The Bone House

by Brian Freeman

  Reich knew they would never divorce. Godly couples didn't do that. He had just never imagined where it would all lead when Harris finally snapped.

  He heard the call on his radio as the poker game was winding down. The report of the fire. He jumped in his truck to respond, and Pete, who'd driven with him to the game, joined him for the ride. They had no address, but the closer they got to Kangaroo Lake, the more the smoke guided them, until they spotted a black column above the trees that was even darker than the night sky. It had never occurred to either one of them where the fire might be, and it was only when they turned down the road leading to the lake, where Pete's family lived, that Reich began to get a sick feeling. He drove faster, and the loose gravel made a roar under his tires.

  He could sense it in Pete, too. The fear. The horror.

  When they were half a mile away, he saw the glow of the fire, but it was too late. He parked on the road, and both men got out and ran, but the flames were already smacking their lips, popping and belching as they picked over the remains. A hundred tiny fires glowed throughout the wreckage, spreading across the wooded lot. Reich felt the heat on his face. He coughed violently as he inhaled smoke. He smelled gasoline and wood, and above all that he recognized a foul odor he hadn't smelled in decades and had hoped he would never smell again.

  Burnt human flesh.

  Next to him, Pete began to disintegrate. His eyes widened in terrified disbelief, as if he'd been ushered into the belly of Hell to witness the conflagration. He moaned his daughter's name and the names of his grandchildren. He crumpled in the driveway and then ran, stumbling, directly for the fiery core where the house had been. Reich chased after him, knowing that Pete wouldn't stop; he would run into the fire and let it kill him. With a shout, he threw himself on his friend's back and drove Pete into the earth, holding him down while he cried and beat the ground. Reich winced, listening to the primal agony screeching out of Pete's throat, hearing it devolve into whimpers of despair.

  When Reich got to his feet again, covered in dirt and ash, he saw Harris Bone.

  Harris stood thirty feet away, silent, motionless, watching the work of the fire. His Buick was parked in the grass. Sparks flew around him like fireworks, landing in his hair and making black burn marks like cigarette holes on his clothes. He seemed oblivious to the presence of Reich or to the tortured desperation of his father-in-law. Reich approached Harris carefully, and as he did, he realized that the man reeked of gasoline, and his face was streaked with soot. Harris's eyes, reflecting the fire, were blank and devoid of emotion.

  'What happened here, Harris?' Reich asked.

  Harris Bone shook his head and murmured, 'I'm sorry.'

  'Were they inside? Was your family inside?'

  'I'm sorry,' he repeated, continuing to watch the fire as if it were something distant and detached.

  Reich heard Peter Hoffman bellowing behind them. 'YOU DID THIS! YOU DID THIS!'

  Before Reich could stop him, Pete had Harris on the ground. The old man had the younger man's throat in his grip, and he hammered his son-in-law's skull against the rocks as he squeezed off the air from his windpipe. Harris barely struggled to save himself. Reich grabbed Pete's shoulders and threw his friend bodily away and stood in his way to block him as he charged for Harris again.

  'Pete, stop'.'

  Crying, breathing hard, Pete backed off and stood with his hands on his knees. Reich took Harris and pulled him up by the collar of his shirt and held him. Without thinking, he made a fist with his left hand and crashed it into Harris's face, where he heard the snap of cartilage breaking. The man's nose erupted in blood, and Harris staggered back and sank to his knees.

  Reich rubbed his knuckles, which were bruised and raw. He cursed himself under his breath for losing control. Pete watched him, saying nothing at all.

  That was when Reich heard it. A tiny voice, hidden under the roar of the fire. 'Help me!'

  He looked up with a sudden urgency.

  'What the hell was that?' Reich asked. 'Did you hear that?'

  Pete shook his head. A mile away, they both heard the sirens of the fire trucks growing louder.

  'Someone's alive,' Reich told him.

  He marched into the grass, dodging pockets of smoldering fragments blown from the house. He scoured the burnt yard, pushing through tall weeds. He listened but didn't hear the voice again.

  'Hey!' he called. 'Hey, where are you?'

  No one answered.

  Reich tramped toward the woods on the west side of the house. He made his way around the burnt shell of the old garage, which had disintegrated except for one wall that seemed to defy gravity and cast a shadow into the meadow. He squinted, trying to see through the darkness. The field was a mess of brush and flowers, but just outside the spotty clusters of flames, he saw a flash of pink huddled amid stalks of Queen Anne's lace.

  As he watched, the pink bundle moved. He saw a girl's face. Scared eyes. The fire was moving closer to her.

  Reich ran.

  'I don't want to hear you talking about the fire,' Reich told Peter Hoffman.

  Pete nodded slowly. 'I hear you, Felix.'

  'Mark Bradley didn't pay for what he did to Tresa, but he sure as hell is going to pay for what he did to Glory. So it's not going to help I anybody if you and me start dredging up the past.'

  Reich smoothed his uniform and headed for his Tahoe, leaving Pete alone on the trail, looking out on the water. Before he could climb into his truck, he heard Pete calling after him.

  'Felix?'

  Reich stopped. 'What is it?'

