Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

I couldn’t remember.

Weariness fell on me like a cloak and suddenly I was too exhausted to care much.

I had a gun. I was trained. I was tired.

I set the tip of the shotgun against the door and slowly pushed it, swinging it inward, opening it all the way. The air was heavy with the smell of the citrus bath oil. The light from the hall spilled into the small room, revealing the toilet, the sink, the tub with the shower curtain hooked to one wall. In the shadows, they were all soft shapes, safe and domestic.

Familiar.

I leaned in and flipped the light on and stared at the sticky red substance that came off the switch and on to my finger. It was moist but not wet, waxy but not malleable, and as I brought my fingers to my nose, the smell I experienced was similar to that of melted crayons.

I lifted my eyes and saw the message on the bathroom mirror. Written in a tidy print, its author must have been as unhurried in his writing as I had been in my searching of the house:

The next message I leave will be written in your blood. Leave the past in the past if you want to have a future Bitch.

A gold tube of lipstick, the cap removed and the scarlet wax smashed down, rolled to and fro in the sink, a relic from my dating years. It was one of a dozen I kept in an old shoe box in the bathroom cabinet. I watched the tube come to a stop and saw it was Kiss My Face #47, an old favorite, with a sexy color and a name that used to make me laugh: Killing Me Softly Rose.

I sank down to the floor, my legs finally giving out.

I couldn’t figure out when the message had been written.

I would have heard the intruder on the stairs, or Seamus would have. That dog still barked at the mailman, and poor Mr. Ellis had done our route for years.

I took a picture of the note with my digital camera, and careful not to touch the edges of the smooth tube, sealed up the lipstick in a plastic baggie. When I held the bag up to the light, I saw faint ridges on the tube from a fingerprint almost touching the small label at the bottom.

I did another round of the house and checked every closet, under the guest bed, and in the garage, pulling out the bikes, camping gear, and stacks of junk that piled up month by month, year by year. There was nothing out of the ordinary. The only disturbing thing I found was a mouse taking the big sleep in an old ski boot.

At midnight, I grabbed a pile of blankets and made up a bed on the living-room couch. I set the gun on the floor, and put my cell phone under the pillow. My sleep was deep, free of dreams, and when I woke, I found myself in a twisted, sweaty heap of blankets and loose cushions.

The rain had stopped sometime around dawn. I stumbled into the kitchen and tripped over Seamus’s water bowl, as I did most mornings, and swore. Later, on the back patio, I sipped from a pot of hot tea and scarfed down a plate of bacon and eggs and toast.

The sun was shining and already the dozen or so puddles of muddy water that dotted the yard like miniature ponds were beginning to dry up. Two matronly robins, their breasts plump and rosy hued, picked at fat worms that had drowned in the storm. Their sharp beaks picked up the thick pink tubes and neatly sucked them down like housewives at an oyster bar.

In the light of day, the sun warming the air and my skin, it was hard to believe the previous night’s events. Other than the lipstick and the photos I’d taken of the message, there was no sign of my visitor. I took a look in the front yard, but the tire treads I saw were my own and those from Tessa’s car.

After a shower and quick check of my e-mail, I locked up and carefully backed out of the driveway. The mud was thick, and the west-facing front of the house was deep in shadows, not yet graced by the sun’s heat.

Driving down the canyon, I saw evidence of the storm’s destruction everywhere. The creek ran fast and high, racing over tree limbs and submerged boulders that two days ago had stood dry. Ahead of me, a silver Honda minivan slowed to a crawl and then carefully maneuvered around a pine tree that lay across the road like a felled giant.

Perched delicately on one of the pine’s limbs, a single crow, its feathers black as ink, bobbed his head up and down into the tree’s nooks and crannies. A pickup truck from the local utility company was parked just beyond the tree, and as I drove by, the driver gave me a halfhearted wave.

I passed the turnoff to Scarecrow Road, a winding stretch of dirt and cement that culminated, four curvy miles away, in an abandoned mine shaft. The signpost’s sketch of a once-friendly scarecrow had faded over the years. Vandals had gouged out his cheery eyes and widened his mouth into more of a leer than a grin.

Someone had taken a red Sharpie to the figure, drawing devil horns on the scarecrow’s head, and a protruding tongue from his mouth, lascivious, its tip forked like a snake’s. The scarecrow’s crotch was filled with crude, obscene sketches that only vaguely resembled anything like standard male equipment.

I drove past the turnoff, making a note to talk to the county about a replacement sign.

I drove, and I remembered.

In March, before the forest fires came, before school let out for spring break, but after the last big snowfall, and after the junior prom had come and gone, a group of six teenagers, two boys, four girls, sat in a basement, bored out of their minds. Inspiration struck and they piled into Greta Tobias’s father’s minivan-a van identical to the silver Honda I’d been caught behind just a few minutes before-and headed to Scarecrow Road.

Their final destination was the old mine shaft four miles beyond the turnoff.

As teenagers are apt to do, they drove distracted, half of them texting, the other half hollering at one another to change the radio station. But Greta was a good driver, and she tuned out her friends and concentrated on the icy road. The two fatal errors the group made on their way out of town could hardly be blamed on these distractions.

The first error was stopping at Shane Montgomery’s house. While Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery sat in the den watching an old movie on the Turner Classic Movie network, their son-star football player, straight-A student-grabbed a bottle of tequila and a bottle of vodka from the liquor cabinet above the refrigerator.

The second error was poor arithmetic, plain and simple. The van’s gas gauge was broken; it had been for weeks. Greta’s father was a busy man, and he traveled a lot for business. He simply hadn’t had time to get the damn thing fixed. So, he had shown Greta how to do the math-fill it up, drive it down. If you knew how many gallons the tank held, you could estimate how far you could go at any given time.

Only that night, Greta’s math was off.

Of course, when we arrived at the scene, we didn’t know about any of these fatal errors. We only got the details the following day when the five surviving teens told us the gruesome tale, piece by piece.

They had arrived at the mine shaft just fine. They drank by the light of the van’s headlights, passing the vodka and tequila bottles around and around, over and over. Lisa Chang-Hughes dared Shane to strip naked and run through the woods. He did, and then he dared Lisa to climb down into the mine shaft.

It was supposed to be a short trip, a few feet down and then back up again. But her heeled boot caught a rotted rung, and her hands, numbed by the cold and the tequila, were slow to react.

She fell fifteen feet.

Frantic, her friends called her name, but there was no answer. They waved the beams of their flashlights into the pit and saw her legs, and then one hand.

The rest of her body lay in darkness.

In a panic, they tried to dial 911 but not one of their cell phones picked up a signal. They were too far into the woods, out of range of all the satellite towers. They decided to split up, and a couple of them would drive into town and get help.