Bone White

by Ronald Malfi

  “I appreciate you meeting with me, Mrs. Rhobean.”

  “Call me Gwen.”

  Ryerson smiled and picked up her glass of water. She glanced down and saw a dog hair stuck to one of the ice cubes.

  “I’ve recently read the police report, the file on your husband and son. I had a question about an odd symbol that was left at the crime scene. Do you remember anything about it?”

  Gwen furrowed her brows. “A symbol? What kind of symbol?”

  “Just like this,” Ryerson said, setting the glass of water back down on the table and producing a folded index card from the inside pocket of her coat. On it, she had reproduced in red marker the symbol of the eye with the vertical pupil. She would have preferred to have shown Gwen the actual photograph taken from the crime scene, as some of her fellow troopers might have done, but she couldn’t be so crass.

  Gwen took the card from her and examined it.

  “This symbol was discovered on the interior walls of the toolshed where the . . . when the police arrived.”

  “It wasn’t just in the toolshed.” She handed Ryerson back the index card. “Dennis became obsessed with it near the . . . well, near the end.”

  “Obsessed how?”

  “He carved it onto our bedroom door. He . . . he . . . he’d scribble it on sheets of newspapers or on old bills that were left around the house. I saw him sitting in a chair one morning, staring out the kitchen window, his finger working furiously on his thigh—making circles over and over with his finger. He never realized he was doing it, and he couldn’t explain what it meant.”

  “Had he seen it somewhere before?”

  “Only in his head. He didn’t know what it meant.”

  “In the months before the incident, had your husband joined any new organizations? Had he maybe started going places, or maybe to any one place in particular, that he’d never gone to before?”

  Gwen shook her head, an absurd smile stretching her bright red lips. There was lipstick on her upper teeth.

  “How about any new friends? Had he been hanging around with any new people?”

  “No, dear. We’d lived in Chena Hills our entire married lives. There were no new people.”

  “Any other changes in his behavior leading up to the incident, Mrs. Rhobean?” It was an unconscious shift back to using the woman’s surname—a habit of her profession.

  “Well, he became possessed,” said Gwendolyn Rhobean, matter-of-factly. “This . . . obsession . . . gripped him and wouldn’t let him go. It tormented him, day and night. He wept about it. He stopped going to work.”

  “What obsession?”

  “Well, with Kip,” said Gwen, that clownlike smile still plastered on her face. “He became obsessed with our boy.”

  “Your son?”

  Gwendolyn Rhobean’s smile faltered. “He became tormented by what he believed he had to do. You see, Dennis’s change was only a result of what had happened to Kip.”

  “What happened to Kip?”

  “His behavior. He’d begun to change. We thought maybe it was drugs at first.”

  “Was it?” It so often was out here—drugs or alcohol. A toxicology report on the father was included in the file—Dennis Rhobean had not been under the influence of any illicit narcotics or alcohol at the time of the incident—but there hadn’t been such a report completed on the son.

  “No,” Gwen said. She was struggling to maintain that false smile now, and it was a battle she was losing. She blinked rapidly, and that seemed to rejuvenate the smile. Gwendolyn Rhobean’s whole face brightened. “Do you have any children, Jill?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Oh.” That brightness fled from her face. For the first time, Gwen Rhobean looked her age—looked much older, in fact. She hid a dark grief behind that mask of rouge, eye shadow, and lipstick.

  “Tell me about your son,” Ryerson said. “What had changed with him?”

  Gwen Rhobean’s eyes grew distant. Her gaze left Ryerson’s face and skirted across the room. Behind her, Drew Carey helped a giddy female contestant spin the giant wheel.

  “It was both of them, really. Something happened to both of them.” She cleared her throat, then said, “Twice a year, Dennis would take Kip on a hunting trip. It was a way for them to bond. They always came back refreshed and excited. But that last trip . . .” Her voice grew solemn. “I could see a change in both of them the moment they returned. Kip was withdrawn. I thought he might be sick. Dennis did, too. And Dennis, he was . . . unsettled. Restless. I don’t know how else to describe it.”

  Ryerson nodded.

