The Bone House

by Brian Freeman

  He only cared what one person thought. Hilary.

  The morning had felt like a turning point between them after a bad, bad night. He'd slept alone, feeling her absence. He hadn't blamed her for doubting him, but he'd worried that doubt was like a genie you couldn't put back in the bottle once it was free. Every day for the rest of their lives, he feared that she would look at him and a single thought would flit through the back of her mind, even if she never said it out loud. Did he?

  Then Hilary came home. She arrived on the first ferry to the island in the morning. They didn't say a word. Something shook loose in both of them. Her lips were on his, and his fingers were on her clothes, and they stripped on the new carpet he'd laid in the living room and made frantic love, soundless except for the pace of their breathing. The tenderness of their bruises didn't matter. The graffiti hiding under the fresh paint didn't matter. They were alone and connected for the first time in days, and in the aftermath, as he stroked her bare skin, he felt as if he'd won her faith back.

  She was sleeping now. He'd left her a note that he was going to the mainland for a few hours.

  At the bakery counter, Mark ordered a loaf of rosemary-garlic bread and a cherry pie, warm from the oven. Everything in Door County was cherries. Fresh cherries, cherry pies, cherry soda, cherry caramels, cherry jam, cherry cider, cherry ice cream, cherry wine. There were cherries in tomato sauce, cherries in cheese, cherries stuffed in peppers, cherries stuffed in olives, cherries stuffed in roast beef. He didn't really even like cherries, but that was like living in Chicago and not rooting for the Bears. He'd become a cherry fan out of sheer necessity, because you couldn't escape them here.

  He balanced the pie box on his hand. The tin was hot through the cardboard, and he juggled it. At the end of an aisle, he put down his shopping bag and dipped a pretzel stick in mustard. It was cherry mustard. Of course. He actually liked it. He took a jar and put it in the bag.

  Mark heard his phone ringing. He had a special ring tone for Hilary, which was Aerosmith's 'Dude Looks Like a Lady'. She'd got very drunk one night at a bar in downtown Chicago and danced to it solo, and he'd never let her forget it.

  'I really needed to sleep,' she said.

  'I figured.'

  'That was a nice way to come home.'

  'Will I get the same treatment tonight?' he asked.

  'Come home and see.'

  'Soon. I'll swing by the Pig for groceries and get some wine at the liquor store and then head for the ferry. Do you need anything?'

  'You.'

  'That's a date,' he said.

  He hung up the phone and realized he was smiling, because he felt a glimmer of the life they'd enjoyed in their first year. Before Tresa. Before Glory. When they were first living on the island and commuting together to their teaching jobs, he'd wondered what he had done to deserve that kind of happiness. He'd feared in his secret soul that one day fate would want to take it all back and even the score.

  Sure enough, fate did.

  Even now, he couldn't escape it.

  Mark looked up, holding his phone in his hand, still smiling at the thought of going home to Hilary. He found an older man with slicked, jet-black hair standing in front of him. Alcohol wafted from the man's breath. They were nearly the same height, but the man's shoulders were rounded by age, and he held himself at an angle, as if one leg was weaker than the other. The man jabbed a finger in Mark's face.

  'I know who you are,' he said.

  Mark had no interest in a confrontation with a stranger. He picked up his shopping bag and tried to squeeze past the man in the aisle. 'Excuse me,' he said.

  'Do you know who I am?' the man asked sharply.

  'I have no idea.'

  'My name's Peter Hoffman.'

  Mark stopped and took a deep breath. 'OK. All right. I've heard of you. What do you want, Mr Hoffman?'

  'I know what kind of man you are,' Hoffman snapped. His voice grew louder and more belligerent. People in the market turned to look at them.

  'I'm leaving,' Mark said, but Hoffman blocked his way and put his hand squarely on Mark's chest.

  'You stand there, and you listen to me,' Hoffman told him.

  Mark felt his heart rate accelerate. His fist tightened around the phone in his hand. He imagined Hilary standing next to him and what she would say. Stay calm. Don't make it worse.

