Carol O'Connell - Bone by Bone

More reporters had joined the feeding frenzy below, where Hannah Rice was chasing a station wagon off the grass. When another helicopter descended to the meadow, the housekeeper threw up her hands and retreated to the porch.

"Oh, Christ," said Sarah, one eye to the telescope. "You see that yellow Rolls-Royce? That's Ferris Monty's car. You remember him, don't you?"

Yes, Isabelle had a vivid recollection of Monty, though he had only come to dinner once, never to be invited back. His yellow Rolls pulled into the judge's driveway. It was a beautifully restored vintage model. She loved the car, but the little man behind the wheel revolted her. She had never shaken off the first impression of him formed in her childhood. "Wasn't he a real writer once? I think I read something of his when I was in college."

Her mother nodded, never lifting her eyes from the telescope. "Thirty years ago, he was a literary star on the rise. But he turned out to be a one-trick pony."

This slur was charity. The man had de-evolved into a celebrity muckraker, a writer of gossip columns and exposes in the form of true-crime books. As a frequent guest on television, he was known to millions of viewers who had never read nor even heard of his one good piece of art.

"So he still keeps a house in Coventry?"

"Oh, yes," said her mother. "And he's still the only one in town who's never invited to my birthday ball."

Isabelle imagined that the gossip columnist left a trail of slime instead of footprints as he walked toward the Hobbs house. The first reporter had spotted Ferris Monty, and now they all ran toward the slander man like children who have heard the calliope music of the ice cream truck. She focused on Monty's face. The pasty white blot in her lenses was capped with a thatch of black that might have been made of fur or feathers. "He still has the same bad toupee. He should give it a name and buy it a flea collar."

Monty was holding court with the crowd of reporters, and a war of egos was predictable. Her famous father would not enjoy sharing the spotlight with another celebrity.

The sheriff only listened for a few seconds and then said, "Thanks, Addison," and slammed the telephone receiver down on its cradle. "One more thing, Oren. Stay the hell away from Ferris Monty."

"Who is he?"

"He's famous," said the sheriff, as if this might help. It did not. "Well, maybe he only shows up on TV in California. Ferris's trade is gossip. If you see a chubby little jerk, white as bug larvae, that'll be him. You might remember his yellow Rolls-Royce."

Oren nodded. He never forgot a classic car. "It belonged to one of the summer people."

"And now he lives in Coventry year-round." Cable Babitt gathered up his file holders-all but one-and locked them away in his credenza. Then he picked up his car keys and sunglasses. "I'll be gone for a while."

When the door had closed on the sheriff, Oren glanced at the remaining folder that had been overlooked. It would be rude not to open it-since the sheriff had gone to some trouble, all but decorating this file with a neon arrow and then providing time and privacy to read it.

The name on the first page was not familiar, though, according to the sheriff's notes, this man had been a citizen of Coventry for years before Josh had vanished. William Swahn was identified as a former police officer from Los Angeles, wounded in the line of duty after barely one year on the job. Disabled, he had been pensioned off at the tender age of twenty-one. Today this ex-cop would be in his late forties.

Penned in the margins were the sheriff's updates, noting that the man was not licensed as a private investigator, though Swahn had conducted many interviews around town, all of them related to Josh's disappearance. Handwritten words at the top of one page described him as uncooperative, refusing to divulge the name of his client. A margin note listed the most likely client as Oren's father. This would make sense from Sheriff Babitt's point of view. The relatives of crime victims commonly hired private police when a case went cold.

Oren recognized the address on Paulson Lane, a house so well buried in the woods that lifelong residents of Coventry might be unaware of it. That property was well beyond the means of an ex-cop on a disability pension.

Was Swahn bleeding his client dry to make the mortgage payments?

No one looked up as Oren passed by the desks in the outer room. Apparently the deputies and civilian staff had been told not to interfere with him. Once outside the building, he stepped into the street to flag down a ride. A woman stopped. Whenever he had occasion to hitchhike, it was always a woman who stopped for him.

Ferris Monty led his flock of reporters through the town on foot. As a favor to Addison Winston, he had taken on the job of keeping his fellow jackals away from Judge Hobbs.

He was more than happy to do whatever Addison asked of him. For the first time in twenty-five years, he had hopes of receiving an invitation to Sarah Winston's birthday ball. It was a gala event that cost the moon and made the society pages, a night when the famous and the infamous danced with the local folk until dawn. Ferris Monty had the distinction of being the only Coventry resident ever to be dis invited. Each year, he received a formal card that bore the printed script of his un invitation, and it was always bordered in black like a funeral announcement.

The reporters gathered around him on the sidewalk, and he preened for the handheld cameras. "The dead boy's photographs can be seen in a number of places around town. We'll start here." He led them up the steps of the Coventry Bank, a modest two-story landmark that dated back to the mill-town days. In the small lobby, a triptych of photographs hung on the wall. Ferris pointed to an image of himself standing in line to make a deposit more than twenty years ago. "This is me when I was young and beautiful."

A reporter said, "So you knew Joshua Hobbs personally."

"Oh, yes. In fact, I liked these photographs so much I bought a set of prints from the boy."

"What was he like?"

"Very sensitive. An artist." He shrugged to say, You know the type.

The day he had purchased those custom prints, there had been no conversation. Joshua Hobbs had been edging back toward the door from the moment of his arrival. Without a word, the young photographer had handed over the pictures and held out his other hand for the check. Ferris had blinked but once, and the boy had vanished.

A few weeks later, following a second, more permanent vanishing, Ferris had begun his comeback book, the story of a tragedy in a small town. It had opened with descriptions of townspeople, haggard and tired, marching past him in the streets, homeward bound after another fruitless day of searching the woods for a lost child.

Outside on the street again, a reporter broke into Ferris's reverie and pointed toward the library. "Any pictures in there?"

"I couldn't say. No one in Coventry ever goes to the library." And, lest they find this fact too intriguing, he marched them down the sidewalk with a lie of something more interesting at the other end of the block. As they walked, his mind was on the abandoned manuscript in his desk drawer, and he was already planning his rebirth as a serious author.

Ferris opened the door to a tourist-trap restaurant and the din of luncheon conversations and tin silverware. He ushered his charges inside, where more examples of Joshua Hobbs's work were hanging on the walls above the heads of the patrons. However, Ferris was not featured in any of these pictures, and he never even glanced at them. He was looking at an interior vision of literary prizes, love-struck critics, and the naked adoration of readers waiting in line for his autograph on the book-tour circuit of his imagination.