Idyll Hands

by Stephanie Gayle

  His frown was unusual. Finnegan was my sunny detective. He left the bad moods to Wright. I wondered if the frown had to do with the bone.

  “Who’s Colleen?” I asked.

  DETECTIVE MICHAEL FINNEGAN

  FRIDAY, MAY 14, 1999

  1010 HOURS

  “Hiya, Mike!” Hugh called from his dispatcher’s seat. “Or do you prefer Finny?” Hugh was hired two weeks ago. He still had that new hire shine. I gave it another three weeks before it dimmed.

  “Either is fine.” Most guys called me Finny, a few called me Mike.

  “How goes it?” he asked.

  “It feels like Friday the 13th.” I’d had a call from ex-wife number two about her broken hot water heater, and my car was falling apart. It was shaping up to be a humdinger.

  “The mayor is here,” he said, voice low. He was new, but he wasn’t stupid.

  Sure enough, Mayor Mike Mitchell held court by the water cooler, pontificating about policing. I’d been a cop since 1971, so I figured I could skip his lecture. “You never saw me,” I said. Hugh nodded, and I walked toward Mrs. Dunsmore’s office. She’d offer me sanctuary. Besides, I’d finished The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and wanted to discuss the book with her. Try to convince her to read it. She thought all Stephen King could do was scare people with monsters. This would change her mind.

  She wasn’t in her office, and her door was locked, so I headed for the Evidence room. I’d gotten a hammer, a flashlight, and many rolls of toilet paper from Evidence over the years. Maybe I’d grab the duct tape we’d impounded. A group of teen girls had used it to affix signs to utility poles declaring that Stacy MacMoore was a SLUT (the key word in pink glitter). The duct tape was heavy-duty, and my bumper was in need of repair.

  Inside the Evidence room, Chief Lynch fondled a bone like a modern-day Neanderthal. I said, “Oh. I see you’ve met Colleen,” before I thought it through. He asked, “Who’s Colleen?” as he turned the bone in his large hands. Chief’s a big guy, well over six feet, and handsome if you like Rock Hudson–types. He squinted at it, and I wondered if he needed glasses. Not that I’d suggest such a thing. I’d leave it to my pal Lewis to make that mistake. He would, someday soon. I’d put money on it.

  “Mayor’s outside.” I looked over my shoulder. “Guess you knew that, huh?”

  “Finnegan,” he said. “Who’s Colleen?”

  So much for distracting him. “Colleen. Well, that’s a hard question to answer.”

  “Why?”

  “Because no one knows,” I said. “But I found her.”

  “When?”

  How much had he seen? He’d opened the box, but the folder wasn’t in sight. He hadn’t read it, or he’d be asking different questions.

  “Wouldn’t you rather sit down while I spin you the story?” There were no chairs back here, and it was cramped quarters for a guy his size.

  “Mayor’s still out there, right?” he asked.

  “When will he be back?” the mayor shouted. We could see his outline behind the frosted glass pane of the door. The chief winced. No way he was stepping out there, into the line of fire.

  “Okay.” I set my book on a shelf, crossed my arms, and leaned against the metal shelving unit. “It was summer 1983. July. And I was reciting poetry in the woods. Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Only the woods weren’t lovely. The woods were hotter than Hades and full of mosquitos looking to suck my blood.”

  “Why were you out there?” He set the bone back in the box, carefully. Some guys would’ve tossed it.

  “Mr. Graham had called to complain, again, that bonfire parties were being held in the woods behind his house.”

  “Mr. Graham?”

  “Dead now. He used to live on Oak Road. The house with the wraparound porch, though that’s new. Belongs to the Crawfords, those folks from California. Back when it was Graham’s, it didn’t have the porch or the blacktop driveway. Just a gravel drive sprouted with weeds.”

