Carol O'Connell - Bone by Bone

Oren had become curious about her past, but he loved that little woman dearly, and he would never ask for her story, nor would he betray the fact that she had surely been a fugitive.

Henry Hobbs spoke to his housekeeper's back as she pulled down two coffee mugs from the cupboard. "Why did you do it, Hannah? I know you convinced the boy to come home. Why now of all times?"

"You have to stop calling him boy." It was her custom to deflect every rebuke with one of her own. "I know how you hate change-oh, don't I know it-but boys will grow into men." She set the mugs on the table and turned to the window that looked out on the meadow. "At least the reporters are gone." She sighed. "That's one small mercy. They're all following Ferris Monty. He took them on a walking tour of Coventry."

"My idea." Addison Winston's voice preceded him down the hall, and now he materialized in the doorway. A puff of smoke and a whiff of sulfur would not have surprised Hannah.

"Don't worry about Oren," said the grinning attorney. "After all this time, there can't be much of a case against him."

The judge rose from his chair, knocking it over in his rush to make a stand. "There's no case-period!" He pounded the table to bring this point home. "There never was a case against Oren." The old man stomped out of the kitchen, though the effect of this angry exit was somewhat blunted by the crepe soles of his sandals.

Addison Winston's professional smile never faltered. He stared at the old-fashioned coffeepot percolating on the stove, and then he turned to Hannah, willing her to offer him a cup of her wonderful brew. Hands on hips, her eyes narrowed to tell him that this was not going to happen.

He handed her a business card. "You never know when you might need a lawyer. The pressure's on. The sheriff will have to arrest somebody."

She never glanced at his card, but let it hang there in the air. "How many years have I known you, Addison? I've got your number." She had taken this man's measure long ago. "And I know what you do." Nothing good.

Far from taking umbrage with her tone and a double entendre or two, his eyes lit up, and he was laughing when he left her.

"So the sheriff found Josh's body." Swahn tapped his cane on the floor for punctuation. "Of course, it's murder. If there were any possibility of an accident, you wouldn't be here, Mr. Hobbs. So there was an obvious cause of death. A bullet wound? A blow to the head?"

Oren shrugged, allowing the other man to believe that he had not yet seen his brother's body. "The coroner hasn't made a finding yet."

"That should be interesting. Our new county coroner used to be a dentist."

"I'd like to see all your interviews with the locals," said Oren. "The sheriff won't let me read his."

"Perfectly understandable. You're his prime suspect."

"And yours, too?"

Swahn was deaf to this question, or maybe he thought a countering jab just too easy. He reached out for the telephone by his chair and placed a call. The person at the other end of the line must know the sound of his voice, for all he said was, "The judge's son is here." After listening for a moment he said, "If you wish." He hung up the phone and rose from his chair with a grimace of pain. "I'll get my files."

No need to ask who had given the instruction to play nicely with Oren.

Thank you, Hannah.

The older man limped across the room, opened a narrow door and stepped into the cage of a small elevator. The gears clicked and whirred and carried him upward. The ironwork of the cage dated it back to an era long before Swahn's purchase of the house. This conveyance on the premises must have been a great selling point. Climbing stairs would pose a problem for a man who winced as he walked. But an elevator could also be a technology trap for a hermit.

When the former owner was alive, she had two small boys to keep track of her. Who was looking after Swahn?

Oren had his answer when he ran one finger over a tabletop. Not a day's worth of dust had collected there, and the wood floor around the area rug had the shine of fresh waxing. Swahn's wealth and his handicap were two more indications of a full-time cleaning lady on the payroll, and that woman might be worth an interview.

The passing minutes were spent reading book titles in earnest this time. Many were familiar. Most of them related to the field of criminology, an interesting choice for a man whose natural enemy was the police. The sound of gears signaled the return of the elevator. It slowly settled to the floor. The man in the iron cage stood beside a carton piled high with file holders and envelopes. Oren was quick to cross the floor and help with the unloading.

"I hope you plan to stay awhile," said Swahn. "None of this material leaves my house."

"Fair enough." Oren lifted the box and carried it to the center of the room.

With both hands gripping the cane, Swahn lowered himself to the floor and sat down in an awkward pose, one leg drawn in and the twisted one sticking out, unable to bend at the knee. The two men emptied the contents of the carton to cover the surrounding carpet with manila folders, large envelopes and banded bundles of paper.

Oren leafed through a stack of typed interviews. Each one was clipped to a photograph. "My brother took these pictures." Some of these same compositions were framed on the walls of the judge's house. "But Josh didn't make any of these prints."

They lacked the crisp perfection that Josh had achieved by manipulating his negatives. The boy's attic darkroom had been a place with a language of its own, words like dodging and burning to play down bright lights and coax lost details from areas of gray. Other things came back to Oren, a memory of that room bathed in red light and the array of bottles, some of them intensifying chemicals. And there were special grades of paper and filters to push the contrast of every picture into the darkest shadows, the brightest highlights.

Almost magic.

He looked down at the print in his hand. This was-ordinary.

"It's a bad job, I know," said Swahn. "Miss Rice loaned me the negatives, and I ordered these prints from the drugstore in town. No comparison to Josh's work. He was gifted in a dying art form. I don't think he would've cared for the age of digital cameras."

Oren picked up a photograph of a birthday ball. In this shot, the stout hotelier, Evelyn Straub, was in her thirties, still lean and fine, her short skirt showing the endless long legs of a former Las Vegas showgirl.

Swahn leaned over to glance at it. "Your brother was probably ten when he took that one, and I'm not just guessing by Mrs. Straub's age. It's the perspective of a child looking upward. That angle changes subtly as he gets taller." He looked down at the other pictures spread out on the rug. "Even though Josh doesn't appear in any of these pictures, it's like watching the boy grow up."

Oren noticed that only his brother was referred to by his given name. Even Hannah, a longtime acquaintance, was always called, more formally, Miss Rice. Was Swahn only comfortable with the dead, or had he lied about never meeting Josh?

"I think your brother knew his killer."

The photograph fell from Oren's hand.

"According to your housekeeper, the boy was carrying a camera the last time she saw him."

"He always took one of his cameras when he left the house."

"But this one wasn't his pocket camera," said Swahn. "It was the old Canon FTB, the heavy one. Why would he carry that dead weight on a hike in the woods? The boy wasn't a nature photographer. Look at these images-only people. That was his subject. Did he take pictures of you that day?"