House of Bones: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  Still he didn’t look at Prather. “He was crazy. It was nothing.”

  “Was it? He knew things. He knew things about me.”

  This time the voice was raw with chafed feelings. It commanded his attention. Keel’s guts cramped. An acidic torch ignited at the base of his throat. Almost against his will, he found himself turning his head.

  Prather hadn’t moved. He radiated a tense neediness, a stiffness that transcended the soreness of his injured ribs, his eyes invisible behind the reflective shields of his spectacles. Tell him, the voice said again, and this time Keel recognized it. It was his father’s voice. He deserves it, the voice said. Keel swallowed an acidic surge of resentment.

  “You were … you were the kid in that apartment,” he managed.

  “Yeah.”

  But now that he’d made a start of it, Keel found he didn’t have the heart to continue. He’d done enough, hadn’t he? He’d tried to make amends. What more could anyone ask of him?

  “You were a cop once, right?”

  That too sounded like an accusation. Keel felt a bright flash of anger—

  —you don’t mind a nigger’s sloppy seconds, do you—

  —at the question.

  “You implying something?”

  “Should I be?”

  Weariness swept over Keel. He turned back to the darkness of his own suite, quiet now, welcoming. The AA people were full of shit, he thought. The thing to do with the past is let it lie. Let bygones be bygones. He started to speak, hesitated, cleared his throat.

  Ben waited.

  “That was a long time ago,” Keel said at last. “That was so long ago it might as well have been another man.”

  “And the name? John?”

  “Nothing. Really, I have no idea.”

  “Okay,” Ben said. “Okay.”

  Keel stepped into his suite, into the darkness, and closed the door behind him.

  3

  Sedated, Abel Williams looked like a wounded child. Lara had done what she could to make him comfortable—swabbed the blood from his face with a soft towel, disinfected his split lip, propped his head on a pillow. In truth, though, there wasn’t much more she could do for him. He’d need a surgeon to reconstruct his nose and broken teeth. Time would take care of the rest—the swelling, the deep bruises under his eyes.

  In the meantime, they’d both just have to wait.

  Lara straightened the IV line, loosened the strap a notch where it was biting into his wrists, smoothed the hair off his forehead. “We’re going to get you some help,” she whispered, the words rising to her lips before she even knew she intended to say them. “Just hang on. All you have to do is make it through the night.”

  She sighed, embracing herself, cold despite the warm air wafting through the ductwork. The night beyond the windows weltered with wind and snow.

  Dear God, would this storm ever pass?

  She checked the phone for maybe the fiftieth time—nothing, not even the hiss of dead air. Hung it up again. When she turned, Abel had stirred into bleary wakefulness. He watched her out of drug-addled eyes. Gazing back at him, she fancied that she was looking at Abel, the real Abel, not the monster from the kitchen. His tongue appeared, probing at his cracked lips.

  Lara moistened them with a damp towel.

  He stared up at her from glazed eyes.

  “Should … have been … you,” he whispered, the venom in his voice palpable.

  “Maybe so,” she said. “Maybe you’re right.”

  On the way out of the room, she switched off the light.

  4

  He knows.

  Keel sat in his suite, listening to the storm outside his windows, the voices in his head. An image of Prather came back to him—the tense set of the other man’s shoulders, the soulless glare of his glasses.

  “He doesn’t know shit,” he said into the darkness. He said, “It doesn’t matter what he knows. We’re even now.”

  But the words sounded false in his ears, full of swaggering bravado. The truth was, you could never be even. Never. He didn’t need his father to tell him that.

  His guts twisted again.

  Keel sat straight, his hands on his knees, enduring the spasms. After his little heart-to-heart with Prather in the corridor, he had reeled into the bathroom, dropped his pants and hunched in agony over the bowl, emptying his bowels in three agonizing gushes. Then he’d just sat there, stewing in his own feculence, replaying the events in the kitchen on an endless loop.

