Carol O'Connell - Bone by Bone

"Turn around," said Oren. "Take me home."

"Bad idea, son. But don't worry. I'm the one who called Ad Winston. He'll look out for your dad and Hannah. Nobody handles reporters better than Ad does."

"The judge doesn't even like him."

"So what? Henry Hobbs is like royalty around here, and Ad would never miss a chance to do that old man a favor. It's better if you stay away from the media. You know that, right?"

"I know I'm the prime suspect."

"Son, you could confess right now, and I'd still put you to work."

Oren Hobbs was stunned and quiet for all the time it took to point the wheels of the jeep toward the county seat. In sidelong vision, Cable kept an eye on his passenger as the younger man struggled with the logic of this proposition-the absolute lack of legality, not to mention common sense.

"You know I can't help you," said Oren. "You laid it out yourself back at the house. You told me-"

"What I said back there-that was for my deputy's benefit."

High school grudges were long-lived, and Dave Hardy would never forgive Oren for beating him bloody and senseless in front of half the town.

Isabelle Winston, Ph.D., stood upon a wooden deck that encircled her mother's retreat, a tower room at the top of the lodge. The crisp, cool air was filled with spraying birdseed, loud caws, whistles and trills, and the rush of wings. Hungry birds landed at feeders hung all around the railing, and the sated ones took flight.

The ornithologist ignored them. Birds were not her passion today.

Her binoculars were trained on a helicopter landing in the Hobbs meadow. She could easily identify her father, Addison, as he crossed the tall grass, one hand extended to greet the reporters piling out of the aircraft. Overhead, a private jet was making a descent at the county airstrip. More media? Of course. First the local radio station had created a serial murder from the bones of one lost boy, and now the circus had come to town.

She moved around to the other side of the tower and set the binoculars on the railing, startling a cowbird into flight and a high whistle of wee titi. She looked through the eyepiece of a telescope, one of three that were permanent fixtures of the deck. This lens was focused on the town of Coventry. Her mother, a gifted amateur naturalist, did more than note the passage of birds.

Isabelle looked back at the sleeping woman on the other side of the glass wall. How many years ago had that bed been moved up here? When had the tower room become Sarah Winston's whole world?

Turning back to the telescope, Isabelle shifted it, and kept the sheriff's jeep in sight until it made the turn onto the coast highway, carrying Oren Hobbs away. Keeping track of Oren had once been the schoolgirl hobby of summer vacations. And now that he was out of sight, her interest in voyeurism faded. She opened the sliding glass door and stepped inside.

The tower room offered shade from the midday sun but no greater sense of privacy. The northern and southern exposures were floor-to-ceiling panes of glass, and there were no curtains. The walls, east and west, were made of plaster and covered with framed drawings from her mother's sketchbook. There were also photographs taken by the judge's youngest son, Joshua Hobbs. They pictured the early birthday balls, a time when her mother had looked forward to that annual event. By Addison 's account, the festivities of later years had been stressful. On those nights, Sarah Winston had been allowed no alcohol until the last guest had departed, and then her own private parties would become drunken stupors lasting for days.

This morning's stress had been resolved not by the bottle but with sleeping pills.

Sleeping beauty.

In her middle fifties now, the woman lying on the bed was greatly changed by time. But in repose, wrinkles smoothed, the good bones of a fabulous face could still be seen. Her eyes fluttered open, so blue, so wide. "Belle?"

"Yes, Mom, I'm here." Isabelle reached down to stroke her mother's hair. Once, the blond tresses had been natural, so silky. Now they felt coarse. "It's after one. You must be starved."

Her mother sat bolt upright on the bed. "Is it true? I wasn't seeing things?"

"You were right. Oren Hobbs came home. I ran into him in town this morning."

More accurately, she had chased him down with a very fast car and an old grudge.

Oren Hobbs stood by the window and looked out on the Saulburg street. This town seemed like a bustling metropolis compared to his lethargic Coventry, where a dog on crutches could outrun every car. Behind him, a fly buzzed round the room, and Sheriff Babitt's fingers drummed on his desk blotter.

"Pull up a chair, son."

Oren was more inclined to leave, but the judge had raised him to be well mannered, and so the gentleman in blue jeans and cowboy boots accepted the invitation to sit down. By his posture, no one would guess his military background, for he slouched low in the chair. By outward appearance, he had shaken off twenty years of soldiering, as if that part of his life had been lived by someone else. This might well be the day after Josh had gone missing, the last time he had sat down to a conversation in the sheriff's private office.

"So," said Cable Babitt, "we have a deal? This is an old cold case, and I don't-"

"It never was a case. You wrote my brother off as a runaway."

"The hell I did." The sheriff spun his chair around to unlock a drawer in his credenza. When the chair swiveled back again, the man held a stack of files in his hands, and he settled them on the desk. "There must've been a thousand people combing the woods for Josh. And I'll bet you not one of them ever saw that boy as a runaway."

To be fair, a search of the forest had gone on for a solid month, long after all hope of finding Josh alive was gone.

"It's always been an open case." The sheriff slapped one hand down on his pile of paperwork. "This is it, all the files. There are no copies. Now this is a one-way deal. I don't share anything with you. But everything you find, Oren-you bring that straight to me."

No copies? Active files should be in the hands of a case detective. The sheriff had at least five of them to cover a county this size. Why would this man shut out his own investigators?

"I'm a civilian now," said Oren, "and a suspect. What you're suggesting is against-"

"Son, this is between you and me. It's not like I'm gonna give you a deputy's star."

As if the sheriff might be only half bright, Oren carefully measured out the words, "I'm-the- prime -suspect."

"Oh, hell, I never thought you had anything to do with Josh's disappearance, and neither-"

"When I was seventeen, you asked me for an alibi."

"And your alibi's one thing that isn't in these files. It was a good one. I believed it… but I never put it down on paper." He tapped his temple. "It's all up here. So I guess you're working for me. Now that it's a homicide investigation, you might need that old alibi."

"I never-"

"No, Oren, you never said a word. Someone else came forward to account for your time that day. You wouldn't tell me a damn thing when you were a kid. But now you'll work this case for me."

A gang of ravens made an assault on the bird feeders surrounding the tower room, and the flight songs of smaller birds were fading in the distance. The ravens had no song. They croaked.

Cr-r-ruck and pr-r-ruck.

"I don't see Judge Hobbs. He must've gone inside." Sarah Winston handed the binoculars to her daughter and then bowed her head to look through the eyepiece of a telescope. "I see your father. He's in the middle of that crowd of reporters."

"The sheriff asked him to handle the media. That's his job today." Father was not Isabelle's preferred name for Addison, but all of the four-letter names disturbed her mother.