Bone Dust White (5 page)

“So you were out there on your own all that time?”

His gaze settles on hers and it’s like looking in the mirror. Macy can tell that Jared doesn’t sleep much either. When he speaks again his hooded eyes drift downward like they’re about to shut.

“It wasn’t ideal.” He glances up at the television. “I can’t shake the feeling we were being watched.”

“I doubt the killer stuck around. It would have been too risky.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

Macy yawns into her clenched fist. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long day.”

Jared jiggles the ice in his drink and raises the glass to his lips. “It’s really good to see you again.”

Macy waves at the waiter to come to their table and reaches for her wallet. “Likewise. It’s just a shame it wasn’t under better circumstances.”

Macy pays the bill and leaves Jared alone with the sports channel. Inside her hotel room it’s stuffy and smells faintly of urine. She turns down the thermostat and cracks open a window before leaving a message on Ray’s voicemail.

“Hey, it’s me,” she says, feeling stupid. “I just wanted to check in.”

Spread out like a starfish on the bed, Macy stares up at the ceiling lamp. It’s shaped like a wagon wheel and hangs from a heavy length of chain. Trying to find something of the man she once knew, she listens again to the messages Ray left on her phone earlier in the day. Every word is closely guarded. Never going off script, he says the same thing in three separate messages.
Give me a call when you get a chance.

Macy checks the clock on the bedside table. It’s late. Ray will be at home with his wife, Jessica, and their three children. Seven months have gone by since they renewed their marriage vows and moved back in together for the sake of their daughters. Macy pulls at the fabric of the shirt stretched across her belly and thinks about her unborn child. Doing what’s best for your children isn’t always possible.

She switches on the television and scrolls through the channels, only stopping when she finds the local news. Unable to name the victim, the reporters have interviewed anyone who’s ever known Grace Adams. Several photos flash across the screen. Grace is a tearful toddler, clinging to an unseen adult. Grace is a sullen preteen, posing as an angel in a Christmas Nativity scene. Grace scowls, dressed as a witch for Halloween. Grace is an anxious teenager, her uneasy smile captured in a high school yearbook.

All the while a dramatic voiceover reduces her life to bite-size chunks.
A sickly child raised by a single mother. Abandoned at seven and adopted by her aunt and uncle. A heart transplant. The only witness to a brutal murder.
There’s nothing new to report, so after a few minutes the same headlines are repeated.

Macy presses the pause button on the remote and stares at a photograph taken six months earlier at Grace’s high school graduation. Grace stands perfectly still, her dark eyes gazing past the photographer, but all around her there’s chaos. Her classmates laugh, hug, and throw their caps into the air, but Grace looks as if she’s alone on the stage. Macy switches off the television and shrugs out of her blazer, tugging off her shirt and trousers before hanging them up on the back of the desk chair. Barely able to see her own feet, she pads toward the bathroom feeling tearful and fat. The only thing that seems to help is hot water.

3

Jared eats his breakfast cereal dry, washing it down with black coffee. The view outside his back door is flat white punctuated with the slim dark trunks of pine trees. He watches his two springer spaniels chase each other through the snow, darting beyond the woodpile and skirting the length of chain-link fence that surrounds his backyard. They do this again and again, never growing tired of the repetition. He envies their persistence.

He had a disturbing dream about Grace Adams and he can’t shake the images out of his head. A bony little creature with no curves to her at all, she had an angry mouth that drew blood when she tried to kiss him. He woke up feeling anxious in ways he didn’t understand.

Jared’s cell phone rings, and he lowers the volume of the television. “Hi, Mom,” he says, pacing the cluttered kitchen.

His mother sounds nervous when she speaks. “I know you’re probably getting ready to go to work but I needed to hear your voice.”

“I take it you saw the news.”

“It’s so upsetting that things like this happen in Collier. Your father and I worry about you.”

“You know I can look after myself.” He picks at a whiskey bottle’s label, takes a shot glass out of the dish drainer, and sets it down on the counter.

“Do you know who the woman was?”

“Yeah, but I’ve got to keep it to myself for now.”

