Bare Bones

  “I got to be thinkin’ ’bout her sou—”

  “Did Tamela discuss her relationship with Darryl Tyree?” Slidell cut Banks off.

  “Some.”

  “Did she tell you she was pregnant?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When was that?”

  Geneva shrugged. “Last winter.”

  Banks’s shoulders slumped visibly.

  “Do you know where your sister is?”

  Geneva ignored Slidell’s question.

  “What d’you find in Darryl’s woodstove?”

  “Charred fragments of bone,” I replied.

  “You sure they from a baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe that baby was born dead.”

  “There is always that possibility.” I doubted the words even as I spoke them, but couldn’t bear the look of sadness in Geneva’s eyes. “That’s why we have to locate Tamela and find out what really happened. Something other than murder could explain the baby’s death. I very much hope that turns out to be true.”

  “Maybe the baby come too early.”

  “I’m an expert on bones, Geneva. I can recognize changes that take place in the skeleton of a developing fetus.”

  I reminded myself of the KISS principle. Keep It Simple, Stupid.

  “Tamela’s baby was full-term.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “The pregnancy lasted the full thirty-seven weeks, or very close to it. Long enough that the baby should have survived.”

  “There could have been problems.”

  “There could have been.”

  “How d’you know that was Tamela’s baby?”

  Slidell jumped in, ticking off points on his sausage fingers.

  “Number one, several witnesses have stated that your sister was pregnant. Two, the bones were found in a stove at her residence. And three, she and Tyree have disappeared.”

  “Could be someone else’s baby.”

  “And I could be Mother Teresa, but I ain’t.”

  Geneva turned back to me.

  “What about that DNA stuff?”

  “The fragments were too few and too badly burned for DNA testing.”

  Geneva showed no reaction.

  “Do you know where your sister has gone, Miss Banks?” Slidell’s tone was growing sharper.

  “No.”

  “Is there anything you can tell us?” I asked.

  “Just one thing.”

  Geneva looked from her father to me to Slidell. White woman. White cop. Bad choices.

  Deciding the woman might be safer, she launched her bombshell in my direction.

  AS SLIDELL DROVE BACK TO MY CAR, I TRIED TO QUELL MY emotions, to remember that I was a professional.

  I felt sadness for Tamela and her baby. Annoyance at Slidell’s callous treatment of the Banks family. Anxiety over all I had to accomplish in the next two days.

  I’d promised to spend Saturday with Katy, had company arriving on Sunday. Monday I was leaving on the first nonfamily vacation I’d allowed myself in years.

  Don’t get me wrong. I love my annual family trek to the beach. My sister, Harry, and my nephew Kit fly up from Houston, and all my estranged husband’s Latvian relatives head east from Chicago. If no litigation is in process, Pete joins us for a few days. We rent a twelve-bedroom house near Nags Head, or Wilmington, or Charleston, or Beaufort, ride bikes, lie on the beach, watch What About Bob?, read novels, and reestablish extended-kin bonds. Beach week is a time of relaxed togetherness that is cherished by all.

  This trip was going to be different.

  Very different.

  Again and again, I ran a mental checklist.

  Reports. Laundry. Groceries. Cleaning. Packing. Birdie to Pete.

  Sidebar. I hadn’t heard from Pete in over a week. That was odd. Though we’d lived apart for several years, I usually saw or heard from him regularly. Our daughter, Katy. His dog, Boyd. My cat, Birdie. His Illinois relatives. My Texas and Carolina relatives. Some common link usually threw us together every few days. Besides, I liked Pete, still enjoyed his company. I just couldn’t be married to him.

  I made a note to ask Katy if her dad had gone out of town. Or fallen in love.

  Love.

  Back to the list.

  Hot waxing?

  Oh, boy.

  I added an item. Guest room sheets.

  I’d never get it all done.

  By the time Slidell dropped me in the ME parking lot, tension was hardening my neck muscles and sending tentacles of pain up the back of my head.

  The heat that had built up in my Mazda didn’t help. Nor did the uptown traffic.

  Or was it downtown? Charlotteans have yet to agree on which way their city is turned.

