Emily Littlejohn - Inherit the Bones

“Aunt Hannah, let me go!” Annika said, her voice catching. She was crying and I stepped back from the women, wary of the knife and the emotions at play.

Mrs. Watkins grabbed Annika by the arm and shook her, violently. Anger flashed across her face and I saw for the first time how quickly the Furies struck in this family. “Stop it this minute, Annika. You spoiled little child. You could have had everything. I see now that you deserve nothing.”

Annika tried to pull her arm free but Mrs. Watkins was strong, and tall, taller than Annika, and her grip was fueled by a deep rage. I pulled my cell phone from my back pocket and stole a second from watching them to dial dispatch. I whispered the address and the situation into the phone but I needn’t have bothered trying to be quiet. The two women were completely distracted by their own tragedies.

“Let me go!” Annika screamed. She shoved at Mrs. Watkins with her free hand, the hand that held the knife. I heard something tear, and then Mrs. Watkins cried out.

The older woman gasped and stepped back from Annika. She sank to the floor and held up hands slick with a black wetness. I dropped to the ground beside her and felt her body. Her chest was warm and damp and I pushed down, trying to stem the flow of blood. So much blood, an artery near her heart must have been sliced.

“Annika! Get me that towel, quickly.”

Above me, Annika stared down with horror. “Aunt Hannah? I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just… you were holding me so tight.”

Mrs. Watkins shook in my grasp and tried to say something but her words were swept away in the stream of blood that poured from her lips. She would die before any paramedic ever reached us.

Annika seemed to realize that, too. She fell to her knees and took her aunt’s head in her hands and gently, softly, brushed the hair away from the older woman’s forehead. Mrs. Watkins closed her eyes and her body grew still. The lines fell from her face and a quiet peace descended over her features.

Annika carefully laid her dead aunt’s head on the ground and looked at me. All the fight seemed to have left her body. She suddenly looked on the outside like the lost little girl she was on the inside. Incredibly, I felt sorry for her, for I saw for the first time how lonely living such an evil life must be.

She asked, “What happens now?”

I sat back and held my hands up, unsure what to do with the blood that coated them as thick as paint. In the distance, I heard sirens begin to make their way up the mountain, past the Swiss-Miss chalets and the more moderate log cabins, higher and higher up the road, toward a cold house, with dark secrets, that was full of old blood and now, new blood.

Annika heard the sirens, too. The knife slid out of her hands. “I’m going to prison, aren’t I? All I ever tried to do was be a good girl. The best girl, in the best family.”

I remembered Nicky’s blood, the pattern it made in the dirt at the fairgrounds.

I remembered the skull I found in the woods, the way it gleamed like a small treasure waiting to be found.

I remembered a girl with turquoise eyes who flirted with a boy at a bar, a boy who’d lose his leg, and an old woman, ready to die, who’d kept a terrible secret to protect her only son.

“Yes, Annika. You’re going to prison for a very, very long time.”

The last time I saw Annika Bellington was on the stairs outside the old courthouse, across the street from City Hall. An early frost had come overnight and the stairs were slippery, so I walked down them slowly, one hand gripping the rail. I had dropped off the last of my files on the Bellington case and was about to head into an early maternity leave.

Things were, for the most part, wrapped up.

Chief Chavez released our findings in a press conference the day after the events at the Bellington house. On the steps of City Hall, before a crowd of hungry reporters and curious townspeople, Chavez announced the arrest of Annika Bellington for the murders of Nicky Bellington and Hannah Bellington Watkins, and the attempted murder of Sam Birdshead. Chavez took no questions. He instead ended his announcement with the news that the Woodsman had been identified, and that further information would be forthcoming.

Mayor Terry Bellington threatened to sue the department for libel, slander, and a whole host of other things, but when he saw the evidence, he shut up pretty quick. I have a feeling this will be the mayor’s last term in office. If he does run again, he’ll do so alone: Ellen Bellington bought a one-way ticket to Norway, and the last I heard, she was living in Oslo, trying to make a move back into show business.

When I saw Annika, she was ten feet away, surrounded by a group of older men in expensive suits. Mayor Bellington lawyered her up an hour after her arrest, and today, Annika was to be formally charged with the murders.

I must have known that, but somehow, I’d forgotten.

Or maybe I hadn’t.

Maybe I needed to see her again, one last time.

“Annika. You look well.”

Her hair was styled up off her face in a bun, and she wore a navy pantsuit, and looked rested and innocent of anything and everything.

“Thank you. You look ready to pop,” Annika said. She smiled at me.

One of the lawyers, a small, fussy-looking man, tried to hustle her up the stairs. In return, she whispered something to him that made his face go white and his hand drop from her elbow.

“I have to thank you, you know,” she continued.

“For what?”

I shouldn’t have asked.

I should have lowered my head and made my way down those slippery steps and kept right on moving into the next chapter of my life, a chapter that hopefully didn’t include death, so much death.

“For not killing me when you had the chance. I’ll never be found guilty. These dicks make more in a day than you make in a month. And clearly,” she said, “clearly I’m insane. If anything I’ll spend a few months at Clear Water Lodge, attending group sessions and bumming cigarettes off the night nurses.”

I looked at her and decided she might be right.

Annika waited for a response that I didn’t have.

Instead, I did what I should have done a moment before. I put my head down and made my way slowly toward the street.

Three days later, at midnight, I stood at the bedroom window and watched as the first big storm of the season blew in. Behind me, Brody threw clothes, toothbrushes, and a paperback into an old gym bag. As another contraction hit, I leaned forward and rested my head against the cold glass. A single snowflake, larger than the others, caught my eye. I watched it slowly float down. The flake lost its specialness the instant it hit the ground, though, becoming just a tiny speck joining with a billion other tiny specks to blanket the world in this strange phenomenon we know as snow.

In the end, life is a series of snowflakes, isn’t it? Each moment is unique and completely separate from the next, with the power to change everything and nothing all at the same time. If you’re lucky, over time those billions of moments add up to a life.

Or they don’t. Some people spend their entire lives seeing the snow without ever seeing the magic in the existence of one snowflake.

“What are you thinking about?” Brody asked as he zipped up the gym bag and motioned for me to follow him. It would be a slow drive down the mountain in this weather, but I stood still another minute.

“Honey?”

I pushed off the window and turned and looked at him. “I was pondering the mortality of the humble snowflake. In flight but for a moment…”

Brody rubbed his chin. I saw the geologist gaze creep into his eyes. “Well, that’s not entirely true. Remember the water cycle? You probably learned about it in middle school. All water molecules…”