  He nodded, and I continued. “That day, Chief Stoughton was in a mood to assign his ‘lead detective’ to check out Mr. Graham’s property. As if tramping through the woods at two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon was going to solve the problem. I told Stoughton it was kids looking to drink during vacation, and there was no way they’d be outside in ninety-two-degree weather, hosting a bonfire.” But reason had held no sway with Chief Stoughton. He’d been nursing a hangover that hot day, and he’d been eager to dish out punishment. “I went and beat back tree limbs as best I could. After twenty minutes, I hadn’t seen a thing. I thought maybe Mr. Graham was losing it. He was eighty-six and fuzzy at the edges.”

  Chief Lynch waited. Other cops would’ve asked, “When did you find Colleen?” or begged me to skip the boring bits. But Lynch enjoyed a good yarn.

  “I headed back to my car, waving my arms to keep the mosquitos at bay. My foot kicked a log. Something bright winked on the ground. It was a watch. Its glass face was broken.”

  “The one in the box,” he said.

  “I thought it was evidence of Mr. Graham’s nighttime trespassers, so I looked around. The pine needles and leaf cover looked disturbed, but that could’ve been from me lumbering through. After a minute or two, I saw something else under the leaves. It was a dirty piece of fabric. When I got it up, I saw it was a skirt, a plaid skirt. Could’ve been the bonfire kids had gotten frisky, but it bothered me. I was thinking, Why someone would leave a skirt in the woods? when I spotted the bone. My first thought was it was a rotted tennis ball.”

  I’d knelt to examine it and the ache in my gut sharpened. It felt like I’d caught the soft skin of my belly in a zipper.

  “There were divots and pockmarks, where scavengers had chewed on it. I tugged it out of the ground, turned it over, and saw it was the upper arm bone, the humerus.”

  “Then what did you do?” His face was alive with interest, and I realized I’d played this all wrong. I should’ve stressed that it was a dead-end case with no good angles. Now he’d want to know more. He’d definitely go through the box and read the folder, cover to cover. Damn it.

  “I marked the site with my handkerchief. Then I got back to the car and called it in.”

  But not before I’d stood where the woods met Mr. Graham’s yard. I’d stared at an old charcoal grill that hadn’t cooked a hot dog in a decade. Tilted to one side, its cover so rusty I couldn’t make out its original black paint. And I wondered why there was a bone in the woods, and how much trouble it was likely to cause.

  “I got on the radio and told dispatch what I’d found. Jonathan said, ‘A bone? You mean, like a deer, right?’ As if I’d call in about finding a fucking deer bone. When I told him it was human, he asked, ‘How can you tell? You take one of them adult ed classes?’”

  “Jonathan sounds like a delight,” Chief said. These comments made me like him. Some of the other cops thought he “talked funny.” They weren’t as fluent in sarcasm.

  “What did you think about the bone?” he asked.

  “It had been outside for years. I wondered why there was only one and how it got there.”

  He glanced at the box. “I’m guessing they didn’t recover much else?”

  I leaned away from the shelving unit’s metal frame. “They found signs of a bonfire, burnt logs twenty feet from where I found the bone. There were beer cans and cigarettes. Some food wrappers and a discarded condom.”

  “July 1983,” he said. “A cold case.”

  “The coldest.”

  He cocked his head. Looked toward the door. “Mayor’s gone.”

  “You sure?”

  He grunted. “He’s not capable of staying silent for so long.” He bent and picked up the box. I hoped he’d put it back on the shelf, but he carried it, in his arms, toward the door.

  Damn it. “Chief, how ’bout I grab that for you?”

  “I’ve got it,” he said, and walked out.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “You been talking to Billy? I
’m not old. I can carry plenty heavier things than this.”

  “I wasn’t implying—” I stopped. And let him go. I needed to get my hands on that box before he read the folder, but there was no need to make a scene now. That would tip him off.

  If you live your life like an open book, if you keep 90 percent of your info out there for anyone to see, they assume you’ve got no secrets.

  That was the Chief’s mistake. He was 100 percent secrets when he arrived in Idyll, so we assumed he was hiding stuff, important stuff. He should’ve flooded us with information, most of it nothing we’d want to know. It would have silenced us, made us wish he’d stop talking. That’s how you go undetected for years—decades. How everyone thinks they know you so well. Trust me. I’ve been doing it for so long, I’ve forgotten I’m doing it most days.