  Knowing it would be a late night, I detoured to La Paz, a Mexican restaurant at South End, for carryout enchiladas. Guacamole and extra sour cream for Birdie.

  My home is referred to as the “coach house annex,” or simply the “annex” by old-timers at Sharon Hall, a nineteenth-century manor-turned-condo-complex in the Myers Park neighborhood in southeast Charlotte. No one knows why the annex was built. It is a strange little outbuilding that doesn’t appear on the estate’s original plans. The hall is there. The coach house. The herb and formal gardens. No annex.

  No matter. Though cramped, the place is perfect for me. Bedroom and bath up. Kitchen, dining room, parlor, guest room/study down. Twelve hundred square feet. What realtors call “cozy.”

  By six forty-five I was parked beside my patio.

  The annex was blissfully quiet. Entering through the kitchen, I heard nothing but the hum of the Frigidaire and the soft ticking of Gran Brennan’s mantel clock.

  “Hey, Bird.”

  My cat did not appear.

  “Birdie.”

  No cat.

  Setting down my dinner, purse, and briefcase, I crossed to the refrigerator and popped a can of Diet Coke. When I turned, Birdie was stretching in the dining room doorway.

  “Never miss the sound of a pop-top, do you, big guy?”

  I went over and scratched his ears.

  Birdie sat, shot a leg in the air, and began licking his genitals.

  I knocked back a swig of Coke. Not Pinot, but it would do. My days of boogying with Pinot were over. Or Shiraz, or Heineken, or cheap Merlot. It had been a long struggle but that curtain was down for good.

  Did I miss alcohol? Damn right. Sometimes so much I could taste and smell it in my sleep. What I didn’t miss were the mornings after. The trembling hands, the dilated brain, the self-loathing, the anxiety over words and actions not remembered.

  From now on, Coke. The real thing.

  The rest of the evening I spent writing reports. Birdie hung in until the guacamole and sour cream ran out. Then he lay on the couch, paws in the air, and dozed.

  In addition to Tamela Banks’s baby, I’d examined three sets of remains since my return to Charlotte from Montreal. Each required a report.

  A partially skeletonized corpse was discovered under a pile of tires at a dump in Gastonia. Female, white, twenty-seven to thirty-two years of age, five-foot-two to five-foot-five in height. Extensive dental work. Healed fractures of the nose, right maxilla, and jaw. Sharp instrument trauma on the anterior ribs and sternum. Defense wounds on the hands. Probable homicide.

  A boater on Lake Norman had snagged a portion of an upper arm. Adult, probably white, probably male. Height five-foot-six to six feet.

  A skull was found on the banks of Sugar Creek. Older adult, female, black, no teeth. Not recent. Probably a disturbed cemetery burial.

  As I worked, my mind kept drifting back to the previous spring in Guatemala. I’d picture a stance. A face. A scar, sexy as hell. I’d feel a ripple of excitement, followed by a prick of anxiety. Was this upcoming beach trip such a good idea? I had to force myself to focus on the reports.

  At one-fifteen I shut down the computer and dragged myself upstairs.

  It wasn’t until I was showered a
nd lying in bed that I had time to consider Geneva Banks’s statement.

  “It wasn’t Darryl’s baby.”

  “What!” Slidell, Banks, and I had replied as one.

  Geneva remumbled her shocker.

  Whose?

  No idea. Tamela had confided that the child she was carrying had not been fathered by Darryl Tyree. That was all Geneva knew.

  Or would say.

  A thousand questions jockeyed for position.

  Did Geneva’s information clear Tyree? Or did it render him even more suspect? Knowing the child was not his, had Tyree murdered it? Had he forced Tamela to kill her own baby?

  Did Geneva have a valid point? Could the infant have been born dead? Had there been a genetic defect? An umbilical cord problem? Had Tamela, heartbroken, merely chosen the most expedient way and cremated the lifeless body in the woodstove? It was possible. Where had the baby been delivered?

  I felt Birdie land on the bed, explore possibilities, then curl behind my knees.

