House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  “Here’s another thing,” Keel said. “Why us?”

  And Ben, though he suspected at least half the answer, though he knew or thought he knew why Ramsey Lomax had recruited him, anyway, only said, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the four of us: you, me, the doctor. Abel Williams.”

  “Well, Abel seems pretty obvious.”

  “If you believe all that,” Keel said, pointing with his cue. The two ball rattled home. He straightened and looked at Ben. “Still, the whole thing’s pretty strange, when you think about it. Where did you say you’re from? LA? Me, I’ve been living in San Antonio—”

  “So?”

  “So why us, from halfway across the country? Or why not a real doctor—”

  “She is a real doctor.”

  “She’s a resident. She’s still in training. You think Lomax doesn’t have his own personal physician?”

  “Maybe he wasn’t interested in coming along for the ride.”

  “And Lara?”

  Ben shrugged. “You think he has some leverage over her?”

  “My point exactly,” Keel said. “Which raises a question: what’s his leverage over you?”

  “Or you, for that matter,” Ben said.

  They stared silently at one another.

  Fletcher Keel smiled. “Eight ball in the corner pocket,” he said. He leaned across the table, splayed his left hand atop the felt, and leveled his cue in the fleshy dip between his thumb and forefinger. He drew it back and swept it down in a single graceful gesture. The cue ball snapped forward. There was a sharp concussion as it collided with the eight, and then it spun backward, a white blur. The eight ball drained into the corner pocket. “Game,” Keel said. “Care to have another go?”

  “Why not?”

  As Keel racked the balls, Ben wandered over toward the books, his mind churning. Maybe—probably, he decided—Lomax was a little crazy. Perhaps more than a little. But that merely begged the larger—and, to Ben, more interesting—question. Specifically how was he crazy? And why? And what role did Dreamland play in his psychosis? What did he hope to accomplish here? Because the cost-benefit ratio of this little expedition didn’t quite add up, did it—not to Ben’s mind anyway. And Lomax’s explanation—simple curiosity—seemed altogether too facile for a man of his sophistication.

  Ben gave the books a cursory glance—bestselling fiction mostly, much of it recently remaindered—and turned away, dragging one finger along the ranked spines. That was when he noticed the painting mounted on the far wall. Only—

  Ben stepped closer.

  —it wasn’t a painting, was it?

  It was a photograph, an aerial shot of Dreamland, taken in the shining moment of its conception, just before everything turned sour. It looked new, a diminished thing compared to the architectural renderings, certainly—eight squarish towers in lieu of the glass spires that had been planned, a concrete plaza that might have been a park—but still scrubbed and fresh-looking, awash and hopeful in bright morning sunlight. Unstained by the darkness to come. Yet there was something faintly unsettling about it all the same. Maybe he was projecting it on the picture himself—almost certainly, in fact, considering both his apprehension about the place and Lomax’s little penny dreadful over dinner. Still …

  There was something foreboding about it. Some chance juxtaposition of elements. Something about the towers themselves. Something about their placement around the plaza …

  What did it remind him of?

  Ben lifted his hand, his fingers outstretched—

  “Weird, isn’t it?” Keel said.

  Startled, Ben looked up. Keel stood at his shoulder. He must move like a cat, Ben thought uneasily.

  “It looks like one of those places in England,” Keel said, nodding at the photo. “Stonehenge or something.”

  And that was it exactly. Stonehenge.

  Or something.

  A circle of ancient standing stones. It creeped him out a little.

  Keel laughed. “Let’s go,” he said. “You can break.”

  8

  Lara was almost done with the dishes before she noticed the watch.

  Really noticed it, that is.

  Sure, she’d seen Abel loosen the catch, slide it over his wrist, and put it out of harm’s way on the countertop—it was the first thing he’d done after he had volunteered to help clean up the kitchen. But there was nothing unusual about that. Indeed, as far as she’d been able to tell, there was nothing much unusual about Abel Williams at all.

