“Nah, she wouldn’t. She’s my angel.”
“Maybe so, but I wouldn’t press my luck if I were you,” the nurse said, waving me out.
“Don’t make my new friend go,” Arvin said with real sadness in his voice. “We were just getting acquainted.”
The nurse rolled her eyes. “I’m sure you’ll both have plenty of time to get to know each other, Arvin.”
“Prolly so,” he said. “You know me—I keep turnin’ up like a bad penny.” Then he was laughing, and the laugh turned into a cough that even the water couldn’t stop. The nurse pushed me out and closed the door, but I could hear her voice inside, asking Arvin where his inhaler was, telling him everything was going to be fine.
Once I’d finally finished the tutorial and faked my way through the tax form, Tru took me out to the reception desk, gave me a quick intro to the clinic’s recordkeeping software, and handed me a list of questions that was supposed to help me decide which doctor or nurse practitioner to schedule patients with.
For the rest of the morning, I fumbled my way through call after call until I wasn’t fumbling so badly anymore. While I handled the phone, Tru directed incoming patient traffic like some kind of tattooed, bilingual ninja-Buddha. He juggled walk-ins, bleeders, drunks, screamers, weepers, and hallucinators. Nearly every kid who came through the door ran straight to him, begging for stickers and suckers. Depending on some complex mental formula known only to him, they got one or both. The whole time, he switched back and forth between English and Spanish so fast even Señora Markowitz would have been impressed.
When things finally got a little quieter, he gave me an insurance manual and told me to read it. Ten minutes later, I set it down.
“You finished?” he asked.
“Finished? I’m not even sure it’s in English.”
Tru laughed and leaned close like he was about to let me in on some big secret.
“Good answer. I was just checking to make sure our evil insurance overlords didn’t send you to spy on us. Any questions you can’t answer about payments go straight to our billing clerk, J’Neece.”
He dropped his voice. “She lives in a cave at the back of the building, and the only proof we have of her existence is the empty Diet Coke bottle she leaves in the recycling bin every night.”
“Doesn’t she ever come out to pee?” I whispered back.
“Never. And it’s a liter bottle.”
He stood up and stretched. I answered the phone and had just started in on the question list when Tru gave me a quick wave, saying, “Back in half an hour.” My stomach barrel-rolled as I asked the woman to please hold, and pushed a button on the keypad.
“Where are you going?” I asked. Tru was already halfway to the door.
“Lunch,” he said, like it was the silliest question in the world.
“But I’m…”
“You’re fine. Besides, Arvin’s an old hand, aren’t you, Arvin?”
Arvin had been dozing in his spot by the door since his appointment ended. At the sound of his name, he bolted upright and gave Tru a salute. “You bet, boss.”
Tru smiled. “See, Rowan? You’ve got this. And lunch is on me. You like brisket? I’ll get you some brisket.”
Then he was gone, and according to the dial tone coming from the phone, I’d hung up on the caller. I was also all alone except for Arvin and the little girl with Down syndrome whose grandmother had brought her in for a checkup and the roofer who’d started having seizures after he fell off a two-story house and the old woman who smelled like stale cigarettes and kept talking to the Chihuahua in her lap. Everybody there needed help. None of them had gotten a new Lexus for their birthday, or taken a spring shopping trip to Paris, or spent afternoons at the country club charging Cokes and baskets of fries to their parents’ account. It was pretty much the opposite of school and everything I was used to.
The phone rang. A woman trailing four kids came through the door.
It’s okay, I told myself. You’ve got this.
I so did not have it.
The ringing phone was the woman I’d cut off, and I got flustered enough that I disconnected her again. The lady and her four kids had no appointment, but they did have five raging cases of pinkeye between them. The Chihuahua barked at the kids. The phone kept ringing.
Then Arvin pulled a bologna sandwich out of his backpack and fed little bits of it to the Chihuahua to shut it up. I filled the kids’ hands with suckers to keep them from getting pinkeye cooties on everything in the waiting room. The nurses hustled to get people in as fast as they could. By the time Tru came back, things were basically calm again.