  “I could tell that something had happened to them on that hunting trip, but neither of them would talk to me about it. It changed both of them. Dennis started sleepwalking. One night I woke to the sound of something scraping against our bedroom door. It was Dennis, scratching that symbol onto the door with a kitchen knife. He was disoriented when I woke him. He didn’t recognize the symbol he had carved, although he said that he sometimes dreamed about it. When I asked him what it meant, he refused to talk to me about it.

  “Kip began to change, too, only in different ways. Worse ways. He wasn’t himself anymore. He’d become . . . darker.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’d defecate on the floor of his bedroom,” Gwen said.

  Ryerson cocked her head. “What?”

  “It was to be spiteful. He claimed that he’d started sleepwalking, too, and that he wasn’t in control of himself when he’d do these terrible things. But I could tell that he was lying to me. It was one of his . . . his changes. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and he’d be standing at the foot of our bed. Just standing there in the dark, staring at us. Watching us sleep. ‘Hey, Mom,’ he’d say, when he realized I was awake and looking at him. I asked him what he was doing and he’d always say, ‘I’m sleepwalking, Mom. Don’t worry about it. Go back to sleep.’ But let me ask you, Jill—do sleepwalkers know when they’re sleepwalking?”

  Ryerson shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “They were lies. They were games. ‘Go back to your room,’ I’d tell him. Sometimes he did. Other times, he kept standing there. I’d wake up Dennis, but Dennis wouldn’t know what to do. He seemed . . . I don’t know . . . afraid of Kip by this point. They were both changing around me, living under the same roof but becoming . . . different. It’s like that movie where the aliens replace real people with evil versions of themselves.”

  It was at that moment Gwen Rhobean seemed to remember that she had a cocktail sitting on the table in front of her. That eerie clown smile situated back on her face, she picked up her rocks glass. She brought the drink so quickly to her mouth that some vodka and tonic sloshed onto her knuckles and spattered onto the carpet. Ryerson heard the glass clink against the woman’s teeth. When she set the drink back down, her hand was shaking.

  “Other nights, he’d just stand there at the foot of the bed and not say a word. Even when I saw him and said something to him, he’d not say a word. I remember one night I woke up to find him standing there with an old stuffed sheep’s head on his own head, wearing it like a mask or a headdress or something.”

  “A—what?”

  “Sheep’s head. One of the sheep he and his father had shot on a hunting trip. It was mounted on the wall in the den, but Kip had taken it down, and he was wearing it over his head that night. Like a mask. He started wearing it more and more toward the end.”

  Ryerson suddenly felt very cold.

  “He started hurting people, too,” Gwen Rhobean went on. “Kids at school. He’d fight them for no reason. Even kids who were older and bigger than him—even if that meant he would get hurt in the process. He just wanted to hurt them. And he laughed about it. All the time, he laughed about it.”

  Gwen’s eyes grew glassy.

  Ryerson reached out and touched one of the woman’s knees. “It’s okay,” she said.

  “We had some trouble,” Gwen went on. “There was a
family who lived down the road from us. The Pecks. Allison Peck was a few years younger than Kip. They used to play together when they were small. When they got older, Kip acted like a big brother to her. She was . . . she was a little slow.” Gwen’s shaky hand tapped the side of her own head. “One night, her parents came over to our house. Allison’s mom had been crying. Her dad was so angry his face was the color of a tomato. They said . . . they said that Allison said that Kip had . . . that he’d . . .”

  She made some gesture with her hands in the air that suggested nothing and everything all at once.

  Ryerson nodded.

  “Kip denied it. We stood up for our son. Allison wasn’t all there, you know? We thought maybe she’d misunderstood something that had happened. It was possible. Somehow, we convinced the Pecks. They went home. But then the second we shut the door, Kip started laughing. Laughing like a madman, so much so that it frightened me. Dennis was frightened, too, but he was also angry. He slapped Kip across the face. It was to get him to stop laughing. And he did, he stopped. But then something changed behind his eyes, and he was on Dennis and clawing at him like some wild animal. Biting. Scratching. I pounded Kip on the back to get him off of Dennis. When he stopped, he stood there panting like a dog. He’d bitten Dennis so hard on the arm that there was blood on his lips. And when he looked at me, he smiled. A dark spot spread across the front of his pants, too. He’d wet himself in all the excitement.”

