Sing It to Her Bones (7 page)

Mrs. Foster, a scrawny woman wearing blue jeans and a turtleneck shirt, simply said, “Oh,” and opened up her wallet to extract two new ten-dollar bills.

We were almost up to the counter before Ellie noticed us. “Oh, hi, you two.”

“I’ve got some boxes for you, Ellie.”

“Okay. I’ll be with you in a minute.” She leaned over the counter and shouted toward the kitchen, “Bill! We need your help out here unloading some boxes!”

Bill, whom I took to be in his mid-twenties, appeared immediately. He wore khaki bermuda shorts, a T-shirt covered in food stains, and a five o’clock shadow. “No problem,” he grunted. A man of few words.

While Bill slapped back and forth in his cheap rubber sandals, helping Ellie and Connie get the boxes ready for UPS, I selected a bottled iced tea from one of the upright glass-fronted coolers standing near the window. I took it to the cash register just as a heavyset woman I assumed was Ellie’s daughter, Angie, emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel that she had tucked into the waistband of her jeans. She had Ellie’s unruly light brown hair, and I noticed a certain resemblance around the eyes and mouth.

“Hi, there. Can I help you?”

“I’m just waiting for my sister-in-law over there.” I pointed with my drink.

“Oh, you must be Hannah.” She squinted at me. “Sorry! I didn’t recognize you at first.”

I noticed her checking out my wig and decided I’d make it easy for her. “I’ve lost some weight lately.”

“Lucky you!” Angie, who had a good thirty pounds on her mother, gathered up a roll of fat at her waist and pinched it between her thumb and index finger. “I could stand to lose some myself.”

I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say to that.
Darn right? I
covered the silence by examining the candy bars and packs of gum displayed prominently near the cash register. I selected a Milky Way Dark, one of my vices, and laid it on the counter. “Want a candy bar, Connie?”

Connie didn’t even turn around. “After those doughnuts? Are you nuts?”

“Just having a fading spell. You work me too hard.”

“Why don’t you order us some lunch?”

Angie took our order for two crab cake sandwiches and a single order of fries on the side—they were for Connie—writing it down with a nubby pencil on a green order pad. She tore off the page and shoved it into the kitchen through a square window that had been cut in the wall, where Bill, who apparently served as cook as well as UPS assistant, picked it up.

While I gulped my iced tea, Angie rang up a bottle of dish soap and a box of raisin bran for a bearded sailor who looked as if he had just returned from a round-the-world cruise. After he left, letting the screen
door bang shut behind him, she perched behind the counter on a tall stool.

“My mom tells me that you found that body yesterday.”

I nodded without taking my mouth from the bottle.

“Mom thinks it’s Katie Dunbar.”

“That’s what everyone thinks, Angie, but that’s because she’s the only person who ever went missing from Pearson’s Corner. It could certainly be somebody else, you know. Anybody could have dumped a body out here.”

“I hope it isn’t. Katie, I mean. I’d hate to think of her lying all alone down there in that cold, cold water.” She stared at her hands, which lay folded in her lap. “Course I’d hate to think of
anyone
ending up like that. But Katie … well, she was my best friend.”

“She was?”

“Oh, yes! We were on the cheerleading squad together. Everyone said we looked like twins.”

I studied this doughy young woman who was sliding into middle age far too early and tried to reconcile what I saw sitting before me with a perky blond youngster shaking pom-poms and shouting “Gimme a J, Gimme an O!” I couldn’t do it.

Angie began twisting the towel. “I still remember Katie at the homecoming dance. She was so happy! She couldn’t sit still. Just flying around the room in a gorgeous satin dress, blue like the sky. It cost the earth, too. Three hundred dollars! Katie showed me the receipt.” Her voice was a husky whisper, as if she were sharing a great secret. “She danced with all the guys on
the basketball team, even though she came with Chip.” Angie reached behind her to rearrange a tin box of crackers that must have been cutting into her back.

“After she disappeared, I kept thinking about that night. Playing it over and over, trying to remember if I missed anything.” She leaned back against the shelves and closed her eyes. With one graceful hand, she beat out a slow, imaginary rhythm in the air. Suddenly her eyes snapped open, and she stared at me. “We had real bands then, you know, not disk jockeys like they have today who just sit on their duffs all night and play CDs.”

