The Secrets of Bones

by Kylie Logan

Nick slanted her a look. “Did you believe it?”

  “We couldn’t say otherwise.”

  “And Maddie?”

  “Eileen talked to her. The school counselor talked to her. I know her parents talked to her. She never said a word against Bernadette. Still, Eileen wasn’t taking any chances. She stopped the tutoring sessions. She put Maddie in another homeroom. We juggled schedules to make sure Bernadette and Maddie didn’t eat lunch at the same time or even come and go in the same hallways at the same time.”

  “And how did Maddie react to it all?”

  “I think she missed the extra attention she got from Bernadette, but other than that, life went on and things settled down. At least with Maddie and her parents.”

  “But not with Bernadette.”

  Jazz sighed. “She seemed to accept the changes well enough. But then something happened. I don’t know what. Whatever it was, Bernadette was a mess. She looked terrible. Like she wasn’t eating, like she wasn’t sleeping. She even missed teaching a couple classes. Eileen tried to intervene, and when Bernadette refused to cooperate, well, that’s when Eileen told her about being put on probation, and that’s when Bernadette threatened to sue. As far as Eileen was concerned, she was welcome to try. In the meantime, we tried to work with her, and Eileen suggested counseling. We hoped she’d relax and recover over Christmas break, but after break…” Jazz remembered arriving at school after the first of the year, and Bernadette’s resignation letter waiting for her.

  “Lindsey didn’t say anything about fingerprints on that letter from Bernadette, did he?” she asked Nick.

  “None,” he told her. “That means we can’t say if the victim did, or didn’t, write the letter.”

  Jazz ran her hands through her hair. “It’s crazy making!”

  “And it’s not going to make sense. Not tonight. Not when you’re tired.” He tugged her to her feet and turned her toward the stairway. “Get to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  * * *

  Sleep was exactly what she needed, and the thought of Nick waiting for her in the morning actually made Jazz smile. Still, in the small hours after she promised Nick she’d get some rest and climbed the stairs sleep refused to come. Her head was filled with questions, and when there were no answers to go along with them she got more and more antsy. She sat up and read through her email for a bit, but it didn’t make any difference. Thinking about what had happened to Bernadette made her think about her dad.

  About the dead.

  Jazz finally gave up and crept to the stairway. If she was quick and she was quiet, she could grab a couple of the boxes she’d brought home earlier that day—well, the day before now—and get back upstairs to look through them before Nick ever knew.

  Except he wasn’t asleep on the couch.

  At the bottom of the steps, Jazz leaned forward, certain the dark and her eyes were playing tricks on her. A second later, she realized why. Nick was wide awake, too, standing at the front window, silhouetted against the glow of the security light from the school across the street.

  “You okay?” she wanted to know.

  “Are you?” He met her halfway, their shadows mingling in the space that separated them.

  “My brain won’t shut off,” she admitted.

  “You’re thinking about Bernadette?”

  Jazz glanced at the pile of the boxes in the corner. “About her. About the things people leave behind.”

  Since there was no use pretending either one of them was going to get any sleep, Jazz flicked on the light next to the couch and crossed the room. A couple of months earlier when her brothers gave her the framed photo of her and Manny with her dad and Big George that they’d taken out of her dad’s locker down at the softball field, she’d put the picture in a place of honor. Now she took it off the shelf and handed it to Nick.

  “I saw it earlier,” he told her. “Great picture.”

  “Hal and Owen found it. And it’s not the only thing they gave me.” There was a desk in the dining room and she went to it and took out a box where she’d stashed the rest of the things her brothers had collected from the locker—recipes, shopping lists, notes. Among them was a business card from a real estate developer named Sean Innis, and she found the card and handed it to Nick.

  He looked it over. “What does it mean?”

  “I wish I knew. Maybe Dad had plans to build, or maybe he was going to invest in some project. Except…” She turned over the card and showed him the message written on the other side. Ask Darren Marsh. Her dad’s no-nonsense handwriting.

  “Darren Marsh. The name’s familiar,” he admitted.

