The Bone Bed

  “Which resident are you here to see?” she says, with a cheerful smile.

  I ask her if there is a director. I realize it’s after hours, but is there someone in administration I can talk to? It’s important, I let her know.

  “I don’t believe Mrs. Hoyt has left yet. She had a late meeting.” The receptionist picks up the phone to make sure, and I notice a fall arrangement of fresh flowers on a table behind her, burgundy Asiatic lilies, purple lisianthus, orange roses, and yellow oak leaves.

  A floral delivery with no card. Someone, possibly the receptionist, has taped to the vase a piece of paper from a Fayth House memo pad, a name with a room number written on it that I can’t make out from where I stand. But I recognize It’s her Bday written in large print and underlined.

  “Cindy? There’s someone here to see you? I’m sorry,” the receptionist says to me. “What’s your name?”

  I’m directed to an office at the end of a long hallway that takes me past a brightly decorated dining room where residents are finishing dinner, some of them in wheelchairs, a lot of walkers and canes by the tables. The beauty salon is closed for the night, and an elderly man is playing the piano in a music room, and a cleaning cart is parked outside the library. I notice boxes of commercial trash-can liners, a hundred to a carton, the same brand I found inside Howard Roth’s house.

  I walk on to the administrative offices and knock on the open door of the one at the end where Mrs. Hoyt, young and very pregnant, is putting on her coat. I introduce myself and shake her hand and she seems puzzled.

  “Yes, I recognized the name when Betty just told me,” she says. “Do you have family here? I saw you on the news yesterday. That huge turtle on the fireboat and then the poor woman. What can I help you with? Do you have family here?” she again asks. “I would think I would know.”

  She sits down at the desk with her coat on.

  “Or maybe you’re considering Fayth House for someone?”

  I take a chair across from her and reply that my mother lives in Miami and is stubborn about leaving her house even though she probably shouldn’t be on her own anymore. What a lovely place this is, I say.

  “I’m wondering if you know who Howard Roth is,” I begin. “He was local and lived just a few blocks from here. He did odd jobs, was a handyman off and on.”

  “Yes.” She opens a bottle of water and pours some in a coffee cup. “He was nice enough, with some problems, though, and I heard about what happened. That he fell down his stairs. Very sad; his life was tragic.” She looks at me as if to say she doesn’t understand.

  She can’t imagine why I’m here about him.

  I ask her about volunteers and if they might include a Cambridge woman named Peggy Stanton.

  “I don’t know what happened,” Mrs. Hoyt replies. “She just stopped coming. Why do you ask?”

  “Then you knew her?”

  She looks at me, baffled, and of course she has no reason to be aware that Peggy Stanton is dead.

  “Okay,” she says, and she’s starting to get upset. “Please don’t tell me . . .”

  For a moment she looks as if she might cry.

  “Well, what a lovely woman. You wouldn’t be here if it was nothing,” she says.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” I ask.

  “I don’t recall exactly.” She nervously types on her keyboard. “I can check. It’s easy enough to take a look at our volunteer schedule. We have such a wonderful group of people who make the lives of the residents so much better, people who bring joy and hope where there wouldn’t be any for so many of them. I’m sorry. I’m talking too much. I’m just a little flustered.”

  She asks me what happened, and I tell her Peggy Stanton is deceased. We plan to release the information to the media first thing in the morning, but a body has been positively identified as hers.

  “Good God, what a shame. Oh, Lord,” she says. “Dear God. How awful. Well, I thought it was the spring, and I’m right. This is terribly upsetting. When the residents know, they’ll be heartbroken. She was so popular, had been helping out here for many years.”

  The last time Peggy Stanton was here was the night she vanished, April twenty-seventh, a Friday, when she ate dinner with a group she was working with, a collage that night, the residential administrator explains.

  “It was a true passion with her,” she says. “Teaching arts and crafts, working with your hands. Peggy was just very involved in improving self-esteem, reducing anxiety and depression in seniors, and when you actually shape something with your bare hands and watch it evolve into a work of art? There just isn’t better therapy,” she adds, and she describes Peggy Stanton as a fine woman shattered by personal devastation, by unimaginable loss.