  Lara wasn’t sure what she had expected. She’d caught his show—bits and pieces of it, anyway—on the television mounted high in one corner of the ER’s waiting room. Once or twice, at home in her apartment, flipping through the channels when the adrenaline hangover from trauma duty kept sleep at bay, she’d even watched it all the way through. But she’d been far more interested in the dumbfounding gullibility of his audience than in the phenomenon of Abel Williams himself. She’d written him off as a con man from the very first.

  Her ER rotation had taught her far too much about the frangible realities of the human condition to accept him as anything else. The truth was, the line between life and death was exceedingly narrow even at the best of times. Everyone stood a scant heartbeat from the abyss. It didn’t take much—a slip of the foot, a blink on the highway—

  —a single stroke of the pen—

  —to push them over the edge. And what a step it usually turned out to be—messy, smelly, all too often agonizing. You didn’t have to see too many torn aortas or gutshot teenagers to get the point: the body was a fragile mechanism, strung together with chicken wire and bone, and God, if God existed at all (she had more than a few doubts on that score, too), had one sick sense of humor. If nothing else, the ER assaulted you with the organic reality of human existence, its meaty physicality—with the mingled stenches of vomit and urine and blood, with the fine grit of particles in the hamburger that used to be a spilled motorcyclist’s leg (donorcycles, they called them in the ER) or the shocking white grin of exposed bone.

  In the context, spiritual survival—the ghost in the machine—seemed like a long shot. Which had made the gullibility of Abel Williams’ petitioners all the more unfathomable. Yet Lara had seen the same kind of denial in the ER, survivors clinging to hope long after all hope had realistically been exhausted.

  Hang the paddles and pronounce the patient, as one of her med school professors had been fond of saying. Human beings just didn’t last, and Lara couldn’t understand how anyone could believe otherwise, even for the thirty-minute span of a television program.

  Ergo: Abel Williams was a fraud.

  But she’d reached that conclusion before she had ever talked with the man—before she’d seen him in the flesh instead of as a presence on the screen. In person, divested of the mannered theatricality of performance—the portentous little pauses, the wrinkled brow and puzzled frown of concentration—Abel seemed essentially normal, friendly and handsome in an unthreatening way, with his blocky face, his head of close-cropped brown hair and his washed-out green eyes. So normal in fact that you could forget his penchant for sententious little pronouncements from the dead.

  She had, anyway.

  “Come on, surrender the sink,” he’d called playfully no sooner than the door swung shut behind Lomax and the others. “Move aside. I hate to dry.”

  Lara, already filling the oversized basin with iridescent mountains of suds, just shook her head. “Too late.”

  “It’s never too late,” he said, rolling back his sleeves. Unsnapping the catch on his watch, he worked it over his hand and set it aside. He cracked his knuckles ostentatiously. “See? I’m ready. Come on, scoot. You wouldn’t want an unsightly case of dishpan hands.”

  “I’ll risk it,” she said, laughing in spite of herself as she tossed him a dish towel.

  But that little negotiation—though it was really more of a flirtation, wasn’t it? Lana announced inside her head—had served to swee
p away the worst of the awkwardness between them: the accumulated tension from dinner, from Ben Prather’s wounded touchiness and Lomax’s horror story about the glazier—a performance worthy of television in its own right, she realized. What she hadn’t realized—not immediately, anyway—was that Abel Williams was putting on a performance, as well. She hadn’t even noticed, had she? He was that good.

  “So you always been this domineering?” he said as he loaded a freshly rinsed plate into the dishwasher.

  “From day one.”

  “Yeah? And where was that?”

  “Where was what?”

  “Day one.”

  “Wilmington, North Carolina,” she said. “I’m a Tarheel by birth. What about you?”

  “I grew up in Pittsburgh,” he said. “Mostly, anyway.”