She let out a long sigh. “I broke a strap on my gown that night, and when we went to the rest room to pin it back together, Katie told me she was the happiest girl in the whole, wide world. Later I saw her standing near the punch bowl, holding Chip’s hand. Chip just smiled that sweet, closed-mouth smile of his and looked mysterious.”

“I read in the paper that he was the last person to see her before she disappeared.”

“That’s right, except for whoever …” She shivered. “But Chip could never do anything like that.”

“Maybe they had a fight and something got out of hand.”

“Oh, no! Chip was crazy about Katie. Besides, he’s way too religious, one of those born-again Christians. He attended that all-glass megachurch over near Lanham; still does, for all I know. You’ve probably seen it. It’s the one that looks like a humongous greenhouse.”

I shook my head. Episcopalians like me aren’t
usually up on the location of churches with TV ministries and parking lots the size of RFK Stadium. I changed the subject. “I keep thinking about the Dunbars and how tragic it would be for them. Was Katie their only child?”

“Oh, no. They have another daughter, Elizabeth. She’s four years older than Katie. Now that she’s working for some hotshot law firm in D.C., though, she doesn’t come home very often.” She leaned toward me confidentially. “To tell you the truth, I think Liz is a little ashamed of her parents, her father just being a handiman at the local nursery and all. They don’t call him a handiman, or course; he’s head gardener or deputy horticulturalist or something.”

The phone rang, and Angie took a minute to write down a carry-out order for four Italian subs and hand it through to Bill.

While Angie scribbled, I stared at a poster hanging crookedly on the wall and wondered how Katie’s parents could have afforded a three-hundred-dollar dress. I know we couldn’t. For her junior prom, Emily had selected a red leather skirt with a slit from here to Christmas and a strapless black plastic bustier with spangles that cost the earth and would have looked right at home in Madonna’s closet. I absolutely put my foot down, insisting it made her look like a tart. There had been a terrible scene in the dressing room that sent the sales associates scurrying for cover and ended with both of us in tears and not speaking to each other for a week. Shortly after that Emily had
run away again, and I tried to convince myself that it hadn’t been my fault.

Angie hung up the phone and stuck the pencil she had been using behind her ear. “Sorry about that. Where was I?”

“You were telling me about Katie’s sister,” I prompted.

“Oh, yeah. Liz is a lot older than Katie. She was a sophomore at the University of Maryland when Katie disappeared.”

“It must have been hard on Liz, too,” I said.

“I suppose.” Angie paused. “But they were never very close. Katie was prettier and more popular than Liz.” She leaned forward, and her folded hands disappeared into her lap. “One time when Katie was a freshman and Liz was a senior, they had a knockdown, hair-pulling, rabbit-punching fight in the girls’ locker room just because Katie got asked to the senior prom by one of Liz’s old boyfriends.” She wiggled off the stool and turned to fetch our sandwiches, which had just appeared in the pass-through window. “I’m sure the police filed that interesting fact away in their little notebooks,” she added. “They talked to Liz, too, you know. She was home that weekend.”

Connie chose that moment to join us and demand what she claimed was a hard-earned lunch. Angie returned to the kitchen, and Ellie busied herself with the UPS delivery truck. Connie and I sat on the wooden crates and balanced our paper plates on our knees. “Gawd, these are good!” Connie mumbled through a mouthful of succulent backfin crab lumps.
She offered me some of her fries, but she had ruined them with catsup, and I told her so.

“Picky, picky.” She waggled one under my nose, just to taunt me.

I had finished my sandwich and was standing at the cooler, selecting a fruit drink for Connie, when the screen door slammed and a familiar voice boomed out, “Hey, hey!” Dennis. He made a beeline for Connie. “I knew I’d find you here.” He gestured toward the front porch. “That decrepit heap you’re driving is a dead giveaway. I should give you a ticket just on general principles.”

Connie popped a french fry, loaded with catsup, into her mouth. “I had to put my boxes in something, Dennis. What brings you here?”

“I’m dying of thirst.” He joined me at the cooler, where he picked out a bottle of cranberry juice, twisted off the cap, and finished it in three long gulps. I simply stared.

Dennis put the empty bottle down on the counter and fumbled in his pocket until he found three quarters, which he laid on top of the cash register. He pulled up a crate and sat down next to Connie, his arms resting on his knees. “I’ve just come from the Dunbars.” He looked up at me. “I had the unhappy task of telling them that the body you found has been positively identified as Katherine Louise Dunbar and that she had been murdered.”