  “She had a healing touch, you might say. Maybe because of what she’d been through in her own life. She was just starting the residents on pottery,” she explains. “But then she didn’t come back.”

  She assumed Peggy Stanton had gone to Florida, perhaps to her lake cottage in the Chicago area.

  “I wasn’t concerned, just a bit disappointed, as we’d been investigating kilns,” she says, and I think of Peggy Stanton’s basement, of work recently done and of the unusual tools on the table down there.

  Not for baking but for pottery, and I ask her if Peggy Stanton might have been thinking about installing a kiln in the basement of her home and if she might have hired Howard Roth on occasion to do an odd job or two. Very possibly, she says, but she can’t be sure, and she offers to give me a tour of Fayth House.

  “I’ve held you up enough,” I reply, and I thank her as a chime sounds on my phone.

  A text message from Lucy.

  Who is Jasmine? I read, as I’m leaving.

  Mildred Lott’s missing dog that turned up later, I text her back in the dark, returning to my SUV, which is next to another SUV that wasn’t parked there earlier.

  A silver Jeep Cherokee with a silver mesh grille right next to me when the whole damn parking lot is practically empty, and I get an eerie feeling, a sensation that flutters.

  Missing??? Then why’s she outside at night calling it?

  About to get in the car & will call, I reply.

  The silver Jeep Cherokee that passed me a little while ago when I first got here, it occurs to me. The same one I saw earlier in my own parking lot or one just like it. I point my key to unlock my SUV while part of me wants to run, and another text chimes.

  Jasmine! Jasmine! Where are you? Come!

  thirty-nine

  I’VE BEEN TAKEN BY PIRATES.

  The boat I’m in has a metal hull with carpet. It is moving fast on a heavy surf. It is cold and claustrophobic, and I’m groggy and in pain. I want to sleep.

  Don’t sleep.

  I’m going to be sick, motion sick, vertigo. My stomach lurches as if it wants to climb up my throat, and I wonder if I was hit on the head, if that’s how they got me here, dumped me in the cargo area of an old boat. On my back, a fishnet wound around me, I’m nauseated, about to gag. My stomach has nothing in it, and I don’t want dry heaves, mustn’t start retching uncontrollably. They can’t know I’m conscious, and I focus on every part of me, not sure if I’m injured. I don’t feel pain, just my pounding head.

  “Are you awake?” a man asks loudly.

  I’ve heard his voice before.

  I don’t answer, and my head clears some. I’m in a car. In the cargo area in back, lights from oncoming traffic illuminating him intermittently. Surrounded by boxy shapes behind the front seats, I do the best I can to gather the darkness around me. To hide in it.

  Make him think you’re dead.

  “You should be awake,” says the man driving what I thought was a good idea for the CFC, a small crossover SUV.

  I struggle to remember his name and envision his complete lack of empathy when he sat across from me. Soulless. Empty. Emoting nothing.

  “Don’t fake it,” he says.

  Play dead.

  “Your fakery ca
n’t save you anymore.”

  I recognize the textures of the clothes I put on this morning, I think it was this morning. The corduroys, the cable-knit sweater, and a down jacket I wore because the temperature was freezing.

  I rub my feet together, and they are bare and very cold, and I push them against the net and they find the resistance of something hard and square. It is completely dark, and I hear traffic. While I don’t remember what happened, I am beginning to be certain I know. Then I think I’m dreaming.

  This is a bad dream. I need to wake up. It’s a terrible dream, and you’re fine.

  I take a deep breath and choke back bile as my head throbs, and I take more deep breaths and realize I’m awake. I really am, and this really is happening. I mustn’t panic. I push the hard square shape with my netted bare feet, and whatever it is moves very slightly and feels like plastic.

  A scene case.

  He speaks loudly from the driver’s seat, asking if I’m awake, and again I don’t answer, and I know who he is.