  Gwen Rhobean used both hands to pick up her drink this time. Three swallows drained it.

  “That night, I woke to find him standing at the foot of our bed again. He was naked and . . . and he . . .” Gwen shook her head, ridding it of the image. Her eyes were still glassy but no tears had fallen yet. “You know what he said to me, Jill? Standing there in the dark, you know what he said?”

  “What’s that?”

  “He said, ‘We got them good, didn’t we, Mom?’ He meant the Pecks—that we’d fooled the parents and that he’d done something terrible to their daughter after all. ‘We got them good, didn’t we, Mom?’”

  For several moments, the only sound in the room was the TV.

  “It’s been almost a decade, Ms. Ryerson, and I need to confess something to you now.”

  “All right.”

  “About a week or so after that confrontation with the Pecks, Allison Peck disappeared. She never returned home from school. Police questioned all the neighbors, but no one knew anything. And maybe in their grief, the Pecks never made the connection to what Allison had accused Kip of doing, because they never came back to our house to ask any more questions. But, you see, Dennis and I knew. Not because we had any hard evidence—only Kip, and Kip’s behavior. When the police came to our house and asked if we had any information that might help them find Allison, Kip stayed up in his room. Once the police left, I went upstairs and found Kip sitting at the foot of his bed. He had that sheep’s head on, and he turned and stared at me as I came into the room. I knew he couldn’t see through that thing, but at the same time, I knew he could. ‘What did you do?’ I asked him. And for a long time, that sheep’s head just stared at me. I began to feel sick standing there in that room. ‘I know you did something to that girl.’ And he just started to laugh—muffled beneath the sheep’s head, but loud and mocking, too. And then . . . and then he sort of rolled back onto the bed in slow motion until his legs were up over his head. He rolled back until his back was flat against the headboard and that sheep’s head thumped against the wall. And then he just . . . he climbed the wall. He just sort of crawled up the wall like a spider, and hung there, laughing beneath that sheep’s head mask, his hands and feet flat against the wall, his body just . . . just hanging there.”

  Ryerson opened her mouth but no words came out.

  “I know how it sounds,” Gwen said quickly. Perspiration had dampened her upper lip. “I’ve never spoken about this before, not even to Dennis. I just . . . I just ran out of his room crying.”

  “He . . . he was just—”

  “He was just hanging there,” Gwen said. “And I never told the police about it. I never told them that Kip was probably the one who did something to that poor girl. They never found her, Ms. Ryerson, and her poor parents never knew what became of her. Because I was scared. I was so scared. But Dennis and I, we knew. It sounds terrible, doesn’t it? We knew, and we were too scared to say anything.”

  Outside, a dog bark caused Ryerson’s heart to skip a beat.

  “It was two nights later that Dennis told me what happened on that hunting trip,” Gwen continued. “They’d gone out to the forest and spent the first night sleeping in a tent, just like they always did. But something woke Dennis in the middle of the night, and when he looked around, Kip wasn’t in the tent with him anymore. He went outside and saw Kip crouched down among the trees, staring off into the darkness. He had stripped all his clothes off and he was out there, shivering and naked. Dennis went to him, shook him, but Kip didn’t respond. It was like he was in some sort of trance. Dennis said there was a large red handprint on Kip’s back, as if he’d been slapped by someone. When he bent down to meet Kip’s eyes, he could see bruises around his neck, as if someone had been choking him.

  “He got Kip back inside the tent, covered him up, then went back outside with his rifle. It was the middle of the night. He couldn’t see anything, but he could hear something moving around their camp, just beyond the trees.

  “He saw a shape move through the trees behind the tent. He went toward it, and in the light of the lantern, he saw a man standing there, just a few yards away, but mostly hidden in shadow behind the trees. He raised the rifle and called to the man, but the man didn’t respond—he just stood there.

