Disembodied Bones (35 page)

Leonie reached out and rested her hands on
the desk. Her knees were wobbling and she wasn’t sure if she could
support herself. Had Gideon been inside her house before,
substituting drugs in her kitchen cabinet? Had he been deliberately
drugging her for some reason she couldn’t quite understand yet?
There was a profound sense of violation that was beginning to
engulf her and the feeling made her want to take a long, hot shower
while using plenty of soap.

Brad went on blithely, “They experimented on
schizophrenic patients, particularly ones who claimed psychic
powers, for a method to diminish or eliminate the voices in their
heads. Interesting results. But it was a test in South America
somewhere. No really ethical at all. Or moral. I think that was
when I was interested in psychology particularly.”

“What happened to the patients?”

“Dead mostly. The medication had a limited
effect. Six months to a year. They were mostly paranoid
schizophrenics and all were prone to violence and died out. Brain
embolisms.” The doctor looked at Leonie’s intent eyes. “But this
couldn’t be that drug. The FDA never approved it in this country,
not even for experimentation and you’d have to get it somewhere
like some third world country, if you could get it all. No, it’s
probably nothing serious at all. Some mistake at the factory, I’m
sure.”

“But you’ll bring it up to the sheriff, all
the same,” Leonie said firmly.

“Well, yeah,” Brad replied, surprised.
“Thought you’d want to keep it to yourself.”

“He needs to know.” Leonie turned to leave
and hesitated. “By the way, your stethoscope is on a table in the
cafeteria. If you don’t get it in the next ten minutes one of the
patients’ relatives is going to take it home as a souvenir.”

“Huh?” But Leonie was already out the door.
Brad tapped his fingers on the desk and wondered how she knew that
he’d been missing his stethoscope since lunchtime. “Hey,” he said.
“I could have left the damn thing in the cafeteria. Bet she saw it
down there.”

•

Leonie didn’t know exactly where to start.
She called up Erica at the Gingerbread House and told her to close
it for the weekend. Lock it up tight and take a breather. Erica
asked about Dacey’s health and agreed to close the store without
argument, which seemed to disturb Leonie more than anything else.
Erica liked to argue about minor issues and she must be getting a
lot of flak from people coming into the store for her to be feeling
puny. But Leonie knew she didn’t have a whole lot of time to deal
with that.

She drove home and parked her car in the
drive and realized that there was a red Chevy Tahoe sitting in
front of Mrs. Smith’s house. Mrs. Smith owned a beige Toyota with a
dent in the front quarter panel. However, the big SUV had been
there the night before and all day, and Leonie suddenly suspected
that it belonged to Gideon Lily. They had carted him off to jail
and Scott hadn’t impounded the vehicle. Or the service the
sheriff’s department was using for impounding wasn’t getting around
to doing the job particularly fast.

Leonie studied the car and thought about the
two riddles. The first one had been a riddle about a riddle. The
second one was something else. She tried to remember the words
while she looked at Gideon’s car.
Never ahead, ever behind, yet
flying swiftly past: for a child I last forever, for an adult I’m
gone too fast. What am I?

“I am childhood,” she answered aloud.
A
riddle about a riddle and a riddle about childhood.
“What’s the
message in that?”

Returning to her porch she thought about
child’s backpack. She closed her eyes and willed a connection to
come to her. All she could feel was that Gideon was sitting on a
bunk in the jail and that a mass of angry red mist colored his
thinking like a mass of raging thunderstorms. When he realized that
she was thinking about him, he tried to speak with her but she cut
him off again. Then for a moment there was a dark place and the
child was dreaming of his puppy. The puppy’s name was Fred and he
had paws larger than his own fists. His mother thought that the dog
was going to grow up to be a monster, but all he really was, was a
big, cuddly St. Bernard mix who liked to chew on any kind of shoes
and to take up half of his little master’s bed. But Fred stayed
with grandma and grandpa because they had a large fenced in back
yard, and Keefe missed him something fierce.

