The Bone Key

  Mr. Levington-Price was silent for a long moment, watching. Then he said, “You couldn’t have known. No one could. It isn’t even . . . ”

  I thought of the boy I had been, of his murderous, pent-up hatred, of his strange, silent, green glass maelstrom of wrath.

  “No,” I said. “I knew.”

  LISTENING TO BONE

  In clement weather, I sometimes went to the Henry Davenport Public Zoological Gardens on my lunch break. The zoo was free to the public, and an hour spent watching the credo quia impossibile gaudery of the flamingoes or the bright-eyed inquisitiveness of the otters was more than worth the discomfort of the crowds. That particular early June day, I was standing by the elephant’s cage when there was a tug at my sleeve and a high-pitched voice said, “This is my bone, and I want you to have it.”

  I do not like children. I do not know how to speak to them. They frightened and confused me when I was a child myself, and they frighten and confuse me now that I am an adult. I could not determine either the age or the sex of the child clutching my sleeve, but it was an unhealthy-looking creature, its skin almost gray in the bright summer sunlight; its pale curls were badly tangled, and although its clothes were clearly expensive and well-made, they were dirty and torn.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said, looking around frantically for an adult that might belong to this tatterdemalion.

  “I want you to have my bone,” the child said. Its blue eyes were as glassy as marbles—definitely not well, this child—but their stare was accusing. And the hand that wasn’t gripping my sleeve was extended, grubby palm up, proffering a small, unremarkable bone.

  “I, er . . . that’s, er, very kind of you, but—”

  “I want you to have it.” Out-thrust lower lip, and one did not need to know anything about children to recognize the signs of an imminent temper tantrum. I looked around again, even more desperately, but still there was no sign of a parent in the offing.

  “I, er . . . ” But there was really nothing else I could do, not without creating a scene. “Thank you.” And I let the creature give me its bone.

  It was a mistake. I knew it as soon as those cold dirty fingers touched my skin. “Now you can help me,” the child said. “I’m lost, and I want to go home.”

  “But I can’t—” Automatically, I shoved the bone in my pocket. I wanted it not to be touching my skin, and I knew I could not simply drop it, not here with the child’s blue eyes eviscerating me.

  “I got away from the bad man, and I want to go home. But I’m lost, and you have to help me.”

  “I can’t help you,” I said to the child in a ludicrous imitation of firmness. “I have to get back to work. But if you’re lost, you should, er, find a policeman. He’ll help you.” I pulled free—with an effort, for its stick-like little fingers were remarkably strong—and fled, ignominiously routed. I did not care, so long as I could get away from those staring blue eyes and that piercing voice.

  At the gate, I looked back, a foolish Orpheus. But the child was nowhere in sight. I hoped, somewhere between guilt and relief, that it was taking my advice.

  When I came out of the Parrington that evening, the child was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs.

  I went backwards against one of the flanking sphinxes, wishing its guardianship were more than symbolic. The child fixed me with its accusing blue stare and said, “I’m lost, and you have to help me.”

  It was also patently invisible to the other people going up and down the steps, to the people passing by on the sidewalks, and if it could track me from the zoo to the museum, it was not lost by any conventional definition of the word. Looking at it more carefully, in surrender to the fact that I could not pawn it off on a policeman or otherwise escape it, I saw the leaden tinge to its lips, saw that some of the smudges I had taken for dirt were actually bruises ringing its throat, and although it was standing beneath one of the tall lamps that guarded the stairs at the bottom as the sphinxes did at the top, it cast no shadow. The fixed blue eyes did not blink.

  My bone, the child had said, and suddenly, horribly, I understood what it meant.

  It took me three tries, but I managed to ask, “What is your name?”

  It said only, as it had said before, “I got away from the bad man, and I want to go home. You have to help me go home.” It started up the stairs, its clawed hands reaching.

  My nerve broke; I bolted back into the museum, and the child did not follow.

  All I had accomplished was to trap myself in the Parrington. I did not make the experiment of trying the back door, but retreated to my office to think.

