The Blessed Bones

by Kathryn Casey

  I shut my laptop. “I’ll go to the shelter and talk to Hannah,” I told Stef. “Maybe we can figure out who knows the family. She may be able to refer us to someone to talk to about Lynlee and Danny.”

  “I could do that,” Stef said, but I shook the suggestion off.

  “Hannah’s a friend, and I’m heading to the shelter for the night anyway. I’ll do it.”

  Disappointed, Stef slipped out of the chair and quickly out the door. As soon as she was gone, I grabbed my bag to leave, but Gladys walked in. A pudgy woman, our night dispatcher had her graying brown hair pinned in a French twist that rose to an impressive pompadour and swept over her forehead, nearly covering one eye. When I’d interviewed her for the job, Gladys had insisted that we were related on my mother’s side, that we shared a great-great-grandfather. That didn’t strike me as a particularly remarkable coincidence, since I was pretty sure that with so few fathers for so many wives, most of the town was related, if family trees were carried back far enough. Gladys did, however, look a bit like my mother. They had the same dark eyebrows that arched into pyramids when they were displeased.

  “You’re here?” I remarked.

  “Sorry I ran late, Chief,” she said. In the beginning Gladys had tried to call me Clara. I’d made a point of stressing that wasn’t appropriate, even if we were somehow vaguely family. “The good news is that my son’s team won the game. Looks like they’ll be in the championships later this week.”

  “Good for him. But you need to keep your home life from interfering with work.”

  “I don’t think Kellie minded,” Gladys said with a conspiratorial glance. “She was beaming when she walked out, said something about a date with our young Conroy.”

  “Well, still, I need you here, working, and on time.” She gave me a noncommittal look, but nodded, so I wasn’t quite sure she’d latched on to the fact that I wasn’t making a suggestion but issuing an order. I was getting ready to push the matter when my cell phone rang. Gladys used the call as cover for her swift departure.

  “Clara?” the woman on the phone said.

  I recognized the voice. “Mother Sariah, yes.” I thought back to earlier that afternoon, when I’d asked Delilah to have her call. “Thanks for getting back to me. I wanted to talk to you about—”

  “Clara, your mother’s in the hospital in Pine City,” Mother Sariah blurted out. “You need to come. Quick. Mother Naomi and I, we’re not sure what happened, but there’s something very wrong.”

  Ten

  Doc Wiley wasn’t in the morgue but in my mother’s hospital room in the ICU when I arrived. Mother Sariah looked as if she’d run out half dressed. Her auburn hair, so like Delilah’s, was mussed and falling out of a topknot, and she wore an old apron over her long dress as she ran to greet me. “Clara, thank you. Thank you so much for coming,” she said, her eyes wild. “Ardeth, your mother, well, she collapsed at the trailer, flat down on the floor. We didn’t know what to do.”

  I couldn’t see Mother, just the delicate mold of her thin body lying stone-still under a blanket as Doc bent over her, looking into her eyes with a small penlight, assessing the response of her pupils, I guessed. I crept up beside him. Nearly as pale as the white pillowcase beneath her, Mother had a slender tube delivering oxygen at the base of her nose.

  “What’s wrong with her, Doc?”

  He glanced over his shoulder at me, and I saw the worry in his eyes. “I’m not sure. I think something neurological.”

  “No theories?” I thought of all Mother had been through the past few years. Father’s death, last summer’s search for one of my sisters, the death of another, the financial turmoil of trying to keep the family together. I wondered how my return had added to her stress, my attempts to work myself back into the family. The last time I’d talked to her, she’d ordered me to leave the family double-wide—the battered old trailer that overflowed with my three mothers and more than a dozen of my siblings. That day she’d talked of how hard their plight had become, and I’d offered to help, to subsidize the family financially. She’d turned me away, not willing to take even such sorely needed help from an errant daughter.

  “I’m thinking it could be a stroke,” Doc said. “We aren’t sure yet, but the signs are there. I ordered blood work. We should know soon.”

  “Unconscious?”

