Walking the Bones

by Randall Silvis

  She nodded. “We’re looking for Carson Avenue, by the way.”

  “You’re looking for it,” he told her. “I saw it two blocks back.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Aaron Henry’s three-room apartment on the seventh floor of the low-income high-rise looked like the home of an octogenarian who had never thrown anything away. The living room was crammed with small antique tables, every surface covered with Hummel figurines, vases, bowls, faux Tiffany lamps, and other yard sale purchases. The only furnishings suggestive of the current century were a small flat-screen TV and a laptop computer. The room smelled of fried onions.

  Aaron himself looked twenty years older than a man in his late forties. His face sallow, unshaven and haggard, a pair of reading glasses on a chain perched near the end of his nose. He answered the door dressed in red-and-black-checkered lounge pants, brown socks, and a pale-green T-shirt speckled with coffee and mustard stains.

  He sat nervously at one end of a cloth-covered sofa, DeMarco at the other end. Jayme stood with her back to the window, arms crossed over her chest.

  “They still haven’t found that guy yet?” Henry said. “It’s been how many years now?”

  DeMarco smiled sympathetically. “The wheels of justice sometimes grind slowly, I’m afraid.”

  Trooper Matson said, “Tell us about any trips you made between the years of 1998 and 2004.”

  Henry looked startled by the question. “I was in college back then. Undergraduate, graduate school.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question, does it? In fact, it avoids the question.”

  Henry looked to DeMarco. “Anytime I ever left town back then, I had my wife and kids with me. My wife,” he said, “my ex-wife, she already told the police all that.”

  DeMarco nodded. “I know, I know. We just need to go over this again. It’s for our benefit, since we’re new to the investigation.”

  “And where is your ex-wife now?” Trooper Matson asked. “Where are your children? Why would she move them to North Carolina if she has so much trust in you?”

  “Listen,” Henry said to DeMarco, “those girls. The ones from my school. I never hurt a single one of them. I was good to them.”

  “Is that why you went to jail?” Matson asked.

  DeMarco said, “We’re not accusing you of anything, Mr. Henry. We’re just trying to get an idea of who hurt those other seven young women. You, in the past, displayed a proclivity for females of similar age. So if there’s anything new you have to tell us, it’s better we hear it from you. You understand? Better that we don’t have to find it out on our own.”

  “And we will,” Matson told him. “You better believe that we will.”

  Henry sat there doubled over, elbows on his knees, his head shaking back and forth. “I take Depo-Provera,” he told them. “I have behavioral therapy every week. My computer is monitored, I can’t get a job, I’m ashamed to show myself in public.”

  He sat back and spread his arms out wide. “This is my life,” he told them. “This! This is all I have left.”

  “If you ask me,” Jayme told him, “it’s a lot more than you deserve.”

  Henry bent forward again, arms tight across his belly, eyes squeezed shut.

  DeMarco took a business card from his pocket and laid it on the sofa cushion. He then stood and laid a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “If you remember anything at all that might help us out,” he said, “if you hear anything at all, I’ll be very grateful for a call.”

  On her way past Henry, Jayme leaned down and whispered in his ear. “I’ll be looking forward to seeing you again.”

  On the elevator, going down, DeMarco turned from the button panel and faced her. “Any chance you might have enjoyed that a little too much?” he asked.

  “No way,” she told him, grinning. “I enjoyed it just the right amount.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  “You up for heading north?” DeMarco asked as they approached her grandmother’s car.

  Jayme checked the time on her cell phone. 1:44. The missed call alert from Captain Bowen remained on the screen.

  “It’s two hours minimum to Evansville,” she told him, and handed him the car key. She glanced at the sky. Battleship gray. With ominous deeper gray squall lines moving in from the west. “And there’s rain on the way.”

  He popped open the passenger door for her. “We have a roof and we have air-conditioning.”

  “So does Grandma’s house,” she told him.