  Asking why the creature had chosen to give me its bone was pointless. My foolish and unwilling foray into necromancy had made me attractive to such things, as a magnet is attractive to iron. Whether the child could or wished to harm me was an equally futile line of inquiry, although one singularly difficult to dismiss from consideration.

  The only proper question was: who was this child, and how could I help it?

  I got away from the bad man, it had said. And it had appeared at the zoo. There was a faint sense of familiarity, an echo as of a story I had once known. Sharp voices murmuring in my guardians’ parlor, a thin exhausted woman, always in black. “She used to be quite a beauty,” Mrs. Siddons’s flat gloating voice said in my memory. “Before her Trouble, of course.”

  A noise. I looked up—screamed, jerking back so violently that I overbalanced and fell. The child had found me again, its face pressed against the glass of the window, blue eyes goggling. There was no breath to mist the pane. I do not remember how I got into the hall, whether I crawled or ran, my mind yammering, Thank God I keep the window closed, thank God, thank God. I slammed the door shut, pressed myself against the opposite wall, the cool plaster making me aware of pain in my hip and shoulder. I had hit the floor hard and badly. But the fall seemed also to have jarred something looks, for I could now remember that woman’s name: Rosalie Merton, born a Crowe, and if that was not proof that birth and breeding could not save one from grief and horror, then nothing was.

  It was a relief to have something to do, even if it involved going into the stacks. The revenant pressed against my window like a ghastly moth was worse even than the causeless noises and capricious electricity of the Mathilda Rushton Parrington Memorial Library Annex, and I knew where to find what I sought: the wedding announcement of Rosalie Crowe and Harcourt Merton. Then, armed with that date, I plunged into the newspaper archives and secured a teetering armful of bound collections of the Hub-Telegraph, starting two years after the Crowe-Merton marriage and continuing through the tenth anniversary. I fled the stacks for the Archivists’ Reading Room, which had no exterior windows and thus was safe.

  I hoped.

  There was not much information reported in the Hub-Telegraph. There never is. But I had long practice at reading between the lines, and the story came back to me with very little prompting.

  Harcourt and Rosalie Merton had had one child, Gareth, who had been, due to the inability of Rosalie Crowe Merton’s brothers to beget children on their wives, heir to both the Merton and the Crowe fortunes. One sunny June day when Gareth Merton was five—and I was not at all surprised when I saw the date: the dead are strongest on their anniversaries—his mother yielded to his pleading and allowed him to go to the Davenport Zoo as part of a small friend’s birthday celebration.

  That afternoon, Gareth Merton disappeared and was never seen alive again.

  There had been the inevitable paraphernalia of sightings, ransom notes, imposters, clairvoyants. But the clairvoyants were frauds; the ransom notes were fakes; the sightings led nowhere. No one was ever arrested. Gareth Merton was presumed dead, and the fortunes to which he was heir were dismantled.

  And now Gareth Merton wanted to go home.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I said and flinched at the echoes of my voice from the marble walls. The Merton family had died out; the house that Gareth Merton had called home had burned down tw
enty years ago. Doubtless the Mertons were buried, like the Crowes and the Parringtons and the Booths, in Resurrection Hill Cemetery, but would the child consider that its home?

  Somehow, wretchedly, I did not think so.

  I am not given either to obscenities or to blasphemies, but at that moment I was sorely tempted, transfixed by a horrifying image of being accompanied by that loathsome, demanding creature everywhere I went for the rest of my life.

  I slept that night, little and fitfully, on the couch in the staff lounge, blinds down, curtains drawn.

  I could not stay in the Parrington forever; I was not convinced, in any event, that the revenant might not find its way in, given time. I washed as best I could in the men’s lavatory, but I had slept in my clothes, and I looked it. At least it was unlikely anyone would notice white stubble on pale skin and realize I had not shaved.

  I hoped.

