Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

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"A sure bet for one of the finest debut novels of the year." – Deborah Crombie
Secrets and lies can't stay buried forever in Cedar Valley.
In the summer, hikers and campers pack the small Colorado town's meadows and fields. And in the winter, skiers and snowboarders take over the mountains. Season by season, year after year, time passes and the lies, like the aspens and evergreens that surround the town, take root and spread deep.
Now, someone has uncovered the lies, and it is his murder that continues a chain of events that began almost forty years ago. Detective Gemma Monroe's investigation takes her from the seedy grounds of a traveling circus to the powerful homes of those who would control Cedar Valley's future.
Six-months pregnant, with a partner she can't trust and colleagues who know more than they're saying, Gemma tracks a killer who will stop at nothing to keep those secrets buried.
Beautifully written with a riveting plot and a richly drawn cast of characters, Inherit the Bones is a mesmerizing debut from Emily Littlejohn.

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“Armstrong and Moriarty took a call on an accident in Pine. I don’t know where Nowlin is,” Sam said. “I think the chief is in his office.”

I nodded. “Get anything good?”

Sam shook his head. His expression was so hangdog I had to laugh.

“Don’t worry about it, that’s part of the deal. For every hour you spend on a case, you might get a minute of gold. Just remember that gold makes those fifty-nine other minutes of sweat and tears and blood and bullshit all worth it.”

“I guess. It’s strange, I get the impression that Fellini’s is like its own little society, and everyone belongs to a class, and the classes don’t mix,” Sam said. “For example, the grunts and the glitter don’t ever get together.”

“The grunts and the glitter?”

“Yeah, the performers like the clowns and the acrobats, the showmen. They’re the glitter, and the grunts are the guys like this Pat Sheldon I talked to, the cooks and the mechanics and the trainers,” Sam said. “The grease in the wheels of the big machine that is the circus.”

Hadn’t Tessa said something about that? She’d said it was like a totem pole, with the gassers on the bottom.

“Did this Sheldon mention the gassers?” I asked.

Sam nodded with surprise. “How’d you know about them? They’re the worst, apparently. The gassers, and the guys who run the kiddy booths; Sheldon called them the peddies.”

“The peddies?”

“Yeah, as in peddlers, or pedophiles, depending on if you think they’re just selling wares or if they’re manning the booths to get up close and personal with the kiddos.”

I winced.

“Well, after I called you from Fatone’s, I went and saw Reed’s girlfriend, Tessa,” I said. “We ought to take a look at her roommate, Lisey. Seems there was a bit of a love triangle.”

Sam perked up. “Oh yeah?”

I nodded. “Yeah, but not the way you’re thinking. Lisey apparently has a thing for Tessa.”

“You thinking this Lisey killed Reed in some kind of jealous rage?” Sam asked. “That’s pretty violent for a crush.”

He stood and stretched and handed me an open bag of peanut M &M’S.

“You’d be surprised what can happen when love’s involved,” I said. I knocked back a handful of the chocolates and noticed they were all brown, red, or green candies. “The worst things I’ve seen were between people who loved each other. Did you pick out all the blue and yellow M &M’S?”

Sam looked at me, aghast. “I would never do that.”

“Well, someone did. Did you get anything else?”

Sam shook his head. “Not much. Same stuff we’ve been hearing, sweet kid, liked everyone, blah blah blah.”

I stopped him. “No, not blah blah blah. This is good, and important, and we can’t forget it, no matter what else we discover. Consistency tells us a lot, Sam. People are creatures of habit. Everything we know about Nicky thus far tells us he was a good kid, sweet, gentle-natured. Everything we know about Reed thus far also tells us he was a good kid. And what does that tell us?”

Sam shook his head and shrugged. “Well, we’d expect that, right? Since it was the same guy?”