  He crossed to the driver’s side, climbed in, started the engine and air-conditioning, but left his door hanging open. “I figure we wrap this up today. Debrief Vicente tomorrow. Be on the road to New Orleans in the afternoon.”

  She held her face close to the air-conditioning vent. “I told Warner we want to interview McGintey. It would be good to talk to the females too. If there’s anything more to find out about their boyfriend, they’re the ones most likely to tell us.”

  He sat there staring through the windshield, left hand on the steering wheel.

  She asked, “Are you that anxious to talk to Royce, or just anxious to be done with this?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not really our problem, is it? We agreed to help is all.”

  She leaned back in the seat. Studied his posture, his face. His index finger softly tapping the steering wheel.

  “I know you, Ryan. You’d don’t really want to walk away from this.”

  He inhaled deeply, then blew out a breath. “I do and I don’t.”

  “Why and why?” she asked.

  “Because it’s just one more case in a never-ending series of cases. So what if we put one more bad guy in jail? There are thousands and thousands more out there. And there always will be.”

  She leaned across the console and laid a hand on the back of his neck. “Preprandial depression,” she said. “You need a small cheeseburger and a big salad.”

  “A chocolate milkshake wouldn’t hurt either.”

  “I’m pretty sure there’s a Steak ’n Shake just before we hit 24 north.”

  His face turned toward her hand, and he kissed her palm. “You say the sexiest things sometimes.”

  They drove northwest holding hands, her fingers laced in his. She wondered if he had driven like this when he was married to Laraine. In fact, he was still married to Laraine. He didn’t wear the ring anymore but they were still married. Does that bother you? she asked herself. And answered, Not so much yet. But it might start to.

  First she needed to get him healthy again. Get him right in the head and the heart. He made her healthier too. Made her want something normal. Something she had never wanted before. She was maybe too old for children but how old was too old these days? And what did it mean that she was longing finally for a normal relationship, one that wouldn’t be universally condemned? When she was with him she seldom thought about the other one.

  She had been surprised by her interchange with Aaron Henry. Surprised to feel the anger welling up inside. Surprised by the pleasure she took from his abject shame. Surprised by how badly she wanted McGintey to shrink from her in fear and humiliation.

  Outside, the sky was darkening. Heat lightning spiderwebbed soundlessly in the west.

  She scanned the road ahead. “Steak ’n Shake dead ahead on your right,” she said, and hoped her voice sounded steady.

  “And none too soon,” DeMarco answered.

  She squeezed his hand and wanted to cry.

  FORTY-NINE

  Jayme was in seventh grade and already taller than all the boys in her class when the girl across the street took an interest in her. Usually Jayme followed the girl when they got off the bus after school, MaryKyle fifteen and a natural blond, shapely, pretty and popular, always with two senior high boys walking beside her, Jayme following five yards behind, limbs too long, feet too big, breasts too small. MK was who
Jayme wanted to be and wished she could grow into. That self-assured walk. That fluidity and grace. Where did such confidence come from? Jayme was confident too but never in public. In fact, only in her own bedroom, where she was as confident as a hurricane. Surrounded by others, she would stare at the floor.

  Then one day MK fell behind the boys walking her home from school, shushed their complaints, and told them to move on. With a nonchalant Hey, she fell into step beside the younger girl, Jayme’s heart a startled rabbit, wildly quivering. You have such beautiful hair, MK said, and lifted a handful with her fingers. The sun just glimmers in it. You’re so lucky not to look like everybody else.

  Jayme blushed red hot, pale skin aflame.

  I don’t like most red hair, MK continued, but I’m so jealous of yours.

  All Jayme could think to say was Thank you.

  Do you ever curl it? MK asked. If you want to come to my house I can curl it for you. See if you like it that way.