“What’d I miss?” he asked. And if the brisket smell coming from the container in his hands hadn’t made my stomach growl so loud, I might have actually told him. Instead, I ate my lunch (which, by the way, was really good), stayed at the desk, and made it to three o’clock with no major screwups.
“Hasta mañana?” Tru asked as I dug around for my keys.
“I don’t know. Is it always like this around here?”
He shook his head. “Nah. Some days it gets kind of crazy.”
“Well, since you put it like that…”
He smiled.
I smiled back.
“Hasta mañana.”
Mom and Dad were still at work when I got home, and there was an old green van parked in the driveway. Its back windows were tinted so dark I couldn’t see in. The driver’s seat had one of those back support wedges strapped to it, and the passenger side was full of crumpled McDonald’s bags and old mix tapes. Someone had written State of Oklahoma Medical Examiner in purple Sharpie on an index card and stuck it between the windshield and the dashboard like a kid playing pretend. The ME guy had said he was calling in a forensic anthropologist, but the van looked more like it belonged to a serial killer.
She was on her stomach in the back house, snapping pictures of the body with an old-school camera. When I got to the doorway, she looked up. “Who are you?”
“Rowan Chase,” I said. “I live here.”
“Well, Rowan Chase, you can come in or you can leave, but please get out of that doorway.” She started taking pictures again.
I stepped inside and stood against the wall. The woman kept working, scooting inch by inch around the hole, making tiny adjustments to the focus before each shot. She didn’t seem to mind me being there, or care that her T-shirt was hiked up past the fleshy rolls around her middle.
While she ignored me, I studied her—the worn soles of her Birkenstocks, the faded list of concert dates on the back of her T-shirt, the varicose veins running like roads on a map underneath the pale skin of her calves.
I drummed my fingers against the wall.
She kept taking pictures.
I shuffled my feet and cleared my throat.
Still nothing.
Then I started wondering if maybe she was actually some delusional ex-hippie wannabe who’d overdosed on CSI episodes and made a fake ME sign for herself. The only hitch was, unless she’d found the emergency key we kept under a flowerpot in the garden shed, Mom or Dad had to have let her in.
It was another five minutes before she spoke.
“Rowan, would you please hold my camera?”
I walked over, took it from her outstretched hand, and saw the skeleton for the first time since the day before. In the bright glare from the umbrella lights she’d brought, it was more sad than upsetting.
The woman hoisted herself up and brushed construction dust off her T-shirt, which (hello, irony) turned out to be from a Grateful Dead concert. Her arms and hands were leathery, her face pale and smooth. Best I could tell, she was somewhere between forty and seventy.
She took the camera and got so close-up in my face that I had to fight the urge to move away.
“Sorry,” she said, backing off on her own. “I’m making you uncomfortable.”
“No, you’re not,” I lied.
“Yes, I am. I’m Geneva Roop. People call m
e Genny but I don’t like it. I consult for the medical examiner’s office.”
Genny. The one the ketchup-stained guy had mentioned the day before.
“You’re an anthropologist?” I asked.
Geneva frowned. “I don’t have a PhD and I’m not in ABFA.”
“ABFA?”
“The American Board of Forensic Anthropology. You have to pass a test to join. I don’t like tests.”
I was about to say I hated tests, too, but Geneva didn’t give me a chance.
“The police tracked down three of the workers who were here yesterday. They claimed they never touched the body, and that they left immediately after finding it because the fourth man with them was illegal. Can you verify that?”
Two seconds before, she’d been apologizing. Now she was grilling me harder than the detectives had.
“I don’t know about the undocumented part, but they left right after they cut the hole,” I said. “Probably because they didn’t want to get interrogated over something they had nothing to do with.”
