Forgotten Bones

by Vivian Barz

  Susan’s real father had never been around much, at least not where it counted. Physically, Calvin Marlan had been present plenty when Susan was a young girl, every morning and evening, a mortgage loan officer with standard working hours at the local bank; emotionally, it was a different story. He spoke to his family only when addressed directly, a dazed look always playing at the edges of his features, as if he’d been jolted awake from a happy fantasy and was disappointed to discover the true state of his existence. The thankless job, the wife with her overcompensating cheerfulness, the morose little girl who wanted absolutely nothing to do with sports . . . surely, this couldn’t be his life.

  Calvin’s exchanges with his daughter were stilted, plagued by aggravated sighs—Why are you bothering me, and what do you want? He dealt with Bonnie, Susan’s mother, in much the same manner. Susan and Bonnie generally tried to stay out of Calvin’s way. Susan spent much of her childhood holed up in her bedroom listening to music, an underage lodger who’d overstayed her welcome but was forced to remain because she had nowhere else to go.

  Bonnie spoke badly of Calvin when it was just her and Susan, giving him the moniker Sir Lump—He just sits there like a huge lump! —her hollow giggles veiling evident pain. Eventually, Bonnie grew fed up with Sir Lump’s indifference, about the time Susan had become old enough to remain at home unsupervised. She sought therapy, got a job in retail as the afternoon shift manager, left Calvin lickety-split, and took her daughter with her. Calvin put up embarrassingly little fight, but he’d paid every single child support payment on time, up until the day Susan turned eighteen. Which Susan figured was something. Susan and her father now spoke approximately three times a year: his birthday, a day near her birthday (he could never seem to nail the exact date), and Christmas. It was an arrangement that satisfied them both.

  After her cooldown on the treadmill, Susan stretched out her tired muscles and then took a shower. She started to feel antsy even while she was drying off, absurdly disappointed that she wasn’t due back at the station until Wednesday. She was having a difficult time taking her mind off Gerald’s disappearance, as well as Mary’s left field confession.

  She now understood that she’d have to tell Ed about Mary’s confession. There was just no way around it. She felt it prudent, however, to first do a little fact-checking, lest Mary had been fibbing about the disappearance of the boy next door as a means of further justifying the murder of her husband. She fired up the desktop computer in her home office, hoping Google would spin its usual magic.

  She did not get as lucky as she’d expected. Unsolved kidnappings 1960s. California kidnappings 1960s. California farm kidnappings 1960s. Perrick, California, disappearances 1960s. Unsolved child murders California 1960s. And the list went on. She tried dozens of variations on the same key phrases and netted very few results that were even close to being relevant.

  Finally, it dawned on Susan to search for something more specific, Lenny Lincoln disappearance 1960s , which she did without much hope. She let out a quiet yessss when she found the web page of a local historian, Ben Pepper, who blogged about notable Perrick events from the last hundred years: storms, droughts, sporting events, crimes. It was the only source on the net that mentioned Lenny Lincoln, so Susan felt fortunate to have found it, even if the newspaper clippings on the site were slightly blurry and faded.

  She read on.

  The first article, taken from the front page of Perrick Weekly , was dated June 13, 1964: Local Boy’s Disappearance Remains a Mystery . Beneath the story was a large photo of Lenny Lincoln. Mary Nichol hadn’t been kidding when she’d said that he was precious. Though the photo was black and white, it was obvious that his large, round eyes were bright blue, his lashes as long and lush as swan feathers. Across his nose was a smattering of freckles, the two bottom front teeth missing from his wide smile.

  Susan’s eyes misted. It was impossible to conceive that anyone would ever want to hurt this child.

  Beneath the photo of Lenny was a smaller photo of Lenny’s mother, Nora. She was coming down the stairs of the police station, clutching a lace handkerchief against her bosom. Her eyes were puffy from crying, and her mouth was contorted into a bloodless grimace. Below the photo was a caption. Grieving mother mourns: “I know in my heart Lenny is alive,” said Nora Lincoln after county officials called off the search for her son. “I just want my baby home.” Lenny Lincoln, age six, has been missing for one month. He is now presumed dead.