From the kitchen came a long, high-pitched wail and the clang of something metallic hitting the floor and rolling, rolling, rolling.

chapter

6

It was a Marx Brothers movie.

Dennis, Connie, and I reached the kitchen door simultaneously, a confusion of legs, colliding shoulders, and bumped elbows. Dennis straight-armed the kitchen door, but it moved only a few inches, stopping with a hollow thud against some inert object on the other side. When we finally squeezed through, it turned out to be Bill’s broad behind as he stood with his arms around the sobbing Angie, comforting her in the narrow space between the door and a stainless steel counter strewn with chopped vegetables. Angie rocked back and forth, moaning, using a soiled dish towel as a handkerchief, pressed hard against her eyes and completely covering her face.

Bill moved to one side so that Ellie could sidle by and join her daughter. Ellie fussed and cooed while
escorting Angie to a folding wooden chair just to the left of the door. Angie sat down heavily beneath a wall-mounted telephone near the spot where a copy of the menu, sheathed in plastic, was tacked to the wall. While Connie and I hung back, leaning against a sink, I could hear Dennis’s voice, deep and reassuring, talking to Angie, arranging an appointment for an interview later in the day. Angie nodded mutely while dabbing at her swollen eyes with the crumpled towel.

“I feel like an intruder here,” Connie whispered. “The worst kind of eavesdropper.”

I, on the other hand, was inclined to stay, even though I could feel that water from the edge of the sink I was leaning against had soaked through the back of my slacks.

Connie tugged at my sleeve. “There’s nothing we can do here. Let’s sneak out the back.” She pointed to a screen door near the french fry cooker. I followed reluctantly, but as we reached the door, I hung back, gazing across the kitchen at the sad tableau: Angie seated, still sobbing; Ellie leaning solicitously over her, rubbing her back; Dennis squatting in front of the two, forearms resting on his thighs; and Bill, looking helpless, wiping the stainless steel counter over and over, even though it was by now thoroughly clean. As far as they were concerned, we were no longer there.

We drove to the farm, sitting in silence most of the way. I thought about all the problems of my own that should have kept me from saddling myself with somebody else’s.

One, I had had cancer. Maybe I still did. Who knew how many microscopic malignant cells had survived the chemicals and were even now cruising around my bloodstream, scouting out a comfortable spot to set up housekeeping?

Two, I was unemployed.

So why did I care so much about these people I had just met and a dead girl I never knew at all? Were they simply a distraction from my own troubles or was it the realization that Emily had been just Katie’s age the night she flounced off to a Phish concert in Washington, D.C., and we didn’t see her again for over three weeks? But unlike the Dunbars, we’d been lucky. Somewhere between Durango and Albuquerque, Emily and her rat-tailed, pierced-eared boyfriend had run out of money and decided to hitchhike home.

I
need to go home, too
, I told myself.
Get some perspective. Sort through my mail, print out my résumé, find some envelopes, and, last but certainly not least, give Paul a sizable piece of my mind
.

By three o’clock I had thrown my toothbrush and a few necessities into the car and told Connie I’d call, promising to see her again in a few days. I settled into the driver’s seat and breathed deeply. The overnight rain had cleared the air, leaving it fresh and smelling of clean, damp earth. Plump clouds scudded across an otherwise clear blue sky, and the sun warmed my face as I drove north up 301 toward Annapolis with the car windows rolled down and the wind roaring across my ears, making my gold hoop earrings sing.

Annapolis can be so beautiful in springtime that it
almost breaks your heart. Somewhere before Interstate 97 joins Route 50 bringing visitors in from Baltimore and points north, new construction had widened the highway and money had been found, goodness knows where, to face the overpasses with brick. Wildflowers, in a rainbow of brilliant colors, thrived in the median strips and nestled in the Vs formed by the exit ramps.

On Rowe Boulevard, the scenic approach into Annapolis, the city fathers had planted tulips, and as I waited for the light to turn at Melvin Avenue, I had to admire the red and yellow blooms, heads nodding in the light breeze. Nature was doing its best to cheer me up, but I wasn’t buying. It was hard enough to leave Pearson’s Corner with the mystery of Katie’s disappearance still weighing heavily on my mind, but by the time I passed the new courthouse building near the stadium, I had almost convinced myself that Paul must have interrupted a burglary in progress. I worried that I’d find him sprawled on our kitchen floor with his head bashed in, one arm outflung near the off-the-hook phone.