Disembodied Bones (15 page)

Elan spared Leonie a serious glance. “Do you
want us to help?” he asked her politely. “We can find her more
quickly.”

Dacey’s mouth opened. There was that impulse
to deny that anything was wrong, that little girls like Olga did
things like this all the time. Olga didn’t have a good sense of
time and she often came in minutes later than she should and Dacey
was just as prone to forgetting the time. She had looked up at the
old grandfather clock in the main foyer and discovered that Olga
was not only a few minutes later but almost a half-hour later than
she should be. When Dacey had circled the block she couldn’t find
her daughter and she hoped that Olga had stolen into the
Gingerbread House without anyone being the wiser. After all, Erica
and Tinie didn’t know that Olga was supposed to be inside or out
and were both busy with customers. But when Dacey had returned and
asked the two women in front about Olga, both had shaken their
heads. Just the same way that Elan and Leonie were shaking theirs.
No one had seen Olga since she had walked out the front door of the
store.

It would be easy for Dacey to say something
like, “It’ll be all right. Olga will show up in a minute. She’ll
show up with ice cream on her face and some excuse about how she’d
gone into the old pharmacy and Mr. Smith had given her a float.” It
would be easy for Dacey to deny that anything could possibly be
wrong. But something was wrong. “Yes, I want you to help me,” she
answered Elan and there was a quiver in her voice that made Leonie
tremble.

•

Leonie walked around the south side of the
city block on which the antique store was situated. There were a
total of four brick commercial buildings that dated from as early
as 1895 and as late as 1915. Later builders had been careful to
maintain similar styles as the older buildings and replicated
decorative metal cornices and graceful arched windows that allowed
an abundance of natural light to filter into the interior of the
stores. The sidewalks were narrow affairs with cracks and breaks
that demonstrated how well the sifting clay soil below soaked up
water and then dried out. It wasn’t a large block but it had a
significant number of craft and antique related stores. Leonie
stuck her head into each door and asked if they had seen Olga. Most
of the owners belonged to the Buffalo Creek Downtown Merchants
Association and knew each other. They also knew Olga Rojas and she
wasn’t in any of the stores. Furthermore, and more troubling, none
of them had seen her that day.

When Leonie rounded the northeast corner of
the block she found Dacey and Elan speaking with the Pegram County
Sheriff. Scott Haskell towered over the diminutive Dacey with an
imposing six feet five inches of muscle, but it was his orange red
hair and a mist of freckles across his face that usually caught
people’s attention. He had pulled his Stetson off his head and held
it under one arm as he looked down at Dacey. In his forties, he was
considered a decent law enforcement officer and had been reelected
to his post by a high percentage the previous November.

Leonie stopped in her tracks and stared at
the three of them. Dacey must have flagged Scott down in the street
as he’d passed. His patrol car was parked haphazardly in a space
next to the curb, blocking three spots in front of the store. She
was gesturing with her arms while Elan looked over Dacey’s shoulder
at Scott, looking bizarrely discordant with his circumspect suit
and professional grooming. A worried Erica Jones came out of the
Gingerbread House, pausing beside Elan to listen to Dacey’s urgent
appeal to Scott.

Then Dacey ran nervous fingers through her
black hair, craning her neck about, just in case Olga would
magically appear. She spotted Leonie and called jarringly, “Lee,
you find her?”

Scott’s impenetrable gaze followed Dacey’s
gaze, unerringly discovering Leonie in his line of sight. She
resisted the impulse to turn around and go the other way as if she
hadn’t heard her partner call for her. Instead she shook her head
and started forward again. “I checked all the stores on our block.
No one’s seen her. But maybe she could have gotten into their
stores without someone seeing so we can go-” She had almost reached
the four people standing on the sidewalk when Scott Haskell harshly
interrupted her.

“I’ll do that.” His voice was like crushed
ice as he stared at Leonie. She already knew what his problem was.
He was a skeptical cop. He knew about her past. He knew and he
disapproved, not hesitating to share that information with her. Not
only did he disapprove but he felt as if she were some kind of
elaborate swindler. He’d taken a few grating minutes when she’d
first opened the store with Dacey to warn her privately that he
wouldn’t put up with that kind of nonsense in his county. There
would be no fortune telling. No interpretation of the future in a
goat’s entrails. No crystal ball gazing. No gobbledygook from
someone like her. If she wanted to sell antiques, fine then, but
he’d be keeping one of his astute brown eyes on her. And Scott’s
final words of his warning haunted Leonie, “And by God, nothing
like you did with that Harkenrider kid.”