  My mind circled back to the upcoming beach junket. Could it lead anywhere? Did I want that? Was I looking for something meaningful, or merely hoping for rock-and-roll sex? God knows, I was horny enough. Was I capable of committing to another relationship? Could I trust again? Pete’s betrayal had been so painful, the breakup of our marriage so agonizing, I wasn’t sure.

  Back to Tamela. Where was she? Had Tyree harmed her? Had they gone to ground together? Had Tamela run off with someone else?

  As I drifted off, I had one final, disquieting thought.

  Finding answers concerning Tamela was up to Skinny Slidell.

  * * *

  When I awoke, scarlet sun was slashing through the leaves of the magnolia outside my window. Birdie was gone.

  I checked the clock. Six forty-three.

  “No way,” I mumbled, drawing knees to chest and burrowing deeper beneath the quilt.

  A weight hit my back. I ignored it.

  A tongue like a scouring brush scraped my cheek.

  “Not now, Birdie.”

  Seconds later I felt a tug on my hair.

  “Bird!”

  A reprieve, then the tugging began again.

  “Stop!”

  More tugging.

  I shot up and pointed a finger at his nose.

  “Don’t chew my hair!”

  My cat regarded me with round, yellow eyes.

  “All right.”

  Sighing dramatically, I threw back the covers and pulled on my summer uniform of shorts and a T.

  I knew giving in was providing positive reinforcement, but I couldn’t take it. It was the one trick that worked, and the little bugger knew it.

  I cleaned up the guacamole Birdie had recycled onto the kitchen floor, ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts, then grazed through the Observer as I drank my coffee.

  There’d been a pileup on I-77 following a late-night concert at Paramount’s Carowinds theme park. Two dead, four critical. A man had been shotgunned in a front yard on Wilkinson Boulevard. A local humanitarian had been charged with cruelty to animals for crushing six kittens to death in his trash compactor. The city council was still wrangling over sites for a new sports arena.

  Refolding the paper, I weighed my choices.

  Laundry? Groceries? Vacuuming?

  Screw it.

  Refilling my coffee, I shifted to the den and spent the rest of the morning wrapping up reports.

  * * *

  Katy picked me up at exactly twelve noon.

  Though an excellent student, gifted painter, carpenter, tap dancer, and comic, promptness is not a concept my daughter holds in high esteem.

  Hmm.

  Nor, to my knowledge, is the Southern rite known as the pig pickin’.

  Though my daughter’s official address remains Pete’s house, where she grew up, Katy and I often spend time together when she is home from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. We have gone to rock concerts, spas, tennis tournaments, golf outings, restaurants, bars, and movies together. Never has she proposed an outing involving smoked pork and bluegrass in a backyard.

  Hmm.

  Watching Katy cross my patio, I marveled, yet again, at how I could have produced such a remarkable creature. Though I’m not exactly last week’s meat loaf, Katy is a stunner. With her wheat-blonde hair and jade-green eyes, she has the beauty that makes men arm-wrestle their buddies and perform swan dives from rickety piers.

  It was another sultry August afternoon, the kind that brings back childhood summers. Where I grew up, movie theaters were air-conditioned, and houses and cars sweltered. Neither the bungalow in Chicago nor the rambling frame farmhouse to which we relocated in Charlotte was equipped with AC. For me, the sixties were an era of ceiling and window fans.

  Hot, sticky weather reminds me of bus trips to the beach. Of tennis under relentless blue skies. Of afternoons at the pool. Of chasing fireflies while adults sipped tea on the back porch. I love the heat.

  Nevertheless, Katy’s VW could have used some AC. We drove with the windows down, hair flying wildly around our faces.

  Boyd stood on the seat behind us, nose to the wind, eggplant tongue dangling from the side of his mouth. Seventy pounds of prickly brown fur. Every few minutes he’d change windows, flinging saliva on our hair as he whipped across the car.

  The breeze did little more than circulate hot air, swirling the odor of dog from the backseat to the front.

  “I feel like I’m riding in a clothes dryer,” I said as we turned from Beatties Ford Road onto NC 73.

  “I’ll have the AC fixed.”

  “I’ll give you the money.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “What exactly is this picnic?”

  “The McCranies hold it every year for friends and regulars at the pipe shop.”

