Bone River (23 page)

“Because I’ve seen you dance too,” he said with a smile, “and no one who’s seen that could think you’re meant to hide yourself away on a farm and tong oysters for a living.”

I did not mistake his admiration, nor my own response to it, my quick flush of warmth, and I realized suddenly what he was doing, how easily he’d turned my suspicions, how well he’d worked me after all.
You’re a fool, Leonie.
I said, “I know what you’re doing.”

He turned a bland expression. “Which is what? What am I doing?”

“I don’t trust you.”

“Yes, I remember your story.” Wryly spoken.

“What do you mean to accomplish, Daniel? What is it you want?” The echo of Bibi’s words.

It was as if he’d heard them too. I saw the flash of recognition in his eyes, and the quick way he glanced away told me I’d been right to think it.

I said, “Why are you here?”

“I’ve told you. I came for the story. And to meet my father.”

“No other reason? You don’t wish for revenge?”

His expression gave nothing away. “What would it avail me?”

“Satisfaction.”

“I don’t care enough about him for revenge. I wanted to meet him. I come up here to find he’s got a lucrative business—those oysters are a gold mine. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want a part of it.”

“And the mummy? What part of her do you want?”

“You know that too. If you discover something important about her, I want to be the writer who tells her story. I want people to know my name. Money and recognition—I suppose I’m more like my father than I’d thought.”

“And that’s all?” I tried to measure him, but his gaze was unreadable, his stance inscrutable. “That’s all you came for?”

“You think I’m lying?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why would I?”

“I don’t know that either.”

Daniel smiled thinly. “Have I done something to offend you that you think so poorly of me?”

“Junius suspects you’ve a hidden motive,” I said honestly. “And I’m not certain he’s wrong. Bibi warned me about you. What she said last night—”

“My father likes me about as well as I like him. He’s been collecting things too long. He thinks everyone’s a rival.” His voice was bitter, but I heard the hurt behind it. “And I don’t know why your Indian woman would dislike me. She sounds no better than a fortune teller. How did she warn you about me? What did she say?”

“That I was to—” I struggled to remember the exact words.
You will need it now he is here.
Not the words so much, but the feeling...“It wasn’t what she said really. But she intimated that I should be careful of you.”

“Careful in what way?”

“She didn’t elaborate.”

He laughed shortly. “You know that saying about suspicion? It’s like bats among birds, always flying at twilight. This place breeds it. I swear you can feel it in the rain.”

It was true; I’d felt it myself. Perhaps not suspicion itself but lingering spirits, the press of the past even when the past was not cities or people but the history of floods and smoke, rain and fog, and trees so tall they blocked out the sun. Dark days, mist and wet, a depth that even sunlight did not penetrate. The brightest summer days made it beautiful but did not disguise it. I’d told my father I’d felt that way once, on a gorgeous summer day, and he told me I had a tendency to the macabre and that he hoped to God I would grow out of it. I never did. I was a little startled to learn that Daniel felt it too. I’d never known any white man who did.

“What is it?” Daniel asked. “Why do you look at me that way?”

“The things you say sometimes...I’ve never known anyone who speaks as you do.”

Again, a short laugh. “You’ve been dancing in oystering boots too long.”

I shook my head. “That’s not it.”

“Perhaps it’s that you recognize the truth in what I say.”

Now I laughed. “What you want to be the truth, you mean.”

His gaze was searching, unsettling. The lamplight glazed him—I was reminded of what I’d seen in him in the cave, that strange beauty, and suddenly I was seeing him as I had the first time we’d met, when he was just an attractive man and not my husband’s son. The moment stretched out. I had to look away.

He said quietly, “I didn’t expect you.”

Uncomfortably, I said, “I don’t know what that means.”

“When I came here. I didn’t know he had another wife. I suppose I hoped he’d be living in a shack somewhere, some bitter recluse, a drunk perhaps. But then I saw you and I realized why he never returned.”

“I said I was sorry for that—”

“I don’t want your apology. I’m...I didn’t expect you. That’s all.”

