The Thread That Binds the Bones (2 page)

She took three steps and set the groceries on the table, then picked up the magazine and stared at her own clean features, the wide beige eyes, the generous lips, the spills of curling, streaky blonde hair. She could smile on the cover of a fashion magazine because she trusted that no one at home would ever pick one up. Yet Michael had found her.

She dropped the magazine and collapsed on the couch, hugging a pillow to her stomach. The light seeped out of the day. She listened to a drip in the kitchenette sink, and thought about the frozen vegetables thawing in her grocery bag, and she couldn’t find the energy to get up, because getting up would mean opening the envelope, and opening the envelope would mean Family trouble, no matter what was inside. She had made her life from scratch, and done it well; she spent most of her time feeling contented with her work, her friends, her home, her solitude; days went by without her feeling depressed, and she counted that a victory.

At last she sighed. She threw the pillow across the room, where it hit a large framed print, Klimt’s
The Kiss.
She rose and took the groceries to the kitchenette, put them all away, and finally took the envelope and sat with it in the breakfast alcove.

Michael had most likely addressed the envelope in the kitchen cavern; he didn’t like to sit still, and had no desk in his part of the house. Yet the paper carried no trace of home: cinnamon, incense, wood and candle smoke, roasting meat, dank earth; all the scents had been lost in transit.

She slid her finger under the flap and opened the envelope.

Please grace our union with your presence

Michael Bolte and Alyssa Locke will be joined,

Powers and Presences permitting

September 24

Purification, September 23

We look forward to your arrival

She tapped the invitation on the table, biting her lip. She had a month to think about it.

Finally she got up and went to the phone. “Zandra?” she said to her agent. “I’m going to need some time off next month.”

“What? You never take vacations.”

“This is Family stuff.”

“You have a family?”

“Boy, do I have a family.”

“WeVe worked together three years, and you never had a family before.” Zandra sounded suspicious.

“They just never caught up to me before.”

“Is that what all this jumping around was about, all these forwarding addresses? This is why you keep running away from great opportunities for me to make lots of money?”

“Partially.”

“And they found you anyway, huh?”

“Yeah. I should have known they would.”

“Laura, once you do this family stuff, will you stop hiding out in the sticks and come to New York, where I can get you some really great jobs? I mean, now your family knows where you are, right? So you don’t need to hide anymore, right? Or at least you could hide someplace sensible for a change, and do some better stuff than department store catalogs. Cover photographers don’t go out there often enough.”

“Once I do this family stuff, I don’t know what kind of shape I’ll be in.” Laura blinked, hearing her own words. She laughed, then covered her mouth with her hand. “If I’m in decent shape, I’ll think hard about it.”

“Which days do you need off?”

Laura told her,

“I’ll start apartment hunting, sweetie,” said Zandra.

After hanging up the phone, Laura put the wedding invitation on the kitchen corkboard. She stuck the tack through the “o” in Bolte. She wondered if Michael felt it. She hoped so.

Chapter 2

Tom stood at the bar in the Dew-Drop Inn in Arcadia, a small town next to the Columbia River on the Oregon side, and glanced at the door, since it was after four and he had just heard the Greyhound bus pull in next to its one-window ticket outlet in the same building. If anybody got off the bus here, they might need a taxi to somewhere. Tom could use a fare; after ten months as a cab driver in Arcadia he knew that Bert Noone had given him the job out of charity, since there wasn’t enough business for one cab, let alone a second. Bert had several interests in town, including real estate (not a very active market) and other, unnamed activities; whatever Bert was up to, he seemed to be able to afford supporting a supernumerary. He owned the garage where the cabs stayed when not in service, and it had a number of unused storage rooms above it. Tom lived in one of them, inconveniencing nobody.

The TV down the bar showed pre-game action, and the rest of the regulars clumped at that end, keeping their distance as they always did. Tom knew them by name and spoke to them in passing, and they were pleasant, but they never encouraged conversation.

That suited Tom, for the most part. He had come to Arcadia to get away from Portland and the people who were interested in him. After the peculiar press coverage of the suicide attempt he had foiled, and the thirty-fourth “make me fly like an angel” joke, he had walked away from his janitor job without picking up his last paycheck. The ease with which he gave his spider plant to his next-door neighbor, said goodbye to his apartment, and packed his duffel bag made him realize he still hadn’t found the place he was looking for: home.

