Walking the Bones Read online

  Most times DeMarco had wanted to answer truthfully, but heard only half-truths coming from his mouth. Just the mention of Baby Ryan made him wince, made the scar on his silence shrink tighter. The psychiatrist had called the baby’s death an accident, which made DeMarco angry. Was stupidity an accident? Was inattention, no matter how brief, an accident? No, that so-called accident was his doing—not the other driver’s, not God’s, not Fate’s, not anybody or anything else’s fault but his own. And he refused to be denied that guilt.

  In the end he returned to active duty, back to the routine of helping to maintain a semblance of order throughout the villages and hamlets and farms of a rural county where the social high point of the year was the end-of-summer farm show.

  And there encountered the most onerous irritation of that dangerous winter. The way the other troopers treated him…the way his station commander always looked at him when he thought DeMarco wouldn’t notice, as if DeMarco were about to split down the middle and…and what? Release the demons? Set the entire barracks aflame with the fury of his misery?

  Thank God for Jayme. This became his mantra each time he slipped toward anger or, even worse, into a mute and impotent despair. She had no idea how desperately he clung to her, for he was careful to ration out his attention through the week. A touch on her arm, a cup of coffee, a gesture here, a smile there. And always felt guilty, as if he was playing her somehow, exploiting her for his own survival.

  Saturday nights were different. He made love as if he fully believed he would lose her in the morning. And if he lost her, he would lose that last small part of himself that was maybe worth keeping.

  TEN

  During the first warm days of March in southwestern Kentucky, the yard and garage sales began. Aaron Henry, disgraced eighth-grade teacher and registered pedophile, made his rounds every weekend. He focused on first-edition books, old jewelry, women’s handbags, DVDs, band instruments, working iPods and MP3 players, carnival glassware, ceramic figurines, dolls and action figures, and any other items that could be cleaned and sold on eBay for a profit. He always wore a ball cap and mirrored aviator glasses, stayed away from trailer courts, where most of the items were worn-out junk, and from affluent neighborhoods, where most items were priced too high for profitable resale, and never shopped in the school district where he used to teach.

  On their third such surveillance of his activities, with Hoyle and David Vicente watching through binoculars behind the tinted windows of Hoyle’s Ford Bronco, Rosemary Toomey attempted a more direct approach.

  “This is interesting,” she said while standing opposite Henry at a folding table crammed with children’s toys. She picked up a rubber troll doll with flame-orange hair, held it up for him to see, and said, “My granddaughter loves things like this.”

  He looked up only briefly, nodded, and looked away. Took a step farther down the table.

  Rosemary walked apace. “I keep telling her it’s junk, but she says it will be valuable someday. What do you think?”

  He glanced at the doll. “How much?”

  “Four dollars,” Rosemary said.

  “She might get ten for it now. Hard to predict its future value.”

  He turned away from the table then, walked to the next table. Rosemary followed.

  “What about Beanie Babies?” she asked. “She has at least a hundred of those. She’s been saving them since she could walk.”

  “The market’s saturated,” he told her. “Only the rare ones have any value.”

  Again he tried to walk away from her. Again she kept apace. “She has them all, I think,” Rosemary said. “Which ones are most valuable?”

  He said, “There are price guides online.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Rosemary said. “She’s thirteen now. Such a beautiful girl. Let me show you a picture of her.”

  Aaron Henry turned away once more, abruptly this time, and strode toward the street empty-handed. She watched him walking half a block to his car parked along the curb, then returned the troll to its proper table and crossed to the Bronco.

  Vicente opened the rear door from inside, then slid over to make room for her. She closed the door and said, “He wouldn’t bite.”

  Hoyle asked, “He showed no interest whatsoever?”

  “None I could detect.”

  Vicente leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. “The man is voluntarily subjecting himself to Depo-Provera. He doesn’t warrant any further attention.”

  Hoyle said, “Current behavior is not necessarily relevant to past behavior.”

  “Then why,” Vicente asked, “are we wasting another Saturday morning?”

  Hoyle turned the key, started the engine. “I’ve ordered a listening device,” he said. “It should arrive within the week.”

  ELEVEN

  DeMarco’s decision to retire from the Pennsylvania State Police had not been a sudden one except to his employer and colleagues and everyone else who knew him. None were aware he had been considering retirement ever since last November, when he had watched his friend die, and then had fired a bullet into the heart of a madman. Ever since that day, the fact that he had been unable to save Huston sat like a crushing weight at the top of his spine, even though he knew how cleverly Thomas Huston had choreographed his own death.

  Then, eight days before the summer solstice, DeMarco walked into Jayme’s office at the barracks, closed the door, and told her, “I wanted you to know before I make it official. I’m hanging it up.”

  She stared at him for ten long seconds before pushing away from her desk, standing, then crossing to sit on the desk’s front edge. Even in uniform, she took his breath away—her long hair pulled back and double-braided like the mane of a sorrel filly; her long, slender, talented legs; the long, delicate fingers; the eighteen pale freckles spread across her cheeks…the scent of her neck, the taste of her skin.

