Bone Valley

by Claire Matturro

  Which is what I did—I practically scrubbed the keys on my shirt. Then, holding them by my shirttail, I eased the keys under the front seat. After that, I carefully wiped off the steering wheel, the inside of the cab, and the outside doors with the same shirttail. I backed off from the truck, wondered if I was missing something, checked for nearby witnesses watching me, and, seeing none, I anchored my purse around my shoulder, ran a few feet, and stopped.

  I went back to the truck. After yanking open the passenger-side door, I banged open the glove compartment. Looking for what, I didn’t know—maybe a gun, a handkerchief, a spare Handi Wipe, or some more of the paper that Angus had pulled out earlier with phosphate data on it. As a trial attorney, I’d learned never to underestimate the potential value of scrap pieces with odd bits of information written on them.

  Papers jumped out at me. So Miguel was a slob, I thought, itching to organize and label the jumble, which at a quick glance appeared to be mostly shopping receipts. Then a modicum of reason sputtered through me, and I grabbed up the random sheets and stuffed them in my purse to study later. I rewiped down the inside and outside of the truck, and made my escape, jogging down the side road toward the humble haven of my own home.

  If a cop drove by, I was dead. I mean, my shirt was bloody, my face was bloody, I was running, and without a real clue as to why I was running.

  But no one stopped me. I got home, and there, I swear, was Jimmie’s car in my driveway. Actually, the thought of Jimmie was reassuring, like the thought of my granddad waiting up to hear my adventures. I burst inside my own house, and hyperventilated. Jimmie came staggering into the living room, clutching a bottle of wine, and before I could say anything like “I almost got killed,” damned if he didn’t start complaining about Dolly.

  “That there neighbor lady done been over a couple times ’bout my car. So I reckon I got to go move it, now you’re home. Anyways, I done promised her I’d get it out of here.”

  Then I watched Jimmie actually look at me, and watched him processing what he saw. “Lady, sweet Lord, what in tarnation happened to you? You awright?”

  “No. I’m not. I nearly got killed and I threw up in public.” Okay, so that might have missed the more important part of the evening, but throwing up in public is not only pretty disgusting, it is also clearly a mark of someone not on their way up the social or professional ladder.

  Jimmie inched forward toward me like I might explode.

  Which is, more or less, what I did—I burst into tears, not the dainty sniffling I’d done on the Tamiami Trail, but great, gulping, end-of-the-world-horror sobs. Angus was surely dead. That was finally sinking in.

  Angus, oh, poor, volatile little man, I thought, and cried harder. Then I thought of Lenora, and that whatever Angus had been to her was gone now, and I sobbed so convulsively I couldn’t get enough air to breathe. Frankly, if I had cried any harder, I would have passed out.

  Jimmie grabbed me into his skinny arms, holding on, and hugging me, and he even smelled like my granddad—which is to say, he smelled like liquor and sweat.

  “Nobody’s gonna hurt you now I got you,” he said, and for a moment, I believed him.

  I calmed down, but got the hiccups. With Jimmie’s encouragement, I managed to tell him what had happened on the pier, in little bits and pieces of information between hiccups and sniffles and wiping my nose on the same damn sleeve.

  “Reckon I otta call Philip?” Jimmie asked.

  “No. Not Philip.” I needed to think, and Philip would want me to call the police or do something that he, Philip, in his usual alpha-male manner, would decide I should do. Also, I looked gross, and the last I could remember, I was mad at Philip.

  No, instead of letting Philip tell me what to do, I was going to decide what to do myself.

  What I decided to do was take a shower and pop a Xanax.

  I stayed in the shower until I drained the hot-water tank and I could feel the little peaceful chemical fingers of Xanax soothing out the bunched muscles in my neck and easing my brain back into a state that didn’t call for fight, flight, or hysterical tears.

  With the last of the hot water gone, I toweled off, slipped into a T-shirt and shorts, and went in search of the rest of the bottle of my wine that Jimmie was obviously taking for his own.