  “He’s the firefighter who committed suicide at the station where Matt Duffey works. It happened right before my dad died.”

  Nick handed the card back to her. “And…?”

  “And it’s been bothering me, that’s all. And thinking about all this stuff I got from Bernadette’s house just made me think about the card. I feel like it’s…” As always happened when she looked through the box of softball locker items, a shiver cascaded over her shoulders. “Why would he keep a card like that?”

  “Because he knew this Darren guy had dealings with Sean Innis and he wanted a recommendation?”

  “Possible.”

  “Or he’d heard something bad about Innis and wanted to confirm that.”

  “Also a possibility.”

  Nick put a hand on her shoulder. “The most obvious possibility is the most logical one. There was no way your dad knew he was going to die in that fire. He had the card because it was something he was going to deal with. But he never had a chance.”

  She knew it was true. Which didn’t mean she had to like it.

  Jazz didn’t so much twitch Nick’s hand away as she shook off the uneasiness that wrapped around her every time she thought about the card, about her dad’s death.

  “You can tell me I’m nuts, Nick, but I think it’s more like Dad was leaving some sort of message. I think he was trying to tell us something. Only I don’t know what it is.”

  “Something about…?”

  “I have no idea. But remembering that card, it got me to thinking, that’s all. Thinking about Bernadette. Those boxes are hers, Nick; I helped Sam Tillner take them out of her attic. Maybe she left some sort of message, too.”

  Nick considered the suggestion, but only for a moment before he headed into the kitchen. “I’ll put on the coffee.”

  CHAPTER 15

  “I don’t suppose there’s any rhyme or reason to any of this.” Coffee steamed in two mugs nearby and Nick lifted the first box and put it on the dining room table. “Does Tillner seem like the type who would have taken his time? Arranged things?”

  “There’s only one way to find out.” Jazz popped the lid off the first box, looked inside, and made a face. “File folders.” She ruffled her fingers through the alphabetically arranged manila folders. “Cable bills, electric bills, gas bills. Charge statements, church collection envelopes waiting to be filled.”

  “There might be something interesting there.” Nick must have been expecting her to give him exactly the look she did—mouth screwed up, eyes squinted—because he laughed. “Hey, being a detective isn’t all about car chases and excitement. Sometimes clues are in the most boring places.”

  “Let’s save these boring clues for when we’re more awake.” Jazz put the lid back on the box and set it on the floor and Nick lifted the second box to the table.

  Jazz opened it and looked at the mess of papers and old photographs heaped inside. “Looks like Tillner scooped up whatever he could find and shoved it in here to get it out of the way.”

  “And my guess…” Nick’s eyes glowed at the prospect of what might be hidden in the mound of junk. “There might be some treasures here.”

  They sat down and got to work. The idea was to sort the items in the box—pictures in one pile, any correspondence in another, magazines and newspaper clippings over on the other side—but they’d just start
ed when Jazz took out a small scrap of paper printed in color on one side, in black and white on the other. She found a second scrap, then another, then a fourth.

  “What’s all that?” Nick wanted to know.

  He hadn’t been raised Catholic like Jazz. Nick didn’t know about prayer cards.

  While Jazz explained, she dug through the rest of the box and came up with dozens of more pieces. To give herself room, she pushed the box to one side and got to work, setting out the pieces, color-side up, and sorting them as best she could.

  “Brown monk’s robe.” She set that piece to her left and looked over the other scraps. “Aha! Another piece of brown monk’s robe.” That piece went with the first. She made a pile of light blue pieces, another of golden ones, and when she was all done she started fitting the pieces together like little jigsaw puzzles.

  “Pictures of angels and saints,” she told Nick, and showed him a scrap of paper with a halo on it to prove it. “People give out prayer cards at funerals as mementos of the person who died and with information about them printed on the back. That’s how I knew where Bernadette’s ashes were interred, from the prayer cards at her memorial service. Or sometimes, teachers give them to the kids at school. You use them to mark your place in a prayer book, or if you’re my grandmother you hang them on the refrigerator and think about all your dead friends.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t look or sound convinced of the advantages of any of this. “So why would Bernadette have ripped ones?”

