Cut to the Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  On this day—three days before a much-anticipated match against the Florida Gators—a half-dozen early arrivals rocked gently in the water. Dangling high off the stern of one of the vessels, the reptilian eyes Xed out with black electrical tape, a ten-foot-long inflatable alligator swayed from an oversized hangman’s noose. Here’s hoping, I thought. The Vols looked promising this year.

  The hostess seated us at a corner table overlooking the river—overhanging the river, in fact, as part of the restaurant extended above the water, supported by pilings. The windows on the river side extended from the floor to the ceiling; we sat down just in time to see a towboat and a load of empty barges, riding high in the water, making their way upriver. The headwaters of the Tennessee were only a few miles beyond, at the confluence of the Holston and French Broad Rivers. Both tributaries were navigable beyond Knoxville, but not for long, at least not for heavy traffic. A limestone quarry lay just above the confluence, on the French Broad—half a mile upstream from the UT pig farm—and my guess was, the barges were headed up there to take on a load of gravel. As the wake from the churning towboat reached the advance squadron of the Vol Navy, the boats rocked and heaved in the water.

  “So,” Jeff intoned dramatically, “you two are probably wondering why I called you here today.”

  “What?” I said, turning from the window. Jenny laughed.

  SHE OPENED THE PORTFOLIO slowly, dropping her gaze and fumbling with the latch on the leather case as if it were a complicated mechanism. It might have been my imagination, but her fingers appeared to be trembling a bit. Reaching inside, she took out a sheaf of papers and slid them onto the table. On top was a photograph—actually, a photocopy of a photograph—showing a frontal view of the dead girl’s skull, printed in high contrast to bring out the contours of the bone. “I wasn’t sure how to do this, so I started by taking pictures,” she said. She slid the frontal view aside; beneath it was another photocopied picture, this one showing the skull in three-quarter profile. “I used these as templates, underneath the paper I was drawing on, to make sure I didn’t change the shape or proportions.”

  “Smart idea,” I said. “So then you put tracing paper on top of these and drew on that?”

  She shook her head. “I tried that, but I could see the skull too well through the tracing paper. It was overwhelming, and I couldn’t visualize the face. Then I tried drawing on regular printer paper, but the skull was too faint through that—all I could see were the edges and the eyes. So finally I decided to try working on a light box, illuminating the skull and my drawing paper from underneath.”

  “Third time’s the charm,” said Jeff, who was leaning in—more closely than necessary, it seemed to me—from her other side. “Just like with Goldilocks and the three bears. It was just right.” It was the cheesiest flirting I’d ever seen. I looked at Jenny, expecting to see her rolling her eyes in scorn.

  Instead, she was beaming.

  “Something like that.”

  She slid the second skull image aside, and I felt a jolt almost like electricity. Staring up at me from the table was a teenage girl—a skinny, ashen-faced girl who looked as if she hadn’t had a good meal or a glimpse of the sun in months. Her hair hung straight, limp, and greasy looking. Her lips were thin and pursed. But it was the girl’s eyes that gripped me; they locked onto mine, or so it seemed, and wouldn’t let go.

  “Wow,” I said. “You’ve put a lot of despair in those eyes.” Jenny looked at me for the first time since she’d slid the papers onto the table, and I saw concern in her eyes. “Don’t worry,” I hurried to assure her. “It’s fine. It’s better than fine; it’s really good. From what I see in the bones—from what I imagine they’re whispering—I’d say she had cause to despair, every day of her life. I’m just surprised you were able to convey that with a pencil and a piece of paper.”

  “I can’t really take credit for that,” she said. “I borrowed that.” Seeing my puzzled look, she went on, “I’ve got a big book of photographs by Dorothea Lange. Do you know her work?”

  “I do. She took a lot of portraits of hardscrabble folks during the Great Depression, didn’t she?”

