House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  “No, I’m not saying you’re finished at Mercy, Lara,” he was telling her. “What I’m saying is I can’t reinstate you until the review board finishes its investigation.”

  “What’s there to investigate? I’ve already admitted fault.”

  Lara’s voice was steady as she made this admission. It hadn’t been so strong the first time she had said it, to Katie Wright’s family, nor the second time, in the office of the staff psychologist. But it had grown stronger by the time she made the same statement to the hospital’s general counsel, and it was steadier still now. She liked to think of this as progress.

  Sutherland sighed. “I know you’ve admitted fault. The board knows you admitted fault. Katie Wright’s parents know you’ve admitted fault. Everyone knows you’ve admitted fault. That’s part of the problem, isn’t it?”

  Lara said nothing.

  Sutherland leaned forward, propped his elbows on the cluttered desk, and stared at her from the cradle of his palms. “Did you ever stop to think about the liability issues involved here?”

  This time she didn’t have to monitor the steadiness of her voice. It came out filled with a cold fury that drove any consideration for Dan Sutherland completely out of her head. “I haven’t thought about much of anything else for the last two months,” she said, and the ghost of Katie Wright hovered briefly in the room between them.

  Even Sutherland seemed to feel it, for he sat back, frowning, steepled his long fingers under his nose, and stared over them at her. He seemed abruptly sadder, his customary mien shot through with something deeper and more authentic, something personal; watching him, Lara was reminded suddenly of all he had done for her in these last years. Sutherland was the one who had recruited her to Mercy in the first place, and he’d stood by her without wavering long after everyone else had written her off. She had to swallow an impulse to apologize.

  “I know that Lara,” he was saying, but she cut him off with a wave of her hand.

  She shook her head, fighting back tears.

  “Maybe you don’t understand,” she said. “This is all I’ve ever wanted. It’s all I’ve dreamed about since—” She broke off, not wanting to utter the name—

  —Lana—

  —not wanting to summon up all those years of grief and sorrow. “Since I was a little girl,” she said finally. “It’s all I was ever good at. I didn’t want this to happen. I mean, Jesus Christ, Dan, I hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, it was just a mistake, and now”—she shook her head ruefully—“now, I can’t sleep at all. Every time I close my eyes, I see her face. If I can’t get back to work soon, I’m going to go crazy. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me—”

  “I know,” he said. “That’s why I called you in.”

  “You just said you couldn’t reinstate me.”

  “I can’t, not while the Review Board is dragging its feet. And I think we both know they’re waiting to see which way the wind blows. If the hospital can get a settlement, maybe I can do something for you. If it goes to trial …”

  He didn’t finish the statement, but he didn’t need to. Lara could still see the anger on the general counsel’s face when she had told him what she had said to Katie’s parents. Christ, he’d snapped, of all the stupid things you could have done. And then, turning abruptly away from her, as if she no longer merited his consideration—as if she no longer even existed—he’d looked at Dan Sutherland. Cut her loose, that’s my advice. Take the hit and cut our losses. Sutherland had stood by her then, but they both knew he didn’t have the power to protect her if the case went public. Lara sat back, the events of the last two months weighing leadenly upon her. She felt tired. She felt so tired.

  “But there’s something else,” Sutherland said. “I had a phone call from a gentleman named Ramsey Lomax.”

  Lara looked up, puzzled. “The telecom guy?”

  “That’s right.” Sutherland hesitated. “He called me himself, Lara. I don’t know how he found out about this … situation. But he wants to intervene.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s willing to offer a financial settlement to the Wrights. I don’t know how much, but—”

  “They don’t want money. They want their daughter—”

  “I know, but listen: if they’ll agree to let you off the hook, he’s also promised to endow a foundation in Katie’s name. We’re talking a major research initiative to study medical errors and their prevention—”

  “Where?”

  “Here. Right here. At Mercy General. But the whole deal is contingent on your finishing up your residency. If you’re denied that opportunity”—Sutherland lifted his hands—“the money goes away.”