  “Good question.” Jazz fit the Virgin Mary’s face under a particularly showy golden halo. “Bernadette was so…” She found the face of a male saint, tried it on one, two, three bodies before she realized it fit perfectly above a green clerical robe. “Knowing Bernadette, she would have treasured these, not ripped them in a million pieces.”

  “Here’s a couple that aren’t ripped.” Nick plucked them out of the box. “They’re just mangled.”

  They were crushed the way Nick had wadded the bandage wrappers. “When you were angry,” she mumbled.

  To which Nick had every right to respond, “Huh?”

  Jazz took the crumpled cards from his hand and smoothed them out on the table. One showed Saint Joseph with the Christ child. The other was an image of an angel in a long white robe.

  “When I was telling you what happened to me tonight,” she reminded Nick. “You were holding the bandage wrappings and you crushed them in your hand.”

  To demonstrate, she grabbed the two prayer cards and squeezed them in a fist.

  “That’s what she did,” Jazz said, looking down at the cards wadded in her hand. “Bernadette mashed these two cards, and I bet she’s the one who tore up the others.”

  “But you said she was so religious, such a believer. Why would she?”

  Jazz thought back to the last weeks Bernadette was alive. “I have no idea why it happened,” she admitted. “But I bet I know when.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t a cry; it was a high, tight keening. A sound that crept through the hallways of St. Catherine’s like a bone-chilling mist. It bounced off the ceilings like the echoes of a bad dream.

  The wail of a lost soul.

  Jazz paused at the top of the third-floor stairway and looked around. It was late and except for the Drama Club students practicing for the Christmas program and the staff catching up on their work, most everyone had left St. Catherine’s hours before. She’d volunteered to stick around so she could get Eileen’s Christmas gifts to teachers and staff wrapped and she’d come upstairs because she knew Sarah kept ribbon in the art studio and she wanted to add some to the presents.

  There was no one in the hallway, no one in any of the classrooms Jazz passed, and for a moment, she wondered if the ghost stories the girls told about the unused fourth-floor space really were true.

  Was St. Catherine’s haunted?

  A door bumping closed and the high-pitched titter of girls giggling snapped Jazz out of her fantasies. Ghosts, she imagined, didn’t need to open and close doors to come and go.

  Students were another story.

  The sounds of scrambling footsteps confirmed her theory, but wherever the noises came from—whoever ran from the direction of the chapel—she didn’t see a soul. And the high-pitched wailing? It never stopped.

  Jazz pushed through the chapel door and the sound washed over her, amplified by the whispering walls until it rang in her ears and vibrated in her breastbone. This time of the year, it was already dark, and with none of the overhead lights on in the chapel, she stood with her back to the door, searching the shadows for the source of the pathetic sound, letting her eyes adjust. A little light seeped from the neighborhood outside and through the chapel’s stained-glass windows threw muted pools of color on the floor and over near the altar, the sanctuary lamp with its red shade was lit, and its glow spilled over a shape crumpled on the floor.

  Jazz’s heart bumped, and she raced to the front of the chapel, tallying the details as she went.

  White blouse.

  Plaid skirt.

  She had her phone out and the flashlight app on before she dropped to the floor next to where Bernadette Quinn was on her knees, her shoulders crumpled, her chest heaving, her head bent until it nearly rested on the floor.

  “Bernadette!” Jazz touched a hand to the teacher’s shoulder. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  Like a wild animal, Bernadette reared up. Her face was gray and swollen, her eyes wild.

  “What happened?” Tiny bits of spit collected at the corners of Bernadette’s mouth. “How dare you! How dare you ask me what happened!”

  When she scrambled to her feet, Jazz did, too, and when Jazz stepped closer, Bernadette threw out a hand. She held a prayer card in that hand, one of the ones she gave out to the girls who did especially well on tests, and she gripped it tightly in desperate fingers. “You stay away from me! You all stay away from me! You just want to laugh at me. It’s all you’ve ever wanted to do. Well, now you can do it, can’t you? Now you know how stupid I am, how gullible.”