Leonie hadn’t known exactly what to say to
Scott. He stared down his nose at her as if she were some kind of
disease that threatened to endanger every last soul in the county,
as if she were contagion itself, Typhoid Mary on the prowl to
infect new prospects with her malady. The last words he’d spoken to
her slithered through her consciousness like the disease he thought
she was, tainting every brain cell, every synapse, axon, and
dendrite. She hadn’t thought of Jay Harkenrider and his mother,
Alexa, for nearly three years. It was enough to make her stop again
in her tracks a full ten feet away from the other four people.

Dacey had looked back at Scott expectantly.
Scott’s searing gaze left Leonie and she wavered. Her head was
starting to ache. Specifically, the scar from the bullet that had
separated the skin of her face was on fire. It burned back into her
brain and wove a path to the back of her eyes. If she wasn’t
standing so close to these people she would have thrown her hands
up to her head and cried out with the sudden intensity of the pain.
It was as if something untouchable and invisible was forcing its
way to the surface of her consciousness, using brute strength to
rip at her soft interior organs to make its way.

There were days like these. Twenty years
hadn’t made much of a difference. Leonie’s mind had been opened by
the Pennsylvania Dutch chest. Someone had cried over that chest.
Someone had felt its absence as if another were tearing their
pulsating hearts of out of their living bodies. And Leonie had been
able to touch upon it. She couldn’t explain the connections that
happened. They didn’t happen frequently, but only occasionally and
enough to make her go into a dark room with a cold compress in an
attempt to forget what was happening inside her brain. But today,
for the first time in months, her mind was open, and Dacey was
missing Olga. Dacey had been merely concerned at first, but now
fear was running rampant through her veins, an unbridled course of
emotion that leached out to Leonie.

It was as if there was an invisible stream of
hidden light that linked the pair. Leonie had tried to explain the
process before to Dacey, but had failed. The key was that something
had to be missed. If it wasn’t truly missed then she couldn’t bond
to the one who professed missing something. But there was more than
that to it. It didn’t work all the time. And when her gift was
working, when she wasn’t thinking of an angry Monroe Whitechapel
thundering at her with the weapon in his hand, it didn’t always
work with certain individuals. Leonie couldn’t call it on demand.
The family deemed that she had been damaged by the event with
Whitechapel and worse she had threatened the safety of the family
members by approaching the police. She had been ostracized because
in a world of people who were so patently different than those in
the greater universe, she was just as different from them.

But Dacey was open to Leonie. She was a
beloved friend, someone who took Leonie’s strange traits in stride,
neither judging nor condemning her for her disparities. “Olga’s
missing,” Leonie muttered hoarsely. She couldn’t prevent her hands
from reaching up to cradle her aching head. Her fingers pressed
hard into her flesh trying to push the pain away.

She didn’t see Dacey’s head spin toward her
and Scott Haskell growl, “Dammit, Leonie, I told you none of that
crap, and not now, for Christ’s sake.”

Elan and Erica both stared at Leonie with the
fixed fascination of people staring at a raging house fire with
people screaming from within, their helplessness conveyed to the
outside world with petrifying screams that made the heart clench in
powerless shock. It was horrifying but they couldn’t look away.

Leonie’s knees crumpled and she fell to the
hot pavement. She didn’t even let go of her head, but took the fall
on both knees, a piece of concrete skittered away from her. The
July sun was blazing down upon them and she felt as if she were
trapped inside a freezer. The ripping pain inside her head
intensified, a knife tip thrusting into her flesh between her eyes.
“Missing,” she moaned.

“Lee,” said Dacey appalled. She took a
faltering step closer. “Lee, honey, do you…know where Olga is?”

Scott gently grasped Dacey’s shoulder with an
iron grip. “Jesus Christ, Dacey. How could she know where Olga is?
That mental hogwash is pure-D bull!”