“It tells us that even though Nicky went to drastic, extreme measures to change his appearance-the tattoos, the piercings, the hair dye-he didn’t, or couldn’t, change his personality. On the outside, Nicky became Reed. On the inside, Nicky stayed Nicky.”

I stood and walked to the back of the station, where a whiteboard stretched the length of the wall. I erased a few scribbles and a tiny unflattering cartoon of what looked like Chief Chavez and a pack of ponies and rummaged around the markers until I found one that wasn’t dried out.

I drew a long horizontal line and then added a tick mark along it.

“Three years ago, in the summer of 2012, Nicholas Bellington left home for a camping trip and he never came back. He was presumed to have died when he what-fell? Tripped? Was pushed? Jumped?-over Bride’s Veil. His body was never found.”

Sam nodded. He grabbed a marker and some distance from my first mark, added another tick. “Two days ago, Nicholas Bellington, living under the alias Reed Tolliver, turns up in his hometown murdered. This is all we can say for certain, right?”

“Right.” I drummed my marker against the wall, thinking. “I think we need to consider the possibility that Reed wasn’t the target.”

“You mean Nicky was the target. Someone discovered who Reed really was and that’s why he was killed; not for something Reed did but for something Nicky did.”

Pleased, I nodded at Sam. “You’re sixteen. You survive a fall that would have killed anyone else, and then you run. But you don’t run to your parents, your school, or your church. Instead, you run as far away as you can and then you change. You change your name, your hair. You destroy your face with tattoos and piercings to the point that if your own mother saw you on the street, she’d walk right by you. Why?”

The room was silent save for the rhythmic whoosh of the ceiling fan. It paced our thoughts like a giant metronome. Whoosh, whoosh. Whoosh, whoosh.

“You’re scared. You do all that because you are scared to death,” a voice whispered into my ear. I jumped and turned around. Finn Nowlin had crept into the room in that silent way of his and he stood, looking at us. Then with a wolfish grin he reached around me and slapped up the window shade on my left. Sunlight streamed into the room and I thought about Finn’s words.

I knew there were shades of fear, the same as there are shades of like, and love, and anger, and desire. I was grateful in that moment to have never known the level of fear that Nicky must have felt, to do the things he did.

Chapter Sixteen

The phone rang for a long time at the Bellingtons’. I was about to hang up when Ellen Bellington answered. She sounded harried, impatient to get off the phone.

“Of course we didn’t keep his things. We boxed them up and gave it all away, after the police came and poked their damn fingers through it, touching every little item they could,” Ellen replied in response to my question.

“What about his schoolwork, his papers? Did he have a journal, maybe a diary?”

She laughed, that harsh bark so at odds with her beauty. I was starting to believe that laugh was more representative of her true self, the ugly side she kept hidden.

“What do you think? He was sixteen.”

“Mrs. Bellington, we need to discover why Nicky disappeared three years ago. If we can figure out what he was doing at the time-”

“Nicky wasn’t doing anything, Gemma,” she interrupted.

I heard a low voice in the background and then a muffled sound, as if she’d covered the phone with her hand.

“I have to go. Frank, my father-in-law, he’s not well, I have to go to him,” she said. “Check with that basketball coach. Maybe he can tell you more. He was real fond of Nicky, too fond for my liking.”

Ellen hung up the phone with a force too strong to be an accident, and I rubbed my ringing ear.

Although school had not yet resumed, Cedar Valley High School ran summer classes through the end of August. I checked my watch; it was nearing four o’clock. I took a chance and called, and waited while an administrative assistant put me on hold and tracked down the basketball coach.

I paced the office and listened with one ear as Finn regaled Sam with war stories. He was beginning the one about Christmas Eve of ’09, and the drunken department store elf, when the hold music stopped and a male voice came on.

“This is Darren Chase.”

His voice was low and sounded like he’d spent some serious time down in the bayou; I heard in the ebb and flow of his words days spent on shrimping boats, in swampy wetlands, watching shell-pink and blood-orange sunsets over the Gulf.

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