Geneva set her camera down on top of a storage bin and picked up a stubby pencil and a Five Star spiral-bound notebook. I love those things, especially when they’re new and empty and begging to be written in. There’s a stack of them on the top shelf of my closet, each one filled to the first divider with stories, poems, journal entries—stupid stuff I never finished.
Geneva apparently had no such problem with persistence. Most of the pages in her notebook looked full, all the way up to the last section. She flipped there, past a sheet with our address written on it in the same purple Sharpie as the index card in her van.
“What else can you tell me?” she said.
I went over the whole story again: how the men woke me up when they arrived, how they got back in their truck two minutes after the sawing stopped. She didn’t write anything down.
“Was the body in the oilcloth when you found it?”
“Yes. I’m the one who unwrapped it.”
“Why?” She sounded genuinely curious.
“I’m not sure,” I said, because I felt like it may have been true, but it would have seemed rude.
Geneva wasn’t convinced.
“Why are you calling the skeleton a ‘him’?” she asked.
“He’s wearing men’s clothes, isn’t he?”
“So am I.”
“Okay, but you can tell, right?” I asked. “From his pelvis?”
“Where did you learn that?”
“Netflix. Is it true?”
Her eyebrows pinched inward. “Yes. Unless it’s an infant or a child, you can almost always tell from the pelvis. Women’s hip bones are wider, with space inside for babies. Men’s are narrower and look taller.”
“So do you know if this skeleton is male?” I asked.
“Of course not. It’s wearing pants.”
I felt like an idiot. Geneva didn’t seem to care.
“I won’t know much about these remains until I get the clothes off and take a look,” she said. “Oilcloth is good protection, but I’m sure that crawl space has flooded over the years. Plus, unembalmed soft tissue breaks down into rot soup. Even if the anterior skeletal structures didn’t percolate in that, chances are they’re still degraded from ground contact alone.”
The thought of spleen stew made me want to hurl, but I was, after all, a mystery junkie. Geneva had my complete attention.
“For the sake of argument,” she said, “let’s assume the remains are from a man. I’ll be able to figure out a lot about what he was like when he was alive: his height, his build, which hand he used, whether he had any serious diseases or injuries before he died, and if he did much heavy labor. I’ll get his age within a few years, too. And there’s quite a bit of intact facial structure left on the upturned side of his skull, so I’ll probably have an idea about his ancestry.”
“How long will all that take?” I asked.
“Not long. But my assistant had his gallbladder out yesterday and I’m on my own.”
I looked at the skeleton. The way Geneva talked, it was one big puzzle just waiting to be solved. This wasn’t a show or a dusty bookshelf mystery. This was real.
“I could help if you want,” I said, figuring she’d say no right away. But she only opened one of the storage bins and rummaged around.
“Would that be okay?” I asked.
“I suppose,” she said. “How about you start by showing me the wallet?”
Cue my minor panic attack.
“Wallet?” I said.
“Don’t be obtuse, Rowan. I can see perfectly well that the fabric of the back pants pocket is distended. Peter didn’t mention finding it in his preliminary report, and there’s no sign of it in his pictures. So unless you’re lying to me about unwrapping the tarp yourself…”
“I’m not,” I said. “Hang on.”
I ran to the main house, calling myself nasty names that got even nastier when I realized our housekeeper, Gladys, had been there that day. She’d made a neat stack on my desk of everything she hadn’t known what to do with, including the wallet I’d stashed back under my bed and a folded-up piece of paper I’d never seen before.
It was yellowed and brittle. I pressed it open carefully so the folded edges wouldn’t crack. Inside, the blue ink was faded but readable.
Victory Victrola Shop
Payments rendered by J. Goodhope towards one Victor Talking Machine Company Victrola Model XIV
The columns underneath were labeled Date, Amount, and Balance Forward, and the first three entries read: April 1, 1921; $5.00; $42.50. Each entry after that came in once-a-week five-dollar increments, with the last on May 27. W. T. was penciled into the margin alongside every one, and even though there was still a $2.50 balance left at the bottom of the Balance Forward column, someone had written PAID underneath it in the same handwriting as the initials.
