Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

“Hokay,” said a low voice behind me. I jumped and sneezed again, my heart pounding.

Tilly grinned at me, exposing all twelve of her remaining teeth.

“Jumpy, are we? Well, come on. I don’t have all day. Wouldn’t you know, I wait three dang years and you come on the day I have got a doctor appointment; it’s the cancer in the breasts. Hereditary. My mother had it. Her mother had it. Our whole dang family has it.”

I murmured some sympathies and followed her down one labyrinthine aisle after another, pausing as she switched on another row of lights. When she did, the lights behind us flickered off. Once, I stopped and turned and saw an emergency exit sign mounted high up, back in the direction of the stairs. The green glow seemed far away.

Then Tilly was telling me to come on, and I hurried to catch up with her.

She stopped abruptly in front of a study carrel. It was a cubicle-size space; the desk piled high with books, binders, folders, boxes of loose-leaf papers, and a magnifying glass, a tablet of paper, and a pencil.

“What is all this?”

Tilly shook her head at me and said to Petey in a low stage whisper “amateur.”

She pointed at the cubicle and said, “That, my dear, is the town’s complete archival materials on the McKenzie boys slash Woodsman murders.”

I swallowed. Research had not been my forte in school. “And this is what Nicky was doing when he came here? Reading all this stuff?”

“Yessiree,” she said. The sequins on her eyeglasses caught the reflection of the ceiling lights and a thousand tiny bulbs sparkled back at me. “That boy spent about four months down here.”

“And when was this? Exactly, I mean?”

“Oh, springtime, early summer of 2012. The last time he came by was two days before he went on that camping trip, in July. You know I’m up there a few times myself every summer? There’s a beautiful camping spot, just near that lookout point. Only place I can ever find some dang peace and quiet. Anyway, he told me I could pack all this up, that he had what he needed and thank you very much but he was all done,” Tilly said.

She stroked the stuffed parrot as she spoke, and I could have sworn I saw its emerald-green wings shudder at her touch.

“Why didn’t you?” I asked. “Pack it up, I mean?”

“Because he died, dummy. And I thought someone would come asking and I sure wasn’t about to put it all away and then go find it again, was I? Do you know how long it took me the first time, to gather all of this for Nicky? A week,” she said.

I looked at the overflowing cubicle and then at her. “Are you telling me this has been here for three years? Untouched? Doesn’t anyone else use this room? Or this material?”

She shook her head sadly. “You’re the first. Oh, I dust it all every week. But no one is interested in the past. If they were smart, they would be, for the past tells us all we need to know, if we listen. But no one takes the god dang time to listen.”

“Why didn’t you call the police and tell them to come check this stuff out?”

Tilly scoffed. “I did. I left a message at the station and no one ever got back to me. Time passed, and then it seemed silly to keep pestering you all. I figured if someone was interested, they would have come.”

I considered that, and Tilly’s age. If she was a native of the area, her answer to my next question might help frame things a bit.

“Did you know them? The McKenzie boys?”

Tilly nodded slowly, her eyes growing wider. She continued caressing the dead bird on her shoulder but her touch slowed, her finger making one long rhythmic stroke from crown to tail, and then beginning again.

“I was forty when they disappeared. Oh, but it was hot that summer. Hotter than a clap infection, so hot you could walk outside and feel like you could lie down and just die. I knew Tommy’s father, peripherally of course. We used the same dentist and we must have been on the same schedule, because every six months like clockwork we’d find ourselves waiting together in the little reception area at the dentist. Dr. Whitman. He’s long dead, by the way. Brain tumor.”

Tilly continued. “I remember the parents, John and Karen McKenzie, and Mark and Sarah McKenzie, they were everywhere that summer. Putting up posters, hosting folks who’d come in from out of town to help search… the newspapers interviewed them every week it seemed.”

She paused and for a moment I thought she was finished. Then she smiled sadly again and said, “And I couldn’t see that it made a damn difference. It was like those boys went up in smoke. They were here and then they were gone.”

She stopped stroking the parrot, her eyes locked on something very faraway, lost in the summer of 1985, the hottest summer on record in Cedar Valley, a summer where the sky was bright and children disappeared.

I asked her the same question I asked Darren Chase. “Did Nicky ever say why he was so interested in the boys?”

Tilly shook her head. “Nope. I’m a librarian. You’re the cop. It’s none of my damn business why people are here. I just show them how to access information and do good research. Nicky was polite and he treated the materials with respect. He was a good boy. This town loses more good boys than it keeps.”

I left Tilly with the promise that either I, or a charming young man by the name of Sam Birdshead, would return soon and go through the materials in the cubicle. I added a second promise; when we were finished, truly finished, Tilly could pack it all up and place the whole dang caboodle back where it belonged.

The clouds could contain themselves no longer; it was pouring when I emerged from the library. I dashed as fast as I could to the car and climbed in. The rain beat down on the roof of my car like a drummer on a drum set, pounding out a steady tempo, drop-by-drop, beat-by-beat.

I called Sam. As it rang through, I held the phone between my ear and my shoulder as I undid my belt buckle. Something I’d eaten that morning wasn’t agreeing with me, and my stomach was making noises like a diesel truck at a stop sign.

Sam picked up on the fourth ring.

“How’s it going over there?” I asked.

“Not bad. The reporters are about done. The chief was awesome, he gave ’em exactly what they needed to know and not a drop more.”

“Good. I’ve been at the library. There’s a ton of stuff we need to go through here, Sam. You know the Bird Lady? It turns out she is the librarian that Darren Chase, the basketball coach, referred Nicky to three years ago. She’s kept Nicky’s work exactly as it was when he went over Bride’s Veil.”

“No kidding? You find anything?”

“Sam, there’s so much stuff there, I didn’t know where to begin. But I’m going to come back tomorrow. Darren Chase was right; all of it is about the disappearance of the McKenzie boys, the Woodsman murders. Nicky could have been writing a dissertation on this stuff, for all the original material that’s there. I’ve got a little project for you: comb through the original files on Nicky’s accident, would you? I’ve got the basic report here with me, but I know there’s another report or two at the station. We need the inventory of what was found in Nicky’s room when the police first visited the Bellingtons.”

“Would they have done a search of his room? Wasn’t his fall tied up as an accident pretty quickly?” Sam asked.

I said, “Ellen Bellington said something strange yesterday when I spoke to her on the phone. She said she’d boxed up his things after the police inventoried his room. Finn Nowlin and Louis Moriarty are no fools. They may have missed some things-this library angle, for instance-but I’m starting to get the impression they were maybe a little more thorough than you’d expect on a routine accident report.”