Brian Freeman - The Bone House

Mark pushed past Hoffman, their shoulders colliding. For an old man, Hoffman was solid, and even drunk he was fast. Mark never saw the punch coming. Hoffman's left fist shot up from his hips and connected with the underside of Mark's jaw, snapping his head back. Mark staggered. The pie tumbled from his hand, spilling out of the box as it fell to the floor, spraying cherries and filling on to the ground like blood. His phone flew. Mark lost his balance, stumbling backward into shelves lined with canning jars. The shelves dropped, and dozens of jars clattered downward and rained a mess of sauce and glass. His face and clothes dripped with stains.

Mark regained his balance. He rubbed his jaw, which was stiff, and ran his tongue along the back of his teeth to see if any were loose. He shook his clothes, and bits of glass sprinkled around him. The crowd in the shop around them froze in silence. Hoffman cocked his fists, expecting Mark to retaliate, but Mark had no intention of hitting an old man. He just wanted to get out of the store.

Hoffman rooted his feet so Mark couldn't pass. 'Nobody thinks I've got the courage, but I do. I'm going to make sure you get what's coming to you.'

Mark tried to keep a lid on his temper, which raced to a boil. He felt trapped as people closed in between the aisles. 'My wife and I almost died yesterday, Mr Hoffman. I'll tell you this only once. If anyone comes after us again, it will be the last thing they ever do.'

'You can't threaten me, and you can't scare me.'

'I'm promising you,' Mark said.

'I'm not afraid of someone who messes with teenage girls.'

Mark was tired of denying it. Tired of protesting his innocence. Angry with the world. 'Get the hell out of my way,' he snapped.

'Your wife knows the truth. I told her. She knows what kind of man you are.'

Something snapped in Mark. He couldn't stop himself. By mentioning

Hilary, Peter Hoffman stepped across a line that no one could cross. Mark's muscles wound up into knots, ready to burst. He backhanded his left arm like a club into Hoffman's chest and shoulder. Despite his military bearing, Hoffman was no match for Mark's strength. The blow lifted the man off his feet and drove him sideways, where he crumpled into a card table that collapsed under his weight. Hoffman dropped, hitting the floor hard. Broken glass scored the man's face and drew blood.

'Shit,' Mark hissed under his breath.

The older man squirmed to get up, but he couldn't get his balance. Mark bent over with an outstretched hand to help the man up, but Hoffman swatted the hand away. Mark saw rage and humiliation in his face.

The crowd closed in on all sides, rumbling with menace around him. Mark's claustrophobia increased, and the store suddenly felt small. He needed to get out. He needed a chance to breathe in the open air. He felt arms grasping for him, trying to wrestle him to the ground like a prisoner, but he pushed past the people in the store and bolted for his truck.

Hilary hung up her phone with a pang of worry. She'd tried to reach Amy Leigh in Green Bay half a dozen times since the previous night, and each time, the call had gone straight into voicemail.

Wherever Amy was, she wasn't answering her phone.

She knew it didn't mean that anything was wrong. The girl had sounded drunk during her odd phone call. It was possible that Amy was embarrassed about making the call and was now ducking Hilary's attempts to reach her. Things like that happened at college parties. You drank too much, and you no longer knew what you were doing or why. Even so, that wasn't the girl that Hilary remembered.

Her former student had always reminded Hilary of herself in her high school days: confident, bubbly, determined, and sometimes naive. The girl was self-conscious about her larger frame and determined to make everyone forget it when she was on the dance floor. Amy was religious, just as Hilary was, and she came from a solid Chicago family. On the other hand, she was also young, and fun, and prone to impetuous mistakes, like any student away from home.

Hilary just wanted to make sure that Amy was OK. She dialed again. Voicemail. She left another message. 'Amy, it's Hilary. Listen, sorry to be a pest, but could you call me back? I'm a little concerned.'

She wouldn't have made a big deal of Amy's strange call, but the girl had talked about Florida in the midst of her ramblings. More than that, she'd said the one name that made Hilary sit up and take notice.

Glory.

Hadn't she? It had all happened so fast on the phone, and Amy's voice was a drunken whisper, and Hilary had barely understood the words. Amy had been talking about her dance coach, Gary Jensen. Then she'd said it. Glory. Or maybe Hilary had simply had Glory on her own mind, and when Amy said Gary's name again, she'd heard Glory instead. Maybe she was hearing what she wanted to hear. Maybe.

Hilary padded into the kitchen and poured herself a third cup of coffee from the pot. She wore a roomy sweatshirt, running shorts, and white socks. Her blond hair fell loosely about her shoulders; it was clean and wet from her shower. Her body ached, but it was mostly a pleasant ache now. A post-sex ache. She'd come home not realizing how badly she and Mark needed each other, like both of them grasping for a lifeline. The result was a wild, almost animal coupling, the way it had been in the early days, when they were getting to know each other's bodies. She could still feel him where he'd held her and been inside her.

It made her believe in him all over again. He couldn't fake what he felt for her. There had been a time when she, like Amy, was naive about relationships, but she'd left that part of herself far behind in her twenties. She had open eyes about men and about Mark. If Cab Bolton had a witness, then the witness was wrong. Whatever had happened in Florida, it wasn't what everyone else thought.

Florida. Glory.

Hilary was sure that Amy had said Glory's name.

She took her coffee into their bedroom, booted up her desktop computer, and logged into her Facebook home page. When she called up a listing of her online friends, she found Amy Leigh on the third page. She clicked on Amy's profile and saw that the girl had updated her status at 6:47 p.m. the previous day.

Amy's status read: I'm going into the lion's den.

Hilary didn't think that Amy sounded like a girl heading for a college party. She reviewed the rest of the girl's profile page and noticed a comment from another Green Bay student that had been posted earlier this morning. Hey, Ames, missed you in class today.

Hilary didn't like that at all.

She replayed the brief, hushed phone call from Amy in her head. She didn't know if there was anything she could glean from it. The call itself had only lasted a few seconds. Even so, whether Amy had said Gary or Glory, she had definitely mentioned Florida, and more important than that, Amy had been in Florida when everything had happened. She was a dancer, like Tresa. So maybe she saw something. Or maybe she knew something. What?

Amy talked about her coach. My coach. Do you know him?

Hilary knew most of the college coaches who worked with dancers in the Midwest, because she'd had to counsel students on choosing colleges, mostly in Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. She knew the name Gary Jensen, but she'd never met the man. His name had made its way around the dance grapevine when he'd been hired as a physical education instructor at Green Bay and been put in charge of the dance team. She didn't know much about his background, but from what she'd seen, he'd done well with the girls. She remembered an email from Amy two years earlier in which Amy talked about the enhanced physical training regimen their coach had implemented, which was something Hilary always emphasized herself. It wasn't just about coordination and practice; it was about conditioning.