  So it went, light and quick, through the plates and silver and into the pots and pans, which she scrubbed by hand. A flirtation Lana had called it, and Lana—as she usually turned out to be—had been right. By the time Lara finished wiping down the countertops and started helping him stow the final odds and ends in the cabinets, she had grown so comfortable that she almost told him the truth when he asked why she had become a doctor.

  Almost.

  In fact, Lana’s name was already on the tip of her tongue when two events occurred simultaneously. The first event—which happened entirely inside her own head—was an abrupt realization about where the flow of this conversation was taking her. The natural follow-up to Abel’s query was a simple reversal of its direction: how had he wound up in the profession he had chosen? Except, given the nature of the profession he had chosen, she couldn’t think of a way to phrase the question that wouldn’t betray her bone-deep skepticism about the entire enterprise. And this simple reminder of what Abel claimed to be spurred yet another, more disturbing perception—how easily she had been drawn in, how willing to surrender to him the most intimate details of her past, details she hardly allowed herself even to think about on any truly conscious level, let alone discuss aloud, and with a total stranger. Perhaps that was the secret of Abel’s success—he had the seductive charisma of a good therapist. You wanted to trust him. You wanted to believe him. And if you weren’t careful, you’d wind up telling him far more than you had ever intended—maybe more than you were even aware of yourself.

  In the same moment that these thoughts were passing through her mind, Lara happened to notice Abel Williams’ watch. Really notice it this time. She’d been leaning over the counter on her toes to slide a colander onto a high shelf, and just as she settled back on the soles of her feet, she caught a glimpse of it, curled atop the Corian beneath her. At first she mistook the flaw in the crystal for the shadow of the overhanging cabinets. A closer examination revealed it as a jagged fissure in the glass. For a single irrational moment she thought she might have broken it somehow—maybe she had jarred it in leaning over to get at the shelves above.

  But that was absurd, wasn’t it? Because there was no way she could have been responsible for the rest of the damage—the other chip in the face or the peeling silver laminate on the battered metal band or the frozen second hand—not unless she had dropped the entire colander on the thing—and she knew that hadn’t happened. Besides, the watch had obviously stopped working some time ago. It had to be getting on past eight now, and the hands seemed to have frozen up almost ten minutes short of twelve.

  “Lara?”

  She responded without looking up, her voice distracted. “Yeah?”

  “You were telling me why you decided to become a doctor.”

  In that moment, with the name of her long-dead sister hovering unspoken on her lips, Lara McGovern had a sudden change of heart. Abel Williams was performing, too, she thought, and his normality was part of the performance, maybe the key part. That was how he did it to you. His everyday facade, his utterly unremarkable averageness, ran so counter to your expectations that he could charm the truth out of you and feed it back piecemeal, and you would never even notice that you’d been had. She had a sudden sense of herself surrounded by performers—by Lomax and Benjamin Prather, by Fletcher Keel and Abel Williams, too, all of them moved by barely concealed agendas to push and probe at one another, working for position in some kind of macho game she hadn’t even known was going on. It was like standing in a hall of mirrors, like stumbling among the revelers at a masquerade ball.

  Lana was right: what on earth had she gotten herself into?

  And just like that, as swiftly and neatly as a cartoon frog darting out his tongue to snatch home a cartoon fly, Lara drew in a breath and swallowed down her dead sister’s name, taking it safely back inside herself, where she had kept it all these years, nursing it like a stone. She felt violated, angry.

  But she didn’t let it show. Oh, no, she thought. When in Rome …

  She could be an actress, too.

  She let surprise creep into her voice, the faintest note of concern. “Hey!”

  “What?” Williams said.

  “Your watch.” Lara shut the cabinet and picked up the watch. Now, examining it in the even glare of the overhead lights, she saw that it was older than she’d thought—not merely battered, but old. Really old, decades even, to judge by the greenish crud that had accumulated in the joints of the band. Moisture must have seeped through the cracked crystal at some point. The age-jaundiced face was slightly wrinkled, the figures of the five and six blurrily adrift in the deeper yellow lagoon of a water stain. Some kind of black gunk clogged the pin from which the hands radiated.

