Carol O'Connell - Bone by Bone

A player asked, "Does it ever go in a straight line?"

And then it did-back and forth across the board.

A voice to his right complained, "When will it ever stop?"

It stopped over the letter Y that stood for yes. Yes, the dead boy was among them tonight. A man on the other side of the table asked the next question. "Do bears shit in the woods?"

Alice Friday's eyes snapped open. "Goddamn tourists!" With a dramatic wave of her hand in the direction of the door, the offended psychic dismissed the man from the table.

She was backed up by another woman, probably the wife, who yelled, "Harry, you idiot! Go wait outside in the hotel van!" And he did.

And now they were five.

Ferris leaned toward Alice Friday. "Could you ask if the boy has a message for one of us?"

She nodded and closed her eyes once more as she posed this question for her spirit guide, Joshua Hobbs.

Ferris was grinning, hoping that this would be a good quote for his book a dead child speaking from beyond the grave. The wooden planchette shot across the board to stop over the first letter, and then the second, shooting, stopping, and all around him players chanted the letters in unison.

"D-O-Y-"

He sensed that the wooden heart had come alive to emanate its own energy, a palpable beat.

o , that's insane.

"O-U-S-T-I-"

The planchette jumped like a spider from letter to letter.

"L-L-L-O-"

Logic and sanity flew out the window. Ferris was a passenger on a runaway train, helpless, waiting for the rest, hanging on each letter, and only hanging by fingertips to the speeding piece of wood.

"V-E-M-E-"

He drew back his hands, as if the planchette had wounded him. He sat very still-still as death, no blinking. He held his breath-digesting the message from a murdered boy.

Alice Friday opened her eyes and looked beyond him to the people gathered at the back of the room. "Won't you join us? There's an empty chair." Heads were turning all around the table in the manner of a celebrity sighting.

Ferris looked back to see Oren Hobbs walk out of the shadows and into the circle of candlelight. An adrenaline chill filled his veins as he imagined that the older brother was accusing him with Joshua's eyes-the same blue eyes.

But no, Hobbs only showed interest in the retired pharmacist, who sat in the next chair. He and the elderly Mr. McCaully exchanged "Sir, you're looking well" for "About time you came home, young man." After a few more pleasantries, the old man invited the younger one to his house for a nightcap after the séance.

Hobbs sat down and joined the others in placing his fingertips on the planchette.

Alice Friday closed her eyes, and her head rolled back. "Does anyone have a question for Joshua?"

A voice from the back of the room called out, "Why did Oren leave you all alone in the woods to die?"

The planchette flew off the table and shot across the room, lost in the shadows. The cabin door had closed on Oren Hobbs before one of the players found the small wooden heart in the darkest corner of the room. And the question was never answered, though other people posed it again and again.

The final days of Joshua Hobbs were shaping up on the glowing screen of a computer monitor. Ferris Monty left it to his future readers to ponder how he came by this information. He had done it the old-fashioned way, on foot-stalking a child. And an exhibitionist quality led him to parade his fixation across the pages of his book.

He lovingly described Joshua's face washed in bright sunlight as the boy stood by the safety rail across the street from the Straub Hotel.

Even with his camera hanging by a strap around his neck, Joshua did not blend in with out-of-towners, tourists taking pictures of one another against the backdrop of the sea. The posers changed. Their poses did not. All the smiles and compositions were identical. These amateurs only amused the boy for a few minutes. He turned his own long lens on the hotel. Evelyn Straub stood on the verandah. She hardly looked her age, fortyish in those days. She was so much more than just another pretty woman. The former showgirl went everywhere wrapped in a full-metal jacket of steely personality, invulnerable-and maybe inhuman.

He would not mention here that she had always intimidated him.

The tourists identified Joshua as an alien in their midst because he was facing the wrong direction, away from the boring vista of sea and sky. A few of them moved close to the boy, taking an interest in the complexity of his manual camera, a standout among their own idiot-proof equipment. Once they recognized him as a source of expertise, Joshua graciously answered questions about film speeds, and then he explained the concept of F-stops, useless data for people with point-and-shoot cameras. This child had exquisite good manners and great patience.

If this scene had been illustrated with pictures instead of words, Ferris Monty would have been detected near the boy. Hiding behind dark glasses and the wide brim of a straw hat, he had stood within touching distance of Joshua Hobbs. He remembered his hand reaching out to touch the boy's hair, hesitating in the air, then quickly drawing back.

When the young photographer parted company with the tourists, he had walked away at a rapid pace, his camera focused on the street ahead. Had the boy been following someone that day? Ferris would never know, for his own surveillance had come to an end when the boy suddenly turned around and snapped a picture of his stalker.

After dinner, Hannah had surrendered the car keys, and now Oren set out for Mr. McCaully's house, aiming his headlights at signs posted along the back roads.

Offered the option of streetlights, the outlying citizens of Coventry had turned down these modern conveniences, arguing that they would pale the starlight. Ever backward-thinking, the town had also voted against cell towers, for who would want to carry a telephone in their pocket? It was annoying enough to have one in the house.

Amen.

Oren did not miss the trappings of a world that ended where the town began. Tonight he was counting on the old-fashioned methods of the man who once ran the local drugstore. Mr. McCaully's recordkeeping would have bypassed the age of computers in favor of hard copy. And that old man never threw anything away.

The wood-frame house was in sight, and the windows of the parlor floor were lit. The sound of the Mercedes' ancient engine had preceded him, and the elderly householder was waiting on the porch when Oren turned off the ignition.

"Hello again." The retired pharmacist gave him a sweet smile of false teeth and extended a frail hand lined with blue veins and freckled with liver spots. "So, you came for that nightcap. Well, good."

When the judge's regards had been passed along and condolences offered on the death of Mrs. McCaully a decade ago, Oren explained his errand to the delight of his host. The old man put a fresh bottle of beer in the hand of his guest, then led him outside and across the backyard toward a long wooden structure of plain walls and boarded-up windows.

As they walked, the older man recounted the story of his family drugstore. "My father was a historian of sorts. He built that shed in 1932 to warehouse the records my grandfather collected. Did you know that Coventry 's first druggist was the town barber?" Mr. McCaully opened the door to the low hum of a motor, and he flipped on a wall switch. Long fluorescent tubes spanned the ceiling and illuminated row upon row of boxes sitting on metal shelves as high as walls. "My son installed the climate control years ago. That's why we boarded up the windows. He says paper lasts longer this way. Some of it dates back to the eighteen hundreds."