  Lara, shocked, didn’t move. The silence in the office seemed suddenly unbearable—each tick of the clock as loud as a bomb, the rise and fall of Dan Sutherland’s respiration as steady and mysterious as the sea.

  “But … why? What does he want?”

  “That’s just the thing, Lara. He wants you.”

  3

  At that very moment, in a San Antonio bar more than one thousand miles to the south, another speaker had dropped virtually the same words—Mr. Lomax wants you—into the smoky midafternoon stillness.

  “Me?” Fletcher Keel said. “He wants me?”

  “That’s right,” the stranger said. “He wants you.”

  Fletcher Keel took a sip of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He glanced up at the television, where a late-summer Rangers game was playing, and then out the window. Two or three cars swept by in a blur of colors, there and gone again, the street empty. A woman in a yellow blouse walked past carrying a paper shopping bag. A whole world full of people, Keel thought, sunlit and busy, slipping by untouched. Yet despite the buttery slabs of bright southwestern light that lay against the pavement, it seemed suddenly a darker place. Keel turned away. The bar was nearly empty. A man and a woman huddled whispering at a corner table, their drinks forgotten. The bartender stood by the register, polishing glasses.

  The stranger—Klavan, he had introduced himself—stared up at the television. “Rangers are for shit this year.” Keel grunted.

  “Me, I’ve always been a Cubs fan,” Klavan said.

  “You would be, I guess.”

  “Just a hometown boy. Much like yourself, John.”

  “Don’t call me that. That’s not my name.”

  The man shrugged, unmoved. “You’re the boss.”

  Keel felt a flush of anger, but he let it ride. He stared at the liquor bottles standing in jeweled ranks on the other side of the bar and took a deliberate pull off his beer. One swallow, two swallows, three. Yet his heart still hammered inside his breast. It felt like it might tear itself loose and plunge, still wet and pulsing, into his lap.

  “Let’s have something a little stronger,” he said.

  Klavan shrugged again and crooked his finger. The bartender set them up in silence—two double shots of Maker’s Mark and a fresh round of Sam Adams—and then went back to polishing glasses. Keel picked up his shot glass, studied the light swimming in the amber depths of the bourbon, and tilted it to his lips. It went down smoothly, drawing a line of fire that detonated in his stomach. Keel’s heart slowed. He held himself still, basking in the calming glow of the liquor.

  Klavan’s shot stood untouched by his beer. Keel stared at it.

  “Dreamland,” he said at last.

  “Changed a lot since your day on the force,” Klavan told him. “Housing Authority took the wrecking ball to it a while back. But it was mostly abandoned by then anyway. It’s nearly gone now. Tower Three is the only one still standing, and that would have gone too if Mr. Lomax hadn’t intervened. You remember Tower Three, don’t you … Fletcher? A lot of bad shit happened in Tower Three.”

  A lot of bad shit indeed, Keel thought, and for a moment—just a moment—he felt it all trembling at the lip of some crumbling internal dike: the trial, the publicity, the wrenching agonies of shame. But most of all he
remembered Dreamland itself, the looming weight of the place, the—

  He took a slug of his beer.

  “That girl was raped there,” Klavan said, ticking points off on his fingers, “and that kid Dante Morris took a header off the roof—a terrible thing, that one—and of course you remember the—”

  “Shut up.”

  Klavan shrugged. It seemed like the only gesture he was capable of. “Whatever you say. Course that’s just the stuff that made the papers. Dig deeper—and Mr. Lomax has—you’ll find a world of nasty shit. You don’t know the half—”

  “What’s he want?”

  “Lomax?”

  Keel nodded.

  “Two weeks of your time, that’s all.”

  Two weeks in Dreamland, Keel thought, and once again he felt the subterranean lure of the past, deep buried, but never quite forgotten. “To do what?”

  Yet another shrug. “Eat, breathe, sleep. Whatever. Protect Mr. Lomax if it comes to that.”

  “Protect him from what?”

