Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

We parked across the street and stared at Sam’s apartment building. Sam had woken from his coma but had no memory of the crash. He was just starting to understand what he’d lost-his leg, possibly his livelihood.

Finn said, “This is weird.”

I nodded. “Tell me about it. Did you ever come here with Sam?”

“No. We met up a few times after work but always out at a bar. Do you think our guy was here?”

I shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. Guess we’ll see.”

We locked the car and entered the building, a three-story World War II construct. The lobby was uncomfortably warm and heavy with the smell of stale disinfectant and burning incense. One wall contained twelve tin mailboxes, each with a locking door and a neatly printed label. On the opposite wall, hanging askew next to a faded watercolor of a pack of wild horses, a pockmarked bulletin board held business cards and a few brightly colored fliers.

The manager, a Vietnamese man with sad eyes and poor English, met us in the lobby. We followed him to the second floor and down a narrow hallway until he stopped in front of a door crossed with yellow crime scene tape.

Reaching under the tape, the manager slipped a key into the lock and then stepped back. The door opened with a sigh, releasing cool air out into the warm hallway.

“We got it from here, bud. Thanks,” Finn said. He gave the man’s back a hearty thwack. “We’ll let ourselves out.”

The manager nodded and moved away, his slipper-clad feet sliding across the parquet floor as quietly as feathers falling to earth. Finn pulled a switchblade from his back pocket and sliced the yellow tape, then held it to the side and motioned for me to enter. I squeezed by and found the light switch.

The apartment was nothing special. It was neither large nor small, with a living area, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen. I started there, as it was closest to the front door, while Finn took a bedroom that seemed to double as an office.

Cabinets stained in a color last popular forty years ago held canned goods, plates and bowls, a few boxes of rice and cereal. But the appliances had been updated in the last few years, and the steel refrigerator hummed along, keeping milk, eggs, cheese, and deli meats cold for someone who wasn’t coming home anytime soon. On the counter sat a juicer, its glass pitcher reflecting the cherry red of a toaster on its left and the deep black of a Mr. Coffee machine on its right. I left the kitchen and went to the other bedroom.

I glanced over a double bed, dresser, and nightstand. Sam’s closet was organized and neat; clothes on hangers all hung to face the same way, and his dress shirts and uniforms were pressed and crisply ironed. On the dresser, a shallow bowl held a watch, a half-empty box of matches, a few dimes and a nickel, and a pair of cuff links. These I fished out of the bowl and felt the heaviness of solid silver. They were engraved with Chinese or Japanese symbols, and I wondered what they said.

On the bedside stand, a couple of paperbacks-an old Michael Crichton and a newer Stephen King-were stacked under a half-empty bottle of water. The nightstand had a drawer and I hesitated a moment, not wanting to invade Sam’s privacy, but Sam was beyond caring and I couldn’t leave the apartment without a thorough search.

The drawer stuck halfway open, caught on its tracks. I gave a mighty tug and a bottle of lubricant rolled forward and hit a box of condoms. The condoms were unopened; the lube expired by a few months. I thought of the pretty turquoise-eyed woman Sam had met at the bar, and a weight like a rock hit my chest. I sat on the edge of the bed and willed the tears that fell from my eyes to stop. Sadness comes in strange packages sometimes; today it was in the form of a box of condoms. I ached for what was taken from Sam, and from Nicky, too. And then I thought about Brody, and wondered if it was a sin to mistrust so much of our relationship.

I wiped my eyes and then reached my hand into the drawer and stretched to the back, grasping empty air with my fingers until I was sure I had covered the whole space.

“Got anything good?”

Finn stood in the doorway, a look of amusement on his face. He watched me untangle myself from the drawer and I looked away as I answered, not wanting him to see my tears.

“No, you?”

Finn shook his head. “Not yet. In the office, the paperwork is mostly bills and correspondence with his dad and his grandfather. There are lots of letters to and from the reservation. Luckily, the original Nicky case files all seem to be here. If our guy came by, he either couldn’t get in or he wasn’t looking for the files.”

I nodded. The apartment had felt undisturbed.

“Avondale PD didn’t come through, did they?”

“No, the chief asked them to lock-and-leave it until we’d done a sweep.”

I left the bedroom and went to the living room. There, I paused a moment and then turned in a circle.

Sam was everywhere.

They say you can tell what’s essential to a person by what he surrounds himself with, in the sacred spaces of his own home. If that’s true-and I think it is-Sam’s culture and ancestry were of utmost importance. The place was filled with tribal textiles and artwork.

Black-and-white photographs, portraits mostly, covered the wall above a maroon leather sofa, framed in different metals and woods. I knelt on the couch and looked up at them. All of them seemed to have been taken on some reservation; the same run-down government-issue buildings and dusty, dirt roads appeared in the background of most of them.

I pushed off the couch and bumped into the coffee table. On it, a wooden tray held a half-dozen candles, some melted down into mere puddles of wax; a handful of incense sticks; and a bundle of what looked like horse hair, wrapped into a short switch. In the center of it all was a chipped ceramic ashtray filled with bits of burnt paper, tissue-thin.

A breeze blew in then and lifted the crisp black pieces a few centimeters and then floated them gently back down. As the air caressed my bare shoulders a rash of goose bumps broke out across my flesh. The breeze retreated and I heard a whisper at my ear, one word said so faintly I might have imagined it.

Go.

Finn came out of the bedroom that doubled as an office, his arms heavy with files and folders. “This is everything, every damn note and file Moriarty and I wrote three years ago.”

“Sam was thorough. He would have been a good cop.”

Finn said, “Hey. He is a good cop.”

“Yeah. Let’s get out of here, we’re wasting time.”

“Do you want to look through this stuff, make sure we’re not missing anything?”

I shook my head, more chilled by the second. “This doesn’t feel right, being here. Close that window, would you, and let’s go.”

Finn tilted his head to the right and peered around me. “The window’s closed.”

I turned around; he was right. I walked to the glass and looked at the clasp. There was no need for a lock; thick putty-like paint held the latch shut. The view out of Sam’s living room was uninspired: a parking lot with an army green Volkswagen bus parked at an angle, taking up three spots. A few slots down, a hot pink Vespa sat in the shadows of a Harley. Dumpsters, two for trash, one for recyclables, completed the tableau.

I jogged to the bedrooms and checked the sliding glass doors in each. Locked as well, each leading out to a narrow balcony.

“Gemma?”

I spun around. “Did you open these?”

Finn shook his head, watched me. I went back to the living room and reached up, waving my hand under the ceiling vents. Nothing.

“Gemma?”

I was fatigued and emotionally spooked. My stomach growled. “Forget it, I’ll buy you lunch at Frisco’s.”