheeling to face her. “I’m hungry right now. Why don’t you join me, you can make sure I eat all my veggies?”

  He smiled the same playful smile he’d used on her that first night, cleaning up the kitchen, but it seemed forced now, artificial, the wattage of his charisma dimmed by anxiety. Weary lines framed his mouth, and his eyes were bloodshot, as if he’d slept restlessly, or maybe not at all.

  “You already used that joke, Abel. When you lied to me. Remember?”

  “Oh.”

  “You get any sleep?”

  “A little.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Listen, if you’re going to give me the third degree, let’s at least get something to eat, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Shrugging past him, she pushed through the door into the kitchen, cavernous and dim, empty, too—or so she thought until she touched the light switch, summoning the overhead fixtures into life. Ben stood at the window, a coffee mug in one hand. He gave her an uncertain smile, a little of the morning-after awkwardness, though there hadn’t been any night before, not unless you counted the oddball intimacy of their rooftop parley. And what was it exactly, that unspoken link she had felt close between them—more evidence of the unseen connections and half-hidden agendas she sensed everywhere around her? Or something else, something personal?

  “You were right, Lara,” he said, lifting his mug to the window. “It looks like a storm’s coming.”

  They crossed the room and stood beside him, wreathed in the aroma of coffee. An armada of lowering clouds, backlit by the distant cinder of the January sun, had seized the sky, and a hazy cast of light filled the air. The dead lands looked jaundiced, a sickly yellow blight expanding outward from the point of infection, from Dreamland, threatening even the remote towers of the yet-inhabited city. The wind gusted audibly, and Lara found herself thinking once again of the Titanic, stranded in the icy latitudes of the North Atlantic, dark water on the rise.

  Ben finished his coffee.

  “You gave us a scare yesterday, Abel,” he said from the sink. “You feeling better?”

  “I feel okay.”

  “You guys ever figure out what happened?”

  “A nutritional deficit,” Abel said. “Nothing a square meal won’t take care of. Right, Doc?”

  “It’s a theory, anyway.” She looked at Ben. “Have you eaten?”

  “Just finished, actually. A sandwich.” He closed the dishwasher. “There’s some stuff in the fridge.”

  “Good,” Lara said.

  Ben hesitated, as if he wanted to add something, and she felt it once again, that wordless tug between them. Then he smiled and it disappeared. “So anyway,” he said, “I think I’ll see if I can get some writing done. Enjoy your meal.”

  7

  Back in his suite, Ben found himself pondering the irony of his words. I think I’ll see if I can get some writing done. What was the joke about old men and sex? By the time you finally figure out how to do it right, you’re not capable of doing it at all. The spirit’s willing but the flesh, the flesh is weak …

  Something like that.

  He was paralyzed, anyway. Terrified to sit down at the keyboard. And when he couldn’t write, when the poisons built up inside him, unreleased, things had a way of turning ugly. Which brought last night’s little rooftop scene clamoring back to him—the panic rising like dark wind inside him, gale force, scattering everything—reason, coherence, purpose—pell-mell before it. Jesus. Thank God Lara had been there—though that opened another can of worms, didn’t it, for he’d felt something, too, looking into her eyes as she coaxed him back from the edge of panic. A link of some kind, humming and invisible, like a circuit closing in the icy air between them.

  It was all knotted up inside him—not just his own unremembered past, but the scene with Lara, too, and Lomax’s faintly mocking responses to his questions. Most of all the sense that he was but one or two crucial steps away from unraveling the whole thing. Lomax was no fool, that was clear in everything Ben had read about him; nor was he subject to whim—one did not achieve his level of success, much less sustain it, without a certain cold discipline. He’d had his reasons for coming here, and he’d had them for choosing the companions he had brought along, as well.

  What were they?

  Pacing—love seat to desk (the laptop waiting) to door, and once again around—Ben tried to untangle it, but every time he grabbed a loose thread and started to pull, the knot seemed to tighten elsewhere—in his solar plexus or high in his chest, making it hard to breathe. He was accustomed to thinking at the keyboard, his fingers wired directly to the logic centers in his brain.