He slouches on a stool at the breakfast bar and sips his coffee but he keeps one hand around the neck of the whiskey bottle. His mother asks him for more details and he tries to be patient. “I’m not going to tell you anything. You’d have nightmares.” He glances at the television. “Yeah, I’ve got it on too. Nothing new.”

“According to what I’ve heard, Grace Adams has been in and out of Collier County Hospital for years. Do you know her?”

He thinks about his dream and hesitates. “No, I don’t know her.”

For a while he listens quietly, twice lifting the bottle to pour, twice emptying the shot glass. “Yeah, Lexxie and I are still coming for Christmas.” His mother had pressed his grandmother’s engagement ring into his hands the last time she met him for lunch. He knows what’s coming next.

She almost whispers. “So I guess you haven’t popped the question yet.”

“I promise you’ll be the first to know when I do.” Claiming he has to get to work, Jared says good-bye and hangs up.

Instead of leaving the house he turns the volume up on the television and pours more coffee. Young people are caught on camera for the first time in their lives. Microphones practically stick to their lips. Prepared to claim Grace Adams as their best friend, the kids of Collier crowd around the reporter, telling stories dating back to when they wore their Sunday school best. One girl says she saved a seat for Grace on the school bus every morning. Another declares they talk regularly on the phone. Another says she visited Grace’s house the week before the murder.

The screen blinks and a newscast goes live to a female reporter stationed in Grace’s front yard. Bundled up for cold weather, the reporter gazes into the camera. Her expression is muted by a thick layer of makeup. Snow falls heavily and she brushes it away from her hair. Behind her, Grace’s home on Summit Road is wrapped up in snow, power cables, and yellow crime-scene tape. The narrative is disjointed. The reporter speaks too quickly and has to wait for the information to come through her earpiece.

“This is Connie Evans reporting live at the scene of what police are describing as a particularly brutal murder.”

She turns and points to the Adams residence.

“At approximately 10:35 yesterday morning emergency services received a desperate plea for help from a residence in this Northridge neighborhood.”

She presses her earpiece and nods a few times, holding up a finger indicating that the viewers should be patient.

“Reports are just coming in. The police hope to interview Grace Adams later this afternoon. As of yet there is no word from the police as to the identity of the murder victim. They are appealing to the public for any information that might be pertinent to the case.”

Text from the live news feed moves like a ribbon across the bottom of the screen:
Grace Adams remains at Collier County Hospital. Police to interview her today. No suspects. Police: “a particularly brutal attack.” Stay tuned for a press conference later this morning.

Jared looks at his watch and frowns. He’s late for work, but can’t be bothered to make a move. He lights another cigarette and yawns. The phone started ringing at two in the morning and it didn’t stop until he gave up and answered it a half hour later. At first all he could hear was Hayley crying down the line. It took him ages to calm her down.

Jared takes a long drag off his cigarette and swirls the last dregs of his coffee. His ongoing affair with Hayley has to end. It’s been two weeks since he saw her at his family’s summer cabin out at Olsen’s Landing, and he’s been trying to distance himself ever since. He can no longer deal with the stress of not knowing if or when he’ll see her again. It’s better to end it, to not see her at all. Jared picks up his cell phone and scrolls through the texts. Aside from a couple from his girlfriend Lexxie, most of the messages and calls are from Hayley. One way or another he has to let her go.

When his dogs stretch up against the fence and howl, Jared grabs his deer rifle and walks over to the back door. He squints into the low morning light. The chain-link fence that surrounds his little patch of land stretches up the hillside. The dogs stand in the far corner barking into the trees. The view behind his home is no different from the one behind Grace’s house. The trees are the same. The light is the same. The snow has fallen from the same sky. It makes him uneasy.

The road Jared takes to work is as twisted as the narrow creek it follows but he knows every curve, transitioning smoothly in and out of the gears. Sleet falls heavily, sliding down his windshield before being flicked away by the wipers. He speeds up and races past a gritting truck, honking at the driver as he takes the final turn. The road opens up and descends into the washed-out river valley.

