Bone by Bone Read online

  Judge Hobbs laughed. Approaching his seventy-fifth birthday, he could pass for ten years younger. There was no sign of illness in his rosy flesh, nor had age slowed his brain. He announced every thought with the flicker of bright blue eyes, quick to note everything, missing nothing, not even what went on behind his back, for now he turned to catch Hannah watching from the window.

  Reaching down to a lower step, Oren plucked a small clump of yellow hair from the splintered wood before the next breeze could take it. There was no need of a microscope, no doubt that this was fur recently shed by the barking dog.

  ‘I thought you’d be wearing your uniform, boy.’

  Oren stuffed the fur ball into the watch pocket of his jeans. ‘I left the Army.’

  Finding human bones on the porch seemed to be an everyday thing with the judge, but this news from his son was clearly unsettling. ‘You quit? Not on my account.’

  ‘No, sir. It was time for a change.’ Years ago, he had ceased to define himself as a soldier. He was a man in search of a second act, and Hannah’s most recent letters had pried him loose from the inertia of military life. The mail from his father had always been returned unopened, twenty years of letters, and yet the old man had remained a constant correspondent all that time. The silent war of father and son was a one-sided thing.

  Oren, formerly Warrant Officer Hobbs of the US Army’s Criminal Investigations Division, picked up the jawbone and pondered the rust-colored stain. ‘So . . . this happens a lot?’

  The door opened wide, and Hannah stood there, hands on hips, wearing a shapeless denim dress. Her hair was massed on top of her head and magically held in place by two wooden sticks. The new day had officially begun, and the balance of power shifted to her side of the porch. ‘Oren, I need you to carry that bag of yours upstairs. It’s too heavy for me.’

  In times past, the housekeeper had used this voice of authority only for special offenses, such as the grimy rings of a boy’s life left on the porcelain sides of the bathtub. Smiling, he rose from the steps and followed her into the house. Closing the door behind him, he paused to stare at the dead bolts. Once, there had been a quaint keyhole lock – only one – and there had never been a key. Now there were three heavy-duty bolts, and each one required a key to unlock it from the inside.

  The parlor of the old Victorian was flooded with sunlight, and Oren had his first look at what time had done to this room. It was disturbing. The shabbiness was not a symptom of apathy; it was worse – a conscientious thing. A broken vase of no value, sentimental or otherwise, had been glued back together so that it could remain a fixture of the mantelpiece. The rug was faded and near bald in places, evidence of scrubbing spills or maybe the accidents of an old dog in its dotage. And though Henry Hobbs had bags of money, the old man had kept the same furniture. Rips in the massive red sofa had been carefully mended, as had the cracks in the old brown-leather club chairs and the recliner. This was no act of preservation, but more like hard-core denial that two decades had passed since the loss of Josh.

  An Irish setter lay on the floor near the fireplace. The dog was posed in sleep, but nothing could be so still as death. ‘Horatio?’

  ‘Your father had him stuffed twelve years ago,’ said the housekeeper.

  Not the brightest of animals, Horatio had never learned to do tricks or obey commands; he had only known how to slime his family with kisses and wet them down with drool. So happy was he to love and be loved, his tail had wagged in his sleep.

  This stuffed – thing – was nothing like Horatio.

  Hannah squinted, as if to see the lifeless carcass more clearly. ‘I suppose it is a bad joke on a dead dog.’ She gestured by hand signals that he should follow her upstairs, where they would not be overheard.

  He picked up his duffel bag, his socks and cowboy boots, and then he climbed the steps behind her, noting the rut worn into the center of the staircase carpet – the same old carpet. Up to the second-floor landing and down the hall they went. The housekeeper led the way, and Oren spoke to her back. ‘So, Hannah, you mentioned a coffin in your last letter.’

  Surprised, she stopped mid-stride. ‘The judge didn’t tell you?’ She continued on her way down the hall, saying over one shoulder, ‘Your brother’s been coming home – bone by bone.’

