Charlaine Harris - A Bone To Pick

Maybe, I suddenly thought, now that the law had the bones, there would be more information on the sex and age of the skeleton included in the next story. The few paragraphs this morning had stated that the bones were going to a pathologist for examination. I swam out of my thoughts to find Bubba Sewell eyeing me with some apprehension.

“The bones?” he prompted. “A skeleton?”

“Well, there wasn’t a skull,” I murmured.

“Was that in the paper?” he asked sharply. I’d made a mistake; as a matter of fact, the skeleton’s skull-lessness had not been mentioned in the story.

“Gosh, Bubba,” I said coolly. “I just don’t know.”

We stared at each other for a minute.

“Gotta be going,” I said finally. “The cats are waiting.”

“Oh, sure.” He tucked his mouth in and then relaxed it. “Well…if you really need me, you know where I am. By the way, had you heard I’m running for office?”

“Yes. I’d heard that, sure had.” And we looked at each other for a second more. Then I marched up the sidewalk and unlocked the front door. Madeleine slithered out instantly and headed for the soft dirt around the bushes. Her litter box was only a backup system: she preferred to go out-of-doors. Bubba Sewell was gone by the time I locked the front door behind me.

I rattled around restlessly in the “new” house for a few hours. It was mine, all mine, but somehow I didn’t feel too cheerful about that anymore. Actually, I preferred my town house, a soulless rental. It had more room, I was used to it, I like having an upstairs I didn’t have to clean if company was coming. Could I stand living across the street from Arthur and Lynn? Next door to the unpredictable Marcia Rideout? Jane’s books were already cramming the bookcases. Where would I put mine? But if I sold this house and bought a bigger one, probably the yard would be bigger, and I haven’t ever taken care of one… If Torrance hadn’t mowed the yard for me, I wouldn’t know how to cope. Maybe the yard crew that did the lawn at the town houses?

I maundered on in my head, opening the kitchen cabinets and shutting them, trying to decide which pots and pans were duplicates of mine so I could take them to the local Baptist church, which kept a room of household goods for families who got burned out or suffered some equal disaster. I finally chose some in a lackadaisical way and carried them out to the car loose; I was out of boxes. I was treading water emotionally, unable to settle on any one task or course of action.

I wanted to quit my job.

I was scared to. Jane’s money seemed too good to be true. Somehow, I feared it might be taken away from me.

I wanted to throw the skull in the lake. I was also scared of whoever had reduced the skull to its present state.

I wanted to sell Jane’s house because I didn’t particularly care for it. I wanted to live in it because it was safely mine.

I wanted Aubrey Scott to adore me; surely a minister would have a specially beautiful wedding? I did not want to marry Aubrey Scott because being a minister’s wife took a lot more internal fortitude than I had. A proper minister’s wife would have marched out of the house with that skull and gone straight to the police station without a second thought. But Aubrey seemed too serious a man to date without the prospect of the relationship evolving in that direction.

I did run the pots and pans to the Baptist church, where I was thanked so earnestly that it was soothing, and made me think better of my poor character.

On the way back to the new house, I stopped at Jane’s bank on impulse. I had the key with me, surely? Yes, here it was in my purse. I went in hesitantly, suddenly thinking that the bank might present difficulties about letting me see the safe deposit box. But it wasn’t too difficult. I had to explain to three people, but then one of them remembered Bubba Sewell coming by, and that made everything all right. Accompanied by a woman in a sober business suit, I got Jane’s safe deposit box. Something about those vaults where they’re kept makes me feel that there’s going to be a dreadful secret inside. All those locked boxes, the heavy door, the attendant! I went into the little room that held only a table and a single chair, shut the door. Then I opened the box, telling myself firmly that nothing dreadful could be in a box so small. Nothing dreadful, but a good deal that was beautiful. When I saw the contents of the long metal box, I let my breath out in a single sigh. Who would ever have imagined that Jane would want these things?

There was a pin shaped like a bow, made out of garnets with the center knot done in diamonds. There were garnet and diamond earrings to match. There was a slim gold chain with a single emerald on it, and a pearl necklace and bracelet. There were a few rings, none of them spectacular or probably extremely valuable, but all of them expensive and very pretty. I felt I had opened the treasure chest in the pirate’s cave. And these were mine now! I could not attach any sentiment to them, because I’d never seen Jane wear them-perhaps the pearls, yes; she’d worn the pearls to a wedding we’d both attended. Nothing else rang any bells. I tried on the rings. They were only a little loose. Jane and I both had small fingers. I was trying to imagine what I could wear the bow pin and earrings to; they’d look great on a winter white suit, I decided. But as I held the pieces and touched them, I knew that despite Bubba Sewell’s saying there was nothing else in the safe deposit box, I was disappointed that there was no letter from Jane.

After I’d driven back to the house, despite an hour spent watching Madeleine and her kittens, I still could not ground myself. I ended up throwing myself on the couch and turning on CNN, while reading some of my favorite passages from Jane’s copy of Donald Rumbelow’s book on Jack the Ripper. She had marked her place with a slip of paper, and for a moment my heart pounded, thinking Jane had left me another message, something more explicit than I didn’t do it. But it was only an old grocery list: eggs, nutmeg, tomatoes, butter…

I sat up on the couch. Just because this piece of paper had been a false alarm didn’t mean there weren’t any other notes! Jane would put them where she would think I’d find them. She had known no one but me would go through her books.

The first one had been in a book about Madeleine Smith, Jane’s main field of study. I riffled through Jane’s other books about the Smith case. I shook them.

Nothing.

Then maybe she’d hidden something in one of the books about the case that most intrigued me- well, which one would that be? Either Jack the Ripper or the murder of Julia Wallace. I was already reading Jane’s only Ripper book. I flipped through it but found no other notes. Jane also had only one book on Julia Wallace, and there again I found no message. Theodore Durrant, Thompson-Bywater, Sam Sheppard, Reginald Christie, Crippen…! shook Jane’s entire true-crime library with no results.

I went through her fictional crime, heavy on women writers; Margery Allingham, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Agatha Christie… the older school of mysteries. And Jane had an unexpected shelf of sword-and-sorcery science fiction, too. I didn’t bother with those, at least initially; Jane would not have expected me to look there.

But in the end I went through those as well. After two hours, I had shaken, riffled, and otherwise disturbed every volume on the shelves, only a trace of common sense preventing me from flinging them on the floor as I finished. I’d even read all the envelopes in the letter rack on the kitchen wall, the kind you buy at a handcraft fair; all the letters seemed to be from charities or old friends, and I stuffed them irritably back in the rack to go through at a later date.