  She nodded. “Tenant farmers. Migrant workers. Appalachian families. I was looking through that book, and I saw a picture of a farmer’s wife holding their baby. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty, but she was totally beaten down by life already. You could see it in her eyes.” She paused to clear her throat. “If this girl had made it to twenty and had a baby, I bet she’d have looked like the farmer’s wife in that photo. So I borrowed that woman’s despair. She had plenty to go around.”

  She set the frontal sketch aside to show me the next one, a three-quarter profile. It, too, was excellent—the girl’s gauntness was emphasized by the deep hollows in her cheeks, which showed up more prominently in this one. “I really like it,” I said slowly, “but the first one grabs me more. I’m not sure why.”

  “It’s the eyes,” Jeff chimed in, surprising me. “In this one, she’s not looking at us.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed, impressed that he’d nailed it so fast. I picked up the frontal view for another look. “The way those eyes stare at you? It’s like she’s challenging you, saying, ‘Hey, look at me. Do you know me?’ You can’t ignore that look.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Jenny said. “So next I did this one.” She unveiled another drawing—another three-quarter profile—but in this one, the girl’s gaze was locked on mine once more.

  “Wonderful,” I said. “That’s the one to use.”

  “If you think so. But there’s one more. I took a little artistic license with it, though. Maybe too much.” She uncovered the final drawing. She’d gone back to the frontal view for this one. The eyes, as I’d come to expect, were arresting and haunting. But underneath one, she’d added a detail—an unexpected bit of shading that hit me like a punch in the gut: She had given the girl a black eye, and in the process, she’d somehow given the girl a story, given her a life. I remembered Jenny’s assessment of the girl’s life, as we’d sat at the table in the coffee shop—“Sounds like a pretty awful life,” she’d said—and somehow she’d captured that in her sketch. As I held the soft nap of the drawing paper in my hand, I found myself staring into that life—even as I felt myself being stared into by the haunted, haunting eyes of the dead girl.

  I COULD SMELL ONIONS and potatoes frying even before I got to the top of the basement stairs and opened the kitchen door. “Yum,” I said. “Smells great.”

  Kathleen looked over her shoulder, her spatula still stirring the sizzling contents of the cast-iron skillet. “How was your day?”

  “Good. Interesting. I’ll tell you about it, but not right now.” I switched on the portable television that we kept on the kitchen counter and switched it to WBIR, the NBC affiliate, which dominated the local news. “I think they’re doing a story about that Morgan County case I’m working. The strip-mine girl.”

  The newscast led off with a story about Saturday’s football game between the Vols and the Gators. Even though the Vols’ head coach, Johnny Majors, was still recuperating from a quintuple bypass, the Vols had won their first two games, including an upset win over fourteenth-ranked Georgia. This week, though, the Vols were taking on an even tougher opponent. The Gators were ranked number four in the nation, and they’d beaten UT the year before. Even though UT was a 10-point underdog, the story ended with a string of Vol fans professing their confidence. “Gator season is open!” yelled the final fan, an orange-clad man swaying on the rear deck of a houseboat. Behind him, I saw the familiar shape of Calhoun’s in the distance, and—directly over the man’s shoulder—the inflatable alligator hanging from its noose.

  “Authorities in Campbell County are investigating the mysterious death of a teenage girl,” said Bill Williams, WBIR’s longtime news anchor. “The bones of the girl, whose age is estimated at twelve to fifteen ye
ars, were found on Labor Day beside an abandoned strip mine. Dr. Bill Brockton, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Tennessee, says the girl’s body was dumped at the mine at least two years ago, possibly longer.”

  The camera shifted to Williams’s coanchor, a woman named Edye Ellis. “Investigators today released an artist’s conception of what the girl may have looked like.” The screen filled with two of Jenny’s sketches—the three-quarter profile and the frontal view that included the black eye—while Ellis continued, “Authorities have not been able to determine the cause of death.” Now the image switched to a two-shot, with Ellis turning solemnly to Williams. “And Bill, investigators are treating this case as a homicide.”

  Williams nodded gravely. “Anyone with information about the girl’s death or her identity is urged to call the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office or the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.” The sketches flashed on the screen again, this time with phone numbers for the sheriff’s office and the TBI.

