Carol O'Connell - Bone by Bone

Did he believe that? Did she? No, and no.

He refilled his shot glass and hers. "You weren't quite that patient, Hannah. Right after Josh went missing, you asked for help. You got William Swahn to find me an alibi." He lifted his glass and drained it. "I always knew who really ran this house-our lives. Was it your idea to send me away that summer?"

"No, I was against it." The shot glass seemed almost too heavy for her as she lifted it to take a sip. "I told your father to send Josh away. He didn't listen to me then. After the boy disappeared, the judge probably thought about that all the time. I wish I'd never said a word."

Now all her words were spent, and so was she. Her eyes were closed by half. Her day was done.

Oren switched on the bedside light and then rose to pull on his jeans. Though he was tired, sleep would not come, and he was grateful. He lacked his father's gift of forgetting every dream. Sometimes acts of nightmare violence broke into his wide-awake mind, but it was worse when he lay helpless, wrapped in sheets, eyes closed in the dark. And some nights he would wake up screaming the soldier's song, Makeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstop!

He sat down at his old desk and wrote a letter to Evelyn Straub. Then he put out the lamp and padded down the stairs in his stocking feet so as not to wake the house. Having no keys to the bolts on the front door, he climbed through the porch window, pulled on his boots and struck out for Coventry on foot.

No need for a flashlight. The moon was back, and it was bright. Oren walked down the road, undisturbed by any traffic. His only company was a dead boy and a dead dog. Josh had walked this same route with him on many a summer morning, and Horatio had trotted along between the brothers. Occasionally, one boy or the other would reach down to ruffle the dog's fur, reassuring their pet that he was still part of the family, though Josh never wanted the dog to come along on trips into town. Horatio had been shameless about kissing strangers and drooling on them, and he had been banned from every store where customers preferred to do their shopping dry and unloved.

One standout day, Josh had locked the poor beast in the kitchen, using his let's-be-reasonable voice to say, "No, you can't come today." That had set off the barking tantrum, followed by whining that was almost human. The dog had cried, as if in fear that he would never see his boys again.

Oren remembered his own words. "I know why you don't want Horatio along. He gives you away. This has to stop. It's creepy."

Josh had ducked his head under the weight of that comment. Creepy was a word that could turn a boy's high school life into a living hell of derision. Oren had released Horatio from the kitchen, and the dog had jumped his brother, paws on shoulders, kissing and slobbering. All was forgiven. This was followed by the old familiar line, screamed at the top of Josh's lungs, "Get off me! I'm gonna puke !"

Horatio had done his mad little dance on hind legs, barking to say, Let's go! Let's go! The boys could have set fire to him, and the dog, who was love incarnate, would have assumed that they were only having a difficult day and promptly forgiven them.

Tonight, Oren resolved to get rid of the stuffed carcass on the living room rug, that bad joke on a good old dog.

The lights of town were up ahead, and he pulled the letter from his back pocket. He planned to leave it with the night-shift clerk so that Evelyn could read it first thing in the morning. As he approached the Straub Hotel, it was a surprise to see her sitting on the verandah at this late hour.

Oren walked up the steps and sat down beside her. She never acknowledged him, not even by a nod in his direction. By unspoken agreement, they sat in peaceful silence for a while. The beach could not be seen from this view, only the straight lines of the road, its railing and the broader stripes of sea and sky.

He studied her profile by moonlight, looking there for signs of Evelyn trapped inside that aging stranger's body. Her lean jawline and high cheekbones had disappeared into loose folds of flesh. Her breasts sagged above a thickened waist and protruding belly. Yet he persisted in his search for a clue to her, as if she might be only hiding from him-though that was hardly her nature.

In the younger days of her forties, she had been the aggressor, taking him down with her strong tanned arms, sinking with him deep into a feather bed, her long legs wrapped around him-no escape-and never was it enough, not for him, not for her. And there had been feeling between them, as much as Evelyn had allowed. As a boy, he would never have betrayed her-even if it had meant jail. He would've lied for her, died for her. And was he still tied to her?

Yes. The strings were still there. He could feel a tug in the dark when she said, "Good evening, Oren."

"Hello, Evelyn." He said his as if he had just discovered her-and he had.

"Glad to see you made it out of the woods tonight."

When she spoke, it was easier to recognize her. He only had to close his eyes, and there she was. "Hannah told me you called the house tonight."

"I can guess why you're here," she said. "When you see Cable Babitt, you tell that old bastard I know the sound of his jeep. It's a piece of crap with a skippy motor. I know it like I know the sound of his voice." The wicker chair creaked as she turned to face him. "I could put Cable's ass in a legal sling for taking you out to the cabin tonight. But I won't mess with him-not this time. Satisfied?"

"That's not why I'm here." He gently laid his letter in her lap. "After Josh disappeared, you must have wondered why Swahn came to see you- how he knew. I swear to you, I never told anyone about us."

"I know that, Oren."

"When you went to the sheriff… to give me an alibi… why did you lie for me?"

"Get off my verandah, Oren."

Upstairs in her bedroom, locked in the safe among her jewels, Evelyn Straub kept a yellowed envelope. Inside it was a photograph that Oren Hobbs had sent to her from a boarding school in New Mexico. The image was a cold nightscape of barren rock formations and vast tracts of sand- so different from the forestlands where he had grown up. Scrawled upon the back of the picture, a brief note had voiced the only complaint of a teenage boy in an alien world far from home: "The judge has sent me to live on the moon."

Alone again, Evelyn resumed her vigilance over that cold ball of light hanging in the sky. She had never read a human face into its surface features, but always saw it for what it was, a sterile and distant chunk of rock. And now, because she refused to recognize the grown man who had come to sit with her tonight, she fell back into her old ritual of the lunar cycles. Her eyes turned upward as she spoke softly, bidding good night to the boy on the moon.

Though he was off to a late start this morning, Ferris Monty drove his yellow Rolls-Royce into town at the leisurely pace of a longtime Coventry resident. He had sacrificed a night's sleep to review his abandoned notes and false starts, reams of words written many years ago. Fortunately, all the landmarks and most of the people were right where he had left them on the pages of his unfinished opus.

He parked at the curb in front of the public library, a one-room brick building made ludicrous by grand marble pillars and a lintel that overshot the roof. A hundred years ago, when Coventry's only employer had been the sawmill, this building had been the lofty donation-call it a joke- of the town founder, a man who believed that only a handful of his workers could read or have need of more than a few books.