  THREE

  Oren dropped his bag and boots. Grabbing the housekeeper by the shoulders, he turned the tiny woman around to face him. ‘The judge thinks that jawbone belongs to Josh?’

  ‘Well, yes. But that’s not the crazy part.’ She rolled her eyes and sighed. ‘It never ends.’ By her tone, she might be describing a long parade of ants in the kitchen instead of his younger brother’s strange homecoming, one bone at a time. Hannah turned solemn as she studied his face. She must have seen that he was stalled somehow. The wiry little woman scooped up his belongings from the floor, as if the heavy bag and boots weighed nothing, and she carried them to the bedroom at the end of the hall.

  He was slow to follow her through that last door. Unlike the parlor downstairs, his old room showed no signs of time passing. Oren stared at the familiar blue bedspread and its history of soap-resistant stains. It was unwrinkled, not quite the way he had left it when he was a teenager who struggled with the concept of tucked-in sheets and smoothed-out blankets. The same photographs hung on the walls. His old fountain pen lay on the writing desk alongside a book he had never finished reading. All that appeared to be missing was the knapsack taken with him on the day when the old man had sent him away.

  Hannah settled his duffel bag on the bed and opened a bureau drawer. ‘You travel light.’

  ‘I shipped a trunk. It ’ll be along in a day or two.’

  ‘Good. That sounds more permanent.’ The housekeeper unzipped his bag and removed an old Colt .45 with two fingers and a look of surprise. ‘How on earth did you find it?’

  ‘That’s not Granddad ’s gun. I bought that one from a collector.’ He had seen it as a sweet reminder of early childhood, a day when the housekeeper had found him and Josh playing with an old revolver in the attic. They had just figured out how to load the bullets when Hannah had snatched it away from them. Then she had hidden the gun with only the clue that it was buried, and the two brothers had dug up large sections of the yard by flashlight and moonlight in a quest that had gone on for years.

  Next, she pulled a heavy wad of T-shirts from the bag and unwrapped them to find a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey buried inside.

  ‘A present,’ he said.

  She carried the bottle to the window and grinned at the label in this better light. ‘You remembered my brand. You good boy.’

  ‘We need to talk about the judge – and the bones.’

  ‘I know.’ Hannah set the bottle down on the desk and left the room. She returned a few moments later with two small paper cups from the bathroom dispenser. Three fingers of alcohol had been poured and drunk before she said, ‘You know it’s possible for a man to be crazy and functional. Take the judge for instance.’

  ‘Right,’ he said dryly, ‘just hypothetically.’

  The housekeeper crumpled her paper cup into a ball – the only sign that she was vexed – and set it on the bureau. She turned her back on him to fold the T-shirts and place them in a drawer. ‘This business of stuffing the dog – turning the house into a damn museum.’ More clothes were pulled from the duffel bag. ‘It’s like one little crazy spot in the middle of a real clear mind. That ’s called a fixation.’

  ‘Fixation?’ Pain had ebbed away with the medicine from the whiskey bottle, and Oren smiled as he parroted the housekeeper’s old mantra: ‘You’ve been reading books. You know that can’t be good for you.’ Countless times, she had said this to him when he was a child spending too many daylight hours in the judge’s library. It had been her mission then to save him from literacy and send him out of doors in search of a life.

  He poured and downed another shot of whiskey as he leaned back against the only patch of wall not cluttered with
photos in white mats and black wooden frames.

  ‘I’ve got a present for you, too.’ The housekeeper opened the top drawer of the desk. She pulled out a photograph framed in silver and handed it to him. ‘You were such beautiful kids.’

  He studied her gift, a portrait of two boys. Oren, pictured at the age of seventeen, stood half a head taller than his younger brother. He had never seen this shot, though he remembered when it was taken. No detail of that day could be forgotten. Josh had mounted his camera on a brand-new tripod and used a cable release to snap this picture from a distance. And so the two brothers were standing together – for the last time. The photograph was black-and-white, and Oren’s blue eyes looked very dark. He seemed so subdued in that moment, and today he was not so changed after all, still brooding in his countenance, as if he had made a pact with Josh, for whom change was impossible.