Dacey refused to look away from Leonie as her
slight body crumpled on the sidewalk, long black hair spilling over
her face like an ebony waterfall of silk. She was bent over so far
that Dacey feared the younger woman was going to spill over on her
face without reaching out her hands to stop the impending collapse.
Dacey tried to step forward but the large freckled hand on her
shoulder held her in place. For a moment her eyes glided over the
other people standing there. Erica had a hand over her shocked
mouth and her eyes were set on Leonie’s figure. Even Elan was
stunned into position, frozen in place, enthralled by her. Other
people began to spill out of various stores, silent and staring,
wondering what was happening.

When Leonie looked up at Dacey at last, the
gold color of her eyes was almost completely concealed by huge
black pupils. “I know where she is. She’s frightened but she’s
alive and unhurt.”

Dacey groaned with the mental pain of it all.
“How can you know, Leonie?” she demanded gutturally. “How can you
possibly know?” She shook Scott’s hand off her shoulder and went to
her partner.

A sad look consumed Leonie’s face. “I don’t
know. I just know.”

-

It can be said:

To be gold is to be good;

To be stone is to be nothing;

To be glass is to be fragile;

To be cold is to be cruel.

Unmetaphored, what am I?

I am a heart.

Saturday, July 20th

A lot of bark,

But no one notices.

A lot to bite,

And everyone cares.

I’m not a dog,

If anyone notices.

And there’s a lot to me,

But I don’t have hair.

I stand up straight,

If you’ve noticed me.

I’ve got lots of limbs,

If anyone cares.

I can give you shade,

If you’ve noticed it.

And I do even more,

I give you air.

What am I?

“You can’t honestly believe that she knows
where your daughter is?” Scott Haskell barked, with all the
sensitivity of a rabid dog. “She’s a fake. If you could have seen
what that Harkenrider woman had to go through because of her.”
Words suddenly failed Scott and he resorted to a string of virulent
curses that would have made a company of sailors blush.

Dacey took Leonie’s arm in a tight grip and
stared down into her eyes. “Where is Olga?”

“Then she took Olga away,” Scott suddenly
pronounced. “Leonie must have taken her, herself just to make
herself look-”

“When?” Dacey roared, throwing her head back.
“When she was in the backroom with the Dutch chest for the last
forty minutes? When I asked her about fifteen minutes ago if she
wanted a cold coke and she ignored me because she was so wrapped up
in her work? When Elan came in a few minutes ago? Jesus, Scott, you
think I’m stupid? You think I have some crazy person as a partner
in the store? Leonie knows things. She’s always known things. I
can’t always tell if she’s right, but she’s been right too many
times to discount.”

Leonie stared at the sun and Elan approached
silently to shade her face from the strong light. He said, “We
should take this inside. It’s a hundred degrees in the shade.” He
wrapped a gentle arm around Leonie’s shoulder and helped her up.
“What about Olga, Leonie?”

Dacey let go with great reluctance and her
voice when she spoke revealed the amount of fear inside. “Lee,
honey. If you know then tell us. Don’t keep us hanging on a
string.”

“The park,” Leonie whispered. “She’s at the
park. The trees are as tall as the courthouse to her. Their bark is
like a roadmap of deep crevices and the shadows are almost as cool
as being inside. She’s all alone but…”

“But what?” Dacey shot the words out.

“Something’s wrong,” Leonie finished, her
voice just a thread. “We have to hurry.”

“What park?” Scott snapped. “What park did
you take her to?”

“Scott!” Dacey yelled. “Shut up! Just
shut…up.”

“Trees. Lots of trees. Big trees,” Leonie
said quietly. “Get me to a car. I’ll find it.”

Scott made a grunting noise. “Get into the
patrol car, Leonie. You too, Dacey.”

“I’m going,” insisted Elan, holding onto
Leonie’s shoulders.

“Fine.” Scott held the doors open and glared
at Leonie. Then he glared at the people on the sidewalk who had
come out to watch. “I’m still taking out an APB on Olga. We can
have every patrolman in the county looking for her. We can have an
Amber alert put out on her for the Dallas/Fort Worth area.” From
his skeptical tone, Scott clearly didn’t believe a word that Leonie
was saying and didn’t believe that she could lead them to Olga.