  And for the next three years they met once a week or more. Like Jayme, MK had no sisters, only a brother already in college. They did each other’s nails and styled each other’s hair and MK told hilarious stories about how weird the senior high teachers are and how gross and conceited the boys are. She took Jayme to Victoria’s Secret where they nearly died laughing while trying on colorful panties and bras. Every touch from MK’s fingers made Jayme quiver and blush. And when MK taught her by sucking on Jayme’s arm how to give the perfect blowjob—Life is so much easier if you know how to do it, she said—Jayme felt a hot trembling rush between her legs. A rush that at first frightened her, made her worry for a week that something bad had happened down there. But the next time they met MK asked, Do you know how to make yourself orgasm? And then told her where to touch herself, Something else every girl should know, and to practice they sat on the bed and touched each other, Because this makes life a whole lot better too, especially on those nights when nobody calls. And it did. Easier and better and brighter and more promising.

  Until Jayme was almost sixteen and MK’s boyfriend crashed his car coming home from the prom. King and queen dead on arrival, the princess-in-waiting awakened by the screaming sirens at 3:00 a.m., still awake when a police car pulled into the house next door. Then too numb to breathe, too sick to eat or go to school. She lay dully in her bed for days at a time, sobbing until she had sobbed herself numb again, her body a too-long board, every thought a splinter. Two or three nights a week she would call her brother Galen, whisper to him with her head under the blanket and beg him to come home. She had no appetite, no interest in school. At her father’s insistence she spent eight weeks in therapy, but told no one why she was rotting away inside. Only when she talked to Galen or thought of MK and touched herself did she feel a quiver of life again, but only briefly, then dead once more, gagging on despair.

  The house next door grew as still as a grave. MK’s mother moved out, and again Jayme cried, as if the mother were a form of MK, last vestige, lingering shadow. Why does she have to leave? Jayme asked, and her own mother told her, Grief is like that, honey. It makes people sink down deep into themselves sometimes. Sometimes so deep that people never come back out again.

  Jayme came back out by sneaking into MK’s room when the father was at work. She knew where the key was kept, she knew his lonely hours. In MK’s bedroom she would write little notes and hide them under a pillow, in a shoe in the closet, inside a book on a shelf. Everything else in the room was the same. I miss you, Jayme wrote. Life sucks. Please come back.

  She would lie on MK’s bed and place her mouth on her arm where MK’s mouth had been. She would inhale MK’s scent, which was everywhere in that room.

  Jayme stopped seeing the therapist. The only therapy she needed was MK’s room.

  The last time she went to MK’s room was a Friday in March. MK’s father came home from work early. Jayme hid trembling in the closet, deep inside MK’s scent, until she heard the shower running. Then she sneaked out of the room and down the hall. But instead of escaping she paused outside the master bedroom, she did not know why. Maybe she wanted to see MK’s father again, up close, not waving sadly to each other from across her yard and his. He had always been so nice to her, they had all been so nice, mother gone, MK gone, only the father remained. She heard him come out of the bathroom and with a heavy sigh lie down on the bed. All was silent for a while and then the soft noises began. No words, just short, soft groans. She peeked around the doorjamb and saw him naked on the bed, eyes squeezed shut, mouth frowning. She watched him masturbate and felt both sad and aroused. What he must be feeling, she thought, and then he laid the bath towel over his belly and his hand quickened and he raised his head and watched himself as he spurted onto the towel, and she watched him watching himself and imagined going to him and crawling up beside him and saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry. But then he folded the towel in half and cleaned his penis and then folded the towel in half again and then tossed it to the floor. He rolled onto his side and faced the bathroom. It was when he started crying that she went to him, walking in noiselessly and leaning onto the foot of the bed so that he looked up startled, ashamed, and she told him Shh and put a hand on his ankle. She told him Shh and eased down beside him, kicked off her shoes and stretched out beside him, and molded her grief and her body to his.

  FIFTY

  While DeMarco waited for their order, watching from the booth as rain fell in thunderous gray sheets at the far edge of the parking lot and then came closer and closer and finally hammered hard against the glass, making him feel like some kind of Bizarro World fish in a dry aquarium, Jayme leaned against the lavatory in the restroom, cell phone to her ear.