  “We put her under. Her brain is swelling, and we have her on meds to try to stop it. We’ll wake her when the danger passes.”

  Mother’s long salt-and-pepper hair was spread out across the pillow, her face placid, expressionless. She appeared asleep. Behind her an IV on a pole dripped, a long clear tube draped across her arm feeding into a vein on the back of her hand. The equipment monitoring her vitals beeped and her blood pressure, at least to my lay eyes, looked elevated: 160 over 92. I pointed at it. “Doc, isn’t that pretty high?”

  He grimaced. “We’re working on bringing it down.”

  At that moment, the third of my mothers, Naomi—soft brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses—ambled in carrying two white paper cups of water from the cooler beside the nurses’ station. She handed one to Sariah and scowled when she saw me. I wasn’t surprised. I’d attempted to talk to her off and on since last year’s bison farm murders. My investigation had gotten in the way of her planned marriage, one that would have brought her prestige and money. Each time I’d approached her, she rebuffed me. It turned out that Mother Naomi, despite her tendency to praise the Lord at every turn and light up at the mention of the divine, hadn’t fully embraced the teachings that said the only way to gain God’s forgiveness was to forgive others.

  I shot Mother Naomi a concerned glance, then turned back to my mother on the bed, slipped my hand over hers. I shouldn’t have been surprised at the coldness of her skin, like a marble sculpture, but I was. I remembered holding Mother’s hand as a child, the warmth of my small hand inside hers, the security I’d once found there.

  “It’s good that you’ve come, Clara,” Mother Sariah said. “I need to talk to you. There’s a matter to discuss.”

  I nodded at her, but I felt unsure what to do. I placed my other hand on top of Mother’s, hoping my two hands could warm hers, as if that would somehow save her. Doc peered over his glasses at me. “Clara, it’s okay. I’m watching over Ardeth,” he whispered. “You can talk to Sariah. We’ll call you if anything happens.”

  “Clara?” I felt Mother Sariah’s hand on my sleeve. “Please, can we talk?”

  “I’ll stay here with Ardeth as well,” Mother Naomi said. “Clara, go with Sariah.”

  Numb, I let go of Mother’s hand.

  In a small family waiting area, Mother Sariah motioned for me to sit on a plastic-covered couch. “Tell me again what happened,” I said.

  She winced at the memory. “We’re not exactly sure.” Then she repeated what she had said earlier, fleshed out a bit, mentioning that Mother had just finished cleaning up after dinner with the older girls, while Lily and Delilah helped Sariah dress the toddlers in their pajamas. Mother Naomi had the younger children at the outhouse behind the trailer, to get them ready for bed.

  “Was Mother angry, emotional, upset about anything?” I asked.

  “She’d been fretting over the bills all day, working herself into a frenzy trying to figure out what she could pay and what she couldn’t. She worried that they’d turn off the electricity, but we’d run up a bill at the grocery store, too. We were short this month. The quilted skirts I make are selling well, but with so many of the local families gone from Alber, Ardeth’s poultices aren’t as popular as they once were. Of course, Naomi doesn’t harvest honey from her bees over the winter, and she sold out months ago. But Naomi and I told Ardeth that it would be okay. That we’d manage. We couldn’t quiet her. On top of that, Ardeth hasn’t been sleeping well. Naomi and I had cautioned her that she was wearing herself out, but you know your mother, Clara. Ardeth is hard on others, but she’s harder on herself.”

  How true, I thought. I remembered a time
when I was in junior high. Mother had decided to sew all of us girls—I had eight sisters at that time—matching Christmas dresses. She’d put her potion money aside and bought bolts of silky fabric. The prophet frowned on wearing the color red, said it was reserved for God, so Mother chose a bright green. For more than a week, she worked all day at the big house we then lived in, cleaning and cooking, then sewed all night. When she finally fell asleep, the last dress finished, she woke during the night and tripped, hit her head on the corner of a nightstand and opened up a cut that required stitches. She still had the scar above her right eyebrow. Nothing stopped Mother. Except, thinking of her in the hospital bed, perhaps something finally had.

