Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

Fuck.

“I can’t believe no one saw anything. For Chrissakes, Lou Moriarty and three other cops were less than a hundred yards away,” I said. “We got to get on this, Chief. Witnesses, tire treads, there’s a security camera at the 7-11 on the corner of Blair and Third-maybe it caught a car on the way up the road?”

Chavez nodded slowly. “I called in a favor, Avondale’s sending a team over to the site. They’ll work the case, Gemma. We should be here, for Sam, in case…”

In case.

In case he lived.

In case he died.

I slid down the wall and sat next to Chavez as he told me the story. The guys had driven up to Wally’s Pond, a quiet fishing hole twenty minutes outside of town stocked to the reeds with trout. There were two trucks; the beds were loaded with coolers of sandwiches and beer and bait. Sam followed them on his road bike and then took it past the fishing hole, up the road for another few miles. His plan was to ride down and join them, getting in both a workout and some relaxation on the river.

It was a good day for fishing.

A couple of hours later, seven trout were resting on ice chips, gutted and filleted, their innards thrown to the birds, birds that had waited and watched as the fishermen tied their flies and threw their casts.

And somewhere, somebody else had waited and watched.

When they were finished fishing, the guys loaded up their gear and headed back into town, Sam coasting behind the second truck. At some point, the driver noticed Sam was no longer in his rearview mirror. He turned around and backtracked and came upon a red Ferrari pulled over on the side of the road, the driver frantically yelling into his cell phone.

It was a hit-and-run.

The impact knocked Sam off the road and down the ravine. One of the officers scrambled down and got a tourniquet on Sam’s bleeding leg. That action probably saved his life. His bike was in pieces. Sam was unconscious and broken and scratched all to hell.

Ferrari Man wasn’t much help; he’d noticed a white sedan with muddy plates, possibly a passenger in the backseat. Possibly it was just shadows. He thought it might be a Honda or a Toyota.

It didn’t make sense, any of it. Sam was a twenty-two-year-old kid with a few weeks on the job and a girl with turquoise eyes waiting for him. He was supposed to be a cop, a good cop, not a desk jockey with one working leg and a psychological scar a mile wide.

Maybe he would turn out okay, we told ourselves, Chavez and Moriarty and I and a half-dozen other cops. We sat in the sad, cold hospital waiting room. We waited for Sam’s family to arrive; we waited for an update from the surgeon; we waited to see if one of our own would pull through.

Sam Birdshead lost his leg at midnight, about the same time that Frank Bellington died in his sleep. News of both events came by text message early the next morning. Chavez let me know about Sam; Bull sent me word about Frank.

I called Bull right away, before I got out of bed.

“I’m so sorry. I know you were close to Frank.”

Bull sighed into the phone. I heard a cuckoo clock chime in the background and knew he must be in his study. “We certainly were, once upon a time. It’s hard to grieve when I know he’s with our Lord Jesus now, but I would’ve liked to speak with him one last time.”

“What would you have said?”

Bull was silent.

I watched through the open bedroom window as the rising sun overpowered the gray morning light with vibrant shades of pink and orange. It was going to be a beautiful day. Seamus jumped on the bed and nuzzled into my hip. He curled himself into a tight ball and I scratched behind his ears, glad for the companionship.

“Bull?”

“I would have asked him if he had made peace with our Savior. Frank was a complicated man, Gemma. He had demons, secret demons, more than anyone really knew.”

I sat up in bed, the cover falling from my shoulders. “Bull, what happened, all those years ago? Why did your friendship with him end? Why did Julia tell me to stay away from him?”

Bull inhaled sharply. “When did she say that?”

“She called me a few days ago, after the news conference the mayor and his wife gave, about Nicky’s murder. Julia told me to ‘stay away from that man,’ and I have to assume she meant the mayor or his father. Why would she say that?”

Bull coughed and I heard another noise in the background, the familiar set of beeps and commands of a computer starting up. He was definitely in his study, a room he kept a few degrees colder than the rest of the house. It was his private space, his retreat, a room lined with his volumes of state-revised statutes and other legal tomes.

“Why don’t you come by the house; there’s a few things we should talk about. Your grandmother made a quiche, it’s delicious,” Bull said. “By the way, Brody e-mailed me. Gemma, I don’t like the idea of you all alone in that house, being so isolated. You want to stay with us for a few days? I can make up your old room.”

“Brody e-mailed you, huh? He can’t seem to find the time to get in touch with me,” I said. “Did he tell you Celeste Takashima is with them, in Denali?”

“No! What? Brody wouldn’t…”

“Don’t ‘Brody wouldn’t’ me, Bull. You know damn well he would. You men all think with your little brains. I’m fine staying here, but I’ll come down and see you guys. I’ll be there in an hour.”

I showered and dressed quickly. Before leaving the house, I called Chief Chavez. He had gone home to catch a few hours of sleep and a change of clothes and then returned to the hospital. Chavez said Sam was resting comfortably after his surgery. Sam’s prognosis was good; he faced months of physical therapy but he was alive and he would heal.

I drove to Bull and Julia’s house. The streets were quiet as I made my way through town. I saw empty parking lots and just-waking stores. A lonely bus passed me on its way headed somewhere south, a single passenger silhouetted by the interior dome lights. It was a woman, young, with long pale hair and a dark scarf wrapped around her neck. She looked cold and lonely and I hoped she was making her way somewhere warm and happy.

I wondered, not for the first time, if that’s what I should do. Head south, to a warmer clime, maybe a little border town on the beach. Raise my daughter in a place that I don’t associate with so much death. It would be a place where winter never fell, where the sun shone and the beer was cold and the ocean came to our toes and then receded and then returned in a never-ending pattern. We could learn to surf and she would spend summers with her father, in exotic locales around the world.

As I pulled into the driveway of my old childhood house, though, the dream of leaving floated away as quickly as it had come. They say you can never go home again, and I’m too afraid that might be true, to ever really leave.

This is home, for better or worse, in good times and in bad, till death do us part.

Bull met me at the front door with a plate of quiche and a cup of hot cocoa. He wore a bathrobe, a navy blue-and-black plaid wrap that clashed with his green pajamas. The robe was last year’s Christmas present from Brody. I remember Bull modeled it for us, right after he unwrapped it, and then we all took turns wearing it, pretending the hallway was a runway.

“I haven’t had hot cocoa in years.”

“You always used to drink cocoa when you were a girl, Gem. When I first met you, you were six years old and cute as a button, until you heard the word no. Then Lord help us but you were a little terror. I learned very quickly never to say no to you when it came to cocoa,” Bull said. His expression grew sad. “I guess you couldn’t stay my little girl forever, could you?”