  Susan scrolled down to the next article, also from Perrick Weekly . This one—Community Comes Together to Search for Lost Boy —focused on the search party that had been organized for Lenny the day after his disappearance. There was a photo for this one as well, snapped early during the hunt. It really did seem as if the whole town were there: farmers, high school students, volunteers from the fire department, police with floppy-eared dogs, other men and women of all ages. They’d searched the Lincoln farm, the woods, the schoolhouse, the park, the railroad tracks, and every store in town, even ones Lenny would have no interest in entering, like the fabric shop and meat market. They’d dragged the lake. They’d even explored the Nichol property, though obviously not underground, where Lenny might have been in a grave.

  If Lenny Lincoln was, in fact, Overalls Boy, Susan reminded herself once more. There also remained the chance that she was grasping at straws, connecting two completely unrelated crimes.

  There were no more articles on the blog, though Pepper had cited additional information about the Lincolns using indiscriminately placed asterisks. A *funeral was held for Lenny on July 1, 1964. A bodiless coffin was buried in the family plot after it had been filled with items Lenny cherished: toys, baseball cards, a marble collection, and his favorite food: sourdough bread that his mother had baked fresh. Lenny’s father, *Henry, died the day after Lenny’s funeral in what was reported as a farming accident (*though many locals believed that it was a suicide). The story was that he’d fallen off his tractor while plowing and had been crushed by the machine. It was the second farming accident on the Lincoln farm that had resulted in death. Nora’s first husband, *William, had also been killed after a baler had torn off his arm. William was father to Lenny’s half brother, Milton. *Nora died of heart failure in 1983.

  Susan printed up a few screenshots from Pepper’s blog and then closed out of it. For good measure, she ran another search about the Lincoln family, though she wasn’t too surprised when nothing came up.

  The evident setback she faced was that there had been no internet back in the sixties. Even Perrick PD hadn’t gone fully digital until the early 2000s. Susan knew this empirically because of the volunteering she’d done at the station as a teenager. As one of the unlucky student helpers chosen to type up ancient handwritten files, she could attest that it had taken hours to get through just a few minor cases. As far as Susan knew, they’d stopped updating digitally around crimes that had occurred in the late seventies. All earlier handwritten files remained in boxes down in the station’s storage basement, where they’d probably stay, ignored, until the end of time.

  Printouts in hand, Susan went into the living room to find her cell phone to call Ed. He didn’t pick up on his direct line at the station. His cell phone also took her straight to voice mail, which was odd; usually, if he couldn’t be reached at one, he was available on the other. Susan called the main line to locate him, which she was loath to do, since it involved conversing with Officer Fran Terri, who made the notoriously ill-tempered parole officer Juno Tomisato look like Tickle Me Elmo.

  Terri was pleasant as ever when she picked up. Somehow, she made even the standard greeting, “Perrick Police Department, how can I help?” sound like Fuck you, what do you want? Susan quickly stated her business—no pleasantries for this one.

  “You should call Ed’s direct line,” Terri barked, as if that hadn’t already occurred to Susan.

  “I did. And his cell. No answer. Which is why I’m now trying you.” You crabby bitch.

 
; “He’s not here.”

  Susan waited for additional information, which she should have known better than to expect. Extracting anything other than the bare minimum from the officer was like trying to pull crocodile teeth, though you’d have a better chance of having your hand bitten off with Terri. “Okaaaay. Any idea when he’ll be back?”

  “None. We’ve been busy here, with the guys from—” A man yelling in the background, followed by the sounds of a minor scuffle. “Look, I gotta go. Some drunk asshole’s trying to tear up the place.”

  Have fun with that. Susan smirked to herself as the line went dead in her ear.

  Despite her smugness, Susan felt oddly jealous of Officer Terri. If there was one thing that Susan couldn’t stand, it was missing out on the action.