  CHIEF THOMAS LYNCH

  FRIDAY, MAY 14, 1999

  1130 HOURS

  Billy walked into my office. “My application for the drug squad program we discussed.” He thrust the papers at me. Professional development. We had a small budget for it. Billy was one of three men who’d approached me about using those funds to get more on-the-job training. I promised to look the sheets over. “They’re due Friday of next week,” he said.

  “Got it.”

  He stared at the bone on my desk. “That a human bone?” Got closer to it. “The humerus, right? Back in Boy Scouts we learned the differences between human bones and animal bones. People were always reporting they’d found body parts, and usually they were deer legs or bear bones. Our scoutmaster, Mr. Mulaney, he worked as an EMT, and he taught us to spot differences.”

  “I thought Boy Scouts went camping.”

  “We did that too.” He peered at the bone. “Where did this come from?” Billy didn’t know. Interesting. Then again, Billy was young, and Finny said he’d found it back in 1983.

  “Woods back of Mr. Graham’s place,” I said.

  “Whoa.” Billy’s eyes widened. “Is this Colleen?”

  “What do you know about Colleen?” Finny had made it sound like nothing was known about her.

  “She was our local ghost. As kids, we’d dare each other to spend the night in the woods behind the Graham place. Story was that a young woman had been murdered there. Her ghost was seen amongst the trees, screaming. People heard her. They wouldn’t always see her, but they’d hear her. That was the bit that freaked me out, the screaming.”

  “Anyone ever do it?” I asked. “Stay overnight in the woods?”

  “Kids claimed to, but without witnesses, who’s to say if they did? I wouldn’t sleep out there. Tons of mosquitos, and, back in the day, Old Man Graham kept a shotgun he threatened to fire at trespassers. I figured Colleen was made up by him to keep kids out of the woods. But this bone … Are you saying there was a body in the woods?”

  “Just this bone,” I said. “Sounds as though they never identified it.”

  “Shouldn’t that be at Farmington?” Even a young patrolman like Billy knew the rules.

  “Let’s keep it between us, okay?”

  “Sure thing.” He looked at the bone. “Huh. Never thought she was real. I mean, not now, not as an adult. Weird to think the story was based on truth.” He frowned. “I guess some legends turn out to be real, huh?”

  “Guess so,” I said.

  He left me to dab at my eyes with a fresh tissue. My direct line rang. Outside call. 212 area code. New York City.

  “Tom?” my brother, John, said when I answered. “How are you?”

  “Fine. Everything okay?” He didn’t call me midday, at work. We communicated through his wife, Marie, or our parents.

  “Yeah, everything is fine. We’re having a get-together, and I wanted to invite you.”

  “Get-together?” Had I forgotten someone’s birthday? Anniversary? My mental calendar came up blank.

  “I won a teaching award, and they’re having a ceremony. Mom wanted to do dinner afterward.” John had followed in our parents’ academic footsteps.

  “Congrats,” I said. “Do you get money? A statue?”

  “My name goes on a plaque, and I get a tiny, one-time bonus.”

  “When’s the ceremony?”

  “Next month on a Tuesday night. You’re probably working.”

  “Probably,” I said. “But let me look into it. What time does it start?”

  “Well, the award thing is at 5:30 p.m. Mom wants to go out afterward.”

  “Kids coming?” I hadn’t seen my nephews since Christmas. It seemed like they grew an inch between my visits.

  “Yup.”

  “Where’s it at?” I’d been to NYU just often enough to realize I’d be lost without explicit directions. John gave them to me.

  “It’d be great to see you there.” His voice was resigned. He didn’t expect I’d come. I had a history of missed holidays, birthdays, and family outings. As a homicide detective, my excuses were solid. As chief of police in a sleepy small town? Not so much.

  “Is it okay if I call you later and let you know?” Hedging my bets was my standard MO.

  “Sure,” he said. “Talk to you later.”

  No sooner had I hung up, when in came Mrs. Dunsmore. She wore her hair in a bun, and her trademark scowl was absent. Today she wore a lavender scarf. The ends floated behind her as she walked. She stopped abruptly and asked, “Why is that bone on your desk?” The scowl appeared.

