A Haunting of the Bones (2 page)

She had disappeared in 1976, when Bell was three years old and Shirley was nine. They had been raised—if that's what you could rightfully call a noxious combination of cruelty and indifference—by their father, Donnie Dolan, until the night when he turned his grotesque leer in Bell's direction and Shirley murdered him, an act that had sent her to prison for three decades. She was paroled a year and a half ago.

Dental records were being sought to nail down the identification, but the most plausible initial conclusion was that Teresa Dolan at last had been found.

“There's nothing to see out there,” Fogelsong had told Bell a second time during his brief call. She hadn't spoken since he'd broken the news. “Heard from the principal investigator at the lab—that's what she called herself—and she promised to let us know once they get more information,” he added. “But for now, Belfa, I'd recommend just sitting tight. I wanted to call and let you know—you've got a right to know, and I'll leave it to you to tell Shirley—but until they can confirm the results, there's really nothing for you to do or to see out at the site. Okay?”

“I'm going.”

“Like I said, there's really no point because right now there's nothing to—”

“I'm going.”

And then she'd hung up on the sheriff. It was not Bell's habit to hang up on anyone, much less a valued colleague and a cherished friend who had seen her through the roughest patches of her life, who had known her since she was ten years old and who had encouraged her to go to college and law school and who deserved a large share of the credit for her having carved out a decent life for herself after a horrific childhood.

But she had to go. She couldn't just sit in JP's and drink coffee. She had to be in motion. She had bolted out of the booth—she heard, from somewhere behind her, a startled Jackie asking, “Bell? Everything okay?,” but she didn't hesitate—and slammed out the door and hurried down the block and flung herself in the Explorer, and she drove out to the area Fogelsong had named. She drove too hard, too fast.

And now here she was.

* * *

“Rick was the first one to realize there was something down there,” the man said. He was considerably older than the bandana-clad students hovering at the periphery, and he was dressed in gray slacks, a lavender linen shirt, and a floppy white hat with a drawstring knotted under his chin. Bell had barely glanced at him during their walk over the rugged terrain, but now she had time for a more careful appraisal. Fogelsong had told her that the person in charge was Dr. Peter Burnside, the professor whose class was conducting the excavation work.

Burnside, tipped off by the sheriff, had met her at her vehicle and escorted her to the site. Fogelsong wasn't there. He had business on the other side of the county that he couldn't postpone.

“Rick called me over to take a look,” the professor continued. “I told everyone to stop digging and back away. And then the forensics unit took over. We moved to another section.”

Bell returned her gaze to the shallow indentation in the ground. She estimated it to be about five feet long and two feet wide, a cradle of reddish-brown dirt.

“Mrs. Elkins?” Burnside said. The silence had gone on too long for anyone's comfort.

Bell looked up. “Which one is Rick?”

“I'm Rick.” A young man—thin, but with a visible strength to him and a sheen of sweat on his skin—stepped forward. He was holding a rake. From under the rim of his maroon ball cap, scruffy orangey-blond hair stuck out. The shade matched the patchy hair on his face. As he moved, the canteen hooked to his belt with a shiny new carabineer joggled against his lean hip. “Rick Drayton, ma'am. I'm a junior anthropology major.”

He put out his hand. Bell ignored it.

“So, what were you doing? Tell me exactly,” she said.

“Ma'am?” He was confused. He didn't know what she meant.

“When you found it,” Bell said testily. “The remains. What were you doing? Digging? Raking? Walking? Texting? Skipping along and singing a show tune?
What?
”

The student looked at Burnside, who shrugged.

“Well, ma'am,” Drayton said, still avoiding Bell's eyes, “we've divided up the sections we're excavating into a big grid. That's how we keep track. I was in charge of this section here and I—”

“What do you call it?”

“Ma'am?”

“This section. The section where you found the body. What name did you give it?”