Leonie opened her eyes and saw that the
afternoon sun was beginning to hide itself behind the trees in the
west.
It’s dark wherever Keefe is. It’s dark and he’s alone and
drugged. It’s so far away from here, and I don’t know which way to
go to find him
.

Gideon’s thoughts came to her, as clearly as
a warning horn from a ship in the night. You need to go to my
house.
There’s something there. Something you need to
see.

What do I need to see at your house,
Gideon?

It’s not what you think, dammit.

Did you switch the pills in my
ibuprofen?

Switch the pills in your…? Are you all
right
? There was a clear pause.
You’re not all right. You’re
afraid of something, aren’t you? Your friend, Dacey, is hurt and
you’re afraid for her? I didn’t do anything to her. I swear. Can’t
you believe that you’re the last person on earth I would hurt. You
saved me from that sick psychopath and-

Enough!
Leonie concentrated and felt
her eyelids slide shut.
What is it that you want me to see at
your house?

I don’t know.
The response was as
confused as the answer. The thought patterns distorted in
bewilderment and uncertainty.
But when you’re thinking about
Keefe, it’s like something is pulling me toward the house. He
planted something else there. Something that will help us to find
Keefe.
There was another surge of warped puzzlement
. I don’t
understand why this is happening to me.

Me neither
. She admitted it slowly.
Now tell me where you live
.

-

‘
Tis not, ‘tis.

‘
Tis good, ‘tis bad.

‘
Tis left, ‘tis right

‘
Tis day, ‘tis night.

What is it?

It’s opposites.

Friday, July 26th - Saturday, July 27th

One thin, one bold,

One sick, one cold.

The earth we span,

To prey upon man.

Who are we?

While she drove Leonie thought about a little
boy. He had been a little smaller than she had been. His hair had
been the color of lightly roasted chestnuts, shades lighter than it
would become with the crux of adulthood. Collar length, he looked
like a child who was far too active to allow his mother to give him
the trim he needed. Or perhaps it had been that she had been too
slow to catch him. Nonetheless, it had been a pale face, a face
drawn with worry at his fate, and at the knowledge that his mother
was eaten up with concern and with guilt. There had been bruises on
his wiry arms and the blue T-shirt he had been wearing had a tear
in the shoulder as if someone had yanked him hard one way or the
other. One of his front teeth had been missing and Leonie hadn’t
been able to help but to wonder if Whitechapel had knocked it out
of the boy’s perfectly formed mouth because he had dared to yell
for help.

There had been a moment when the young Doug
had insisted to her, “You have to come. He’ll kill you. He’s told
me. He’s killed before. He will hurt you. Leonie. You have to
come.” His voice had been deadly serious. The look in his eye
backed up the earnestness there because of the lessons his short
captivity had taught him. He had known what he was talking about
because Whitechapel had not minced his words once he’d had the
child under his control. A moment later, Doug had gone but he’d
returned to help her. And he’d never left her side until she’d
adamantly commanded him, even when he’d known what it would mean to
be caught by the man who chased their shadows through a dim attic
full of creeping phantoms.

I could have left you and lived to fight
another day.

No, I don’t think so.
Leonie wasn’t
surprised to have his thoughts intermixed with hers. She was
getting used to it and was peculiarly pleased by the sensations it
caused in her. It meant that whatever had affected her before had
passed or was passing and no longer would she be one of those
family members who didn’t quite belong
. I think he would have
killed you that day, regardless. The police were at the gate. So
was my father. He couldn’t hide anymore.
There was a moment of
brooding uncertainty.
And I don’t think you would have left me
to him.

Gideon was pensive. She felt the emotions
like a lick of warm wind tickling the curve of her cheek. It lasted
only a twinkling of a second and she wasn’t sure what she had felt
once it had gone. He was going to put us someplace else.
Someplace where no one would find us. I’d forgotten that. With
all of his elaborate buildings and setups for luring children, he
had some special location where he would hide them. “The police
could search a thousand years,” he said, “and never find
you.”