  And there sat Philip, in my kitchen, with Jimmie blabbing an earful at him.

  “I done called him anyways,” Jimmie said, and ducked his head.

  When Philip saw me, he eased out of his chair and moved slowly toward me, keeping eye contact and searching my face. For what I didn’t know.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Physically, yes, but I wouldn’t know about the rest until the Xanax wore off. “Fine,” I said. And I waited for him to hug me. But he didn’t.

  Instead, Philip asked me for an exact accounting, and I understood this was his client-in-trouble approach, not his the-woman-I-love approach.

  I walked past him, got a glass, and poured a trickle of wine from the nearly empty bottle on the table.

  Jimmie hopped up and said, “Ah, Lady, let me open you another one. I, er, ’bout drunk that ’un, well, you was gone a long time.”

  “I don’t think wine is a good idea. Not until you tell me exactly what happened,” Philip the substance-abuse counselor said. “You should be clearheaded.”

  No, clearheaded was the last thing I wanted to be. So I said, and perfectly nicely too, “Yes, Jimmie, that would be good of you to open another bottle. A glass of wine would be good.” Xanax kept my voice calm, my vision of the explosion soft and fuzzy in the memory box, and it kept me from snapping at Philip, who, after all, was only trying to help, and, might just possibly, I now realized, also have been mad at me. After all, not only does mad beget mad, but I’d snapped at him this morning, stood him up for a date so I could eat supper on a boat with another man, and entangled myself in a felony, if not a murder.

  Jimmie, guided no doubt by some granddadlike radar, stopped to hug me on his way to open the bottle of wine.

  Maybe I’d marry him instead of Philip, I thought.

  As soon as I had half a glass of wine floating through my system, which punched up the Xanax nicely, thank you, I eased my way into explaining the explosion to Philip.

  “Why were you going to have dinner on the boat with them? We had a date for tonight.”

  I sighed. Yeah, definitely mad. I sipped more wine. “I canceled that date, don’t you remember?”

  Philip eyed me curiously. I couldn’t read his expression. Possibly because I couldn’t read anything by then.

  “How come you run off like that?” Jimmie asked, and then poured himself another glass of wine. “From that pier, I mean. You hadn’t done nothing bad.”

  “A very good question,” Philip said, “that is, why you ran. And one I would like to explore in greater detail. But first, tell me, where was the explosion? Was it within the jurisdiction of the city police?”

  I nodded. “The pier was right off downtown Bradenton. You know the one, it’s not all that far from your Bradenton office.”

  “All right, then. I have a source in the Bradenton Police Department. Let me call him and see if he can tell me anything.” Philip rose from his chair at the kitchen table, neglected to kiss me, and moved toward my den and my phone, leaving Jimmie and me alone so we could do what we so clearly had decided was the most sensible option open to us under the circumstances: We refilled our wineglasses.

  A few gulps later, Philip came back into the kitchen, picked up the bottle, corked it, and shoved it in the refrigerator, and then gave Jimmie and me the same look my grandmother gave my grandfather the day he drank a fifth of Black Jack and drove his riding lawn mower over her petunia bed and straight through the plate-glass window. “He does not know anything yet. The police are at the scene, investigating,” Philip said.

  “What about Angus? Any word on whether he…survived?”

  “We don’t know, Lilly. I just told you, my inform
ant doesn’t know anything yet.”

  I sat back and closed my eyes, trying to visualize some version of what I remembered where Angus might have survived the explosion.

  “You being a criminal-defense lawyer what gets the bad guys out of jail, how come you got somebody at the PD that’ll tell you stuff?” Jimmie asked.

  Philip shrugged. “Money will buy you information any day of the week.”

  Yeah, sure. I was long used to paying large hourly fees to expert witnesses who would tell a jury anything I wanted them to say. Idly, and wholly off the main point, I wondered if paid police-insider informants were more reliable. “Money will buy you words, but truth is a whole other issue,” I said.