  'What do you want?' Mark asked. 'Because if all you want is to accuse me of things I didn't do, then you're in a long line, and you'll have to take a number.'

  'You think you're funny? You think this is funny?'

  'No, I really don't.'

  'Do you have any idea what I lost? My daughter? My grandchildren? Do you know what it's like to watch your family die?'

  Mark felt the flush of embarrassment on his face. A crowd was gathering, and he wasn't the sentimental favorite in this contest. 'Mr Hoffman, I do know what you went through. I can't imagine how horrible that was for you. You have my sympathy, you really do.'

  'I don't want your sympathy.'

  'Then please move aside, so we can both leave in peace.'

  'I've killed men, Bradley. More than I want to remember. I did what my country needed me to do, and I don't regret any of it. But you. I don't know how you live with yourself.'

  'That's all. We're done here.'

  'Then you have the goddamn nerve,' Hoffman continued, his raspy voice growing shrill, 'to hide behind the man who killed my whole family. How dare you. I won't let you do it. I won't let you get away with it.'

  Mark pushed past Hoffman, their shoulders colliding. For an old man, Hoffman was solid, and even drunk he was fast. Mark never saw the punch coming. Hoffman's left fist shot up from his hips and connected with the underside of Mark's jaw, snapping his head back. Mark staggered. The pie tumbled from his hand, spilling out of the box as it fell to the floor, spraying cherries and filling on to the ground like blood. His phone flew. Mark lost his balance, stumbling backward into shelves lined with canning jars. The shelves dropped, and dozens of jars clattered downward and rained a mess of sauce and glass. His face and clothes dripped with stains.

  Mark regained his balance. He rubbed his jaw, which was stiff, and ran his tongue along the back of his teeth to see if any were loose. He shook his clothes, and bits of glass sprinkled around him. The crowd in the shop around them froze in silence. Hoffman cocked his fists, expecting Mark to retaliate, but Mark had no intention of hitting an old man. He just wanted to get out of the store.

  Hoffman rooted his feet so Mark couldn't pass. 'Nobody thinks I've got the courage, but I do. I'm going to make sure you get what's coming to you.'

  Mark tried to keep a lid on his temper, which raced to a boil. He felt trapped as people closed in between the aisles. 'My wife and I almost died yesterday, Mr Hoffman. I'll tell you this only once. If anyone comes after us again, it will be the last thing they ever do.'

  'You can't threaten me, and you can't scare me.'

  'I'm promising you,' Mark said.

  'I'm not afraid of someone who messes with teenage girls.'

  Mark was tired of denying it. Tired of protesting his innocence. Angry with the world. 'Get the hell out of my way,' he snapped.

  'Your wife knows the truth. I told her. She knows what kind of man you are.'

  Something snapped in Mark. He couldn't stop himself. By mentioning

  Hilary, Peter Hoffman stepped across a line that no one could cross. Mark's muscles wound up into knots, ready to burst. He backhanded his left arm like a club into Hoffman's chest and shoulder. Despite his military bearing, Hoffman was no match for Mark's strength. The blow lifted the man off his feet and drove him sideways, where he crumpled into a card table that collapsed under his weight. Hoffman dropped, hitting the floor hard. Broken glass scored the man's face and drew blood.

  'Shit,' Mark hissed under his breath.

  The older man squirmed to get up, but he couldn't get his balance. Mark bent over with an outstretched hand to help the man up, but Hoffman
swatted the hand away. Mark saw rage and humiliation in his face.

  The crowd closed in on all sides, rumbling with menace around him. Mark's claustrophobia increased, and the store suddenly felt small. He needed to get out. He needed a chance to breathe in the open air. He felt arms grasping for him, trying to wrestle him to the ground like a prisoner, but he pushed past the people in the store and bolted for his truck.

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Hilary hung up her phone with a pang of worry. She'd tried to reach Amy Leigh in Green Bay half a dozen times since the previous night, and each time, the call had gone straight into voicemail.

  Wherever Amy was, she wasn't answering her phone.

