Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

We ate a silent lunch at the restaurant, our hands and mouths busy with the steaming platters of enchiladas and fajitas until finally, we were sated. Finn waited until our server had refilled our iced teas and whisked away our plates before he pulled an interoffice manila folder out of his briefcase.

“What’s that?”

Finn opened the flap and withdrew a black-and-white photograph, eight and a half by eleven inches. He took a look and then slipped it across the Formica table to me.

The photograph was of two objects: a necklace, and a notecard-sized piece of paper, with a single line written on it in block print.

“I can only see death and more death, till we are black and swollen with death.”

Finn took a long swallow of his iced tea. “Yup. The actual necklace and notecard are in the evidence room, at the department’s offsite storage center. We can go look at the real thing, but if we don’t, at least you’ve seen what the necklace looks like and the note. No idea if they’re relevant but they were sure hidden up high under Nicky’s bed.”

I stared at the photograph and then swore. “Finn, I’ve seen this necklace somewhere.”

Finn tore open a pink packet of sugar substitute and poured it into his tea. He stirred it with the straw. He looked at me and said, “Yup.”

“Tell me.”

He sighed. “The other day, at the library? You showed me her driver’s license. The forgotten one.”

“Rose Noonan. Of course! The pendant is a rose, isn’t it?”

The photograph of the necklace was blurred, but once you knew what you were looking at, you could see the petals and the budding leaves on the stem of the flower growing up the gold chain like it was a vine.

Finn said, “The question is, what was Nicky doing with a dead woman’s necklace and a D. H. Lawrence quote on rotting corpses?”

He saw my look and continued. “I got curious after we found it, I looked it up on the Internet.”

“You continue to surprise me, Finn, you really do.”

He shrugged, finished his tea. I sat back in the booth, the faded teal leather squeaking as I moved.

I closed my eyes, watching the scene unfold, like a silent film produced for an audience of one. It’s late in the day, but in the dark, cool basement, it might as well be midnight on the moon. Time moves slowly here, and Nicky has found an entire afternoon can pass by in the blink of an eye. Since that lady cop found the kids-the bodies-he’s been here most days reading these old, dusty case files from the ’80s.

If asked, he would be unable to explain his fascination.

He prays to God that he is never asked.

He thinks it has to do with the fact that life, for him, has always run so smoothly. Good looks, enough talent and smarts to get by, money to waste; yes, he was handed not just the silver spoon at birth but the damn golden ladle to boot. He’s never known cold, never known tragedy, never known loss, except for the death of his grandmother, of course, and well, she’d been so sick, it was really a blessing, wasn’t it?

But these kids, the McKenzie boys. The Woodsman. They represented another side to life that Nicky had no knowledge of but was desperate to understand. The dark, grim, real side, what the rest of the world experienced on a daily basis.

So he loses himself down here, asking the same question the cops did in 1985, and again in 2011: why these two? What made them special to him, to the Woodsman?

Because they were special to him, they had to have been. For if it was just random, what did that mean? What kind of a universe-what kind of God-allows that?

Then one day, he stumbles on a newspaper article about another special one, a woman, Rose Noonan. He looks at the picture they’ve included in the article, an old black-and-white photo that is obviously a reprint of a driver’s license.

He stares at the picture, and then he sees it.

Nick’s heart seizes for a second, two seconds, three seconds, and then it lets out a mighty beat and the blood and the heat and the oxygen race through his body and he gasps.

He has to hide this article, but where? That old librarian upstairs checks the workspace every night after he leaves, he knows she does. She’ll know something’s missing. He thinks and thinks and then realizes, duh , that if he puts it back in the same place no one would ever be the wiser.

And no one is.

I opened my eyes and slapped the table with the palm of my hand. “He recognized the necklace. Finn, he recognized the necklace. He must have.”

Finn nodded and drained his iced tea. “It feels right. He recognizes the necklace, and puts two and two together and instead of four, he gets Rosie Noonan’s killer. But how does he know it’s the same prick that killed the kids, too?”

I thought on that. “Maybe he doesn’t know for sure. Maybe he thinks it would be a hell of a coincidence if it weren’t the same guy. Think about it, Finn. How many unsolved murders do we have in Cedar Valley? Three. Every death, every other death in the whole damn town, we can account for.”

Our server, a cheery man in a sombrero, returned with the bill and I fished a twenty out of my wallet and laid it on the black tray, weighing it down with the pen he had provided in case of payment by credit card. Finn added a five for tip and we left.

At the front door, though, I stopped and then backtracked to a wall I’d noticed when we first came in.

Portraits, dozens of them, lined the wall. Taken over decades, they depicted different threads of the same family. The same dark eyes and heavy brows filled many of the faces and I thought about what gets passed down, parent to child, year after year, generation after generation, the visible lines of paternity and fidelity, and the invisible strains of legacy.

With one hand on my belly and the other at my mouth, worrying at a cuticle, I returned to Finn. He had continued on outside and waited by a bench, a toothpick in his mouth, hands in his pockets, briefcase at his feet.

I pulled him by the elbow toward the car. “We’ve got to find out how Nicky got that necklace. It’s the key to everything.”

The station was quiet, and in spite of all that had happened, life in Cedar Valley went on as usual, chugging along as reliably as a locomotive on an engineer’s schedule. I had an inch-high stack of paperwork to deal with, routine court notices on prior cases, a few summons that I would need to appear for, as a witness for the prosecution, an unpaid annual permit license fee that I could write off for tax purposes, and a dozen other things that had taken a backseat to the Nicky Bellington case.

Thoughts of Annika continued to bloom in my mind and I felt myself interrupted again and again with worry.

I spent a few hours working the pile, then called it a day at seven.

At home, more mail and correspondence had built itself into a tower that threatened to topple over if I breathed on it wrong. I spent an hour paying bills, filing paperwork, and tossing a backlog of catalogs and circulars into the blue recycling bin we kept out back. Seamus ate and then I ate, a bowl of shredded wheat with blueberries and walnuts tossed in for good measure.

I hoped for a word or two from Brody but my electronic in-box was empty. Thinking about Brody made me think about Celeste Takashima. I hated someone that I’d never even met. I hated that she knew me-she knew the man I loved and made love to, the eyes and mouth I woke up to, the genes that I carried in my belly.

Stop it, I told myself.

I crawled into bed and instead of the Woodsman, I dreamed of a wide snowfield in Alaska, white and pure and empty as far as the eye could see. It should have been peaceful but it filled me with panic, all that space and nothing to fill the horizon. A frozen wasteland, a barren land void of humanity or life.