The bones, p.1
The Bones, page 1
The Bones
The Rebecca Underhill Trilogy
Vincent Zandri
Published by Vincent Zandri, 2025.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
THE BONES
First edition. April 6, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 Vincent Zandri.
ISBN: 979-8230092278
Written by Vincent Zandri.
Also by Vincent Zandri
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Also By Vincent Zandri
Begin your Moonlight journey today with a FREE copy of MOONLIGHT FALLS, the first novel in the Thriller and Shamus Award-winning series. | Or visit WWW.VINZANDRI.COM to nab all of Vin’s thrillers and mysteries. | PRAISE FOR VINCENT ZANDRI
"Beware...beware! Beware of the big green dragon that sits on your doorstep. He eats little boys...puppy dog tails, and big, fat snails. Beware, take care...beware!" | —What Little Boys are Made Of, Eighteenth Century Nursery Rhyme
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Also By Vincent Zandri
Begin your Moonlight journey today with a FREE copy of MOONLIGHT FALLS, the first novel in the Thriller and Shamus Award-winning series.
Or visit WWW.VINZANDRI.COM to nab all of Vin’s thrillers and mysteries.
PRAISE FOR VINCENT ZANDRI
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The Bones
Vincent Zandri
"Beware...beware! Beware of the big green dragon that sits on your doorstep. He eats little boys...puppy dog tails, and big, fat snails. Beware, take care...beware!"
—What Little Boys are Made Of, Eighteenth Century Nursery Rhyme
1
Rensselaer County
Present Day
The little girl was about to disappear from the earth forever and ever. The Teacher had no choice but to cover his eyes. Who on earth wants to see a child disappear into thin air like that? They are so new, so innocent, so uneducated, so physically undeveloped. They never had a chance to know true friendship, comradeship, love, passion, or sex. They simply live for the present, and the present is so fleeting, is it not?
“I’m counting, Mary Mary, Quite Contrary,” he said. “I’m counting to ten. Tell me when you disappear, you little devil.”
“If I disappear,” the eleven-year-old, dark-haired and brown-eyed girl, said, “then I would not be telling you anything about anything, now would I, Mr. Burrier?”
“You make a very good argument, Mary Mary,” the former schoolteacher turned tutor said. “I have raised you well when no one else wanted you. You’re getting very smart now that you’re growing up fast and have become a woman in the official, physiological meaning of the word. But to me, you’re still my little Mary Mary Quite Contrary.”
“Not anymore,” she said. “Soon I’ll be leaving your home and your private school and headed to high school. In just two years I will be my own woman.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “Since our time together is apparently limited, you keep disappearing and I’ll keep counting.”
Time passed as he slowly, patiently counted, from one to ten. Seconds that felt like minutes. Hours. Stephen Burrier’s mustache and goatee-framed mouth was watering, his heart pounding and his now hard sex had expanded so much he felt like it was about to explode out of his khaki trousers.
He ran both hands over his mostly bald scalp. He smoothed out the longish hair gray hair that, over time, he’d allowed to grow down the length of his neck, Ben Franklin style. It made him feel wise and somewhat handsome even if he’d never see sixty again and as his late middle-aged paunch oozed over his belt buckle like pizza dough.
While he counted, he recalled a time when he was a brand-new, young English teacher at the best country day prep school in New York’s capital city, and how all the girls and even some of the boys were hopelessly in love with him. But those days had long passed. If not for the little friends who came to live with him, along with the ones who stopped by daily, he would be completely alone.
“I’ve disappeared, Mr. Burrier,” Mary called. “Try and find me. I bet you can’t.”
“Mary Mary Quite Contrary,” he said. “I’m coming for you and when I get you, I’m not going to ever let you go.”
The teacher gazed out across the expanse of the big backyard his parents owned before him, and his grandparents before that. He owned thirty or more acres, most of which had turned into thick, second-growth woods. But he paid a lot of money to have a tall, wooden privacy fence constructed around a full acre of property that contains little hills, trees, and shrubs. He created a pond filled with fish, and a pool for those hot days when the little ones liked to swim naked.
Located at the very far end of the property was a small cemetery. At present, four headstones marked four graves. Soon, there would be one more added to the site. The headstone had already been prepared, and the soon-to-be deceased’s name was already chiseled into the stone.
The world The Teacher built not only for himself but for his little friends and private students, was a wonderful one, free of all the absurdities of the outside world. It was a place where a child could learn but, at the same time, never had to grow up. And The Teacher had made certain that his children would remain children. They were not to see a single day past puberty. It was his gift to them. A gift only God could offer. For this small but oh-so-important deed, he couldn’t help but feel a saint-like goodness swimming through his veins.
The Teacher looked out onto the trees and at each far corner of the fence. Mary was nowhere to be found in those hiding spaces.
“Too obvious,” he whispered to himself. “Too easy.”
But then he saw a shrub that, over the years, had grown tall beside the north side of the chain link swimming pool fence. He sensed movement in the dark shadows at the bottom of the shrubs.
“I see you Mary Mary Quite Contrary,” he barked. “You can’t disappear from me entirely.”
“I am,” she said. “I am completely off-world now. Soon I’ll be leaving your school for good, Mr. Burrier. I’ll be a real grownup and can live on my own. No more foster parents.”
“Oh, Mary Mary Quite Contrary,” The Teacher whispered to himself, “if only you knew how wrong you are. If only you realized the gift I am about to give you not out of kindness, but out of love.”
Reaching into the pocket of his trousers, The Teacher pulled out the red-handled switchblade. He thumbed the blade open.
“I’m coming Mary Mary Quite Contrary,” he shouted. “I’m coming to save you from the big bad world.”
2
Things haven’t been easy since my blonde-bombshell best friend and co-conspirator at the School of Art, Robyn Painter, passed away in a car crash that broke her bones and shattered my heart. Since then, her daughter, Molly, moved to California for college and now super-stardom as a young pop star. Or that’s the plan as the young Lana Del Rey wannabe explained to me over a lengthy Zoom call just the other night.
“My golly, Miss Molly, where has the time gone?” I said quietly, not to Jessica’s Molly, but to my late identical twin sister who was her namesake. “One day it’s 1985, we’re healthy as hell, and rocking out to the new REM album (how many times did we spin “Don’t Go Back to Rockville” that summer?). The next, I’m a grandma and battling Stage Four lymphoma which, by the way, sucks.”
“Hey, look on the bright side,” Molly said. “At least you had the chance to live your full life, even if Joseph William Whelan tried to end it in a most unscrupulous way when we were still budding young women. Of course, my cancer turned out to be even more of a monster. The C-bitch took me young. But that’s just me bellyaching.”
“And don’t forget the Skinner,” I said. “He wasn’t exactly the type of man...excuse me...animal, that I’d like to invite to a dinner party. Especially if we’re having the neighbors. Get it? I consider you blessed, my dear dead twin sister, for not having had to endure his horrors.”
“If I recall,” my dear Molly said, “the hairless beast who was living in a hole under the cornfield out back did indeed want to have you and the kids over for dinner. The only problem was, you were the main course.”
“As usual you stole my joke,” I said. “But you’re so right.”
The Joseph William Whelan my late twin was referring to was the man who lived in a house in the woods. As kids, Molly and I would sometimes sneak out there at night. On one of those nights, he found us playing in his abandoned house. He tried to do unspeakable things to us. For his sins, he went to prison for a long time, until the great State of New York saw fit to parole him some thirty years later. Even though Molly’s cancer had taken her life during his prison sentence, he decided to finish the job he started anyway. With me being the last twin standing, I was all he thought about while incarcerated behind the iron bars of his maximum-security prison.