  Klavan didn’t answer. He simply sat there and gazed back at Keel. He had the look of a cop, Keel thought. There was something in the economy and grace of his movements, a certain watchfulness in his eyes. It was a little like looking in a mirror—or, better still, through a window in time, into the face of an alternative self, the man he might have become.

  “I’m surprised he didn’t hire you to do it,” Keel said.

  “So am I, frankly,” Klavan said. “But he seems to want you.”

  “And if I go, what’s in it for me?”

  This time Klavan didn’t shrug. He reached into the inner pocket of his sport coat and pulled out a pen. Dragging a napkin close, he scratched out a figure with a series of broad confident loops: zeroes—a lot of them—and one sharp downward slash. There must have been some moisture on the bar because the ink bled. Even as Klavan drew his hand away, the lines were spreading, losing definition, fading slowly into illegibility, until finally nothing but a soggy Rorschach blotch remained. It was like watching a mirage loom on the horizon—a shimmering promise of green-dappled shade and a pool of thirsty blue, the answer to all your dreams—only to see it dissolve into a wasteland of sand and broken stone.

  Keel looked up.

  “It’s exactly what you think it is,” Klavan said.

  His fingers dipped into the pocket and emerged yet again, this time with a plane ticket. “That’ll get you home,” he said, and once again the blunt fingers moved toward the pocket, Keel watching mesmerized as they emerged clutching a thick roll of bills, folded in half and secured with a rubber band. Klavan removed the band, licked his fingers, and counted out twenty one-hundred-dollar bills. “That’ll get the debtors off your back for a little while,” he said. He counted out another ten. “And that’s for you. Call it a down payment.”

  Klavan folded the rest of the cash, banded it once again, and slid it back into his pocket. He stood, smoothing his slacks. When he let his gaze fall on Keel at last, his eyes glinted with disdain.

  “Use it to get yourself sobered up,” he said. “Otherwise don’t bother coming at all.”

  And then he was gone.

  Keel sat there for a long time afterwards, staring down at the cash fanned on the bar before him, at the splotched black promise of the napkin.

  Dreamland, he thought.

  When he reached out for Klavan’s untouched shot of bourbon, his fingers were trembling.

  4

  For Benjamin Prather it began—or, more accurately, it began again—in the comforting nest of his home office, where he worked in a flood of almost subaudible jazz from corner-mounted speakers, among a forest of ferns glistening in the brightly moted shafts of California sunlight that lanced through the slatted blinds. Hunched in front of his keyboard, his fingers flying as he chased the blinking cursor of his thoughts, Ben almost didn’t hear the telephone. Almost. In the months that followed, he would have occasion to wonder how things might have turned out differently if the ring had passed unnoticed.

  It didn’t though.

  Startled, Ben stared blankly at the screen, readjusting himself to the tactile reality of his surroundings: the hum of the hard drive and the understated tinkle of piano keys which he had tuned out almost the moment he plugged the CD into the changer, the faintly humid scent of the ferns, the line of sun-fired dust on the lip of the monitor.

  Then the shrill banshee shriek of the phone. Again.

  Ben lifted the receiver and punched the button. “Prather,” he said, more than half expecting the gruff complaint of his editor in response. He was already framing his defenses when he realized that the smoothly professional voice emanating from the earpiece belonged to someone else entirely. A female someone.

  “Benjamin Prather?” she was saying.

  Cradling the phone with his shoulder, Ben started typing again. “That’s right. Is there something I can do to help you?”

  “I hope so. My name is Sara Havilund.”

  The fingers stopped. “Did you say Sara Havilund?”

  “That’s right. I’m Ramsey Lomax’s per—”

  “I know who you are,” Ben said. “This is a joke, right?”

  “Would you feel more comfortable if you called me back, Mr. Prather? The number—”

  “I’ll find the number myself. You’re at your office?”

  “I am. I’ll see that you get through,” she said, and the line went dead in his ear.

  Ben put down the phone. He stared into the monitor, his thoughts buzzing, before he saved his changes and backed up to disk. Then, still staring at the empty screen in front of him, he picked up the phone and dialed a friend at the LA Times.