  He sank down on the bed beside Hannah.

  She wrapped her arms around him in a hug. ‘It’s good to have you home.’

  He had sorely missed this little woman, and she released her hold on him too soon. He bowed his head to look down at the picture in his hands. ‘So . . . about that jawbone?’

  ‘Ah, the bones. They’re always left on the porch late at night. You’re the only one who knows – besides me and your father.’

  No, there was one other person who knew – the trespasser who traveled by night with a yellow dog. ‘I’m guessing this has been going on for months.’ He dated that guess by the housekeeper’s letters and their cryptic allusions to something amiss. ‘If the old man doesn’t call the sheriff, I’ll have to do it myself.’

  She placed one hand on his knee and squeezed it with the gentle warning, ‘He won’t like that, Oren.’

  ‘He was a judge. He knows the law.’

  ‘But you don’t know the half of it – not yet.’ Hannah stood up, a little unsteady for the liquor. Late in life, she had evidently become a pansy drinker.

  He followed her down the hall to Josh’s old room, where the braided rug and the striped wallpaper were holding up well. But the bedspread had once been brilliant green, and now it was a muted shade. The closet was open, and Josh’s favorite denim shirt hung by a hook on the back of the door along with the Sunday-best blue jeans. His brother had been wearing knock-around jeans the last time he was seen alive.

  Hannah seemed lost in reverie and a whiskey buzz, perhaps forgetting why she had brought him in here. To refresh her memory, Oren slapped the top of the coffin that had pride of place in the center of Josh’s bedroom. ‘This is new,’ he said.

  Did that sound sarcastic? He hoped so.

  The varnished rosewood was trimmed with shiny brass that spoke of a recent purchase. It was the wildly upscale model hawked by funeral directors whose souls were interchangeable with used-car salesmen. And this could only mean that one such undertaker must have seen enormous grief in the old man’s eyes. And tears? Oh, yes. The expense of the coffin was proof. This obscene trick could only be worked on a fragile mourner deep in pain.

  Hannah raised the lid and laid it back on its hinges. ‘The judge didn’t want anybody to know about this until he had all the bones – till Josh was finished coming home. He made me swear not to tell.’

  The satin lining was green – Josh’s favorite color – and the skeleton nestled there was the same red cast as the jawbone outside on the porch. The hands and feet were missing. Perhaps the judge ’s night visitor was an amateur at exhumation and had overlooked remains that might pass for sticks and stones. What destroyed Oren was the slight overlap of the skull’s front teeth, the only physical imperfection of a fifteen-year-old boy.

  Hello, Josh. Did you miss me?

  Hannah stepped back from the coffin. ‘You wouldn’t expect bones to smell.’

  By profession, Oren was accustomed to decomposition. He knew it was the confined space and the seal of the coffin that gave the bones the reek of an ossuary. And there was also an earthy smell. He leaned down, as if to kiss his brother’s lipless face. ‘Hannah. Did the judge clean the skull? Did he do anything to it before it went into the coffin?’

  ‘No, not a thing. The way Josh is now – that ’s the way he came home.’

  The bones of the body were dusted with soil, but the skull bore the circular marks of cloth-wiped dirt. No part of the skeleton showed signs of exposure to the elements, and there was no damage from the fangs of animal predators – only the stains of sheltering earth.

  Raw burial could only be read as murder.

  The torso and limbs were more lightly colored than the skull, a sign that they had been protected for a time by a layer of clothing. Oren took small comfort in the knowledge that his little brother had not been thrown naked into some hole.

  Hannah tugged at his sleeve. ‘The judge won’t want to give Josh up to the sheriff, but he might be willing to part with one or two bones.’

  Oren nodded, as if she had said something sensible. It had been easy enough for the judge to part with his firstborn son. But it would be too hard on the old man to give up the other child, the dead one.

  Hannah raised one finger to herald another thought. ‘Maybe we could just hold off on reporting Josh’s skeleton – at least until it’s finished.’ One hand went up to her mouth to stifle any more mad ideas. Her head tilted to one side, as if to shake out this contagion of an old man’s insanity, and then she gripped Oren’s arm. ‘Before you call the sheriff, you have to prepare the judge.’

