by Jan Burke
“Nothing.”
“Have you talked to any of the families of the men who went up there with you?”
“God, no.” I felt myself color. “No. I feel terrible about that, but when I think of facing those people . . .”
“What will happen?”
“I don’t know. They might ask — just after I came back, Gillian asked about her mother. I couldn’t tell her. I can’t — I can’t talk about what I saw. Not to the families. Not yet.”
She poured a glass of water, gave it to me. She waited for me to calm down a little.
“You talked to Gillian before her mother’s body was released to the family?”
“Yes.”
“But by now, the families have already been through funerals, right?”
I nodded.
“I doubt they’ll have questions of that type, but if they ask,” she said, “and you politely tell them that you’d rather not talk about that just now—?”
“They’ll still be angry, even if the subject never comes up. They must hate me.”
“Because you survived?”
“Yes. And because media attention was probably one of the reasons Parrish killed all of those men. You’re looking at the only reporter that went up there.”
“Did you go up there to glorify Parrish?”
“No. I suppose any attention from the media could be construed as glorifying him, but that wasn’t my plan.”
“So you think the families will be angry with you because he tried to use you for a purpose other than your own?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“People aren’t always reasonable. They’ll see me as a reporter. Some days, I think it would be easier to tell people that I’m an IRS auditor.”
“Do you have any evidence that this particular group of people — the families of the victims — will be unfair to you?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Perhaps you should find out how they feel. Visit one or two of them. You have a little carving to give to Duke’s grandson?”
“Yes,” I said, awash with guilt over not having brought it to Duke’s widow.
As I started to leave Jo Robinson’s office, I said, “I want to go back to work.”
“I think you will be able to do that fairly soon.”
“I mean, this week.”
“Soon,” she said. “Try something entirely new — be patient with yourself.”
She held the power to keep me from my job at the Express for as long as she liked. I was more than a little angry about that, and she undoubtedly read that in my face. She continued to calmly regard me.
I wondered if a woman reporter who had thrown a large object through the glass wall of her editor-in-chief’s office could get a job an another paper. I wondered if I should go back to my friend and former boss at the PR firm I’d left a few years ago to ask if my old job was still open. I knew he’d hire me, but the thought of being forced to write cheerful, upbeat copy for the rest of my life truly depressed me.
Instead, I did my homework assignment.
Two days later, I completed the last of my visits to the widows and families of the officers who had died in the mountains. I was exhausted. No one had asked about remains. None of them had failed to welcome me; all had thanked me for taking the time to come by. There had been plenty of tears at each stop along the way.
Duke’s widow thanked me profusely for the little wooden horse, and would hear no apology for my delay in getting it to her. It was the same with each of them — lots of remembrances, a few regrets, but no recriminations. All anger, all blame was focused on Nicholas Parrish.
The last visit had been to the parents of Flash Burden, the youngest of the men who had died in the mountains. They had gathered their son’s belongings from his apartment, and today, from cardboard box after cardboard box, they showed me trophies he had won — mostly for photography, but another boxful from amateur hockey. They proudly took me into a room which served as a gallery for photographs he had taken. These included stunning shots of wildlife, but also glimpses of city life that showed him to be a keen observer with a sense of humor. Frank had told me that he had liked Flash, and had liked working with him, but thought he was wasting his skills on police work. Seeing these photographs, I had to agree, and found myself wishing that Flash had never come along with us to the mountains.
As I was thinking this, his mother said, “These weren’t his favorites, of course. He was happiest if one of his photographs helped solve a crime or convict a criminal.”
I regretted none of these visits, but emotionally, each was a run through a gantlet flanked by grief and remorse, by terrifying memories and lost chances. Each renewed my anger toward Parrish, but also made me aware of how much I feared him. When I said good-bye to the Burdens and walked back out to the van, I was a little unsteady on my feet, and hoped Jack wouldn’t notice.
I found him cleaning out the van’s refrigerator.
“The secret life of millionaires,” I said.
He took one look at my face and put an arm around my shoulders.
“Sorry to make you wait out here so long,” I said, when I could talk. “You must wish you hadn’t agreed to do this.”
“Tough assignment, huh?”
I wasn’t ready to talk about it, so I changed the subject. “What possessed you to start cleaning the refrigerator?”
He wrinkled his nose. “There’s some kind of weird smell in the van.”
My eyes widened. “You smell it, too?”
“Not very strong, and not all the time, but yeah — something strange. I don’t mind it much, but . . . hey, why are you crying?”
So I told him about smelling bones after my visit to the map store. That led to telling him about imagining that I was seeing Parrish. “Christ, I’ve even made up a car for him to ride around in!”
He handed me a packet of Kleenex. I used every last one of them. When I had calmed down a little, he said, “Have you told Frank?”
I shook my head. “He worries enough as it is. He doesn’t need to walk around wondering if the bughouse will take Visa.”