  “You’re retiring,” she said.

  He nodded. “That’s the plan.”

  “To do what?”

  He shrugged. “Catch up on my sleep, I guess.”

  She straightened her back, took in a deep breath. Her breasts beneath the starched gray shirt pulled his gaze. They were lightly freckled too.

  He remembered their most recent Sunday morning together. “Let there be light,” Jayme had said after climbing naked from the bed and sweeping the heavy curtains aside, flooding the room and her own pale body with the pink hues of sunrise. Her fair skin glowed even brighter than the light through the window.

  And DeMarco, from the bed, had blinked like a man arising from his grave. “Hallelujah,” he had said.

  But now, in her office in the final days of spring, her glow seemed more of a glower. “Is this some ploy of yours to get rid of me?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he told her.

  “You’re damn right,” she said. And then, a few seconds later, “You’ve thought this through?”

  “Extensively.”

  She chewed on the inside of her cheek. “So now what?” she asked.

  “You mean us?”

  “Of course us.”

  “Now it gets better, I hope. Now we don’t have to hide this.”

  “And?”

  “I’m not sure what that means.”

  “It’s a conjunction. It’s not the end of a sentence. More words are required.”

  “Yabba dabba do?”

  She smiled. “Very appropriate, Mr. Flintstone. But I don’t speak Neanderthal.” She raised her hands in front of her body, fingers cupped inward. “Are you saying you want more of this?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Good. I like you when you’re docile. But how do I know you won’t get bored doing nothing, and buy a motorcycle, and go off without me in search of some hairy-chested adventure?”

  How do you tell a woman that the only thing you
know for certain is that you cannot survive without her? He had not yet learned how to fit such words to his mouth. “Like I said, I’m not going anywhere.”

  The tiny pools in her eyes glittered with their own light. He waited for her to say more, but when she looked away from him and down at her desk, and a tear splashed onto the varnished wood, he said, “I promise. Nothing will change.”

  When he moved toward her, she raised a hand and held it motionless in the air, head canted down now and turned to the side, so he retreated to the door as quietly as he could, and he left her alone with his silence.

  TWELVE

  On his tenth birthday Ryan DeMarco was walking the tracks that ran alongside the river two miles from his home. The tracks were never used anymore and were rusted, and in some places spikes had been removed and a length of the rail pulled up. He liked to walk along the tracks because he could do so without making much noise and could sometimes steal up close to a turkey or grouse or ring-necked pheasant that would then burst into the air with a loud whumping of wings that always startled and pleased him.

  On his birthday he did not flush any birds so he decided to follow a wide, slow feeder stream to see where it might take him. He hadn’t walked for very long before the hot sun scents of scrub grass and Indian tobacco and dry summer day began to stink of rotting carcass. He kept walking and the stink grew stronger and he finally had to pinch his nose and breathe with a hand cupped over his mouth. He had never before smelled such a powerful stink of putrefaction, so he wanted to see what was making it. No dead possum or squashed cat along the road ever smelled like that. No pile of rotting garbage or dead rat on the kitchen floor.

  This stink had a physical presence too and it felt like grease on his face and like some kind of sour stinging smoke in his eyes. He wondered if what he smelled could be a human body or maybe two of them and he started thinking about all the ways something like that could happen in the woods. A couple of drunks could have passed out and been attacked by a bear or a flock of buzzards so big the drunks died under the weight of the birds. A man might have chased some woman into the woods to do sex and they had ended up killing each other with knives or guns. Maybe somebody hunting deer out of season had tripped and shot himself in the head and accidentally blew his brains out. Something like that could generate a powerful stink. He wasn’t sure but suspected that rotting people would somehow smell far worse than roadkill or rotting rats, the only other corpses he had any experience with.

  Then after twenty minutes or so the stream made a turn into a kind of shallow cove full of stagnant water, and suddenly there was a swollen brown-and-white cow with its rear end in the filmy water and its white belly looking impossibly huge in the sunlight, and its eyeholes pecked clean and its long, dead tongue hanging out the side of its mouth looking black and obscene. He was surprised that something as common and innocuous as a cow could produce such an overwhelming odor. Every hole and rip in the hide trembled with fat black buzzing flies and silent white maggots. He wondered why there were no buzzards and no signs of dogs or other animals having eaten from the cow. Nobody but the maggots and flies wanted anything to do with it, and the flies were making a sound like a thousand hummingbirds in a field of sweet yellow flowers.

  THIRTEEN

  Fewer than thirty minutes after DeMarco informed Trooper Jayme Matson of his plan to retire, she stepped into the office of Kyle Bowen, the barrack’s station commander, and closed the door behind her. She moved quickly to the chair facing the corner of his desk, sat down, leaned back, crossed her arms, and looked at him.

  Fifteen seconds passed before he spoke. “I tried to talk him out of it.”

  “You tried?” she said.

  “It’s his decision. What am I supposed to do?”

  “You know what state of mind he’s in.”

  “I’m not any happier about this than you are.”