  Disregarding this wine-induced philosophical quip, Philip said there wasn’t anything to do now but wait and see what his man could find out. “Thank you, Jimmie, for your help tonight,” he said, in clear tones of dismissal.

  “I reckon I better stay the night, ’case something more happens.”

  “I believe I can handle things,” Philip said.

  “Jimmie, there are clean sheets for the futon in the hall closet,” I said, and rose from my chair, suddenly feeling all too sober. I couldn’t for the life of me get shed of the idea that not only was Angus surely dead, but that he had died while I was mad at him, and he at me.

  Not that it probably made any difference in the great hereafter.

  But in the here and now, it might have been easier to bear if my last words to him had been something nice.

  Chapter 8

  My head hurt like a son of a bitch, and then some. I tried not to make noise as I crawled out of my own bed and looked back at the still-sleeping Philip.

  I tiptoed to the guest bathroom, hoping to delay waking Philip up by moving the noise down the hallway. Washing my face helped. Seeing that Jimmie had spread his man-thing toiletries about in the second bath didn’t.

  Still, morning is an optimistic time, and I wondered: Could Angus still be alive? I had hope. Perhaps he had jumped clear somehow. I said a quick prayer—for his life, or his soul—and left it to God to apply whichever fit the best. Then I slipped quietly into my own kitchen and put on filtered water to heat for the French press and the copious amounts of coffee I knew we’d all want, and I popped three Advil for my head, two capsules of ginger to settle my stomach, and a couple of multivitamins on general principle. While I waited for the water to boil, the anxiety kept at bay last night via better-living-through-chemistry came rolling back over me.

  Where was Miguel?

  Where was Angus?

  And what in the hell was going on?

  That line of worry led me to fetch my purse, where I had stuffed the papers and receipts from Miguel’s glove compartment. After riffling through the loose collection of paper, I learned such things as: Miguel bought most of his groceries at Publix on a credit card, but that he’d recently bought some motor oil, a couple of plastic five-gallon fuel cans, a car battery, wire, wood screws, and, of all things, clothespins from Wal-Mart, and for those things he’d paid cash. He had also bought something called potassium sulfate, and, for a man who lived yardless on a sailboat, he had purchased an awful lot of fertilizer from a home-and-garden supply.

  The fertilizer receipt definitely caught my eye.

  Fertilizer, as Timothy McVeigh had taught us all, made bombs.

  If you knew what you were doing.

  I looked at the rest of the receipts, not much liking what was beginning to twirl around in my gray matter. Diesel fuel and fertilizer. Okay, okay, maybe he needed some diesel fuel for the auxiliary motor in his sailboat. Maybe he had a large number of houseplants on board.

  But he wouldn’t need that much fertilizer.

  No, this was fertilizer in amounts for small forests, or at least very large yards.

  A nice spike in my anxiety level hit both my head and gut, and, no closer to understanding anything, I smoothed out the receipts and slipped them into my desk drawer to be organized, memorized, copied, and filed later. Then I eased back to my kitchen.

  Just as I scooped out my shade-grown, fair-trade, ten-dollars-a-pound coffee into the French press, Jimmie came tiptoeing into the kitchen and gave me a big bear hug. I felt tears start up until I noticed he had helped himself to a pair of Philip’s pajamas, which were about twice too big on him. He looked like a goofy old clown, and I ended up smiling. I hugged him back.

  A toilet flushed, I heard the sound of running water, and sighed. Philip was awake. By the time I poured the hot water over the ground coffee in the French press, Philip was in the kitchen, eyeing me, I thought, just a bit tentatively.

  “Thought we’d be quiet, let you sleep in,” I said.

  He nodded, quietly and possibly guardedly.

  The doorbell rang. A bit early for company, I thought. Jimmie and I were still in pajamas. Philip, of course, was dressed, and nattily at that for a Sunday morning after an explosion. “Would you please get that for me?” I asked, keeping my voice carefully neutral.

  While he went to the door, I went to get dressed, leaving Jimmie with cursory instructions on the French press. “Push that plunger thing down in another minute.”