  No. Something about the image felt wrong.

  Not the brain, with its cool mathematical structures of logic, but what? The answer came to him in a line from some old poem he’d read in college: not the brain, but the heart. The foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. What had Paul said? Writing—his writing, anyway, obsessive—

  —automatic—

  —and virtually independent of intent—offered nothing less than a direct line into the subconscious. Every time he took his pen in hand, he sank a well into the vast reservoir of anxieties, terrors, and half-formed memories buried deep in the geological strata of his own history, like a scientist coring an Antarctic glacier: the world that is and the world that was, perfectly preserved a hundred fathoms down.

  Something frightening about that, he remembered saying. Like being possessed.

  No. No! Paul had wagged a finger in his face, an old man by then, shrunken, his hair patchy and white, nearer to death than either of them had imagined. He had lifted his wineglass and closed his eyes, inhaling the bouquet with visible pleasure, as if it carried him off to a better place than this, a place where Ben could not follow. He laughed ruefully. Maybe a little, he conceded. But—The finger again. But also useful if you listen carefully.

  Why is that?

  There was something gnomic in the reply. Your brain, the old man had said. It thinks, and so it knows. He thumped his chest. But the heart knows, too.

  What do you mean?

  Paul had merely shrugged. It wasn’t until later that Ben started to understand—until Paul had died and he found himself standing over the casket, realizing for the first time maybe that the man inside it had been his father in some crucial way that defied articulation—some way that his own fathers, biological and adoptive both, black and white, never could have been.

  Heart knowledge.

  The brain parses the world with logic; it divides, it categorizes and classifies, shoving everything into neatly labeled pigeonholes.

  The heart intuits. The heart connects.

  Ben’s circumambulations had brought him back to the desk, the afternoon waning in the windows, the clouds still scowling. The laptop glimmered up at him. A cold fist squeezed his heart.

  He had no memory of turning it on.

  He sat down before it, resting his fingertips lightly atop the keys.

  The truth lives down in the muck, he thought. In the heart’s basement, where everything mixes together.

  The heart knows that the world is neither black nor white. The world is gray.

  8

  Fletcher Keel got to his feet.

  It was colder here in the airy vastness of the main basement—a clammy unwholesome cold that seemed to emanate from the concrete and settle in his bones—but the allure of the bottles was diminished. Not completely, true—one wouldn’t want to say out of sight, out of mind—but it was better, anyway. He could handle it. He found himself repeating the statement aloud—

  “You c
an handle this. Come on, you know you can.” —but it didn’t have the reassuring ring he’d hoped for. The words sounded cheerless and hollow, dwarfed by acoustics, so much empty bravado, like whistling by the graveyard. The darkness was cryptlike, impenetrable, unrelieved by the line of light under the doorway at his back. He could feel its pressure on his skin, an almost physical weight.

  And what would it hurt to have a little light?

  The switch had to be nearby. He could see it in his mind, a metal switch plate with a whole row of switches, five or six of them, just to the right of the door. But just as his fingers closed over them, unerring, ready to throw them home, a voice—

  —my God that voice—

  —spoke inside his mind.

  You don’t want to do that, it said. Not yet.

  It was reedy and thin, that voice, sexless, yet it had an easy mastery, a certain cold command. And he knew it: it was the voice inside the voices, the ones that had drawn him here in the first place, down into the building’s secret and unwholesome heart. He might have been listening to it for years. When it spoke it summoned up a memory of something cracking underfoot, a brittle snap like kindling—

  —but it wasn’t kindling, was it, it was—

  —as it succumbs to the all-consuming flame.

  Keel drew his hand away. He swallowed.

  The darkness wheeled around him, impervious to vision. Yet he could see. He could see as he had seen last night, gazing at the imaginary blueprint in his head; could see as he had seen the super’s office, with a certainty that brooked no doubt. The basement stretched away before him. He could see it: the colonnade of arches, the high ribbed ceiling with its conduits of electrical cable, thick as his arm, the rusting plumbing and the ancient ductwork, the building’s guts exposed, its sclerotic and still-beating heart.