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re crazy.”
I didn’t reply.
“What do bones smell like?” he asked.
“Sort of a subtle, dry, sweet smell. I can only smell it if the bones are what Ben calls ‘greasy.’ ”
“You know about it from the burials up in the mountains?”
“No. Those weren’t just skeletons — there was adipocere and other tissue, and a really overpowering smell of decay. But I’ve visited Ben at his lab at the university on a day when they were working with bones.”
“I’ve been smelling something that’s kind of a sweet, waxy smell. Do bones smell like that?”
“Could be described that way, I guess.”
“So let’s search the van.”
I hesitated, looking back at the Burdens’ house. “Let’s drive away from here to do it, okay? I don’t want to upset them if we do find something.”
He climbed into the driver’s seat, a big grin on his face. When I took the passenger seat, I asked, “What’s so funny?”
“Not funny — just pleased that I’ve finally convinced you that this could be a product of something other than your imagination, or you wouldn’t want to move down the street.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I warned. I looked in the mirror on the visor. The most horrifying thing in that van had to be my face — eyes swollen and nose a lá Rudolph. Still looking in the mirror, I opened the glove compartment and reached for my sunglasses.
My hand went into a pile of small objects before the smell hit me.
I screamed.
Jack slammed on the brakes.
Little bones spilled out of the glove compartment, onto my skirt, my feet, everywhere.
44
WEDNESDAY EVENING, SEPTEMBER 13
Las Piernas
“The glove compartment,” I s
aid. “I should have known.”
I was at home, sitting on the couch, being held by my husband. He was stroking my hair. Maybe I wouldn’t go back to work, I thought. Maybe I’d just stay home and sleep and wait for Frank to come home and stroke my hair. I sighed. Not likely.
I had opened the van door and leapt out into the street, a shower of small, straight bones falling all around me. After he managed to calm my hysterics a bit, Jack had used his cellular phone to call Frank.
The van was impounded to collect the fingerprints Nick Parrish blatantly left in it, and also to collect the remaining small bones of Jane Doe’s toes and fingers.
Ben showed up at the police department, with Jo Robinson in tow. I don’t know who had called him, but he had called Jo. My resentment didn’t last long.
I ended up talking to her about vanishing Parrishes, and I learned that people who had been attacked often had this experience of “seeing” their attacker, especially in times of stress or in public places.
When I was no longer shaking, she set up an appointment with me for the next day. For the first time, I looked forward to it.
The police checked out records of stolen dark green Honda Accords, hoping to establish Jane Doe’s identity.
When Frank couldn’t leave right away, Ben agreed to take Jack and me home.
Wondering how I was going to break the news about the van to Travis, I asked Ben why it should take so long to collect ten fingers and ten toes. “Ten? On each foot, it takes fourteen phalanges to make toes — and just the toes, mind you, not the whole foot. On each hand, fourteen to make fingers. That’s fifty-six bones if we find them in whole pieces.”
Trying to tease me into a better mood, Ben noted that he himself was able to get by with forty-two, which did indeed snap me out of thinking about the little bones of Jane Doe’s fingers, wondering what work those fingers might have done, and if they had ever stroked a cat or touched a lover or held something as fragile as they were.
On Ben’s behalf and hers, I let my anger toward Nick Parrish burn away a little more of my fear of him.
But as the evening wore on, even anger gave way to weariness. I was asleep when Frank came home, but woke up to talk to him while he made a late dinner for himself. Afterward, we spent time curled up on the couch.
“You know you can talk to me,” he said, “Yes.”
“Sorry. No more reprimands.”
“I deserve a reprimand for that.”
“No,” he said, pulling me closer. “No.”
In another regard altogether, it actually ended up being yes.
We did sleep then, a solid, deep, and renewing sleep that lasted through the night.
“You’re looking well today,” Jo Robinson said.
“Slept better,” I said, detecting a certain knowing quality in her smile.
At the end of this session, she said, “Your visits to the families of the men who were killed seem to have gone well. Better than you expected?”
“Much better.”
“Have you tried calling Officer Houghton?”
“Jim Houghton is the one survivor I can’t seem to track down. He quit police work altogether, and moved out of state. But a friend of mine who’s an investigator is going to try to find him.”
“You’ve made a good effort. I hope it works out. In the meantime, though, perhaps you should try to talk to the Sayres again.”
I won a struggle with an impulse to object. “Will you let me go back to work if I do?”
“Hmm. You want to make a deal, is that it?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry, doesn’t work that way.”
I studied my hands.
“However,” she said, “aside from any deal you have in mind, I was going to suggest a gradual return to work.”
“Gradual? What does that mean?”
“Part-time.”
“I’m not sure the Express will go for that.”
“Leave that to me. Between now and next time, I want you to think about Parzival.”
“Parzival?”
“Yes. Why do you suppose you chose the story of Parzival?”
“Ben asked for that one. I’d been telling it in installments.”
