Carol O'Connell - Bone by Bone

He was slow to follow her through that last door. Unlike the parlor downstairs, his old room showed no signs of time passing. Oren stared at the familiar blue bedspread and its history of soap-resistant stains. It was unwrinkled, not quite the way he had left it when he was a teenager who struggled with the concept of tucked-in sheets and smoothed-out blankets. The same photographs hung on the walls. His old fountain pen lay on the writing desk alongside a book he had never finished reading. All that appeared to be missing was the knapsack taken with him on the day when the old man had sent him away.

Hannah settled his duffel bag on the bed and opened a bureau drawer. "You travel light."

"I shipped a trunk. It'll be along in a day or two."

"Good. That sounds more permanent." The housekeeper unzipped his bag and removed an old Colt.45 with two fingers and a look of surprise. "How on earth did you find it?"

"That's not Granddad's gun. I bought that one from a collector." He had seen it as a sweet reminder of early childhood, a day when the housekeeper had found him and Josh playing with an old revolver in the attic. They had just figured out how to load the bullets when Hannah had snatched it away from them. Then she had hidden the gun with only the clue that it was buried, and the two brothers had dug up large sections of the yard by flashlight and moonlight in a quest that had gone on for years.

Next, she pulled a heavy wad of T-shirts from the bag and unwrapped them to find a bottle of Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey buried inside.

"A present," he said.

She carried the bottle to the window and grinned at the label in this better light. "You remembered my brand. You good boy."

"We need to talk about the judge-and the bones."

"I know." Hannah set the bottle down on the desk and left the room. She returned a few moments later with two small paper cups from the bathroom dispenser. Three fingers of alcohol had been poured and drunk before she said, "You know it's possible for a man to be crazy and functional. Take the judge for instance."

"Right," he said dryly, "just hypothetically."

The housekeeper crumpled her paper cup into a ball-the only sign that she was vexed-and set it on the bureau. She turned her back on him to fold the T-shirts and place them in a drawer. "This business of stuffing the dog-turning the house into a damn museum." More clothes were pulled from the duffel bag. "It's like one little crazy spot in the middle of a real clear mind. That's called a fixation."

"Fixation?" Pain had ebbed away with the medicine from the whiskey bottle, and Oren smiled as he parroted the housekeeper's old mantra:

"You've been reading books. You know that can't be good for you." Countless times, she had said this to him when he was a child spending too many daylight hours in the judge's library. It had been her mission then to save him from literacy and send him out of doors in search of a life.

He poured and downed another shot of whiskey as he leaned back against the only patch of wall not cluttered with photos in white mats and black wooden frames.

"I've got a present for you, too." The housekeeper opened the top drawer of the desk. She pulled out a photograph framed in silver and handed it to him. "You were such beautiful kids."

He studied her gift, a portrait of two boys. Oren, pictured at the age of seventeen, stood half a head taller than his younger brother. He had never seen this shot, though he remembered when it was taken. No detail of that day could be forgotten. Josh had mounted his camera on a brand-new tripod and used a cable release to snap this picture from a distance. And so the two brothers were standing together-for the last time. The photograph was black-and-white, and Oren's blue eyes looked very dark. He seemed so subdued in that moment, and today he was not so changed after all, still brooding in his countenance, as if he had made a pact with Josh, for whom change was impossible.

He sank down on the bed beside Hannah.

She wrapped her arms around him in a hug. "It's good to have you home."

He had sorely missed this little woman, and she released her hold on him too soon. He bowed his head to look down at the picture in his hands. "So… about that jawbone?"

"Ah, the bones. They're always left on the porch late at night. You're the only one who knows-besides me and your father."

No, there was one other person who knew-the trespasser who traveled by night with a yellow dog. "I'm guessing this has been going on for months." He dated that guess by the housekeeper's letters and their cryptic allusions to something amiss. "If the old man doesn't call the sheriff, I'll have to do it myself."

She placed one hand on his knee and squeezed it with the gentle warning, "He won't like that, Oren."

"He was a judge. He knows the law."

"But you don't know the half of it-not yet." Hannah stood up, a little unsteady for the liquor. Late in life, she had evidently become a pansy drinker.

He followed her down the hall to Josh's old room, where the braided rug and the striped wallpaper were holding up well. But the bedspread had once been brilliant green, and now it was a muted shade. The closet was open, and Josh's favorite denim shirt hung by a hook on the back of the door along with the Sunday-best blue jeans. His brother had been wearing knock-around jeans the last time he was seen alive.

Hannah seemed lost in reverie and a whiskey buzz, perhaps forgetting why she had brought him in here. To refresh her memory, Oren slapped the top of the coffin that had pride of place in the center of Josh's bedroom. "This is new," he said.

Did that sound sarcastic? He hoped so.

The varnished rosewood was trimmed with shiny brass that spoke of a recent purchase. It was the wildly upscale model hawked by funeral directors whose souls were interchangeable with used-car salesmen. And this could only mean that one such undertaker must have seen enormous grief in the old man's eyes. And tears? Oh, yes. The expense of the coffin was proof. This obscene trick could only be worked on a fragile mourner deep in pain.

Hannah raised the lid and laid it back on its hinges. "The judge didn't want anybody to know about this until he had all the bones-till Josh was finished coming home. He made me swear not to tell."

The satin lining was green-Josh's favorite color-and the skeleton nestled there was the same red cast as the jawbone outside on the porch. The hands and feet were missing. Perhaps the judge's night visitor was an amateur at exhumation and had overlooked remains that might pass for sticks and stones. What destroyed Oren was the slight overlap of the skull's front teeth, the only physical imperfection of a fifteen-year-old boy.

Hello, Josh. Did you miss me?

Hannah stepped back from the coffin. "You wouldn't expect bones to smell."

By profession, Oren was accustomed to decomposition. He knew it was the confined space and the seal of the coffin that gave the bones the reek of an ossuary. And there was also an earthy smell. He leaned down, as if to kiss his brother's lipless face. "Hannah. Did the judge clean the skull? Did he do anything to it before it went into the coffin?"

"No, not a thing. The way Josh is now-that's the way he came home."

The bones of the body were dusted with soil, but the skull bore the circular marks of cloth-wiped dirt. No part of the skeleton showed signs of exposure to the elements, and there was no damage from the fangs of animal predators-only the stains of sheltering earth.

Raw burial could only be read as murder.

The torso and limbs were more lightly colored than the skull, a sign that they had been protected for a time by a layer of clothing. Oren took small comfort in the knowledge that his little brother had not been thrown naked into some hole.