  “Oh,” Williams said. “That.”

  “Was it like this when you took it off or is it, like”—she tried to resist the joke, she really did, but given the context, it was just too easy—“oooh, the haunted watch?”

  She looked up, laughing, but Abel Williams didn’t seem to find it funny. He stepped toward her, and lifted the watch firmly out of her hand. “Yeah, right.”

  He was halfway to the door before she realized he was angry.

  “Hey, wait,” she said, but something in the obdurate set of his shoulders told her it was too little, too late, and that was a shame because she couldn’t exactly afford to alienate anyone here, could she? The circumstances hardly provided for a generous circle of acquaintance—

  But Abel Williams paused.

  “Really,” she said. “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know.” Turning, he lifted his hands. The watch dangled between his fingers, glinting. He smiled sheepishly. “I know. I’m being ridiculous. Look, the watch—it was my father’s—”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her hand moving unbidden toward the neck of her blouse, where the locket—Lana’s locket—nestled unseen between her breasts. She felt like a complete ass.

  “—it has a lot of sentimental value,” Abel finished.

  They stood there, staring at one another in the silent kitchen.

  Abel swallowed. “He was wearing it when he died. In the coal mines, back home in West Virginia.”

  “I thought you were from Pittsburgh.”

  “We moved there. After Dad died. I was just a kid.” He hesitated. “Anyway, I’ve worn the watch ever since. It’s kind of a superstitious thing, I guess.”

  It was only then, ten seconds too late, that his words—

  —he died in the mines—

  —managed to penetrate her thick skull. A coal mine, to be exact. And suddenly the significance of the time dawned on her—those hands frozen forever a few minutes short of noon and the jagged crack in the face and the black gunk clogging up the works. Everything.

  She felt herself flush, the heat rising in her face.

  “That—” She swallowed. Took a breath. “That must have been really hard.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Death’s hard.”

  Nothing more, and just like that they had passed over some kind of weird border and into foreign territory. Into his territory, actually—into the Twilight Zone, where the dead had voices.

  Like this place, Lar
s, Lana intoned inside her head, her little-girl voice pitched unnaturally low in a strained imitation of Rod Serling’s best sepulchral tone.

  Except there was nothing funny about it, was there? Nothing at all. The truth was, death was hard—as this Hallmark moment in the kitchen, this awkward little epiphany made all too abundantly clear. Because let’s face it, Abel Williams’ father must have died years ago, decades even, but the wound was obviously still fresh. Some wounds just never heal, that’s all—no one knew that better than she did. Maybe everyone staggered through life this way, enchained by their promises to the dead.

  The idea cast a new light on the phenomenon of Abel Williams, didn’t it?

  Not that she believed he could really do what he claimed he could do—death was death. Death was another country. The borders were closed and the lines were down. There was no passage between. But that didn’t make Abel Williams a fraud, not if he believed he could really do it. And maybe he did believe it.

  Maybe he had to.

  She stood there looking at him without really seeing him, her face masklike, as these thoughts passed through her mind in a kind of half-conscious blur.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She looked down to find her hand curled at her breast. She forced a smile. “Yeah,” she said. “I was just thinking about what you said. About … how hard it is.”

  He nodded.

  “Anyway,” she said. “That was totally insensitive of me.”

  Abel Williams shook his head and smiled. He had a nice smile, she thought. A slightly lopsided smile, with teeth that were a shade less white than most television teeth. It was all part of his charm—as was the ease with which he passed off her discomfort, saying, “There wasn’t any way you could have known. Let’s just forget it, okay?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  He smiled again, that same average and reassuring smile, and as he turned to go, a sudden impulse rose up inside her.