  “I’m glad Delilah mentioned that I wanted to talk to you,” I said. “But we don’t need to do this now. Not with what’s happened with Mother.”

  “You wanted to talk to me? The girls hadn’t told me. About what?”

  Maybe Lily and Delilah hadn’t had time to tell her yet. “Nothing important. What did you want? You tell me.”

  “Well.” Mother Sariah cleared her throat, visibly ill at ease.

  Whatever this was, she didn’t want to say it. I guessed at what she might want to say and thought that I would make it easier for her. “If you’re going to tell me to stay away from Delilah and Lily, well, I do think that—”

  “No! No! That’s not it.”

  “What, then?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about…” she started, then paused. I waited, and finally she took a deep breath and said, “Money. We need money.”

  “For the electricity?”

  “Yes, that would help, but for the hospital bill,” she said. “We have no health insurance. No way to pay, Clara. We’re… well, we’re barely keeping everyone fed.”

  I sat back on the couch, and the plastic cover rustled. “This is rather ironic. I’d asked Delilah to ask you to call me because I want to help the family financially. So there’s no reason to be embarrassed.” Relief spread across Sariah’s face, and before my eyes she began to relax.

  “You want to help us?”

  “Yes. I offered last fall, talked to Mother about setting up a monthly stipend to cover some of the household expenses. She turned me down. Actually, she said she would never take money from an apostate.”

  Mother Sariah wore a pained expression as she reached out and put her hand over mine. “Oh, Clara, I am sorry that she treated you so harshly. Ardeth can come across as severe, I know. It isn’t that she doesn’t love you. It’s—”

  “You don’t have to explain. I asked to talk to you because I thought we might be able to work something out between the two of us.”

  Sariah’s blue eyes glistened, and she dropped her head. I thought that perhaps I’d upset her, but her lips spread into a slight smile. “Thank you. Mother Naomi and I, we didn’t know what we would do. We have so little since your father died. And Ardeth, she tries, but we can’t…”

  I leaned toward her, gathered her in my arms, and she finally allowed the tears to flow. “I know. It’s okay. I have some money. I can help. I want to help.”

  “Aaron has said that he will try to help more, too,” she said, referring to my oldest brother, the one who’d inherited the sawmill when my father died. “Aaron gives us a check each month to help with the bills, and he’ll give more. But the sawmill isn’t turning much of a profit lately, and he has two wives and seven children to support. We are too many with too little to live on.”

  “Okay, it’s okay.” I tried to reassure her as I held her. As a teenager, Mother Sariah had held me like this, comforted me when life took its toll. “We’ll work it out.”

  “We will,” Sariah agreed. “Thank you.”

  “But mother can’t know,” I cautioned. Sariah sat back, appearing ready to argue, but I didn’t allow it. “If she found out, she’d refuse my help. And we can’t have that. She needs the care. I can afford to pay, and I will.”

  Naomi and Sariah departed for home not long after our talk, returning to the family’s trailer that bordered the cornfield below our town’s landmark, Samuel’s Peak. They needed to make sure that the older ones had gotten the younger ones to bed. The children had school in the morning.

  An hour or so after they left, Doc returned to Mother’s room and explained that the test results had come in. As he’d suspected, she’d had a stroke. “The good news is that she’s stable now. There shouldn’t be any issues tonight,” he assured me. “Her blood pressure hasn’t quite returned to the normal range, but it’s close.”

  “That’s good to hear.” I’d been thinking about how proud Mother was, and about the substantial harm a stroke could do, impairing limbs, speech, the ability to think. “Do you know how much damage has been done?”

  “No, we won’t know until she wakes. But Ardeth is a strong woman, and I’m hopeful it won’t be severe. Clara, please try not to worry. Go home. Get some sleep. There’s no reason for you to stay through the night. Your mother has been given enough medication to ensure that she’ll sleep. The nurses will notify you if her condition changes.”

  “I’ll head home soon. And I’ll see you in the morning.” Doc appeared taken aback, not sure what I was talking about, so I explained, “At the autopsy, the pregnant woman from the mountain?”

