Bone White

by Ronald Malfi

  “How about explaining it to me?” she asked. “Who were they? The victims.”

  “Just some folk,” Mallory said. It sounded offhand, cursory, yet not quite insolent.

  “How’d you meet them?”

  “That don’t matter no more,” he said. “Just so long as we get them to consecrated ground. It’s the least that can be done for ’em now.”

  “It’s good of you to want to see them get a proper Christian burial,” she said. “But we’re going to have a difficult time identifying them.”

  “They don’t need to be identified. Just sanctified.”

  She frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “It means their souls won’t be at rest until they’re properly buried. I did the best I could up there, but it ain’t enough. Not to ward off eternal damnation for their souls. It’s what’s been weighing on me all this time.”

  “Is that why you confessed?”

  Mallory leaned closer to the bars of his cell. “The devil’s pull is a strong one, ma’am. But I just couldn’t do it no more.”

  “We found that room beneath your house. All those items down there—the jackets and backpacks and everything. They belong to the victims, don’t they?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We’ve got Forensics examining those items right now. We’ll start piecing things together and learning who these people are—were—but it would go a long way with the judge if you’d just tell us.”

  “Ain’t nothing to tell,” he said. “Don’t rightly know off the top of my head, to be honest, ma’am.”

  “How did you meet these people? Where did they come from?”

  “Who can remember now?” he said back, his voice just above a whisper. He looked up, met her eyes with his—and his gaze was unexpectedly soft. “I don’t mean to cause you more aggravation than necessary, ma’am, but it’s been a long while with some of ’em, and my memory, it ain’t so good no more.”

  “You painted your windows,” she said. “Why?”

  “So nothing could see in,” he said.

  “Who would be looking in? The police?”

  He waved a dismissive hand at her, although even this action seemed somehow polite and timid. Yet she gathered from it that the police had never been much of a concern to this man.

  “Those symbols on your walls,” she went on. “Did you draw those?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “In blood?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The victims’ blood?”

  “No, ma’am. My own.”

  “What do they mean?”

  “They don’t mean nothing,” Mallory said, the first hint of exasperation in his voice now. “They there to sanctify. Ain’t a one of you payin’ any attention out here?” He leaned forward just enough so that the wooden bench creaked beneath him. “You live all your life out here, ma’am?” he asked her.

  “I’m from Ketchikan.”

  “Ah,” Mallory said, leaning back again. “The Big Stink.”

  “That’s right,” Ryerson said. It was the Tsmishian translation of the city’s name. All those flyblow salmon corpses filling up the rivers during spawning season.

  “Someone send you in here to ask me all these questions?” he asked.

  “No, sir. I’m the lead investigator on this case.”

  “Seeing how you found that little hole beneath my house, ma’am, you haven’t asked me the one question you really want to ask, have you?” Something about his face—not his expression, Ryerson thought, but his face—chilled her. He looked like a skeleton stuffed into people clothes and puppeted by a mad wizard.

  She felt herself nodding, as if hypnotized by him, and she realized she was rubbing the lucky rabbit’s foot on the key chain that hung from her belt.

  “What’s that thing in the trunk?” she asked.

  Joseph Mallory offered her a sad and terrible smile.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  8

  The following morning, Paul contacted Rena Tremaine and his department head, Alvin Limbeck, and told them both he had an emergency and needed to leave town for a while. Rena was at the ready to take over his classes, but the concern in her voice was palpable over the phone. She asked if it had anything to do with Paul having passed out in class the day before. He assured her that it didn’t, and that he was fine. Limbeck, a dour old codger who always wore too much tweed, surprised Paul by being sympathetic and asked for no details. Paul guessed Rena had filled Limbeck in on his little fainting episode, and much like Paul’s assistant, the man likely assumed that Paul was checking into the nearest hospital to undergo a battery of CT scans and MRIs.

