KATHY REICHS - 206 BONES

I yanked my wrists outward with as much force as my battered muscles could muster .

Again .

Again .

With the sixth heave I felt a hitch, then my left palm slipped relative to my right. Or had I imagined it?

“ Break!” I screamed into the darkness .

I yanked and twisted, yanked and twisted. “Break, you bastards! ”

Tears streamed down my cheeks as my hands pistoned wildly .

“ Break!” I tasted salt on my trembling lips. “Break!” I wrenched my arms outward again and again .

At long last, some frayed strands yielded .

The ropes loosened. I managed to extract my left hand .

I fumbled free. Sat upright. Shook both hands. Blood rushed like fire into the deprived vessels .

I ran my fingers over my ankles, exploring the arrangement of the bindings. Finding the knots, I began clawing, desperate for freedom .

It was futile. My fingers were barely functioning and the knots were like rocks .

Again tears threatened .

Again, I banished them .

“ Move!” my drill sergeant voice boomed .

Rolling to my stomach, I began inching through the darkness by dragging with my elbows and pushing with my legs. When that grew too painful, I rolled onto my bum and hitched forward with my feet and the palms of my hands .

I followed a zigzag pattern, determined to find a route to freedom. Or, that failing, an implement to free my feet .

My prison was long and narrow, perhaps a tunnel or passageway. As I proceeded through it, the musty odor grew stronger .

Now and then I’d stop for a time check. The glowing hands formed a horizontal bar. An L. Overlapped to the right .

Inevitably the periods of movement shortened. More and more often I dropped and went fetal. My elbows were bloody, my hands and feet numb from contact with the frozen ground. Despite my resolve, my efforts were waning .

Then, in a belly phase, my elbows pulled me forward and my shoulder brushed something. It wobbled. Settled back .

My hands reached out into the dark .

I heard a gravelly crunch .

My sensory-deprived brain computed the input .

Round. Hard. Roll trajectory two feet up and to the left .

Elbow-dragging my torso and legs, I groped the base of the wall. The smell was powerful now, a mix of mold and mildew and moth-eaten fabric, like clothes abandoned in an old attic trunk .

My bloody fingers finally grazed an edge. Pivoting to a hunch-sit, I teased the object up into my hands .

Gingerly, I hefted, weighing. I caressed the thing’s outer surface. Explored its dimensions. Probed its contours .

With horror, I recognized what was sharing my darkness .

LIFTING MY FINGERS, I ALLOWED THE SKULL TO ROLL BACK TO ITS original position.

The searchdog’s name was Étoile. Star. And she was one.

The grave had been under two feet of snow. Didn’t matter. Étoile had nailed it.

Ryan had picked me up before dawn on Saturday. My window thermometer said minus six Celsius. Twenty-one Fahrenheit.

We talked little during the drive. Our flight from O’Hare had landed late, and it was midnight when I reached my condo in centre-ville , two before I got to sleep. Barely awake, I sipped the coffee Ryan provided and watched the city slide past my window.

My funk wasn’t entirely fatigue-induced. I was still bummed by events in Chicago.

Ryan and I never got to see Schechter. Excuse was he was taking depositions in Rock Island. Consequently, I was still clueless about the viper who’d smeared my reputation with false accusations.

The conversation concerning Lassie had been as painful as anticipated. Throughout, Cukura Kundze wept as though she’d lost her own grandchild. The only upside was that Mr. Tot had insisted on informing his son and daughter-in-law personally concerning their son’s fate.

In addition, I’d had another clash with my new neighbor, Sparky Monteil. Yeah, Sparky. Though built like a pear, the guy works hard at looking tough. Elvis hair. Badass tattoo on the side of his neck. My building superintendent, Winston, says the little twerp’s at least fifty-five.

Sparky moved into my complex sometime last spring. His boxes weren’t unpacked when the whining began. Seems Sparky hates cats. No, that doesn’t do it justice. Sparky would have every feline on the planet rounded up, bagged, and tossed into the sea.

Granted, our home owners’ association has a no-pets policy. But since Birdie and I are away so much in Charlotte, and since the little guy never sets paw outside the condo when in residence, I’ve been granted an exemption. Sparky is fighting to have that revoked.

Sparky exited the elevator as I was waiting in the lobby for Ryan. This morning’s grievance concerned turds in the courtyard.

Sorry, pal. My cat’s not with me this trip.

On top of all that, I was once again freezing.

The heater in Ryan’s Jeep wasn’t state of the art. The windows were frosted, and I could feel cold rising through my boots, up my legs, and into my pelvis. I suspected the only warmth I’d experience all day would be that leaching from the cup I clutched in gloved hands.

Our destination lay approximately fifty kilometers northwest of Montreal in Oka. When I hear the town name I think of three things: Mohawks, monks, and monastery cheese.

The last two are interrelated.

In 1815 a group of monks settled in Brittany and created a cheese called Port Salut. Six decades later their brainchild was the rage of Paris. Didn’t matter. In 1880 the army of the French Third Republic seized the order’s Abbaye de Bellefontaine, and the cheese-making Trappists were booted from the country.

At the invitation of Quebec Sulpicians, eight of the exiles set sail for Canada. From their vast holdings, the host brothers gave the immigrants land on the north shore of Lac des Deux-Montagnes. Naming the property La Trappe after Soligny-la-Trappe, the order’s 1662 founding site, the new arrivals established L’Abbaye Notre-Dame du Lac.

At its peak, the monastery boasted upward of two hundred monks. By the early twenty-first century only twenty-eight remained, most over seventy years of age. Today, L’Abbaye is no longer a working monastery but serves as a nonprofit center for preservation of the site’s heritage.

In making their transatlantic journey back in the day, the Trappist travelers brought with them their treasured recette de fromage and, once settled, the churning of cow’s milk began anew. As in the homeland, the cheese was a box office hit.

As far as I know, the brothers still oversee the production of Oka Trappist Cheese, which, over the years, has evolved a new-world character uniquely its own.

The Mohawk thing is a bit more complicated.

In the summer of 1990, the “Oka Crisis” made international news. Essentially a land dispute between the town and the Mohawk community of Kanesatake, the confrontation lasted from mid-July until late September, and resulted in a commuters’ nightmare, a public relations fiasco for the government, and the death of one Sûreté du Québec officer.

In a nutshell, here’s what happened.

The town of Oka wanted to expand a golf course onto land containing a Mohawk burial ground and a sacred grove of pines. The natives screamed sacrilege. Their appeal was denied and construction of the back nine began. Incensed, tribal members barricaded access to the terrain in dispute.

No big deal. The cops clear the protesters, right? Wrong.