  “I found it in the Evidence room.”

  “And you decided it belonged on your desk?”

  I sneezed and grabbed a tissue.

  “Bless you,” she said. “Your allergies are getting worse.”

  I honked like a goose into the tissue.

  “Don’t worry—they’ll probably subside next month.”

  “Next month?” I’d been hoping for a few days more, a week at the outset.

  She neared my desk. “Ah, that bone.” As if we had a bunch of them lying around and she’d only recognized it now that she’d gotten a closer look. “There’s a ghost story because of it.” She went to my windowsill and began fussing with the plant she’d given me as a welcome-to-thestation gift. She’d repotted it because it had grown too big. At least one of us was thriving.

  I waited, but she didn’t say anything more except, “Looks like it might rain,” and then, “That’ll help with your allergies. Wash the pollen away… . And that physical-fitness memo you had me type up.” Her lips flat-lined. “If you’re looking to make yourself unpopular, you created a surefire way to do it.”

  “What? They’re baseline fitness standards I’ve adapted from several state departments. Exercise is good. It’ll make those guys better able to do their jobs—”

  “Is this because Dix lost the race to that nine-year-old?” she asked.

  “No. Take a good look at our officers. They can barely lift road works signs. They’re out of shape, and it’s not good for them. Fit officers take fewer sick days, you know.”

  “This wouldn’t have anything to do with your new health kick, would it?”

  “What health kick?” I asked.

  “The one that has you eating salads and working out in the interview room during lunch.”

  “I think the men are going to respond more positively to this program than you think. It’s got built-in incentives.”

  “You think you can convince the selectman and mayor to approve cash bonuses for meeting fitness goals?”

  “The firemen basically get paid to work out all day. We’ll be looking to fund an hour.”

  She tsked twice. “Sometimes you act like you haven’t learned the rules of small-town politics at all.”

  I pointed to the bone atop my desk. “Speaking of rules, shouldn’t this be in Farmington?” Bodies and their parts went to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

  “Yes, but I wouldn’t send it there if I were you.”

  “Why not?” She was a stickler. Why advocate for keeping the bone?

  “Detective Finnegan wouldn’t like it.” S
he and Finny had a funny relationship. She scolded him, and in the next breath recommended books he should read. He smiled, took the scolding, and read the books. Every now and again he’d offer to make her his fourth wife. She’d laugh and say he couldn’t keep up with her.

  “You ever try to put your hand between a dog and its food bowl?” she asked.

  I said, “Thought that was a surefire way to get bit.”

  “Exactly. ME isn’t missing that bone. No need to bring it to his attention.” Was Finnegan the dog in that story? I swore she spoke in riddles to confuse me. “Put the bone in the box and give it here,” she said.

  “What? Why?”

  “Because you are the chief of police, not a detective. It’s not your job to investigate crimes. You already took on two of the biggest cases we’ve ever had. You think Detective Wright’s going to join your fan club if you do it again?”

  Lewis Wright was my full-time detective, and, it was true, he got peeved when I elbowed my way into his cases.

  “Finny says it’s an ice-cold case,” I protested.

  “Then it surely doesn’t need your attention while I’m waiting for your crime statistics for the next town meeting.”

  “Fine.” I took the bone from my desk and set it atop the bagged skirt swatch. Then I refolded the cardboard flaps and handed her the box.

  “Was that so hard?” she asked before she left.

  “No,” I said, louder than necessary. The door closed and I grinned. Then I opened the manila folder on my desk. What she didn’t know was that I’d made a quick copy of the papers within the Colleen box while Hallihan talked my ear off about John Elway, as if I cared about anyone who played for the Denver Broncos. I was a Giants fan. I’d thought I’d look at the papers later—maybe this evening, since a cold case wasn’t part of my job duties.

  But since she’d tried to make sure I’d leave well enough alone, well, there was no time like the present, was there?

  I scanned the papers and stopped. What was this? A DNA test. Wait, who?