Carol O'Connell - Bone by Bone

Oren had finished ransacking his brother's darkroom. Next, he planned to tackle the other side of the attic, where trunks and boxes were stacked up to the rafters. He hunkered down to open the seal on an old storage carton, and then he heard the bumps on the steps. Rising, he walked to the stairwell to see Hannah climbing upward and dragging his trunk behind her.

"You're a lot stronger than you look." He descended the stairs to relieve her of this burden. He found the trunk surprisingly light now that she had unpacked his civilian clothes. It only contained twenty years of his life, a dress uniform, his decorations and the only personal items, Hannah's letters from home.

"What are you doing up here?" She reached the top of the stairs and stared at the mess on the other side of the open door to Josh's darkroom. "You're still looking for those missing pictures? Any luck?"

He settled the trunk on the floor. "I'll never find them, will I, Hannah?"

She deigned not to hear this. "I hope you're not planning to upset the judge with-"

"No, this is between you and me."

"Good." Bending low, she grabbed a leather handle and dragged the trunk toward the shadows on the far side of the attic.

To hide it?

"What's the hurry?" he asked. "That could've waited another day."

She stood upright, arms folded. "Tell me something, Oren. How much do you miss the Army?"

He hesitated for a moment, and then he fashioned the softest lie that came to mind. "No one misses the Army, Hannah."

"Then we'll put all these old memories away." She stooped low to grab the handle once more.

"Wait a minute." He crouched beside his trunk. "There's one little thing I keep forgetting to check." He opened the lid and sorted through the contents until he found a packet of envelopes addressed in the housekeeper's handwriting.

"You kept my letters," she said. "How sweet."

"Not all of them, just the most recent ones… but you already knew that."

He smiled, and she smiled. And now they had a game.

Oren leafed through the packet, reading every postmark. He pulled a letter from its envelope to scan the opening lines. "This is the one. This is why you couldn't wait to stash my trunk up here."

The woman could hardly hide it-as she had surely hidden the pictures from Josh's last roll of film. Letters missing from this trunk could not be easily explained away. He waved this one like a flag. "It's the letter you wrote to call me home."

She shook her head, as if confused-as if Hannah could ever be confused. "That was a while ago, Oren. I remember it took a bunch of letters to get you here."

"This one was mailed weeks before the first bone was left on the porch." Oren held up the envelope to show her the postmark, his proof. "It can't be a coincidence that you asked me to come home when-"

"Oh, that." She smiled. "I wrote that letter after Sarah Winston's daughter came back to town. It looked like Isabelle planned to stay awhile this time. Well, she wasn't married, and you weren't married-"

"Hannah, don't even try to tell me this was all about matchmaking."

"All right, I won't." Indignant, she marched to the attic stairwell, and her wooden clogs made more noise than necessary as she descended to the floor below. Then she put on some speed-and she was fast. Oren was lagging behind her as she made it down the next flight of steps to the ground floor.

And there the interrogation of Hannah Rice ended.

The judge sat in the front room, fitting the yellow stray with a collar. He looked up at his housekeeper, saying, "We'll have to come up with a name for this dog. Any ideas?"

"I got an idea," she said, and the old man never raised an eyebrow as the little woman dragged the stuffed carcass of the late Horatio out of the room and down the hall, heading for the back door.

Oren was pressed into offering his father a few suggestions for likely names, and then he caught up to Hannah down by the garden shed.

She handed him a shovel. "Let me know when the hole's deep enough."

The housekeeper raced back up the path. So fast. Oren had to run to catch her, and now he held her by the shoulders. He stood behind her, bending down to whisper in her ear. "Hannah, you know who killed Josh. I can even name the hour when you put it all together. It was the night of the séance… when you went back up there for a talk with Evelyn. She told me about the tourist in the yellow slicker, a woman with pale blond hair. The one who stopped by her cabin on the day Josh-"

"Evelyn shouldn't have done that."

"You told her not to tell. You were afraid I'd lose my alibi, and you worked so hard to get it for me. Well, it's gone, Hannah. Last night at the ball, I tore up Evelyn's statement and gave it back to her. So now there's a lot riding on those old photographs-Josh's last days. He went to some trouble to hide them-so they were important. I need them. Where are they?"

She was helpless to answer him, hands flailing, words failing her.

Custom of the house forbade the obvious question: Hannah, what have you done?

Evelyn Straub escorted her visitor into the crawl space beneath the cabin, where two ancient television sets had been running for a day and a night, scanning years of séances.

The back wall of shelves had once been filled with videocassettes. Now there were wide gaps where some of the tapes had been pulled out and stacked on the floor between two wicker chairs. Evelyn held one in her hand, hesitating to play it. The younger woman's grief was only days old- still raw. "Are you sure you want to see this?"

Isabelle nodded.

Evelyn fed the old cassette into the slot below a TV screen and then depressed the play button. The two women sat down to watch the image of Sarah Winston taking a turn at the Ouija board. Sarah had been the first of the players to raise a question of murder.

"Any day now," said Evelyn, "Sally Polk will get a search warrant for this cabin. I thought you might want the tapes of your mother… to keep them… or burn them."

Late last night, Oren Hobbs had stressed the option to burn this evidence of guilty knowledge, and Evelyn had wondered why. "Just being tidy," he had said to her then. And what else had he done to thwart the CBI agent's investigation?

Isabelle leaned closer to the television set, as if to climb inside the glowing box with her dead mother. Her fingertips touched the barrier glass.

On screen, the late Sarah Winston was crying as she posed a question for the lost boy. "Did you suffer?"

Isabelle waited out the string of letters chanted by the players around the table, and she strung them all together to whisper Josh's reply. "All day long."

Over the rims of coffee cups, Hannah and the judge discussed the long-overdue burial of Horatio. They turned to the kitchen window as Oren rode by in the open cab of a small yellow tractor. Extending out from this noisy machine was a long metal arm with a mechanical elbow and a dangling bucket with jaws and teeth.

Henry Hobbs frowned. "I believe that backhoe belongs to the cemetery."

"I'm sure he'll give it right back," said Hannah.

"Remember the good old days-when we buried our pets with shovels?" The judge kept his eye to the window. "Where's the boy going with that thing?"

"I thought we'd bury Horatio down by the garden shed. And Oren's not a boy." She smiled at the yellow stray waiting in the open doorway, still hesitant to enter any room except by invitation. "Why don't you name the dog Boy?"

"Come here, Boy," he said, and the dog ran to him to be petted and scratched behind the ears and to lick the old man's face. "Boy it is." The judge looked out the window, following the backhoe's progress toward the shed. "That grave should be on higher ground, closer to the house. The water table rises after spring rains."