  What Paul actually did was board a 777 out of Baltimore-Washington International at ten thirty that morning, which ushered him into Dallas/Fort Worth at just after one o’clock in the afternoon. He’d slept very little the night before, his mind alternating between images of Joseph Mallory’s black-and-white visage and that vision of the bloody hand held up against a gunmetal sky. However, at some point during his layover, and despite being contorted in an uncomfortable chair with armrests digging into his ribs, his exhaustion overtook him and shuttled him off to sleep. When he awoke sometime later, it was with a start, as if someone had just screamed into his ear. He could remember no details of what he assumed was a nightmare. At the gate, his connecting flight to Seattle was boarding.

  It was around 10:30 P.M. when the Airbus’s wheels touched down on the runway at Fairbanks International, which meant he’d been traveling for sixteen straight hours by that point. It also meant that it was after two in the morning back home in Maryland. Paul Gallo coasted through the airport like someone waltzing through a dream.

  When he stepped out of the baggage claim area and into the night, he was struck, almost like a slap across the face, by the sudden cold. He looked around, wincing as tears threatened to freeze in the corners of his eyes. A thermometer bolted to the wall beside a set of hydraulic doors proclaimed the temperature to be 33 degrees—a world of difference from the mild autumn temperatures back home. He wondered what sadist had decided to put up a thermometer in a climate like this.

  He spent that night at a Best Western, where the young woman at the reception desk served up a broad smile as he came in off the airport shuttle. He did his best to return the good cheer, but in his exhaustion, the smile felt like it was splitting the seams of his face. He felt like he’d been awake for a week straight.

  His room was on the fourth floor, and there were two large windows beside the bed that looked out on a lightless landscape. A single star burned in the sky above the empty highway. He plugged in his cell phone and heard it chime as it began charging. Then he pulled the drapes closed and wandered into the bathroom.

  He showered, then climbed naked into bed. The sheets felt cool and good. He closed his eyes, and must have fallen asleep quickly, given his exhaustion, because a dream seemed right there at the ready to slip unimpeded into his brain—a dream so real that he thought he wasn’t dreaming at all.

  He was lying in this very same bed, staring toward the foot of the bed and at a dark figure who stood there, masked in the shadows, staring back at him. Despite the fact that the figure was human, Paul had the sense that it was actually some animal—maybe a wolf, maybe a horned ungulate—crouching in the darkness across the room, watching him. The figure’s eyes glowed green. As he stared at the figure, it moved around the foot of the bed until it passed in front of the large windows. Its form was silhouetted against the night sky, and even though Paul couldn’t make out any details—it was a black, formless suggestion of a human being—he imagined this person to have a bushy lumberjack beard and a rifle slung over one shoulder.

  Paul sat up in bed to get a better look at the figure, but the figure was no longer there, and Paul was no longer asleep. In fact, it felt as though he hadn’t been asleep at all, and that the arrival of this strange bearded figure carrying a rifle hadn’t been a dream at all, either. Even the d
rapes over the windows had been swept aside, revealing the darkened night sky—drapes that Paul had shut before going to bed. It felt so real that he leaned over to the nightstand and clicked on the lamp, flooding the room with light.

  Wincing, he glanced around. Of course, he was alone. He even peered over the bed and down at the floor, half-expecting to find muddy boot prints on the carpet. But there were none.

  * * *

  The Fairbanks division of the Alaska Bureau of Investigation was housed in a squat brick-and-glass building with concrete planters out front. It looked more like an airport terminal than a police station, and it sat across the road from a nice-looking residential neighborhood.

  Paul arrived at the station at eight in the morning, paid his cab driver fifteen bucks, then downed the rest of his Dunkin’ Donuts coffee while shivering against a bone-chilling wind. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find upon arrival, but the unpretentious nature of the building, with its diminutive parking lot slotted with a sparse number of SUVs with rack lights and shiny white police cars, did not live up to any of his expectations. If it wasn’t for the large sign with the Department of Public Safety badge on it, he would have thought he was at the wrong location.