  'You know it doesn't matter what we say or don't say. Somebody's going to make the connection to the fire anyway.'

  Reich said nothing. He knew Pete was right.

  'They'll say it was Harris Bone who did this to Glory,' Pete went j on, and his voice was broken and old. 'They'll say he finally came back.'

  * * *

  PART TWO

  THE GHOST

  * * *

  Chapter Fourteen

  Five years ago, the buzz around Hilary Semper's high school in Highland Park was about the hot new substitute teacher who'd joined the district. The grapevine already had him pegged: six feet tall, buzzed brown hair, a golf pro who'd given up the tour because of an injury. Loud, confident, funny. Married once, divorced quickly, now unattached. In a school where most of the teachers were twenty-something blondes looking for a husband, this was big news.

  Hilary herself had no interest. It wasn't that she'd had no relationships in her life. She had fallen in love at least twice, but in both cases she'd realized that she was dating someone who wanted a wife, not a partner. In those days, she had tried to change herself into more of what a man was looking for, but she'd eventually decided that love wasn't worth pretending to be someone else. She knew she intimidated men with her brains. She knew she was outspoken to the point of driving people away. If the man didn't exist who could live with that combination of qualities, so be it.

  She was the only one of six Semper siblings who hadn't walked down the aisle. Two had divorced and remarried; three had marriages that had barely survived the arrival of children. They all looked at Hilary at holiday gatherings and asked her in amazement why she wasn't married yet. They weren't amused when she asked them why they were.

  In truth, she did want to get married. She wanted to be in love. She wanted kids. If a relationship came, she would throw herself into it. If it never happened, she wasn't going to cry about it or spend time regretting what she hadn't found. She simply went about her life, without wasting her time hunting for a man who might never show up.

  Her family, who already looked at her strangely for staying single, hadn't understood her choice to go into teaching, either. She'd graduated from Northwestern summa cum laude with a major in finance. Brokerages and banks in Chicago and New York had dangled six-figure salaries in front of her, and she'd turned them all down. Instead, she did what she'd always said she would do, teach math and dance to hi
gh schoolers. It wasn't the road to riches, although her own expenses were low, and she'd invested well. Her loud criticism of everything that was wrong with public schools didn't win her any fans among the school district or the teachers' union, but her students loved her. She loved them, too. She was exactly where she thought she wanted to be in life.

  Then Mark Bradley became a substitute teacher in her school.

  She'd already prepared herself not to like him. The more the naive young teachers swooned over him, the more she'd steeled herself to meet an egotistical womanizer who was overly impressed with his looks. He worked in the district for six months before she got him as a sub. She did what she did with every sub for her class - meet him in advance to go over lesson plans for an hour and a half, map out what she wanted him to do, and provide him with bios on the strengths and weaknesses of every student. All that for two days while she attended an education conference in New Orleans. Most subs groaned at her thoroughness, and few did what she directed them to do in her classroom. She expected that Mark Bradley - English and art major from the University of Illinois, former pro golfer - would be among the worst, with little interest in what she wanted from her math students. She'd already leaped to the conclusion that he was nothing more than a dumb jock.

  She knew - because he told her so later - that she'd been rude and condescending to him. She'd barely looked at him, although even a glance was enough to realize that he really was as attractive as the other teachers had said. If he wanted an opening with her, she wasn't prepared to give him one - and she doubted that an ex-athlete pursued by most of the cute twenty-somethings at school would have much interest in a tall, pushy teacher in her mid-thirties, with a handful of stubborn extra pounds on her frame.

  Mark surprised her. He kept his ego and his jokes firmly in check when they met and listened to her instructions and took detailed notes. He had a brain and the same kind of passion for kids that she did. When she returned to school after her two-day conference, she was shocked to discover that Mark had followed her guidelines precisely and kept the classes on pace with her lesson plans. She was less surprised that half her girls had already fallen in love with him and were begging her to bring him back.

  Later that week, when she did a post-mortem with him in the cafeteria, he waited until the very end of their conversation before asking her out to dinner.

  She had to admit to herself that she was intrigued and a little aroused. Even so, she wasn't stupid, and she had no interest in a date where his only objective was sex. So with her usual bluntness, she'd asked him why he wanted to go out with her. It wasn't exactly a great way to launch a relationship, but it was a great way to cut one off in its tracks. He surprised her again.

  'When I golfed, I never liked to play it safe and lay up,' Mark told her. 'I always went for the green. I figured it wasn't worth it to settle for second best.'

  If any other man had tried that line with her, she would have written it off as hollow flattery, but she saw something different in Mark Bradley. Sincerity. It was a quality she prized more than just about anything else, and she had been let down by enough people in her life to believe she could recognize it when she saw it. Mark was a man who meant what he said, who didn't pretend to be someone else for the world. That was her own philosophy, too.

  She decided that Mark Bradley was worth the risk. One night. No sex. No strings. She didn't expect it to lead to anything deeper, which was her way of managing her expectations. She certainly never expected that not even two years later, she would be married, and she and Mark would be leaving the Chicago area for the kind of idyllic life they both thought they craved. Moving someplace quieter and emptier. Moving someplace where the roads were lonely and tree-lined and the rest of the world was far away. Giving up old dreams for new dreams. Living in isolation.