“Well, first off, it wasn't really a body, ma'am, it was more like some bones that looked like a bunch of sticks until I got closer and—”

“
Whatever
.” Bell's voice was suffused with frustration and impatience. “Whatever,” she repeated. “Just tell me what you called this section. The section where you found it.”

Drayton looked once more at his professor. The young man was plainly afraid of saying the wrong thing, of pissing off this woman even more.

“Mrs. Elkins,” Burnside said. He talked gently, slowly. “I think Rick is confused. He's not sure what you're asking him.”

“Really,” Bell snapped back. Not gently. Not slowly. “I thought I was pretty clear. I guess the intellectual requirements for college admission aren't what they used to be. Let me try again.” Mockingly, she enunciated with exaggerated care: “I want to know what you called this section when you set up your goddamned grid.”

Drayton, stung by her insult as well as her tone, glared at her. Fine. He wouldn't try anymore to be sensitive. “So we called it Fourteen-B. Okay? The grid lines are numbers and letters. Okay? Longitude and latitude. Okay? Everybody uploads the grid on their iPads and off we go. Then, when a section is finished, we mark that and then we reload the whole thing. Okay?”

“Okay.” Bell swept a hand over the spot. She was no longer aware of the other students or even Professor Burnside; her world had narrowed to the shallow cavity in the dirt and the kid named Rick. “So what did you do?”

“First I cleared off the surface debris.”

“Like what?”

“Like—rocks. Dirt. Seeds. Broken-off branches.” His reply flew back at her like a vicious return of serve in a tennis match between rivals. “Just your basic outdoor shit, okay?”

“And then what?”

“Then I got down on my hands and knees.”

“Your hands and knees.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because that's how we do it. When we come across something, we don't use rakes or shovels or even trowels or toothbrushes. We get real close and we do it by hand. That's how we're trained, okay? We don't want to destroy the things we're out here to find.”

“Okay.” She was settling down. The agitation in her voice was receding. “And then what?”

“I was sifting through the dirt, and I probably went a little deeper than I should have. I felt something hard. Hard and sort of long and skinny. So I called over to Professor Burnside. Asked him to give it a look.”

Burnside took over the narrative. “Tell you the truth, when I first heard Rick calling me over, I was thinking he'd probably dug up some animal bones. Until I saw it.”

“Saw what?”

Burnside sucked in air. Let it back out. Bell's intensity had rattled him, just as much as it had rattled his students. “Two things, really. First, as we proceeded to go deeper with our bare hands, we came across a rounded piece that we knew—well, we suspected—was a skull. Or part of one, anyway. Definitely a human skull. And there was another thing.”

Bell waited.

“There was,” the professor went on, “a piece of cloth. Light blue. With a pattern on it—clouds, I'd say, if I had to guess. Maybe it was clothing. Maybe something else. But it was definitely fabric. That's when we called the university's forensics team. We went back to work, but we gave this place a wide berth. We went to a section about three-quarters of a mile away. We didn't want to take a chance on destroying something important. When the forensics team got back to us with the preliminary report—there was actually some DNA on file that could help make a positive ID—we contacted your sheriff right away.” He looked at Bell. “Believe me, Mrs. Elkins, we meant no disrespect to you or your family, and if we'd had any idea that what we'd stumbled upon was—”

“I know.” She gazed up at the mountain that had been watching them all the while. “I know.” She left the mountain to its own devices, seeking out Rick Drayton once more. She'd been hard on him. Too hard. Her desperate, lunging hunger for answers had blocked out everything else. Yet that was no excuse. She needed to make it right.

“Listen,” Bell said. “I want to apologize. I was rude to you and I'm really sorry. This is all just so—”

He quickly cut her off with a smile and a wave of his hand. “No problem.”

Bell envied him his ability to heal so quickly. It was, she knew, an attribute of youth—but then again, she'd never had it, not even when she was young.