  CHAPTER 10

  For the second time that afternoon, Eric was questioning a group of twenty or so students: “How many of you are here because my class meets a science requirement for transfer?” He’d asked the question under false pretenses, as he knew most of them were only going to lie anyway.

  He’d already gone through the first-day rigmarole of taking roll and reiterating key points on the syllabus that students could easily discern for themselves if they only bothered to read the damn thing: No, I do not grade on a curve. Yes, exams are closed book. With one class already under his belt, he was less nervous this time around, though still not feeling a hundred percent.

  Like in the class before, very few students responded to his query. The ones who did venture to raise their hands did so shyly and with hesitation, as if they suspected Eric was trying to trick them and sniff out those who were only taking the class out of obligation.

  Eric smiled his best Don’t worry; I was a student once too smile. “It’s okay, you guys. I’m sure not all of you are here because you just can’t get enough of geology.” This netted him a few nervous chuckles. “So let me ask again: How many of you are here to fulfill a transfer requirement? One, two . . . five. Ten. Fifteen . . . eighteen,” he said, counting the newly raised hands. “Right, so most of you, then.”

  Though this was not surprising, Eric was still disappointed. He’d grown accustomed to the enthusiasm of his students back in Warrenton, many third- and fourth-year science majors. Like Eric they’d been geeky, and his classroom discussions had often been so animated that he’d had a hard time getting a word in edgewise.

  Here at the community college, not so much. Eric hadn’t been speaking for even five minutes when half the class turned back to their cell phones and laptops, the importance of social media trumping that of inexpensive public education. It had gone the same during his first class, and he imagined it would be ditto for the next one. His other students back in Philly, having shelled out forty grand a year for their educations, had paid attention.

  Eric, who rebuffed elitism of any kind, would normally be the first to point out that a university degree was only as good as the student, and one did not necessarily need to spend tens of thousands of dollars to acquire knowledge. Still, he couldn’t deny the substantial difference in the manner in which his previous students had conducted themselves. He tried not to take it personally—kids will be kids, as the saying goes—but he couldn’t help smarting over the outrageously disrespectful behavior of his Perrick pupils. There were a lot of things Eric would have to get used to in this new teaching environment, and as far as he could tell, none of them were good.

  Eric could feel that sharp, cheated bitterness creeping in, a sensation so familiar as of late that it had practically become like breathing. He knew it wasn’t fair to those who actually were paying attention in class, all eight of them, and he made a conscious effort to squash his negative attitude. As much as he loathed coming to grips with the reality of his situation, this was his job and his life now, whether he liked it or not. It would be a long, miserable existence if he constantly dwelled on the past, and it would only make him feel like shit.

  (Don’t you mean shittier? )

  “But we’re also here because we love geology,” quipped a heavily made-up blonde, attractive in a pornographic sort of way. She winked at Eric from the first row of seats. She was an older student—at least in relation to her classmates—around twenty-four or twenty-five. “Yes, indeedy.”

  Just perfect , Eric thought with an internal scowl. A comedian. He could feel a migraine blossoming at the crown of his skull. He pinched the bridge of his nose. It did nothing for him.

  “Geology is sa-weet ,” jeered some deep-voiced jackass in the back. He was the kind of meathead Eric could picture doing keg stands to impress underage drinkers, the token lecherous older dude at high school parties. Driving a lifted truck with oversize wheels—shrill heavy metal music blasting, spike-collared pit bull slobbering out the passenger window, Confederate flag sticker pasted across the back windshield—taking up two spaces wherever he parked. Sporting a backward trucker hat and barbed wire bicep tattoo, T-shirt adorned with an ultra-classy maxim: NICE LEGS . WHAT TIME THEY OPEN ? He was just the sort of asshole who’d chuck his dirty old mattress in front of Goodwill after they’d closed. Use speakerphone in a quiet movie theater. Swear in public in front of children.

  Eric would never go so far as to say that he hated guys like this.

  Though he wouldn’t exactly claim to like them either.

