Old school bones, p.12
Old School Bones, page 12
She says it again. Things will be OK.
“I don’t think so,” he says. “A white truck hit me, ran me off the road. He was laying for me. Do you understand?”
“Maybe it just seemed that way.”
“The driver had this look. Like he knew me. Knew what I had found in the attic. Knew that I’m on the trail of Liberty Baker’s killer. And he was shredding me. I had this weird thought that I could already be dead. That you might already be gone … Gracie too.”
She takes his good hand.
“We’re OK. Don’t worry about us. Get some sleep, Michael. I’ve called your aunt in New Bedford. Your uncle and your father are due back from their fishing trip in two days. You’re safe here. I’ll see you in the morning.”
She presses her head against Danny’s shoulder, smells the subtle scent of ewe in the sweater’s wool as the arms of her lover draw her in.
“Just hold me, please!”
Even at this time of the night, even after the hospital visiting hours are over, the parking garage at the Brigham is full of cars. None moving. When she looks out through the windshield of Danny’s car the place seems a tomb, complete with transports for the afterlife. Florescent lights cast violet pools. But mostly the shadows rule. The mist, the ceiling leaking rain, the concrete walls slimy with dampness.
“Can we go now?”
“Not yet, I need this touching. I’ve been through hell.”
“You know I’m here for you.” She nuzzles Danny’s neck, chest.
“But I’m feeling a little—I don’t know—stupid, I guess.”
“Why?”
“What kind of fool sits in a parking garage at night, for hours, waiting … for a girlfriend who’s off mooning over someone else?”
She lifts her head, searches for Danny’s eyes, finds them. “That’s not fair. Someone tried to kill him. You know that?”
“You believe him? You sure he didn’t just make this up?”
“Why would someone ever invent such a thing? I mean, the poor guy almost died. I don’t think you’re being exactly …”
“Hey, why was he even in Tolchester? Shouldn’t he be fishing or something?”
She takes a deep breath, not sure she wants to tell about the Club Tropical. Or the rest.
“We heard a rumor about a kind of clubhouse for a secret society in Hibernia House.”
“You went looking?”
“Yes.”
“You and him. He’s gotten to be kind of a nosy guy, don’t you think?”
“I wasn’t going in that place alone.”
“You could have taken me.”
She kisses the heal of Danny’s jaw. “You’re right. It was a really dumb idea, but …”
“But. But you didn’t find anything, right? He was going back to wherever. To New Bedford?”
“We found a room. In the attic. A hidden crawl space with loose floor boards. There was a body.”
“No way!”
“Mostly bones. And a school uniform like they used to wear when Tolchie was a boys school.”
“Another dead kid?”
“This one sure wasn’t suicide.”
“Did you call the police?”
“We were going to do that today, but now.”
“Don’t do it.”
“What?”
“Maybe the fisherman’s right. Maybe someone really did try to kill him. Maybe keeping that room and that body a secret is important enough to kill for.”
“You think this has something to do with Liberty, too? This body’s a clue to who killed her?”
“My advice is to leave it alone. Unless you want to end up like Liberty or your pal Michael.”
“What do you mean?”
“If anything happened to you, I … Can you just let Liberty rest in peace?”
“But—”
“Walk away from that house for good. Leave that room the way you found it. Close up the floor on those bones. I’ll give you a hand.”
“But after what has happened, how can we be sure any of us is safe? I mean, Liberty and another child are dead. Look what happened to Mi—”
“Did you let him make love to you?”
28
GRACIE hears the shouting even before she reaches the side door to Beedle Cottage. She has forgotten the novel Heart of Darkness in her bedroom. Needs the book for English class, has hiked all the way across campus in the rain to get it.
Now this. Shrill women’s voices. And Bumbledork’s bark.
She can see him through the living room window, pacing in front of the dean and Doc P who sit side-by-side on the couch. She knows that scowl on the headmaster’s face. The bully, the dickhead.
But she is not used to seeing fear in the eyes of these women, a gray pall on their faces.
She backs away from the window so they cannot see her.
Something’s going down in there. Like maybe this is about her little excursion on the Red Line, and that Brazilian bar, yesterday. Maybe Bumbledork thinks the dean and the doc have not been aggressive enough in their supervision, punishment.
She wants to listen. But from outside, all she can hear are the high and low notes of the voices. No words.
When she reaches the side door of Beedle Cottage that enters into the back stairwell, she squeezes the latch slowly, softly, until it releases. She unlaces her Doc Martens, leaves them and her black umbrella on the threshold. Slips inside in her stocking feet. Does not move until the voices swell in fierce debate. Then she tiptoes up the back stairs to her room, grabs the novel she needs off the floor by her bed, starts down the stairs again. Voices in the living room swell and fade, her ears a cheap radio tuned to a distant station.
Until she hears Bumbledork’s posh Midlands accent utter Liberty’s name and launch into a tirade.
She stops halfway down the stairs, puts her right ear to the wall separating the stairs from the living room. Listens.
“Do you have any idea the kind of things that child wrote in her journal?”
One of the women groans.
“Well, I’ll bloody well tell you. Enough dynamite to make the three of us look like fools and knaves and … You get the picture?”
