Bone Deep

by Janice Kay Johnson

  Huh. He had arrested a Camp one time, after a bar brawl, if his memory served him. Robert? Ray? Grant could see the family resemblance. Apparently Wally was used to cops coming calling.

  “No, I’m here about your hand,” he said.

  “My hand?” Wally echoed, forehead creased. Then his voice quickened with hope. “You mean, you think the mill committed some kind of crime?”

  Grant shook his head, pity seizing him again. Along with it came uneasiness that made him want to back away. He should have phoned, not come in person. He didn’t want to see this kid’s misery.

  “No. Sorry. We’ve had a finger bone show up where it shouldn’t be, and I understand you’re the only person in town who has lost any fingers in the recent past.”

  Wally Camp gave a bitter laugh. “So I’m famous now, huh? Too bad that don’t pay the bills.”

  Grant regretted having raised the subject at all. He could see that the kid’s hands weren’t big enough to have bones the size of the one in Grant’s pocket.

  Obligated to say something, he asked, “You getting physical therapy for that hand?”

  Wally gave a dispirited shrug. “Yeah, but what’s the use? Doctors say the nerves ain’t growing the way they was supposed to. And it’s my right hand.”

  Grant wanted to be gone so bad, keeping his feet rooted to the porch required a physical effort. “You’re getting disability, aren’t you?”

  “I’m twenty-three. What am I gonna do for the rest of my life?”

  What decent answer could he give? It wasn’t any help to say, “one of these days that mill’s going out of business, too, and then you’d be starting over anyway.”

  Because at least he would have been starting over with two good hands.

  “Did they even try to attach your other two fingers?” he asked.

  Wally shook his head. “They was chewed up pretty good. I heard ’em say there wasn’t nothin’ left to save.”

  Grant thanked him for his help and left, accompanied to the main road by the two dogs, who cheerfully pretended to be chasing him off their property.

  He felt lousy about the visit and kept thinking, Bet I made his day.

  Since he’d failed to find the owner of a missing finger, his speculation inevitably circled back to Kat.

  Grant made himself be analytical. Did Kat know damned well where that bone had come from this morning? Would it have vanished immediately if her employee hadn’t unexpectedly walked in on her?

  If so, she was an amazing actress. Grant would swear she’d been shaken to her core.

  Hugh Riley had disappeared from the face of the earth that morning four years ago, after driving away from the nursery just before 10 a.m. He didn’t get pulled over by the highway patrol or cross the Canadian border, he didn’t use his ATM card, he didn’t show up at any nursery or plant farm, including the one he’d supposedly planned to visit. Not one single witness had reported seeing his truck. He pulled out of the nursery, turned west toward I-5, and apparently crossed into some other dimension.

  A single tear had slipped down her cheek that day as her voice sank to a whisper. “He didn’t signal. That’s one of my pet peeves, when other drivers don’t. I watched him go, and was irritated because he didn’t signal.” Her teeth sank into her lip so hard, Grant had expected to see blood. “And there was hardly any traffic. He didn’t even have to wait, so no one else would have seen his blinker anyway. It was just…” A shudder racked her, and she didn’t finish.

  Just his usual carelessness? Just a slap in my face, because he knew I was watching and liked to piss me off?

  It hadn’t seemed to matter, what she didn’t say.

  And still didn’t.

  Grant’s problem was, he hated not being able to figure out where this damn bone had come from. But like it or not, that was police work. Hell, that was life. Not all mysteries got solved.

  Live with it, he told himself.

  “THE PATHOLOGIST AT THE hospital says the bone is human,” Kat told Jason Hebert. “Right now, Chief Haller is leaning toward thinking someone lost a finger accidentally.”

  “Whoa.” Her young employee curled his hands into fists, as if making sure none of his fingers were hanging out there in danger. “That would really suck, wouldn’t it?”“Yes, it would. Fortunately, we don’t use many power tools here. Now, hadn’t you better get back to work?” She nodded at the handcart loaded with forsythia that he had been hauling to the front. With their early, cheerful yellow bloom, they sold as fast as they could be put at the entrance to draw attention.

