The Bone Box

by Gregg Olsen

  The first article announced the arrest.

  Indian Arrested for Murder of Girlfriend

  It described the basic circumstances surrounding Anna Jo’s murder and the discovery by a “family member” of Tommy soaked in blood.

  A second clipping included a photograph of Anna Jo and another of Tommy. Hers was a pretty image taken in the eighth grade. His was a glowering mug shot taken at the county jail.

  Makah Murder Case On Trial Next Week

  It was on the front page of the paper, a preview of the evidence, including the passage:

  Freeland’s 14-year-old maternal cousin is one of the chief witnesses for the prosecution. Because the Makah native girl is a minor, the Daily News is not naming her. She’s expected to testify about seeing the accused flee the scene of the stabbing.

  And then, the final clipping.

  Freeland Convicted Of Bonner’s Murder

  SENTENCED TO LIFE

  The article was short, only four inches. After it ran, Tommy Freeland had been sent away to prison and expunged from most conversations around the reservation. His wasn’t the worst crime committed, but as far as Birdy Waterman remembered, it was the one her family never talked about. Only a couple of times had her mother brought it up.

  “I know you saw what you saw, Birdy, but you didn’t need to tell anyone about it. Bad things need to stay in the family.”

  Lastly, Birdy studied the autopsy report with its voodoo-doll-like outlined drawing of a genderless dead figure, accompanying weights and measures, and the deadpan commentary about a young woman and her horrendous demise. The medical examiner, Stephanie Noritake, had been an idol of Birdy’s. She was one of the first women Birdy had heard of doing the work of speaking for the dead. Birdy had stood in line for two hours to get a signed copy of the doctor’s Among the Stones and Bones: My Life in the Autopsy Suite. She felt like she’d gushed too much when it came her turn to get an autograph, but she couldn’t help it. Dr. Noritake was a forensic science rock star, a woman who mixed care and concern with authority and science. There was no denying that the two shared a bond. Dr. Noritake was one of the first Asian women to hold the position of medical examiner in a major American city when she served in San Jose in the late 1960s. After retirement she moved to the Pacific Northwest, where her family had lived before internment in World War II. Dr. Noritake consulted on cases in Clallam, Jefferson, and Kitsap Counties.

  One of those was the Anna Jo Bonner’s case.

  She’d testified at trial that the blood found on the victim matched what had been recovered from Tommy’s T-shirt—putting him in the cabin—but her most interesting testimony had been about the stab wounds that killed the girl.

  From the autopsy report:

  . . . there are twenty-seven wounds, indicating overkill. Twenty of the wounds were made after the victim was supine on the floor; nine of those hit the floorboards after piercing the victim’s upper torso ...

  It was, as Dr. Noritake said in her report, and later at trial, “a classic rage killing.”

  And while there could be no doubt that whoever had wielded that knife had overdone it—severing the carotid artery had done the job just fine—as far as Birdy could recall there was no mention as to why Tommy would have wanted to kill his girlfriend. If it had been rage killing, then what was he so angry about?

  The next morning, she faced the mirror in the tiny mint-green and black-tiled bathroom. Birdy wasn’t big on makeup, but a hurried glance indicated her sleepless night and the need for a little help. Her brown eyes were puffy, and her skin uneven. She applied a light swipe of powder. Tying back her shoulder-length black hair with a rubber band, she pronounced herself presentable.

  It must have been intentional because it happened every time, but Birdy Waterman found herself dressing down for her trips back home to Neah Bay. She commanded a good salary as Kitsap County’s forensic pathologist. She dressed beautifully every day for work. Weekends around Port Orchard, she always put on dressy slacks and a nice top. Jeans—and not even new ones at that—were reserved for visits home.

  She put on a pair of Lee’s from Walmart and a sweater. In Port Orchard, she was Dr. Waterman, and she wore her accomplishments proudly. At home, where they would certainly be noticed, she was merely Birdy. And she did everything she could to keep herself from giving the appearance that she’d made it.