Leonie reached down to turn on her
headlights. Someone going the other way had flashed her with their
high beams. Darkness had long since come to stay and with it,
seeming protection from the men who were determined to find
evidence at Gideon Lily’s home. She reasoned that if she waited for
a later hour, then there would be the least amount of people at the
house. Perhaps there would only be a bored deputy to make sure
someone didn’t come and torch the place at the stroke of
midnight.

I can hear them talking. The jailor and
one of the deputies. They can’t find much besides the shirt, the
book of riddles, and the duct tape roll. All in the same place,
they say. I guess they were lucky. I was in a rush to get to you
this morning. I didn’t set the alarm on the way out, which is how
he got to plant so much evidence
.

Her response was dry.
Lucky them
. She
thought about what she wanted to communicate to him next and
assiduously composed the words in her mind.
You know, I don’t
want to hear about how they found evidence linking you to the
kidnapping of two children on your property. But there’s something
about that which is bugging the hell out of me. Maybe if I could
just stand there I could tell about Keefe. I could “see” where he
is.

He’s still alive isn’t he
? It wasn’t a
question exactly. Gideon couldn’t feel what she was feeling and
Leonie fought the instinctive response to agree with him.

That mental image of the younger Doug,
fighting with her against Whitechapel, couldn’t have grown into the
man who would do the same horrible things.
What child would grow
into a duplicate of his long-ago captor?

You can read my mind, Leonie. If you can’t
see the obvious then you’re as blind as your mother accused you of
being.

The reference to Babette immediately angered
her and Gideon straightaway realized his mistake.
Ah, Jesus,
don’t do that-

Leonie cut him off ruthlessly and pulled to
the side of the road to consult the map of the area she had.
Residential numbers were listed on the roads and it wasn’t hard to
find Gideon’s. He had made the crucial mistake of telling her where
to find his house before insulting her, so she had little
compulsion about abolishing him from her head. With a little smile
of realization, she comprehended how the family existed with each
other.

They allowed what they wanted through and
kept the rest out when they could. Her understanding of them
revealed that some of them had problems keeping random thoughts of
outsiders out of their minds, and preferred the isolation of
country life and the encounters of the two groups to a minimum.

The result was that she made Gideon angry.
Tiny rivulets of irritated deliberation were making their way into
her head despite her will. He was isolated in a jail cell, had been
questioned by the county prosecutor once, and had called his mother
to get him a good lawyer. He was feeling less than helpful and the
frustrating thought that his nephew could die because of him was a
constant streaming feeling of horrendous aching pain.

Repentant, Leonie almost relented. She bit
her lower lip and stuck to her guns. She didn’t need him in her
head, making her think about things best left in the past. She
needed everything she possessed in order to make a difference here.
But if he were correct, then someone else was the culprit, someone
who hated her and wished wretched things upon her.

That little boy’s face featured clearly in
her memory. That child wasn’t a monster. He was only a ten year
old, faced with dire circumstances, tested to the ends of his
abilities.
Not a monster. Not an unfeeling brute who would
threaten children. NOT!

Leonie froze as she realized that she wasn’t
sure if the last thoughts were her own or Gideon’s.
Dammit.
She glanced down at the map and then looked up. She didn’t think
she was very far from his house. There was a farm road that cut
into the acreage that the cotton farmers used. Gideon told her it
circled the property and came past the ridge behind the house. She
could park there in relative safety and then walk down to his
house.

After driving another half mile she found the
road, which was just a pair of ruts that cut through thick
vegetation into the cotton fields. It bordered an irrigation canal
and threaded away into blackness without end. Even the lights of
the Explorer didn’t cut through the shadows.

Looking both directions of the road, Leonie
pulled the SUV off the road and drove slowly down the dirt track.
After a few minutes it became a monotonous blur of blobs of white
cotton growing on waist high bushes as far as her dim lights could
reach. The rows weren’t like fields of corn with neat borders and
patterns that flowed endlessly. It was simply cotton growing in a
great patch on either side of her, the oddly shaped splotches of
white was like snow resting peacefully on innocent gray shrubbery.
As far as she could tell it was about time for the hulking
harvesting tractors to drive through the fields making sure each
and every particle of the plant was collected efficiently.