  I kept moving that morning, not sure whether I feared more being caught by the revenant or by the museum director. Fortunately, I saw neither of them, and there was a surprisingly large number of things I legitimately needed to do in various storerooms, card catalogues, and other nooks and crannies of the museum. I would have been rather pleased with myself if it had not been for the louring knowledge that I was merely delaying the inevitable. And that I still did not have any answers, or even any wild guesses.

  At noon or thereabouts, Miss Coburn came upon me in the staff lounge, where I was gloomily contemplating a lunch of cold coffee and stale doughnuts. “Growing a beard, Mr. Booth?”

  “What? Oh, er, no. I . . . ”

  “You look terrible. What’s wrong?”

  “I, er . . . ”

  “Spend your lunch money on books again?” she said, and I blushed at her teasing.

  She relented, smiled. “I’d be happy to take you out for lunch, if you’d like.”

  “No, I, er . . . ” But perhaps the revenant would not approach me if I had a companion. And I could trust Miss Coburn. “That is, thank you, Miss Coburn. I would be very grateful for your company. But I can, er, buy my own lunch.”

  “Then why . . . ?” She frowned at me. “Are you in trouble?”

  “No. Yes . . . er. Maybe. Do you know anything about Gareth Merton?”

  “Who?”

  “The heir to the Crowe-Merton fortune.”

  “But there is no . . . Oh. You mean the little boy who disappeared.”

  I nodded. She tilted her head, frowning at me suspiciously. Miss Coburn had witnessed one of my previous encounters with the supernatural, and she was clearly putting the pieces together in her head. I nodded again.

  “Let’s go out to lunch,” Miss Coburn said decisively.

  She took me to a harborside restaurant, where we ate clam chowder and sourdough bread, and I told her what I could about Gareth Merton. Although there had been no sign of the revenant when we left the museum, I was careful to sit with my back to the window.

  “But what do you think he wants you to do? Find his body?”

  “No. That’s the, er, bone.”

  Miss Coburn shuddered.

  “Sorry. But it, er, it wants to go home. I just don’t know where it thinks its home is.”

  “Home is where the heart is,” Miss Coburn said.

  “But where is that? It doesn’t have a heart any longer. And there’s no one left . . . the Mertons have died out, and the children who were Gareth Merton’s friends wouldn’t—”

  “Wait,” Miss Coburn said, frowning fiercely into her coffee. “Children . . . children . . . Aunt Ferdy said something once . . . There was an imposter, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he’d remember Gareth Merton, I bet.”

  “But how on Earth am I supposed to find him?”

  “You don’t have to. You already know him. He’s Mr. Garfield, the piano tuner.”

  The Parrington had two Blüthner concert grand pianos, which were used for fund-raising concerts and were hired punctually four times a year by a consortium of the city’s piano teachers, who apparently wished to hold piano recitals in the most overpowering venue possible. And the man who tuned the Blüthners was Mervyn Garfield. As Miss Coburn had said, I knew him. I made a habit of slipping into the concert hall when he had finished tuning, so that I could listen to him play. I never said anything; I only wanted to hear the music that came pouring out from beneath his strong, square hands. I had never thought about what he was beside a piano tuner, never wondered what other lives he might have had.

  “Do you know his address?” I asked Miss Coburn.

  “No, but I can find out.” She rose and, after a quick murmured exchange with the maître d’, strode out of the main dining room. Without wanting to, I turned my head. The revenant was standing on the restaurant’s patio, oblivious to the patrons seated around it, as they were oblivious to it. I saw its lips move: I’m lost. I want to go home.

  And then Miss Coburn returned, and I turned back to the table hastily and gratefully.

  “Is he . . . there?” Miss Coburn said, and I noticed she was being very careful not to look at the window.

  “Yes. But I don’t think you’ll . . . that is, no one else seems to be able to see, er, him.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said with a shiver, and kept her face carefully averted. Illogically, I felt better for this small proof that she believed me.

  She said briskly, “According to Aunt Ferdy, Mr. Garfield lives in a boarding house on Hamish Street. I wrote down the address.” She tore a page from her memorandum book and handed it to me. “Are you going to go talk to Mr. Garfield?”