  Each recollected impact of face and tile seemed to set off a kaleidoscope of long-repressed memories. Each spray of Abel’s blood summoned back still more blood, oceans of the stuff. And not just the blood on his clothes that morning in Nevada, either. Oh no. There was LaKeesha Turner’s blood, and her mother’s blood, and her sister’s blood, too. There was Patrick Mitchell’s blood.

  You fragged him, his father said inside his head. Fragged him over that humiliation in the lobby. You’re everything he feared you might be. And worse.

  Crouched there over his own stink, Keel uttered his denials to the unhearing air. “I didn’t,” he whispered. “It was that … that …”

  That thing. The thing that had assailed him in the south stairwell. The thing with the reed-thin voice.

  You invited it in, his father said. Your fear, your anger—those were the doorways. You welcomed it. You own those crimes.

  Now, sitting upright on the armchair in his living room, his guts clenching, Keel accepted it: they were his crimes. And even if they weren’t—even if the thing with the voice, the black wings beating at his shoulders, had been responsible—the others, the one in Nevada, and the other one, too, Tim Underhill, those were all his. There was no way of passing the buck on those, was there?

  No, indeed.

  And how could you redeem such oceans of blood?

  You cannot, his father said inside his head, and a fresh layer of perspiration prickled Keel’s brow. He felt empty inside, hollowed-out, his guts twisting. He thought about eating something, maybe that would help, but the idea of facing the shambles of the kitchen—

  —the tile, the blood-smeared tile—

  —made him cringe. He thought about sleep, but sleep seemed a million miles away.

  A memory of the bottles in the basement possessed him, tactile in its intensity: two liters of Old Crow and a pint of Jack, good old Denny Eakin’s private stock, all of them standing at attention on the desk. He could almost smell the whiskey, he could taste it on his tongue, wood smoke and licorice and the sweet promise of oblivion, the warmth blooming inside him like a benediction.

  He wrestled his thoughts into other channels, the flex of Lara McGovern’s ass—

  —you don’t mind a nigger’s sloppy seconds, do you—

  —the long hike in deep snow that awaited him, each of them fraught with their own anxieties.

  The night stretched before him like a sleepless desert.

  Jesus God, if only he could get some rest.

  The image of the whiskey bottles floated into his mind.

  Fletcher Keel closed his eyes and gripped the arms of his chair until his knuckles turned white.

  5

  Ben found the file buried in one of the boxes Lomax had shipped for him. What a marvelously devious thing the human brain could be, he mused. The same impulse that had led him to accept Lomax’s invitation, that had led him to pack the damn file in the first place, had also enabled him—no, forced him—to consign it unexamined to the closet. You could go through the motions of facing up to the past—but as for actually doing it, that was another matter altogether. That was strictly verboten.

  No doubt Paul Cook could have offered some insight on the issue. But the Cook, as it had been lately pointed out, was dead.

  He was on his own here.

  Ben sat on the floor, and leaned against the bed, the file—a frayed brown accordion folder with an overstressed elastic closure—unopened in his lap. He drew in a breath, wincing as a row of i
nvisible fishhooks embedded themselves in his aching ribs, and let the conversation replay in his mind: the silent corridor, Keel haggard and lean before him.

  You used to be a cop once.

  That was a long time ago. That was so long ago it might as well have been another man.

  But it wasn’t another man, was it—much as you might like to pretend otherwise … John?

  Abel—

  —the thing inside of Abel—

  —had called him John.

  Recalling it, Ben felt certainty blaze afresh inside him. He had known it from the start, hadn’t he? He’d seen it that first afternoon in the elevator, something familiar in the set of the man’s eyes. If he went back through the notes he’d made that night, he’d see it there, interleaved with those foreboding little warnings—

  —do you believe in ghosts—

  —from—from whatever the hell they came from.

  Another goddamn mystery.