  “Why are we going?”

  Katy rolled her eyes, a gesture she’d acquired at the age of three.

  Though I am a gifted eye roller, my daughter is world-class. Katy is adept at adding subtle nuances of meaning I couldn’t begin to master. This was a low-level I’ve-already-explained-this-to-you roll.

  “Because picnics are fun,” Katy said.

  Boyd switched windows, stopping midway to lick suntan lotion from the side of my face. I pushed him aside and wiped my cheek.

  “Why is it we have dogbreath with us?”

  “Dad’s out of town. Does that sign say Cowans Ford?”

  “Nice segue.” I checked the road sign. “Yes, it does.”

  I reflected for a moment on local history. Cowans Ford had been a river crossing used by the Catawba tribe in the 1600s, and later by the Cherokee. Daniel Boone had fought there during the French and Indian War.

  In 1781 Patriot forces under General William Lee Davidson had fought Lord Cornwallis and his Redcoats there. Davidson died in the battle, thus lending his name to Mecklenburg County history.

  In the early 1960s the Duke Power Company had dammed the Catawba River at Cowans Ford and created Lake Norman, which stretches almost thirty-four miles.

  Today, Duke’s McGuire Nuclear Power Plant, built to supplement the older hydroelectric plant, sits practically next to the General Davidson monument and the Cowans Ford Wildlife Refuge, a 2,250-acre nature preserve.

  Wonder how the general feels about sharing his hallowed ground with a nuclear power plant?

  Katy turned onto a two-lane narrower than the blacktop we were leaving. Pines and hardwoods crowded both shoulders.

  “Boyd likes the country,” Katy added.

  “Boyd only likes things he can eat.”

  Katy glanced at a Xerox copy of a hand-drawn map, stuck it back behind the visor.

  “Should be about three miles up on the right. It’s an old farm.”

  We’d been traveling for almost an hour.

  “The guy lives out here and owns a pipe store in Charlotte?” I asked.

  “The original McCranie’s is at Park Road Shopping Center.”

  “Sorry, I don’t smoke pipes.” r />
  “They also have zillions of cigars.”

  “There’s the problem. I haven’t laid in this year’s stock.”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t heard of McCranie’s. The place is a Charlotte institution. People just kind of gather there. Have for years. Mr. McCranie’s retired now, but his sons have taken over the business. The one who lives out here works at their new shop in Cornelius.”

  “And?” Rising inflection.

  “And what?” My daughter looked at me with innocent green eyes.

  “Is he cute?”

  “He’s married.”

  Major-league eye roll.

  “But he has a friend?” I probed.

  “You got to have friends,” she sang.

  Boyd spotted a retriever in the bed of a pickup speeding in the opposite direction. Rrrrppping, he lunged from my side to Katy’s, thrust his head as far out as the half-open glass would allow, and gave his best if-I-weren’t-trapped-in-this-car growl.

  “Sit,” I ordered.

  Boyd sat.

  “Will I meet this friend?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  Within minutes parked vehicles crowded both shoulders. Katy pulled behind those on the right, killed the engine, and got out.

  Boyd went berserk, racing from window to window, tongue sucking in and dropping out of his mouth.

  Katy dug folding chairs from the trunk and handed them to me. Then she clipped a leash to Boyd’s collar. The dog nearly dislocated her shoulder in his eagerness to join the party.

  Perhaps a hundred people were gathered under enormous elms in the backyard, a grassy strip about twenty yards wide between woods and a yellow frame farmhouse. Some occupied lawn chairs, others milled about or stood in twos and threes, balancing paper plates and cans of beer.

  Many wore athletic caps. Many smoked cigars.

  A group of children played horseshoes outside a barn that hadn’t seen paint since Cornwallis marched through. Others chased each other, or tossed balls and Frisbees back and forth.

  A bluegrass band had set up between the house and barn, at the farthest point permitted by their extension cords. Despite the heat, all four wore suits and ties. The lead singer was whining out “White House Blues.” Not Bill Monroe, but not bad.

  A young man materialized as Katy and I were adding our chairs to a semicircle facing the bluegrass boys.