“Then I suppose we’re even. I never expected you, either. Not your existence, nor...” I let my words trail off, uncertain what I’d been about to say, suddenly aware of a strange restlessness. A longing I didn’t understand.
Who are you?

I looked at him. I wanted him to go. I wanted not to have to say it.

He hesitated. I thought he would not understand, but I was relieved when he nodded. “I’ll leave you to your study, then.”

The piece of sea glass he’d put on the table glimmered, as if the lamplight had suddenly hit it, or as if it were illuminated
from inside, calling my attention to it again, and I grabbed it up and held it out to him. “Don’t forget your sea glass.”

He was halfway to the door. He turned. He said, “It’s yours. I brought it for you.”

He put his hat on his head and turned again to the door, and when he was gone, I looked down at the glass in my hand, a polished round the color of the sky.
Junius’s eyes
, I thought. But his weren’t the eyes I saw, and I dropped the stone into my pocket.

When Daniel was gone, I turned back to the mummy. I knew she could distract me from the unsettling conversation with Daniel, and I wanted to be lost in her. I felt her waiting for me, and as I unlocked the trunk and took her out I had to fight the urge to apologize for being so long, for wasting time on places that could tell me nothing about her.

I looked her over slowly, wondering where I should begin. I knew I was supposed to be checking for signs of mummification techniques. No brain in the skull, a chest emptied of organs and filled with rags and herbs and sewn back up again. Junius’s instructions. I muttered, “Where’s the poetry in that, Junius?” and then was surprised at myself for saying it, for
thinking
it.
Where’s the
science
in that, Leonie?

But to find any chest incision, I would have to undress her, and break her. Her knees were drawn up so closely to her chest, and her arms wrapped so tightly about them...there was no way to find an incision without moving them, and no way to move them without tearing her apart.

Can you even bear to do so?
Junius’s taunt. I did not want to have to admit that he was right, but my reluctance to desecrate her was overwhelming.
Desecrate
. I told myself it wasn’t that. This was a body, a husk, only bones. I would not hesitate to break a rock to remove a fossil bone. I was an ethnologist; all I cared about was knowledge.

I forced myself to step away, to get the saw hanging on a nail near Junius’s tools. No bone saw, but this would do well enough. When I went back to the mummy I stood there, studying her, looking for the best place to start cutting. The arms first, I imagined. I set the teeth to the joint of her shoulder—

And nearly swooned.

I dropped the saw. It clattered to the floor and I put my hand to my eyes, trying to breathe though a wave of light-headedness. More than that. A sense of wrongness, of intrusion. Her presence was all around me, pushing at me, her horror and her anger, filling me as if it were my own, threatening, terrible, and I was suddenly so afraid I had to fight the urge to run. I clutched the edge of the table, trying to right myself, and gradually the sense of menace faded, and my light-headedness, and I was myself again, and profoundly alone.

Junius was right; I could not do this. It felt less like failure than fear, but my failure was there too, and the fear was still too real to talk myself past, the horror of it lingering. I glanced down at her. “You don’t want me to cut you,” I murmured without thinking. “Very well. Then what?”

My notebook lay beside her, my pencil had clattered to the floor with the saw. I could finish drawing her, I realized, and not in the pieces I’d intended, a foot or an arm, an incised chest, but whole, as she was. I would not cut into her, not today,
perhaps not ever
, but I could do this. Slowly, hesitantly, I retrieved my pencil, spooked now, waiting again for that sense of menace, but the dimness of the barn was benign, and so was she, and gradually I relaxed, and opened my notebook, and the drawing took over. I became lost in it, and with every stroke of the pencil she became more and more alive to me, her forthright, dark gaze and the saffron skirt shifting about a slim brown ankle and her hair glinting in the late afternoon sun...

The world was already dark when I finally came back to myself, when sheer exhaustion claimed me. I put her away and went to
the house. I’d forgotten my conversation with Daniel, but now I remembered it, and I was relieved that I did not see him anywhere about. It felt good to be alone, but I was relieved as well when Junius and Lord Tom returned. Junius’s mood was buoyant. He smiled and laughed at something Lord Tom said, and his step was light as he made his way to the kitchen, swooping past the table, wrapping his arms around my waist to nuzzle my neck. “The canoe’s in almost perfect condition. We’ll be able to send it this week.”