Something about Arcadia, a hundred and fifteen miles inland from Portland along the river, had whispered “stop here” to him. A ride had dropped him on the off-ramp. He had walked down into town, wandered into the Dew-Drop Inn, thumped his duffel down beside a table, and ordered a glass of milk. The first person he had met was Bert, who offered him a job without asking any questions except whether he could drive and memorize maps.

“Fella I had before you didn’t last very long,” said Bert. “It’s not such a complicated town, but there are ways and ways of getting lost. You gotta be careful here, Tommy.”

Tom memorized maps, then applied for and received a chauffeur’s license. He hadn’t changed his name since his brief notoriety in Portland, but few people in Arcadia took the
Oregonian
,
and of those who did, no one appeared to connect him with the weird but accurate press story.

Tom spent some of his nondriving time in the bar, where Fred, the owner/bartender, let him run a tab. Bert had a half-time dispatcher, Trixie Delarae, who would phone Tom at the bar if anybody wanted a cab. On slow days or when Bert was on duty, Tom worked in exchange for things he needed. He chopped wood, washed dishes, cleaned buildings, repaired fences, weeded gardens.

He hadn’t seen any ghosts since arriving in town, and he missed them. The people were kind but impenetrable; ghosts at least would have given him some kind of information. He had made one friend, Eddie, who pumped gas and changed oil at Pops’s Garage, but Eddie was a short-termer like Tom, and he disappeared three months after Tom arrived in town.

Once when Tom was unloading produce at the grocery store, Cleo, the grocer, watched him with such a sad look on her face, he had asked what was wrong. “Nothing,” she said. Then she shook her head. “You’re a good worker, Tom, and you seem like a nice fella. We’ll be sorry to see you go.”

“But I don’t plan to leave.”

“People usually don’t,” she had said, and shrugged.

The Dew-Drop Inn was warm and much more comfortable than his room. It smelled of beer and smoke and sawdust. It hosted a collection of strange taxidermied creatures—a two-headed lamb, a goat with a single horn, an albino raccoon—on shelves above eye level. Taxidermy was a hobby of Fred’s son’s, Fred had explained. Tom had learned to ignore the creatures and watch people while waiting for fares. During the quiet months of almost-isolation he’d spent in Arcadia, Tom had noticed that the starch in his shoulders was washing away. He was learning to relax again. It made him wonder what he had really been feeling in Portland, and Reno, and Los Angeles before that ....

The pre-game action and ads ended, and the game began, sparking discussion among the regulars at the other end of the bar. Tom heard the big door squeak on its hinges, and turned to see a woman standing there, holding the door open, autumn light behind her. Sun shone through the edges of her cloudy light hair and defined her shape, tall and slender. Tom finished chewing a mouthful of beer nuts, washed them down with ginger ale, and waited, wondering if conversation would be called for. The murmur from the other end of the bar stilled. Fred stopped wiping glassware with the towel over his apron.

The woman stepped inside, letting the door close behind her, and suddenly she had a face, pale and firm, a high, domed forehead, slanting eyes and eyebrows, high cheekbones, a slender nose, full lips, and a strong jawline. She wore a black knit dress with a pattern of hand-sized white stars on it. It clung to her from neck and wrists to midthigh. She wore black tights and flat black slippers. Tom felt something warm and strange stir inside him.

“Miss Laura,” said Fred. His tone surprised Tom. He sounded scared.

“Hello, Mr. Forester. Could you tell me who drives the cab outside?” She sounded scared too.

“I do,” said Tom.

“I need a ride—a long ride,” she said. “Can you take me out to Chapel Hollow?”

“Miss Laura,” said Fred, upset, as Tom grabbed his cap. Tom had seen Chapel Hollow on the map. It was about eighteen miles away.

“Mr. Forester, I need a cab. My car broke down on the highway, and the only way I could get even this far was on the bus. Michael’s getting married tomorrow. I have to get home. Right away.”

