Hold of the Bone (2 page)

“So that's it for me, and now I'd like to hear from our friend in the doorway who just turned five. Frank?”

Because she was late, she is surprised to be called on, but answers, “My name's Frank. I'm an alcoholic.”

About forty people chorus, “Hi, Frank.” Except for three or four of the faces turned her way, she recognizes them all. “Welcome to any newcomers and visitors. I got here late—sorry—so I'll pass.”

“Don't be silly,” the man leading the meeting says. “Go on.”

“Alright,” she agrees, embarrassed to be standing instead of sitting like the others. “If you're new, stick around. Your life'll change. Mine sure has. First thing that happened to me was finding the man who murdered my father. Got that old monkey off my back, and did it sober. Then I got back together with a woman who'd left because of my drinking, only to lose her a year later to cancer. Managed to get through that, too, with your help, then a little after that I had, um, a very, unexpected one-night stand.”

The people who know her well chuckle at the understatement.

“Yeah.” Frank can't keep from grinning. “Ended up pregnant. That was a shock. I had the baby, but I gave her to her father to raise. He's a great guy and does a far better job raising her than I ever could. And right now—” she thinks about her abundance of riches “—I couldn't ask for a better life. I have a lovely girlfriend, lots of friends. My health. Mortgage is paid off, and I'm considering retirement. I'm comfortable in sobriety, but I hope not complacent. So like I said, stick around. Life gets easier. Doesn't mean tough times won't happen, but you'll learn how to get through them without drinking or making them worse.”

She calls on the woman beside her and relaxes against the jamb. Across the room, Caroline Anderson sends a wink and a smile. Frank returns them. Caroline is not only a good friend but a companionable lover. They met in this room, and after her inexplicable one-night stand with Darcy James, Frank asked Caroline to be her obstetrician. They grew close during the pregnancy and after a gentle flirtation became easy lovers. Theirs is a tender relationship with few demands; recently out of a long-term relationship, Caroline is reluctant to enter another, while Frank doesn't need or want promises about the
future, having learned that most of life occurs in the hollows between expectation and reality.

The meeting ends at ten sharp. Everyone chips in to pick up dirty cups and coffee pots, talking loudly over each other and laughing often. Frank is blocking the door, so she waits downstairs for Caroline, receiving cologned and perfumed hugs for her five years of sobriety. Caroline steps from the building, looking fine in jeans, boots, and a snug T-shirt.

Frank smiles and leaves the well-wishers to hook an arm through her lover's. “Coffee?”

“I'd love some, just give me a minute.”

“Sure. How 'bout I grab a table and you get me a latte when you're done?”

“That's all? No breakfast?”

Frank grins and shakes her head. “Jeans are getting a little tight.”

She crosses to the café across the street and threads past the line at the entrance to an umbrella-ed table on the back patio. Leaving the shaded seat for Caroline, Frank drops the sunglasses back into place and stretches her long legs into the sun. Stray hairs tickle her collarbone, reminding her it's time to get a trim. That makes her think how she always had to reprimand Darcy about keeping his hair regulation length, and she checks her phone. It's not unusual for him to ring on Saturdays to chat about their daughter, and sure enough, she's missed his call. She returns it, listening to the phone ringing two thousand miles away.

Conceived in a mutual confluence of grief, loneliness, and need, Destiny was quite the surprise to her perimenopausal mother. After Caroline confirmed Frank was indeed pregnant, she toyed with aborting the fetus, but the chances of getting pregnant in one shot at her age were astronomical enough to give Frank pause. The odds that she had slept with Darcy at all were so incalculable she couldn't help but feel that their brief coupling had happened for a reason. When she told Darcy, he begged her not to abort. She wasn't surprised; a few months earlier his beloved only child from a failed marriage had finally lost her grueling, lifelong battle with cystic fibrosis. Frank agreed to keep the baby, provided Darcy took full custody upon its birth.
She'd have it for him, which seemed right in a weirdly scripted kind of way, and she'd help with money but wanted no part of the day-to-day raising.

“Hey. How's it going?”

“It goes,” Darcy answers in his grumbling diesel engine voice. “You?”

“S'all good. Destiny?”

He snorts, “She's your daughter. Intractable as hell.”

“Yeah, like you're such a pushover.”

“We had to buy shoes last week and she saw a pair of moccasins. Had a fit until I let her try 'em on. Now I have to bargain with her every night to take 'em off and they're the first things she puts on in the morning. That and her bone necklace.”

“Bone?”

“Yeah, she found some old vertebrae and strung 'em together with baling twine. She wears 'em all day and if anyone tries to take 'em off she has a fit. Didn't I send you a picture last week?”

Darcy sends so many videos and photos she honestly doesn't look at them all, but she recalls one of Destiny smiling under a platinum tangle of hair, naked but for underwear and what she guesses now were the moccasins. “What kind of vertebrae we talking?”

“I don't know, some old possum or raccoon. They're harmless. But here's the queer thing.”

Frank rolls her eyes. Darcy loves saying that to her.

“She was crying the other night when I was trying to talk her out of 'em and when I explained that they'd be right by her bed and that she could put 'em on first thing in the morning she said that Gran'ma Marioneaux told her to never take them off.”

“Who's that?”

“Pearl Marioneaux was my mother's grandmother.”

Darcy gives her time to do the math. His mother's in her seventies. Her mother would be at least in her nineties, making her grandmother—“She's
still alive
?”

“Nope.” She hears the grin in his voice. “Been dead sixty, seventy years. When I asked Dez how she knew about Gran'ma Marioneaux, she said, ‘I knew her from before I came here.'”