“Send it? How? From where? You can’t paddle it to Washington.”

“No, but we can to Astoria. We’ll put it on a steamer from there. Or a train.”

I gave him a doubtful look. “That canoe once held twenty men. And you mean to take it south in this weather with only Lord Tom and Daniel?”

“I don’t know that it would take all of us,” he said, releasing me, stepping back. “I’ll send your cave drawings at the same time, I think.”

I glanced at Lord Tom, who was taking off his coat and boots by the door, and then to the burlap bags beneath the stairs, the ones Junius had sneaked inside that held the Toke’s Point and graveyard skeletons. “What about those?” I asked in a low voice.

“I think they’d best go separately,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m still thinking how to do that. Where’s the boy?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. He—”

I stopped short at the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and suddenly there was Daniel, looking tousled and drowsy, softly lovely.

“Sleep the day away?” Junius asked.

Daniel raked his hand through his hair and ignored that. He sat at the table, and Junius did too, and Lord Tom came ambling over as I served dinner and the talk turned to the canoe, and I barely paid attention. Daniel said little, and he did not look at
me. The fact that neither of us did much speaking did not seem to affect Junius at all. His excitement over finally getting the canoe was evident, and didn’t flag throughout dinner, nor after, when he and Lord Tom began to make plans. When I excused myself early to go to bed, Junius didn’t seem to notice. Only Daniel looked up and said, “Good night,” and I hurried to my room as if pursued. I readied for bed quickly. I left my hair down, and then I snuggled into bed and waited while the lamplight glowed softly gold. I heard the back door close—Lord Tom to his lean-to. I heard footsteps on the stairs—not Junius’s, and I deliberately inured myself to their sound, to the walk down the hall, the closing of a bedroom door. When I heard Junius’s steps, I was glad. Here, at last, the thing I waited for, and when he came in through the door I let him know I was still awake.

I watched him undress in the dim lamplight—surreptitiously, because he would not like the overtness of it.

He blew out the lamp and crawled into bed. His excitement over the canoe had translated as I’d known it would. He rolled to me, drawing up my nightgown, skimming my thighs and cupping my breasts. I wanted him close; I wanted to know I belonged to him, to undo the buttons on his long underwear and release him into my hand, to lift my hips to him, and hear him moan deep in his throat as he eased into me. I wanted to be overtaken. I wanted savagery. I wanted possession and passion, to grip him with all my strength and rock against him until his thrusting became frenzied. But I did none of those things. He hated it. He’d told me once it was the behavior of a whore. At seventeen, I had been ashamed, and still was, of the untowardness that made me want him that way. And so I let him lift my hips to his, and I bit my lip against the urge to rock and press and churn. His mouth found my throat, his hands tightened.

Junius groaned, and I thought
no no no, not yet
, but he pulled away, and I felt him hot and liquid against my stomach. He collapsed upon me, his breathing heavy and ragged while I throbbed
and bit back a cry of frustration, and I was restless again, but I kept myself still. His arm tightened about my breasts. I lay there and listened to him fall into sleep and knew that I loved him, that I was happy. But I heard again the words from my dream, and I felt the brush of the charms about my wrist, the coarse splinter of the twine like a warning.

In the morning I dragged the brush through my tangled hair so ruthlessly it crackled and flew about my head, trying to ignore Junius’s whistling and his good humor as he dressed.

Finally, I snapped, “Will you stop? I’ve the headache.”

He turned from the window. “Why? Didn’t you sleep well?”

“Yes, I slept fine.” I put aside the brush and pressed my fingers to my temples.

Junius went on thoughtfully, watching me in the mirror, “I wish you would reconsider sending the mummy. We could send her with the canoe.”

I jerked up. “I’m not done with her.”

“But you’re not advancing with her either, are you?”

“I am—”

“Have you cut her open yet?”

“Junius, I would have to take her completely apart,” I protested, twisting on the bench to face him, trying not to think of yesterday, of my effort to do what he wanted. “Her knees...her arms...I...it’s very difficult...and I wanted to draw her first.”