“Miss Laura,” said Fred, and sighed. Then he said, “Tommy, could you come here and settle your tab?”

Tom turned and looked at the bartender. He had just paid up two days before, and Fred usually let him go a week between payments. Tom took out his wallet and walked down the bar to where Fred was standing.

“Don’t take that Bolte girl all the way out to Chapel Hollow,” Fred murmured. “Nothing but trouble out there.”

Fred was the closest thing to a friend Tom had in the bar. Tom looked at Fred, who wore an expression midway between pleading and scolding. He glanced in his wallet, found a twenty-dollar bill, and handed it to Fred. “Thanks,” Tom said, and headed to the door. As he looked at the woman, he listened to the first whisper directed his way he had heard since arriving in Arcadia.

—Come with me. Though the voice was a whisper, it was compelling and promising.

—Come on home, it said.

Awake, afraid, hopeful, Tom followed the woman outside.

The air had a nip in it—night frost had started the leaves turning the week before—but even in her city clothes the woman didn’t look cold. She was tall, must be around five ten; Tom didn’t have to look down very far to meet her eyes. Her hair was the color of dried grass: brown, with streaks of bone and beige. Her eyes were the color of shallow water over sandstone. Her mouth did not smile, but her lips looked soft. She cast a glance at him, then walked down the sidewalk toward a soft-sided silver-gray suitcase with a camel-colored coat and a moss-green beret sitting on top. She stooped to lift the bag by a gray shoulder strap, but he beat her to it. She took her coat and hat, gave him a glimmering of smile, and climbed into the backseat of his cab. He put her suitcase in the trunk, then slipped in behind the steering wheel.

Like everything about Bessie, Cab Number Two, the radio took a moment to warm up. Tom pressed the transmit button and said, “Trixie, are you there? I’ve got a fare.” He waited, but no answer came. Trixie only worked about half the time—when she knew planes were going to land at the tiny municipal airport, and most late afternoons and early evenings. The taxi company phone rang at her house, for those times when someone needed a taxi unexpectedly. Then she would phone, or come down and get Tom out of bed or out of the bar and send him out. She knew he always checked the westbound bus in the morning and the eastbound bus in the afternoon; still, she was usually in the office in the afternoon. He tried reaching her once more, with no luck, then shrugged and clicked the flag on the meter.

Bessie growled at him when he started her. She seemed to want to hibernate; the previous winter, he had had to coax her carefully for each start, and now she was getting sleepy with cold. Tom wallowed the car around and headed south out of town on Highway 21, up away from the river and the green it gave to the south shore and the town. Phone lines and barbed-wire fences kept pace with the taxi along the gray asphalt road. Magpies flew across the sky. Tom wondered what they found to eat in the desert scrub, the low lichen-looking green-gray bushes and the scatterings of black pumice rock, dead grass lending a warm brown tone to the country. Brown and black cattle drifted away over the rises.

The old cab ran quietly once she started. Tom watched the woman in the rearview mirror. Just being in a small enclosed place with her set something simmering inside him. The air carried a faint scent of cedar and sagebrush: was it hers? Light lay like milk on the curve of her cheek, the column of her throat, as she stared out toward human-shaped metal hieroglyphs a hundred feet high that carried power lines along the horizon.

—Come with me, something whispered, even though the woman was looking away from him.

With
,
the whisper had said. It had been so long since he had done anything
with
someone on any level below the surface.

When he turned left on Rivenrock Road, she met his eyes in the mirror. “I don’t think I remember you from school,” she said. “Not unless you’re the Meyers kid and your acne finally cleared up.”

There was a Scott Meyers about her age—looked like mid-twenties—who was a cook at the Ring-Necked Pheasant Grill. No acne. Tom said, “No, I’m new.”

“Why would anybody move to Arcadia? I couldn’t wait to get away.”

“It’s quiet here.”

“You can’t have been here long if you think that,” she said. “The town runs on talk. They talk about seven generations ago, bring you up to the present, and predict that everything will stay the same in the future. That’s why I left. I didn’t want to get stuck on the same track as my ancestors and relatives.”

“It’s quiet here for me,” said Tom. “I’ve only been here ten months. Hardly anybody talks to me yet.”