  “Oh, of course. Such a day this has been. I’d nearly forgotten.”

  Not long after Doc’s departure, my phone vibrated. It was Max. I texted:

  Can’t talk tonight. Busy. No news on the case.

  Another vibration:

  You okay? Everything all right?

  I sat back in the chair and considered calling him. I thought about how good it would be to hear his voice. Max had a way of calming me, of making it seem like everything would eventually work out. When I was with him, when he touched me, for a short time I felt whole. But I didn’t want to disturb Mother, and I wasn’t ready to leave her side.

  I’ll explain tomorrow.

  I hit send, then sat staring at my mother in the bed, as still and pale as a china doll. I took her hand again, and tears collected in my eyes. I bent toward her and kissed her cheek. I thought of the mother I’d loved as a child, the one I’d been so angry with as a young woman, the one I’d yearned for since my return, who’d banished me and kept me at arm’s length.

  Moments passed. As worried as I was about Mother, other thoughts intruded, and my mind circled back to my plans to spend the evening working on the case. I pulled a chair close to the bed and opened my laptop. A few clicks of the keys and I was logged back on to NCIC. I entered the same terms I had at the office earlier: MISSING; UTAH; WOMAN; BROWN HAIR; PREGNANT.

  As the website churned away, I considered how, not far down the highway in Alber, families were turning off their lights for the night. I thought of Naomi and Sariah, of my brothers and sisters asleep in the worn-out trailer, barely enough room to all fit. I thought of the big house I’d grown up in, how comfortable we’d been, all I’d had as a girl that my family had lost, and how desperate they were without Father to support them.

  A row of potential matches flashed on the computer screen, and I searched for leads on the bones found in the shallow grave. I read accounts of missing women from Salt Lake, St. George, Orem, Sandy, Ogden, and small towns across Utah. One pregnant woman had disappeared, and I thought that perhaps I’d found a match. Thankfully, she’d been found safe, wandering the streets of Provo. While relieved for that woman and her family, I felt a deep sadness that there wasn’t a similar, happy resolution for the mother and her sweet baby whose remains awaited autopsy in the morgue.

  As the clock clicked toward midnight, the hospital lights dimmed, including those inside the room. Determined to use the time, I stayed on the computer. I’d barely begun combing through the listings when my eyelids grew heavy. It had been a long day, but I fought to keep them open, scanned one profile, clicked on the next, then considered yet another. None of them seemed to be a good match, but I kept searching. At some point, I must have
drifted off. I surrendered to a restless sleep, one filled with dreams of my mother, much younger, when I was just a child: my mother seated, her back rigid, beside my father during worship services; my mother stirring soup over the stove in our old house; leading me through my homework at the kitchen table.

  When I awoke, it was with a start. The room had filled with daylight.

  Morning.

  Eleven

  “Clara, why didn’t you go home last night?” Doc and Ash Crawford were waiting for me when I walked into the morgue a few minutes after seven. I’d taken the elevator down from Mother’s room without pausing to do more than wash my face and hands and comb my dark hair back into its usual bun at the nape of my neck. No time for breakfast.

  The remains we’d dug up the day before lay in front of them on an autopsy table, much of the bone poking out between amber shards of mummified tissue pulled so tight in places that sections of her skeleton appeared shrink-wrapped. I inspected the swelling around her middle, the baby’s shriveled body protruding from its mother’s abdomen. Doc had placed the damaged skull and the chunk knocked out of it above the woman’s shoulders. He had it propped up with small wooden blocks, making it easy to see the broken edges. I again considered the difference in the color, the lack of staining that confirmed it was a new fracture. The edges of the break, too, suggested it was post-mortem. Live bone more often breaks in spirals, while after-death breaks are smoother, like a china plate dropped on a tile floor.

  I hadn’t noticed out in the mountain air, but in the autopsy suite the remains gave off the stench of rotting meat. The smell made my empty stomach lurch.

  “Max isn’t here?” I asked, disappointment creeping into my voice. I still felt uneasy, worried about Mother, uncomfortable around Crawford, who I didn’t trust.