  And, yet, everyone on the reservation knew she had. There were very few secrets kept among the Makah.

  Maybe just one.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The front steps of the old mobile home were spongy. Each tread had soaked in rainwater on such a steady basis that the fact they were intact was some kind of minor miracle in a place that was decidedly short on them.

  Birdy knocked on the door and waited, feeling the past come at her like it always did. Her mother’s house. The home she and her siblings had grown up in. It was only fiberglass, aluminum, and carpet that hadn’t been changed since the home was delivered to the reservation in 1969 as a part of a government-sponsored effort to help impoverished Native Americans get a step or two closer to something that had eluded them—hope.

  The Makah people weren’t so foolish to think that a mobile home was the equivalent of the American Dream.

  Birdy’s father, Mackie Waterman, had put it very succinctly the day the doublewide was rolled into position.

  “If this is their idea of making things even, they’re working with the wrong set of scales.”

  As she stood there on the wobbly stoop, the memory of her father brought a smile. He’d been gone for a couple of years, but in a very real way, he was always with her. While her mother could be cold, her father had doted on her. He’d called her every variation of her name—Baby Bird, Purty Birdy, and when she was didn’t do as she was told, he jokingly called her Birdzilla. She used to wait on those very steps for him to come home from one of his extended fishing trips or from the lumber mill where he’d worked in the off-season.

  Birdy let the memory pass as she knocked. She knew the door wasn’t locked, but it seemed that her mom and her boyfriend of the moment required the courtesy of a warning. Neither owned a car, so a vehicle check wouldn’t tell her if anyone was home. Birdy hadn’t liked what she’d seen the last time she opened the door without knocking. No child ever wants to see her mother doing that.

  Natalie Waterman twisted the knob and the chintzy aluminum door swung open a sliver. Birdy’s mother stood quiet for a second. Dark eyes scanning. Silver-streaked black hair going every which way like a turn indicator on an old car.

  “You keep coming,” Natalie said. “Don’t know just why, but you do.”

  The door opened the rest of the way, and Birdy, feeling like she had when she was ten years old, went inside the small living room. The TV was blaring, smoke curling along the dingy yellow ceiling, leggy houseplants clawing their way toward the saggy curtain-framed windows that looked out over a chicken pen and a woodpile.

  Just like it always had.

  Birdy hugged her mother, who remained stiff. “I come because I love you, Mom. Even when you don’t make it easy. I still do.”

  A cigarette dangled from Natalie’s nicotine-stained fingertips, and she braced herself as she allowed the physical contact with her oldest daughter.

  “My, my, aren’t you the giver,” Natalie said, falling into the recliner pointed at the home shopping channel, where a bubbly actress was promoting Christmas candles and wreaths “guaranteed to freshen a room with holiday smells.”

  It was the type of item Birdy hoped her mother would buy. She’d offered to help get the trailer home in order, but Natalie always refused. Charity, she said, was for losers and that simply wasn’t her at all.

  Birdy pretended to ignore the sarcasm that seemed to pour from Natalie’s cigarette-puckered lips. “You looking for your sister? She’s not here. She’s at home with her no-good husband and her litter of no-good brats.”

  Her mother—a charmer, she wasn’t.


  “No, Mom,” Birdy said, softly. “I came to see you today.”

  Natalie’s eyes stayed fixed on home shopping, but she answered her daughter.

  “Look at me. I must have won the lotto,” she said, without even trying to offer a smile. “If you want some coffee, I’m out. Might have some instant in the cupboard somewhere.”

  “I’m good,” Birdy said, as she took a seat across from her mother in the familiar green La-Z-Boy recliner that had been artfully crisscrossed with black electrical tape and silver duct tape. It had been her father’s favorite chair. She ran her fingers over the armrest.

  “I’m going to Walla Walla to see Tommy,” she said.

  Natalie sucked the life out of her cigarette before answering.

  “What for? Haven’t you done enough to that boy?”

  “He’s not a boy,” she said. “He’s almost forty.”