  “And then a second later, the man charged at him. He just ran straight for Dennis, coming right out of the trees, and Dennis pulled the trigger and fired a shot at him. But then . . . when the man hit the ground, Dennis saw that it wasn’t a man at all. It was a sheep. The thing had come charging at him out of the trees, but it was just a sheep.

  “He convinced himself it was a trick of the light, a trick of the shadows, combined with his nervousness—that it had never been a man. Yet he said that when the man had first come through the trees at him, he’d caught a glimpse of his face, and it was . . .”

  “Was what?”

  “The man had Dennis’s face. Dennis said the man looked just like him—a mirror image, right down to the clothes he was wearing. The whole thing happened in less than a second, and of course it hadn’t been a man after all, but Dennis had been so certain at the time.

  “The next morning, they packed up their gear and came home. Kip didn’t say a word on the drive home. The bruises on his neck were no longer there, either, and Dennis began to wonder if he had imagined the whole thing. ‘But I know now that I didn’t imagine it,’ Dennis told me that night. ‘I know that the boy down the hall is not our son. And I know what I have to do about it. It came to me in a vision.’ And then . . . then the next day . . .” Her voice trailed off with a hitch. A moment later, Gwen sprang up from her rattan rocker and said, “Time for a refill.” She fled into the kitchen nook.

  Ryerson stared at the dog hair stuck to the ice cube floating in her glass. She heard something rattle off to her left. She looked and saw a blue parakeet in a wire cage in one corner of the room. She looked behind her and out the window, and saw Gordon Boutillier weaving a thick rope between the latticework of the large crab pot.

  “I wasn’t trying to hide any of this from the police at the time,” Gwen said, returning with a fresh drink. “I just didn’t know what to believe back then. It’s been almost ten years, Ms. Ryerson, and I’m able to look back on things now with more clarity. Even through my grief.” She smiled at Ryerson. “The grief, it never goes away, you know.”

  “I guess not,” Ryerson said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “That wasn’t our son that my husband killed. My son never came out of those woods. My husband knew it, and I knew it near the end
, too. My husband did what he had to do, yet his grief was too great. He blamed himself for losing our boy up there in that forest. And that’s why he killed himself, too.” Gwen smiled, and Ryerson found it impossible not to stare at the bright red streak of lipstick across her front teeth.

  “Where did they go on this hunting trip?”

  “The same place they always went. Up the Hand.”

  “The Hand?”

  “Dread’s Hand. It’s a small village about two hours north of here.”

  The interior of the trailer felt too hot. Each breath Ryerson took was like breathing through a face mask. She reached up and pressed a palm to her forehead. It was burning up and damp with perspiration. In her rocking chair, Gwen Rhobean’s face had revealed itself, even beneath all that makeup; the woman who looked at her now wore a withered, angry, grief-stricken mask, half her mind lost in the past and focused for all eternity on one terrible day.

  “Excuse me for a moment, will you?” Gwen said, and left the room.

  Outside, the dog continued to bark. Ryerson peered back out the window. Boutillier was gone, but the malamute was out there, staring at the trailer. Barking at it.

  “Well,” Gwen said when she came back, swiping an index finger beneath her eyes. She had reapplied her eye shadow. She sat back in the rocking chair, then frowned as she peered past Ryerson’s shoulder and out the window. “Goddamn dog.” Then her eyes jittered over to Ryerson, and just like magic, that forced smile was back on her face.

  “I’m sorry,” Ryerson said. “I think I’ve taken up enough of your time.”

  Gwen Rhobean continued to smile at her, the look in her eyes one of confusion. “You haven’t had any cookies. They’re just out of the oven.”

  Ryerson took a cookie from the plate, but the thought of eating it made her want to vomit. Instead, she thanked Gwendolyn Rhobean, and carried the cookie with her toward the door. Ten seconds later, she had chucked the cookie into the bushes and was hurrying around the side of the trailer, worried that she might throw up on her way to her car. Boutillier was gone, as was the woman named Claire. But the malamute was standing beside her vehicle when she reached the front of the house. The dog growled at her and bared its teeth.