  The next story was a heartwarming piece about a fuzzy, adoptable puppy at the Humane Society shelter. “Cute dog,” I said.

  “Adorable,” Kathleen agreed. “Sad thing is, there’ll be more calls about the puppy than about the girl.”

  “Lots more calls,” I agreed, switching off the set. “What’d you think of the sketches?”

  “Good,” she said. “Really good. Much better than usual. Those drawings of suspects they put out? Terrible.”

  “That’s my doing,” I preened. “The good ones, not the bad ones.”

  “Get out of here,” she said. “You couldn’t draw your way out of a paper bag.”

  “No, but I found an artist—a good artist—and I loaned her the skull to work from. The chairman of the Art Department recommended her. Cute girl. Amelia somebody; no, wait—Jenny, not Amelia. Earhart. Jenny Earhart. I think maybe Jeff’s gonna ask her out.”

  “Jeff? Our Jeff? Ask out a college girl?”

  “No, she’s still in high school. She goes to Laurel—you know, that hippie school? She took a drawing class at UT last spring, knocked the socks off the professor.”

  “What makes you think Jeff might ask her out?”

  “He came by to have lunch with me today, right about the time she showed up with the sketches. So he invited her to Calhoun’s with us. Flirted with her the whole time. I kept expecting to look under the table and see his hand on her thigh.”

  “Bill!” She turned and waved the spatula at me reprovingly. “You’re incorrigible.”

  “What? I seem to remember putting my hand on your thigh under the table a time or two, back in the day.”

  “Back in the day? More like last week, at the provost’s dinner.”

  I took a step toward her, pressing against her from behind, and slid my hands down to her thighs, giving them a fond squeeze. She swatted my hands away, but not immediately.

  “You don’t want me to burn the potatoes,” she said. “Besides, Jeff will be upstairs any second now.” She leaned back and rubbed her hair against my cheek. “But hold that thought.” So I did.

  I HEARD THE CLOCK striking eleven as Kathleen lay curled against me, her head on my chest. “Bill?” Her voice was low and drowsy.

  “Hmm?”

  “Wouldn’t it be great if Jeff found some nice girl?”

  “He’s got a girl,” I pointed out. “Good old what’s-her-name. Tiffany? Brittany?”

  “Madison. Oh, please. That girl has the brains of a Dalmatian.”

  “True. But I’ve seen her in a bikini, and that girl has the body of a centerfold.”

  “That’s the reason he’s going out with her. The only reason he’s going out with her.”

  “Seems like a damn good reason to me,” I chuckled. I felt a sudden pain, as the point of an elbow gouged my ribs. “Ow.”

  “Beauty’s only skin deep,” she murmured. “Stupidity goes all the way to the bone.”

  “You talking about the Dalmatian, or about me?”

  Her only answer was a soft, sighing breath, which ruffled the hair on my chest, like breeze ruffling a Kansas wheat field.

  THE PHONE RANG THE next morning at seven thirty, just as I got back from my weekly trim at the barbershop. I snatched up the receiver, hoping to hear Sheriff Cotterell or Bubba Hardknot on the line; hoping that someone had ID’d the girl after seeing the sketches on WBIR or in this morning’s News Sentinel.

  My hopes were quickly dashed. “Hi, Dad.”

  “Jeff? Why aren’t you in school?”

  “I am in school. I’m calling from the pay phone in the hall.” In the background, I heard the clamor of boisterous young voices.

  “What’s wrong? Are you sick? Are you in trouble?”

  “No, no, I’m fine. I just didn’t see you this morning. You’d gone to get a haircut when I came up for breakfast.”

  “Did you need to see me this morning?”

  “Mom said you told her about Jenny last night.”

  “About Jenny? Yesssss,” I said slowly, turning to look at Kathleen. She was stirring her coffee with unusual attentiveness. “We did talk about Jenny. Why?” Stretching the phone cord to its limit, I leaned in Kathleen’s direction, into her field of view, and raised my eyebrows at her. She shrugged, as if she had no clue why Jeff was calling me. I took the gesture as proof positive that she’d put him up to it. To something.