  She knew it didn't mean that anything was wrong. The girl had sounded drunk during her odd phone call. It was possible that Amy was embarrassed about making the call and was now ducking Hilary's attempts to reach her. Things like that happened at college parties. You drank too much, and you no longer knew what you were doing or why. Even so, that wasn't the girl that Hilary remembered.

  Her former student had always reminded Hilary of herself in her high school days: confident, bubbly, determined, and sometimes naive. The girl was self-conscious about her larger frame and determined to make everyone forget it when she was on the dance floor. Amy was religious, just as Hilary was, and she came from a solid Chicago family. On the other hand, she was also young, and fun, and prone to impetuous mistakes, like any student away from home.

  Hilary just wanted to make sure that Amy was OK. She dialed again. Voicemail. She left another message. 'Amy, it's Hilary. Listen, sorry to be a pest, but could you call me back? I'm a little concerned.'

  She wouldn't have made a big deal of Amy's strange call, but the girl had talked about Florida in the midst of her ramblings. More than that, she'd said the one name that made Hilary sit up and take notice.

  Glory.

  Hadn't she? It had all happened so fast on the phone, and Amy's voice was a drunken whisper, and Hilary had barely understood the words. Amy had been talking about her dance coach, Gary Jensen. Then she'd said it. Glory. Or maybe Hilary had simply had Glory on her own mind, and when Amy said Gary's name again, she'd heard Glory instead. Maybe she was hearing what she wanted to hear. Maybe.

  Hilary padded into the kitchen and poured herself a third cup of coffee from the pot. She wore a roomy sweatshirt, running shorts, and white socks. Her blond hair fell loosely about her shoulders; it was clean and wet from her shower. Her body ached, but it was mostly a pleasant ache now. A post-sex ache. She'd come home not realizing how badly she and Mark needed each other, like both of them grasping for a lifeline. The result was a wild, almost animal coupling, the way it had been in the early days, when they were getting to know each other's bodies. She could still feel him where he'd held her and been inside her.

  It made her believe in him all over again. He couldn't fake what he felt for her. There had been a time when she, like Amy, was naive about relationships, but she'd left that part of herself far behind in her twenties. She had open eyes about men and about Mark. If Cab Bolton had a witness, then the witness was wrong. Whatever had happened in Florida, it wasn't what everyone else thought.

  Florida. Glory.

  Hilary was sure that Amy had said Glory's name.

  She took her coffee into their bedroom, booted up her desktop computer, and logged into her Facebook home page. When she called up a listing of her online friends, she found Amy Leigh on the third page. She clicked on Amy's profile and saw that the girl had updated her status at 6:47 p.m. the previous day.

  Amy's status read: I'm going into the lion's den.

  Hilary didn't think that Amy sounded like a girl heading for a college party. She reviewed the rest of the girl's profile page and noticed a comment from another Green Bay student that had been posted earlier this morning. Hey, Ames, missed you in class today.

  Hilary didn't like that at all.

  She replayed the brief, hushed phone call from Amy in her head. She didn't know if there was anything she could glean from it. The call itself had only lasted a few seconds. Even so, whether Amy had said Gary or Glory, she had definitely mentioned Florida, and more important than that, Amy had been in Florida when everything had happened. She was a dancer, like Tresa. So maybe she saw something. Or maybe she knew something. What?

  Amy talked about her coach. My coach. Do you know him?

  Hilary knew most of the college coaches who worked with dancers in the Midwest, because she'd had to counsel students on choosing colleges, mostly in Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. She knew the name Gary Jensen, but she'd never met the man. His name had made its way around the dance grapevine when he'd been hired as a physical education instructor at Green Bay and been put in charge of the dance team. She didn't know much about his background, but from what she'd seen, he'd done well with the girls. She remembered an email from Amy two years earlier in which Amy talked about the enhanced physical training regimen their coach had implemented, which was something Hilary always emphasized herself. It wasn't just about coordination and practice; it was about conditioning.

