Ashes and Bones (5 page)

“Seems that part of the attraction of the garage was the world-class collection of girly magazines our young man kept stashed in there. Vintage of about 1960 or so, I don’t know where he got them—”

“I do,” Betty said. “And I spoke to the other boy’s parents
about it, too. Little brat, thinking it’s okay for him to leave that stuff in our house, and get Brian in trouble for it. You know I told his mother off.”

“That so? Well, good one of us took care of it.”

She shook Stan’s arm. “You knew about this, I told you at the time!”

“Yeah? Must have slipped my mind,” Stan said.

“Must have been a Padres game on,” Betty retorted.

“Anyway. A two-foot stack…” Stan held his hand off the floor to show just how high, wheezing with laughter, tears running down his cheeks. “Fifteen years drying out in cellars and attics, and they’d caught fire and went up—poof!” Stan could barely sit up straight now, he was laughing so hard. “All in front of the fire department, the neighbors, his mother. The whole neighborhood was finding little bits of T&A floating around for days after…”

“All right, all right, it’s not that funny,” Brian said. “Dad, you’re gonna choke.”

Stan slapped the table, still wheezing. “It
is
that funny!”

Betty looked around nervously. “Stan, you’re making a scene now,” she whispered. “And you’re embarrassing Emma.”

“Oh, she’s not. She knows boys look at girly magazines.” Stan sat up, wiped his eyes, but looked at me, a little guiltily. “You’re not embarrassed, are you, Emma?”

I shook my head. “Not me. Got any more good stories like that?”

“
Hell,
yes.”

“No!” Brian and his mother said together. Betty continued in a lower voice. “You know the rule, Stan. One story per visit. Now stop it. Eat your shrimp.”

We did manage to find other topics, and by dessert time, I’d had just enough wine to ease my sore muscles, then enough more to let me ignore them. The waitress reappeared, bearing a dangerous-looking cocktail. She set it before me.

“Excuse me, I didn’t order this,” I said.

“No, the big blond guy at the table in the other room sent it for you. He said to say, ‘sweets to the sweet.’”

“Oh, that’s, ah, nice of him. What is it?” Looked kind of like a mai tai, but I am no connoisseur of complicated drinks.

“A Suffering Bastard.”

The volcanic roar of laughter from the other room rattled the plates and glasses for several blocks.

The next day, I didn’t mind that our connecting flight from Chicago to Portland was delayed. No one likes to prolong a transcoastal trip, but for me, I was safely lost. No one could find me, I was off the radar: The only person I’d want to find me was softly snoring in the seat next to me and my cell phone was turned off. I did a little work updating my syllabuses (“accent on the
abuse
,” is what my grandfather Oscar used to say), and then, satisfied that I was caught up, pulled out a copy of
Shamela
, and started to giggle to myself. I doubt that my family is related to this Henry Fielding, as honored as I would be to discover a connection. I just never get tired of rereading his novels on eighteenth-century society. I love the fact that he can make me laugh out loud.

I looked up to check on the status of our connection. Another half hour before we boarded. I was drawn, once again, to the infinitely fascinating parade of humanity moving past me.

I looked straight into the eyes of one man. He smiled faintly—familiarly.

I returned to my book, then I looked up again. The guy, still walking slowly, was looking back at me through the crowd. He pursed his lips, blew me a silent kiss, no smile in his eyes.

The shock that someone would do that took me by surprise. What an odd, aggressive sort of thing to do. And then it struck me.

The man I’d just seen was Tony Markham.

D
EAR
G
OD…
I
STOOD UP.
B
RIAN NEEDED TO SEE;
I shook him. “Brian! Brian, I just saw Tony! We have to go after him!”

He sat bolt upright, grabbing for his backpack. “I’m up, I’m ready,” he mumbled. Then his eyes cleared. “Is that us?”

Why didn’t he get it? “Shit! No! I just saw Tony Markham!”

The wary look came into his eyes. “Em, you couldn’t have—”

I craned my neck, trying to see where Tony had gone. “We have to go after him!”