  “Oh.” He blushed and bent to pick up the handle. “Yeah. Sure. I just wondered. You know.”

  “I don’t blame you,” she said, smiling. “It was a weird thing to find.”

  “Yeah.” He grinned. “Too bad it wasn’t in the bonemeal!”

  She pretended to laugh, and he must have been convinced, because he chuckled as he pulled the heavy cart away.

  God. She wished Grant would discover some county road worker had lost a finger accidentally, as he’d suggested when he was out here. She wanted to know where the damn thing had come from, so she could put it out of her mind. She wanted, with a passion that startled her, for that bone not to be her husband’s.

  Kat picked up a sign that had fallen from beside a bare-root rose and thrust it firmly back into the shavings. And I thought I wanted to find Hugh.

  Had the search become habit more than a real need to know what had happened to him? Maybe when people disappeared from your life, you should just let them go. Maybe her mother had been right after all, not even trying to find Daddy.

  With a sick knot in her belly, Kat knew that if Hugh had been murdered and his bones turned up somewhere in a shallow grave, she’d have to relive the original investigation and the suspicion that had, inevitably, focused on her. Back then, it had made her furious and kept her from sleeping at night, even though she knew she had nothing to do with Hugh’s disappearance and nothing to feel guilty about except maybe not having a better marriage. She’d gotten so she hated Grant Haller, constantly showing up with a few more questions.

  If that finger bone was Hugh’s… But it couldn’t be. That made no sense at all. Finding it in her compost was cruel mischance, that’s all.

  But the queasy feeling stayed in her stomach as she waited to hear from Grant.

  George Slagle was back at the nursery today. It seemed he’d wanted her personal advice on what tree to choose.

  “That kid who was trying to help me probably knows more about rock bands than he does plants,” George said dismissively. “They’re going to cost a pretty penny if I put in a whole row of the damn trees, and I don’t want something I’m going to have to tear out five years from now.”

  “That’s smart of you,” she said. “I do teach all my employees about the plants I sell, but I’m glad to help you, George.”

  “You have problems yesterday?” His eyes had an avid glint, as if he wanted to be the first one in town to know her troubles. Was he back today to be nosy and not because he wanted to buy those damn trees? “I saw Chief Haller’s car out front.”

  “Nothing big. You know how it is.” She shook her head, hoping he’d assume she was talking about shoplifting. “He bought a nice daphne yesterday for his own yard while he was here.”

  Apparently her suspicions were unfounded, because she was able to turn his attention to ornamental trees. She wasn’t surprised to find that he had his mind set on the typical spring flowering cherry or pear; he wasn’t interested in foliage or fall color. He liked pink. She steered him to a prunus cultivar with a columnar shape and semidwarf stature that wouldn’t outgrow the narrow strip or make passage on the sidewalk impossible, and promised delivery of eight trees as soon as he had the holes dug. He hinted that she might give him a price break, as a fellow chamber of commerce member, and she deftly sidestepped.

  After he left, having paid full price but still smiling, Kat’s oldest—in both senses of the word—employee m
urmured, “I think he was flirting with you.”

  They were having a momentary lull at the cash registers, although through the open double doors Kat could see several customers filling flats with annuals.

  Flirting? “Is that what he was doing? Oh, ew.” She frowned at Joan. “You didn’t hear me say that.”

  “Deaf as a post,” her friend and right-hand woman promised with unfailing cheer. “I’m just saying.”

  “He’s got to be sixty!”

  Batted eyelashes were incongruous on Joan’s round face. “May-December relationships can work, you know.”

  “Am I May?”

  “You just turned thirty-three. You might even be June. And, hey, at sixty, he’s not December, either. Maybe October.”

  “God.”

  Joan leaned an ample hip against the counter. “Were you planning to tell me about that finger bone?”