It's not the first of her daughter's unearthly pronouncements, but each time Frank hears one her skin prickles. Caroline sets a foamy mug of coffee in front of her, and Frank mouths thanks. While Caroline scans the movie section of the local weekly, Frank listens to Darcy explain that his great-grandmother was a full-blooded Lakota.

“She and my great-grandfather married and got railroaded out of town and eventually settled here. You know the only two things she took with her?”

“Let me guess.”

“Uh-huh. Mom said she was buried in them. Caused quite an uproar at the funeral home.”

“Great. Our kid's channeling Sacajawea and you were worried about raising her in LA.”

“Speaking of funny, guess who called yesterday.”

“No idea.”

“Marguerite.”

“Oh, yeah? You two gettin' chummy again?”

“Nothing like that. Just seems since Gaby died she's been reaching out to me more. Probably because I'm her last link to her. Who knows, maybe she's softening in her old age. She said to say hi. Said she's been thinking about you.”

“Oh, yeah?” She wonders why his ex-wife is thinking about her. Marguerite James isn't just a researcher at UCLA with a doctorate in quantum physics and half a dozen honorary titles; she is also a mambo, a Yoruban priestess who, along with Darcy, happened to save Frank's life years ago on a case gone bizarrely sideways.

“Are you there?”

“Sorry, what?”

“Your daughter. She's starting half-day care next week.”

“Right, right. You got my check?”

“Yeah. It's all paid for. Mom and Tina took her shopping last week and she's already balking about having to wear clothes. I won't be surprised if she gets sent home naked before lunchtime.”

“You're really raising a little heathen.”

“You think you can do a better job?”

Frank laughs. “You know I can't.”

“Damn right,” he grumbles.

“Give me a call,” she tells him. “Let me know how it goes.”

“Will do.”

She hangs up and Caroline asks without looking from her paper, “How's Dez?”

“Fine, I guess. Wearing bone necklaces and channeling her great-great grandmother.”

“Again?”

“Hey, you're the one that told me it's not uncommon for kids to have past-life memories. Recanting your testimony, Doctor?”

“Not at all. I just find it fascinating she has so many.”

Caroline nibbles her scone, catching the crumbs with her plate.

“Can I have a bite?”

She neatly breaks off a piece and is about to put it on a napkin but Frank guides Caroline's hand to her mouth, taking the bite from her fingers and kissing them. Caroline is a delightful companion but lacks imagination in romance.

She stands and kisses Caroline's cheek. “I gotta go check on Tatum, drop off some paperwork. Pick the movie and let me know.”

Frank kisses her again, on the mouth. She doesn't care who sees.

Chapter 3

Frank takes the long way to the station, veering east to drop papers off at Headquarters. It isn't a necessary detour, but a breeze from the ocean has cleared the air, cooled the heat, and made it far too nice to be inside. Frank smiles. It's a good excuse and she almost believes it, but she's been sober long enough to recognize her own shit when she's stepping in it, and though the weather is great it has nothing to do with avoiding the station.

Tapping the side panel in time to a Jay-Z rap, Frank pictures the retirement forms squared neatly on the corner of her desk. She filled the papers out once, then balled them into the trash. Now a fresh set beckons each time she walks into her office. Cop, detective, supervisor, bureaucrat—Frank is bored with it all. Not one aspect of the job excites her anymore. She can't even justify that bad guys still need catching. For every one they get off the streets, another takes his place. That's if they even get him off the street; handing the DA a live suspect and hard evidence never guarantees a conviction.

Automatically monitoring the sidewalks while she waits at a light, she decides pride is the only motivation she has left. Thirty years ago, as punishment for being women on an all-male force, Frank and her first lover were dumped into the worst division in the LAPD. Determined not to cave to harassment and cold shoulders, she persistently, quietly worked her way up from boot to detective, then Sergeant to Lieutenant. Under her aegis, cops sent to Figueroa for disciplinary action became detectives that closed record numbers of uncloseable cases.

But nowadays, except for Lewis, even her detectives bore her, the lot of them young and PC. She wouldn't be surprised if Tatum filed
a suit against her for harassment or brutality or some other goddamned candy-assed complaint. Along with the rest of his colleagues, he looked at Frank like she was the last, thank God, of a dying breed. Like Frank had looked at the old-timers when she was new.

Frank sighs; she's hung around long enough to become a good old boy. Spotting a parking space, she switches lanes. There is parking below Headquarters, but the thought of being in her car when the next big quake hits makes above-ground spaces more attractive. She locks her old Honda and heads for the slick new Police Administration Building.

Thinking she's outlived even the old HQ, Frank glances at a dark bird turning circles high in the rare clear sky. She absently watches the faraway flight, knowing in her heart of hearts it's time to quit, yet each time she tries to fill out the papers she stumbles over the same old obstacle: being a cop is all she has ever been, done, or known. The job is wife, friend, mistress, mother, whore—and Frank isn't ready to explore the mystery of who she'll be without a badge.

“Lieutenant?”

Frank turns, shading her eyes. It isn't until the woman lowers her sunglasses that Frank recognizes Darcy's ex.

With a laugh she reaches for the mambo's hand. “Marguerite James. As I live and breathe. What brings you downtown on a Saturday?”

“A conference.” Marguerite clasps her hand warmly. She tips her chin to the hotel beyond Frank. “I'm on my lunch break.”

Keenly aware of the heat from the mambo's hands, Frank flushes and deliberately keeps her gaze from Marguerite's formidable cleavage. “I just talked to Darcy. Hear you've been asking about me.”

“I have.”

“Any particular reason?”

Marguerite lets go to check her watch. “I have some time before my next panel. Might we talk?”

“About?” Frank hedges.