  “Now you won’t have to figure it out anymore,” Al Galbraith says, and I can tell by the sound of his voice, the fluctuations in the volume of it, that he continues to turn around, looking in my direction.

  I don’t move in a way he can see, the entire back of the SUV outfitted as a cargo area, the backseat permanently folded flat, and I try to envision what is in here. It is difficult to think, difficult to breathe. My hands are free. He didn’t tie me but wrapped the net around me, and it is quite tight, and oddly I think of creatures entangled, of the huge leatherback and what I was told. They run into something like a vertical line and panic and spin themselves up in it and then they drown.

  Don’t panic. Slow, deep breaths.

  My phone is gone. He has my phone. He has my shoulder bag, unless it and my phone are on the pavement of the Fayth House parking lot and he left them there.

  He wouldn’t leave them.

  My hands are pinned against my chest, and I move them, poke my fingers through what I realize is the cargo net we use to secure our equipment, and I feel a knotted tie-down and try to loosen it but I can’t. My fingers are stiff and cold, and I’m shaking as if I’m shivering, my teeth about to chatter, and I will myself to calm down.

  “You should be awake,” he says. “I didn’t give you that much. I’ve always wondered if they could smell it coming. The sweet smell of death coming.”

  I don’t remember anything at all, but I know what he did, probably keeps a bottle of it in his car, in that silver Jeep Cherokee, for when the urge strikes. His murder kit.

  You son of a bitch.

  “Of course, everybody reacts a little differently,” he says. “That’s the danger and the art. Too much and the show ends early, which is what happened to the lady in Canada, had to keep knocking her out because I was driving.”

  I can tell from the sound of the pavement under me and the change in pitch of the engine that we are going through a tunnel.

  “Her head was in my lap, and I knew she was going to fight me if I didn’t keep the cloth handy. Then she wouldn’t wake up anymore. I didn’t get a chance to tell her what she needed to hear. Stupid as hell, such a waste. She never heard a word. Not one.”

  I wiggle my fingers through the net and feel the rough plastic side of another case.

  “She had no idea. Keys out, opening a door in a downpour, the last thing she ever knew or did, and that’s just a waste. A real waste after all the trouble I’d gone to, so I had to make something of it. I mean, I didn’t want it to be a complete waste. I made it interesting, at least. It’s all about timing and I know how to wait. But some things aren’t preventable. See what happens when people interfere?”

  I can’t envision which scene case this is.

  “How did you know it was dear Mother’s birthday? Maybe you didn’t. Did you go to see her? Probably not. Wouldn’t matter. She can’t talk.”

  I’m trying to remember exactly how the cases were arranged back here.

  “You have to admit I made it interesting, sending you what I did. Look what it caused.”

  He says it bitterly.

  “It’s probably best if your boss isn’t in jail unless you’re the one who put him there. But the end result wasn’t the plan. You need to know that, and some of it’s your fault. I never intended for him to win the way he has. He should rot. It was just a really perfect time to get everybody’s attention, and it’s a pity he won’t rot in a stinking cell that he can’t furnish comfortably with all his money.”

  He would have moved things back here to fit me inside.

  “I confess I was a little squeamish at first. I’m not talking about the disgusting old carcass you were all over the news about. An old carcass even when she was still alive, such a Goody Two-shoes teaching Mother to make a collage and other mindless hobbies and not appropriately polite when I’d show up. She was earlier than the bone lady, and I wasn’t as daring because I didn’t need to be. I had plenty of time for our little chat, for her to realize the error of her ways. I’m talking about the other one who was a waste. A damn waste.”

  I’m not sure which plastic case is what. Some are orange, others are black, but it’s too dark back here to make out colors.

  “It actually turned my stomach, the sound of the knife going through cartilage. And I’m thinking, if this doesn’t wake you up, lady, you really are dead.”

  He laughs. It is a quiet chuckle that has no joy in it.

  “Lend me your ear. Play it by ear. Think of all the lame clichés with the word ear in them. You never listened. If only you had listened. Why did God give ears to people who don’t listen?”