  “Didn’t I…? No,” she said, remembering, “you weren’t here yesterday. Well, I gather Jason has beaten me to it.”

  “And it really is human?”

  “So Chief Haller says.”

  “You’re okay?” Joan asked, tone tentative. “You’re not thinking—?”

  “I’m fine. And no, I’m not thinking. Shoot,” Kat added. “I never connected with Annika yesterday. I’d better give her a call.”

  “She was by half an hour ago when you were with George. She left flyers for the garden club meeting.” Joan gestured toward the table that held reference books, business cards for other nurseries and informational bulletins.

  Kat glanced that way, then said, “I’m going to be in the office for a few minutes, then in greenhouse four if you need me.”

  Kat hadn’t been back in the greenhouse since yesterday, her taste for potting seedlings having evaporated. But the work had to be done, business was slower today, and as long as she was brooding she might as well occupy her hands with something useful.

  Once she made it there, she discovered that nobody else had taken up where she’d left off. Kat put on her gloves and resumed work.

  It had to be the uneasiness she couldn’t shake that made her so conscious of how alone she was in the big greenhouse filled with long, plank tables covered with tiny, potted seedlings and seed trays. The quiet that yesterday had seemed peaceful today felt…thick, as if her ears were stuffed with cotton. She strained to hear anything at all and began to wonder if she shouldn’t get her iPod out of her car to keep her company. But she knew she wouldn’t use it; with earbuds in, she really wouldn’t hear anyone coming. As it was, she remembered her start of near-terror yesterday when Jason had gotten so close without her even hearing the creak of the old door swinging open and closed.

  Sitting so that she could see the doors at both ends of the greenhouse, at least peripherally, she reached for another seedling, another empty plastic pot, and kept working.

  The rhythm freed her mind to begin circling old doubts, as if on a looped tape.

  She knew what people had said, out of her hearing, when Hugh disappeared. They speculated about their marriage and why a man as expansive and outgoing as Hugh had married someone so cold. Maybe running away was the only way he could escape her, they’d said.

  Kat hadn’t let herself do this in a long time. Mostly, she tried not to think about Hugh, beyond the inchoate desire to know what had happened, where he was. She believed he was dead. He’d had his flaws, but he wasn’t the man to leave her in endless purgatory like this, not on purpose.

  Only sometimes did her stomach clutch up and she wondered whether their marriage could have been bad enough that he’d wanted to escape and would take any way to do it. He’d always warmed and cooled toward her, going two or three months without turning to her in bed at all, then suddenly becoming the passionate man who’d wooed her in the first place. She couldn’t call it moodiness because he stayed cheerful. It even seemed to her that she was still his best friend. Just…not his lover.

  That had made her wonder, but she’d never had any proof, and he’d denied it the one time she confronted him and insisted he must be seeing another woman. So she let it drop because mostly she was happy. Not rapturously so, but she had a husband and a home and a business and somewhere to belong. Was any marriage perfect?

  No, she would swear Hugh wasn’t unhappy enough to run away. He had to be dead, not to have ever come home.

  But then, where was his body?

  Her trowel, dipped in the potting mix, seemed to grind on something.

  Kat froze.

  No. It couldn’t be. The bone had been in the compost, not the potting mix.

  Nonetheless, her breath came fast as she adjusted the angle of the trowel and scooped whatever it was up. She turned the trowelful over on top of the garden cart full of potting mix.

  Another bone lay, half-exposed. Another…what had they called it? Phalange?

  No, no, no.

  Heart lurching, she stared at it.

  Then, in a frenzy of fear, she set it on the table and began scrabbling in the potting mix with her gloved hands, flinging soil aside, not caring that she scattered it over the floor. Within seconds, she found yet another bone, smaller. Only when she reached the wooden bottom of the cart did she stop, panting, realizing that now she had a whole finger.

