The Bones of Old Carlisle (14 page)

“What thing?” Stapleton demanded impatiently.
“It’s kind of like a shelf, Ma’am,” Watell said. “But bigger, and
higher. Like, over my head.”
“A loft?” Demizu inquired.
“Yessir, a lost,” Watell replied.
“Rope in the back of my Humvee,” Demizu said. But before Watell
reached the vehicle, Demizu seemed to have second thoughts. “Whoa,
hold on a minute, let me help you.”
Demizu dashed out of the tent, told Watell to back up, then
cracked open the vehicle’s back gate a sliver, rummaged around for a
minute and retrieved a mass of tangled rope.
Demizu went into the vehicle’s passenger side while Watell made
his way back to the tent, once again pressing his face against the
screen and looking at each occupant.
“Wouldn’t a found him if I hadn’t climbed that lost,” he
announced, and he seemed to be focusing on Dr. Schaumberg. “I took
that barn like the damn cavalry, I was all over it, like a rash on a
forgot baby.”
Schaumberg returned his gaze with an expression somewhere between
condescension and contempt, and she said nothing. Was Watell hitting
on her? Arrowroot wondered.
“I’m like that,” Watell continued, looking only at Schaumberg. “I
don’t let up.”
“Corporal!” Demizu shouted from his Humvee, and his voice rang
out like thunder. “Get that damn body!”
“Yessir!” Watell replied, but he had one more thing he wanted to
say: “You thought the first two were bad, wait until you see what we
got this time.”

“You still alive over there, Floyd?” Karl Arrowroot asked, giving
the chief of police a nudge.
“Don’t mind me,” Hatfield replied, sliding his fingers over his
phone. “Just looking for anything out there like what we’re seeing.”
“Found anything?” Arrowroot asked.
“Nothing.”
Arrowroot turned to Dr. Schaumberg. “So how long you been a
doctor out here?”
“Two years,” she said. “I’m planning to retire here.”
“You mean in Heligaux?” Arrowroot asked.
“Not sure, probably not,” Schaumberg said. “I just meant Fort
Shergawa is going to be my last post. Got six more months. Then I can
go wherever I want.”
“No family keeping you here?” Arrowroot asked.
“Not anymore,” she replied cryptically, and Arrowroot wished he
hadn’t asked the question.
“So where did ol’ Col. Demizu go?” he asked.
Stapleton and Bonaventure exchanged a quick glance that contained
no explicit information, but everything Arrowroot needed to know. It’s
one of the first things you learn when you’re an alcoholic:
deciphering what other people are telling each other about your
condition. Furtive looks, nods and gestures – that’s how they
communicate in your presence, Arrowroot knew. There was one look for
when you were drunk, another for when you were hungover, a certain
look when someone discussed a problem your drunk self had created, and
a whole series of frantic expressions and gestures when you were
getting ready to get drunk.
I know way too much about this kind of thing, Arrowroot admitted
to himself, and he thought again about going to an AA meeting.
Although it was all supposed to be confidential, word would certainly
get out and it would cost him some votes, he knew. But then, he wasn’t
sure he was going to run for re-election anyway.
Arrowroot closed his eyes and listened as the wind picked up
again, rattling the tent screens. The clouds were thickening into a
solid gray sheet, and Arrowroot wondered if it was going to rain. He
thought about looking up the weather on his phone, but he decided he’d
rather it be a surprise. The way the weather used to be.
If it weren’t for the corpses he’d just had to look at, he
realized, this would be another good day. Maybe it was a good day
anyway. Yes, he’d seen the remains of someone who’d died horribly, and
someone else whose death struck him as terribly sad. But not seeing
them doesn’t mean they didn’t exist, and didn’t die. There was
terrible death everywhere, everyday. Either you ignored it and were
happy, or you looked it right in the face and still achieved happiness
somehow. The latter seemed like the better choice. The harder choice,
of course, as the better choices invariable are.
Life is hard, Arrowroot reminded himself. If it’s easy, you’re
not doing it right.
The door to the Humvee slammed, and Demizu appeared at the tent
flap a moment later.
He made a beeline for the whiteboard, uncapping markers in red
and black. First, he put another “X” next to Watell’s name. There were
three there now. Then, in large red letters, he wrote, “SOMEONE DID
THIS” and then “SOMETHING DID THIS,” with “THING” underlined in red.
Underneath that, in black, he wrote “EVILDOERS” and “EVIL THINGS.” And
then, a large question mark.
“You’d think they’d be back by now,” Demizu observed, and he
waved his hand over his head like a cowboy trying to rope something.
“I should have brought that rope over there myself.”
“Here they come,” said Stapleton
Arrowroot looked toward the barn, saw the three soldiers slowly
making their way toward the tent, and was hit with a sudden pang of
regret. What was he doing here? he asked himself. He should have
stayed home. Gone to the Promenade. Had lunch with Danielle and
Guillaume. Floyd would have given him a full report. Robert’s not
here, and this thing they’re bringing on a stretcher isn’t Robert.
Nope. Couldn’t be.
Despite his reservations, he couldn’t take his eyes off the
soldiers and the body they bore among them. As they came closer, he
made out black gore in the general shape of a human, then the ruined,
eyeless face, and then, as they arrived at the tent flap, ribs
sticking up from the middle of the mass like the frame of an
unfinished building.
“Everyone’s gonna need these, I suppose” Demizu said, handing out
facemasks. Arrowroot put his on and wished it would cover his eyes.
Instead, he simply looked away, toward the whiteboard, where he
pondered what Demizu had written while the third body was slid onto a
table for Schaumberg’s examination.
Watell stepped to the center of the tent and stood at attention,
his chest puffed out, arms stiffly to his sides, chin down.
“Male, about 20, eyes gone,” Schaumberg said, uttering another
horrible observation every few seconds. “Brain matter gone. Torso
defleshed. All large muscle groups removed. Liver gone. Ribs and
breastbone over heart have been cut or sawed. Aorta severed.”
Then, as if to make up for everything else she had said, she
added, “Teeth perfect.”
“Mr. Mayor?” Demizu said. “Mr. Mayor?”
“Huh?” Arrowroot replied with a start. “What’s that?”
“Anyone you know?”
“Oh, God, I don’t think so,” Arrowroot replied, casting a brief,
sideways glance at the victim. The man’s hair was long, blond and
curly. Not Robert’s hair, certainly. Nor anyone else’s he knew.
“You’re going to have to do a dental exam on that one,” he said.
“But it’s not my boy.”
Watell was still standing at attention, and Demizu finally
noticed him. “Corporal, do you have something to report?”
“Yes, Sir!” Watell shouted, and he glanced at Schaumberg in the
apparent hope she would be looking at him. She wasn’t.
“I’d like to report an unknown party, possibly a hostile, in the
house,” he said, pointing toward the Carlisle mansion.
“What did he look like?” Stapleton asked.
“Hard to say, just eyes and a mouth is all I saw,” Watell
reported. “And hair. There was hair there too.”
“Did either of you see it?” Stapleton asked the other two
soldiers.
These were the two Arrowroot had seen in front of the house when
they first arrived at the property. It was their job apparently to
record the horrors they had found, and then carry each ruined body
back to the tent for examination. They were both tall and blond and
could have been brothers. One had a large camera slung over his
shoulder. They had been performing their responsibilities silently all
morning, and they remained voiceless now, just shaking their heads no.
Demizu uncapped his pens and began scratching out an image of the
house. “Where did you see the face?” he asked Watell. “Which window?”
Watell pointed toward a second-story window at the far right end
of the dwelling, and Demizu drew a face there. “This is what I was
expecting,” he said. “This is just what I was expecting. This is where
we’ll get our answers.”
Demizu drew arrows of various colors pointing to the house, and
to the face in the window, and then he wrote out, in black, a series
of rules:

1.
Do not step outside the flags
2. Do not kill any hostile unless you have no other choice
3. Keep the sun at your back; maintain visual reconnaissance at
all times
4. Remember the Army way
5. Military personnel in first, civilians in second (Arrow and
Chief) – BOOBY TRAPS???!!!
6. Apprehend with extreme prejudice – these are killers,
defleshers, eye taker outers!

“I have the utmost confidence in all of you,” Demizu yodeled, and
he waved grandly around the tent. “You three,” he continued, and he
pointed to the three junior soldiers, “clear the house. Chief and
Mayor, you’re going too, but strictly for identification and
informational purposes. You’ll enter the home only when it’s safe to
do so, and then conduct civilian reconnaissance.”

Arrowroot was only too happy to leave the tent and its growing
collection of corpses. He and Hatfield rose and followed the soldiers
out, and no one spoke as they marched past the barn with its cavernous
darkness, across the front lawn that had long ago gone to seed, and to
the front door of the Carlisle mansion.

Arrowroot, delighted that he was about to get inside the fabled
edifice, studied its façade as he neared the building, and he began
spotting the flaws, the chipped paint, the lose shingles, the cracked
pavers. There was a great window to the right made of dozens of small
panes, and something had blasted a hole in a handful of them. The
years nor the Army had been kind to Carlisle Manor.

Once he reached the front door, Watell put his fingers to his
lips and pointed to a raised wall that ran parallel to the front of
the home. Arrowroot and Hatfield sat beside each other on it, and
Watell nodded.

Then Watell lifted his M16 and pounded its butt against the front
door, putting three shallow dents into the old wood. The whole house
seemed to echo under Watell’s assault.