  I don’t want to open the wrong case.

  “Well, now you have to listen. That’s all you can do. Isn’t it something the way things turn out?”

  Please don’t let me open the wrong one.

  “Are you awake yet!” he yells. “The best part you won’t smell. Well, sort of an ozone smell. You ever heard the old saying about someone sucking all the air out of the room? You’re about to find out it’s true.”

  I’m pretty sure what I want will be in a Pelican transport case, what Marino calls a sixteen-thirty.

  “Are you listening to me? Wake up!”

  I feel a fold-down handle, and that could be a good sign, but it’s hard for me to remember.

  “How good I’ve been to you, and this is what I get. I bring you flowers and hold your disgusting hand.” He continues talking to me, and he’s talking to somebody else.

  Very, very slowly I push up a plastic clasp, working my fingers along the side of the case until I feel another clasp and then another.

  “Dutiful, perfect, really, and put you in the best place when what I really should have done is spit in your face. You know what it’s cost me all these years because you had me late and I was raised by a disgusting old hag? By the grace of no one but me. Fayth House, and you aren’t gracious or grateful. A damn hypocrite, and it’s time you admit it. Well, you will. In a little while, you’re going to apologize.”

  Please don’t let there be nothing but gloves and protective clothing in here.

  But the size seems right. A Pelican case, what feels like a large toolbox. The cases we keep disposable clothing and sheets in are more like utility dry boxes with steel bar latches. I’m pretty sure. I’m trying so hard to think straight. My heart is flying like a terrified bird.

  “You’re a cold-blooded bitch, and I could have let you die, which is what you really wanted. And that’s why I didn’t. A squash for a brain, nothing but a fruit or a vegetable lying there or sitting up in the chair, staring. And you can’t speak for yourself anymore, not the silver-tongued phony anymore, the virtuous do-gooder anymore. I’ve let you live because I enjoy seeing you this way. For the first time, I actually enjoy coming to see you. Pissing yourself, shitting in the bed. Getting uglier, more sour-smelling, more revolting every day. Who’s the hero now?”

  I work up the lid several inches, feeling inside
the case without opening it all the way because it’s heavy and I don’t want to make noise. I feel convoluted foam inside.

  “I know you’re awake!” he yells, and I freeze. “Tell me the password for your phone!”

  I slowly, gently move my fingers inside the case and feel marking pens and a stapler. Evidence packaging supplies, and I know I’ve found the right one. I feel the looped steel handles of small scissors and pull them out, and I begin to cut the netting, and the SUV is going much slower. I see tall streetlights and broken windows and corrugated aluminum siding flowing past the tops of the dark tinted windows, some of the buildings we pass boarded up.

  Moving as little as I possibly can, I work my arms and head out of the netting, and then my feet are free of it, and they feel frozen, as if they’ve turned to stone. I slip my hand back inside the case, feeling for the metal handle.

  “Wake up!”

  Plastic and glass, and I recognize pillboxes and vials, and a steel scalpel handle. He is going very slowly over rough pavement in a dark, deserted area with old abandoned warehouses.

  “I know you’re awake. I didn’t give you that much,” he repeats. “I’m going to stop in a minute and get you out, and it’s no good for you to try anything. Another little nap and then I’m going to show you something you’ve never seen before. I think you’ll be fascinated.”

  I find the foil pouch of disposable scalpel blades.

  “The perfect crime,” he says. “And I came up with it, not you.”

  I slowly, quietly peel open the pouch.

  “A way to put someone to sleep that can’t be detected. Not by anyone. An environmentally friendly way. You will go out green.” That mirthless laugh again. “They all go out green. Except the bone lady didn’t. Really too bad. I honestly don’t feel good about that one. This didn’t have to happen, you know. It’s all your fault. Showing up and poking your nose in what’s none of your business? Timing’s everything, and yours is up.”

  I lock a blade into the handle and steel against steel makes a soft click, and I worry that he heard it.