  “I have to do something,” I said, not turning around, not yielding to the force of the revenant’s lightless blue eyes. “At least . . . at least he will remember.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Coburn and signaled for the check, her eyes still avoiding the window as resolutely as if Gareth Merton were visible to her.

  Hamish Street was one of a tangled skein of streets not old enough to have historical interest but too old to be fashionable. It was within walking distance of the Parrington if one did not mind a long walk—which, when faced with the horrors of the city’s public transportation system, I embraced gratefully as the lesser of two evils.

  The boarding house on Hamish Street was a massive, moldering Queen Anne, its porch railings leaning erratically out of true and its clapboards peeling leprously. I rang the bell with a sense of dread not entirely attributable to the revenant which had trailed me all the way from the restaurant and was now standing at the bottom of the porch steps, its dull blue eyes fixed on me. It had not attempted to approach me, although that might have been because I set a pace fast enough that it was difficult for the creature to keep up at all.

  The door was opened by a small woman, bright-eyed and neat as a wren; I observed that whatever the state of the exterior of the house, the interior was spotless. “Can I help you?”

  “I, er, I’d like to speak to Mr. Garfield, please. Is he in?”

  “Is it about a piano?”

  “No. It’s, er, a personal matter.”

  She seemed surprised, but said, “Yes, sir. Just a minute, and I’ll go to fetch him.”

  I waited in the hall, regarded somnolently by two enormous white cats on the stair-landing. It was more than a minute, but less than five, before I heard the landlady’s voice “ . . . and mind the cats on the landing,” and Mr. Garfield’s cane came into view, followed by Mr. Garfield himself. I noticed that the cane nudged the cats only very gently, and the cats, clearly resigned to the eccentric behavior of human beings, did not even twitch.

  Mr. Garfield stopped two steps up and said, “Mrs. O’Mara said there was someone here to see me?”

  “Er, yes,” I said. “You don’t know me, but my name is Kyle Murchison Booth—”

  “At the museum?” Mr. Garfield had turned his head toward the sound of my voice, although his clouded eyes seemed to be gazing past my left shoulder.

  “ . . . Yes.”

/>   “But you wouldn’t come about the Blüthners.” He came down the last two steps, as if the mention of the pianos somehow established my bona fides.

  “Er, no.” I hesitated wretchedly, but there was no tactful way to introduce the subject, and I did not need to turn my head to know the revenant had come up onto the front porch. “I’m sorry, but I must ask you about Gareth Merton.”

  For a moment, Mr. Garfield seemed not to understand what I had said; then I watched in helpless dismay as his face crumpled, not like an adult’s, but like a child’s, the child both he and Gareth Merton had once been. He drew breath as if against a great weight and said, “You’d better come sit down.”

  I followed him into the parlor, chose a chair that put me with my back to the window and the dead, accusing eyes of the revenant. Mr. Garfield sat down and said sadly, “I thought people had forgotten about that.”

  “I, er . . . I was reminded.”

  He sighed, a noise like his heart tearing free inside his chest. “I love my work, Mr. Booth. I love my pianos and I love the fact that nobody ever notices me. I love being just Mr. Garfield, the blind piano-tuner. I don’t want to be the Gareth Merton Imposter again.”

  “I won’t bring your name into it,” I said, hesitated, added, “The museum didn’t send me. You won’t, er . . . that is, you won’t lose . . . the pianos won’t . . . ”

  “I understand.” He did not smile, but there was perhaps a little less grief in the lines of his face. “This is important to you.”

  “Yes. Er. I actually . . . that is, I’m not really interested in the, er, imposture.”

  “No?”

  “No. I meant what I said. I need to know about Gareth Merton. There’s no one else left to ask. And I . . . ” Again, I could not help myself. I twisted to look out the window, and the revenant was there. I felt pinned between its glassy stare and Mr. Garfield’s clouded sightlessness.