  The reception area was as small as a closet and just about as festive. There were a few molded plastic chairs against one wall and a framed photo of a jowly man sporting a manicured black beard that Paul suspected was some figure of authority. Seated behind a half wall of bulletproof glass, a solemn-faced female receptionist of indeterminate age glanced up at Paul from over the rims of smudgy bifocals. Paul affected his friendliest smile and informed the woman, via an intercom inserted into the glass, that he was here to surrender some of his DNA.

  “Please have a seat,” the receptionist instructed, nodding toward the row of plastic chairs. “Someone will be with you shortly.”

  “Is Investigator Jill Ryerson available?” he asked.

  “Investigator Ryerson is out on a call.”

  “I thought there’d be more people here,” he said.

  The woman arched her eyebrows, as if anticipating further commentary from him. He gave none.

  He sat for several long minutes, listening to the buzz of the electric heater that vibrated against the wall in one corner. There was a smell in here, one reminiscent of locker rooms and body odor. Paul ran a shaky hand through his hair. He realized that he was nervous.

  Is this it, Danny? Am I finally going to find out what happened to you? Will I finally put that all to rest?

  A memory returned to him then—a memory from their shared childhood, back when the bond was still strong. Paul couldn’t have been more than seven, and he was by himself in the backyard searching for carnivorous plants. He’d read a book about the Venus flytrap, and although the book assured him that Venus flytraps were only found in the subtropical wetlands of the Carolinas, seven-year-old Paul didn’t think it was a stretch that some might have migrated as far north as Maryland. He didn’t find a flytrap that day, but he did come across a peculiar grayish-brown sac made of brittle paperlike material dangling from a tree limb. It was the size and shape of a football, and it was honeycombed with tiny portholes, like the windows on a submarine. Bested by curiosity, he did what any boy his age might do—he found a long stick on the ground and swatted at the thing.

  The cloud of hornets that spilled from the hive appeared instantly, and from every direction at once. Paul no sooner realized what they were than he felt a sharp lance of pain along his left cheekbone. He dropped the stick and howled. A second jab of pain caught him on his right forearm. A third caught him just above the right eye, and this one felt like a branding iron.

  Screaming, Paul had run back to the house. By the time he came bursting through the rear patio door, he had been stung nearly a dozen times and his face had already begun to swell. Tears streamed down his face. It was a Saturday, so his father was home, and the old man examined Paul with a steady eye while Paul’s mom peeled off his clothes as he stood in the bathtub. (There had been three or four more hornets twisting about inside his clothes, which his father mashed one at a time beneath the sole of a tattered bedroom slipper.) Danny had watched wide-eyed from the bathroom doorway as the stingers were extracted from Paul’s flesh.

  Later that night, Paul and his parents had awakened to the sound of Danny screaming from his bedroom. They all rushed in to find Danny sitting up in bed, clawing at his arms and legs, his torso, his thighs.

  But nothing was wrong with Danny. Not physically, anyway. He shrieked and said his skin was burning, and he’d raked his fingernails over his arms, his chest, this thighs, his face. But there was nothing there. Nothing.

  Thinking about this now, Paul recognized this mystery for what it was: Danny stealing his thunder. He’d stood there in the bathroom doorway watching all the attention lavished on Paul by their parents, and that little fit in the middle of the night was Danny’s counterbalance. Had Paul been so naïve back then to think that it had been something more? That powerful, inexplicable bond they shared, perhaps? That Danny could be capable of feeling Paul’s pain was, in hindsight, preposterous.

  Paul realized his leg was bouncing nervously, and that he couldn’t control his breathing. He could feel the slight increase in his heartbeat, and despite the cold that he’d carried in with him from the outside, a film of perspiration had come over him. He felt amphibious with it.