  Ben opened his eyes and stared down at the file in his lap, bulging with the work of a long-ago summer, everything he’d been able to find about his family’s deaths—clippings and dime-a-page off-prints from the microfilm readers in the reference room, police reports, the trial transcript, the whole sordid history, his first experience in tracking down a story from every conceivable angle.

  He’d found his calling that summer in the Santa Monica Library, Paul Cook, as always, showing him the way. When you thought about it, every single event in his life unfolded from a few tragic seconds he had been too young to remember. You could trace the line backward from his profession through his matriculation at UCLA and his years with Paul, all the way down to his youth in the safety and affluence of southern California, all of it paid in the coinage of his family’s blood—a family he’d never met.

  Flinching, Ben snaked a hand into his pocket and retrieved the crumpled photo Abel had discovered among the junk in 1824. He unfolded it carefully, smoothing the seams with his fingertips. LaKeesha Turner stared up at him, a total stranger, familiar only from a few newspaper photos, thirty years out of date.

  Ben, Ben, Ben, what color is your skin?

  He sighed and opened the file.

  6

  Ben found Lara in the lounge, staring blankly into the pages of a book.

  “I went by your room,” he said.

  “Yeah, I couldn’t stand it in there anymore.” She put the book aside, and massaged her temples with her thumbs. When she looked up, brushing her hair out of her eyes, he was struck by how tired she looked, how pale and tired. “I came out to check on Abel.”

  “How is he?”

  “About as well as can be expected, I guess. He’s sleeping, anyway.” She smiled wryly. “So what’s up? I figured you were holed up in your room, rationalizing things.”

  “Hey—”

  She held up a hand. “No, it’s fine. Believe whatever you have to believe.”

  He dropped to the sofa beside her and put his feet up on the table. He leaned his head back, exhaling through pursed lips.

  “How’s the side?”

  “Hurts like hell.”

  “I can get you something.”

  “No, I took a couple Tylenol.” He looked at her from the corner of his eye. “Thing is, I kind of want to keep my wits about me.”

  She laughed. “See, you have come around to my way of thinking.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what changed your mind?”

  He didn’t answer, just held up the file.

  “What is it?”

  “Have a look,” he said, handing it over to her.

  Watching her undo the elastic closure, her fingers graceful and sure, the nails trimmed short, Ben found himself thinking about her hands at his side, how knowing they’d been as she bandaged him up, how confident. He remembered something else, too: how she had clutched at his hand back in the kitchen, how natural it had felt, their fingers winding together like they had been custom-sculpted to fit, like two pieces of a puzzle coming seamlessly together.

  “Oh, Ben. When did you put all this stuff together?”

  “I was a kid. I must have been eleven or twelve; I just got obsessed with the whole case.”

  “And your—your parents, how did they feel about it?”

  “Hated it. They tolerated it, though. I was in therapy, and the therapist talked them into it, God knows how. I was never able to talk them into anything, not Dad, anyway. So I spent most of a summer in the library, tracking down everything I could lay hands on.” He shook his head. “I’ve been carrying that file for years.”

  “So how come you to dig it out tonight?”

  “Something Abel said. Here—” He reached out, thumbing through the sheaf of shiny microfilm off-prints, still faintly redolent of cheap ink—or maybe he only imagined it, the way he imagined he could still feel the warmth of each slick sheet as it emerged wet and streaky from the cut-rate printers, weighted down with its freight of history. “You don’t need to look through the whole thing, just look at the articles from the trial. Here, look at this one.”

  Lara took the proffered article, skimming the text, her eyes flicking rapidly back and forth across the page. “What am I supposed to be looking for? I don’t see—” And then she did see it, Ben saw her see it, her eyes widening slightly in surprise.

  She puffed out her cheeks, exhaling slowly.