A long silence. She feels sweat starting to bloom on the back of her neck. The rain makes a low drumming sound on the roof and the half-frozen ground outside.
Finally a woman clears her throat. The dean speaks.
“Don’t worry, Malcolm. Everything is under control. What happens behind closed door stays behind closed doors.”
He says something under his breath she can’t understand until he clears his throat, booms, “Dr. Patterson, do you think you can let sleeping dogs lie? Can we all be on the same page here? For the good of the school?”
Gracie gags at his clichés, calls him a filthy prick in her mind. Holds her breath until her mentor breaks the silence.
“Why not, Dr. Sufridge?! Sure. But maybe Gracie Liu and I have over-stayed Denise’s hospitality here at Beedle Cottage. We should find permanent accommodations, don’t you think? Say, back in Hibernia House?”
She pictures Bumbledork’s face scalded red with Doc P’s proposal. Her quid pro quo.
Then she slips into her shoes, slides out the door, heads for English class. Wondering whether Doc P wants to move back to Hibernia House to take a longer look at the Club Tropical, to investigate it in depth, to protect the evidence. The clues to Liberty’s killer. Maybe stuff she doesn’t even know about.
29
THE cop told her, “You want to talk, you got to meet me over chowder. I’m a sucker for chowder … and pretty girls!”
So … So she has canceled her appointments, split from Tolchester, school, Boston. Left Michael in the hands of his nurses. Now she’s driving down South County Road on the Upper Cape. Wimpy’s, a local seafood place in Osterville, seems like an odd place to meet this man who Michael calls, o padrinho, the godfather. Lou Votolatto.
And, Jesus, she could use a godfather right now. If he’s not just an old lech.
“Hey, Pocahontas. Over here,” a guy shouts at her from across the street as she exits her parked Saab.
“Excuse me!”
“We going to have a chowder fest, sweetheart?”
“Detective?” She squints into the sunlight at the shaggy figure leaning against the blue Ford.
Michael has described the padrinho as a sort of Dirty Harry type, but the man she sees reminds her more of a vacuum cleaner salesman: thick salt-and-pepper hair bushing out in about five directions, shadow of a beard.
“Minga! You’re a knockout. I mean the way Rambo talks about you I got the impression you were easy on the eyes, but, honey …”
For a moment she feels like getting back into her car, just driving for about a hundred hours. Who the hell does this guy think he is calling her “Pocahontas,” a knockout? Is this how Michael sees her too?
“Hey, good lookin’, how about putting a little smile on your face for Uncle Lou.”
He’s crossing the street to her. Weird guy in the Sears suit and topcoat. Before she knows it, he holds her hands in his bony fingers, kisses her on both cheeks. Crazy damn Italian!
“Yo …! Detective!”
“Yo? What’s with this yo? Am I making you nervous, princesa?”
She steps back, her eyes darting off, seizing on the only cloud in the sky to carry her away from this creep. Maybe all the way to Aquinnah.
“I’ve got to go. This is a mistake.”
“No, this is an obligation. A mistake is finding a can of Red Bull laced with GHB at a crime site and not telling the police. A mistake is conspiring to impersonate a police officer. A mistake is protecting the killers of children.”
“I didn’t.” Her cheeks color. “You know what? I don’t care if you’re Michael’s friend. Fuck you, asshole!”
He bows deeply. A stage bow, from the waist. In the bright sun of a March morning, on the main street of Osterville.
“I’m sorry. I deserved that. And more … But …”
“What?” She turns her back on him.
“I had to press your buttons. I had to know, Awasha Patterson.”
“Know what?”
“Whether you can be trusted. Whether you have any self-respect. Whether you have the courage to spit in the Devil’s face … Or whether you’re as strung out as you brother.”
“You know Ronnie?”
She takes her soup spoon, scours the bottom of her bowel to capture the last of the chowder, licks the spoon clean.
“Pretty good stuff, huh?” The detective smiles at her across the table. They are in a booth in the darkest corner of the restaurant. The light in Wimpie’s today more of a brassy haze than anything else.
“I forgot how much I missed Cape cooking. My mother used to always keep a pot of fish chowder simmering on the stove during the winter when Ronnie and I were kids.”
“Can I ask you what went wrong for your brother?”
“Ronnie’s my twin. My little brother by ten minutes.”
He rubs his eyes. “I’ve sat in a couple of his bail hearings. He seems like a decent guy. A sweet guy. But he’s way into the system. DUI, disturbing the peace, assault … Should I continue?”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“First it was always being the odd kid in school, the Indian, and moving around the Cape and the islands a lot. Then it was the Army and Iraq. After that …”
“Alcohol, pharmaceuticals, violence.”
She stares at the specks of pepper stuck on the bottom of her chowder bowl.
“Sounds like a good candidate for a rehab program. I could maybe help if you …”
She shakes her head no, feels tears flooding her eyes. “He won’t listen to me. Only our mother. Now with her gone … Do you know how I’ve tried to …?”
“It must tear you up.”
“You have no idea. Liberty Baker killed. And poor Michael. That jeep wreck. I must have really done something terrible in another life to bring on all of this. You know, Detective?”