The best I could figure was that the paper had come out of the wallet when I threw it under the bed yesterday, and I must have been so focused on gathering up the coins that I missed it. Übermeticulous Gladys hadn’t, though. Gladys never misses anything.
I folded the paper back up and grabbed the wallet. Set the paper down. Picked it up again. Set it down.
I’m still not sure why I left it there. Blame it on my detective fetish, or the fact that my day at the clinic had left me feeling salty.
The wallet and the bones were Geneva’s.
The receipt was mine.
WILLIAM
A week to the day after Joseph Goodhope made his backroom deal with Pop, I was dragging my feet westward on Sixth Street, making the walk between school and work last as long as I could and thinking how I hadn’t seen Addie in an age. The air was warm even for spring, and the Oklahoma wind blew stiff enough to make you hold your hat.
“April Fools’!”
Ruby popped out from behind the corner of a building, hopping up and down and giggling. I jumped myself, only out of fright.
“You should see your face, Will Tillman! Looks like you seen a ghost!” she said, cackling like a tiny madwoman.
I put my head down and tried to push past, saying, “You’re no ghost, Ruby Goodhope, just a pesky little monkey.”
Which made her scramble back ahead of me, scowling to beat all.
“Joseph says when white folks call black folks monkeys it shows they’re ignorant.”
Unaccustomed as I was to being sassed by little girls, that stopped me short. “Oh yeah?” I said.
Ruby crossed her arms over her chest and glared.
“Mm-hmm.”
“And how exactly does Joseph figure that?” I asked.
She glared harder.
“He says we all come from monkeys. Or apes, maybe. I can’t remember. But people come from monkeys ’cause science says so.”
To which I replied that what she’d said was blasphemy, and little girls shouldn’t talk like that, and did she want to make God mad?
“I reckon it makes God madder when p
eople don’t use the brains he saw fit to give ’em,” she said.
I gave her a nasty look and was about to lecture her on how she shouldn’t question the Bible when a wind gust lifted the cap off my head and sent it flipping and rolling on its edge down the sidewalk. Ruby took off like a shot, zigging and zagging around parked bicycles, ducking in and out of the shade from striped store awnings, weaving through a display of shovels and rakes outside a hardware store. Each time she’d catch up, the wind would carry the cap further. I ran after her, stumbling over bootlaces I hadn’t even noticed were untied. “Wait!” I hollered, kneeling quick to fix them. The cap flew into the road. Ruby followed. That’s when I heard the rumble of an engine over the wind.
Everything happened so fast I can’t say exactly what transpired. First there was Ruby, small and quick-winged, darting into the middle of the street with her braids flying. Then there was the big black milk truck behind her, bearing down so fast I knew it couldn’t miss.
Only it did.
Or, rather, she missed it, snatching my hat midbounce and hopping away so nimbly that the driver had only just started to swerve. But swerve he did, cutting his tires hard into the curb. Glass bottles clinked and clattered. Square metal baskets tumbled out a side door, the empty milk bottles inside them shattering against the brick-paved street like icicles off a roof. And all the while, Ruby paid no mind to the chaos. She gave a deep curtsy, holding out my hat like it was grand prize at the county fair, saying, “Your chapeau, mon frère.” I don’t believe she even saw the white-uniformed milkman stomping towards us.
“What in hell’s name do you think you’re about, you little—”
I got myself between Ruby and him quick, keeping her behind me with my good arm while the fingers of my casted hand clutched my cap.
“It was my fault, sir,” I blurted. Which surprised me even as the words left my lips. “I sent her to fetch my hat without checking for vehicles first. She’s a good girl, sir, doing as she was told.”
The milkman’s mouth clamped shut just ahead of him calling Ruby whatever ugly name had been on the tip of his tongue. His jaw hardened down like dark-stubbled granite.
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