Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

“What do you mean?” I asked, but Chavez was done. He shook his head and watched Sam move a few inches closer to the grad student with the turquoise eyes.

“That kid’s got his whole life in front of him, doesn’t he? Do you remember being that young? ’Course you do, what am I saying,” he said. “Christ. What a week.”

I stifled a yawn and waved at the waitress and signaled for the check.

“It was surreal when I got here, though. I’d heard so many stories from Terry, about how screwed up his family was, especially his dad, Frank,” Chavez said. “His mom was a bit of a head case, too. She was born in Poland, just after the shit hit the fan. Her parents were Jews, wealthy, and they managed to get the family across the border and into Switzerland. Two years later they arrived in New York.”

That explained the Polish surname I’d seen on her gravestone-Wozniak.

The chief continued. “Anyway, Terry’s mom was real quiet, sneaking around the house like a mouse, always popping up right behind you when you least expected it. Like Terry’s sister, Hannah, that old bag of a housekeeper. Jeez, but she was a beautiful lady, looked like Elizabeth Taylor. But to hear Terry tell it, Frank Bellington was a real son of a bitch. Quite the racist; n word this, n word that. But I never saw it. I don’t know. Maybe that sort of thing fades with age.”

I couldn’t agree. The worst racists I’d ever met were older folks who had years to deepen their hatred for the Jews, the blacks, the Asians, the gays. The bigotry never faded; the bigots just got better at hiding it as the rest of society evolved around them.

I tried to reconcile Chavez’s words with the jokester who used to pull my pigtails and sneak me butterscotch candies, with the old man I’d seen slurping pudding from a spoon, his gaze on some distant horizon that would never get any closer.

We untangled Sam from the grad student as they were bumping iPhones. It used to be you exchanged a business card, maybe a phone number. Now you had to do cell number, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter handle, blog address, and any other number of social networking tools. How anyone found the energy to hook up after all that, I didn’t know.

At Sam’s car, we did an awkward shuffle of courtesy and practicality that ended with Chavez in the front seat, Sam driving, and myself in the back. Our drive took us past the edge of the forest and I watched through the window as the trees streaked by like ghosts, their gangly branches like outstretched arms linked to one another for all time.

Sam dropped me at the station, where I found my car, as promised, the tires gleaming with the shine of rubber that’s barely been around the block. As the Audi pulled away, the passenger-side window rolled down and the chief stuck his head out.

“You were wrong about something tonight, kid,” Chavez said. He raised a hand to his forehead and rubbed at the skin between his eyes. I saw creases there I hadn’t noticed a week ago.

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“When you said you didn’t think the Woodsman was running around slashing tires, and breaking into your house. You’re already presuming there’s a connection between Nicky and the Woodsman. Don’t confuse one with the other. There’s absolutely nothing linking them. All you’ve got is one young man’s obsession with a sad bit of local history.”

The Audi pulled away with a squeal.

I stood in the dark lot; the moon had grown shy and hid somewhere up in that great black sky. The stars were few and far between, sprinkled like garnish against the darkness. Somewhere in the distance a coyote howled, its cry as plaintive as a newborn’s, and still I stood, thinking about Chavez’s words.

I woke Sunday with an energy I hadn’t felt in weeks. My sleep had been deep and quiet. In the pantry, I spied an old box of Bisquick and I found enough eggs, butter, and oil in the fridge to make a stack of pancakes.

I took the pancakes and a pot of tea and a warm saucer of syrup to the dining-room table and inhaled the first few in a matter of minutes. The Peanut gave a little kick; she liked the sweet, chewy starch. Between bites, I pulled my laptop close and fired it up and waited for my browser to pop open, but when I opened the mailbox icon, there were no new messages.

To be truthful, that wasn’t completely unusual-when Brody was in the field, we sometimes went a few weeks without talking. But I wanted to fill him in on the case, and give him a heads-up that our joint checking account was about to be a few hundred dollars lighter, thanks to my new tires.

I also wanted to ask him point-blank, without any warning, if Pink Parka was Celeste Takashima. If it was… well, as they say in space, Houston, we have a problem.

Seamus nudged my ankle and I looked down into his deep brown eyes. He panted and a thin line of drool fell from his mouth and landed on my toe.

“Gross, buddy,” I muttered. I knew what he wanted and it was disgusting, but I did it often enough that he had come to expect it, so I placed my plate on the floor and watched as his long tongue swept across the surface, slurping the last dregs of syrup and the tiny crumbs that I’d missed. Content, he left the plate and waddled across the room and scratched at the floor, then turned around twice and with a low burp, settled back into his spot.

Replacing the computer with the stack of files I’d brought home with me, I opened the top folder, with its thin tab marked 1985. As I read through the pages, thin and faded with age, I found myself once again asking why.

Why these two boys.

Thomas and Andrew McKenzie. Cousins, thirteen and eleven.

They were average students, well liked by their teachers and classmates. Tommy’s father, John, owned a chain of discount mattress stores across the state, and his wife, Karen, was a stay-at-home mom. Andrew’s father, Mark, was a line cook at a fast-food chain and his wife, Sarah, did day care out of their basement. Her business was spotty, though, and most years she barely made enough to cover her license fees.

All four parents had been thoroughly investigated. Nine times out of ten crimes against children are perpetrated by close relatives such as parents, siblings, or an aunt or uncle. Although you’d never know it listening to the media, abductions, molestations, and murder at the hands of strangers are the very rare exception, not the norm.

The McKenzie families represented about as close to the average slice of life as you could hope to get in small-town America, circa 1985. John and Karen McKenzie were upper-middle class, not extravagantly wealthy but comfortable, especially for Cedar Valley. Mark and Sarah hovered somewhere much closer to the poverty line, but they made do.

Mark and John both smoked. Karen drank, mostly in secret, but sometimes at a ladies’ lunch in town in full sight of anyone who cared. Mark had three prior arrests. Sarah, the day care provider, had at one time been the star of an amateur porn video. All paid their taxes, owned their homes, and had two automobiles registered to each household. They spent Easter and Christmas together, and the rest of the time mostly ignored each other’s families. The boys, though, Tommy and Andrew, had gone up through elementary school together, and shared the same middle school. They were buddies, as close as John and Mark had once been.

Each of the parents was carefully and thoroughly exonerated in the disappearance of their children. They spent most of fall and winter of 1985 in meeting rooms across town, spaces that reeked of despair and curiosity, frequented by psychologists and detectives and reporters.

I pushed the papers away and stood and stretched. There was nothing here that hadn’t been looked at hundreds of times, by the best eyes the state was able to hire. I didn’t know what I hoped to find. I thought that if a sixteen-year-old kid could find an answer in these old papers, I could, too.