  “Fine, but why are you going to see him?”

  “Because he wrote and asked me to come. And besides, Mom, I have never felt right about him going to prison.”

  “A little late for you to say that now.”

  “I liked Tommy. I probably even loved him, even if he was my cousin.”

  “You are making me sick now, Birdy. Let it be. Go back to the dead people you seem to love so much. Leave the living alone.”

  It was cruel remark and it hurt. Natalie was a sharpshooter when it came to piercing her daughter’s insecurities. She always had been. Where most mothers sought to comfort a child, Natalie seemed to seek ways to hurt. Counselors and teachers, mentors and friends, each had tried to convince Birdy that her mother’s cruelty was a sign of her own insecurities, but that did little to alleviate a girl’s pain.

  “I knew you’d be supportive, Mom,” Birdy said, in a futile attempt at jabbing.

  “Leave Tommy alone,” Natalie said. “Let him be. Let sleeping dogs lie. You got that, Birdy? You’re never satisfied with the way things are. You understand?”

  Birdy’s neck muscles pulsed. Her neck. It was like a barometer of her stress.

  “I understand what you are saying, yes,” she said. “But I don’t agree with it. I don’t know what Tommy will tell me when I see him, but I do know I want to hear it.”

  “All you need to know is that he’s in prison because of you,” Natalie said.

  Birdy laid her palm against her neck. “I was fourteen, Mom.”

  “I had my first baby at fifteen. Fourteen isn’t so young. Being young isn’t an excuse for anything.”

  “It wasn’t an excuse, but a fact. I did what I was supposed to do.”

  The room went silent as Natalie Waterman pressed the MUTE button. She wanted to make her point without the home shopping hostess’s over-the-top spiel about a “Christmas kitten ceramic coming up next.”

  “You went against the family, Birdy,” she said. “Twenty years is just a drop in the ocean. Families never forget a betrayer. You’re a smart girl. You’d think with all your schooling you’d understand something as simple as that.”

  The sound went back up on the TV.

  “I don’t know,” Birdy said, “I thought that you’d be glad about it. Happy maybe. Something positive about seeing him.”

  “You don’t know me and I don’t know you. On second thought,” Natalie said, pulling herself up from the recliner. “I’m pretty sure I’m out of that instant coffee. You better run along home. Go back to your precious job and forget about all of us up here. You’re too busy. Too important. I’m surprised you even remember where you came from.”

  Birdy stayed planted, thinking that if she stood her ground her mother would calm down a little and take back what she just said.

  Yet that wasn’t about to happen.

  It was a stalemate and not the first one. “Are you waiting for something?” Natalie asked.

  Birdy’s heart was racing and her stomach was in knots, but she didn’t want her mother to know that she’d gotten to her—like she always did. She’d seen a gentle side of her mother in the past and she craved it again. Didn’t every child?

  “I’m waiting for you to be a mother,” Birdy said, her voice soft as though it was too much to even ask. “That’s what.”

  Natalie laughed. “You don’t need a mother. And I don’t need a daughter like you. Why don’t you go on now? I’m watching Judge Judy next, back-to-back episodes. Do me a favor, Birdy.”

  Birdy wasn’t a crier. If she had been, she would have dissolved into tears right then. But not now. Not in front of her. Not with her mother’s seeming indifference, or outright hostility.

  “What’s that, Mom?”

  Natalie turned the sound up on the remote.

  “Don’t mention Tommy again and don’t go see him,” she said. “Leave it be. Let the past fade away. Leave it.”

  Birdy Waterman slumped in her car in front of her mother’s house. All visits home were bad, but on the scale of their relationship, this visit had been particularly disastrous. Natalie Waterman had come up empty-handed if she’d sought a reason to be happy. Few on the reservation would argue that she had many reasons to be happy. She was an alcoholic. Her husband had died in a fishing accident off the Pacific coast. Arthritis had taken its toll on her joints. Natalie was angry at the world and maybe rightly so. Knowing all of that didn’t make the pain pass any easier.