  “It’s him, isn’t it?” she said, gazing down at the photo, a shot of a rangy blond man, clean shaven, climbing the courthouse steps, one hand thrown back in a gesture of angry defiance, his face caught over the left shoulder in three-quarters profile. Everything about him, the grace of his posture as he mounted the stairs and the line of his shoulders, most of all the eyes, a hard set that might have been anger and might have been fear, proclaimed his true identity.

  “It’s him, all right,” Ben said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I tried to track him down once. After he was acquitted—”

  “He was acquitted?”

  “Oh yeah. There were two snipers, one in each of the bedrooms. When the SWAT team went in, they didn’t know that. They found themselves in a cross fire. He claimed the whole thing was accidental—”

  “And they acquitted him.”

  “It gets worse. They not only acquitted him, he stayed in the city for several years after that, trying to get back on the force. Even filed suit once—this was eighty-five or six—seeking reinstatement. Might have won, too.”

  “What happened?”

  Ben sighed. “Kid named Tim Underhill happened,” he said. “There’s some coverage on that a little further on. John Martin was working mall security, then, and he picked up this kid, he was fifteen, sixteen, something like that, he lifted a cassette in a Record Bar—remember those places? Anyway, the kid got mouthy, one thing led to another, and John Martin—or Fletcher Keel or whatever the hell you want to call him—ended up beating the hell out of him. Nearly killed him.”

  Both of them were silent, thinking of the display of temper they’d seen in the kitchen, the way Abel had goaded him way over the edge. Thinking, too, maybe, of the man strapped to the table in the infirmary, his face smashed nearly beyond recognition. Ben was, anyway, and it was hard to see how Lara couldn’t be—she’d been the one, after all, who’d had to try putting the pieces back together.

  “What happened then?” she asked.

  Ben stopped himself just short of shrugging. “He disappeared before he ever came to trial on that charge. I lost him then.”

  “He changed his name?”

  “Not officially, not that I could find any record of. Doesn’t mean anything, though.”

  “Why?”

  “He was a cop. He might have bought some paper on the street. Maybe not even that. Maybe he’s just drifted all those years, working in the underground economy, cash and carry. Who knows?”

  “Lomax found him.”

  “Are you impugning my investigative skills?”

  She laugh
ed, a real laugh, her voice a little hoarse from the afternoon’s excitement, and he felt it strike an answering chord within him. She squeezed his hand, a fleeting impression, there and gone again almost instantaneously, leaving him to close his fingers on the neural echoes of the gesture, a split second too late.

  He tilted his head against the sofa back and smiled. “Suffice it to say our host has deeper pockets than I do.”

  Lara snorted. “Yeah, but he lacks your sensitivity.”

  “No doubt about that,” he said, glancing toward the windows. “What do you know? Maybe our luck’s changing. The snow’s stopped.”

  She followed his gaze, her expression pensive. And then she turned back to face him.

  “How do you feel, Ben?”

  “I don’t know.” He thought it over for a while, and then he looked up, seeking her eyes. “There’s more,” he said.

  7

  You have to tell him, Keel’s father said in the darkness.

  Keel, still sitting stiffly in the living room of his suite, his guts roiling, shook his head. “I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t.”

  You have to. It’s the right thing to do. It’s the honorable thing.

  Keel cradled his face in his open hands. Honor. How it sickened him, that word. How it had weighed upon him all these years. He could see his father in his mind, already an old man when he fathered his son, his body puckered with scar tissue and worse, the empty sleeve and ragged stump that had horrified Keel as a boy—all this for a handful of metal and ribbons. For a handful of trinkets.

  And more: Keel suddenly found himself recalling how it had all come rushing back to him that day in Charles Maitland’s store, the day he’d finally chosen to absolve himself of this burden, this legacy he could not live up to—this legacy no man could live up to. He had walked into that store to surrender it all, only to find himself confronted with another neatly pinned sleeve, a ghostly vision of the very man from whom he was fleeing. Even now, in memory more than two decades lost, the moment sickened Keel, shocked him.