  Just when he was about to get up and approach the receptionist again, a side door opened and an officer in a powder-blue shirt and navy slacks came over to him. His name was Holtzman and he didn’t bother shaking Paul’s hand before leading him into what Paul assumed would be an office or even an interrogation room, but what turned out to be a snack lounge with Formica tables and some vending machines standing in an appropriate lineup against one wall. There were a few other people in there, most of them paired up, seated at some of the tables, while some lone stragglers paced the floor. One guy in a turban fed change into one of the vending machines with infuriating sluggishness.

  “What’s this?” Paul asked.

  “Waiting room. Just take a seat and wait,” Holtzman said. “I’ve got your name. Someone will call you when it’s your turn.”

  “Are all these people—” he began, but cut himself off as Holtzman, preoccupied with his iPhone, strutted away.

  There was one other person, a woman, seated at the nearest table, so Paul sat in an empty chair opposite her, hoping she would not make eye contact. But she did, and he was too slow to look away, so he smiled at her. She was maybe in her early sixties, with a braid of graying hair spilling out from beneath a knit wool cap. She might have been attractive at one time, but now she looked defeated, her eyes empty.

  “The answer is yes,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The question you were going to ask that cop. The answer is yes. We’re all here for the same reason.”

  Paul nodded, his gaze skirting across the Formica tabletop and away from the woman. Across the room, a man in a neon-green ski jacket and headphones sat typing on a laptop. He appeared to be the only person in the room who wasn’t nervous, apprehensive, unfocused. Paul watched him until the man glanced up and returned Paul’s stare. The guy nodded at him and Paul nodded back. Then he redirected his gaze toward the wall of vending machines, where the guy in the turban was still feeding change into one of the machines with unflinching, methodical persistence.

  “He’s a reporter,” said the woman at Paul’s table.

  “Who? The guy who thinks that thing’s a slot machine?”

  “No, the guy at the table typing on his laptop. I got here early and he asked me some questions about my daughter.” The woman’s face softened, and Paul felt pity for her. “She’s missing, my daughter.”

  The woman got up and sat down in the empty seat beside Paul. He smiled as she placed a small photo album on the table and opened it. The album was small enough so that it only fit two photos on each page. The girl in each ph
otograph was a stunner—brazen in her beauty, deeply tanned, every third picture showing a spaghetti-strap bikini on full display. She looked nothing like the wasted, haunted woman sitting next to him.

  “Her name’s Roberta Chalmers. Bobbi, we call her. Does she look familiar to you?”

  “She doesn’t, no. I’m sorry. But I’m not from around here.”

  “Oh.” This didn’t seem to faze the woman; she turned another page of the album and pointed to one of the photographs. “This was her college graduation. See that? Can you believe she almost dropped out?”

  Paul felt ill. Was this where it ended? In some police station in the middle of goddamn Alaska waiting to get his cheek swabbed? Was he now a member of some morbid, soul-draining club, in which he’d suffer through the rest of his life showing strangers pictures of his brother and asking if he looked familiar?

  “I’m sorry,” said the woman. “Sometimes I don’t realize what I sound like, being so forward. Maybe you aren’t in the mood for conversation. I apologize.” She closed the album.

  “It’s all right. I’m sorry to hear about your daughter. How long has she been missing?”

  “Two and a half years. She’s always been a free spirit, my Bobbi. She’s always been too trusting, too. I worry all the time that she might fall in with bad elements. There are always bad elements around. In high school, she went with a man who was college age—not that he actually went to college, of course—and he had no job and rode a motorbike and had arms full of tattoos. He smoked marijuana cigarettes. Of course, I know those things don’t necessarily make someone a bad person—except maybe for the marijuana part—but this guy just happened to be a bad person on top of everything else. He sometimes hit her.” The sob that ratcheted out of her throat sounded like a shrill laugh, and it caused Paul to lean away from her. A few heads turned in their direction.

  “How old is she?” Paul asked.

  “Twenty-six. Do you have children?”

  “No, I don’t.” He reached over and placed a hand on the photo album. “May I?”