  “Then talk him out of it somehow.”

  He blew out a breath. “I was hoping you would. You’re the one he cares about most, Jayme.”

  With that her posture went tight; her hands dropped into her lap.

  “You thought we didn’t know?” Bowen said. “Everybody knows. The only time he isn’t scowling or bitching or muttering to himself is when he’s around you.”

  “It wasn’t like we planned it or anything.”

  “Hey, I’m happy about it. You’re good for him. At least now we can all stop pretending we’re too stupid to notice the obvious.”

  She leaned forward and clasped her hands between her knees. “When was the last time you were at his house?”

  “Me? Never.”

  “It’s full of ghosts,” she said.

  “I can imagine.”

  “Really? Do you blame yourself for your baby being killed in a car accident?”

  He said nothing.

  She sat hunched over, voice breaking. “Do you blame yourself for the end of your marriage? For your wife turning into some kind of sadistic nymphomaniac? For your best friend’s family being slaughtered, and for your friend dying in front of your eyes?”

  “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  “It’s been one trauma after another for what—ever since we’ve known him? His psyche is in pieces, Kyle. This job is the only thing that’s holding him together.”

  “Then why does he want to retire?”

  “Because he feels like he can’t make a difference anymore. Like everything ends in failure.”

  “So it’s a better solution to just quit?”

  “Did you say that to him?” she asked.

  He offered a wincing smile. “You know he kind of scares me, right?”

  “He loves you like a son.”

  “Love might be just a bit too strong a word.”

  “He loves everybody in this place. And he used to love his work. He needs his work. You can’t let him retire.”

  “I don’t know what to do, Jayme. He’s determined to go.”

  Both were leaning forward now in the same posture of helplessness, shoulders hunched, hands between their knees.

  A few moments later, Bowen cocked his head, then sat upright again. He put his hand on the wireless mouse and woke the computer, then clicked to move from screen to screen. Jayme waited.

  Finally he spoke. “He has two hundred and ninety-three sick days saved up.”

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “So what if I tell him the maximum buyback is two hundred days?”

  “Is that true?”

  “I don’t know, I’d have to call HR. The point is, if he believes it’s true, maybe we could convince him to go on extended medical leave for a while. Instead of retiring. He stays on the payroll, he doesn’t lose his insurance.”

  “Okay,” Jayme said, thinking it through. “So he’s sitting at home in his dark house while on medical leave. Drinking too much and surrounded by ghosts and wallowing in a sea of failure and grief. But at least he still has insurance coverage. Yay! Good save, Kyle!”

  “You know, you’re even starting to sound like him. I’m trying my best here, and all I get is sarcasm.”

  “Your best sucks.”

  They sat in silence.

  Then she said, “I have at least a couple months of sick leave and vacation days saved up myself.”

  “Yeah, but…I’m pretty sure I can get a psychiatrist to sign off on him. But where’s your PTSD?”

  “Don’t try to tell me you’ve never fudged a report.”

  “Fudged? This would be insurance fraud, Jayme. For the sick leave, anyway.”

  “You think I wouldn’t go to jail for him?”

  “And maybe we can get adjoining cells. While my wife takes a job at the Dollar Store.”

  “He’d do it for you. He’d do anything for any of us.”

  In frustration Bowen whacked his fist on the edge of the desk
, then winced in pain and massaged the fingers with his other hand.

  When the pain subsided, he asked, “So be honest with me. What do you really think will happen to him if he retires?”

  “He’s forty-nine years old, multiply traumatized, and clinically depressed. He self-medicates with excessive coffee during the day, excessive alcohol every night. He doesn’t eat right, doesn’t exercise, and doesn’t get enough sleep. What will he do if left alone with no purpose in life? He’ll disappear. One way or another.”

  Bowen thought for a moment. “So he’s a danger to himself?”

  “It might be a very slow suicide, but yes, he is gradually killing himself. Right before our eyes.”

  He thought for a few moments. “Okay. Fudge I will do. Exaggerate I will do. But not fraud.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning you’re still the best medicine for him I can think of. Starting now, I am assigning you to full-time surveillance of Sergeant Ryan DeMarco.”

  “Get serious,” she told him.

  “Your job is to bring him back to us healthy and sound. How you do that is up to you. But like I said, he scares me a little. So if this conversation ever gets back to him, I’ll deny we ever had it.”

  “He would hate me if he ever found out I’d agreed to something like that.”

  “He would hate both of us.”

  “It’s insulting to him. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Look,” Bowen said. “Would you rather we turn him loose on his own?”

  She considered her options. “Maybe I should just take a leave of absence. Unpaid.”

  “How long?”

  “However long it takes.”

  “Can you afford to be without a salary?”

  “I live alone,” she reminded him. “I’ve saved my money.”

  “It’s not like he’s going to be on another planet or something. Even if you’re here at work, he’s only what, eight miles away? So you meet for lunch. You spend weekends with him. You check in by phone a couple times a day. I mean really. Nothing personal, but would a guy like him even want a full-time nanny?”