  Somewhere in the time line of her mother’s downfall were the murder of Anna Jo and the subsequent conviction of her nephew Tommy for the most reprehensible of crimes.

  Birdy pulled out of the muddy drive way and drove west toward the trail along the coast. The sky was clear and sunlight jabbed downward through the thick covering of spruce trees that contorted away from the ocean. She parked her car and started down the trail, each step taking her back twenty years to the day she’d seen the unimaginable.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Summer weather along the Pacific is governed by a kind of strange roulette wheel, one that makes anyone with concrete plans on the all-but-certain losing end of things. Not until the moment one ventures outside to experience the world of nature is it apparent if it is sunny or rainy or a mix of both. Its unpredictability is the only sure thing.

  Three days after her fourteenth birthday, Birdy Waterman dragged a wagon down the coast trail to gather kindling. This was something she did nearly every day in the summer, and most weekend days during the school year. In the rain. In the snow. In the most blustery of autumn days. It didn’t matter. Birdy’s family heated their little aluminum box of a house with a woodstove. Wood was free if one was skilled with a chainsaw. She wore two layers of clothing, a T-shirt and a sweatshirt that she’d undoubtedly peel off once she got down to the business at hand.

  Birdy was small for her age, fearless when it came to the noisy saw, and just hungry enough to help her mother and father in any way that she could. Helping each other was not only the tribal way, but the way of the Watermans. Natalie made money doing what she considered bogus crafts for the tribal gift shop, and Mackie Waterman fished for salmon up and down Neah Bay and over to West Port. Tribal fishing rights didn’t always guarantee a good income—no matter what the non-Native fishermen said. So there, on that summer day, Birdy did what she always did: forage for deadfall along the coast trail that wound its way from the hillside down to the rocky beach populated by sea stacks and smelly sea lions.

  She was on the east fork of the trail when she first heard the noise. It came at her like a locomotive, pushing, huffing, and puffing. Each breath was a gasp for air. At first, it didn’t seem human. Birdy idled her chainsaw, then shut it off. She turned in the direction of the noise.

  “Hey!” a familiar voice came at her. “Birdy!”

  She looked through the tunnel-like pathway and strained to see who it was.

  “Birdy!” It came again.

  Coming toward her was her cousin, Tommy Freeland. He was in the darkness coming toward her. The ground thumped under his frantic feet. She set down the saw. Then, like a strobe light, his face was suddenly il
luminated. It wasn’t the handsome face of a much loved relative, despite the familiar flinty black eyes and handsome broad nose.

  The twenty-year-old’s face was dripping in red.

  “Tommy!” Birdy cried out, and moved closer. “Are you okay?”

  “Birdy!” he called again, stopping and dropping his elbows to his knees. “Help me.”

  By then she was close enough to see that the coloring on his coffee skin wasn’t just any red. It was the dark iron red of blood. Tommy’s T-shirt had been splattered with what instinctively Birdy Waterman, only fourteen, knew was human blood.

  “Are you hurt?” she said, almost upon him.

  His eyes were wild with fear. “No, no,” he said as he tried to catch his breath. “I don’t think so.... I think I’m okay.” He looked down at his bloody hands and wiped them on his blue jeans, also dark and wet with blood.

  Birdy shook a little as fear undermined her normally calm demeanor. “What happened? Who’s hurt?” she asked.

  Tommy, breathing as hard as a marathon runner at the finish line, swallowed. He started to cry and his words tumbled over his trembling lips. “Anna Jo. Birdy, I’m pretty sure Anna Jo’s dead.”

  Anna Jo was a beautiful young girl, the kind other girls of the reservation aspired to be. She had a job, her own car, and she was kind. No one thought anything but the best of Anna Jo Bonners.

  Did he say dead? The question rolled around in her head, but she didn’t say it out loud. Something held her back. Maybe it was because she didn’t want confirmation of something so terrible. Birdy took a step backward and fell onto the black, damp earth. Tommy lunged at her and she screamed.