  That was how it had all started. Five years ago.

  Now those dreams were dying.

  The calendar said winter was over, but no one had told the weather gods in Wisconsin. The wind off the bay was raw. Snow was expect overnight. The only sign of spring was the expanded schedule on the Northport car ferry, which meant that they could now come and go from the island mostly at will. During the three deepest months of winter from January to March, they were forced to spend weekday in a small rental cottage near Fish Creek, and they could only retreat to their real home on the weekends. Hilary would be glad to sleep in their own bed every night.

  Mark was silent as they drove along the southwest coast of Washington Island toward their home. It had been a long day, flying into Chicago from Florida and driving north for four hours along the coast of Lake Michigan to Door County. They'd barely made the last island ferry at dusk. They were both exhausted and wanted to do nothing more than sleep.

  He drove them along the main road leading through town, which was a generous description of the rural community on Washington Island. There were a handful of shops and restaurants, most of them on the west side, widely separated by farmlands and trees. The island itself was flat as a board, barely thirty-five square miles, with dense forest over most of the land and rough water on all sides. Anything that was sold here had to be shipped over from the mainland, and as a result there wasn't much more than the bare necessities for the residents, particularly in the off season. The prices were high. Most people waited and did their main shopping once a month at the far southern end of the county in Sturgeon Bay, which was the closest thing the peninsula had to a real city, unless you wanted to travel another forty miles to Green Bay.

  They drove past the island's old watering hole, Bitters Pub, and Hilary saw the owner of one of the handful of local motels standing next to his pickup truck with a bottle of beer in his hand. She knew him; he knew them. That was the way it was on an island populated by fewer than seven hundred people. He didn't wave or smile. Instead, he watched their Camry pass, and his face was graven with hostility as he tilted the bottle to his lips. She knew that word had already spread among the locals about what had happened in Florida.

  When they'd first moved to the island, they had been welcomed politely, if not embraced. You weren't really accepted if you weren't a native, but people were cordial and helpful, even if they didn't invite you into their lives. Hilary and Mark didn't care about that kind of friendship, but at least they hadn't felt like intruders. That all changed when the story about Tresa broke. From that moment, politeness turned to cold distrust. It wasn't easy living in a small town where you were shunned, particularly a community that was cut off by water from the rest of the world.

  She worried what would happen next, now that they all knew about Glory. How far do your neighbours go to tell you they don't want you?

  Mark saw it too. There was a deadly expression on the face of the man in front of the pub.

  'Welcome home,' Mark said to Hilary with a weary smile.

  He continued up the north coast of the island and turned down the harbor road at the cemetery, which was scattered with gray headstones among the pines and snow. The gravel road led from the graveyard into the trees, ending at Schoolhouse Beach, one of the most popular gathering spots for tourists during the summer season. During the off season, though, the cove was deserted on most days. The back porch of their house was a hundred yards from the shore, and during the winter, when the trees were bare, they could glimpse the water.

  Rather than turn right on the road that led home. Mark continued to the dead end at the beach. He parked and got out and walked down to the shore, which was made up not of sand but of millions of polished rocks. The sheltered harbor created by the half-moon inlet was calmer than the violent lake just beyond the edge of land, but calmness was relative here. He shoved his hands in his pockets and stared at the whitecaps blowing across the water like tiny icebergs.

  Hilary joined him. They stood next to each other, not talking. The brutal wind tossed her hair around her face and made her lips white with cold. The entire curving stretch of beach was empty. In the desolation, they could h
ave been the only two people on the island. That was what they'd wanted - seclusion in the midst of nature, the deserted roads, the silence unbroken except for birds and wind. It had never felt ominous before, but for the first time, she felt threatened by their very remoteness.

  'You know what's hard?' Mark said. 'I still love it here. This is like the most beautiful place in the world.'

  'I feel that way too.'

  He turned for her and cupped her neck in his palms and kissed her softly but intensely. There were so many kisses you could have as a married couple, the goodbye kiss, the after-a-fight kiss, the love kiss, the bedroom kiss. His cool lips on hers this time felt new, like a kiss that acknowledged they were both in need of rescue and had to save each other. It was a kiss that said: Hang on to me, because this crossing is going to be rough.

  They got back in the car. Their house was half a mile to the north. It was small - a three-bedroom house with matchbox rooms and a screened-in rear wood porch growing soft with age. The pale blue paint needed a fresh coat. The windows let in the drafts. For its size and age, it had been absurdly expensive, but out here, you paid for the land and the view. They'd scraped together a down payment from Hilary's investments and a nest egg left over from Mark's golfing days, but that still left them with a mortgage that was barely within their reach. Their budget had been based on two jobs. Now there was only one.

  Even so, when they turned into the dirt driveway, Hilary felt home. She'd never had that sensation anywhere else. That was why she never wanted to leave, no matter how bad it got, no matter what it took to keep it. When she climbed out and smelled the coming of snow, and felt the mushy, molding leaves under her feet, she felt a sudden surge of contentment. When she glanced at Mark's face, she knew he felt the same way. This was their refuge.