Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

With his beer bottle halfway to his mouth, Louis Moriarty froze. “What the hell does the Woodsman have to do with the murder of Nicky Bellington?”

Shit. I hadn’t meant to bring up the Woodsman yet. The rest of the crew didn’t know about that angle. I glanced at Finn but he refused to meet my eyes.

So I was on my own, then. Some partner.

“Well, you might as well all know. At the time he went over Bride’s Veil, Nicky had just wrapped up three or four months of intense-and I mean intense-research on the Woodsman murders. Intense as in consumed.”

Silence.

Moriarty, Chavez, and Ravi stared at me.

Sam shook his head slowly and continued to wipe at his shirt.

Finn stared at the plate of slowly congealing nachos.

Finally Moriarty muttered, “Is this another part of your, uh, obsession with that case, Gemma? Because this is getting kind of old.”

“This has nothing to do with me. Nicky was down in these archives at the library almost every day, digging through wads of old newspaper articles and reports. He spends more than three months down there and then all of a sudden, announces to the librarian that he’s done. And a few days later, the world thinks he’s dead.” I stared at Moriarty. “You were there. Finn told me you had your suspicions. You thought suicide, didn’t you? Why? In a perfectly normal kid with no prior history of depression, why would you think suicide?”

Chavez, Ravi, and Sam looked from me to Moriarty and back again like they were watching a Ping-Pong game. Finn stood and mumbled “men’s room” and made his way to the back of the bar and ducked through a dark curtain that hung at an angle.

Moriarty pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “Yup, he was perfectly normal. Normal kids do stupid shit all the time, screwing around things they shouldn’t, daring one another, showing off for the ladies. One false step, a loose rock, and bam, it’s over, just like that. Except Nick wasn’t that guy. No one remembers him messing around like that. He wasn’t a risk taker. One minute they’re eating Cheetos, the next he’s gone over a waterfall. There wasn’t anything normal about that. ”

Finn returned from the men’s room and took his seat. A single hot wing remained on the platter in the middle of the table and he picked it up and sucked the meat from the bone with a smack.

I thought back on the reports I’d read three years ago, the transcripts of the kids, the other campers and the statements they’d given the police. But my memory was hazy. Sam had the reports in his possession, but I didn’t want to alert Moriarty to that.

“Did anyone actually see him go over?”

Moriarty glanced at Finn then shook his head. “Not a single person.”

“And everyone’s first thought is that he’d fallen off the cliff?” I asked. “Did anyone search the woods? What if he’d waited for the perfect moment and simply snuck away?”

The chief interrupted me. “Gemma, you’re forgetting two things. We found his Windbreaker the next day, five miles downstream. He’d worn it tied around his waist all weekend. One of the searchers spotted it, tangled on the banks of the river. And we found footprints in the dirt, right at the edge of the cliff. Size eight Adidas. Nicky’s shoes.”

Anybody could toss a Windbreaker in a river.

And anybody could leave prints.

Maybe Nicky had survived his big fall over Bride’s Veil by not falling at all.

Moriarty said, “You ever stop to think this is all one big, fat coincidence? You’re so busy chasing after your damn old demons you’ve already made up your mind on this. Leave the past alone, Gemma. There’s nothing there worth kicking up.”

He tilted the tip of his beer bottle in my direction and continued. “Did Finn tell you how many Stephen King books we found in Nicky’s room? And the posters, Christ, with what’s his face, that Manson rocker. I think the Woodsman murders were just one more dark, spooky thing that kid was into. I bet you a hundred dollars, none of this old shit has anything to do with the fact that a week ago his throat was torn open.”

Moriarty polished off his beer and set the bottle on the table hard enough to rattle the empty platters of food. He stood and clapped Sam on the back of the neck and squeezed. “How ’bout a game of darts, son? I got ten bucks that says I beat you in best of three.”

I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip while I tried to make sense of the tangled webs this case was bringing to light. The others chatted and drank and let me alone with my thoughts.

Louis Moriarty had just told me to leave the past alone.

The same words my visitor had left on my bathroom mirror in a scarlet shade of lipstick that had taken ten minutes to scrub clean.

Louis Moriarty’s son Danny was at one time considered a suspect in the McKenzie murders.

Louis Moriarty had been close to Frank Bellington and Bull Weston.

What it all meant, I wasn’t sure.

Frank Bellington was a man taking a long, slow slide into the big sleep. Bull Weston had lied to me the other night, I was sure of it, about not remembering what made their friendship die all those years ago. Louis Moriarty was a fellow cop-a brother of my extended family.

At the moment, I didn’t trust a single one of them.

Moriarty bested Sam in three rounds and then left without a good-bye. Finn announced he was walking Ravi to her car and she followed him with a roll of her eyes and a peck on my cheek. Sam looked at a loss but perked up when a trio of curvy grad students took a table near ours. A brunette with turquoise eyes caught his attention and within five minutes, he was in a game of pool with the beauty and her friends.

Chavez muttered something. He was on his fourth beer and I hoped Sam was still planning on driving both of us home. Or at least back to the station so I could pick up my car.

“What did you say?”

He groaned. “I shouldn’t have said that, what I said before.”

“Said what?”

“You know what. About Ellen,” the chief said.

He rolled the half-full bottle back and forth in his hands. They were big hands, rough with calluses formed years ago working the land on his parents’ farm in eastern Colorado.

“I’m not really in love with her. It was a long time ago.”

“What happened?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know but when life hands you answers, you take them, no matter how uncomfortable the telling.

“Terry happened.”

Chavez took a long sip and then belched into his fist. “We were best friends, you know, at Harvard. Roommates freshman year, cocaptains of the tennis team, study buddies. And then one day this stunningly beautiful creature walked across the cafeteria and that was it, man. Ellen freaking Nystrom.”

“And?”

“What do you mean ‘and’? And nothing. She chose Terry. After, of course, she gave me a night to remember her by. You know I was a virgin? Twenty years old and I was a virgin. Christ,” he said. The chief lifted his beer then set it back down. “Christ.”

“Chief-” I began. I didn’t need to hear any more.

He waved a hand in my direction. “What the hell, bygones are bygones, right? We got over it. I met Lydia the next year. And when I got recruited for this job, I honest to God never made the connection between the small dust hole Terry spoke of and the booming ski town I came to in the late nineties.”

“Does Lydia know? About Ellen?”

Angel Chavez gave a deep laugh, the kind that starts in your belly and comes out somewhere at the crown of your skull. “Gemma, you don’t get to be married for twenty years and not know every damn thing about your spouse. ’Course she knows. She also knows that I’d never trade what we have for even a minute for life with that Nordic devil. That woman has more angles than a geometry book. Not all bad, of course, but angles and sides you never want to see.”