  The cross on Bernadette’s chest did a wild rumba to the tempo of her rough breaths, and watching the fake jewels in it catch the light and flash, Jazz couldn’t help but think of everything she’d learned about dealing with frightened animals. She kept her voice down. She moved slowly. She stayed calm.

  “I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” Jazz told her. “But if you want to sit down…” She motioned toward the nearest pew. “You can tell me what’s bothering you.”

  Bernadette was not a tall woman, but when she stiffened her spine, threw back her shoulders, and lifted her chin, she looked formidable. Savage. “I’ll tell you right here and now what’s bothering me. You should know. The whole world should know. What we hear … what we…” Her voice choked over a sob. “What we believe…” She glanced over her shoulder toward the choir loft, then spun to aim a laser look at Jazz. “Sometimes we want to believe so much, so hard, that we deceive ourselves. Then the truth dawns.” She clutched at the prayer card and it crumpled in her fingers. “It’s not always the voice of God we hear. Sometimes the angels aren’t angels at all; sometimes they’re devils.”

  * * *

  By the time she was done telling the story, Jazz’s coffee was cold. Nick got up to refresh both his and hers, and when he came back in the dining room he had a bowl of grapes with him, too.

  “Donuts,” he said, and set the bowl in front of Jazz. “At this time of night, we should be eating donuts, not healthy food. All you have around here is fruit and yogurt and stuff no person in his right mind should eat at three in the morning. Where’s the cold pizza? Where are the donuts? Everyone should have a supply of donuts for emergencies.”

  She gave him a one-sided grimace at the same time she plucked a grape from the bowl. “Spoken like the cop you are.”

  Oblivious to the sarcasm, his gaze drifted over the bits and pieces of the angels and saints laid out on the table, and Nick sat back down. “So
what happened after that day in the chapel? To Bernadette?”

  The thought still made Jazz uneasy, especially when she considered that the end of the story was not a happy one. “She was different after that night. Quiet. Withdrawn. There were complaints from the girls in her classroom. Bernadette had always made her classes interesting and challenging. After that night, we heard she was just going through the motions. She was never good talking to parents, but she at least made an effort. After that night, parents complained that she wasn’t even returning phone calls. Other teachers said … well, she’d never been overly friendly, but the other teachers saw a different side of Bernadette. They said she was short-tempered, crabby. One of the girls told us Bernadette even forgot to lead them in prayer before class. And she always started every class with a prayer.”

  “Despair.” The single word carried so much weight, Nick sat back in his chair. “She’d lost her enthusiasm.”

  Jazz looked at the ripped images of the saints and angels. “I think it goes deeper than that, Nick. I saw her in the chapel. She was frantic. Desperate. It was like her whole world had turned upside down, like the most important thing in her life—” Jazz sucked in a breath. “You know, she never would have destroyed or disrespected a prayer card. It just wasn’t in her makeup. But the one she was holding that night, she crumpled it like it was a piece of garbage. It was like whatever happened there in the chapel, it had caused her to lose her faith. She was suddenly in a free fall and she didn’t know how to stop it. How sad, especially when you think she was dead just a couple weeks later.”

  Their sighs overlapped.

  Nick grabbed a handful of grapes. “What do you think happened?”

  A shrug was hardly an answer. “It was around the time Bernadette found out that Taryn Campbell plagiarized her scholarship essay. Even after the Titus incident, Bernadette never lost faith in Taryn or Juliette or Cammi.” A thought hit and Jazz sat up like a shot. “The Titus incident! I should have thought of that before. Taryn, Juliette, and Cammi had tricked Bernadette once with the cat. What if they kept on playing tricks on her? It explains why they were never at Drama Club practice, Nick. They’d hang around school, but they weren’t where they were supposed to be. What if they waited for Bernadette to go up to the chapel after school? Everyone knew she did it; that was no secret. That’s what Taryn was talking about when she said I should ask Juliette and Cammi about the angels. Could anyone be that mean? What if…” It was nearly impossible to comprehend, but Jazz put her theory into words. “What if the three of them, they were the angels?”