  And how would he convince a crazy old man to surrender his dead son? Well, he would avoid any useless words like closure. Oren could not even bring himself to close the coffin. He wanted to crawl inside with the bones, to lie down with them and die.

  Hannah stepped up to perform this small service for him. She was lowering the lid when he said, ‘Wait!’ and stayed her hands. ‘They don’t match up.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look at the thigh bones, Hannah.’

  She leaned over the coffin to stare at one and then the other. She looked up at him, quizzical – worried. ‘They’re the same.’

  ‘Look again. The left one’s off by an inch. Now look at the arms.’ He pointed to radials and femurs, not wanting to touch them. ‘These bones belong to two different skeletons . . . at least two.’

  FOUR

  After returning the telephone ’s receiver to its antique cradle, Oren knew he could count on thirty minutes, maybe a solid hour, before a deputy was dispatched from the county seat. There would be no sirens screaming, no haste. The deputy from Saulburg might even stop for breakfast along the way. The County Sheriff ’s Office was long accustomed to similar reports from hikers in the woods, and the remains always turned out to be the bones of animals. Oren had made no mention of the skeleton in the coffin – only the jawbone, but not its dental filling.

  He climbed the stairs and returned to his old bedroom, drawn there by the photograph in the silver frame, the shot taken on the day Josh had vanished. That was the only time that his little brother had used a tripod, the only instance of Josh appearing in one of his own pictures. Among the hundred examples of his brother’s work on all the walls of the house, this posed composition was a rarity. The boy had favored a handheld camera for candid shots taken on the fly – hit and run. In this picture, there was more than a foot of distance between Oren and his brother, as if Josh were already leaving him in that moment.

  Other photographs, more than a dozen, hung on the bedroom walls, and they chronicled five years of Josh’s love affair with the camera. Oren stared at his favorite, one of himself and a girl who had only appeared in the summers of his boyhood. He colored her black-and-white image with a memory of long red hair and eyes the color of dark honey. As a boy, he had availed himself of furtive glances to count the freckles on her nose. At the age of twelve, this had been his life ’s work. In his early teens, he had progressed to a fascination with her red toenail polish.

  He might have been thirteen years old when this shot was taken. Boy and girl wer
e pictured walking away from one another, heading toward opposite ends of the frame. Between them yawned a great empty space – nothing but sky. His little brother had never taken a picture without the intention to tell a story or a joke, and this was both. Nothing had ever happened between Oren and the summer girl. They had not exchanged a single word. He had never heard the sound of her voice.

  ‘Isabelle Winston.’

  ‘Hannah, don’t do that.’

  She should know better. Creeping up behind people had always been the judge’s job. Oren turned around to see the housekeeper eyeing the same photograph. How long had she been standing there?

  ‘Josh was good, wasn’t he?’ She moved closer to the wall. ‘A real artist.’

  Oren reached out to the bureau and picked up her homecoming gift, the picture of two brothers. ‘I know this shot came from Josh’s last roll of film, the one he left behind that day. When was this developed? Was it before or after the judge sent me away?’

  ‘You make it sound like he kicked you out of the house.’ She smiled, taking no offense at his tone of interrogation. ‘After Josh went missing, I found a roll of film stashed in his sock drawer. I left it there for a while. The judge didn’t want anything disturbed in your brother’s room. He had a real bug about that. I don’t remember exactly when I took the roll down to the drugstore to get it developed.’ After a furtive glance at the door, she lowered her voice. ‘The judge doesn’t need to know I did that. He ’d pitch a fit.’ Hannah gave him her best conspirator’s grin. ‘So don’t you rat on me, OK?’ She returned the photograph to the bureau. ‘It’s a good picture, but I know Josh would’ve done a better job in his own darkroom.’

  ‘That ’s still in the attic?’

  ‘Just the way he left it.’

  ‘Is that where you put the rest of the pictures from his last roll?’