“Our flight boards in about ten minutes! We’re not—”

I knew then it was futile. “Watch my stuff!”

I dove into the river of people in the crowded hallway and ran after the man I’d seen. I could hear Brian call after me, but didn’t care. I knew what I saw.

As I wove in and out of the bodies, as fast as I could, I tried to remember what I’d actually seen. Same height, same build, maybe a little leaner, a little more muscle, was the impression I had. His hair was colored a dark and uniform
brown, no longer the white that I knew from years ago I’d expected to see. I also thought I saw a scar over Tony’s left eye, one that maybe I’d given him, kicking him in the head in my attempt to escape him at the Point. Khakis and oxford-cloth shirt, navy blazer.

I couldn’t see any one who looked like him, or rather, nearly every man I saw looked like the Tony I’d just seen. About half the guys traveling through O’Hare wore exactly the same thing. And at least half of them were the same description: late middle age, medium height, medium build. Every marketeer, consultant, sales rep, technical lead on the run from one city to another could have fit that description.

I ran as far, as fast as I could, trying to search each of the gates on both sides of the terminal hall as I went. Nothing. Soon I came to a crossroads, a food-and-services court, and knew I was out of luck.

I was being paged. It was just the loudspeakers, just Brian having the airline call me, summoning me back to the gate. To reality, I supposed he’d say.

With one last desperate look around, I resigned myself to failure and turned back for my gate.

Brian was humming with impatience; he had my bags as well as his own, ready to get on the plane. “Where were you? We’re boarding!”

“I told you. I thought I saw Tony.” I could tell how mad he was, but we didn’t have time for it now. “Here,” I said, reaching for my bag. “I’ll take that.”

“Here. Your ticket?”

“Got it.” Monosyllables and half sentences aren’t ever good signs in our house.

I was sweating profusely, shaking like an overloaded washer, by the time we found our seats. Brian stowed our bags without a word. Then he fastened his seat belt, crossed his arms, and went straight to sleep—he’s trained himself to do this. The hum of the airplane, and the rituals of takeoff are like a trigger. Sleeping keeps him from being nervous
about leaving the ground. My husband, the scientist, can’t quite rationalize human flight.

It gave me a few minutes to collect myself. I was absolutely, mortally certain that I had seen Tony. A change in hair color hadn’t fooled me, the business-camouflage clothing—so similar to what he used to wear back when we were both at Caldwell College—only made his face stand out. And it was the smile that finally made me twig to it. A lot of people can have superficial similarities, but facial habits, particularly smiles, are a dead giveaway. The scar supported it. So did the kiss, as far as I was concerned.

It wasn’t until I’d had a few minutes to think it over that I realized the implications of what I’d seen.

I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t paranoid—well, yes, I was, but for perfectly good reasons I now knew—and I wasn’t wrong. I was, however, terrified. I didn’t know why Tony should come back to bother with me. If I had a fortune in gold and was heading to the Caribbean, if I had literally gotten away with murder, why would I ever come back?

The plane leveled out and Brian woke up; he was frowning. “That was strange.”

“Yeah, it was.”

“You want to tell me what was going on?”

Okay, so we weren’t on the same page as far as what actually was strange. “I told you. I saw Tony Markham. In the airport. I had to try and catch him.”

“How could it be him? How would he know you’d be there, at that moment? Just like he couldn’t have known where we were staying to send the flowers—”

“It was him.”

His frown deepened and fixed. “Say it was Tony—”

“Brian, I know what I saw! I tried to wake you, so you could see him, too.”

“You forget; I’ve never met the man in person. Pictures and stories only. Say it was Tony. What would you have done if you’d caught him?”

The question took me aback. It was as reasonable as it was unexpected. “I don’t know. I had to follow him, at least. I probably would have caused a scene, and that would have gotten the cops to investigate, for instance.”

“You almost missed our plane.” Okay, so Brian wasn’t convinced.

“I didn’t. I wasn’t even the last person on board.”

“Emma, you went tearing off after…wait. Do you remember what happened after your grandfather died?”