“The thing is,” she continued, still trying to explain herself, “if this turns out to be my mother, I have to tell my sister. And when we talk about it, I want to be able to say that they found her in—” Bell stopped. She swallowed, and then resumed. “To say that they found her in section Fourteen-B. I don't want to say that they found her in a hole in the ground out in the middle of nowhere. Section Fourteen-B. Not exactly poetic, but it sounds a lot better for a last resting place, don't you think? Section Fourteen-B.” She gave Drayton and the rest of the students a thin, rueful smile. “Beats the hell out of saying ‘A dirty old hole in the ground.' ”

A few of the students nodded, just to be polite, but most of them stared at their feet or rubbed a thumb along the handle of a rake or a shovel. They didn't really know what to say or do. They didn't know her story, its violence and its complications, and they didn't yet understand the kind of chokehold that the past could maintain on a life. They were too young to understand that, even the ones whose own histories had a healthy portion of raggedness and kinks. Because when you're young, Bell knew, you always assume that you'll live your way past any of it mattering—or at least mattering enough to affect every decision you make, every angle from which you regard the world. You think you're more resilient than that. You think you can simply slough off your past, shedding it like the dead skin of a bad sunburn after a day at the beach.

Her cell rang.

“Elkins.”

“Bell, it's Nick. You out at the scene?”

“Yeah.”

“I'm still tied up over here in Chester.” He paused. “Wish I could be there with you. I mean—Lord, it can't be easy. Looking at the spot where— “ He paused again, longer this time. “How are you doing with all this?”

“Fine. I'm fine.” He knew better than to ask her that.

“Okay,” he said. “Well, I'm calling because I heard from the forensics lab again. At the university.”

She waited. She had an inkling of what he was about to say, but hoped she was wrong, because it would make this day even darker.

“The marks on the skull,” he said. “They confirmed it. Evidence of significant fractures. Very significant. At least one of them would've been a lethal blow. Which means there's an excellent probability she was murdered.”

Bell didn't say anything. Her father's face—dark, ugly, hungry—reared up in her thoughts.
The bastard killed her. Just like Shirley said
. Donnie Dolan had claimed that their mother abandoned the family, but Shirley didn't buy it; each time he muttered it Shirley would nod, so as not to rile him, but then she'd give Bell a look. The look said:
like hell
. Bell was too young to feel anything but confusion and fear. Once they became adults, she and Shirley had only speculated about their mother's fate a handful of times, and all they had to go on were fraying memories, stray threads of guesswork, half-remembered dreams. Nothing solid. Nothing definitive. No one other than their father had ever talked about her in their presence. So there had never been any resolution to the question of what really happened to her.

Until now.

“Bell?” the sheriff said. “You still there?”

She was. Physically, that is. Emotionally, she was far away; she was speeding back into the past, traveling toward the center of her memories and the seat of her dread.

* * *

Of course she'd asked questions. Kids always ask questions about everything: fireflies; earthworms; where the stars go when the sun comes up. Naturally she'd asked questions about her mother.

“But
why
?,” Belfa had said. She was five years old at the time. Her mother hadn't been around for quite a while—later Bell would do the math and realize that, at the time of this encounter, her mother had been missing for at least two years.

Her father was sitting at the kitchen table. She was standing about a foot away from him. Experience had taught her to stay out of his reach. He was drinking from a gallon jug of milk. That was how he always drank it. He'd hoist the funny-shaped plastic container, arching his back and lining up the spout with his big red mouth, and he'd close his eyes and receive the continuous river of milk. Belfa was fascinated by the sight of his Adam's apple bobbing up and down, as if it were some kind of primitive semaphore:
Stay back. Stay back
.

Once, she had tried drinking her milk the same way. She was sitting at the table by herself. The jug of milk was almost empty, making it light enough for her to lift. She reared back her head and put her lips against the round opening. At the last minute she remembered to close her eyes, the way her father did.

Suddenly the jug was flying out of her grasp, knocked away by a swiped hand. Then she felt a stinging slap on the side of her face. The blow was so hard—and she was so small—that the force of it nearly sent her tumbling out of her chair.