  The creak of the door brought her spinning around, a gasp escaping her. The heavy door bounced slightly, as it always did when the spring pulled it shut, but nobody was there.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “PROBABLY SOMEBODY STARTED to open the door and then noticed the Employees Only sign.” As close to hysteria as she’d ever been, Kat perched on the old kitchen stool in the greenhouse, her arms wrapped herself. Despite the warmth in here, she shivered. “Or the wind. I noticed how breezy it was earlier.”

  Grant didn’t bother commenting. He didn’t need to. The damp breeze couldn’t have stirred the heavy door.Her teeth wanted to chatter. She clamped them shut until she regained control, then said, “Or one of my employees was looking for me but got distracted.”

  He watched her stolidly. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, which bothered her more than she should have let it.

  Today he wasn’t in uniform. Wearing jeans, running shoes and a flannel shirt under a quilted vest, he leaned a hip against one of the potting tables, the same small spiral notebook he’d used yesterday flipped open. Kat couldn’t see that he was making many notes, even though he held a pencil in one hand.

  As always, his presence produced a flood of conflicting emotions in her. As scared as she’d been, his big, powerful body was a comfort, as was his very intensity and intelligence. She felt safe because he was here.

  She was also unnerved, physically conscious of him in a way she didn’t want to be, reminded that he’d evoked the same, unwelcome response in her when Hugh had still been around.

  “You’re afraid someone was watching you,” Grant said.

  This shudder shook her whole body. She tightened her arms around herself, as if she could keep from disintegrating.

  “Yes.” Her voice came out rusty, shaking. “Or—” and this was the more appalling fear “—someone was in here already and I heard the door when he was slipping out. I’d never have seen him if he was sitting under one of the tables.”

  “Waiting for you to find the bones.”

  “Yes.”

  He’d come the minute she called. Thank God she’d had her cell phone with her. She’d been so terrified, she hated to think what she’d have looked like if anyone had seen her burst out of here. As it was, she’d also called the front desk, and Joan had come tearing in to the greenhouse. She’d stayed protectively at Kat’s side, and now glared at Grant as if he were at fault for upsetting Kat.

  “We’ll find out if an employee started to open the door,” he said. “That’s easy. If it was a customer…we may never know.”

  Kat gave a stiff nod.

  For the first time, his tone softened. “I think it’s unlikely someone was waiting in here. Think about it.
If you’d been a little busier, you might never have come to this greenhouse today at all.”

  That was logical. More logical than she’d been, in her fear. Of course no one had crouched in here waiting all day. She was letting paranoia get the best of her. Some of the tension leached from her body. “That’s true.”

  “But you told me you were heading back to this greenhouse,” Joan said unexpectedly. “Remember? We were out front. Somebody might have heard you. There were several customers in there, and I didn’t look to see if anyone was behind us.”

  Grant’s eyes narrowed. “Did you come straight here after you told Ms. Stover your intentions?”

  Kat shook her head. “I stopped by my office. It was maybe…ten minutes before I got here.”

  His gaze, intense to the point of being fierce, pinpointed first Kat and then Joan. “You’ll make me a list of anyone you’ve seen at the nursery today. And a separate one of anyone here yesterday.”

  “So you think someone was in here?” she whispered.

  “Not while you were. But it’s pretty clear these bones were planted.”

  She couldn’t help looking at them, lying on the splintery worktable, hard to connect with a real-life human being, and yet…gruesome. She wanted to wipe the bits of compost from the bones. Like yesterday, she was unpleasantly reminded of the dark, dank soil from a grave.

  “They might have all been there yesterday.”

  “They might.” His jaw flexed. “I wish like hell I’d poked through this potting mix, too. But I’ll tell you what. I’m betting they were added today.”

  “Why?” Joan asked.

  “If this was meant to be one surprise, why not plant all three together? Why separate them this way?”

  Kat thought about his point, and didn’t like the implications. “To…up the ante.” She wished her voice didn’t sound so thin.

  “And to give you two scares, not just one.”

  “Does this person…um, have more bones?”

  He shut his small spiral notebook and shoved it in a breast pocket. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”