  By the time I got back to the kitchen, Dolly and Bearess were milling around, with Dolly making herself right at home, and rather pointedly ignoring Jimmie, who was drinking coffee, still wearing too-big pajamas.

  “This isn’t a good morning for company,” I said, looking at Dolly. “We had an…an…accident last night.”

  “Are you all right, dearie?” Dolly asked as she opened my cabinet, fetched out a china bowl, and poured a smidge of coffee in it, ladled milk into it, and put it on the floor for Bearess, who slurped it up in one bold tongue stroke and wagged for more.

  I started to point out that that was my grandmother’s china bowl, but Jimmie was faster on the draw than I was.

  “She near got blowed up,” Jimmie said, and poured his second cup of coffee.

  “I don’t think we should be discussing this,” Philip said, and poured a cup of coffee.

  “The correct statement would be, she was nearly blown up,” Dolly said, and poured herself a cup of coffee and topped off Bearess’s china bowl.

  By the time I got to the French press, there was no coffee left and my dull Xanax-and-wine hangover had swelled with the crowd in my kitchen.

  “You know, I could pressure-clean that house of yours for you,” Jimmie said to Dolly. “That is, if you was to cook me a homemade meal sometime. Chicken is what I likes the best. Lilly don’t fry chicken.”

  Dolly was studying on Jimmie, while I heated water for a second pot of coffee, and then the phone rang. I ducked out of the kitchen to the bedroom, Philip close behind me, and I answered it and somebody I didn’t know asked for Philip. I shoved the phone at him and went back to the kitchen. Right then my primary goal was to consume a large cup of coffee and as soon as possible.

  A few minutes later, as finally the caffeine began to seep into my system, Philip beckoned me back to the bedroom.

  “I am very sorry to report that Angus John Cartright perished in the explosion last night,” Philip said. “That was, as you no doubt suspected, my informant in the Bradenton Police Department.”

  Still clutching my coffee cup, I more or less collapsed on the bed, mourning Angus for real and in earnest now that his death was confirmed.

  Philip sat beside me. He took my hand, and held it in both of his own big hands. The pressure was light, the touch reassuring. Perhaps he was done with being mad at me over our broken date. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Really, very sorry.”

  “Me too.” I leaned my head against his shoulder. Perhaps I was done being mad at him too.

  Then I thought about the living. My head popped off Philip’s shoulder. “What about Miguel?” I asked, wondering where he was and if he was safe.

  “There was only the one body. No one has been arrested. No one named Miguel was mentioned by my informant.”

  “But…” So, what
exactly did that mean? Had Miguel run off too?

  “Angus died around eight-fifteen p.m. People from the other boats told the investigators that two men—both tall and dark haired and thin—were seen running from the area of the explosion and escaping in a red pickup.” Philip paused, but I didn’t speak. “Lilly, did you and Miguel run off together? That appears to be what the witnesses are saying.”

  “No, I told you. He shoved the keys at me and told me to save myself, and then he dove into the water, looking, I guess, for Angus.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. You don’t think I’d’ve noticed if Miguel had hopped into the truck with me?” I didn’t care for Philip’s tone or his question, either one. Maybe we weren’t 100 percent over being mad at each other.

  “They said two men ran away in a red pickup. Who would those two men be? Or, in the unlikely event that you were mistakenly identified as a man, who would that second man be?”

  “I ran away in his red pickup. There was no second man. I was wearing jeans and a man’s shirt, and my hair was in a ponytail. The streetlights on the pier had blown out. Maybe I looked like a man. Maybe I looked like two men. I don’t know. Nobody was looking at me, anyway,” I said. But I wondered: Did I look like a man in jeans? Whoa, no more ponytails and men’s shirts for me.

  “Where did you leave the truck?”

  “I told you. At the Southgate Community Center.”

  “What are you hiding from me?” Philip asked.

  “Nothing.” That is, nothing other than the fact that I had been entertaining serious sexual fantasies about another man. Oh, and there was that fake-panther trespassing thing I hadn’t bothered to mention.