  “Quit beating around the bush, son. What’s on your mind?”

  “I want to ask her out.”

  “Go for it,” I said. “You don’t need my permission to ask a girl out.”

  “I want to ask her out for this Saturday.”

  “Fine by me. I wasn’t expecting to see much of you Saturday anyhow. Your mom and I’ll be at the UT-Florida game.”

  “Thing is, I was hoping to take Jenny to the UT-Florida game.”

  “Ha,” I said. “Good luck with that. That game’s been sold out for months. You couldn’t find a ticket . . .” A thought struck me—a thought so awful, I knew instantly that it was the truth. “You can’t be serious. Tell me you’re not calling to ask me what I think you’re calling to ask me.”

  “Please, Dad.”

  “You want my tickets to the UT-Florida game? You gotta be kidding. Wild alligators couldn’t keep me away from that game. You can have my tickets to the Arkansas game,” I said. “Or even the Alabama game. But Florida? You gotta be kidding.” Now Kathleen was desperately trying to catch my attention. Frowning, I mimicked her earlier shrug. “I love you a lot, son, but not that much.”

  Kathleen sighed, shaking her head. Then she reached into the pocket of her bathrobe and fished out a cordless phone. “Jeff?”

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “Pay no attention to your father. Of course you can have our tickets to the game.”

  “What? What the hell?” I squawked.

  “Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad. Late for class—gotta go,” he said, and the line went dead.

  “What the hell?” I repeated. “I’ve been looking forward to that game for a year.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “Don’t be stingy. Look at it as an investment in Jeff’s happiness.”

  “What about my happiness?”

  “Doesn’t it make you happy to see him asking out that nice girl?”

  “You don’t even know her,” I blustered. “Now that I think about it, she’s not so nice after all. In fact, I think she’s a very bad girl. A terrible girl. Dumb, too—she makes Dalmatian-brain look like a genius.”

  “Oh, nonsense. Besides, maybe you can find happiness some other way on Saturday,” she said. She opened the front of her bathrobe and gave me a slow, suggestive smile, swaying her hips as she did.

  “But sweetie,” I said. “Darling.” I felt a powerful surge of conflicting desires. “This is my only chance all year to see UT play Florida. You and I will have l
ots of chances to . . . you know . . . find happiness.”

  Still smiling, she wrapped the bathrobe across herself, two layers deep. “If Jeff doesn’t get to take Jenny to that game Saturday,” she said sweetly, “football might be the only happiness you find for the rest of the season.” She puckered her lips, mimed a kiss in my direction, and then tied the bathrobe belt. In a knot.

  CHAPTER 18

  Satterfield

  HE BACKED THE MUSTANG out of his garage and tucked it around back, behind the house and out of sight. Not that there was anything to see, and not that there was ever any traffic on his street anyhow. Still, the fewer tracks you left, the fewer tracks you had to cover. That was one of the survival-training lessons he’d learned during his brief stint in SEAL training. He’d forgotten that lesson once, with that first girl, and he’d paid a steep price. The disgrace of getting discharged—“under less than honorable conditions”—had cut deeply; it had cut to the bone, and it had left him scarred, as surely as his stepfather’s cigarettes had scarred him. But scars were like combat medals, etched in the skin and the soul: badges of honor, or at least of survival. Satterfield had survived, and he’d begun settling accounts.

  He backed the van out, then eased it back in, centering it on the concrete slab. He’d start with a base coat of olive drab, then finish the camouflage by adding splotches of pale green and muddy brown. He found himself humming as he laid out the drop cloths and taped the glass and poured the viscous paint carefully into the sprayer. He hummed in part because he liked the preparations; liked transforming his meticulous plans into reality. Also, though, he hummed because he enjoyed the joke—found amusement in the ironic absurdity of dressing out a dweeby white work van in hunter’s camouflage.