“No, I meant, why did you choose it the first time?”
“In the mountains?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. Because I had I read it recently, I suppose.”
She waited, but this time she waited in vain.
“Give it some thought,” she said.
“Okay,” I said, standing up.
“Not so fast — about the Sayres . . .”
I tried calling Gillian first, since she had been trying to contact me, but she hadn’t left a number when she talked to Frank, and the one I had for her was disconnected. I didn’t have any luck with the boutique she had worked in, either.
“The media, man,” the owner said.
“The media?”
“Yeah, she didn’t come into work after all those dudes got whacked in the mountains — you know, the guys that were looking for her old lady? So finally she calls me and says she ain’t comin’ in and she’s gonna look for new digs, ’cause the media is, you know, making her crazy. They were always tryin’ to interview her and shit, you know?”
Yeah, I knew.
I called Mark Baker at the Express and asked him if he had been in contact with the Sayre family since Julia’s body had been brought back.
“I saw Gillian once, a couple of weeks later,” Mark said. “I had asked the owner of that shop she worked in to tip me off if she called to say she was coming in for her final paycheck. I wasn’t the only one waiting — the guy must have called half the press in the area, hoping to get free publicity, I guess. She met all the reporters outside, said that she wished we’d look for Nick Parrish as hard as we had looked for her. And that was it.”
Despite my pointing out my recent poor track record with vehicles, Ben loaned me his Jeep Cherokee, saying he would use David’s pickup truck in the meantime. Jack did the driving. We nearly drove past the Sayres’ large home — it used to be gray and white; it had been painted peach since the last time I had seen it.
I thought back; that had been just after Gillian had told me that Nick Parrish had lived on this street. I had spent a fruitless day interviewing neighbors — either they said he was pleasant but kept to himself, or they said they had always thought he was an odd duck. No one in this latter group could say why — leading me to believe that they had been influenced by what they had already read about him. No one in the neighborhood had any real insight into Nick Parrish, or could say where he had lived next, or what had become of his sister.
During the first year after Julia disappeared, the Sayres and I had seen one another fairly often. I had met Jason, and Giles’s mother, a woman who was clearly not prepared to cope with a rebellious teenager like Gillian. I was shocked to realize that although I had spoken to Gillian in person on any number of occasions since then, and had seen her father a few times as well, I had never again talked to her brother or grandmother.
Months earlier, when Parrish had first made his offer to lead police to Julia Sayre’s grave, I visited Giles at the company he owned. The moment I had arrived, he said, “He’s told them where to find Julia, hasn’t he?”
In the privacy of his office, I told him what I knew. He took it calmly, but asked, “Is there a chance he might be lying? A chance that it isn’t her?”
Yes, of course there was, I said, having seen this sort of denial before. He asked me to keep him informed.
“Have you told Gillian?” he asked.
Dismayed, I said, “No, I thought I’d leave that to her father.”
He fidgeted.
“She told me Parrish used to live on your street,” I said.
“Did she?” he said absently. “I don’t know. I never have kept track of the neighbors. The police did ask about it. I suppose that’s how they were able to bring pressure on him.”
<
br /> “Did Parrish know Julia?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, frowning.
“She never complained to you about someone staring at her?”
“Perhaps she did,” he said vaguely. “Listen, Gilly doesn’t have much to do with us these days. I think she’d rather hear this news from you.”
Reluctantly, I agreed to be the one to tell her.
But Gillian, in her usual manner, had revealed nothing of her feelings to me. She simply said, “Have you told my dad yet?”
I told her I had.
“He doesn’t like to deal with anything unpleasant. Was he the one who asked you to tell me?”
“Yes.”
She smiled, not at all cheerfully, but in the tight-lipped way a person smiles if she’s right about something she doesn’t want to be right about.
“You’ll go with them, won’t you?” she asked. “To find out if this woman in the grave is my mother?”
In one minute flat, she had broken down the resistance that neither the D.A. nor my bosses had been able to breach.
I rang the doorbell of the Sayres’ house. To my surprise, it now played “Dixie.” I heard someone scampering down the stairs, shouting, “I’ll get it!”
Jason pulled the door open, seemed taken aback, then looked sullen. His hair was now cut fairly short and dyed a mix of black and blond. He was wearing a long, loose T-shirt and very baggy pants. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, his voice cracking.
“Jason, honey?” a voice called from upstairs. A voice too young to be his grandmother’s.
Jason rolled his eyes. He was thirteen now, and much taller.
He seemed to make a sudden decision, quickly shut the door behind himself and said to me, “Let’s go.”
“Go where?” I asked, startled.
“Just go!” he insisted in his half-man, half-boy voice. He started moving off the front porch. “That your Jeep?”
“The one I’m using, but—”
He came to a halt when he saw Jack sitting in the driver’s seat. “Who’s that?”
“A friend of mine.”
“Really?”