  Eyebrow arched and eyes locked on Eric, the porny blonde bent forward and extracted a glittery notebook from her backpack. She did it in such a way that it provided Eric a perfect glimpse down her shirt at her very large and very shiny

  (fake? )

  breasts, which were now mashed up under her chin by her knees. Slowly, she eased back into her seat. Eric couldn’t be positive, but he thought she’d flashed him a smirk. He quickly averted his eyes, already sensing that this one might be trouble.

  It wasn’t the first time a student had flirted with him, and it surely wouldn’t be the last. Back when he was fresh on the teaching scene as a young and single man, Eric had instituted a personal career policy: Shoot it down from the get-go. To not even flirt with going there , since nothing good could ever come from student-teacher relations. It simply wasn’t worth the risk. If things soured, best-case scenario was that he’d have to contend with drama inside the classroom; worst case, he could find himself the focus of a sexual harassment investigation, maybe even a lawsuit. And try getting a teaching job with that on your record.

  He’d lost count of how many female students had made passes at him in Philly, though none of them had been as brazen as the shiny-breasted blonde. Maybe California girls were just more brazen in general. When he’d first started wearing a wedding band to teach at Warrenton, Eric had assumed the flirting would cease. Much to his bafflement, the ring had only added fuel to the fire, since his marriage implied to young women, fed up with young male immaturity, that he was a real man capable of real commitment. It had only gotten worse after the time Maggie had stopped by his classroom to drop off his forgotten wallet. Clearly, he must be a catch, if he could get a woman like that .

  Even though Eric looked a good five years younger than his true age, he felt ancient when stacked up against his students, most of whom were just a couple of years beyond legal driving age. He liked his women, well, womanly , and though they were undeniably cute, to Eric most girls at an undergraduate level seemed teenagery, on the brink of becoming women but still not quite there: pimpled and wrinkle-free, scrawny waistlines and birdy legs. It didn’t strike Eric to view them in a sexual realm—to him that would be just plain creepy, like perving on his seventeen-year-old cousin. Eric also liked having a partner he could actually talk to, and conversing with a member of the opposite sex got tiresome fast if they weren’t on his level intellectually or were too young to get cultural references from his own era: the childhood annoyance of rushing to find a cassette tape to record a song off the radio only to have the DJ start yammering over the end of it, or what he meant when he joked, “Be kind, rewind.”

  Eric asked, “Are
there any of you here who actually are geology majors?” Those who did bother to look up from their electronics furnished Eric bored, vacant stares. “Anyone at all?” he added, cringing at the desperation he heard in his own voice.

  Finally, a kid sitting in the second row raised his hand. He, like the blonde, was an older student, but shorter. Way shorter. Eric guessed that his height wasn’t much taller than four feet—now, what was it you were supposed to say? Midget was just as taboo these days as retard , not that Eric, himself a veteran member of the mentally challenged brotherhood, would ever use such a derogatory term. Little person? But little people were technically taller, he thought, but then again he could be wrong. Was it . . . dwarf? Yes, that was it. Dwarf.

  “What’s your name?” Eric said to the kid, hoping to get a class discussion rolling. He nearly cursed out loud when he peeked at his watch and saw that sixty minutes remained of the class. The whole damn thing was only an hour and twenty.

  “Jake.”

  “Hi, Jake. Thanks for being here,” Eric said conversationally. “Do you have an idea how you’d like to use your geology degree . . .”

  Do not pass flashes of light. Do not collect pills. Go straight to crazy. This was a saying of Eric’s from way back, a private joke he’d used during times his schizophrenia had reared its ugly head violently, unexpectedly, and without prodromes.

  Prodromes, Eric’s most valued tool against insanity, acted like a warning system inside his head. Like many schizophrenics, Eric’s prodromes were as personalized as a fingerprint; in his case, it was the phantom smell of fresh-cut grass and the sound of parrots squawking. When he imagined either of these two things, he knew to hunker down fast, because shit was about to hit the fan. Big time. It had been quite some time since he’d experienced visual hallucinations without prodromes—ten years at least, probably more like fifteen—but he was now evidently amid a real mental shit storm.