“Lou.”
“Michael thinks the world of you.”
“The boy’s lost his marbles.”
“No … Someone just ran him into the woods.”
“I think he’s probably lucky to be alive.”
“Maybe he should have just gone fishing with his father and his uncle. It sounds like he loves to fish.”
The problem is, says the cop, Michael hates injustice like a bull hates red. He’s also a sucker for long shots. And damsels in distress. The kid’s got an Indiana Jones complex that’s going to get him killed someday if someone like her doesn’t take him out of the game.
“What are you saying?”
“You don’t think the boy has feelings? You don’t have a crush on him?”
“You don’t even know me.”
“But I know him. And he’s forgotten almost everything he knew about the law since he met you. He’s a complete loose cannon.”
“Then thank the heavens he has you for an angel.”
“I’m no angel. I can’t save him. Can’t you see that? Look what’s happened to him now!”
“Someone killed one of my girls. And now we’ve found another dead kid.”
“You can’t help them.”
“There’s something evil at work in my school, Detective. It needs to be stopped. And the school seems to want to push the whole thing under the rug.”
“Maybe you’re right. But I’d say you’ve stumbled into something toxic. You need to leave what happened to Liberty Baker, and that bag of bones, for professionals. Or you, Rambo, and this teenager—Gracie Whoever—are going to end up in the morgue.”
“Are you saying you can take it from here?”
“No! Jesus. Word gets around I’m connected with this scheme, I may as well just march myself before the judge, get down on my knees and plead for mercy.”
“Last night a friend told me to close up those bones in the floor, seal the attic and avoid the police in Tolchester. Said they were no doubt tied in with the school and the cover-up around Liberty’s death. Like someone is probably paying them off.”
He shrugs. “It happens. Don’t take this the wrong way. I’m not saying I’m in favor of letting a killer, or killers, go free. I can’t tell you what to do. But if you value your job, your life—and the lives of Michael and that Chinese girl, the student—maybe you should listen to your friend and try to let go of your suspicions. For everyone’s sake. If you drop it, Michael will have to find a healthier outlet for his passions. Know what I mean?”
She feels a fit of the jitters starting in her thighs and upper arms, spreading to her fingers, toes. “I’m scared. I have this feeling something really bad is about to happen, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
“I know, sweetheart … But wouldn’t it be useful to know what kind and color of car Kevin Singleton drives?”
30
WHEN he opens his eyes, there is a soaking wet Chinese girl standing over his bed. Her bobbed hair plastered to her cheeks, the purple streaks brighter with the gloss of water. Her Red Army overcoat steaming in the hospital heat.
“In case you’re wondering, it’s fucking raining again.”
“So I shouldn’t be in any hurry to get out of this place?”
“What’s the point, right?” She forces a smile. Sets a little potted jade plant on his solar plexis. “I almost forgot. Here’s something to remind you that spring is coming.”
He can see her trying not to wince as she looks at his battered, bandaged face.
“It’s good to see you, Gracie. Take off your coat. There must be towels in the bath. You can—”
“Michael …” She doesn’t move. Just stands there, dripping, holding the jade plant on his belly. Looking down at him. Her lower lip starting to quiver. “I’m sooooo sorry. This is all my fault. I should have never—”
“Hey. It’s OK.”
“If I hadn’t begged you to help us, none of this …”
He puts his good hand on one of hers. “I’m an adult. I make my own choices. It’s your job to take care of Gracie, earn good grades. Write smart essays. Get ready for your swimming championships. And spring break. Isn’t that soon?”
She wipes her eyes on the sleeve of her coat. “Next weekend. Swimming interschols are up at Andover. And then the break.”
“It will be good for you to get away from here for a while.”
“Tory and I were going to visit Justine in California. But now … I don’t know. I mean what with your accident, the Club Tropical and …”
“And what?”
She puts the jade plant on his nightstand, wipes her eyes and nose on her coat sleeve again. “I went back up there, Michael. Like after I heard about your wreck.”
“Back to the attic?”
“I saw the bones.”
He tries to rise off the bed. “Jesus Cristo! Why in the name of God?!”
“I had this feeling. Like something was going really wrong and so I—”
“You have to stay away from that place.”
“But—”
“No buts. Will you sit down? Promise me you will stay away from Hibernia House.”
Suddenly she feels like that girl June Woo in The Joy Luck Club. Like dumb, inadequate, not Ninja Girl at all. “I had to go up there and see what … Before … Please don’t be mad at me.”
“Before what, Gracie?”
“Michael, I’m sorry. The day of your wreck, I came back to Beedle Cottage to get a book I forgot for class. Doc P, Dean Pasteur and the headmaster were having some kind of like really heavy talk in the living room.”
“I don’t understand.”
She tells him about Bumbledork’s coercion tactics. About how Denise Pasteur was quick to close ranks. How Awasha seemed to buckle under the pressure, but angled for her old apartment back in Hibernia House.
“That’s it?”
“Except that after seventh period I got called into the dean’s office. She told me I am being moved into a room with a new girl in Briarcroft Hall. And Doc P is going to an off-campus apartment.”
“Is that OK with you? With her?”