“Grampa Boyce?” I knew what he was getting at, but wanted him to say it out loud.

“No, your father’s father. Oscar. Do you remember what happened?”

“Remind me.” I pulled out my backpack and began looking for the papers I’d put aside. Brian might slow down if he saw I had work; he wouldn’t if it was just pleasure reading.

“You kept seeing him everywhere. You told me you’d see him on the street, in traffic, at the library. I don’t know what the psychological phenomenon is, if you’ve just got someone on your mind or you’ve got a wish looking to be ful-filled, but I think you’re looking for Tony where he isn’t.”

My grandfather, Oscar Fielding, was one of the dearest people in the world to me. My first and best instructor in archaeology, he literally made me what I am today. And if that includes a certain talent for archaeology, then it also includes a reinforced Fielding stubbornness, too.

Brian sighed. “I think you’re just looking for trouble. I’m worried about you, Em.”

“I’m worried about me, too!” I slapped my papers down on the flimsy tray. “It was Tony! He…dammit, he blew a kiss at me!”

Brian fiddled with the catch on his tray table. “There’s no evidence—”

I could have killed Brian for discounting me so readily. Nothing could have driven me crazier. “I saw him with my own eyes!”

“Is there any problem here?”

We looked up. The cabin attendant sternly regarded us; our argument had risen above the vibration and noise of the engines and we were drawing attention to ourselves.

“No. I’m sorry,” I said. I looked at Brian. “There’s no problem.”

He put on his headphones, cranked the CD player up, and closed his eyes.

Three hours is a very long time to try not to talk to someone.

Monday morning I saw a blue-chino-covered butt sticking out from behind the refrigerator door. It was several sizes too large to be Brian’s, and I absolutely would have forbidden the crack of doom I saw lurking below where the waist-band should have been.

“Who the hell are you?” I said, marching into the kitchen.

Whoever it was started and smacked his head against the inside of the refrigerator. “Aw, jeez! Now look what you made me do. Bump my head.”

The butt backed out and a man unfolded himself from my refrigerator. Shaped like a pear—perhaps a bowling pin would have been more accurate—the guy was maybe fifty. His black hair was longish and unevenly cut so that elflocks stuck out from under his paint store gimme cap. Hooded sweatshirt in navy blue, work boots spattered with every color in the Sherwin-Williams rainbow.

He was chewing on an unlit cigar, one that was unraveled at the end, so that it looked as if it had exploded. All I knew about cigars, I learned from observing my colleague Dora Sarkes-Robinson. And even I knew that a good cigar didn’t smell or look like that.

“Yeah, I’m real sorry. Who are you?” I asked, my head throbbing without my coffee.

“Artimus Apostolides. Call me Artie. You know, you’re out of cream.”

“I don’t keep cream in the house. What are you doing, here, Artie?”

“Donald Keyser told me to come. So here I am. You really don’t have any cream? Your coffee is kind of strong.”

Ah, it was beginning to make sense. Keyser was who we thought would be doing our electrical work; he’d promised that either he or one of his people would be out to do the several jobs we needed—upgrading the electrical for the attached outbuildings so I could have my new washer and dryer out there instead of in the basement, adding the new box for the main house, some other items—as soon as possible. When we were discussing the projects with him, he’d promised us the moon. Now that we were trying to get him to do the work, he acted like we were lucky to know him. “No cream. And we were expecting you to come more than three weeks ago.”

“I’m here now. It would have been a lot easier if you could have had us here last week. Saved me some trouble.”

I bit back a retort, and watched him searching the counters. “Here we go, here we go.” He found the sugar bowl, dumped in two heaping tablespoons of sugar and stirred, then carefully replaced the wet spoon back into the sugar bowl. I felt my teeth grinding.

“Look, Artie, are we going to do a little electrical work today? Sometime soon?”

“Sure we are. Or I am—you’re not one of those kind of ladies who hover around and watch my every move, are you?”

I sighed. “Only when I’m writing the checks, Artie.”

Artie nodded, satisfied, took a big slurp of coffee, and then frowned. “Oh.”