  “Shirley,” he said. “Any chance I can get you to run down a telephone number for me?”

  “Sure, Benny. That’s why I’m here: to serve the needs of freelancers everywhere. What do you need?”

  “The number of an attorney named Sara Havilund. She’s in Chicago.”

  “You got some legal troubles, Benny?”

  “Just getting tired of your sex talk, Shirley, that’s all.”

  The voice at the other end made a rude noise. “You want me to call you back with that?”

  “I’ll hold.”

  “It’s your dime.”

  She punched a button, dropping him into the faint purgatorial hiss of the open line. Tilting his head against the back of his chair, Ben took his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He tried to concentrate on the delicate stream of notes pouring from the speakers at his back, but Ramsey Lomax’s sharply hooked features and clean-shaven skull—once gossip-column mainstays—kept breaking into his thoughts. Lomax hadn’t spoken to the press in almost two years—not since his abrupt divestiture of EyeCom Industries, the telecom firm he had started with a single radio station five decades before. Ben’s reputation as a journalist—however ascendant—would hardly have been sufficient to sway him.

  Besides, Ben hadn’t even asked for an interview.

  A minute passed, then another. Ben drummed his fingers on the desk.

  Shirley came back on the line. “You know who Sara Havilund is?” she said after Ben had scrawled the number on the back of an envelope.

  “I know.”

  “You on to something, Benny?”

  “I suspect somebody’s putting me on, actually,” he said. “And don’t call me Benny.”

  He broke the connection and dialed the number on the envelope. Circuits clicked and fell into place. Half a continent away, a telephone began to ring. To his surprise, it didn’t look like a prank after all: the receptionist seemed to be expecting him. The minute he identified himself, she put him through.

  “Ah, Mr. Prather,” Sara Havilund said when she came on the line. “I trust you satisfied yourself as to my authenticity?”

  “It never hurts to double-check, does it, Ms. Havilund? So what can I do for you?”

  “I don’t think I’m the right person to answer that quest
ion. Hold for Mr. Lomax, will you?”

  Before Ben could answer, there was another click, and then a new voice was speaking in his ear. “So tell me, Mr. Prather,” Ramsey Lomax said. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  5

  When he hung up the phone half an hour later, the question was still echoing in Ben’s mind. His immediate impulse was to call Paul Cook, who had been more of a father to him than either of his real fathers—certainly more than the anonymous one-night stand who had surrendered up his half-measure of Ben’s genetic heritage before disappearing forever, into one of the myriad unhappily-ever-afters that awaited black men of his station. And more too than the white man Ben had grown up calling Dad—though Ben supposed even he had done his best in his strangled and conflicted way.

  But Paul—Paul Cook had saved him. Paul had rescued him from himself. Paul had revealed to him a past which even now Ben could not truly remember—a past which Ben’s adoptive father had never permitted himself to discuss, as though merely acknowledging Ben’s true parentage would somehow unman him—this despite the different colors of their skin.

  No, it had been Paul. There in that unassuming second-floor office where Ben had continued to go for weekly therapy sessions years after he left Murrow Elementary School, it had been Paul. Paul who traced the contours of the trauma—in Ben’s need for solitude, in his love for the orderly cadence of words, like ripples in the still water where a stone has dropped. Paul who showed him how to start the healing—who helped him turn the writing from compulsion (writing as self-medication, he had called it) into vocation. Paul who phoned him weekly while Ben was away at UCLA. Even years later, after Paul had retired and Ben himself had gone on to launch a career, a life, Ben had found himself drawn irresistibly back to the man—through letters and email, by telephone, in visits—returning time and again to bask in his simple kindness and uncomplicated love, as a flower will turn its face always to the sun. But Paul had died five long years ago—three years after the auto accident which had claimed Ben’s mother—and now no one remained to Ben but his adoptive father. And the subject of Ramsey Lomax’s phone call was the one subject Frank Prather had never been able to bring himself to discuss.