Logs, harvested in the higher elevations, once floated down the Flathead River. His father told him about the islands of tree trunks, occasionally jammed together so tight that it looked as if you could walk all the way across the swollen river. These days the river runs empty, its milky glacier spill carrying little more than debris. The view of the valley is monochrome in the winter months. Other than a blue signpost indicating a turnoff to Walleye Junction, there’s nothing of color in Jared’s sightline.

Though it was originally a coal-mining town, the logging industry took over as Collier’s main source of employment in the mid-1800s. The streets are wide and accommodating, but unless you count the business loop, which only cuts out the south side of town, there is no way to bypass Collier. Part of Route 93 goes straight down Main Street, and where Route 93 goes so go the big eighteen-wheelers travelling back and forth over the Canadian border. Most of the time Collier smells of exhaust fumes.

Stopped at a red light in front of the high school, Jared waits for the cross traffic to clear. His old school sits just off the road but visibility is poor. He can barely make out the low brick classrooms. In front the parking lot is filling up but around back the sports fields sit lazy and white. An old lackluster marquee announces an upcoming basketball game and the date of the winter formal. Back in high school he’d gone to the winter formal with Hayley. It was during their senior year, and they’d been in love. But that was in January. By June he’d somehow lost her to Brian Camberwell, a truck driver nearly twice her age. Jared did not see much of Hayley the following year, but people liked to talk and pretty much everyone was saying she was doing a lot of drugs. Four years later she was in court and after that she was in rehab.

Jared checks his pack of cigarettes and finds it lacking. He pulls into the gas station at Olsen’s Landing and parks in front of a little grocery store that squats low in a sea of plowed tarmac. The parking lot is empty except for a disused station wagon jacked up on cinder blocks. Stubborn brown grass grows out of the snow on the front hood. A gust of wind blows the sleet sideways and picks at the corners of a red, white, and blue banner stretched across the store’s roofline, but a tattered American flag droops wet and idle from its pole.

Jared searches his coat pockets for his knitted cap, puzzled when he can’t find it. He remembers giving it to Grace, and his mind goes still. He stares beyond the windshield wipers that tick back and forth, keeping time with the music playing on the radio. Posters advertising specials for everything from hot dogs, to ammo, to buckets of lard cover the front of the store, but Jared doesn’t see anything except for that scar running the length of Grace’s sternum. He’d almost touched it, pulling his fingers back just in time. He can’t figure out why he’d done such a thing.

The anxious little bell set above the entrance to the store announces Jared’s arrival. A woman with a weathered face and a tight ponytail watches him as he stomps his feet and shakes off the cold. She relaxes when he pulls his hood back and waves hello.

“Hey, Jared, figured you’d be in at some point this morning.” She glances up at a fat little television that sits high above the counter bleating for attention. She lowers the volume and turns to her customer.

“Mornin’, Trina,” he says, clearing his throat. “Where’s that daughter of yours? Doesn’t Sissy usually do the early shift?”

By way of explanation, Trina juts her chin toward the television news. It’s been fifteen minutes since he turned off his set at home, and they’re still saying the same things. “She’s a little nervous about being here on her own and I can’t say I blame her.” She turns away from the TV and meets Jared’s eyes. They’d grown up together and until she’d dropped out of high school at fifteen, they’d always been in the same classes.

He asks her to heat up a breakfast burrito and she pops one in the microwave.

She sniffs into a wadded-up tissue. “Saw Carson yesterday. He told me that it was you guys that found them out in the woods.”

Jared spots Trina’s daughter Sissy lumbering up the aisle, her pregnant belly pushing out in front of her, a fair indication of the impatient child it’s bound to be. He says good morning, noticing the Coke in her hand and the blue circles under her eyes.

Sissy barely raises her face to look at him. “Mornin’, Jared.” She lifts the hinged board and heaves herself behind the counter to join her mother.

Jared asks for a pack of Marlboros. A twelve-gauge shotgun rests on the shelf behind Trina and Sissy. Hovering above the barrel, a patchwork of photos of young men in uniform is tacked to a pinboard. At the last count more than a couple dozen Flathead Valley boys were away fighting in the war. He points to the picture of Sissy’s fiancé. “Heard anything from Dwayne?”