“Oh, God –“ Arrowroot began, quickly silencing himself when the
soldiers turned and looked.
“US Army!” Watell shouted. “We’re here with overwhelming force.
Lay down arms and surrender!”
Watell grabbed the doorknob and it turned and the door gave way
with a long, deep creek. Watell peered through the opening, saw
nothing, threw the door wide and barreled in with a roaring shout. The
two soldiers behind him, their .45s drawn, followed.
“If there’s any shooting, you know, we’re probably going to get
hit,” Hatfield whispered.
“Then what the hell are we doing sitting here?” Arrowroot
whispered back.
“There won’t be any shooting,” Hatfield said. “There’s no one in
there, and they know it. Whatever the hell went down out here, the
people involved are either dead or long gone. It’s all theater, for
our benefit. Or maybe just for your benefit.”
“So what happened here, then?” Arrowroot asked. “Was this just a
bunch of hippies on angel dust doing crazy shit to each other, or a
bunch of special ops soldiers, or what?”
“I’ve got no idea,” Hatfield admitted, “just no idea, so I’m not
going to guess. But if this can happen across the valley from town, it
can happen in town. And if people start turning up on the Promenade
looking like what they’ve found . . .”
The soldiers moved methodically through the dwelling, Watell
shouting as they pushed from room to room. Watell’s cries grew more
muffled as they moved upstairs, and then toward the back of the house.
The front door had been left open, and Arrowroot took a few
tentative steps toward it. “Look,” he said. “Furniture!”
“Hmph,” Hatfield said.
“Well damn, Floyd, just think about it,” Arrowroot said. “The
last person that mighta sat there is one of the Cronicks, on that last
day. Can you see that couch? I bet that book I was talking about is on
a table right next to it, with a bookmark in it.”
“I don’t know,” Hatfield replied. “Sounds like the last person
who sat there was one of the bodies we were looking at. The doctor
seemed to think they were all living inside the place.”
“Well, you might be right,” said Arrowroot. “Hey, maybe it was
Tamani sitting there. Yesterday morning, you know? She wakes up, says
‘Damn, I’m hungry, someone make me some pancakes.’ So she goes
downstairs, finds no one, says ‘Hey, where the hell is everybody?’
Then she opens the front door, goes outside, says ‘Okay, I’m hungry,
you all hiding from me, I’m gonna kick your ass.’ Then she sees the
two lying there, gives ‘em a good look, says ‘Well, damn, you two look
like shit, I’m hittin’ the road, see what kinda pancakes the US Army
makes.’”
Arrowroot looked up at the house, then across the yard to the
valley and the mountains on the other side. He could see most of
Heligaux from here, his neighborhood, Traxie, and almost down to the
Promenade. In its day, it was certainly a beautiful place to live.
Still could be.
“So that reminds me,” Arrowroot said.
“Yeah?” Hatfield replied.
“Were you really going to shoot her? In my damned living room?”
“Hell, no,” Hatfield said. “I had the safety on the whole time. I
knew what was gonna happen, I was just holding it out there for her to
take.”
“Now why would you do that?”
“Well, I couldn’t just stand there and watch her dismantle a
coupla soldiers, could I?” Hatfield explained. “Stapleton’d probably
charge me with treason or something.”
“Well, God, what if she’d taken your finger off?” Arrowroot
exclaimed.
“Thing is, I knew that wasn’t going to happen,” Hatfield replied.
“In my line of work, you meet the occasional killer, sociopath, even a
soldier or two who got trained to kill and then got bent. She wasn’t
any of that. She just looks at you with those big eyes, and you can
tell she’s just trying to figure everything out, and maybe enjoy life
a little. She just doesn’t want to be fucked with.”
“True enough,” Arrowroot agreed. “But still, I was watching her
when she grabbed your gun, I thought—“
“That’s just it,” Hatfield interrupted. “She didn’t just grab my
gun. She squeezed my fingers first.” Hatfield raised his right hand
like he was holding a gun, then grabbed his index fingers with his
left hand. “So I just let it go – I had no choice really, she’s got a
hell of a grip – and she caught it.”
“So what was all that carrying on about?” Arrowroot demanded.
“You were all goddam this and goddam that, and Hernie was playing
doctor on your hand and all.”
“Okay, it startled me a little, I’ll admit that,” Hatfield said,
“but I told you, we had a civilian taking out two military officers. I
knew she wasn’t going to kill them, or even hurt them much, but they
didn’t know that. A coupla ‘goddams’ so they’d think I sacrificed
something on their behalf, that’s all. And it might be one of the
reasons we’re out here right now.”
“You never cease to amaze me, you never do,” Arrowroot admitted.
There was silence for a moment, and then he looked up at the sky. “I
hope those fellas hurry up in there, it looks like it might start
raining.”
“Yup,” Hatfield agreed, but he wasn’t done talking about Tamani.
“There was something going on there, that much I know. But I wasn’t
close to figuring it out. She’s no soldier, I’m sure of that. It’s
just a shame we couldn’t have talked to her instead of trying to drag
her back out here. That girl’s got a story, if someone could just ask
her right.”
A large raindrop landed on Arrowroot’s light blue sleeve, and he
studied it and wondered why clear water made light fabric dark. “I
tried to talk to her, you know,” he said. “Lotta nonsense, most of it.
But God, you got bodies stacking up like cordwood out here, I don’t
blame Stapleton for being a little, uh, insistent.”
The house began to rumble, and then the noise grew louder and
more distinct, and Arrowroot could tell that it was three pairs of
Army boots marching briskly toward the front door.
Watell appeared first, peered out the door with his gun at his
hip, then exited, followed by the other two. They headed off to the
tent at a near jog without even glancing at Arrowroot or Hatfield.
Arrowroot watched them until they reached the tent.
“Looks like they found another one,” Hatfield observed.