  “This is good for him,” she told her station commander. “I know it is. He’s almost like his old self again.”

  “His old self was a pain in the ass,” Bowen said.

  “Well, do you want that one back, or that quiet, morose, chronically depressed guy?”

  “Are those my only options?”

  “He needs this,” Jayme told him. “He needs to feel useful again. He needs to feel like he’s doing some good. And he is. He will. He won’t say as much, but I know he’s loving working a case again. We’re on our way to the third interview of the day.”

  “All right then,” Bowen conceded. “But I don’t want some Kentucky fried sheriff or, God forbid, the Kentucky State Police commissioner raking me over the coals because of my loose cannon. So it’s up to you to keep him on the straight and narrow.”

  “About that,” Jayme said. “I’m really not comfortable in this position you’ve put me in.”

  “And which position is that?”

  “Your spy!” she told him. “Can’t you just take me off the payroll for a while? Do you know how this makes me feel, collecting a salary for being your informant?”

  “You can’t think of it that way. You’re using your vacation time.”

  “I’m your stool pigeon. Your snitch. Your rat. And I’m not going to do this anymore.”

  “We have an agreement, Trooper, and I—”

  “I’m done!” she said. “I am officially on vacation. I’ll talk to you when we get back. If we come back.” She ended the call before he could say anything more. Then stood there trembling, waiting for the phone to start vibrating again. But it didn’t.

  She took several deep breaths. Checked herself in the mirror. Put on a smile and walked out to join DeMarco.

  FIFTY-ONE

  The Resurrection Baptist Church on Evansville’s Lincoln Avenue was a huge glass-and-faux-stone complex that reminded DeMarco of the top half of a partially squashed geodesic dome. Out of the indented peak rose a three-story spire that also served as a transmission tower. The parking lot alone covered most of a block.

  Fortunately, at four thirty in the afternoon, only eight cars sat in slots near the front entrance, all late-model Cadillacs and BMWs. Their sleek, gleaming reflec
tions in the wide, tinted-glass panels gave the church a look, DeMarco thought, not unlike an upscale car dealership.

  The security guard just inside the door flinched at his brief glimpse of DeMarco’s badge and holstered weapon. He asked DeMarco and Trooper Matson to wait, disappeared through the rotunda and around a corner. Three minutes later he returned and led them down a dimly lit hall to a door marked in gold script, The Reverend Eli Royce. He opened the door without knocking, allowed DeMarco and Matson to enter, then closed the door again and stationed himself outside.

  At the rear of the deep room, sixty-six-year-old Eli Royce sat on a red velvet and black leather swivel chair behind an impressive three-sided desk of thick black mahogany, a bank of floor-to-ceiling, tinted windows on his right. Three somber and steroidal African American males in matching plum-colored suits stood against three matching walls of subdued yellow. Two stunning females, neither older than thirty, in spike heels and bright, floral dresses, sat on chaise lounges opposite the glass panels, long legs crossed at the knees, their brightly painted toes rhythmically stabbing air.

  Royce wore a black pinstripe suit and lemon-yellow tie. The coat’s shoulder pads made him look four feet wide. He lowered the black-rimmed glasses from his eyes and let them hang from his neck on a diamond-encrusted chain.

  Royce said, “You say you’re with the Kentucky State Police?”

  DeMarco smiled. “I did not say that, no.”

  Royce flashed a wide smile full of brilliant-white teeth. “You’re not Sergeant Ryan DeMarco with the Kentucky State Police?”

  “We’re working with the Kentucky State Police,” Trooper Matson said. “In an unofficial capacity.”

  “Unofficially, then,” Royce said, still smiling, “why are you here? And briefly, please. My associates and I are in the middle of a business meeting.”

  DeMarco let his gaze wander across the high, wide room. “Business is good, I’d say.”