  She also remembered something Amy had said in her email back then. It was the kind of throwaway line that a college girl would use. He's a good coach, if you can get past the creepy factor. That was the word she'd used. Creepy.

  Hilary wanted to know more about Gary Jensen.

  She visited the UWGB web site and drilled down to the athletics page. She found a link to the coach's biography in the faculty roster. The first thing she noticed was that, unlike most instructors, Jensen had no photograph posted on his page. His bio indicated that he'd taught at the school for four years, and she thought it was odd that he'd managed to duck the photo shoots for so long.

  His bio said little about his past. He had a bachelor's degree in physical education and a master's in educational leadership, both from the University of Alaska at Anchorage. Based on his years of graduation, Hilary calculated that Jensen was in his mid-forties. At Green Bay, he taught physical education classes for freshmen and coached dance and wrestling. What was missing from his bio was detailed information about his work experience prior to his arrival in Green Bay. The summary was vague: 'Gary has been an adjunct professor and coach at colleges in Alaska, Oregon, South Dakota, and Canada.'

  Despite the lack of specifics, his bio raised no red flags. Even so, Hilary kept digging, looking for more information about Jensen's past. She found references to him - or to someone with his name - in articles about sports teams in Anchorage and Portland, but most of the articles were more than ten years old. The name was also common enough that she found thousands of pages on men named Gary Jensen who had no connection at all to Amy's coach.

  Then she found a headline on one of her searches that caught her attention.

  COACH'S WIFE DIES IN FALL.

  She read the brief article from the Green Bay newspaper. Not even four months earlier, Gary Jensen had lost his wife during a rock- climbing vacation in Zion National Park. The couple had been married only three years. Jensen was described as devastated. Heartbroken. The Utah Police had investigated the incident and found no evidence to suggest the death was anything other than what Jensen described. A terrible, tragic accident.

  Hilary wondered. Two violent deaths in four months, and both times, Gary Jensen was nearby. A coincidence?

  She of all people knew that smoke didn't mean fire when it came to guilt or innocence. Mark had suffered when others jumped to conclusions. She had nothing specific to feed her suspicions about Jensen. No connection to Glory. Nothing in the man's background. Just Amy's unsettling phone call. And a dead wife.

  Hilary returned to Amy's profile page. She knew that Amy posted photographs compulsively, and she found an album dedicated to the girl's dance activities. The album included nearly one hundred pictures of Amy and her college teammates in performances and competitions over the past three years. Hilary went through the pictures one by one
, eyeing the backgrounds, trying to find a photo in which she could spot Gary Jensen.

  She found three pictures. Jensen wasn't the focus in any of them; he was standing behind the girls. When she enlarged the photos, she was only able to obtain two-inch by two-inch squares on her screen, not enough to see his face in detail. She squinted, focusing on his balding crown of hair and his narrow face. One of the pictures was in profile, and she could see the sharp V-angle of his nose. He looked fit and fat-free. She printed out the best of the pictures, and then she ran another search.

  This time she hunted for a photo of Harris Bone.

  A man with no identity could be anyone at all, she reasoned to herself. Even a fugitive with another dead wife in his past.

  The newspapers had all used the same photo of Bone at the time of the fire, a face-front shot from his arraignment. Hilary printed that photo and compared the two. The results were inconclusive. There were some similarities between the two men, but Hilary couldn't be sure if she was looking at a ghost or a stranger. If Gary Jensen was Harris Bone, then he'd lost weight in the last six years and probably had some surgical work done to his facial features. The most she could say was that it wasn't impossible. On the other hand, the faint resemblance may have been nothing more than her own wishful thinking.

  Hilary frowned and rocked back in her chair. The only way to be sure was to know what Gary Jensen was doing six years earlier, before he arrived at Green Bay, when Harris Bone was burning down his house in Door County. She ran another search, and this time she found a brief notice about Jensen's hiring. The article was no more than three paragraphs long, but it provided her with the one fact she needed. The university had hired Jensen away from a coaching position at a private high school in Fargo.

  One of Hilary's best friends at Northwestern was the director of financial affairs at the same school.