Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

Annika’s bedroom was on the other side of the house. Mrs. Watkins led me up the stairs and down another long, narrow hallway filled with more of the nausea-inducing paintings. We walked by an open door and at the faint sound of a television turned low I turned my head and looked in the room as we passed. An elderly man sat in a wheelchair, his head bowed, hands clasped in his lap, asleep.

The room was dim but the blue light of the television filled the space with a neon glow. I watched, hypnotized, as a thin line of spit trailed from his chin down to the orange afghan in his lap.

Ahead of me, Mrs. Watkins turned, stepped back, reached around me, and gently pulled the door shut. Her eyes were unreadable and I felt ashamed at peeping into an old man’s private slumber.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“That’s Frank Bellington,” Mrs. Watkins whispered.

“I know. He was a friend of my grandfather, Bull Weston. I don’t think they’ve seen each other in a while, though.”

Mrs. Watkins shrugged and continued down the hall and I quickened my stride to keep pace with her. At the end of the hall, she pointed at a closed door. On the knob was a tag, the kind you see at hotels, that indicates do not disturb. I lifted the pink laminated sign and smiled; it read “perfect angel” on one side and “raging bitch” on the other.

I crossed my fingers it was the angel that was in today, and knocked and pushed the door open.

The room was as warm and inviting as the rest of the Bellington house was cold and sterile. A four-poster bed topped with a plump lavender duvet took up the south wall. On the opposite side of the room, a sprawling wooden desk held computers and stereo equipment and piles of clothes. In the corner, a keyboard and a guitar rested against a tall bookcase crammed with dog-eared paperbacks and thick hardcovers. Tucked in among the books were small ceramic angels, the kind you see in Hallmark stores and Reader’s Digest ads.

“Annika? I’m Detective Monroe,” I said. “You can call me Gemma.”

She sat cross-legged on the bed, playing with the ends of long hair that was two shades fairer than her mother’s. She glanced up and I looked into eyes that were the same pale blue as her twin brother Nicky’s had been, the same blue as her mother’s. I saw no trace of her father in her, until she spoke.

Her cadence, her openness, her friendliness-that was pure Terence Bellington. She’d make a wonderful politician and she wasn’t yet twenty.

“How do you do?” she asked, and bounded from the bed to me in three steps. She shook my hand politely and then stared at my belly. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks. I’m due in three months,” I said. “It’s sort of crazy, really.”

“I bet. I can’t imagine,” Annika replied. She wore dark jeans and a green T-shirt with the word “Hellkat” stitched across the front in fraying red felt letters. The shirt looked homemade but knowing kids these days, it probably cost eighty bucks at Anthropologie.

She noticed me looking and laughed, a lovely sound completely unlike her mother’s harsh bark. “Hellkat is a garage band in New Haven. My boyfriend’s the lead singer. Pete. He’s got this alter ego on stage, with a costume and everything. Hellkat is like a demented superhero cat. Kind of stupid.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, sounds pretty cool. How is Yale? I bet it’s a lot different than the schools out here.”

I said the words but I didn’t believe them. I do that sometimes; the words tumble out of my mouth as my mind is thinking the opposite. College is college, whether you pay ten thousand or a hundred thousand for the privilege of lectures, narrow twin beds, and crappy dorm food.

She shrugged and laughed again. “The boys are the same. They all just want to fuck you and leave you, blow ’em and snow ’em, as they say. That’s why I like Pete, he’s different from the rest. He never forced it.”

I didn’t know if she was trying to shock me with the word she’d used, but somehow, I doubted it. Annika chose the words she used because they were the right words for the situation.

“Is my mom still crying?” she asked. She wandered over to the bed and sat down and patted at the cover.

I joined her. “I don’t know. She wasn’t just now.”

Annika said, “She cried a lot last night. That’s how I knew something was wrong. I heard the phone ring and then I heard her scream and then she was crying, and so was my dad, and no one would tell me anything.”

She flopped backward on the bed and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “My aunt Hannah was the one who finally told me, you know. Can you believe that? They didn’t even tell me themselves.”

“Your aunt Hannah?”

Annika nodded. “Our nanny, Mrs. Watkins. I’m sure you met her. She’s my father’s sister, my aunt Hannah. She practically raised us. Her husband left her when they found out she couldn’t have kids. My parents were always super busy so she moved in when we were little.”

“I didn’t realize that she was a relative. Does she live here, too, then?”

Annika said yes. “Me, Dad, Mom, Aunt, Grandpa. No brother no more.”

I lay back on the bed next to her and stared up. Tiny green stars dotted the cottage cheese ceiling in random patterns that vaguely resembled constellations. Growing up, my best friend had the same stickers in her room, the kind that glow in the dark once you turn out the lights.

She and I used to lie like this for hours, legs hanging off the bed, flat on our backs, staring at the ceiling and talking about nothing and everything. We’d light blueberry-scented candles and listen to Tracy Chapman and Chris Isaak and wonder if the boys we liked even knew our names.

“I’m really sorry about Nicky, Annika. I know all of this must come as a huge shock,” I said. “Can you think of any reason why he might have done this?”

“You mean disappear? Not get in touch with his family? Let us think he was dead? Or join a circus, work as a clown, and then get himself murdered?”

I sighed. It was an awkward situation; there was no getting around that. “Well, all of that, I suppose.”

She sat up and, looking down at me, gathered her long pale hair up and began furiously twisting it into a bun.

“I have no idea. Nicky was the applesauce to my pork chop, the milk in my cereal. He completed me. What we had was fierce and I don’t mean in some sick, kinky, Flowers in the Attic way. You never met a nicer guy. He made the rest of this fucked-up family better just by sharing our last name. I can’t imagine that if he knew how much he hurt us, that he did it on purpose. There’s got to be some other explanation.”

She bounced off the bed and paced the room with the pent-up fury of a tiger in a cage. “I’m so mad at him I would kill him if he was here right now, Detective.”

“Please, call me Gemma. Annika, can you walk me through that day? Three years ago? I’ve read the reports, of course, but I’d like to hear it from you.”

She laughed. “Well, sure, but obviously we missed something, right? I mean, it’s not the most accurate account anymore, is it? Considering he lived?”

I nodded. “That’s okay. I’d still like to hear it.”

She picked up one of the tiny ceramic angels on the bookshelf and held it a moment before setting it back down. In the sunlight that streamed through the window, she looked younger than her nineteen years.

“We were on a trip, an overnight camping trip up to Mount Wrigley. Paul-Mr. Winters-he asked Nicky and I to come along as mentors for his foundation. I think he thought we would be good role models for the other kids. We hiked up Wednesday night and camped Wednesday and Thursday. Friday morning, we packed up and started the hike down. We stopped for lunch at the top of Bride’s Veil.”