Carol O'Connell - Bone by Bone

The van's passenger door opened, and a man's head and shoulders appeared over the roof. His camera was aimed at the pickup truck.

Dave sank down low in his seat.

I'm so screwed.

No matter what road he took, he would run into the law in oncoming traffic.

The van's driver leaned out the window and extended a microphone. "I almost didn't recognize you out of uniform. You're a deputy, right?" Inspiration.

"Yeah, I'm the first responder." Dave gave the man a short salute, then started his engine and put his pickup truck in gear.

Gaining the portico, Oren knelt down beside the fallen William Swahn and whispered, "Close your eyes. Don't move." He called out to the anonymous shapes who stood before the lights. "He's dead! You killed him!"

Here and there, rocks and bottles thudded to the ground.

Oren understood the ugliest things about mobs. This one had just lost its reason for being. Cohesion was dissolving as some edged away from the pack, a sign that self-preservation had trumped herd instinct. But the mob might rise again as one body, one mind-in seconds. The window for action was small.

The time was now.

He picked up Swahn's cane and held it high as he walked toward the lights. "I'm the law!" he yelled. "And now I'm gonna start cracking heads, and every man I mark is going to jail!"

Though blinded by headlights, his eyes were wide open as he walked into the fray with the slow resolution of a tank. Swinging the cane in wide circles, he connected with flesh and bone. Beyond the bright lights, car doors were opening. One engine starting up and then another. Twin balls of light were backing away, men walking away, and some were on the run.

Squinting now, blurred sight returning, his cane hit a man's skull and felled him, and this one crawled away. Other men were frozen, some of them weaving, easy targets. One stood before him, witless. Oren made a mighty swing to bring him down. A tight group of figures were moving toward him-the resurrection of the mob, though a smaller pack, a tinier brain. He turned on them, using the trash-can lid to fend off rocks. His shield and lance were ripped away, and their hands were on him.

Above their heads was a flash of gunfire and a shotgun blast. Standing atop the cabin of a pickup truck, Dave Hardy yelled, "Nobody move!"

And now the last of them scattered, feet running, engines revving, wheels spinning.

All gone.

Broken bottles and a trampled baseball cap, scattered rocks and a lost shoe were lit by the headlights of official vehicles, county and state. Reporters had been corralled at the other end of the driveway, where they screamed about their freedom of the press as their cameras were confiscated. And three men sat on the steps of the portico.

Dave Hardy sacrificed the last two beers in his six-pack. He handed a bottle to William Swahn and one to Oren, apologizing because it was no longer cold. "But it'll do for medicinal purposes. You know you're bleeding, right?"

Swahn, still dazed, was slow to lift one hand to his face, touching the wound to his cheek. And now he stared at the blood on his fingers. "I suppose it's bad form to mock people while they're chucking rocks and bottles."

And by a nod, Oren agreed that this was so.

Dave Hardy grinned at the bleeding man. "You did that? Well, good for you." He turned to Oren and jingled his car keys. "The sheriff's gonna be here any minute. I gotta go. If Cable catches me driving drunk one more time, I'm toast."

When the deputy's pickup truck had rolled off down the driveway, Swahn lifted his beer to clink bottles with Oren.

When Sarah Winston was sober, the tower room was only a circle. On toward evening, it was a wheel, spinning, spinning, taking her nowhere and leaving her with motion sickness. She straightened picture frames on the sections of wall that were not made of glass. It had taken courage to hang photographs and drawings on the walls of a house that rested upon a planet spinning madly while revolving round the sun.

She walked out onto the deck and looked up at the stars. They moved for her. She had that combination of insanity and patience that allowed her to follow their trek across the sky. Spreading the sleeves of her robe on an evening breeze, she reached out to them.

No, not yet. Not tonight.

Sarah lowered her arms, as a bird would fold its wings. It was an act of will to stay when fear argued for leaving, when she need only let go of the earth and let the ether take her. The notion of flight, like the motion of stars, was seductive. She wrapped her arms close about her body, though not for comfort, but to save her own life-for the sake of Isabelle, who came softly rapping at the door, calling, "Mom?"

"Yes, Belle. I'm here." Still here. By an act of will, she stayed.

"Maybe she'll feel more like talking in the morning," said Addison Winston. "Sarah's a bit shaken up."

"Not surprising," said Cable Babitt. "You'd never expect a thing like that to happen in Coventry." The sheriff donned his hat as he walked to the door. "Mr. Swahn said to thank your wife for calling it in." And now he tipped his hat to Isabelle. "Lucky thing Oren Hobbs happened to be in the neighborhood tonight."

"Yes, very lucky." She stopped smiling after closing the door on the sheriff.

Oren's luck was about to run out.

She opened the hall closet and ripped her jacket from a hanger. She intended to make dead certain that he understood the instructions attached to the birder journals. He was not to go joyriding with her mother one more time. It was going to be so satisfying to hear Oren Hobbs scream in high soprano notes when she-

"Does your mother have another bottle up there?" Addison was facing the staircase.

Isabelle crept up behind him, saying softly, "I know what you did."

He turned around, startled for the split second before he recognized this old routine begun in her childhood. Addison had taught it to her, and most often he had been the one ferreting out secrets with those same words. He glanced at the jacket in her hand. "I'd rather you didn't go down to William's place tonight. I might need help with your mother."

"I know Mom started drinking the year Josh Hobbs disappeared. The other night-after dinner-were you joking when you wondered if she had an affair with Oren? It's so hard to tell with you, Addison. You've got such an ugly sense of humor."

"If I'm supposed to be making a connection here, shouldn't you-"

"From the back, Oren and Josh looked a lot alike. Same kind of clothes, and they even had the same walk. Oren was taller, but if you came up behind his brother-alone-in the woods…" She let the rest of her accusation dangle unspoken.

He laughed. He roared. He showed her all his teeth- wide smile. "Why don't you ask your mother about Josh? She's the one who buried the boy.

Isabelle's jacket fell from her hand.

Addison picked it up from the floor and returned it to the closet, still grinning as he arranged the garment on a hanger. "So you'll stay. Well, good."

William Swahn refused an ambulance ride to the hospital, and a paramedic led the man indoors to patch his wounds. Oren sat alone on the front steps, watching the show as he nursed his beer.

Men and women in troopers' uniforms bagged the empty bottles found outside and inside the house. Every glass surface was a fingerprint examiner's wet dream.

A few yards away, Cable Babitt stood beside Sally Polk, saying to her, "Your guys are welcome to all the bottles they can carry. I don't need them. I've got the whole damn thing on film."