“So what’s up first today?” I went over to the coffeepot. It was empty, but still turned on; my headache redoubled at the sight. I flicked off the switch.

“I thought I’d just get an idea of what the job was going to be.” He settled back against the countertop, and slurped some more coffee. “You’ve got to sort these things out carefully, don’t want to have to redo anything.”

I reached into the manila folder on the table. “Here’s a list of what has to be done. Mr. Keyser said the work should only take about five, six days. Tops.”

“I’m not going to be rushed, do a shoddy job. You wouldn’t want that.”

I want my coffee, you oaf, is what I want. “I don’t want a shoddy job. I do want it done quickly. Do you need me to call the alarm company, let them know the power will be out?” I had already charged up cell phones and computers, pared the food down in the fridge to those that wouldn’t spoil in a hurry, and taken all the other precautions. Several times, now.

“I’ll let you know.” He finally set his cup down, rubbed his hands, and looked around. “All right then.”

Nothing. He stood there, slurped thoughtfully.

White stabbing pains behind my eyes made it difficult to be civil. “Yes?”

He sighed. “I really like a cruller or something with my coffee in the morning, don’t you?”

“I really like my coffee in the morning, but I’m not getting that,” I said. “You’ve drunk the last of it.” I knew for a fact that buying coffee beans was on my list of errands today; we’d gone through the crumbs and the emergency coffee—the assorted samples, gifts, etc., that accumulated at the back of the cupboard—at this point.

“Did I? Oh. Your boyfriend there, he told me to help myself. Next time, you’ll have to get downstairs a little quicker, huh?”

“Husband,” I said, through gritted teeth. Couldn’t figure out if “husband” was a clarification or malediction.

“Oh.” He began to pore over the punch list, looking around as he did. “Box is downstairs?” he asked, without looking up.

“Yep, I’ll show you,” I said, eager to do anything that would get him moving.

“No, don’t trouble yourself. I’ll find it. You just go on about your business.”

I bit back another retort, in the hopes that he was underway now.

No such luck. “So, you gonna make me knock all the time?”

“What do you mean?” All the time? Hell—that didn’t sound like five or six days to me.

“I had to knock to get in today. Your boyfriend—”

“Husband.”

“—let me in. Usually, people give me a key or leave the door open.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” I said. “You’re going to have to knock. One of us will let you in, I promise.”

He looked hurt and his mustache drooped. “You don’t trust me?”

“I’m not in the habit of giving keys out to anyone.” Damn, I sounded stiff; I knew I was not scoring any points with this guy, and my tone was making it worse every second. But I was also beginning to suspect that there were no secret words to get him to work. “I’ll leave you to it. If you have any questions, just holler. I’ll be upstairs—no, cancel that. I’m going out. I’ll be back in half an hour.”

My heart beat a little faster as I opened the door to Café-Nation; maybe it was just joyful anticipation of my morning fix, maybe it was just a contact high through the density of coffee molecules in the air.

“’Lo, Emma,” the woman behind the counter in the blue apron greeted me. “Red Eye?”

“Lord, yes, Tina. Feed me coffee, make me human.”

“Well, I can do the one; the rest is up to you. You want it here?”

“Yes—no, I guess I better get back to the house. To go, please. And a pound of beans, whole.”

“Less than two minutes.”

As she busied herself with the holy apparatus, I sat on a stool by the register, an earnest and grateful supplicant. I sighed, then rummaged through my wallet for my Café-
Nation card, the one that asked “Have you been CaféNated today?,” and counted off how many more trips I had before I got a free drink. Not this time, but not many more to go. I’d already been through two cards since the place opened a couple of months ago.

One of the kids who worked there came in, smiled, and said hi. It took me a second to remember her name: Bell, bell…Isabel. Isabel had a dumbbell in a piercing over her eye. I had always thought the piercing looked painful, but maybe if I had one, it would keep me from falling asleep facedown on my students’ blue books.

I smiled back; something of a feat for me, at the moment, but she had access to the coffee, and therefore my happiness. “How’s the pack?” I asked Isabel.