Carol O'Connell - Bone by Bone

Evelyn's cabin had once been her shelter from a hateful old man. Millard Straub had punished his wife every day of their marriage-because he was dying and she was not.

Tonight, Oren studied the ruins. Nature was reclaiming the structure, sending tree shoots through broken windowpanes. There were cracks in the foundation, and the porch roof sagged under the weight of a fallen branch. He could smell wood rot from the yard.

There was one improvement. The turnout for the driveway had been expanded into a parking lot. The van belonged to the Straub Hotel, and the sedans would be owned by local people. He judged some of the cars to be twenty years old and older, with cracked dashboards, dents and bald tires. Others were brand-new luxury models. The theme of wealth parked next to poverty played out all over Coventry, where a millionaire might build his mansion next to an acre parcel with a mobile home-or an old knock-down cabin like this one.

The land sloped downward as he moved toward the rear of the property, and the cabin's foundation had been built to accommodate this incline. He remembered concrete footings six feet high at the back end and a large opening used for storing yard tools. Even better, there was a trapdoor that would give him a view of the goings-on in the rooms above. As he rounded the cabin, he discovered that the opening had been enclosed. Behind the wooden steps leading up to the kitchen, he found a metal door set into the new wall of cement, and it was padlocked.

A pity. The old crawl space would have made a perfect spy hole. Now he would have to risk being seen. Oren walked up the back stairs and looked through a cracked windowpane. There was no one in the kitchen. He opened the door and entered the room, stepping light and slow. A rough interior wall was pocked with light leaking through the crumbled mortar between the logs. It offered him a selection of peepholes large and small. He moved silently from one to the other until he found a good view of the gathering in the next room.

No money had been wasted on props for the séance. Spiderwebs hung from the ceiling in ghosty gray curtains, very theatrical, but all too real. Six people sat on metal folding chairs gathered around a flimsy card table. They were encircled by the light of candles on cracked plates that sat on the floor. Other people were seated in shadow on the far side of the room. Evelyn Straub occupied a love seat, and no one dared keep her company.

Oren remembered that small sofa. Once, he had thought the plush velvet upholstery and gilt frame were too grand for this rustic setting. Now the old love seat seemed tired and sad in the lean and the sag of it, and the woman who sat upon it had also gone this route, less recognizable now than her furniture. Even by the kindness of candlelight, he could not find Evelyn Straub in this older woman's face.

Inside the circle of candles, all but one of the people rose up in a body and yielded their chairs. As players from the sidelines took their seats, Oren had a clear view of the table and an uncommon Ouija board. This was nothing bought in a store. The numerals and the alphabet appeared to be handmade. He recognized the small object at the center of the board. Made of rough carved wood, the three-legged heart had a hole at its center to display single characters from the painted lines of letters and numbers.

The sheriff had been right about one thing: the Ouija board was an anomaly. None of the grifters that Oren had encountered ever used one. And tonight he did not draw on his experience as a CID agent. This was a game from his childhood, played in secret places, dark cellars and deep woods. His little brother had loved the game-at first-calling it by its older name, witchboard.

A stick-thin woman, who had kept her chair, now gave instructions to the second shift of players. "Place your fingers on the planchette," she said, and, by fingertips, the other five people touched the heart-shaped piece of wood. "No pressure, mind you. It moves by other forces."

This could only be Alice Friday. Her face had a gaunt, starved look, and her eyes were sunken and heavy-lidded. The woman's voice had a nasal twang of the Midwest and a no-nonsense tone. She might well be giving a lecture on aluminum siding when she said, "Now we'll ask my spirit guide to answer your questions." She raised her head and raised her voice, calling out, "Joshua Hobbs! Are you here with us tonight?"

So Alice Friday used his dead brother to earn her living. Oren would not lay any blame upon Evelyn Straub. It had always been her nature to make money off of everything that moved and everything that did not. Why not the dead?

The planchette jumped on the board, startling people who must be new to the Ouija board. The more seasoned players only smiled. The psychic dryly chanted above the noise of crickets and the sounds of small animal paws scurrying across the ceiling. Six people leaned into the center of the table, and their heads bowed over the board each time the planchette stopped over a letter, and together they spelled out a chant, "I-A-M-N-E-"

Starlight could be seen through the mortar chinks in the upper walls, but Oren stared at another light, small as a star and electric green, and this one was in the floor. A cable fed out of one baseboard and traveled up a wall. He looked up to the ceiling, but it was too dark to find a camera lens in the rafters.

"A-R-S-O-D-A-R-K."

Evelyn Straub rose from the love seat and walked toward the kitchen, moving with the limber grace of a woman who had not grown old and stout. This vestige of her younger days fascinated him. It took a moment to collect his wits, to back out through the open door and softly pull it shut behind him.

Good night, pretty woman.

Mercifully, he was gone before the chanters spelled out, "O-R-E-N-H-E-L-P-M-E."

High up where the roof joined walls of glass and walls of plaster, a circular bookshelf ran around the tower room, and Isabelle Winston climbed a ladder on wheels to reach it. Since returning home, it had become her nightly custom to covertly replace a borrowed bird-watchers log and pull down another one. She shifted the remaining volumes on the shelf to fill in the space so that the absence of a single book would not be noticed.

What was the point of worrying over this?

Her mother had drunk herself into oblivion, and, on the rare occasions when Addison visited here, he probably never looked past his own reflection in the glass. The man would have no interest in records of bird sightings, though these were not the typical birder's journals. And, even if he should peruse a book or two, he would never crack the code.

Crafty Mom.

After kissing her sleeping mother, Isabelle carried the purloined journal downstairs to her bedroom, hiding it in the folds of her robe, knowing all the while that her parents would care nothing about her reading habits.

When had she become so paranoid?

An hour later, propped up by pillows, the ornithologist was still reading by the light of a bedside lamp, utterly engrossed in a book that had little to do with birds, though feathered characters were drawn on every page.

Once upon a time, with a child's egocentric view of the universe, Isabelle had believed that these volumes were created for her. The fanciful illustrations better lent themselves to children's books than a birder's journals. And there were story lines and lines of dialogue in song. Before learning her ABCs, Isabelle had learned the human phrases used to identify a hundred birds, words that mimicked rhythm and the rise and fall of notes. As a little girl, her favorite song belonged to the pewee, and she had sung it all day long, "Ah di dee, pee a wee, ah di dee, pee oh," because it had driven Addison crazy.