Carol O'Connell - Bone by Bone

Another night bird answered with hollow whistles in the rhythm of a bouncing ball or footfalls losing their momentum, slowing, slowing.

All stop.

Wits lost.

Oren screamed his brother's name.

All around him, he could hear things moving in the dark, small animals alarmed and stirring in the underbrush, creeping, running. He felt their panic, the same old fear, a coldness stealing up his throat. Shivering, he hugged himself for warmth. And what of Josh? His brother had left his jacket behind.

Josh is dead. You've seen his bones.

How many days had he gone without food or water?

No hunger, no thirst. Today you had a chicken sandwich in the kitchen with Cable Babitt.

Oren turned toward the sound of a car engine in the distance, and he heard it die-suddenly-switched off.

He sucked in his breath and held it.

A small ball of light floated on the air, appearing and disappearing behind the trunks of trees. Was he dreaming this? Every time he dreamed, he died.

Hannah Rice was the resurrection and the light.

Oren fell to his knees on the dirt road. "How did you find me?"

She brushed the hair away from his eyes. "I got a telephone call to ask if you made it home from the séance." Hannah gently coaxed him to stand up. Then she took him by the hand and led him to the car, treating him as a handicapped person-and he was one tonight. "Evelyn Straub saw you dive off the road when her van came around a curve. Everybody knows you have a penchant for getting lost in the woods."

After settling him into the passenger seat, she leaned across his body to fasten the safety belt. And here, all concept of road safety ended. The little woman provided him with the medicine of comic relief as she turned the car toward home. She strained to see over the steering wheel, sometimes using the wheel as leverage to raise her body up. Raising the seat was not an option, not if she wanted to reach the foot pedals. Yet Hannah loved to drive. She lived to drive.

"Odd-this sudden interest of yours." She leaned toward him-big smile. "Séances, Oren?"

"I heard you and the judge were big fans of Alice Friday," he said- big smile.

"Oh, everybody went up to that cabin at least once or twice." Hannah looked at the dashboard clock and then put on some speed. "Dave Hardy called tonight. He wants to buy you a beer sometime."

"I didn't expect to see him this morning. Most kids leave the day they come of age." His brother had been the rare boy who never dreamed of escaping from his small coastal town. Josh had loved Coventry -and he had loved his life.

"But Dave Hardy did leave," said Hannah. "That boy made it all the way to Chicago. And now you're wondering why he came back."

"He forgot to shoot his mother on the way out of town?"

"Dave heard she was dying-a tumor in her stomach. Well, in this world of real estate gone nuts, his mother's five-acre parcel is worth quite a bit. But I don't think he came back just for Mavis's money."

"Maybe he wanted to watch her die? Around here, you could sell tickets to a thing like that."

Hannah shot him a look of disapproval. "You don't want to say things like that when the judge is around. He won't tolerate anybody making fun of that poor woman."

Oren recalled that Mrs. Hardy's other champion was Hannah. He had never heard the housekeeper say one word against Dave's mother-not in earnest, not in fun. And now he grabbed the dashboard as she made a sharp turn onto the road that would lead them home.

"Dave came back to town about eight years ago," said Hannah. "Now here's the odd part. Mavis didn't die. Her tumor keeps growing, but she just won't die."

Oren wondered if Mrs. Hardy was toxic to tumors as well as people.

Hannah shushed him, and this should have spooked him, for he had not voiced that idea aloud. But Oren remembered all of the housekeeper's parlor tricks, and this had been one of her best: divining impure thoughts from a smirk or guilty downcast eyes and the antsy feet of boys.

She looked from the dashboard clock to her wristwatch, double-checking the hour. This might be the first time he had ever seen her wearing a timepiece, and this thought chained back to his brother. "That photograph of me and Josh-he was wearing a watch that last morning. Don't you think that's odd? Josh never cared about the time of day before."

"You mean, not so you noticed." She reached out to pat his hand. "When you were a kid, you missed a lot of things. Take Isabelle Winston. I remember the first birthday ball, the first time you kids set eyes on one another. You were only twelve years old, but I saw your whole life all laid out in front of you that night. I could see all the way into a generation of your grandchildren. But something went wrong, and that was long before Josh disappeared. The life you've been leading isn't the one you were meant to have."

Isabelle Winston focused her lenses on the distant glow of a porch light, and she watched Hannah and Oren enter the judge's house.

She lowered the binoculars and carried them inside, where her mother lay on the bed in a drunk's blackout sleep. No dreams. Was that the reason for her mother's drinking? Was there no peace for her, waking or sleeping? Sarah Winston lay with arms outstretched, her wrists exposed, and her daughter stared at the old razor scars running across the veins. Though these suicide attempts were old events, years in the past, Isabelle had first learned of them only months ago when she had come home for a short visit.

And now she could not- would not -leave.

She climbed the ladder to replace the bird log borrowed earlier and to take another one down from the shelf. At the end of the last journal, the beautiful long-legged heron was pursuing a bird much younger than her gray starling husband. The young hawk and the heron soared together, describing circles around one another in the sky. However, Isabelle's mission tonight had nothing to do with Evelyn Straub's extramarital love affairs.

This time, she did not take a journal and steal away with it, for she had remembered something learned at her parents' dinner table. One of the guests had been a well-known politician. "Kid, if you're gonna do something wrong," the man had said to her then, "do it right out in plain sight. It's the hidden things that attract attention."

She sat down in the chair by her mother's bed and switched on the lamp to decipher the code of drawings and birdsong. A letter fell from the pages, and she recognized the quirky handwriting on the envelope, though she had not seen a sample of it in decades. The lines of longhand were small and lightly penned, all but begging to go unnoticed.

Crazy Mavis.

In the old days, her mother and Mrs. Hardy had gone bird-watching in the woods. In the summers of childhood, Isabelle had sometimes accompanied them, and she had loved the conspiracy of keeping these outings a secret. Addison would never have approved of his wife befriending the town monster.

The opened letter in her hand was filled with descriptions of flight, the colors of feather and sky, and the music of the deep woods. Almost poetry. Apparently Mrs. Hardy had depths unknown and qualities that were not monstrous.

Oren paused by the closed door at the bottom of the staircase. He leaned down to the housekeeper and whispered, "I heard something."

"I'm sure you did." Hannah consulted her wristwatch. "It's about that time." She turned to the judge's door. "Did you know that used to be the sewing room? That's why it's too small for anything but a twin bed. A few days after your mother's funeral, your father moved all of his things out of their old bedroom. He said he wanted to sleep down here so he could catch you boys if you tried to sneak out late at night. Well, you were only three years old, and Josh was still in diapers. Personally, I think his marriage bed just got too wide for him." She tapped the crystal on her watch, as if that would make the hands move faster. "Any minute now. I got this down to a science."